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14792443_8-2.qxd:1479–2443_8-2

7/22/11

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Page 1

vol. 8

265 267–297

Editor’s Announcement Articles John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America JACK TURNER

299–326

History as Form: Architecture and Liberal Anglican Thought in the Writings of E. A. Freeman G. A. BREMNER AND JONATHAN CONLIN

327–359

From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism KRIS MANJAPRA

361–390

Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy: Ferdinand Alquié versus Martial Gueroult KNOX PEDEN

411–434

457–470

Reading Liberal Theology J. DAVID HOEVELER

471–484

Religion, Science, and Political Religion in the Soviet Context MICHAEL DAVID-FOX

485–496

Sartre, Multidirectional Memory, and the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization JONATHAN JUDAKEN

497

Corrigendum

Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at:

journals.cambridge.org/mih

august 2011

Who Were the Sans-Culottes? RUTH SCURR

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447–455

no. 2

Review Essays Texting a Nation? DAVID S. SHIELDS

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august 2011

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issn 1479–2443

modern intellectual history

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435–445

Essays C. Wright Mills, Sociology, and the Politics of the Public Intellectual HOWARD BRICK The Warren Commission and the Dons: An Anglo-American Microhistory COLIN KIDD

no. 2

vol. 8

391–409

Modern Intellectual History


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modern intellectual history Editors Charles Capper, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA Email [email protected] Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, USA Email [email protected] Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge, UK Email [email protected] Assistant Editor Andrew J. Ballou, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Editorial Board David Armitage, Harvard University, usa C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge, uk Thomas Bender, New York University, usa Ruth Bloch, UCLA, usa Julian Bourg, Bucknell University, usa Richard Bourke, University of London, uk Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, usa Howard Brick, University of Michigan, usa Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, usa Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge, uk Jeffrey Collins, Queen’s University, Ontario, canada Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, uk Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore Peter Gordon, Harvard University, usa Malachi Haim Hacohen, Duke University, usa David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School, usa Thomas A. Haskell, Rice University, usa David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley, usa Daniel Walker Howe, UCLA, usa Gerald N. Izenberg, Washington University, St Louis, usa Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley, usa Mary Kelley, University of Michigan, usa Aileen Kelly, University of Cambridge, uk James T. Kloppenberg, Harvard University, usa László Kontler, Central European University, Hungary Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania, usa Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London, uk Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge, uk Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University, usa Tracie M. Matysik, University of Texas at Austin, usa Michael O’Brien, University of Cambridge, uk Lewis Perry, St Louis University, usa Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University, usa Helena Rosenblatt, City University of New York, usa Dorothy Ross, The Johns Hopkins University, usa Emma Rothschild, Harvard University, usa/King’s College, Cambridge uk Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, usa Andrew Sartori, New York University, usa Jerrold Seigel, New York University, usa James Turner, Notre Dame University, usa Caroline Winterer, Stanford University, usa

Modern Intellectual History publishes scholarship in intellectual and cultural history from 1650 onwards, with primary attention to Europe and the United States but also to trans-national developments that encompass the nonWest. Subscriptions Modern Intellectual History (ISSN 1479-2443) is published three times a year, in April, August and November. Three parts form a volume. The subscription price, which includes delivery by air where appropriate (but excluding VAT), of volume 8, 2011, which includes print and electronic access, is £165.00 (US $268.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) for institutions; £26.00 (US $39.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) for individuals, which includes print only. Students ordering direct from the publishers and certifying that the journal is for their personal use can subscribe to the print version at £19.00 (US $29.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico). The electronic-only price available to institutions is £141.00 (US $232.00). Single parts are £55.00 (US $90.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) plus postage. EU subscribers (outside the UK) who are not registered for VAT should add VAT at their country’s rate. VAT registered members should provide their VAT registration number. Japanese prices for institutions (including ASP delivery) are available from Kinokuniya Company Ltd, P.O. Box 55, Chitose, Tokyo 156, Japan. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. This journal issue has been printed on FSC-certified paper and cover board. FSC is an independent, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests. Please see www.fsc.org for information. © Cambridge University Press 2011 ISSN 1479-2443

Instructions for contributors MIH serves as a focal point and forum for scholarship in intellectual history and related fields. Though its primary focus is on Europe and the United States, it also devotes attention to intellectual and cultural exchanges between the West, the non-West, and the Americas. It encompasses the period from 1650 to the present. MIH is concerned with this era’s intellectual discourses - with understanding the contextual origins and reception of texts, and with recovering their historical meaning. The term “texts” encompass various forms of intellectual and cultural expression, including political thought, philosophy, religion, literature, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the visual arts. 1. submissions Articles submitted for consideration should be sent to Modern Intellectual History, Boston University, Department of History, 226 Bay State Road, Boston, ma 02215, usa. Email [email protected] Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished (even in a language other than English) and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Upon acceptance of a paper, the author will be asked to assign copyright (on certain conditions) to Cambridge University Press. Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material in which they do not hold copyright for worldwide publication in all forms and media, including electronic publication, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript. 2. manuscript preparation Contributors must follow the layout and stylistic conventions of MIH. Detailed Instructions for contributors can be obtained from the Web at http://journals.cambridge.org/journal_ ModernIntellectualHistory. The recommended length of articles is 10,000–12,000 words including footnotes. The recommended length of review essays is 5,000 words including footnotes. Articles should normally be written in English. Spelling may follow either British or American convention but must be consistent. Contributors should submit an electronic copy in Word as an email attachment. 3. proofs Typographical or factual errors only may be changed at proof stage. The publisher reserves the right to charge authors for correction of non-typographical errors.

4. offprints No paper offprints are provided, but the corresponding author will be sent the pdf of the published article. Print offprints may be purchased at extra cost at proof stage. Orders, which must be accompanied by payment, may be sent to a bookseller, subscription agent or direct to the publisher: Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 2ru; or in the usa, Canada and Mexico: Cambridge University Press, Journals Fulfillment Department, 100 Brook Hill Drive, West Nyack, New York 10994-2133. Periodicals postage paid at New York, ny and at additional mailing offices. Copying This journal is registered with the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Organizations in the USA who are also registered with the C.C.C. may, therefore, copy material (beyond the limits permitted by sections 107 and 108 of U.S. Copyright law) subject to payment to the C.C.C of the per copy fee of $12.00. This consent does not extend to multiple copying for promotional or commercial purposes. Code 1479-2443/11. ISI Tear Sheet Service, 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, pa 19104, usa, is authorized to supply single copies of separate articles for private use only. Organizations authorized by the Copyright Licensing Agency may also copy material subject to the usual conditions. For all other use, permission should be sought from Cambridge or from the American branch of Cambridge University Press. Modern Intellectual History is included in the Cambridge Journals Online service which can be found at http://journals.cambridge.org. For further information on other Press journals access http://cambridge.org/journals.

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modern intellectual history contents p 265

pp 267–297

Editor’s Announcement Articles John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America jack turner

pp 299–326

History as Form: Architecture and Liberal Anglican Thought in the Writings of E. A. Freeman g. a. bremner and jonathan conlin

pp 327–359

From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism kris manjapra

pp 361–390

Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy: Ferdinand Alquié versus Martial Gueroult knox peden

pp 391–409

pp 411–434

pp 435–445

Essays C. Wright Mills, Sociology, and the Politics of the Public Intellectual howard brick The Warren Commission and the Dons: An Anglo-American Microhistory colin kidd Review Essays Texting a Nation? david s. shields

pp 447–455

Who Were the Sans-Culottes? ruth scurr

pp 457–470

Reading Liberal Theology j. david hoeveler

pp 471–484

Religion, Science, and Political Religion in the Soviet Context michael david-fox

pp 485–496

Sartre, Multidirectional Memory, and the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization jonathan judaken

p 497

Corrigendum

Modern Intellectual History, 8, 2 (2011), p. 265 doi:10.1017/S1479244311000187

C Cambridge University Press 2011

editors’ announcement

Dear Colleagues, We are very pleased to announce that Dr Duncan Kelly, fellow of Jesus College and university senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Cambridge, has joined us as an editor of the journal. Duncan is a scholar of wide accomplishment in the history of political thought, with notable geographical scope and chronological sweep. He is the author of two books, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (Oxford University Press, 2003), and most recently The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions and Judgement in Modern Political Thought (Princeton, 2010). He has also edited Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought (Oxford University Press, 2009). He taught earlier at the University of Sheffield, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Duncan is already at work as a journal editor, and you should feel free to contact him about editorial matters. Sincerely, Charles Capper Anthony La Vopa Samuel Moyn

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john locke, christian mission, and colonial america∗ jack turner Department of Political Science, University of Washington Email: [email protected]

John Locke was considerably interested and actively involved in the promotion of Protestant Christianity among American Indians and African slaves, yet this fact goes largely unremarked in historical scholarship. The evidence of this interest and involvement deserves analysis—for it illuminates fascinating and understudied features of Locke’s theory of toleration and his thinking on American Indians, African slaves, and English colonialism. These features include (1) the compatibility between toleration and Christian mission, (2) the interconnection between Christian mission and English geopolitics, (3) the coexistence of ameliorative and exploitative strands within Locke’s stance on African slavery, and (4) the spiritual imperialism of Locke’s colonial vision. Analyzing evidence of Locke’s interest and involvement in Christian mission, this article brings fully to light a dimension of Locke’s career that has barely been noticed. In so doing, it also illustrates how the roots of toleration in the modern West were partly evangelical. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . Matthew 28:19 It is a strange jealousy for the honour of God, that looks not beyond . . . a mountain or river as divides a Christian and pagan country. John Locke, A Third Letter for Toleration (1692)1

∗

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The Rufus B. Kellogg University Fellowship from Amherst College and a Resident Fellowship from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities funded this project. The penultimate version was presented at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and a conference on Thinking the Human in the Era of Enlightenment at the Australian National University. I thank David Armitage, Lawrie Balfour, Cristina Beltrán, Charles Capper, Alexander Cook, Roberta Culbertson, Jillian Cutler, Christine Di Stefano, Denise Gagnon, Margaret Levi, Jamie Mayerfeld, Kirstie McClure, Sankar Muthu, Melvin Rogers, Rachel Sanders, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at MIH for their help, encouragement, and advice. Special thanks to Mark Goldie for his remarkable generosity as a teacher and scholar. John Locke, A Third Letter for Toleration (1692), in The Works of John Locke, new ed., 10 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823), 6: 235.

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At several points in his life, John Locke was considerably interested and actively involved in the promotion of Protestant Christianity among American Indians and African slaves. Yet this fact goes largely unremarked in historical scholarship. The reason for this neglect is understandable: the evidence demonstrating Locke’s interest and involvement in Christian mission is scattered and fragmentary. This evidence nevertheless deserves analysis—for when pieced together, it illuminates fascinating and understudied features of Locke’s theory of religious toleration and his thinking on American Indians, African slaves, and English colonialism. Prime among these features are (1) the compatibility between Lockean toleration and Christian evangelization,2 (2) the interconnection between Christian mission and the English geopolitics that Locke helped advance as a member of King William’s Board of Trade, (3) the coexistence of ameliorative and exploitative strands within Locke’s stance on African slavery, and (4) the spiritual imperialism of Locke’s colonial vision. Rich as recent scholarship has been, none of it has fully revealed the crucial role of Christian mission in either Locke’s theory of toleration or his English colonialist pursuits. John Marshall’s magisterial study of Lockean toleration and its historical context has refreshed our understanding of how Locke and his allies promoted toleration partly because they believed it was the best way to win the unorthodox to the Protestant Christian faith.3 But while Marshall briefly analyzes Locke’s effort—as secretary to the Lords Proprietor of Carolina—to promote Christianity among Carolina’s natives in the late 1660s,4 he does not attend at all to Locke’s effort—as a member of William’s Board of Trade—to advance Christian mission in Virginia and New York in the late 1690s. Marshall also neglects Locke’s work to Christianize both Carolina’s and Virginia’s African slaves. As a result, he understates Locke’s interest and involvement in Christian mission, misses an opportunity to expand on the ways Locke saw toleration and Christian mission as naturally allied, and fails to explore the complicated relationship between African slavery and Christian freedom in Locke’s thought.

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I use the term “evangelization” and its variants (e.g. “evangelical”) in the generic sense of “spreading the Gospel and fostering conversion throughout the world,” not in any specific sectarian sense. John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 601–4, 613. See also Nabil I. Matar, “John Locke and the Jews,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44/1 (1993), 45–62, and Richard H. Popkin and Mark Goldie, “Skepticism, Priestcraft, and Toleration,” in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 98–100. Marshall, Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 593–5, 599–600.

john locke, christian mission, and colonial america

The work of James Farr,5 James Tully,6 Barbara Arneil,7 David Armitage,8 and Vicki Hsueh9 has greatly enhanced our understanding of Locke’s views of Africans and Indians in relation to England’s colonial project. But though three of the five briefly discuss Locke’s interest in the Christianization of African slaves and American Indians,10 none adequately contextualizes this interest within the landscape of Locke’s thinking on toleration and his Protestant Christian commitments. As a result, they miss many of the most interesting contours of Locke’s views of African slaves and American Indians—such as his recognition of slaves’ mental and spiritual volition within the process of Christian conversion, and his belief that Indians were rationally disposed to accept the Gospel. Compensating for scholarly neglect, this essay makes Locke’s interest and involvement in colonial Christian mission a central rather than peripheral object of inquiry. First, it paints a portrait of the Christian missionary milieu in Locke’s 5

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James Farr, “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought,” Political Theory 14/2 (1986), 263–289; idem, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” Political Theory 36/4 (2008), 495–522; idem, “Locke, ‘Some Americans’, and the Discourse on ‘Carolina’,” Locke Studies 9 (2009), 19–96. James Tully, “Placing the Two Treatises,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 266–80; idem, “Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” in idem, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137–77; idem, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 70–78. Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); idem, “Citizens, Wives, Latent Citizens and Non-Citizens in the Two Treatises: A Legacy of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Assimilation,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 3 (2007), 207–33. David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32/5 (2004), 602–27; idem, “John Locke, Theorist of Empire?”, in Sankar Muthu, ed., Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Vicki Hsueh, “Giving Orders: Theory and Practice in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63/3 (2002), 425–46; idem, “Cultivating and Challenging the Common: Lockean Property, Indigenous Traditionalisms, and the Problem of Exclusion,” Contemporary Political Theory 5/2 (2006), 193–214; idem, “Unsettling Colonies: Locke, ‘Atlantis,’ and New World Knowledges,” History of Political Thought 58/1 (2008), 295–319; idem, Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), chap. 3. Farr, “So Vile and Miserable an Estate,” 265–6; Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises,” 609, 618–19; Hsueh, Hybrid Constitutions, 74, 78. See also Robert Bernasconi and Anika Maaza Mann, “The Contradictions of Racism: Locke, Slavery, and the Two Treatises,” in Andrew Valls, ed., Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 93–4.

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England, providing a historical backdrop against which to analyze Locke’s interest and involvement. Second, it surveys evidence of his interest and involvement, marshaling both old and newly discovered English colonial documents, and analyzing crucial but largely overlooked passages from Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), A Second Letter Concerning Toleration (1690), and A Third Letter for Toleration (1692). This evidence demonstrates that Locke both supported organized efforts to spread Christianity among New World slaves and Indians and used his influence within King William’s Board of Trade to advance these efforts. Third, the essay sets the evidence of Locke’s interest and involvement in Christian mission within the context of his larger life, work, and world, to show that (1) Locke believed that religious toleration and Christian evangelization were compatible; (2) Locke saw Protestant Christian mission in colonial New York as not only a religious end, but also a geopolitical means of securing English advantage against the Catholic French; (3) Locke understood the semi-coercive Christianization of African slaves as a benign effort to improve their lot; and (4) Locke’s colonial vision was spiritually imperialistic, though imperialistic in a softer sense than we usually impute to that word. Providing the fullest description and contextualization yet of Locke’s Christian missionary interests, this essay also advances the larger interpretive project of “desecularizing” the history of religious toleration. The idea that the rise of religious toleration in seventeenth-century Europe was inextricably tied to a larger process of “secularization” is still commonplace.11 By establishing that Locke promoted toleration partly because he thought it was a more effective means of Christianizing Pagan souls, this essay shows that some of the motivations behind the rise of toleration were deeply religious. Distinguishing between religious toleration and religious disestablishment is essential to understanding Locke’s theory. Contrary to recent accounts of Lockean toleration which suggest that the former entailed the latter,12 Locke envisioned toleration coexisting with an ecumenical but publicly sponsored national Protestantism.13 Locke prohibited the magistrate’s use of coercion to effect conversion, but not his use of persuasion. Firm belief in the truth of Protestant Christianity and firm conviction that all 11

12 13

For an important recent statement of the “secularization” position see Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). For an important recent critique of it see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). See, for example, Lilla, Stillborn God, 96–7, 101. See Matar, “John Locke and the Jews”; William Walker, “The Limits of Locke’s Toleration,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 332 (1995), 136–8, 145–6; David McCabe, “John Locke and the Argument against Strict Separation,” Review of Politics 59/2 (1997), 248–52; and Nelson, Hebrew Republic, 136, 198 n. 232.


should embrace it contained the radicalism of Lockean toleration.14 Locke’s commitment to Christian mission undermines characterizations of him as a founding father of secularism.15

i. christian mission in locke’s england Christian mission played a central role in English colonialism from the turn of the seventeenth century. Early English promoters of colonialism such as Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas argued that a principal benefit of establishing New World colonies would be “the inlargemente of the gospell of Christe, whereunto the Princes of the refourmed Relligion are chefely bounde.”16 In 1609, sponsors of England’s first successful American colonial venture—the Virginia Company— declared that the first aim of colonial settlement was “to preach and baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of the Gospell, to recover out of the armes of the Divell, a number of poore and miserable soules.”17 American Indians were the main objects of early English Christian missionary concern, but, at the Restoration, Charles II expanded the scope of that concern to include African slaves, ordering his Council for Foreign Plantations in 1660 to consider how such of the Natives or such as are purchased by you from other parts to be servants or slaves may best be invited to the Christian Faith, and be made capable of being baptized thereunto, it being to the honor of our Crowne and of the Protestant Religion that all persons in any of our Dominions should be taught the knowledge of God, and be made acquainted with the misteries of Salvation.18

One of the members of Charles II’s Council for Foreign Plantations was Robert Boyle, who in addition to being one of the preeminent scientists of his age was an enthusiastic promoter of Christian mission and a lifelong associate of Locke.19 In 1662, Boyle became the first governor of the Company for the

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A fact mourned by Jonathan Israel in Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 138–43. See, for example, George Kateb, “Locke and the Political Origins of Secularism,” Social Research 76/4 (2009), 1001–34. Quoted in Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138. Quoted in W. Stitt Robinson Jr, “Indian Education and Missions in Colonial Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 18/2 (1952), 153. Quoted in M. W. Jernegan, “Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies,” American Historical Review 21/3 (1916), 508. J. R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution: A Study in Social and Intellectual Change (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 144; Roger Woolhouse, John Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 34–35 and passim.

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Propagation of the Gospel in New England.20 The company’s purpose was to raise money to pay Christian missionaries to spread the gospel among New England Indians.21 One of Boyle’s most significant accomplishments as governor was overseeing John Eliot’s translation of the Bible into Algonquian. “Not only was it the first Bible in Algonquian,” writes William Kellaway, “but it was also the first Bible printed in any language on the North American continent.” Boyle also financed the translation and publication of “the Bible in Irish and Welsh, the New Testament in Turkish and the Gospels and Acts in Malayan.”22 Boyle resigned the governorship of the New England company in 1689 and died two years later; his will directed that most of his estate go to Christian missionary causes.23 Though none of the extant correspondence between Locke and Boyle mentions Christian mission (most of it concerns natural science), chances are that they discussed the subject during their thirty-year friendship. Morgan Godwyn was another associate of Locke who fervently promoted Christian mission. Godwyn studied under Locke at Oxford before becoming an Anglican minister and migrating to Virginia in 1666.24 As a colonial pastor, Godwyn baptized slaves and evangelized Indians, which made him a target of scorn and ridicule among white Virginians hostile to both populations. Virginia became so inhospitable to Godwyn that he migrated to Barbados.25 Godwyn’s time in Barbados exposed him to Quakers’ aggressive efforts to preach the gospel to Africans and Indians over the strenuous objection of white planters. There he first read George Fox’s radical question to Christian ministers: “Who made you Ministers of the Gospel to the White People only, and not to the Tawneys and Blacks also?”26 Godwyn’s encounter with Quaker evangelization deepened his conviction that Christians were duty-bound to seek the conversion and Christian baptism of Africans and Indians. After returning to England in the late 1670s, he published The Negro’s & Indian’s Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church (1680).27 Though we do not know if Locke interacted with Godwyn

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Jacob, Robert Boyle, 148; William Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776 (London: Longmans, 1961), 45. Kellaway, New England Company, 1. Ibid., 133, 47. Ibid., 173–4. J. R. Milton, “Locke’s Pupils,” Locke Newsletter 26 (1995), 106; Alden T. Vaughan, “Slaveholders’ ‘Hellish Principles’: A Seventeenth-Century Critique,” in idem, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 58. Vaughan, “Slaveholders’ ‘Hellish Principles’,” 58–62. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, Suing for Their Admission to the Church (London: J.D., 1680), 4; Vaughan, “Slaveholders’ ‘Hellish Principles’,” 56, 62. Vaughan, “Slaveholders’ ‘Hellish Principles’,” 62.


during this period, we do know that Locke owned Godwyn’s book, as well as its supplement of 1681.28 Godwyn’s Negro’s & Indian’s Advocate is an impassioned plea to Englishmen to intensify Christian evangelization in the American colonies. Though he gives equal billing to Negroes and Indians in the title, Godwyn argues most strenuously on behalf of the former, defending two claims which seem obvious to him but are not obvious to his fellow Englishmen: (1) Negroes are human, and (2) slavery does not deprive men of their right to religion. Godwyn portrays the idea that Negroes are not human as the self-serving fiction of slave traders and slave owners— one which frees them from “importunate Scruples, which Conscience and better Advice might at any time happen to inject into their unsteadie Minds.”29 Godwyn also argues sardonically that if Negroes are beasts, those who “make use of them for their unnatural Pleasures and Lusts” are guilty of sodomy and should be prosecuted.30 Notwithstanding his insistence on Negroes’ humanity, Godwyn does not characterize their enslavement as unjust. The Negro’s & Indian’s Advocate takes for granted that African slavery will continue indefinitely. Godwyn even recommends in A Supplement to the Negro’s & Indian’s Advocate that colonial assemblies pass laws stipulating that baptism in no way alters slaves’ civil status as property; this way, owners have no financial incentive to prevent slaves’ baptism.31 Godwyn also argues eloquently that slavery does not deprive men of the right to religion: “An adverse Fortune may deprive us of our Goods and Liberty, but not of our Souls and Reason . . . If Slavery had that force or power so as to unsoul Men, it must needs follow, that every great Conqueror might at his pleasure, make and unmake Souls.”32 Godwyn concludes that the slave’s right to religion should be positively accommodated: slaves should have time for worship and access to ministers. It is crucial to note, however, that Godwyn’s argument on behalf of the slave’s right to worship covers only Protestant Christian worship. His is a defense of the right to practice not any religion, but only true religion. That Protestant Christianity is the only true religion goes without saying. Locke also owned Thomas Bray’s Apostolick Charity, Its Nature and Excellence Consider’d (1698).33 An Oxford-educated Anglican deacon, Bray was the bishop of London’s Commissary in Maryland and a tireless crusader for the establishment

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John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1965), nos. 1279 and 1280. Godwyn, Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, 3. Ibid., 30. Godwyn, A Supplement to the Negro’s & Indian’s Advocate (London: J.D., 1681), 7. Godwyn, Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, 28. Harrison and Laslett, Library of John Locke, no. 481.

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of well-stocked religious libraries in North American Anglican parishes. Bray reasoned that one of the main obstacles to the evangelization of slaves and Indians was an insufficient number of well-qualified colonial ministers, and that well-stocked religious libraries would help attract and equip such ministers.34 Based on a sermon Bray delivered at St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1697,35 Apostolick Charity called on Anglicans to give more of themselves to the Christian missionary project. Bray explained that contributing to his library project was one sure way to “be most industrious in the Instruction and Conversion of Men . . . [and] lay the Foundation of Christian Knowledge”: “Persons will most effectually [assure] their future Happiness and provide best for an Exalted Glory, who shall expend most in fixing Libraries of necessary and useful books in Divinity.” By donating to Bray’s American libraries, parishioners could become “Apostles to those Parts of the World.”36 Locke would have learned of Bray’s Christian missionary work not only from his copy of Apostolick Charity but also from his co-supervision of Maryland affairs on the Board of Trade.37 During Locke’s time on the Board, numerous memoranda from Maryland officials crossed his desk praising the commissary’s efforts to recruit ministers and build libraries.38 In addition, the Board sometimes used Bray as an emissary between itself and the colonies.39 These connections between Locke and Bray, though largely indirect, are noteworthy, for Bray eventually became one of the most prominent Christian missionaries in English history: in 1699 Bray founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), arguably the most important Protestant Christian missionary society of the eighteenth century.40

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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Bray, Thomas (bap. 1658, d. 1730)” (by Leonard W. Cowie), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3296/, accessed 10 May 2010. H. P. Thompson, Thomas Bray (London: S.P.C.K, 1954), 20. Thomas Bray, Apostolick Charity, Its Nature and Excellence Consider’d in a Discourse Upon Dan. 12.3 (London: W. Downing, for William Hawes, 1698), 24–6. H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1876), 2: 356; Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), 419–20; Michael Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century: An Appraisal by James Blair and John Locke,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 74/2 (1966), 144. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, 1696–97, Preserved in the Public Records Office, ed. John W. Fortescue (London: His Majesty’s Stationer’s Office, 1904), nos. 268, 269, 858, 1050; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, 1697–98, nos. 756, 976. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies will hereafter be referred to as CSP, followed by the year(s) and document number(s). CSP 1699, nos. 1014, 1025. H. P. Thompson, Into All Lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1950 (London: SPCK, 1951).


By themselves, neither Locke’s direct nor indirect connections to prominent Christian missionaries establish his own interest and involvement in Christian mission. They do, however, show that he lived in an environment where the question of how best to convert African slaves and American Indians to Christianity was a current and controversial subject. Furthermore, they suggest the high probability of his exposure to arguments about the issue. Against this background, we can make better sense of the primary evidence of Locke’s interest and involvement in Christian mission.

ii. locke’s interest and involvement in christian mission Two types of evidence together demonstrate Locke’s interest and involvement in Christian mission. The first are documents from his tenures as secretary to the Lords Proprietor of Carolina from 1669 to 1675 and as a leading member of William’s Board of Trade from 1696 to 1700. The second are largely neglected passages from his work on toleration, especially from the understudied Second Letter Concerning Toleration and Third Letter for Toleration. The first type of evidence suggests his interest and involvement in Christian mission, but because nearly all of the key documents are co-authored and reflect not Locke the solitary philosopher but Locke the collaborative policy maker, they are insufficient to establish his independent interest and involvement in Christian mission. But when viewed in light of the second type of evidence—solely authored philosophical work that convincingly shows Locke’s independent interest—it becomes more plausible to make strong inferences from the first type. In other words, it becomes more plausible to read the first type of evidence as expressing philosophical and political commitments. Pursuing this strategy, this section first surveys the colonial documents, detailing the conditions of co-authorship as much as possible but also drawing parallels between key passages from those documents and Locke’s philosophical writings to identify resonances between them. The section then analyzes Locke’s discussion of Christian missionary imperatives in his late work on toleration, especially the Second and Third Letter. Establishing Locke’s independent interest in Christian mission, the writings on toleration vouch for earlier inferences drawn from the colonial documents. Together the two types of evidence demonstrate Locke’s interest and involvement in Christian mission. A. The colonial documents As a colonial administrator, Locke advanced Christian mission in three American colonies: Carolina, Virginia, and New York. His efforts in Carolina

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are best known, those in Virginia second-best known, and those in New York not previously known. Carolina The most important evidence of Locke’s promotion of Christian mission in the first colony is The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669).41 Though ostensibly the work of the eight proprietors for whom Locke was secretary—the most prominent of them being Locke’s patron, Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the First Earl of Shaftesbury42 —a scholarly consensus has emerged that though Locke did not compose it entirely, he contributed to it substantially.43 In a 1673 letter to Locke, Carolina proprietor Sir Peter Colleton referred to the Fundamental Constitutions as “that excellent forme of Government in the composure of which you had so great a hand.”44 Locke lent copies of the document to friends; his correspondents also referred to it as “your laws” and “your constitutions.”45 In 1682, Locke collaborated with Colleton and Shaftesbury to revise the Constitutions extensively.46 Based on striking linguistic parallels between Locke’s single-authored texts and the Fundamental Constitutions, Marshall suspects that Locke was the primary author of the document’s provisions on religion and toleration.47 The Constitutions prohibit atheists from settling in Carolina;48 in 1670, the proprietors added an amendment establishing Anglicanism as Carolina’s official religion (though Locke is said to have opposed the amendment).49 The Constitutions also grant religious toleration to “heathens, Jews, and other 41

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The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Hereafter FCC. K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 242; J. R. Milton, “John Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” Locke Newsletter 21 (1990), 111, 117, 127; Hsueh, “Giving Orders,” 427; Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises,” 607. Goldie, Locke: Political Essays, 160–61; Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises,” 602–27; Woolhouse, John Locke, 90–91. The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols., ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1: no. 279. Goldie, Locke: Political Essays, 161. Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises,” 612–14. Marshall, Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 595, 600. FCC, 177. Langdon Cheves, The Shaftesbury Papers (Charleston: South Carolina Historical Society, 2000; first published 1897), 312 n. 2; Haley, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 245–6; Goldie, Locke: Political Essays, 160; Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises,” 607–8; Woolhouse, John Locke, 91. Locke’s opposition to establishing Anglicanism as Carolina’s official religion might tell against my interpretation of Locke as supporting both toleration and an ecumenical form of religious establishment. But opposition to establishing Anglicanism does not necessarily entail opposition to establishing non-sectarian Protestantism. Locke’s


dissenters from the purity of Christian religion” with the stated aim of facilitating their Christian conversion: But since the natives of that place, who will be concerned in our plantations, are utterly strangers to Christianity, whose idolatry, ignorance, or mistake gives us no right to expel them or use them ill . . . may not be scared and kept at a distance from [the Christian religion], but, by having an opportunity of acquainting themselves with the truth and reasonableness of its doctrines, and the peaceableness and inoffensiveness of its professors, may, by good usage and persuasion, and all those convincing methods of gentleness and meekness suitable to the rules and design of the Gospel, be won over to embrace and unfeignedly receive the truth: therefore, any seven or more persons agreeing in any religion shall constitute a church or profession, to which they shall give some name to distinguish it from others.50

This provision resonates with Locke’s early conviction that force is a futile means of religious persuasion. Locke wrote in his 1667 “Essay on Toleration” that “compelling men to your opinion, any other way than by convincing them of the truth of it, makes them no more your friends than forcing the poor Indians by droves into the rivers to be baptised made them Christians.”51 Locke implies toleration’s superiority to coercion as a means of Christian mission two years before the composition of the Fundamental Constitutions. Marshall thus has good reason to suspect that the provision on toleration in the Constitutions was partly—if not wholly—authored by Locke.52

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opposition to establishing Anglicanism, in fact, might have been an attempt to make Carolina more attractive to non-Anglican Protestants. FCC, 178. Locke, “An Essay on Toleration” (1667), in Locke: Political Essays, 156. It is also crucial to note the practical reasons why Locke and the proprietors extended religious toleration to Carolina’s natives. Early English settlers in Carolina relied on Indians for geographical knowledge, military intelligence, and food and supplies. English awareness of the importance of Indian friendship is evident in documents preceding the composition of the Fundamental Constitutions. See “Second Charter Granted by King Charles the Second to the Proprietors of Carolina” (1665), in The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 1, ed. William L. Saunders (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 75–92; “A True Relation of a Voyage upon discovery of part of the Coast of Florida” (1665), in Shaftesbury Papers, 18–25; “The Port Royal Discovery” (1666), in Shaftesbury Papers, 57–82. There are also abundant memoranda written by Locke recording instances of Indian assistance to English settlers in Carolina. See “Locke’s Carolina Memoranda” (1670–72), in Shaftesbury Papers, 223– 4, 245, 263, 349, 388. For penetrating analysis of these memoranda see Hsueh, “Giving Orders”; idem, “Cultivating and Challenging the Common”; idem, “Unsettling Colonies”; idem, Hybrid Constitutions; and Farr, “Locke, ‘Some Americans’, and the Discourse on ‘Carolina’.” Another reason to suspect that Locke wrote the provision on toleration in the Constitutions is the striking parallel between its language of “good usage and persuasion, and all those

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The Fundamental Constitutions also provide for the promotion of Christianity among African slaves: Since charity obliges us to wish well to the souls of all men, and religion ought to alter nothing in any man’s civil estate or right, it shall be lawful for slaves, as all others, to enter themselves and be of what church any of them shall think best, and thereof be as fully members as any freeman. But yet, no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master has over him, but be in all other things in the same state and condition he was in before.53

This provision resonates strikingly with some language in Locke’s posthumously published Paraphrase and Notes on the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (1707). There Locke provided an interpretive gloss on Paul’s instruction to servants, “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it . . . For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise also he that is called being free, is Christ’s servant.”54 In Locke’s eyes, the statement meant that “noething in any mans civil estate or rights is altered by his becoming a Christian,” echoing the statement in the Constitutions that “religion ought to alter nothing in any man’s civil estate or right.”55 The provision in The Fundamental Constitutions on slave religion is peculiar in its ambivalence about slaves’ social standing. On the one hand, the provision recognizes the slave’s personhood in God’s eyes, and expresses confidence in his capacity to evaluate different churches, select the one that best suits him, and function therein as a full and equal member. On the other hand, the provision sharply distinguishes the slave’s spiritual condition from his civil estate. The Constitutions reinforce this distinction in a latter provision stating, “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.”56 These provisions are consistent with a movement in the mid-seventeenthcentury American colonies to establish legally that a slave’s conversion to

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convincing methods of gentleness and meekness suitable to the rules and design of the Gospel” and Locke’s language of “the meekness and tender methods of the Gospel” in “Toleration A” (1675), in Locke: Political Essays, 231, and “the softness of Civility and good Usage” in A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983; first published 1689), 33. FCC, 179–80. Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul to the Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Esphesians, 2 vols., ed. Arthur W. Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; first published 1707), 1: 198. Ibid., 202 n. 23. FCC, 180.


Christianity does not require his emancipation.57 In 1664, for example, colonial Maryland passed a law specifying that the term of African servitude was “Durante Vita”; in 1667, Virginia followed suit, stipulating that Christian baptism does not automatically require a slave’s manumission. The Virginia House of Burgesses framed this latter law as an effort to “free masters from doubt” about the effects of baptism on their slaves’ civil status, and thus to make them more likely to allow evangelization on their plantations.58 Insofar as Locke contributed to the slavery provisions of the Constitutions, he reinforced Carolina slave owners’ domination over their slaves, giving rise to the puzzle of his complicity in New World slavery. That complicity consists also in his personal investment in the early 1670s of £600 in the slave-trading Royal African Company and £100 in a company of Bahamian adventurers engaged in slave-based agriculture.59 Several scholars have tried to reconcile Locke’s espousal of universal natural rights with his participation in New World slavery through creative readings of chapter 4 in the Second Treatise of Government defending the enslavement of captives taken in just wars.60 There Locke writes that “Slavery . . . is nothing else, but the State of War continued, between a lawful conquerour, and a Captive.” If a combatant has “forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death,” his captor may delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it. For, whenever he finds the hardships of his Slavery out-weigh the value of his Life, ’tis in his Power, by resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on himself the Death he desires.61

John Dunn, James Farr, and Jeremy Waldron demonstrate, however, that Locke’s “just-war” argument is inadequate to the task of justifying New World slavery, for Locke restricts legitimate enslavement to the captive himself, prohibiting its extension to the captive’s children.62 Since Locke fully knew that New World slavery was hereditary, the “just-war” defense could not rationalize his 57

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Jernegan, “Slavery and Conversion”; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 210–11; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 180–81; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 250–52. Jernegan, “Slavery and Conversion,” 506. Woolhouse, John Locke, 110–11; Farr, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” 497. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; first published 1690), 284–5 n; Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism,” in Craig Walton and John P. Anton, eds., Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W. Schneider on His Eightieth Birthday (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 133; Bernasconi and Mann, “Contradictions of Racism.” Locke, Two Treatises, 284. Ibid., 389–92.

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involvement. Dunn’s unsatisfying but accurate verdict on the subject stands: Locke felt no need to engage in “moral rationalization”; Locke’s complicity in New World slavery was a case, rather, of “immoral evasion.”63 Yet even if evasion accurately describes Locke’s response to slaves’ rightsbearing individuality, it does not accurately describe his response to their ensouled humanity. The Fundamental Constitutions suggest Locke’s concern for slaves’ spiritual salvation and comfort. They also suggest his recognition of slaves’ spiritual volition and equality, of their capacity “to enter themselves and be of what church any of them shall think best, and thereof be as fully members as any freeman.”64 This recognition is also present in Locke’s colonial writings on Virginia. I will further elaborate the significance of this recognition later on. Virginia From 1696 to 1700, Locke served on King William’s newly organized Board of Trade, charged with the central administration of England’s colonies.65 Shortly after its inaugural meeting, the Board began hearing reports about the sorry state of Virginia’s economy and the corruption of its government. Central to the Board’s efforts to obtain information was James Blair, the bishop of London’s Commissary in Virginia. The first president of the College of William and Mary, Blair secured the college’s royal charter in 1693 by appealing to Queen Mary’s desire to establish a “Nursery of Religion” in Virginia and spread Christianity among the Indians.66 Concurrently, Blair convinced the Estate of Robert Boyle to donate £500 to the college to help it educate Indian children “till they are ready to receive Orders and . . . be sent abroad to preach and Convert the Indians.”67 Blair met Locke when Blair travelled to England in 1697 to plot against Virginia’s governor Edmund Andros, whom he believed was obstructing the college’s growth. Blair learned that Locke and the Board were frustrated with Andros’s evasive responses to Board inquiries, and went out of his way to confirm their suspicion that “what ailments plagued Virginia . . . were owing to Andros.”68 63

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John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 175 n. 4; Farr, “So Vile and Miserable an Estate,” 273–4; idem, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” 516; Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 201. FCC, 179. Peter Laslett, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade: 1695–1698,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 14/3 (1957), 370–402; Woolhouse, John Locke, 361–70. Parker Rouse Jr, James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 64–6. Quoted in ibid., 183. Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century,” 143–7; Laslett, “Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Board of Trade,” 397–402.


What ensued was not only collaboration between Locke and Blair to replace Andros with their mutual friend, Francis Nicholson, but also collaboration on a paper for the Board of Trade entitled “Some of the Cheif [sic] Grievances of the present constitution of Virginia, with an Essay towards the Remedies thereof” (1697).69 The exact conditions of Locke and Blair’s co-authorship of the “Grievances of Virginia” are unclear. On the one hand, some evidence suggests that Locke was primary author. A copy resides in Locke’s papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford; the first fifteen words are in Locke’s hand, while the rest (close to ten thousand) are in that of Locke’s amanuensis Sylvanus Brownover.70 The document contains some distinctly Lockean policy proposals. In a section proposing ways to increase Virginia’s population and labor force, for example, the “Grievances” suggests forcing indigent and criminal Englishmen to emigrate to Virginia. The “Grievances” also recommends that, to encourage emigration, “people of all Nations be naturalized, and enjoy equal priviledges, with the other English inhabitants residing there.”71 These suggestions almost certainly came from Locke: in the contemporaneous “An Essay on the Poor Law” (1697) he proposed transportation to the plantations as a punishment for English poor found guilty of certain crimes,72 and in 1693 he advocated “General Naturalisation” as “the shortest and easiest way of increasing your people.”73 Blair credited Locke with major contributions to the “Grievances,” writing to Locke in 1698 that “God . . . made you such an eminent instrument of detecting the Constitution and Government of Virginia”; in 1699, Blair declared himself beholden to Locke “for the thoughts you was [sic] pleased to bestow on our late unhappy circumstances, and the methods you contrived to relieve us.”74 For these

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The original is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University: John Locke and James Blair, “Some of the Cheif Grievances of the present constitution of Virginia, with an Essay towards the Remedies thereof” (1697), MS Locke, e. 9, fols. 1–38. For the purposes of this essay, I rely on the authoritative reprint in Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century.” Kammen’s commentary is at 141–53, and the text is at 153–69. I cite the commentary as Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century,” and the text as Locke and Blair, “Grievances of Virginia.” Locke and Blair, “Some of the Cheif Grievances,” MS Locke, e. 9, fols. 1–38; Laslett, “Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Board of Trade,” 399–400; Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century,” 141; Richard Ashcraft, “Political Theory and Political Reform: John Locke’s Essay on Virginia,” Western Political Quarterly 22/4 (1969), 742. Locke and Blair, “Grievances of Virginia,” 159. Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law” (1697), in Locke: Political Essays, 186. Locke, “For a General Naturalisation” (1693), in Locke: Political Essays, 322. Correspondence of John Locke, 7: nos. 2380, 2545.

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reasons, among others, Richard Ashcraft thinks that Locke was not just primary, but sole, author of the “Grievances of Virginia.”75 Michael Kammen, on the other hand, argues that although Locke and Blair were in close contact during the essay’s production, the “Grievances of Virginia” “has to be Blair’s composition, with suggestions and possibly emendations by Locke.” Kammen points out that the “Grievances” “resembles Blair’s style much more than it does Locke’s.” A contemporaneous Blair document is “organized in the same grievance and remedy pattern” and “follows the same sort of unsystematic usage of roman and arabic numerals.” Kammen concludes that “Blair composed the document under Locke’s direct encouragement and assistance.”76 The balance of evidence points to a conclusion slightly different from Kammen’s: Blair composed the document not simply under Locke’s encouragement and assistance, but under Locke’s substantive direction. Though Kammen shows that the “Grievances” bears greater resemblance to Blair’s style than to Locke’s, the substantive parallels between the “Grievances” and Locke’s distinctive ideas indicate that Locke’s contribution was major. This conclusion is consistent with Blair’s imputation of significant input to Locke. It is also consistent with the fact that the manuscript is in Locke’s and Brownover’s hands, suggesting that Locke took ownership of the document. Though most of the “Grievances of Virginia” consists of proposals for the reorganization of Virginia’s government and the rejuvenation of its economy, a substantial portion concerns colonial religion and Christian mission.77 Complaining that Virginians were so unconcerned about their religious lives that they barely maintained a stable ministry, Locke and Blair also complain that “Little care is taken to instruct the Indians and Negroes in the Christian faith.”78 Declaring, “The Conversion, and Instruction of Negroes and Indians is a work of such importance and difficulty that it would require a Treatise of it self,” they then advise, That all Negroes be brought to Church on Sundays . . . That a law be made, that all Negroes Children be baptized—catechized, and bred Christians . . . That as many Indian children be educated at the Colledge [of William and Mary] as may be; and these well instructed in the Christian Faith, (but with all keeping their own language) and made fit to evangelize others of their nation and language.79

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Ashcraft, “Political Theory and Political Reform,” 742–743 n. 2. Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century,” 148. Ashcraft, “Political Theory and Political Reform” analyzes the political dimension of the “Grievances of Virginia,” but stops short of analyzing its economic, religious, and Christian missionary dimensions. Locke and Blair, “Grievances of Virginia,” 166. Ibid.


These remarkable remedies deserve enumeration. First, all Negroes—both children and adults—should be brought to church on Sundays. Second, all Negro children should be baptized, catechized, and “bred” Christians. Third, Indian children should be educated at the College of William and Mary and taught Christianity in their native language. Fourth, these Indian children should be encouraged and prepared to evangelize in their native communities. Commissary Blair and his superior, Bishop of London Henry Compton, had long-standing interests in colonial Christian mission,80 so Blair probably took the lead in devising these remedies. But because Locke’s greater power in the relationship meant that he had final say over the document’s contents, their appearance in the final copy handwritten by Locke and Brownover suggests that they met Locke’s approval. What does Locke’s approval of these remedies indicate about his views on Christian mission? Like The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, the “Grievances of Virginia” assumes compatibility between toleration and Christian mission. The document takes for granted Virginia’s compliance with Parliament’s Toleration Act of 1689 and the political prevalence of “Lybertie of Conscience.”81 At the same time, it recommends, among other measures, that “a Law be made, that all Negroes Children be baptized—catechized, and bred Christians.” Such a recommendation may startle contemporary admirers of Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, for it seems to encourage what that work generally proscribes: using the force of law to make people Christians. Yet such a reaction is more the product of the contemporary secularist tendency to conflate religious toleration with religious disestablishment, for Locke’s original theory leaves ample room for state-sponsored Christian mission. The 1689 Letter stipulates that “the Magistrate may make use of Arguments, and thereby draw the Heterodox into the way of Truth, and procure their Salvation . . . Magistracy does not oblige him to put off either Humanity or Christianity . . . it is one thing to perswade, another to command; one thing to press with Arguments, another with Penalties.”82 Christian mission is permissible if the state’s methods are persuasive but not coercive. Locke’s theory of toleration does not prohibit a state policy of Christian mission, only the use of penalties to enforce that policy.

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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Blair, James (1655/6–1743),” (by James B. Bell), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2564/, accessed 10 May 2010; Rouse, James Blair; Michael Anesko, “So Discreet a Zeal: Slavery and the Anglican Church in Virginia, 1680–1730,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 93/3 (1985), 256–78. Locke and Blair, “Grievances of Virginia,” 159. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 27. Cf. Marshall, Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture, 557–8.

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This frequently forgotten aspect of Locke’s theory of toleration underscores Mark Goldie’s point that, in early Enlightenment culture, “Arguments for toleration were broadly evangelical in nature.” Late seventeenth-century politicians, philosophers, and divines debated toleration and the relationship of the church to the state within the context of the Christian duty to evangelise. They began from the belief that all people should be of the true religion and that all godly people should seek to put an end to heresy and schism by winning over the errant and godforsaken.

The question was not whether Protestant states ought to try to promote Protestant Christianity, but whether policies of tolerance or intolerance were more effective in winning the heterodox to Protestant Christianity. Locke exemplifies the early Enlightenment tradition of evangelical tolerationism.83 Do Locke and Blair’s policy recommendations for Christian mission in colonial Virginia respect the distinction between permissible persuasive evangelical measures and prohibited coercive ones? The evidence is mixed. Locke and Blair’s unambiguously imperative language in their prescriptions for African Christianization suggests that they think that these prescriptions should be backed by the state’s coercive apparatus: Negroes will be brought to church on Sundays; the law will require the baptism of black children.84 Yet the form and target of coercion is ambiguous. Will the police bring recalcitrant slaves to church? Such a measure contradicts the volitional essence of Locke’s vision of worship. Locke believed that “all were in principle capable of guiding themselves in their choice of church; indeed, this responsibility they could not cede to another.”85 But what if the real targets of the coercive measures were masters and not slaves?86 This scenario is more likely. Late seventeenth-century English missionaries saw masters as the main obstacle to slave evangelization: masters feared that Christianized slaves would no longer be able to work on Sunday and would be costlier to maintain since they would require ceremonious

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Popkin and Goldie, “Skepticism, Priestcraft, and Toleration,” 99–100. Popkin and Goldie co-authored this article, but Goldie is responsible for the section in which this point appears. See 79 n. Interestingly, Locke condemns policies of mandatory church attendance in A Second Letter Concerning Toleration, in Works of John Locke, 6: 87. The specific object of condemnation is King Louis XIV’s requirement that all French Protestants attend Catholic Mass. At the same time, in A Third Letter for Toleration, Locke argues that baptism is one of the few truly essential Christian rites (154–6). This helps to explain why he and Blair so directly address it in the “Grievances of Virginia.” Timothy Stanton, “Locke and the Politics and Theology of Toleration,” Political Studies 54/1 (2006), 89. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possibility.


Christian baptism, marriage, and burial.87 To overcome masters’ resistance to slave Christianization, Locke and Blair may have considered fining masters who prevented their slaves from attending church and receiving baptism. Such fines would not necessarily violate Lockean toleration. Magistrates, in this case, would not be using the force of law to compel worship, but rather to prevent one person (the master) from interfering with another person’s worship (the slave’s). The underlying assumption, of course, is that guaranteeing slaves the opportunity to attend church—over and against the will of their masters—is the same as guaranteeing religious liberty. Though this assumption is dubious from a contemporary perspective, it is valid from Locke’s: he believed that Protestant Christianity was the one true religion.88 Guaranteeing African slaves the right to practice Protestant Christianity was, in his eyes, the same as guaranteeing them religious liberty. Locke and Blair’s prescriptions for evangelization among American Indians fall more plainly within the zone of permissible, persuasive state evangelization. Since these prescriptions involved the College of William and Mary, which operated under a royal charter, they implicated the magistrate. Granted four years after the Toleration Act of 1689, the charter itself illustrates the widespread postRevolutionary conviction that state-sponsored Christian mission could take place under a regime of toleration; the charter declares that the college will help realize this newly tolerationist nation’s aim of “propagating” the Christian faith “amongst the Western Indians. ”89 Locke and Blair’s prescriptions for Christian mission among the Indians are more tentative than the prescriptions targeted at African slaves: only as many Indian children will be educated at the college as may be. Whether the equivocal may indicates uncertainty about the college’s ability to accommodate large numbers of Indians, or uncertainty about the government’s ability to recruit or coerce Indians to attend, we cannot be certain. Locke and Blair’s expectations probably corresponded to their hopes: Virginia’s Indians would enroll in the college and undertake Christian mission voluntarily. Locke and Blair’s prescriptions for Christian mission among the Indians are also friendly in tone. Nowhere is this more evident than in their stipulation that the college’s Indian students keep their own language. This provision is, in part, tactically motivated. Only by retaining their native language—and to some extent their native culture—can the college’s students become cross-cultural ambassadors of Christianity. At the same time, the provision suggests a spirit of mutual accommodation, an attempt to meet new neighbors halfway. All told, Locke and Blair’s prescriptions for Christian mission seem consistent with Locke’s 87 88 89

Godwyn, Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, 136–7. Locke, “Sacerdos” (1698), in Locke: Political Essays, 344. Quoted in Rouse, James Blair, 72, emphasis in charter.

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stipulation in the Letter Concerning Toleration that “the Magistrate may make use of Arguments, and thereby draw the Heterodox into the way of Truth, and procure their Salvation.”90 New York Locke and the Board of Trade’s promotion of Christian mission among the Iroquois in colonial New York in the twilight years of the seventeenth century is a story still untold. This is because nearly all Locke scholars fail to avail themselves of the wealth of board memoranda bearing Locke’s signature in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1696–1700. Among these is a memorandum, dated 30 September 1696,91 recommending that England escalate its Protestant missionary activities in colonial New York as a means of strengthening its alliance with the Iroquois, or the “Five Nations,” as they were then called,92 against Catholic New France, England’s enemy in the North American theater of King William’s War.93 That Locke’s signature was but one of five on the memorandum might suggest that he simply appended his name in deference to his colleagues.94 Yet such passive compliance would have been—in this context—out of character for Locke. Locke’s biographers all agree

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Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 27. One final feature of the “Grievances of Virginia” deserves mention. The document confirms Locke’s knowledge of and interest in the work of Thomas Bray, future founder of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK): “The encouraging of Dr. Brays project of Parochial Libraries would in a great measure supply the want of Books.” Locke and Blair, “Grievances of Virginia,” 167. This reference to Bray—written in late August 1697—comes one year after Locke would have begun seeing Board memoranda mentioning Bray, but four months before Bray delivered his sermon Apostolick Charity at St Paul’s. This indicates that Locke became acquainted with Bray’s colonial Christian missionary work before acquiring Apostolick Charity. It is even possible that Bray himself sent it to Locke. Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century,” 141. CSP 1696–97, no. 286. An office copy of this paper—“Representation concerning the Northern Collonies in America” (1696)—is in the British National Archives, London: CO 324/6, 59–68. There are slight differences between the Calendar and office copies. I will quote from the office copy since it is presumably closer to the original. These were the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onadagas, and Senecas. Mohawk served as the “lingua franca for diplomacy and trade.” H. Ward Jackson, “The Seventeenth Century Mission to the Iroquois,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 29/3 (1960), 240. For background on English and French efforts to win the Iroquois to their respective sides see Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997; first published 1960), chap. 11, and Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Long-House: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), chap. 8. “Signed Tankerville, Ph. Meadows, John Pollexfen, John Locke, Abr. Hill.”


that he was the Board’s preeminent member, “its chief director and controller.”95 Locke’s contemporary Pierre Coste described him as “the soul of that illustrious body.”96 A further indicator of Locke’s preeminence on the Board is the fact that his friend, William Popple, who had translated Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia from Latin to English, served as the Board’s secretary; in addition, Locke’s amanuensis, Sylvanus Brownover, was one of Popple’s clerks.97 There is also corroborating primary evidence of Locke’s political involvement in Anglo-Iroquois diplomacy and its accompanying Christian missionary activities. In addition to the 30 September memorandum, there are four other Board papers signed by Locke showing interest in Anglo-Iroquois diplomacy and the ways Christian mission could aid it.98 In the Bodleian Library at Oxford, there are notes in Locke’s hand bearing the title “New Yorke Representation.”99 Cryptically, they read “Q . . . The Governor and Assistants of the Indian Stock. Ways of retaining the Indians v. Nelson’s paper.” The reference to “Indian stock” refers to the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel of New England—once governed by Boyle—which Locke and the Board hoped to employ in New York to convert the Iroquois to Protestantism.100 The reference to “Ways of retaining the Indians v. Nelson’s paper” refers to a memorial which Locke and the Board solicited in the late summer of 1696 from John Nelson, an acquaintance of Locke and long-time resident of England’s North American colonies, regarding ways the English could best strengthen the Anglo-Iroquois alliance.101 Furthermore, it has long been known that Locke was instrumental in securing the 1697 appointment of Richard Coote, the First Earl of Bellomont, to the governorship of New York.102 But scholars have failed to note that Locke and Bellomont were both concerned about Anglo-Iroquois diplomacy and the ways 95

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Fox Bourne, Life of John Locke, 2: 353. Cf. Cranston, John Locke, 406; Laslett, “Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Board of Trade,” 399; Woolhouse, John Locke, 366–7. Quoted in Woolhouse, John Locke, 366. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke, 2: 352–3; Cranston, John Locke, 406; Laslett, “Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade,” 390–91; Woolhouse, John Locke, 366, 370. See CSP 1696–97, no. 157 (i) for Locke and the Board’s referral of a report on Iroquois affairs to the Lords Justice of England; ibid., no. 1274 for Locke and the Board’s authorization to the New York government to distribute powder and bullets to the Five Nations; CSP 1699, no. 726 for Locke and the Board’s inquiry regarding the employment of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel vis-à-vis the Five Nations; and CSP 1700, no. 577 for a record of Locke and the Board’s shipment of presents and arms to the Five Nations. Locke, “New Yorke Representation” (1696), MS Locke c. 30, folio 40, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. “Representation concerning the Northern Collonies,” 67; CSP 1699, no. 726. Correspondence of John Locke, 6: no. 2396; CSP 1696–1697, no. 250. Cranston, John Locke, 420–21.

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Christian mission could aid it. Bellomont was a member of the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (the New England Company);103 given the interest the Board expressed in using the New England Company to advance Anglo-Indian diplomacy, it is even possible that Bellomont’s membership in the company was a consideration in favor of his appointment. One of Bellomont’s surviving letters to Locke expresses hope that Locke had heard Bellomont’s most recent report to the Board on Indian affairs.104 A 1698 letter from Popple to Locke reports that the Board had received letters from Bellomont “with an account of his journey to Albany and negociation with the Indians”; the letter further indicates that the other members of the Board would like Locke’s advice on the matter.105 The sum total of evidence suggests that Locke’s signature on the 30 September memorandum reflects substantive agreement—maybe even primary authorship—rather than grudging acceptance. The 30 September memorandum recommends measures “to keep the five nations . . . firm in friendship.” First, the captain-general of the North American colonies “should from time to time make [the Five Nations] presents . . . [and] some of the most eminent & leading amongst them should be entertained, and have constant pay as Ensigns or Lieutenants of his Majesties, and be treated as his officers.” Second, the Indians “should be rewarded for all execution done by them on the enemy, and the Scalps they bring be well paid for.” Third, some lusty vigorous youths of the English, should accompany [the Iroquois] in their Expeditions, huntings and other Exercise, who by inhabiting amongst them would learne their Language, grow acquainted w’th their woods . . . and come in a little time to be able to endure their fatigues; all which would be a means to familiarize them to us and strengthen their union with us.

Fourth, “some of the bravest, or most credited amongst our Indian friends should be brought . . . into England to see the strength of his Majesties Forces by Sea and Land, and the Populousness of his Dominion especially of this great city of London.” Fifth, “effectuall means should be taken for the conversion of [the Indians] to the Protestant faith, For among these here, as well as all other men, Religion has been found by experience to be one of the Strongest bonds of Union.”106 This last recommendation is consistent with Locke’s support of Christian mission in Carolina and Virginia. Yet here, Christian mission becomes an instrument of geopolitics, a means of winning Iroquois allegiance to the exclusion

103 104 105 106

Kellaway, New England Company, 260–65. Correspondence of John Locke, 6: no. 2614. Ibid., 6: no. 2503. “Representation concerning the Northern Collonies,” 66–7.


of the Catholic French. It is important to highlight the geopolitical stakes. The Five Nations occupied the borderland between British North America and New France. Whichever empire secured their friendship secured a critical bulwark against its rival. The impetus for Locke and the Board’s consideration of the matter was an urgent memorandum from a colonial official warning, The value of the Alliance of the Five Nations of Indians to the English is well known . . . The Indians have lost much by [King William’s] war and are inclined to make peace with the French, which would be fatal to the English Colonies . . . It is absolutely necessary to hold the Five Nations firm to their alliance . . . There is no doubt that the English frontier towards Canada is in great danger.107

The impetus for Locke and the Board’s decision to use Protestant Christian mission to strengthen the Anglo-Iroquois alliance was probably that same official’s report of New France’s use of Jesuit missionaries to court Iroquois favor: they have sent Jesuit missionaries among them, who by subtle insinuations have tried to draw them away from their own country into Canada, pretending that they could be better instructed in the Christian religion, and have so far prevailed to have drawn away a considerable number . . . These have done eminent service to the French in the present war . . .108

If England’s Protestant missionaries did not win over the Iroquois, France’s Catholic ones surely would. Locke and the Board thus advised England’s Lord Justices that the Governor and Company here in London for propagation of the Gospell in New England . . . apply their stock, and Revenue [to the conversion of the Iroquois] . . . [T]he converting [of] the Mohaques, and others of the five nations . . . is of the greatest importance imaginable for preserving those of the Protestant religion who are in those parts, as well as for the gaining [of] new Converts to it.109

Three years later, they followed up, asking New York’s governor whether he can “propound unto us any proper methods whereby we may procure some part of the stock of the [New England] Corporation for evangelizing Indians, to be employed toward the instruction of the Five Nations.”110 Locke retired from the Board of Trade before anything came of these efforts.111 Yet a 1701 exchange of letters with Richard King reveals that Protestant missionary

107 108 109 110 111

CSP 1696–97, no. 157 (ii). Ibid. “Representation concerning the Northern Collonies,” 67. CSP 1699, no. 726. “Signed, Ph. Meadows, Jno. Pollexfen, Jno. Locke, Abr. Hill.” CSP 1700, no. 600.

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vigilance against Catholicism remained for Locke a preoccupation. After receiving from King on 13 January an unspecified pamphlet on Protestant Christian missionary societies, Locke responded on 20 January: I thank you for the printed Paper you sent me, and am very glad to see such a Spirit rais’d, for the Support and Enlargement of Religion. Protestants, I think, are as much concern’d now as ever, to be vigorous in their joint Endeavours, for the Maintenance of the Reformation. I wish all that call themselves so, may be prevail’d with by those whom your Paper intimates, to imitate the Zeal, and persue the Principles of those great and pious Men, who were instrumental to bring us out of Roman Darkness and Bondage. I heartily pray for good Success on all such Endeavours.112

This illustrates Dunn’s claim that, at the turn of the eighteenth century, Locke was “nervous” about “the geopolitical vulnerability of European Protestantism.”113 The theater of conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism, however, was not just Europe but also North America. In the eyes of Locke and the Board, Catholic New France threatened England’s American colonies, and the friendship of the Five Nations was essential to defusing that threat. Locke and the Board believed that Protestant Christian mission could secure that friendship. They made little pretense that they pursued Christian mission in New York as an end in itself: it was geopolitics by other means. At the same time, one end of English geopolitics—as Locke’s letter to King suggests—was the defense of Protestant power and position. In the conflict with New France, Christian mission contributed to that defense by winning souls to Protestantism at Catholicism’s direct expense. Ends and means were hard to separate in the Anglo-French battle for the New York frontier at the turn of the eighteenth century: the souls of the Iroquois were a prize of war, and Christian mission was the means of victory. B. Letters on toleration While the colonial documents strongly suggest both Locke’s interest in Christian mission and his belief in its compatibility with toleration, Locke’s 1689, 1690, and 1692 letters on toleration prove both that interest and that belief beyond a reasonable doubt. We have already noted that Locke’s 1689 Letter provides that “the Magistrate may make use of Arguments, and thereby draw the Heterodox into the way of Truth.”114 A heated exchange between Locke and the Anglican clergyman Jonas Proast, his interlocutor in the Second and Third Letter, elaborates

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Correspondence of John Locke, 7: nos. 2843, 2846. John Dunn, Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 18. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 27.


Locke’s understanding of the compatibility between toleration and Christian mission.115 The instigation of the exchange was Locke’s insistence in the 1689 Letter that toleration be extended to Jews, Muslims, and “Pagans”: “neither Pagan, nor Mahumetan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth, because of his religion.”116 Citing this passage in the opening of his 1690 The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration—defending magistrates’ right to use coercion to “save souls”—Proast voiced astonishment at the breadth of Locke’s toleration: how much soever it may tend to the Advancement of Trade and Commerce (which some seem to place above all other Considerations;) I see no reason, from any Experiment that has been made, to expect that True Religion would be any way a gainer by it; that it would be either the better preserved, or the more widely propagated, or rendered any whit the more fruitful in the Lives of its Professours . . .117

In A Second Letter Concerning Toleration—Locke’s first response to Proast— Locke argued that using force to effect conversions would cause Jews, Muslims, and Pagans to doubt the charity and goodwill of Christian preachers: We pray every day for their conversion [i.e. of Pagans, Muslims, and Jews], and I think it our duty so to do: but it will . . . hardly be believed that we pray in earnest, if we exclude them from the other ordinary and probable means of conversion, either by driving them from, or persecuting them when they are amongst us.118

Locke implies that toleration is a superior means of Christian mission because it establishes a positive rapport with non-Christians and thereby makes them more receptive to Christian truth. In his 1691 A Third Letter Concerning Toleration, Proast responded that even if toleration increased the likelihood of Pagan conversion, the price of that conversion was too high—for it entailed “suffering [Pagans] to commit those Indignities and Abominations among us, which they call Religion.”119

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For a general contextualization of the debate between Locke and Proast see Goldie, “John Locke, Jonas Proast, and Religious Toleration, 1688–1692,” in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor, eds., The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143–71. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 54. Jonas Proast, The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration, Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d (Oxford: George West and Henry Clements, 1690), 2. Locke, Second Letter, 62. Cf. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 43. Proast, A Third Letter Concerning Toleration: In Defense of the Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration, Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d (Oxford: George West and Henry Clements, 1691), 4.

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Locke got the last word on the subject in the gargantuan Third Letter for Toleration of 1692. Though Locke conceded that Paganism was an “abomination,” he argued that, for the purposes of evangelization, it was better that Pagans practice an “abominable” religion than no religion at all. Prohibiting Pagan worship would not draw Pagans closer to Christianity, but would “make them downright irreligious, and render the very notion of a Deity insignificant, and of no influence.”120 Prohibiting Pagan worship, in other words, would make Pagans less susceptible to Protestant evangelization. Yet if Pagans were allowed to worship their deity, the salutary practices of religious reverence and subordination would remain in place for Christian evangelists to redirect. What is remarkable about Locke and Proast’s exchange on the issue of tolerating Pagans is the way it allows Locke to articulate his sense of how best to practice Christian mission. Locke sees a glaring contradiction between, on the one hand, the insistence of clerics like Proast that they pray daily for the conversion of Jews, Muslims, and Pagans, and, on the other hand, those clerics’ determination to shut Jews, Muslims, and Pagans out of Christian commonwealths where their conversion can be most easily pursued.121 Sarcastically, Locke wonders whether it is religious error that the clerics object to, or religious error in close geographic proximity. Intolerant policies recommended by Proast—such as the denial of naturalization to Jews, Muslims, and Pagans122 —do nothing to eradicate idolatry; instead, they send idolatry abroad. A true Christian, Locke says, should seek to “drive idolatry out of the world,” not to “driv[e] idolaters out of any one country.”123 Locke’s Third Letter voices specific concern for the “many pagans . . . in the [American] plantations . . . of whom there was never any care taken that they should so much as come to church, or be in the least instructed in the Christian religion.”124 Notice how this concern foreshadows Locke and Blair’s recommendation in the “Grievances of Virginia” that colonial Virginians bring Indian children to the College of William and Mary to learn Christian gospel so that they may one day spread it among their native people. Locke’s Third Letter also calls on Protestants to give up the use of force in matters of religion and instead to emulate the early apostles who brought Christianity “to the heathen world” by “travels and preaching.”125 Locke may have seen his own efforts to promote

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Locke, Third Letter, 234, 233. Ibid., 233–5. Proast, Third Letter, 2–3. Locke, Third Letter, 235. Ibid., 390. Ibid., 234. Cf. Locke, “Toleration A,” 231: “Methinks the clergy should, like ambassadors, endeavour to entreat, convince, and persuade men to the truth rather than thus solicit the magistrate to force them into their fold.”


Christian mission in the New World as a modern successor to early Christian efforts to spread the faith in the Greco-Roman world. Locke nicely conjoins the issues of Christian mission and toleration when he voices contempt for “those men” who, however much they pray for Pagans, are so unconcerned for their conversion that they “will neither go to them to instruct them, nor suffer them to come to us for the means of conversion.”126 Here Locke implies that Englanders must both “go to them” and “suffer them to come to us”—for the goal is not the religious purification of the homeland, but the religious salvation of the world. Toleration is central to this Christian missionary project: toleration allows for the peaceful co-mingling of people of different faiths and the development of trust between them. The development of trust, in turn, diminishes intellectual and spiritual defensiveness and creates conditions where persuasion can take place. Locke is supremely confident that the Gospel—by its own intrinsic “beauty, force, and reasonableness”—will prevail in such circumstances.127 As he says in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), wherever the light of the Gospel has shone, “polytheism and idolatry hath no where been able to withstand it.”128

iii. locke, christian mission, and empire The previous section documented Locke’s interest and involvement in colonial Christian mission and established the first two of this essay’s four points: (1) Locke believed that religious toleration and Christian evangelization were compatible, and (2) Locke saw Protestant Christian mission in colonial New York as not only a religious end, but also a geopolitical means of securing English advantage against the Catholic French. The previous section, for the most part, also demonstrated point (3), that Locke understood the semi-coercive Christianization of African slaves to be a benign effort to improve their lot, but this point needs some elaboration. Point (4)—the spiritual imperialism of Locke’s colonial vision— still needs to be made. This section elaborates point (3) and establishes point (4). Locke showed pronounced concern for slaves’ spiritual salvation and wellbeing in both The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and the “Grievances of Virginia.” In seeking to guarantee them the opportunity to select a church, attend

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Locke, Third Letter, 234. Ibid., 436. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity with A Discourse on Miracles and a Part of A Third Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. I. T. Ramsey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 58.

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it, and enjoy equal membership within it,129 Locke conceded slaves’ volition, humanity,130 and spiritual equality. To be sure, this still occurred within the system of total domination that was racial slavery. Locke nevertheless hoped to create small spaces of spiritual freedom within that system. Understanding this point requires us to set Locke within a late seventeenth-century tradition that was simultaneously “exploitative and ameliorative” in its stance on African slavery.131 Godwyn and Blair exemplified this tradition. Godwyn’s passionate insistence that African slaves “have naturally an equal Right with other Men to the Exercise and Privileges of Religion; of which ’tis most unjust in any part to deprive them” captures the tradition’s self-contradiction:132 it insisted that there was a natural right to religion within a system whose logical culmination was—in Orlando Patterson’s haunting words— slaves’ “social death.”133 Godwyn, Blair, and Locke, however, wanted to resist this logic and create a middle ground where corporeal freedom was denied but spiritual freedom was guaranteed. Even as he reinforced the colonial systems of governance that protected masters’ authority, Locke worked simultaneously to prevent masters from standing in the way of their slaves’ attending church. Locke’s complicity in African slavery was tempered by his desire to make that institution more Godly and humane. This does not excuse Locke’s complicity, but it does enable us to distinguish Locke from those completely indifferent to slaves’ plight. Locke’s desire to Christianize African slaves, however, raises other difficult questions. Though Locke understood this desire to be Godly and compassionate, it is fair to ask whether Locke’s Christian missionary efforts were spiritually imperialistic. This question turns on Locke’s asymmetrical treatment of his own native religion versus African native religions. Locke’s defenses of slaves’ right to worship are always conspicuously limited to the right of Christian worship. Although Locke never says that African native religious practices should not be tolerated, his failure to acknowledge the existence of such practices and to consider what the magistrate’s posture toward those practices should be suggests that he thought of Africans as having either no native religion or none worth

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FCC, 179. A humanity also conceded in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; first published 1689), IV.vii.16, where Locke cites “the Child [that] can demonstrate to you, that a Negro is not a Man, because White-colour was one of the constant simple Ideas of the complex Idea he calls Man” as an example of erroneous generalization. Anesko, “So Discreet a Zeal,” 264. Godwyn, Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, 7. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).


considering.134 Locke’s vision of Christian mission among African slaves tacitly figures English Christians as possessors of truth imparting it to a benighted populace. Locke’s figuration of the English as possessing truth and of non-Europeans as lacking it comes out more subtly in the case of American Indians. Locke acknowledged that Indians had “rudimentary ideas of God and worship,”135 and described their religion as “Pagan”; he advocated toleration of Indian religion over and against the ridicule of clerics like Proast. Locke’s tolerance of Paganism, however, was predicated on the conceit that within a setting of free and open intellectual exchange the Gospel’s truth and beauty would inexorably triumph. The twofold basis of the conceit was, first, Locke’s belief that the truths of Christian revelation were supremely “agreeable to reason, and such as can by no means be contradicted,”136 and, second, Locke’s conviction that Indians were just as rational as Englishmen.137 The most convincing evidence of this latter conviction is Locke’s statement in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689): had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps, been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician, as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Faculties was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other, or farther Enquiries.138

Locke’s sense that Indians were just as rational as Englishmen underwrote his confidence that Indians would assent to Christianity upon hearing the Gospel, for though Indians had previously been deprived of Christian revelation they

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Locke’s only allusions to African native religion are expressions of shock over its supposed absence: in the Essays on the Law of Nature and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he observes that “the Inhabitants of Soldania Bay [in Southern Africa] acknowledge or worship no god at all.” Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature (1663–4), in Locke: Political Essays, 113–14. Cf. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.iv.8. This raises the possibility that Locke thought that compelling slaves to attend church was morally permissible because Africans were atheistic. Locke excepted atheists from toleration. Locke, “Essay on Toleration,” 137; idem, Letter Concerning Toleration, 51. Yet for this explanation to obtain, Locke would have had to generalize from the inhabitants to Soldania Bay to all of Africa. Locke usually resisted this kind of overgeneralization. Farr, “Locke, ‘Some Americans’, and the Discourse on ‘Carolina’,” 26. Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, 61. Farr, “Locke, ‘Some Americans’, and the Discourse on ‘Carolina’,” 68, 72–4; Armitage, “John Locke, Theorist of Empire?”, ms, 2, 5, 11. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.iv.12; cf. Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 3; and Farr, “Locke, ‘Some Americans’, and the Discourse on ‘Carolina’,” 46–50.

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nevertheless possessed the reason necessary to recognize its intrinsic “beauty, force, and reasonableness.”139 Locke’s support of Christian mission in colonial America gives us a new angle on the question whether Locke was an “imperial” thinker. Armitage argues against applying the “imperial” label to Locke, for unlike prototypical nineteenth-century British imperialists such as James and John Stuart Mill and T. B. Macaulay, he did not rank “the world’s peoples in a hierarchical order with Europeans at the top of the scale,” legitimate “European imperialism within a progressivist view of history,” or propose “European capacities— specifically European rationality—as a universal standard against which other peoples were to be judged and toward which they were to be led.”140 Locke indeed fails to meet these criteria for fully fledged imperialist thinking; at the same time, Locke’s support of Christian mission may be imperial in a slightly weaker but still important sense. Locke sought an empire of Protestant Christian spirit. This project is imperial because it presupposes Protestantism’s religious supremacy, works to steer history toward worldwide Protestant Christianization, and employs direct knowledge of the Gospel “as a universal standard against which other peoples were to be judged and toward which they were to be led.” Without a doubt Locke’s Protestant imperialism was moderate: its distinguishing methods—toleration and religious persuasion—were resolutely non-coercive. But the kinder and gentler implements of Locke’s Protestant imperialism should not block from view Locke’s determination to reach into the souls of New World peoples and influence what he saw as the most important decision of their lives: whom to worship. Locke’s effort to turn African slaves and American Indians toward Christ exposes an irony: the modern West’s paradigmatic philosopher of toleration hoped to make Protestant Christianity a universal religious norm. Enlisting colonial policy to promote Protestantism, Locke strove to make his own religion a religion for all the world.

iv. conclusion Locke’s evangelical commitments and defense of toleration on Christian missionary grounds indicate how Protestant norms underwrite his political theory. They also demonstrate his adherence to an ecumenical form of religious establishment. Locke’s insistence in the Letter that “the whole Jurisdiction of the Magistrate reaches only to . . . Civil Concernments . . . [and] it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the Salvation of

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Locke, Third Letter, 436. Armitage, “John Locke, Theorist of Empire?,” ms., 2.


Souls”141 has understandably led many readers to interpret Locke as advocating disestablishment. Yet the particulars of Locke’s theory reveal that he advocated disestablishment only in the limited sense of prohibiting the use of coercion to enforce established religion. The magistrate was still free to endorse Protestant Christian truth and promote it by persuasive means.142 We may fairly characterize a magistrate’s Protestant evangelical efforts as a form of establishment because they entrench Protestantism as a social and political norm; they even insinuate that becoming Protestant is a prerequisite to becoming a fully fledged member of political society. Locke’s Christian missionary commitments and defense of toleration in light of them show that his case for toleration falls short of a case for strict separation of church and state. Not only did Locke believe that England could expand the global reach of Protestantism through an imperial practice of toleration, but he also personally contributed to that evangelical project.

141 142

Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 26. Cf. Walker, “Limits of Locke’s Toleration,” 137–8.

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history as form: architecture and liberal anglican thought in the writings of e. a. freeman∗ g. a. bremner and jonathan conlin G. A. Bremner: Department of Architecture, University of Edinburgh Email: [email protected] Jonathan Conlin: School of Humanities (History), University of Southampton Email: [email protected]

Traditionally viewed as one of the leading lights of Whig history in the High Victorian period, Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) is best known for his History of the Norman Conquest (1865–1876). For all his reputation for scholarly pedantry, Freeman had wide-ranging interests, including architecture. His first book, A History of Architecture (1849), was both unique and controversial: unique in being the first history of world architecture in English, and controversial because its “philosophical” method differed so markedly from the two most common understandings of architecture in his own time (antiquarianism and ecclesiology). A closer look at Freeman’s intellectual pedigree reveals links through Thomas Arnold to German idealist models of universal history. These links lead Freeman to open up a wider perspective on history by developing an understanding of the past based on an analysis of material culture. Architecture offered a window onto the “hidden law” by which human culture evolved. To study Freeman’s historical writing on architecture is to gain a new insight into the development of the Liberal Anglican mind and its concern for a divinely ordained pattern in world history. We can trace in the arts and literature of a nation the mysterious symbolism of its inner mind, the unconscious expression of its position and tone of thought, according to the same hidden law which has caused those very diversities of which these works become the visible and tangible expression.1

Today the Victorian historian Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92) is best known for his History of the Norman Conquest, Its Causes and Results

∗

1

The authors would like to thank Peter Mandler and the anonymous MIH reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this piece. Jonathan Conlin gratefully acknowledges the University of Southampton and in particular the Leverhulme Trust for funding research for this essay, as part of the latter’s Early Career Fellowship scheme. Edward A. Freeman, A History of Architecture (London, 1849), 13.

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(1865–1876)—an opus, like its author, noted for being long-winded, pedantic and somewhat eccentric.2 Freeman’s role as the self-appointed gatekeeper of rigorous, “scientific” history was rewarded in 1884, when his long-held dream of an Oxford professorship was finally realized. Opinionated as well as cantankerous, Freeman combined traditional heady scholarship with enthusiastic participation in contemporary debates concerning politics and empire. “History is past politics; politics is present history” is perhaps his most memorable quip. As a scholar, Freeman is often seen as taking his place alongside J. R. Seeley, William Stubbs, and J. R. Green in the rise of the Whig tradition of academic history.3 Supposedly un-Whiggish aspects of his historical method—most notably his racialism— have either been ignored or downplayed as the personal eccentricities of a “Teutomaniac”.4 More than two decades before the publication of his Norman Conquest, Freeman had already established himself in Oxford as an authority on architecture, having been an active member of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture. In this capacity he encouraged cooperation as well as a certain amount of frank dialogue between the Oxford society and its Cambridge counterpart, the Cambridge Camden Society (CCS, later the Ecclesiological Society). This led to his being commissioned to prepare a history of world architecture for Burns’s Select Library, which appeared eventually with the publisher Joseph Masters as A History of Architecture in 1849.5

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As J. W. Burrow noted in his introduction to the abridged version of the History: “It would be absurd to deny that he can be crude, distasteful, silly, and even sheerly comic . . . Yet it is hard not to enjoy the cheerfully robust way in which Freeman enjoys his own prejudices, the genial unselfconsciousness and vigor and the slightly absurd combativeness.” See editor’s introduction to E. A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest, ed. and abridged by J. W. Burrow (Chicago, 1974), xxv. Above all J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981). See also Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886–(Cambridge, 1986); and Peter R. H. Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1800–1914 (Manchester, 1986). Burrow, A Liberal Descent; and, more recently, Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, 2006). For one exception, see C. J. W. Parker, “The Failure of Liberal Racialism: The Racial Ideas of E. A. Freeman”, Historical Journal 24/4 (1981), 825–46. The “Teutomaniac” label was coined by Matthew Arnold. The change in publisher was motivated by James Burns’s objections as a Roman Catholic to “a good many expressions here and there” in Freeman’s manuscript of the History. Although the precise passages to which Burns objected are not identifiable it is clear that Burns already felt that “the High Ch[urch] Anglicans” had such animus towards him that it would be unwise to publish Freeman’s work. James Burns to Freeman, 14 March

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What makes Freeman worthy of study as an architectural writer is his understanding of architecture as a historical phenomenon whose institutional and aesthetic characteristics were shaped by “natural” processes of development. Central to this understanding was the idea of race. For Freeman, race acted as the underlying factor linking the natural, inborn intellectual aptitudes of a given people with their supposed artistic achievement. In taking this view, Freeman differed markedly from his contemporaries, divided on the one hand by attitudes to archaeological enquiry, represented by well-known antiquaries such as John Sell Cotman, John Britton, Thomas Rickman and Robert Willis, and on the other by the dogmatism of Tractarian fellow-travellers such as the CCS. In this context Freeman’s History of Architecture represented a radical new perspective on architecture (at least in the English-speaking world). By marrying the comparative method in philology, politics, and history with the study of buildings, Freeman was able to arrive at an understanding of architecture that foreshadowed methods of interpretation based on anthropology and social science—methods more readily associated with scholarship in the twentieth century. John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, although appearing in the same year as Freeman’s History, presented architecture in a wholly different light, emphasizing the moral rather than historical nature of building. Unlike Ruskin, Freeman’s aim was to codify architecture as a mode of analysis that would both reveal and substantiate the wider currents and patterns of human history. “The architectural monuments of every nation,” Freeman asserts in the opening pages of his History, “cannot fail to throw light upon its history, institutions, and modes of thought”.6 As far as Freeman was concerned, there was no merit in the study of architecture for architecture’s sake; only architecture seen as evidence of something greater than its formal (i.e. stylistic) mutability—that is, as the “expression” of the character of man and his relative levels of cultural and spiritual attainment—was worthy of the historian’s consideration.7 Race was doubly important to Freeman because it provided an alternative to the Whig idea that history was about mankind’s march towards “civilization”, a story of progress towards religious toleration, the nation state, and parliamentary

6 7

1848. John Rylands Library, University of Manchester (hereafter JRL), FA1/1/10. For other correspondence on this issue see FA1/1/9–12 (Burns) and FA1/1/72–3 (Masters). Freeman, History of Architecture, 10. In this his writing and its antagonism towards the archaeological tendency in architecture is reminiscent of Heinrich Hübsch and the “archaeology” versus “history” debate played out among German historians in the 1820s. Indeed, so close does Freeman’s thinking on architecture come to Hübsch at times that one is left wondering if he did not know it. For Hübsch and the architectural debate in Germany see Barry Bergdoll, “Archaeology vs. History: Heinrich Hübsch’s Critique of Neoclassicism and the Beginnings of Historicism in German Architectural Theory,” Oxford Art Journal 5/2 (1983), 3–12.

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democracy. Like his teacher at Oxford, the famous headmaster and Regius Professor of History, the Reverend Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), Freeman believed in the “unity of history”—the past understood as one, grand, unfolding drama in which various ethnic groups struggled in time to preserve and define their character and institutions within a divine order. Freeman believed that the rise and expression of Aryan culture was revealed through a series of conflicts with outside and opposing racial forces, such as “the Asiatic”. Only by addressing such conflicts could the study of architecture be restored to its “proper position as a branch of mental philosophy”.8 Arnold’s influence on Freeman in this regard was considerable. Attending his inaugural lectures on modern history at Oxford in 1841–2, Freeman later described Arnold as “that great teacher of historic truth” from whom he “first learned what history is and how it should be studied”.9 Arnold’s underlying notion of “unity” is one that stayed with Freeman for the remainder of his life, forming the basis of his own approach to historical scholarship. In this respect, Freeman may be considered the intellectual progeny of Arnold. His History of Architecture is clearly haunted by Arnold’s presence, thus making it a species of what Duncan Forbes has termed “Liberal Anglican” history.10 It is precisely this “idea” of history as defined by Forbes—this new Weltanschauung, inspired as it was by the anti-Rationalist “Germano-Coleridgean” tradition as filtered through Arnold—that influenced Freeman so profoundly and which opens a window onto his conception of architecture as a mode of historical analysis. It is important to note, however, that Freeman was no blind disciple of Arnold. They may have shared a general idealist view of history, but they deviated on other points. Where Arnold believed the arts to be of only subsidiary importance to history, Freeman viewed them as essential to grasping its “pervading principles”. The two men also differed on matters of theology and church organization. While Arnold abhorred Tractarianism, Freeman’s aesthetic sensibilities naturally drew him to it. To be sure, Freeman was not seduced by the teachings of the Oxford reformers as many of his contemporaries were, but Tractarianism did alter and subsequently inform his understanding of the arts, especially architecture.11 This is where Freeman departed from Arnold’s purely “liberal” perspective. For

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Freeman, A History of Architecture, xi–xix. The label “philosophical architecturalist” was applied to Freeman by Beresford Hope. See Hope to Freeman, 17 Feb. 1853. JRL, FA1/1/50a. W. R. W. Stephens, Life and Letters of Edward Augustus Freeman, 2 vols. (London, 1895), 1: 66. Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952). Stephens notes that the tone of Freeman’s college (Trinity) was influenced significantly by Newman, Isaac Williams and Samuel Whyte. Freeman became especially intimate with Whyte. See Stephens, Life, 1: 43–4.

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Freeman, Arnold’s philosophical understanding of history and the “spirit” of Tractarianism were not necessarily incompatible. Both stemmed from certain Romantic impulses, and both contained aspects of “development” (in particular spiritual development) that Freeman was able to reconcile and synthesize in his own mind—the one concerning the “hidden laws” of human genius, the other its externalization.12 This allowed Freeman to see the world in a slightly different way to that of his master, but one no less spiritually determined, formulating what was less a history of past architecture than an architectural history of the past. This essay will consider the extent to which Freeman’s approach to the understanding of architecture may be appreciated as a species of Liberal Anglican thought; or, put another way, how our interpretation of “Liberal Anglicanism” can (indeed should) be extended to include Freeman’s writing on architecture.

i Before addressing the History of Architecture in detail it is important to appreciate the extent to which the project emerged from a set of debates that preoccupied Freeman and Oxford in the 1840s. Freeman came up to Trinity College in 1841, becoming a fellow after taking his degree. In 1844 he proposed to Eleanor Gutch. The pair wed in 1845, settling in Littlemore, a small village near Oxford where Freeman would write his History. Personal correspondence and unpublished poetry preserved among Freeman’s papers at the John Rylands Library enable us to form a fuller picture of Freeman’s search for a vocation in the 1840s than that presented by his nineteenth-century biographer, W. R. W. Stephens. Even before he came up to Oxford, Freeman had been exploring the liturgical and historical traditions of Anglicanism in a Tractarian spirit, in correspondence with the Reverend Henry Thompson (1797–1878), author and curate of Wrington, Somerset. The pair first made contact in 1839, and Thompson became something of a mentor to the young Freeman. Thompson held that the Tractarians’ views were “in the main . . . the views that have been ever entertained by all well-read Churchmen”. “It was high time”, Thompson believed, “to recal [sic] the wandering church to the settled principles of primitive and catholick Christianity—now called ‘Puseyism’, forsooth—it might as well be called Hookerism or Jewelism”.13

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Forbes is unwilling to make any connection between the Liberal Anglican tradition and Tractarianism; however, Romanticism affected both. See Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge, 1976). See also Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London, 1966), 1: 174. Henry Thompson to Freeman, 2 Sept. 1839. JRL, FA1/7/733. A partial transcript is in Stephens, Life, 1: 24.

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The Tractarians had indeed been claiming sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglican divines such as Richard Hooker (author of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity) and John Jewel in support of their dogma. As Peter Nockles has argued, the strain of manipulating selective quotations to propagate the “myth of a unique Anglicanism” put terrible strain on Newman, who was complaining as early as 1836 that “Anglicanism” (i.e. Anglicanism as a discrete doctrinal corpus) was nothing but a “paper theory”.14 Thompson felt no strain, however, and his views on the seventeenth-century Nonjurors and the sacral role of the King as supreme head of the church closely match those of “Old High Churchmen”.15 Thus when Freeman arrived at Oxford in 1841 he was already an AngloCatholic. In his personal habits at Trinity he and his friends attended chapel twice a day and abstained from dinner on Wednesdays and Fridays, although they also abstained from the mortifications practised by others of the same persuasion. In the climate of the 1840s Freeman’s behaviour would not have been viewed as peculiar, but it would certainly have put him in the “at-risk” category. In early 1846 his close friend Samuel Wayte saw Freeman’s attitude to his church as having strong similarities to that of the high-minded Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–36), Tractarian firebrand and one-time fellow at Oriel College.16 Around the same time, Eleanor was worried that her fiancé was spending so much time with Wayte and other friends with “a leaning towards Rome”.17 Among Freeman’s papers in the Rylands Library is a bound manuscript collection of his poems from 1840 to 1844. Thanks to Henry Thompson, several of them were subsequently published.18 Thompson published translations of two of Schiller’s plays in 1845, and doubtless encouraged Freeman’s taste for sorrowful yet self-righteous admiration for the Middle Ages, expressed in a style redolent of the Kunstfrömmigkeit (“art-piety”) of German Romantics such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. Much like Froude’s poetry, Freeman’s ballads are steeped in nostalgia for a blissful medieval age of cathedrals, crusading knights and blushing maidens, when all altars were well garnished and all lances well lubricated with “paynim gore”. “A Rime of Old Things and New” (1842) is characteristic. After a rousing description of a battle during the crusades, in which “The Teuton’s deathful 14

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Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), 129, 130–33. For his reaction to the controversies surrounding the appointment of Bishop Hampden of Worcester and H. G. Ward see Henry Thompson to Freeman, 29 Nov. 1847 and 1 May 1848. JRL, FA1/7/752 and 755. Stephens, Life, 1: 72. Freeman to Eleanor Gutch, 1 Feb. 1846. Stephens, Life, 1: 87. In the anthologies he edited: Poems Legendary and Historical and Original Ballads by Living Authors (both 1850).

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frown” glares “from double panoply of arms and prayers”, Freeman turns wistfully to his own times: O for the gold:decked shrines of other days, Chalice, and cross, and taper’s mystick blaze, And windows pouring from their painted height Through saints of old their dim and trembling light, The clustered shafts, the arches spiring high, Each sculptured marvel pointing to the sky, The boundless temple’s awe, as far and wide, Aisle, chapel, transept, rear their Gothick pride; The daily Host on each dread Altar laid, The seven:fold orison to Jesus paid. ... Where is thine Altar, where thy carvëd skreen? I see but relicks of what once hath been. The spoiler’s hand hath seized what erst was thine, And deems it loss to deck thine holy shrine.19

Such verse’s sacramentalism, liturgical appetites, and critique of latter-day “restorers” shows strong ecclesiological sympathies. Although he claimed to have abandoned such plans by May 1846, for several years Freeman considered taking up architecture as a profession, and may have prepared designs for a chapel at Wantage. The poems also show Freeman’s interest in the Norman Conquest, several years before his 1846 Oxford prize essay on the subject. Though it did not win, this essay, entitled “The Effects of the Conquest of England by the Normans”, was a source of considerable pride to Freeman, and researching it played a crucial role in its author’s decision to abandon ideas of a career in either the church or architecture. It sought to demonstrate “in what sense England has ever [i.e. always] retained independence”, how “her successive conquests” by “strangers” were “territorial” rather than “political” ones.20 Freeman begins his essay with what seems to be a fairly typical “Norman yoke” interpretation of the Conquest: the “native English” degraded into “an inferior and vanquished race” by Norman lords, who import an oppressive feudal system, stamping out any spark of ancient Saxon liberties. But he then resolves this violent picture of total annihilation into a peaceful scene of total assimilation of two races which are really no “strangers” at all. By reuniting these two Teuton races and their political systems, “the overthrow of the English led to the greatness of England”.21 19 20 21

Freeman, “A Rime of Old Things and New”. JRL, FA3/3/2. Freeman, “The Effects of the Conquest of England by the Normans”, f. 1. JRL, FA3/3/4. Freeman, “Effects of Conquest”, f. 46. JRL, FA3/3/4.

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As mentioned, Freeman attended Arnold’s inaugural lecture series as an undergraduate in 1841–2, and both his unpublished essay and his 1849 pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Study of History make his debt to Arnold clear. In his inaugural, Arnold made a distinction between the traditional understanding of history as an exercise in memorizing battles, which he called the “external” part of history, and the “inner life of a nation”, centred around each nation’s “main object”: the “setting forth of God’s glory by doing His appointed work”.22 “Modern history” began with the collapse of the Roman Empire, and was modern precisely because it was in the Teutonic invasions that our story, that of “our blood, our language”, began.23 Although there had been no mixture of blood, the Teutons had nonetheless picked up the torch of civilization from the Romans; in a sense “the German race” was the fertile soil in which the Roman civilizational “seed” had germinated.24 While the Teutonic races had thrived, other races had fallen out of God’s Providential race due to “exhaustion”, leaving “us” with no “soil” in which to deposit our seed. We were God’s “last reserve”; our isolation was itself a sign of the “end times”. Modern history, Arnold concluded, bore “marks of the fulness of time, as if there would be no future history beyond it”.25 Through his working knowledge of German, Arnold had been exposed to the Altertumswissenschaft method of historical analysis by 1825, in particular the writings of Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), a Danish bureaucrat in Prussian service who distinguished himself in retirement as a historian of ancient Rome. Arnold taught himself German specifically to read Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (1811–32). His efforts did not go unrewarded. The work was a complete revelation, opening up a whole new “intellectual world” and laying “wide before my eyes the extent of my own ignorance”.26 Niebuhr preferred to study Roman songs rather than legal or constitutional documents. For him it was language which evolved, not the constitution or constitutional principles. Poetry contained the Saft und Kraft (essence and strength) of a people’s lived experience, and the historian’s duty was to immerse himself in it totally, to forget his own time entirely.27 Niebuhr was adept at making analogies across the centuries with the histories of other 22

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Thomas Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History, Delivered in Lent Term, 1842, 2nd edn (London, 1843), 13. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 26 (Germanic race), 29 (seed). Ibid., 28. Arnold quoted in Arthur Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. (London, 1844), 43. Peter H. Reill, “Barthold Georg Niebuhr and the Enlightenment Tradition”, German Studies Review 3/1 (Feb. 1990), 9–26, 16. Reill translates Saft as “flavour”, when “essence” seems more apposite.

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nations, including English history, though he drew the line at supposedly static non-European civilizations that had no history at all.28 It was the social evolution of nations that determined their particular character and gave their achievements meaning. Thus, following Niebuhr’s lead, Arnold was able to present the idea of modern history in his Oxford lectures as one of process; that is, the rise, fall and assimilation of distinct cultural configurations. The ebb and flow of these patterns over time, along with their interconnectedness, is what gave history its apparent “unity”. Arnold and Niebuhr offered Freeman a way around the nostalgia that dogged “A Rime of Old Things and New” by means of historical analogy. For Arnold the analogy between the Spartans in Laconia and the Normans in England collapsed into identity: the Spartans were Normans, the Normans Spartans.29 Such superimpositions enabled us to do more than reconstruct the past in telling it; we could experience it on a level denied those actually present at the original event. Thus Freeman writes in his Thoughts on the Study of History that we are “more truly present” at Hastings than those who actually fought there.30 Alongside Arnold we should also consider John Henry Newman as an influence on Freeman’s historical thought, and in particular Newman’s concept of the “development of doctrine”. Newman first advanced the concept in a sermon at St Mary’s in February 1843, later expanded into the book-length Essay on the Development of Doctrine (1845). The manuscript of the Essay was completed shortly before Newman’s conversion on 9 October, and appeared shortly afterwards. Although Owen Chadwick has drawn up a pedigree for “development” that goes back through German Liberal Catholics, he argues that Newman picked up the concept from W. G. Ward.31 Newman spoke of doctrine in quasi-architectural terms, as a “large fabric of divinity . . . irregular in structure”. For all the apparent irregularity in its course, Newman insisted that doctrine “evolved” in the minds of Christians. Though the “common origin” that ultimately connected its manifold forms was always perceptible, “development” also involved reacting to alien or mutant strains of doctrine. Even heresy could function as a spur to “fresh forms” and “farther developments”.32 The book proposed a series of seven tests by which true developments could be distinguished 28

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Barthold C. Witte, Der preussischer Tacitus: Aufstieg, Ruhm und Ende des Historikers Barthold Georg Niebuhr, 1776–1831 (Düsseldorf, 1979), 192. E. A. Freeman, Thoughts on the Study of History with Reference to the Proposed Changes in the Public Examinations (Oxford, 1849), 35. Ibid., 8. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 116, 119. J. H. Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (London, 1872), 317.

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from false. As Chadwick has noted, the book met with confused embarrassment from Rome as well as from leading English Roman Catholics. Even today it is often misconstrued as justifying any and all innovations in doctrine, a misreading common among Anglican critics of Newman at the time (such as J. B. Mozley). It must be admitted that Freeman’s published writings do not acknowledge a debt to Newman as they do to Arnold. The ructions caused by Newman’s conversion may have made it unwise to do so. Yet, as David Brownlee has noted, Newman’s concept of the development of Christian doctrine must have seemed pregnant with explanatory potential for Freeman.33 Newman’s book was a heroic attempt to find a via media between Anglican claims to embody the “primitive church” and Roman Catholic acceptance of Marian and other doctrines not supported by the letter of “primitive revelation”. After Newman’s conversion Thompson wrote to Freeman in terms that suggest that both were familiar enough with the idea: It is my great comfort that Newman and his followers have not “developed” Church principles into Romanism, but have been obliged to abandon Church principles in order to be Romanists. The Development Theory places Romanism in bold and avowed opposition to Catholicism . . . Rome cannot stand upon antiquity.34

Unfortunately we do not have Freeman’s reply to this letter. A closer discussion of Freeman’s History suggests that he did not join Thompson and Mozley in dismissing “The Development Theory”, but—like William Ewart Gladstone— saw it as a spur to his own thought on “development”.35

ii Just as Arnold had encouraged the student of history to immerse himself in the literature of a given period so that he might appreciate better its “prevailing tone of opinion and feeling,” so too, he believed, should the student “enquire into the state of art, whether in painting, sculpture or architecture”.36 This advice not only confirmed Freeman’s instinctive prejudice for the true value of architecture

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David Brownlee mentions the influence of Newman in Freeman’s thinking on architecture but does not mention Arnold. See David B. Brownlee, “The First High Victorians: British Architectural Theory in the 1840s,” Architectura 15/1 (1985), 35–7. Henry Thompson to Freeman, St Stephen’s Day (26 Dec.) 1845. JRL, FA1/7/749, underlining in original. See Jonathan Conlin, “Gladstone and the Debate on Evolution”, in David Bebbington, Roger Swift and Ruth Windscheffel, eds., Gladstone: Bicentennial Essays (Aldershot, forthcoming). Arnold quoted in Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea, 130.

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as historical evidence, but also justified his close study of it.37 By Hilary Term of his first year at Oxford (1841–2) Freeman had already become an active member of the recently established Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture (commonly known as the Oxford Architectural Society, OAS).38 In the years that followed he would spend a considerable amount of time discussing architecture with his friends and going on excursions to historic sites in and around Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.39 These activities fed directly into his association with the society. He regularly gave lectures at its meetings and frequently contributed pieces to its journal, the Rules and Proceedings.40 Founded in February 1839, the OAS was, in spirit at least, an outgrowth of the Oxford Movement. Many of its founding members were keen Tractarians who could see that architecture was essential to the full and thoroughgoing process of Anglican renewal.41 The society’s remit was not merely the study of medieval architecture for its own sake—as meritorious as this was—but the promotion of a particular understanding of Gothic architecture that would lead to an appreciation of its “true” catholic and Christian principles. The activities and publications of the OAS quickly generated interest within Oxford and beyond, with its membership reaching over four hundred by the time Freeman became secretary in 1845, including a number of prominent clergymen and architects. The general interest in medieval architecture and its revival in England at the time owed much to the agitations of the indefatigable A. W. N. Pugin (1812–52). However, as Pugin was a Roman Catholic, the enthusiasm he had whipped up in favour of the Gothic required a legitimate Anglican voice if it was to avoid 37

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Freeman had always said that Arnold’s “true” method “ought to be the centre and life of all our historic studies; the truth of the unity of history”. Stephens, Life, 1: 66. It is possible that Freeman was also influenced in his “philosophical” approach to the understanding of architecture by the Rev. William Sewell, Dean of Exeter College (later president of the OAS). A staunch Tractarian, Sewell was among the first in the OAS to outline a theory concerning the principles and symbolic meaning of Gothic architecture along philosophical lines. See Rules and Proceedings of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture (June 1840), 44. Freeman came up to Oxford in Michaelmas Term 1841 and joined the society in March 1842. He was twice secretary of the OAS, 1845 and 1846–7; librarian from 1847; and, in later life, president from 1886–91. Stephens, Life, 1: 51. For an in-depth account of Freeman’s association with the OAS see Christine DadeRobertson, “Edward Augustus Freeman and the University Architectural Societies”, Oxoniensia 71 (2006), 151–73. For the connection between the OSPSGA and the Oxford Movement see S. L. Ollard, “The Oxford Architectural and Historical Society and the Oxford Movement”, Oxoniensia 5 (1940), 146–60.

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being condemned as mere “Popery”.42 This was in part the aim of the OAS. Although James F. White has observed that the society was not particularly concerned with modern church building, it nevertheless sympathized with this cause.43 In fact, as Freeman’s diary reveals, the formation of the Brotherhood of St Mary—an obscure offshoot of the OAS comprising society members that was established in Freeman’s rooms in 1844—considered its basic aim to be the study of “ecclesiastical art upon true and Catholic principles”.44 Such thinking infused and influenced the outlook of the OAS in various ways.45 The OAS was not alone in advancing the cause of Gothic architecture. There was, of course, the Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society. The CCS was formed shortly after the OAS in May 1839, and is now more widely recognized for its contribution to the practice and development of modern Anglican church design and restoration in the nineteenth century. Like the OAS, the CCS was inspired by the Oxford Movement and its reforming zeal. More so than the OAS, however, the CCS was the practical arm of Tractarianism.46 It soon assembled a coterie of designers that would became a veritable who’s who of Victorian church architecture, including G. G. Scott, William Butterfield, G. E. Street, G. F. Bodley and William White.47 Following Pugin’s lead, the CCS insisted upon a far more archaeologically accurate approach to the revival of Gothic architecture. They felt that much of what passed for modern church architecture in England (whether classical or Gothic) was nothing more than an insipid and fraudulent sham. They described their approach as ecclesiology, or the “science” of church design and restoration, and promoted it with vigour in the pages of their principal publication, the Ecclesiologist. For a number of years the CCS determined upon a version of late 42

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John Ruskin had also played a crucial role in extricating the revival of medieval architecture from the idea of Roman Catholicism by taking it beyond a question of religion and transforming it into one of morality. See Michael Brook, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (London, 1987), 33–60. James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge, 1979), 42–3. As stated in Stephens, Life, 1: 58. Ollard, “The Oxford Architectural and Historical Society”, 149. See also W. A. Pantin, “The Oxford Architectural and Historical Society, 1839–1939”, Oxoniensia 4 (1939), 162–94. The CCS saw its remit as covering “Church Building at home and in the Colonies; Church Restoration in England and abroad; the theory and practice of ecclesiological architecture; the investigation of Church Antiquities; the connection of Architecture with Ritual; the science of Symbolism; the principles of Church Arrangement; Church Musick and all the Decorative Arts”, Ecclesiologist, n.s. 1/1 (1845), 1. For the history and wider influence of the CCS see Christopher Webster and John Elliott, eds., “A Church as It Should Be”: The Cambridge Camden Society and Its Influence (Stamford, 2000). See also White, The Cambridge Movement.

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thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English Gothic, or “Middle Pointed,” as the only sound and therefore acceptable model for modern church architecture.48 Anything prior to this date was considered too primitive, while anything much after it (especially Perpendicular) was perceived as whimsical and therefore debased.49 Freeman, who was a corresponding member of the CCS, had always railed against this narrow and restricted assessment of Gothic architecture. Although he too accepted medieval architecture as the only proper basis for modern church design, his own preferences regarding style occupied both ends of the CCS spectrum: Romanesque and Perpendicular. To Freeman, the true value of medieval architecture lay not in any one fixed or arbitrary point of “perfection” but, as with the comparative method, in the process of its development as a distinct cultural form. It was primarily this insight that enabled him to appreciate the whole of medieval architecture—what in essence was a continuous working out of the Teutonic spirit—in a way that the CCS could not. Freeman first tested this idea in a paper he delivered at a meeting of the OAS in March 1843 entitled “On the Progressive Development of the Several Styles of Architecture, and the Connection of Each with the Spirit of the Age in Which It Arose”.50 In this paper Freeman laid down the same thesis he would later develop in his History. As the paper’s title suggests, his basic point was that architecture should be understood, and therefore appreciated, as a logical outgrowth or manifestation of the culture in which it was produced. This interpretation of architecture clearly exhibited the influence of Arnold, in particular his call to seek out the “tone of opinion and feeling” of a people through examination of its various forms of expression. Freeman’s first attempt at relating this concept to architecture, however, fell on deaf ears. It was not until two years later, in November 1845, that he was able to restate his thesis in a lecture entitled “Development of Roman and Gothick Architecture, and Their Moral and Symbolical Teaching”—the title this time reflecting what had come to be expected of ecclesiological discourse, with key words such “moral” and “symbol”. In this lecture Freeman was at pains to stress the underlying meaning of architecture (what he called its “philosophical principles”) rather than its aesthetic or “outward beauties”. “If Architecture, the first of arts, if Ecclesiastical Architecture, its noblest

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See, for example, Ecclesiologist 1/6 and 1/7 (April 1842), 96–7. By the late 1840s the CCS had relaxed its attitude on this point and was willing to look farther afield for inspiration, especially to continental Europe. One of the major turning points in this regard was the publication in 1848 of Benjamin Webb’s Sketches of Continental Ecclesiology. For Webb see J. Mordaunt Crook, “Benjamin Webb (1819–85) and Victorian Ecclesiology”, in R. N. Swanson, ed., The Church Retrospective (Melton, 1997), 423–55. Rules and Proceedings (March 1843), 11–12.

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form, be something more than a stock of details for antiquarian research, or of picturesque effects for the pencil, or of mere aestheticks in any shape”, he insisted, we must look on its successive changes not as the result of mere chance, or of the caprice or taste of individual architects, but as the developments of some great philosophical and moral principles, intimately connected with the spirit and feelings of the successive ages in which they arose; and not merely as arising from them, but as being best suited for them, best calculated, each in its own day, to produce that moral effect which is the end of all art . . . and, if art be moral, if Architecture be the chief of arts, thus to narrow and limit its teaching, shews as little perception of its inward depth of meaning, as of its merely outward beauties.51

In emphasizing “inward” content (a concept akin to Arnold’s “inner life”) over outward form, Freeman was extending a challenge to the doctrinaire position of the Cambridge Camden Society. He was criticizing not only its insistence on Middle-Pointed as the only style worthy of admiration (and imitation), but also its endorsement of the recent translation by John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb of the thirteenth-century treatise on church symbolism by William Durandus, the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum.52 Freeman believed the Rationale to be totally subjective and therefore groundless either as a record of the true meaning of medieval architecture or as an aid to modern design. To focus on the arbitrary and “over-minute allegorizing” of Durandus was, in Freeman’s mind, to miss the wood for the trees. The real meaning of architecture lay not in “mere detail” on the surfaces of buildings but in “proto-symbolism”. Proto-symbolism was fundamental to Feeman’s understanding of architecture. It represented an elemental, first-order symbolism evident only in the underlying mass and formal character of a building—what he later referred to in his History as the “grand features of outline and composition”.53 This particular understanding of architecture demonstrated Freeman’s distaste for the fetishization of extraneous symbolism to which many of his Anglo-Catholic colleagues were increasingly drawn. Like his initial interpretation of the Norman Conquest, Freeman’s insistence on proto-symbolism was essentially idealist. It displays the hallmarks of a Liberal Anglican reading of the past that presupposes the true meaning of phenomena to be comprehensible only in the context of historical development. To Freeman, proto-symbolism was more significant than “aesthetick” symbolism precisely because it was a method of analysis that revealed 51

52

53

E. A. Freeman, “Development of Roman and Gothick Architecture, and Their Moral and Symbolical Teaching,” Rules and Proceedings (Nov. 1845), 24. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments: A Translation of the First Book of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, written by William Durandus . . . (Leeds, 1843). Freeman, History of Architecture, 8.

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in architecture the fundamental organizing principles of society. It had practical benefits too, for it was from this type of symbolism that the most immediate moral “lessons” might be gleaned, both historical and spiritual. Again, this appeal to the moral and spiritual capacity of history reveals the teaching of Arnold. “Romanesque Architecture has to convey the great lesson that the Church is everlasting on earth,” explains Freeman, that neither the storms of persecution, nor the subtler snares of internal corruption, can avail to overthrow her; that she is firm and immovable from her foundations. This is expressed by giving the building a character of physical firmness and immovability; huge, unbroken walls, massive columns, heavy arches, all combine to produce this effect.54

Unlike the previous occasion that Freeman presented his theory, this time the CCS sat up and listened. This no doubt had much to do with the fact that he had charged them with a particular “narrowness of conception”. So incensed were the CCS by Freeman’s jibe, and so desirous to repudiate it, that they attacked him for several months in the pages of the Ecclesiologist, printing an especially long-winded and devastating critique of his theories in the June edition of 1846.55 Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to appreciate Freeman’s ideas, the CCS countered his criticism by suggesting that proto-symbolism was no less arbitrary, describing it as nothing more than a “curious metaphysical process” applied ab externo.56 Freeman and the CCS were not entirely at odds, however. A careful examination of their respective positions on symbolism reveals that neither completely dismissed the ideas of the other, only that they placed their emphases differently. For example, in its critique of Freeman, the CCS conceded that all true Christian architecture was a “compacture” of proto-symbolism and aesthetic symbolism, or what it called the “symbolism of Catholic dogma and practice”. It was just that the latter of these two (according to the Ecclesiologist) was more significant because it offered access to the specific and peculiar nature of Christian architecture.57 Despite this apparent divergence of opinion, both Freeman and the CCS were moving firmly in the direction of a developmental theory by 1846. Freeman, it must be said, had been grappling with ideas of development in architecture long before Neale, Webb and the CCS. One factor that may have hastened their apparent convergence over the matter was the intervention of the then chairman of the CCS (by now the Ecclesiological Society), A. J. B. Beresford Hope (1820–87).58 Hope had established an acquaintance with 54 55 56 57 58

“Mr. E. A. Freeman’s Reply to the Ecclesiologist,” Ecclesiologist 2/11 (May 1846), 181. Ecclesiologist, n.s. 5 (1846), 53–5, 177–86, 217–49. Ecclesiologist, n.s. 5 (1846), 220. Ecclesiologist, n.s. 5 (1846), 220–22. Beresford Hope was one of the earliest and most active members of the CCS. He was the youngest son of the noted antiquary and collector Thomas Hope (1769–1831), and

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Freeman in September 1845, and the correspondence between the two reveals a far more friendly and respectful relationship than that conveyed in the pages of the Ecclesiologist. In reaching out to Freeman and the OAS in this way, Hope was admitting Freeman’s desire to have his theories acknowledged and respected by the increasingly influential CCS, while garnering support for the Camdenians’ reformed attitude towards modern church design.59 If Freeman’s theory of development was concerned with the historical interpretation of architecture, then Beresford Hope’s was associated more with contemporary design. Hope believed that modern British architecture had reached an impasse by the 1840s. It no longer appeared to bear the stamp of artistic progress, languishing as it was in a quagmire of recycled historic styles. It lacked the essential animus recognizable in past architectural epochs, whether medieval or classical. To counter this predicament Beresford Hope began encouraging British architects to create a new, “developed” style of architecture by synthesizing a wide range of forms and materials, not just from within Britain but from around the world.60 Hope may have aimed squarely at the problem of contemporary architectural design but his ideas nevertheless contained an air of that “philosophical” principle characteristic of Freeman’s theories. As David Brownlee and Michael Hall have observed, it is indeed likely that Beresford Hope acquired this penchant for the notion of development from Freeman.61 But, again, such ideas were already in circulation more generally by 1846. This makes it difficult to pin Beresford Hope

59 60

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someone who had already amassed a considerable knowledge of architecture by the time he joined the CCS in 1840. See H. W. Law and I. Law, The Book of the Beresford Hopes (London, 1925). See JRL, FA1/1/38a–46 and 61a–66. This process was imagined as a sort of cross-fertilization of stylistic pedigrees. The caveat, however, was that Gothic—preferably English Middle-Pointed Gothic—would remain the foundation style, or “main ingredient,” as Beresford Hope described it, onto which the foreign elements would be grafted. J. Mordaunt Crook has described Beresford Hope’s idea as “progressive eclecticism”. See “Progressive Eclecticism: The Case of Beresford Hope”, in J. Mordaunt Crook, The Architect’s Secret: Victorian Critics and the Image of Gravity (London, 2003), 85–120. Brownlee, “The First High Victorians,” 42–3; Michael Hall, “‘Our Own’: Thomas Hope, A. J. B. Beresford Hope and the Creation of the High Victorian Style”, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design 1 (2008), 68. One can see this “doctrine” beginning to characterize Beresford Hope’s writing in two articles that appeared shortly after his first meeting with Freeman. See A. J. B. Beresford Hope, “Past and Future Developments of Architecture,” Ecclesiologist 5 (Feb. 1846), 52; Anon. (A. J. Beresford Hope), Saturday Review, 29 Jan. 1856, 236.

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and the CCS’s change of heart down to any one source.62 There had not only been Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) and Newman’s Essay, but also Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33). Indeed, as Beresford Hope had indicated to Freeman in March 1846, the Ecclesiological Society was now “impressed with the feeling that Christian architecture must be developed to suit present exigencies”.63 The idea of development was now exerting its influence with full force in the world of British architecture, and Freeman must have felt that the time was right to apply his method in a more extended and substantial manner.

iii “The term style is one in itself not very easy to define”, Freeman writes in the introduction to his History, “and its use in architecture is more especially vague, as it serves to denote alike the most comprehensive and the most minute divisions under which architectural works may be arranged”. He outlines three different ways of conceiving “style”: as an antiquarian term serving to locate a building in a certain age and country; as a way of arranging buildings according to “some easily recognized circumstance of construction or detail”; and finally as exemplifying “some pervading principle, of which details are merely more or less perfectly developed instances”. These three means of deploying style represented an “ascending scale”, with the last being “the highest and most scientific”.64 By “style” Freeman means all by which we recognize architecture as a cultural artefact: form and construction, as well as decor (i.e. “detail”). Like its author, A History of Architecture is caught between a desire to classify specific buildings by country or construction (deploying “style” in the first and second of the three senses of the term) and a fascination with tracing the process by which a “pervading principle” (“style” in the third sense) manifests itself in buildings spread across time and space. On the one hand, isolation, purity and stasis were necessary to identify the characteristics of a specific style, to make fine distinctions; on the other, juxtaposition, assimilation and change (what Freeman called “transition”) were constantly blurring those distinctions. Freeman is pulled

62

63

64

Michael Hall, “What Do Victorian Churches Mean? Symbolism and Sacramentalism in Anglican Church Architecture, 1850–1870”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59/1 (March 2000), 81–3. Hope to Freeman, 31 March 1846. JRL, FA1/1/38a. The real turning point for the Ecclesiological Society on the matter of “development” was George Edmund Street’s keynote address in 1852, “The True Principles of Architecture, and the Possibility of Development”, Ecclesiologist 10/55 (Aug. 1852), 247–62. Freeman, History of Architecture, 17–18.

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both ways: the theorist speaks of styles as pure, fixed forms; the historian prefers to speak of styles as “streams” that divide and recombine, “sometimes remaining parallel and distinct, sometimes converging and commingling”.65 This understanding of architecture has interesting parallels with the insights and concepts of natural science. The Liberal Anglicans recognized analogies between evolution in the natural world and the developmental processes of history, even if they understood them as distinct phenomena.66 Architects and antiquaries, too, had established theoretical and methodological connections between architecture and natural science by the 1840s.67 Indeed, if we were to use the scientific vernacular of Freeman’s own day, then we might say that he was both a Cuvierite and a transmutationist. In a similar vein to the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), Freeman positions style as a fixed, eternal archetype, understood as principles of construction. Where Cuvier classifies life into rough categories according to whether it has a shell (Mollusca), a radial form (Radiata) or a spinal chord (Chordata), Freeman classifies buildings by whether they are constructed around caves, entablatures or arches. He does, in fact, use the word “type” interchangeably with “style”. Thus, for Freeman, resemblances between the buildings of widely scattered peoples are not indications that those peoples were of one race or even influenced each other. This is because “architecture is in most countries a plant of indigenous birth, and has everywhere passed through the same, or at least analogous, stages”.68 Thus the similarities between Indian and Egyptian architecture reflect an “analogous origin”, not imitation of one by the other.69 As one works one’s way through the History from Incas and Aztecs through Greeks and Romans to the heights of Gothic, Freeman becomes more and more transmutationist; so much so that one begins to suspect that as far as its author is concerned all architecture is under “development”, and the greatest architecture is “in a state of almost incessant flux”.70 All styles are “transitional styles, periods of progress from one principle to another”. Freeman’s enthusiasm for them is clear:

65 66 67

68

69 70

Ibid., 164. Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea, 145. See Carla Yanni, “On Nature and Nomenclature: William Whewell and the Production of Architectural Knowledge in Early Victorian Britain,” Architectural History 40 (1997), 204–21. Freeman, History of Architecture, 47. It was not uncommon for Freeman to use biological metaphors such as this in his writing on architecture. For example, in comparing English Perpendicular with French Flamboyant in his 1845 essay “Development of Roman and Gothick Architecture”, 30, he observed that they did not differ essentially, but “only as species from species”. Freeman, History of Architecture, 52. Ibid., 12.

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The forms produced by these transitional periods are generally, in an aesthetical point of view, the most unsatisfactory of all . . . But in an investigation of the history of art no periods are so replete with interest; every stage, every minute detail, illustrates the combat of antagonist principles; the struggles of the decaying style, receding step by step from the scene of its ancient sovereignty; the sure though slow inroads of its successor, first grasping the main features of construction, then gradually bringing within its power the details of shaft, and capital, and moulding, till all are fused into a perfect whole; are at once a subject of most curious inquiry, and one tending to point out more strongly than any other part of their history, the real animating principles of successive styles, and to supply also a valuable commentary on the two great rival principles in the human mind itself.71

With the benefit of hindsight the historian is able to perfect or complete the “transitional” style in his own imagination.72 The History is divided into two books. The first is devoted to “Architecture of the Entablature” and begins by considering the ancient civilizations of Central and South America as well as India and Persia, whose architecture is seen as beyond or below discussion, due to insufficient evidence or “fixed depravity of taste”.73 James Burns’s original commission had been for a “‘manual of architecture’ . . . a well filled duodecimo vol[ume] of about 400 pages—which should embrace architecture generally, from the earliest ages and embrace every form of the art— secular as well as ecclesiastical”.74 In his introduction Freeman is candid enough to admit that he had to “get up” large parts of Book One in order to fill this brief, something he found “a wearisome task”.75 He steers clear of historiographical minefields such as the debate over the degree of influence Indian and Egyptian architecture had on each other, and only espies his first “style” when he comes to the latter. Already we get a fuller sense of how Freeman defines “style” (which does seem here to overlap significantly with “type”): it must express “an idea”, protected by “laws of taste” and consistent expression from becoming “mere fancy”. This is the moral imperative of Freeman’s method making itself felt. Egyptian architecture is in “an excavated style”, its buildings and their elements, such as their columns, with their “reverse diminution”, are all related to the cave “type”. Thus the use of bracket capitals betrays “the idea of original cohesion between the support and the mass supported”, whereas “in a constructed style” such additional weights on

71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 48. James Burns to Freeman, 7 Dec. 1846. JRL, FA1/1/8. Freeman, History of Architecture, viii.

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the pillar are avoided, so as not to compromise the “appearance of security”.76 Although this “particular origin” of a style in a type of construction could never be entirely obscured, “the fact of a style having one particular origin” did not prevent a certain amount of borrowing.77 Freeman thus begins by discussing style as a principle of construction, or perhaps a building “type”. Unfortunately this suggests that Greek and Egyptian architecture on the one hand and Roman and Gothic on the other are in some way related. Freeman the Christian racialist refuses to accept this, and devotes several pages to proving that “there does not appear to be any resemblance between the two styles [Greek and Egyptian], beyond that which cannot fail to exist between any two which employ the same construction”. Such resemblances that do exist are “details”—which, as already noted above, are of little interest to Freeman. Fundamental differences in religion and temperament were key to this interpretation. He also employs climate theory to widen the gap—a vestige of the Niebuhrian method as translated through Arnold.78 For Freeman, it is ultimately the higher “national character” and greater “national originality” which distinguishes the Greeks.79 Although he clearly admires Greek architecture, it is already clear from the second part of Book One that the agenda of the History is to propose that Gothic is “the most perfect form which the art [of architecture] can assume”.80 If such a suggestion in itself was by no means controversial by 1849, the method by which he arrived at it certainly was. As with his preliminary essays on the topic of medieval architecture discussed above, Freeman was not only seeking to readjust the relative worth assigned each style in architectural history, but also proposing an entirely new system of assessing that worth. It is this approach that distinguishes Freeman from his contemporaries. Part of the problem, of course, was the Renaissance. In a passage reminiscent of Pugin, Freeman insists that the pedantries by which “generation after generation of paganizers” had characterized buildings by orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) was reductive, imposing “unnatural shackles” of “artificial bondage”. Freeman’s squirming over suspected Egyptian influences shows the strain of treating style in abstract aesthetic terms. 76 77

78

79 80

Ibid., 79. “An architecture then, which borrowed its principal forms, and above all, its general effect and character, from the one source, might, in the gradual progress of its development, derive both ornamental and constructive features from the other.” Ibid., 60. For example, see Arnold, Introductory Lectures, 157–67; Reill, “Barthold Georg Niebuhr”, 21. Thomas Hope, whom Freeman praises in his History, also associated the causes of architectural formation with climate and geography. Thomas Hope, An Historical Essay on Architecture (London, 1835). Freeman, History of Architecture, 98 (details), 99 (nationality). Ibid., 27.

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It is at this point that the transmutationist and, to some extent, the racialist and ecclesiologist begin to make their presence felt. Architecture, Freeman concedes, responds to a universal human need. Each style (qua building “type”) is theoretically equal, with the same potential to incarnate “ideas”, to achieve “perfection”. Seen as “the legitimate adorning of a certain construction”, however, a style may be “perfect” and yet not be “either mechanically, aesthetically, or morally, the best that has been produced”.81 Whether certain “ideas” are expressed or not depends on who is thinking them, and some races seem to be better at thinking than others, their intellectual muscles toned by true faith. Differences of race, faith, and national character are thus superimposed on Freeman’s neat classification of “architecture of the entablature” and “of the arch”. Thanks to their influence, “all styles are not of the same merit, all do not equally contain a principle of life, all are not equally the expression of an idea”.82 That Gothic reached “real perfection” as a style was due to its elements having been seized by the “plastic hand of the Northman”.83 As already noted above, Freeman is aware of our tendency to view style as something alive (“something really existing . . . like a tree”), and in a certain context he is prepared to admit that this concept is useful, in so far as it makes a narrative and a certain sort of architectural knowledge possible. But that knowledge is ultimately antiquarian, not philosophical or scientific. A style may be alive, but its life is not its own; its life is literally inspired or breathed into it by race, and its degree of development is determined by the degree of intellect, nationality and faith exhibited by that race. Thus the introductory chapter on “division of styles in architecture” shows a tension between the classificatory task Freeman feels he has been set and the higher task he feels calling him, between constructing “a general arrangement of styles of architecture” and what he sees as that “deep and philosophical investigation into architecture”, which takes the two styles of Greek and Gothic as its focus, “and of the two, Gothic, as the expression of the deeper and nobler idea, even more so than its rival”.84 Whenever the “arrangement of styles in architecture” places the styles of different races in a potentially embarrassing juxtaposition (the Romans and the Teutons, for example), Freeman’s “scientific” racialism asserts itself. “Wherever the two races are brought into contact with each other”, Freeman writes, “the stern and hard virtues of the Northern conquerors bespeak a far higher standard, physical,

81 82 83 84

Ibid., 254. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 19.

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intellectual, and moral, than the worn out and enervated system of Rome could supply”.85 Here style is seen to have a certain equivalency with language. Drawing on Niebuhrian philologic methodology, architectural style, like language, is interpreted by Freeman as an elemental form of cultural expression, one that is understood to embody the unique experiences and character of a people. If, for Niebuhr, words, metaphors and grammar were related to a definite historical context, then so too for Freeman were the “tall shaft, and the soaring arch, and the vault”. However, it was not the mere presence of these elements that mattered, but the underlying “spirit” or principle that enabled their coming together in a unique and coherent form.86 Again, this was the genius of the Teuton. The idea that a “germ” of civilization could be passed across racial divides underpinned the “unity of history”, the scheme by which Arnold saw certain ideals as having been passed from Greek to Roman and then from Roman to Teuton. As with Arnold, in Freeman’s case this transfer will only work if the race in question offers a fertile “soil”. In Book Two Freeman turns to consider “the architecture of the arch”, and starts with Romanesque, which might be called the quintessential transitional style. In Freeman’s day it was common to deny that it was a style at all: it was seen either as “corrupted” Roman or as “imperfect” Gothic. This, as Freeman notes, enabled both the ecclesiologist and “the despiser of Gothic” alike to revile it: it “is looked on not as a distinct style, but as an imperfect form of Gothic, containing the same elements, but in a rude and undeveloped form”.87 Freeman insisted that Romanesque was “a distinct form of Christian architecture”, albeit one only perceptible to those able to think beyond archetypes, able to see a style in transition, to judge “without reference to a fixed standard either of Grecian or Gothic excellence”.88 Freeman is able to perceive the Romanesque as emerging from a “germ” passed to the Teuton by the Romans along with the Christian faith. In both cases the Romans pass on this “germ” without even having been able to propagate it themselves, due to the “exclusively heathen” nature of their achievements.89 This is an instance of Freeman’s protosymbolist concept at work. For the Roman Empire, Christianity “was but the 85 86

87 88 89

Ibid., 150. Freeman describes the Romanesque and Gothic styles as “the architectural language of our own race and religion”. History of Architecture, 8. Ibid., 259–60. Ibid., 261. There are certain limits imposed, therefore, on translation or “transition” between styles. Here Freeman states that the “Saracens” borrow elements from Gothic, only to produce “a sort of dead Gothic”. “We shall see however”, he continues, “that many of these dead forms were grasped by the Teutonic architects, and by them endued with true life and vigour”. Ibid., 27.

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precursor of its fall”—to the Teutons it brought new strength.90 Thus it was possible to see Romanesque both as a distinct style and as one borrowed from the Romans, even while claiming that in Roman hands it had not in fact been a style at all.91 Transition is not, therefore, the result of “a direct and formal imitation”, but requires a catalyst: “some great mechanical discovery, some mighty revolution in politics or religion, some complete revulsion in taste and feeling”.92 It is unclear whether this trigger comes, as it were, from “outside” or “inside” architecture. In a passage from Book One where Freeman is insisting that the Greek style did not emerge from the Egyptian, he argues that “to suppose such an opposite style [i.e. Greek] to have grown up out of a direct and formal imitation, without any great innovation, like the arch, to revolutionize the whole, is contrary to all possibility”.93 Thus a borrowed element of construction could be combined with traditional decoration in the established style, marking the beginning of a phase of transition which would itself give birth to a new style, to a “third form” that matched neither the form of the borrower nor the borrowed form. Freeman introduces this quasi-evolutionary process in his introduction, acknowledging a debt to Thomas Hope’s Historical Essay and noting its similarities with that “progression by antagonism” which Lord Lindsay had advanced in his 1846 Sketches of Christian Art.94 Again, as in the case of his preliminary essays, the “truth” of this higher, proto-symbolist understanding of style as a question of principles more or less perfectly developed was noumenal, almost quasi-religious, based on “evidence of things not seen”.95 At times in the History it can seem quite literally to melt into air, for all the characteristic mixture of breeziness and bluntness with which Freeman presents it. “Any one but an archaeologian knows that there is an indescribable something about buildings”, he writes, “as about everything else, call it air, character, what you please, which stamps their style and date better than all the technicalities from one end of the Glossary to the other”.96 But how could one capture this “air”, how could would-be imitators capture a style and keep it alive?

90 91 92 93 94

95 96

Ibid., 147. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 99. Freeman incorrectly refers to Sketches as “Letters on Christian Art”. See History of Architecture, xviii (Lindsay), 15 (Hope and “third form”). For Lindsay see Conlin, “Gladstone and Christian Art”. Hebrews 11:1. Freeman, History of Architecture, 207–8.

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iv Although Freeman would never be as influential as the Ecclesiologists, it is a mistake to think that he had no impact on the world of British architecture. Through his involvement with the OAS, and the publication of his History, Freeman’s ideas percolated into contemporary thinking on architecture, particularly theories concerning the Gothic Revival. One such admirer was George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), a young designer who was soon to become one of Britain’s premier architects. On 3 October 1849 Scott wrote to Freeman to congratulate him on his History, though he did suspect that it would “puzzle” the editor of the Builder, “it being so different from the common view”. Scott was rather unenthusiastically preparing a paper for the following Tuesday’s OAS meeting on the subject of his own restoration work at St Peter’s, Northampton. His restoration there had been strongly criticized: as he wrote to Freeman, “they have nailed me to it”. Apart from agreeing that he was wrong, however, Scott could see little sign of any consensus on how the balance between imitation and archaeology should be struck.97 For his part Freeman had insisted in his History that the question whether Romanesque was a “perfect or an imperfect style” had no place in “theories as to the preservation or destruction of ancient buildings”.98 Restoration was not the only area of contention in British architecture over which Freeman and Scott ruminated; the rise of “secular Gothic” was another. As both were enthusiasts for the Gothic style, it is hardly surprising that their views on this matter coincided. To be sure, Freeman had argued for the revival of Gothic forms primarily with respect to religious buildings, but he was also aware of the potential it offered the secular domain. After all, a Christian nation ought to build in a Christian style, no matter what the occasion. But for Scott the synergies went further. Through exposure to Freeman and his ideas, it seems that Scott developed an appreciation for both the “philosophy” of architecture and racialist theory. Traces of both are evident in Scott’s own writing, especially in A Plea for the Faithful Restoration of Our Ancient Churches (1850) and Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture (1857), where he can be found justifying Gothic architecture in terms that are palpably Freemanesque. For instance, in Remarks, Scott defends “our Gothic Renaissance” against what he considers to be the invidious “revived Roman”, observing that the Classicists fought hard against it, but—their own architecture being a Renaissance, and that of the style of a foreign land and of an old world—they failed to enunciate any philosophical argument against the revival of the native architecture of our own country and our own family of nations.

97 98

Scott to Freeman, 3 and 9 Oct. 1849. JRL, FA1/1/93a (quote), 94a. Freeman, History of Architecture, 254.

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“[O]ur aim must be a style of our own,” he adds, “the indigenous style of our race must be our point de depart”.99 Although these passages also exhibit the influence of Beresford Hope, to whom Scott dedicated Remarks, the association he makes between race, nation and architecture also reveals the impact of Freeman.100 Freeman’s views on secular Gothic were to be put to the test in a way that he could scarcely have predicted. It was Scott who called upon him for moral and intellectual support during his ill-fated encounter with Lord Palmerston over the design of the new Government Offices in 1859–60. In this altercation Scott was forced to substitute his original Gothic Revival design for a classical one, owing to Palmerston’s personal dislike of Gothic. Although Freeman’s interjection came too late for Scott, the debate over style that gripped this project was both fierce and protracted, representing one of the most far-reaching and divisive debates in the history of British architecture. The terms of this debate (known as the “Battle of the Styles”) were grist to the mill for Freeman, and one suspects that he had been looking for an excuse to wade in. In fact, the association between architecture and identity that had largely characterized this debate chimed perfectly with many of the arguments that he had made in his History. For a public building of such import, and one upon which the artistic merits of the British nation would be judged, “modern Gothic”, as far as Freeman could see, was the only viable option. To this end he penned two articles in June 1859 in which he raised the stakes of the debate considerably.101 These pieces gave Freeman the opportunity to reheat his Teutonic theory in what amounted to a heavy-handed appeal to nationalist sentiment.102 He began rather cautiously by reiterating a number of well-worn prejudices concerning the cultural origins of Gothic architecture that had been present in revivalist theory since the 1820s, especially those developed by John

99

100

101

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George Gilbert Scott, Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture Present and Future, 2nd edn (London, 1858), 262–3. In A Plea for the Faithful Restoration of Our Ancient Churches (1850), 7, Scott describes Freeman’s History as a “masterly outline”. In writing to Freeman, he also described the History as “the most masterly outline of the whole subject I have ever met with”. See G. G. Scott to Freeman, 3 Oct. 1849. JRL, FA1/1/93a. Scott’s lectures before the Royal Academy in 1855 also displayed the influence of Freeman in the way they presented the genius of Gothic architecture in cultural and nationalist terms. See George Gilbert Scott, Lectures on the Rise and Development of Mediaeval Architecture, 2 vols. (London, 1878), 1: 5, 7, 17, 217–19, 275; 2: 292–3, 309, 315. David Brownlee has noted that Scott himself had made extensive comments on the draft version of at least one of these articles (National Review, Jan. 1860) and assisted in having the other one (The Times, 19 Oct. 1859) published. See Brownlee, “That ‘Regular Mongrel Affair’: G. G. Scott’s Design for the Government Offices”, Architectural History 28 (1985), 181 n. 89. The Times, 19 Oct. 1859, 10–11; National Review 10 (1860), 24–53.

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Henry Parker, William Sewell and the university architectural societies.103 But then he struck out in the only way he knew how, arguing, as he had in the History, that Gothic architecture had grown out of a certain kind of racial temperament and was not only the outward expression of English identity but also a ready and palpable source of historical continuity. Freeman sought to win back the moral high ground for the Goths by lending their argument a wider and more scholarly profile. “We, as Teutons prefer to cleave to Teutonic architecture”, he declared; “as Englishmen, we select by special preference its English variety . . . Gothic architecture is the architecture of the Teutonic race”. Peddling the idea that the unity of history was not just a phenomenon observable in the development of English culture but also one that ought to characterize English architecture, he added, “The architecture of England arose alongside of her laws, her constitution, her language. They are all the work of that wonderful thirteenth century, which made England what she still is”.104 Unfortunately for both Freeman and Scott, Lord Palmerston did not have the same view. He forced Scott to change his original Gothic design for the Foreign Office to a classical one, threatening to dismiss him from the project unless he did so. Reluctantly, Scott presented a revised set of plans in April 1861. In July that year the House of Commons voted in favour of the revised plans, bringing an end to the saga and resulting in the building we see today.105 With the Gothic cause on the retreat, Freeman retired from the fray. Although he remained active in the OAS, he would not enter into public debate over architecture in the same way again. He continued to write on architecture but in terms that were considerably less high-minded and compelling. Gone was the desire to transform the way architecture was perceived and understood, sapped perhaps by the apparent indifference he sensed among the wider architectural community to his ideas. Nevertheless, one is left wondering why he believed that

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J. M. Frew, “Gothic Is English: John Carter and the Revival of the Gothic as England’s National Style”, Art Bulletin 64 (1982), 315–19; S. Bradley, “The Englishness of Gothic: Theories and Interpretations from William Gilpin to J. H. Parker”, Architectural History 45 (2002), 325–46. National Review 10 (1860), 24–53. Much of the “unity” argument presented in this piece by Freeman can also be found in a similar piece written around the same time titled “The Continuity of English History”, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for July 1860. See “The Continuity of English History”, in E. A. Freeman, Historical Essays, first series, 5th edn (London, 1896), 40–52. For further discussion of this episode in British architectural history see G. A. Bremner, “Nation and Empire in the Government Architecture of Mid-Victorian London: The Foreign and India Office Reconsidered”, Historical Journal 48/3 (2005), 703–42; Ian Toplis, The Foreign Office: An Architectural History (London, 1987); M. H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London, 1851–1915 (New Haven and London, 1995).

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so abstract and academic a theory as his would receive widespread acclaim in the British architectural establishment. It seems clear that most British architects were not yet ready for architecture as a branch of “mental philosophy”.

v Freeman wished his ideas had had a greater impact in the world of British architecture. He could see the huge influence that his rivals such as the CCS and John Ruskin had achieved, and maybe wondered what it was that prevented his own conclusions on symbolism and architectural nomenclature from being accepted more generally. Although Ruskin, Viollet le Duc and, later, William Morris followed Freeman in delivering architectural writing from the dry-as-dust antiquarian approach of the 1820s and 1830s, under their guidance the terms of debate shifted radically in the1850s and 1860s. No longer was symbolism a leading consideration. Architecture had become a means of diagnosing the moral and social ills of modern Britain, rather than embodying such abstract notions as the vitality of race. Indeed, Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, which appeared the same year as Freeman’s History, made a direct appeal to the romantic, emotive, and somewhat pious inclinations of younger British architects. It, along with The Stones of Venice (1851–3), was a deeply engaging narrative that captured the imagination of a generation.106 But it should be remembered that architects and architecture did not represent Freeman’s ultimate objective. If architects read his History and took something from it, as had Scott, then all well and good. The context in which the ideas underpinning it were developed was 1840s Oxford, and the OAS was an organization established more for the benefit of historians and other like-minded enthusiasts than for architects. These tensions highlight just how different, fundamentally, Freeman’s ideas were to those of Beresford Hope and the CCS. Despite areas of overlap, particularly on the point of development, it is clear that Freeman’s notion of proto-symbolism was essentially anathema to the Camdenians whose agenda revolved around ecclesiastical symbolism and the liturgical diktats of modern church design. For Freeman, the study of architecture had a much higher and nobler aim. In reading his writings on the subject one gets the distinct impression that to study architecture for architecture’s sake was limiting and tiresome, that architecture had a greater and more important story to tell about the history of man and 106

Indeed, in Modern Painters (vol. 3) Ruskin proudly confessed his ignorance of German philosophy. See Cornelius J. Baljon, “Interpreting Ruskin: The Argument of the Seven Lamps of Architecture and the Stones of Venice”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55/4 (1997), 410.

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his achievements. The idealist streak that so characterized the Liberal Anglican mind revealed to Freeman a whole new understanding of built form and the way it might be interpreted as evidence of the developmental and unifying processes of history. In this respect, he was ahead of his mentor and master Arnold, and stands out from other nineteenth-century British writers on architecture, who have often been characterized as eschewing the theoretical pretensions of their Continental counterparts. Freeman is now all but forgotten to the world of architecture. His History may have been the first account of world architecture in the English language, but its conclusions can hardly be taken seriously. Nevertheless, to read Freeman’s writings on architecture today is to rediscover the suppleness and wide-ranging grasp of the Liberal Anglican mind. At first glance Freeman may seem not to fit the Liberal Anglican mould. As a scholar he took the methodological tools developed by Arnold and adapted them to suit his own research agenda, opening up novel, if controversial, ways of viewing the past. But this application of the idealist method in its British guise does not make Freeman any less of a Liberal Anglican. Rather, it forces us to rethink the nature and extent of “Liberal Anglicanism” as an intellectual tradition. Can this tradition have been as limited or circumscribed as Duncan Forbes proposed? Freeman’s development and articulation of it through his History of Architecture suggests not. Finally, it is only in relatively recent times that the philosophical turn (i.e. postmodern theory) has come to shape the practise and “reading” of architecture in Britain, particularly in educational establishments. Cultural and “philosophical” interpretations of architecture are now de rigueur. Though largely neglected by his contemporaries, all those who think and write about architecture today are in a sense heirs of Edward Augustus Freeman.



from imperial to international horizons: a hermeneutic study of bengali modernism∗ kris manjapra Department of History, Tufts University Email: [email protected]

This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of “youth”. Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center–periphery imperial axis in the 1870s, was resolutely reframed within a multipolar international constellation by the 1920s. This change was reflected by the new conversations in which young Bengalis became entangled in the years after the war. At a linguistic level, the shift was registered by the increasing use of terms such as bide´s (the foreign) and a¯ ntarj¯atik (international), as opposed to bil¯at (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination.

introducing KALLOL In 1921, four young writers established the Four Arts Club (Catus.kal¯a for literature, music, the crafts and painting) in Calcutta, to foster artistic modernism. The club was formed in the context of political and intergenerational crises. Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement was in full force and thousands of ∗

I sincerely thank Suzanne Marchand, Anthony La Vopa, Peter Gordon, Sugata Bose, Neilesh Bose, Bharati Datta, Kamal Datta, Saugato Datta, Ketaki Kushari Dyson and the editors and anonymous readers of Modern Intellectual History for offering comments on versions of this essay.

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protesting Indians were sent to jail. The following year, Kazi Nazrul Islam, the famed twenty-two-year-old Muslim bidrohi kabi (rebel poet) was arrested for publishing Marxist literature, and he subsequently went on hunger strike. In response, the Four Arts Club proclaimed a “vitalist revolt” (j¯ıbanbader bidroha) in Bengali literature and culture.1 Buddhadeva Basu, an important literary scholar who joined the club at the age of fifteen, recalled that its journal, Kallol, was identified with “the spirit of youth, with revolt, and even [with] the revolting”. He remarked how startling it was that the “Kallol-clan, then so young and tentative, should have been taken so seriously”.2 The Bengali-language literary journal Kallol, whose name meant “musical waves”3 , began appearing in 1923 and continued publication until 1929. The journal was edited by two relatively poor and relatively young men: Gokulchandra Nag (born in 1895) and Dineshranjan Das (born in 1888). Gokul, aged twentyeight, was a recent graduate from the Government Arts College of Calcutta, had published short stories and was completing a novel.4 He had a day job at a flower stall in New Market, and worked part-time as a sketcher in the Archaeological Society, and as a set designer and actor in the fledgling Calcutta film industry.5 Dineshranjan was a gregarious organizer employed in a sporting goods store. The group they started was put under surveillance by the Calcutta Criminal Investigation Department in 1924.6 Political oppression meant that Kallol had to shift editorial offices three times and print from at least four different presses.7 Nevertheless, the journal had an epochal effect on Bengali intellectual life. The establishment of the Comparative Literature Department at Jadavpur University in 1956, as well as the influential 1962 Bengali anthology of world poetry, Sapta Sindhu Da´s Diganta (Seven Seas and Ten Horizons) by the eminent young writers Sankha Ghosh and Alokeranjan Dasgupta, derived part of their inspiration from the 1920s modernist experiments of Kallol. The study of the so-called “Kallol era” is typically framed in terms of literary history alone, and the efforts of young writers to break away from the style of the great master, Rabindarnath Tagore (1861–1941).8 Sudipta Kaviraj proposed a 1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8

Acintyakumar Sengupta, Kalloler Yug (Calcutta, 1950), 49, 57. Buddhadeva Basu, Green Grass (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1948), 81. See introduction in Ketaki Kushari Dyson, ed. and trans., Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose (Calcutta: Oxford University Press), xxviii. This is the English translation that Kalidas Nag proposed to Romain Rolland, 4 Feb. 1925, Kalidas Nag and Romain Rolland Correspondence, ed. Chinmoy Guha (Calcutta, 1996), 123. Debkumar Basu, Kallolgost.h¯ır Kath¯as¯ahitya (Calcutta, 1960), 51. Obituary of Gokulchandra Nag by Dineshranjan Das, Kallol, 1925, 620. Nag designed the set for and acted in the film “Soul of a Slave” (1923). See letter by Kallol editor, 11 K¯arthik 1924, reproduced in Sengupta, Kalloler Yug, 79. Debkumar Basu, Kallolgost.h¯ır Kath¯as¯ahitya, 9. See the excellent literary studies of Kallol by Debakumar Basu, Kallolgost.h¯ır Kath¯as¯ahitya (Calcutta, 1960); Jibendra Singha Ray, Kalloler Kal (Calcutta, 1973). Also see S. N. Das,

from imperial to international horizons

new approach to studying the journal by placing it within a broader history of artistic representations of modernity in Bengal.9 As Kaviraj has pointed out, Kallol solidified the status of youth (yubak) as chief votaries of cultural production, unleashing an artistic movement keyed to modernism within the frame of world literature (vi´sva s¯ahitya).10 By “world literature”, this paper refers to literary internationalism, institutionalized by the early twentieth century in such forms as the Nobel Prize and the International PEN.11 I follow the path opened up by Kaviraj, and maintain that geopolitical tensions in the international domain and generational divides in the local social order of Calcutta helped account for the literary internationalism of Kallol.12 The persistence of geopolitical and generational divides interrupts totalizing narratives of the “globalization of the West”, or the “global life” of capitalism that often inform studies of colonial Indian intellectual history. Modernism is a slippery term, and tends to be reflexively associated with what Pascale Casanova has called the bourse of originally European literary values.13 Marshall Berman characterized modernism as a record, begun by European artists and then passed along to non-Europeans, of the “tragedy of development” wreaked by capitalistic modernity.14 In this paper, however, I follow Edward Said’s notion of modernism as a form of opposition from within structures of social power that came out of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century resistance movements in both Europe and the colonial world.15 I use modernism to refer to artistic experimentation in colonial Bengal that sought to represent the abject aspects, injustices and irrationality of life, but also sought to stimulate political resistance and spiritual renewal.16 In Calcutta, beginning in Dineshranjan’s small apartment at 10/2 Patuatola Lane, young intellectuals conversed in their adda, or salon, about what they saw

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13 14 15

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“Post-Tagore Period of Bengali Literature”, in idem, Bengali Language and Literature (Delhi: Cosmos, 2002), 217–31. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal”, in Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History (Berkeley, 2003), 559. Jibendra Singha Ray, Kalloler Kal, 15. The Nobel Prize for Literature was established in 1901. The International PEN was founded in 1921. Dipesh Chakrabarty providing a valuable framing of Kallol in terms of “literary cosmopolitanism”. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda”, in idem, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, 2000), 200. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2004), 146–56. Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air (New York, 1982), 40. Edward Said, “The Voyage In and the Emergence Of Opposition”, in idem, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994), 292–3. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 260 ff.; On “the art of representing”, see idem, Representations of the Intellectual (New York, 1994), 12–14; Sudipta Kaviraj, “Two Literatures of Bengal”, 560.

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as the cultural stagnation of their fathers’ society and the need to rediscover rasa (the feeling of wonder) in Bengali letters through affiliations with literary movements worldwide.17 A generation of intellectuals, born between around 1885 and 1905, positioned itself not on a regional or a national stage, but on a global stage in the postwar years in order to pursue the search for value, meaning and social relevance.18 The global horizons of Kallol were intrinsic to its modes of artistic creativity, and this essay explores the historical context in which this global imagination developed, as well as the textures of Bengali intellectual life that it produced. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a major twentieth-century student of Heidegger, developed a powerful philosophy of conversation that provides the compass for this study. The philosophical hermeneutics grounded by Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) elicited a flurry of critique in its time, both from those who insisted that his approach left questions of power and domination unaddressed and from others who believed that it celebrated tradition over reason.19 While a discussion of those debates is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth mentioning that Gadamer’s 1960 insights about the diffuse, environmental quality of power actually resonated strongly with Foucault’s later thought.20 Yet what makes Gadamer’s philosophy of particular interest here is his theory of conversation, and its implications for the study of intellectual history in the context of globalization.21 A Gadamerian perspective invites us to explore Kallol along three lines: (1) the horizons and configurations of conversations in which Bengali intellectuals strove to create meaning for life; (2) the modes by which Bengali intellectuals participated in these conversations, what Gadamer 17

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This follows Ranajit Guha’s felicitous translation of the word rasa. See “Experience, Wonder, and the Pathos of Historicality”, in idem, History at the Limit of World-History (New York, 2002). See Tapobrata Ghosh, “Literature and Literary Life in Calcutta”, in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Calcutta: The Living City, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1990), 2: 230. I derive inspiration for this argument about social relevance from Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, 1987), 14–18; and Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism (Cambridge, 2010). Also see Rajat Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927 (Delhi, 1984), 4. Fred Dallmayr, “Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Gadamer and Derrida in Dialogue,” in Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction (Albany, 1989), 245–60; Michael Kelly, “The Gadamer/Habermas Debate Revisited: The Question of Ethics,” Philosophical and Social Criticism 14/2 (1988), 369–89. See Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2005), 211 ff. Gary Gutting, “Introduction”, in idem, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge, 1984), 2. One major contribution of Gadamer’s Truth and Method involved providing a phenomenology of conversation. See the 1993 English edition, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, 355–460.


calls “phronesis”; and (3) the constraints on intentionality imposed on Bengali modernists by the traditions and milieus of authority in which they lived. Using this approach, I hope to show why, for the study of colonial intellectual history, the global domain is best not conceived as abstract and homogenized, but rather as “lumpy”, in which the lumps are best depicted as congested intersections of power relations and conversation.22

colonial experience within a global horizon Postcolonial theorists have tended to study the intellectual life of the colonized in ways that associate “the global” with imperial rule, with Western domination, or with the trope of abstract capitalist logic. The colony, from these perspectives, becomes a site of contestation with and resistance to dominating global forces, or a location in which global logics are interpolated and unwittingly championed by local social groups. These views of the global domain certainly capture features of globalization in the age of imperialism.23 But what such approaches, discussed in greater detail below, do not bring onto center stage is how the global horizon opened up fields for new experience, and new experiments in making meaning. Hermeneutic activity, by which I mean interpretive activities that create meaning for human existence, occurred on the margins of the Britain–India imperial axis, and outside the imperial axis, and this activity deserves further consideration. Edward Said, in his 1978 masterpiece Orientalism, helped establish the field of postcolonial studies by showing “the Orient” to be a formation of European imperialist knowledge/power. His subsequent work, as well as that of a host of eminent contributors over the course of the next thirty years, has sought to study the intellectual history of empire from the bottom up; that is, from the perspective of the colonized and minoritized as they were located within globe-straddling structures of power.24 A major contribution to the study of colonial intellectual history from the bottom up came in the collection of Homi Bhabha’s essays in Location of Culture (1994), and his theorization of hybridity. Bhabha proposed that colonial subjects, in confronting the colonizer’s hegemonic discourse, responded with a “borderline

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See Frederick Cooper’s critique of binarism in “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History”, American Historical Review 99/5 (1994), 1516–45. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler questioned the notion of ‘the globe’ as a unitary entity in Tensions of Empire (Berkeley, 1997), 33, 34; Cooper launched a more sustained critique of “totalizing” approaches in “Globalization”, in idem, Colonialism in Question (Berkeley, 2005), 94, 95. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 230–340; Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony (Princeton, 2007), 4.

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work” that produced “in-between” spaces of “neither the One nor the Other but something else besides”.25 The colonizer was also hybridized, unable to maintain the “purity” that his power, and the knowledge it produced, sought to ensure.26 The imposition of the imperial order in the Indian colony was met with “sly mimicry”, Bhabha suggested.27 Colonial peoples creatively translated the literature and customs of the metropole in such a way that made their difference known, mocking the power structure of colonialism just as it put it to use. But the assertion that the colonized found themselves on the ambivalent borderland between two domains28 —one belonging to the colonial master language, the other to the indigenous vernacular—tends to leave out of view the differentiated intellectual and social interactions that Indians experienced outside the imperial axis. Were interactions between Indians and Asians, Africans, Americans and anti-imperial communities in Britain, as well as groups in continental and eastern Europe, characterized by mimicry and contestation, or perhaps by other dynamics, such as partial recognition, mutual mirroring or even collaboration? Another means of setting colonial intellectual history within a global horizon was laid out by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe (2000), inspired by a Marxian concern for the historical causes of the West’s universalization, and a Heideggerian interest in the experiential world of the colonized.29 Provincializing Europe provided one capstone to the Subaltern Studies project, which aimed to wrest the fragments of local and indigenous culture from the West’s everpresent “imaginary figure”.30 Chakrabarty envisioned two historical streams: History 1, which is the “transition narrative” of development, posited as the path whereby all groups worldwide gradually take their place in the modern capitalist order; and History 2, consisting of the experiences of “belonging” among cultural communities, that “inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic”.31 Under History 2, Chakrabarty catalogues the “bodily habits, unselfconscious collective practices, and reflexes about what it means to relate to objects in the world”.32 Capitalist circulation and abstract scientific discourses are associated with the global horizon in his interpretation. Local culture becomes 25 26 27 28 29 30

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Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (London, 1994), 28, emphasis in original. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders”, in idem, Location of Culture, 171. Bhabha, “Sly Civility”, in idem, Location of Culture, 93–101. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”, in idem, Location of Culture, 121. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 18. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony (Cambridge, 1997), 1. See Gyan Pandey, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, American Historical Review 99/5 (1994), 1475–90. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 60, 64. Ibid., 66.


the space in which moments of rich meaning can still be salvaged from within the homogenizing global maelstrom. One drawback to this approach is that the History 2s, or the “histories of belonging”, are conceived, at least in practice, as necessarily rooted in vernacular language, and in local customs and traditions. The Bengali family, the Bengali tradition of poetry, or the fraternity among Calcuttan males that develops in their adda discussions are all presented as sites for hermeneutic activity in Provincializing Europe. But from this perspective we have difficulty accounting for the ways that long-distance, global communities of imagination, discussion and even affection became intrinsic to the lifeworlds of colonial subjects who made long-distance travels, either physically or imaginatively. Within a global horizon, especially given the accelerated expansion of transport and communication technologies from the 1880s onwards, hermeneutic activity increasingly interrupted and crossed the bounds of linguistic community, family, fraternity and fixed traditions. If Bhabha and Chakravarty respectively see local hermeneutic activity as contestations with, or respites from, the onslaught of global forces, Andrew Sartori presents hermeneutic activity as the local imprint of global concepts of political economy. Sartori, in his impressive Bengal in Global Concept History (2009), argues along Marxist lines that the condition of possibility for hermeneutic activity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal was determined by capitalist economic relations that operated globally.33 Sartori argues that nationalists around the world were proclaiming cultural difference in such resonant ways because of a deeper, unitary economic experience that engulfed their individual societies.34 But if hermeneutic activity only consists in modifying unitary globally circulating concepts, then we have difficulty in representing the particularity and complication of conversations that developed between groups of differential political power and dissimilar traditions in the modern period. If the globe is ruled by the nomos of abstract capitalism, then the thought of all groups worldwide can be understood as the handiwork of capitalism’s wizardry. But if we study processes of conversation from a high-zoom historical perspective, we emphasize the shifting boundaries and horizons in the global domain that sometimes stopped, and other times facilitated, intellectual interactions. Especially in relation to the study of Indian colonial thought, an appreciation of geopolitics is required in order to account for how Indian hermeneutic activity operated not only within the British imperial axis, but also across and beyond that axis, in lumpy global space.

33 34

Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History (Chicago, 2009), 62. Ibid., 22.

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A host of scholars are adding to postcolonial hermeneutic theory by providing ways to refocus attention onto the subtle agencies of receptivity and interpretation within a global horizon. Leela Gandhi provides an important discussion of “anti-colonial friendships” that formed between Indian and British anticolonial activists.35 Harish Trivedi considers the feedback loops of “interliterary transactions”.36 Tim Harper, Dilip Menon, Benjamin Zachariah and Mark Ravinder Frost shed light on translation and borrowing within colonial interregional zones.37 Dhruv Raina and Kapil Raj study the spaces of scientific circulation that connected South Asians and Europeans.38 Sudipta Kaviraj stresses the “detailed graded structure” of intellectual fields, and Frederick Cooper discusses “intertwining histories” that create disharmonies and “lumpiness”.39 An engagement with Gadamer’s philosophy of hermeneutics contributes to these approaches. We can disaggregate “the global” by considering Gadamerian insights into events of mediation (mediale Vorgänge), and the between-worlds (Zwischenwelten) created by conversation.

alienation of the bhadralok youth Three contexts of Indian political life—the international, the national and the local—all underwent drastic changes beginning in the 1880s. The Kallol journal became the mouthpiece for the generation of Bengalis who were born at the end of the nineteenth century, and saw the world drastically change before their eyes. The Bengali bhadralok, or “genteel society”, at the turn of the twentieth century was largely composed of Hindus from the higher castes. This status community, which distinguished itself through devotion to education and by serving as the literate proletariat of the British colonial bureaucracy, set cultural norms for the colonial metropolis of Calcutta and for the Bengal region more generally, but

35 36 37

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Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities (Durham, 2006), 29. Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions (Calcutta, 1993), 8. Tim Harper, “Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism 1850–1914”, in A. G. Hopkins, Globalization in World History (London, 2002), 154; Dilip Menon, “Keshari Pillai and the Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala”, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones (Basingstoke, 2010), 131–58; Benjamin Zachariah, “Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India, c. 1922–45” in ibid., 178–212; Mark Ravinder Frost, “Asia’s Maritime Networks and the Colonial Public Sphere, 1840–1920”, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 6/2 (2004), 63 ff. Dhruv Raina, “Reconfiguring the Centre”, in idem, Images and Contexts (Delhi, 2003), 159–75; Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science (London, 2007), 23–5. Sudipta Kaviraj, “Said and the History of Ideas”, in Bose and Manjapra, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones, 75; Cooper, “Globalization”, 95.


never became a structurally dominant bourgeoisie.40 All the writers and editors of the Kallol journal came from bhadralok families. The generation of Bengali bhadralok born at the end of the nineteenth century came of age in an era of multipolar globalization. This resulted from the quick rise of new world powers, and their expanding and overlapping communication and travel technologies, especially shipping, printing, telegraphs and finance.41 These technologies, used for imperial expansion, could also be utilized against their own grain by itinerant anticolonial activists.42 In this era, Germany, Japan and the United States began to interfere in the Asian economic paramountcy of Britain and Russia.43 In terms of imperial competition, a “scramble for Africa” in the 1880s was followed by a “scramble for Asia” in the 1890s.44 One German contemporary observer spoke of the “great partitioning of the world” that was taking place.45 On the national level, the end of the nineteenth century saw the institutionalizing of Indian nationalism in the form of the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 and led by many Bengali bhadralok politicians in its early years.46 Indian anticolonialism, although still operating through “prayers and petitions” to the colonial state, had become a unified force in colonial politics for the first time, establishing a platform to connect politicians from diverse regions of British India. The generation of Bengali bhadralok youth born between around 1885 and 1905 thus grew up in the wake of the founding of a new all-India infrastructure for political activism. Their fathers’ generation was peopled by “great men”, individuals renowned for establishing the rudiments for anticolonial nationalism, and for announcing India’s national prowess in the fields of art, science and literature.47 40

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45 46

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On the particular social location of the bhadralok, and their inability to become an enfranchised “bourgeoisie”, see Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture (Delhi, 2005), 64–7. On structural dominance see Rainer Lepsius, “Zur Soziologie des Bürgertums under der Bürgerlichkeit”, in Jürgen Kocka, ed, Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1987), 85. Peter Hugill, Global Communications since 1844 (Baltimore, 1999), 25 ff.; Jürgen Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt (Munich, 2009), 1010 ff. See James C. Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907–17 (Delhi, 1917), 193–316. Chris Bayly, Birth of the Modern World (Malden, 2004), 459–62. On the “scramble” for Africa and Asia see Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 577–80. Gustav Schmoller, Handels- und Machtpolitik (Stuttgart, 1900), 24. Of the 414 members at the first official Congress of the Indian National Congress held in Calcutta in 1885, 230 were from Bengal. See Bimanbehari Majumdar and Bhakat Prasad Mazumdar, Congress and Congressmen in the Pre-Gandhian Era (Calcutta, 1967), 10. For example, these figures founded nationalist intellectual institutions: the poet Rabindranath Tagore (b. 1861), spiritual leader Vivekananda (b. 1863), political theorist

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the bhadralok youth in Calcutta, growing up in the shadow of their fathers’ generation, were also experiencing unprecedented social and political obstacles to their own advancement. Jobs for the educated classes were being squeezed out of the district towns throughout Bengal and funneled into Calcutta as the expanding imperial global economy riveted the countryside ever more directly to the industries and trading activity of the colonial metropolis.48 The period from 1880 through 1930 was a great era of urbanization.49 Calcutta and Bombay were the two main beneficiaries of this urbanization boom, serving as hubs for the subcontinent’s global industries, such as cotton and jute manufacture, and as the centers for finance, shipping and legal institutions.50 Yet while the trading and industrial developments that expanded in Calcutta during this period benefited some merchant groups, especially British and American businessmen, but also Marwari and Parsi trading communities, they did not greatly enhance the prospects of the Bengali bhadralok youth. As the number of young educated migrants to Calcutta bulged at the turn of the century, the availability of administrative employment was becoming increasingly scarce.51 Added to this, the colonial administration was beginning a concerted effort to diminish the social standing of the mostly Hindu bhadralok.52 Beginning in 1904 with the Universities Act, the colonial administration under Viceroy Curzon tried to reduce the position of the bhadralok in the educational institutions of Calcutta, as it also centralized control of the universities in Bombay, Madras, Allahabad and Lahore.53 Curzon also announced plans to create a vying educational center and administrative hub for the Muslims of eastern Bengal in Dacca.54 Bengal was

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Bipinchandra Pal (b. 1858), archaeologist Pramathanath Bose (b. 1855), chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray (b. 1861), physicist J. C. Bose (b. 1858) and historian Jadunath Sarkar (b. 1870). Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture, 224. G. S. Ghurye, “Cities of India”, Sociological Bulletin 2 (1953), 305. Amiya Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939 (Cambridge, 1972), 70, 85 ff.; Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest, 106 ff. Amiya Bagchi, “European and Indian Entrepreneurship in India, 1900–1930”, in Rajat Ray, ed., Entrepreneurship and Industry in India, 1800–1947 (Oxford, 1994), 177–82; Ker, Political Trouble in India, 141. Amiya Bagchi, “Wealth and Work in Calcutta, 1860–1921”, in Chaudhuri, Calcutta: The Living City, 1: 215. Aparna Basu, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India (Delhi, 1974), 23. Curzon declared he would give “the Mohammedans in Eastern Bengal . . . a unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussalman Viceroys and Kings.” See Anon., The Partition Agitation Explained (Calcutta, 1906), 6.


partitioned in 1905, frustrating the bhadralok’s efforts to remain the cultural and political spokespeople for the whole Bengal region.55 The Swadeshi Movement, the largest revolutionary movement in India since the 1857 revolt, began in multiple regions of India in 1905, but Bengal was the most active center of insurgency. The impoverished bhadralok youth led the warfare against colonial meddling. While the broader Bengali society boycotted British manufactures especially in the first years of the movement, from 1905 to 1908, the number of Calcuttan youth who joined radical antigovernment societies continued to increase, year by year, until 1915.56 From 1905 onwards, colonial administrators repeatedly remarked in their reports that “corrupted youths” were the cause of “revolutionary outrages”, including the bombing of buildings, armory raids and even assassinations of colonial officers.57 Between 1915 and 1917 alone, over 1,200 young Bengalis from across the whole province served time in prison as detainees.58 Indeed, the editor of Kallol, Gokulchandra Nag, wrote his novel Pathik (The Wayfarer, 1923) about the lives of young men facing prison terms during the Swadeshi years. Because of this youth insurgency, the British rescinded partition in 1911. In 1911, the colonial administration moved its power center from Calcutta to Delhi. The British administration made it clear to the young radicalized bhadralok that even if they regained a unified Bengal, the security and stature their parents had enjoyed would not be their own.

internationalizing colonial thought Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that members of this alienated cohort, poorly integrated into the Calcutta social order, saw the conflicting spheres of influence among imperial powers in the lead-up to the Great War as a sign of promise. Kallol became the literary register of this generation’s global imagination.59 The journal broke with an earlier mode of representing Bengal in the world, epitomized in Bankimchandra Chattapadhyay’s Bangadar´san journal, which began in 1872. With Bangadar´san, Bankim (1838–94) looked out at the world through the lens

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Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement (Delhi, 1973), 23. The Defense of India Act of 1915 granted the government emergency powers of “preventative” detention of suspects. See Ker, Political Trouble in India, 317; Sedition Committee Report (Calcutta, 1918), 112, 113. Out of a total of 186 persons charged for sedition between 1907 and 1917 in Bengal, 124 belong to the 16–24 age group, and 165 were upper-caste. See Sedition Committee Report (1918), 226; Ker, Political Trouble in India, 7. Charles Tegart, “Terrorism in India”, in Amiya Samanta ed., Terrorism in Bengal, vol. 3 (Calcutta, 1995), xlii. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (New York, 1992), 9, spoke of “planetary consciousness”.

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of the British Empire. Bankim himself was a product of Anglicist education.60 He deeply admired James Mill, as well as Victorian translations and interpretations of Auguste Comte.61 As shown by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bankim’s project was suffused with a sense of cultural inadequacy vis-à-vis Britain.62 “Today some claim that education will ‘filter down’”, Bankim wrote, “but we don’t have enough time to wait for this watery bridge to be built”.63 The aim of his journal was j¯atipratis..th¯a (cultivating national feeling) for the new Hindu nation. He hailed the contemporaneous Italians and Germans as two peoples who had recently united themselves as modern polities. The Hindus across Bengal would soon do the same, Bankim believed. “When the nation-sense is intact, a people grows in importance. This knowledge has led the Italians to create a unified state [r¯ajya]. And with this same awareness, a new mighty German nation has arisen”.64 Bankim’s vision aimed at internal national unification, as with the kleindeutsch solution, but not at the external transgression of the imperial axis. There was a major break, often overlooked, between the global horizons of Bankim’s Bangadar´san of the 1870s that framed Hindu nationalism within the India–Britain imperial axis, and a different kind of global imagination that characterized the alienated youth generation of the 1920s, articulated in the terms of an explosive, extra-imperial, global youth movement. Kallol confidently proclaimed itself a journal started by “a few youth” (koyjan yubak). And as opposed to a focus on the Hindu nation, Kallol asserted a stridently cosmopolitan ethos. One of the editors, Dineshranjan Das, wrote in 1925 that he wanted the magazine to be a “caravanserai . . . where people [m¯anus.] will be able to rest their weary souls without regard to community, age, sex and social position”.65 Indeed, Kallol gave attention to the international feminist movement, the Muslim Khilafat movement and Marxist internationalism in its pages. Although mainly a product of the male Hindu bhadralok, a few renowned young Bengali Muslims contributed essays, and the journal showed a surprising commitment to publishing the critical writings, short stories and poems of 60

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The term “Anglicist” refers to a debate in the early to mid-nineteenth century regarding educational institutions in the Indian colony. “Orientalists” argued for the cultivation of indigenous knowledge. Anglicists, such as Thomas Macaulay in his 1835 “Minute on Education”, insisted on English-medium education. Geraldine Forbes, Positivism in Bengal (Calcutta, 1975), 14; Tapan Raychaudhuri, Reconsidering Europe (Oxford, 1988), 5. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 122. Chattopadhyay, Bangadar´san, 1872, introduction, 3. Bangadar´san, 1872, introduction, 15. Throughout this essay I supply original Bengali terms in brackets in order to clarify the translations. Dineshranjan Das, “Gokulchandra Nag”, Kallol, 1925, 689. All quotations from Kallol are my own translations from the original Bengali.


women.66 The poem that christened the inaugural issue of the journal, written collectively by the editorial staff, began, “I am the wave, rudderless, tumultuous, chasing sleep away”.67 For Bankim, the “Hindu people” was the main category used to make connection within the global realm. But for the Kallol editors, on the other hand, the main categories for bridging global connections were not bounded concepts such as “culture” and “nation”, but unbounded ones, such as youth and experimentation. The rather constrained global horizon in Bankim’s writings, focused mostly on the Britain–India relationship, by the 1920s had given way to a more robust international perspective, that confidently transgressed the imperial axis. Pramatha Chaudhuri, an eminent writer and barrister, began publishing his modernist journal, Sabuj Patra (Green Leaves), in 1914, which provided a model for Kallol later on.68 Chaudhuri wrote that the years leading up to the First World War generated “restless and scattered sensibilities” in Bengal, and that only the youth could “concentrate and organize reflection on present conditions”.69 And in that same year, the famed Swadeshi revolutionary poet Satyendranath Datta (b. 1882) penned his poem Yaubane dao Rajt.ik¯a (Anoint the Youth).70 “Satyendranath was the poet of this new age. Bengal’s new poets will redirect the sensibilities of our people”,71 wrote a critic in Kallol. Kallol identified itself with an unorthodox band of writers, especially Satyendranath Datta and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (b. 1876), instead of with the cultural fountainheads of their elders’ generation, epitomized by Bankimchandra.72 By the 1920s, figures such as Bankim came to be seen as representatives of intellectual mandarinism among the rising young literati.

the youth revolt in literature In orchestrating this shift in Bengali thought from an imperial imagination to an international imagination, the alienated generation born between around 1885 and 1905 found a pathway out from under their parents’ shadow, as well as an avenue for radical intellectual revolt against the British Raj. At the turn

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The Muslim intellectual Kazi Abdul Wadud wrote for Kallol. Suniti Debi was an editor of the magazine. A discussion of the writings of female authors appears below. “Ami Kallol, sudhu kalrol, ghum h¯ar¯a di´sa¯ hin”. Das, “Gokulchandra Nag”, Kallol, 1925, 620. Buddhadeva Basu, An Acre of Green Grass (Calcutta, 1997), 28. ¯ Quoted in Pramatha Chaudhuri, Atmakath¯ a (Calcutta: Book Emporium, 1946), 17. Sengupta, Kalloler Yug, 35. “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1927, 164. Buddhadeva Basu, “Kabi Sukumar Ray”, Kallol, 1925, 1108–25.

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of the twentieth century, a middle-aged ascendancy had come to rule Bengali thought and letters. In the years leading up to the Swadeshi Movement, the most important Bengali thinkers performed their stature not by identifying with the young, but by writing as avuncular counselors to the youth. Vivekananda (b. 1863) wrote his letters to the sant¯an (to the young men).73 Rabindranath Tagore (b. 1861), J. C. Bose (b. 1858), Ashutosh Mukherjee (b. 1864), Brajendranath Seal (b. 1864), Bipinchandra Pal (b. 1858) and Aurobindo Ghosh (b. 1872), among many others, published tracts to rouse the youth, and to promote their “national education”.74 This generational configuration contrasted with the period in the 1830s, during the Young Bengal movement, when the most-discussed writers and artists were recent college graduates.75 It was different, too, from the 1860s, when the likes of Bankimchandra and Bhudev Mukhopadhyay reached the pinnacle of cultural life while in their thirties.76 Already by the 1910s, and especially from the 1920s onwards, however, the magnetic center for new ideas and cultural production in Calcutta came to be situated among the young. The Swadeshi insurgency that began in 1905 brought a phalanx of young people to the forefront of Bengali politics, thought and letters, proclaiming a new internationalist creed. For example, the precocious Benoykumar Sarkar (b. 1887) became professor of literature and history at the newly established Bengal National College at age twenty, and published a series of essays starting in 1910, which summoned his fellow youth to tap into what he called “world forces” (vi´sva ´sakti).77 Of course, this transition from an imperial to an internationalist scope for Bengali intellectual life was already taking place by the end of the nineteenth century. Aurobindo Ghosh’s New Lamps for Old (1893), which praised French modes of politics over British styles, provided an early expression of this new political internationalism. Ramananda Chatterjee (b. 1865), editor of two of the most widely circulated monthly journals, Prabasi (founded in 1901) and the Modern Review (founded in 1907), robustly turned attention away from

73 74

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See the transcript of Vivekananda’s speech: An Appeal to Young Bengal (Calcutta, 1910). Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement (Calcutta, 1973), 164; Pradip Bose, “Sons of the Nation: Child Rearing in the New Family”, in Partha Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power (Minneapolis, 1995), 139. Among the recent graduates who formed the circle around Hindu College instructor Henry Derozio were Krishna Mohan Banarjee, Ramgopal Ghosh and Dashina Ranjan. See Pallab Sengupta, Derozio (Delhi, 2000), 6. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 201. As agents of “world forces”, Sarkar catalogues states, corporations and individual “geniuses” that have effect on a global stage. See B. K. Sarkar, The Science of History, v, vii; idem, Vi´sw¯asakti (Calcutta, 1914). See the discussion in Giuseppe Flora, Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Italy (Delhi, 1994), 15, 16.


imperial relations and towards international relations.78 While Bankim’s journal oriented itself towards bil¯at (which can mean both “England” and “the West” more generally), Ramananda Chatterjee framed his publication in terms of bide´s (the overseas or foreign realm).79 Rabindranath Tagore officially established the ¯ Vi´sva Bh¯arati Antarj¯ atik Vi´sva-Vidy¯aloy (Visva Bharati International University) at Santiniketan in 1921. Tagore made eight international voyages outside the imperial geopolitical framework between the beginning of World War I and the high tide of the Great Depression in 1931. Chatterjee joined Tagore for a six-month international journey to continental Europe in 1926.80 The internationalization of Indian colonial thought was hardly an exclusive Bengali bhadralok phenomenon. In 1916, the influential Punjabi intellectual Lala Lajpat Rai, writing from New York, remarked that “Indian nationalists [are] ardent students of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Austria . . . Turkey and the Balkan States” and excoriated the “taboo” of European history in Indian universities.81 The Kallol literary journal, begun in 1923, radicalized this enthusiasm for bide´s as a realm for artistic experimentation and interpersonal recognition outside the imperial frame. While the poor, young editors of Kallol could not travel by ship or automobile to distant climes, their letter correspondences and imaginations still roamed the planetary republic of letters, and they also eagerly awaited reports sent from their friends and relatives abroad. Easily overshadowed by the international travels of middle-aged Bengali eminences such as Rabindranath Tagor, Brajendranath Seal and J. C. Bose in the early twentieth century, is the peripatetic activity of the alienated bhadralok generation. Benoykumar Sarkar (b. 1887) spent twelve years traveling through Japan, America, France, Germany and Egypt between 1914 and 1926. Through the letters and books he sent back home, Calcutta youth gained access to modernist literature and thought beyond the syllabi of British colonial universities. Other such international envoys included Nandalal Bose (b. 1882), who traveled to China and Japan to perfect his ink-wash painting techniques in 1924; the philosopher Manabendranath Roy (b. 1887), who engaged deeply with German and Russian Marxist thought during his decade living in Berlin and Moscow in the 1920s; Shahid Suhrawardy (b. 1892), a theater director in post-Revolutionary Moscow; 78

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Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s journal Bangadar´san was explicitly concerned with how to negotiate the influences of bil¯at. In Prab¯as¯ı (1901), and continuing with modernist ¯ journals such as Arya, Sabuj Patra, and others, the de´si-bide´si (or domestic and foreign) and a¯ ntarj¯atik (international) dynamic is addressed. See Bijoycandra Mazumdar’s extended essay “Iurop¯ıyo Mah¯asamar” on Prussia’s challenge to England and France from the time of Bismarck to Wilhelm II in Prabasi 15 (1915), 275–81. “The Editor of the Modern Review Returns Home”, Prabasi, Dec. 1926, 699. Lajpat Rai, An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement (New York, 1916), 221.

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Dilip Kumar Roy (b. 1897), a musician and composer widely traveled through continental Europe; Himanshu Rai (b. 1892), an actor and movie director with links to the Munich and Berlin film industries, and the founder of the Bombay Talkies production studios; Meghnad Saha (b. 1893) and Satyendranath Bose (b. 1894), young physicists who worked with Albert Einstein and Walther Nernst in Berlin; and Taraknath Das (b. 1884), a political scientist who obtained his 1925 doctorate from Georgetown University and traveled regularly between the USA and Germany. Perhaps most significant for the present discussion, a young Bengali indologist named Kalidas Nag (b. 1891) was the elder brother of one of the editors of Kallol. Kalidas was completing his dissertation in Paris under the supervision of Sylvain Lévi. During this time, he put Gokul and Dineshranjan, the editors of Kallol, into direct contact with the celebrated author and 1915 Nobel laureate in Literature, Romain Rolland. Kalidas translated portions of Rolland’s famous experimental novel Jean Christophe directly from French into Bengali and sent them to Calcutta, where they were serialized in the pages of Kallol.82 One of the editors of Kallol reflected in 1926 on the role of “Bengalis living outside Bengal” in assisting the development of Bengali literature (s¯ahityer unnati).83 In addition to the network of Bengalis abroad who helped facilitate contacts beyond the imperial axis, the growing book trade in Calcutta created a new scope for the international imagination.84 Bookshops across the street from Presidency College began enthusiastically importing English translations of world literature in the 1910s and 1920s.85 In addition to this, as Suzanne Marchand has shown, a new kind of “furious” orientalism was channeling the travel of countercultural and avant-garde Europeans to Calcutta in these same years.86 Among the writers, indologists, literary scholars and art historians from beyond the imperial axis who traveled to Calcutta and to Tagore’s “international university” (¯antarj¯atik vi´svavidy¯aloy) in Shantiniketan were Sylvain Lévi (1921), Stella Kramrisch (1921–50) and Moritz Winternitz (1922) from Austria, Vincenc Lesný from Czechoslovakia (1925), Leonid Bogdanov from Russia (1922), Schlomit Friede Flaum originally from Lithuania (1922), Sten Konow from Norway (1924), and Carlo Formichi (1925) and Giuseppe Tucci from Italy (1926).87 All these figures from beyond the 82

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Letter from Kalidas Nag to Gokulchandra Nag, 10 Feb. 1926, reprinted in Sengupta, Kalloler Yug, 214. “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1926, 657. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 199. See Dipesh Chakrabarty’s comments on Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay’s Nana katha in Provincializing Europe, 200. See Marchand, German Orientalism (Cambridge, 2009), chaps. 5 and 10. For incomplete lists of foreign visitors to Shantiniketan and Calcutta University in the 1920s see S. Radhakrishnan, Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary (Delhi 1961), 480 ff.; Krishna Dutt


imperial axis taught at Tagore’s university in Shantiniketan and spent time in Calcutta in the years of the founding of Kallol. The world abroad, or bide´s, was not a domain situated “out there”, beyond the horizon of local culture. Rather, bide´s was an inherent dimension for conversation set within Bengali modernist modes of artistic creation. For example, among Kallol writers, Romain Rolland was not only an early European devotee of Vivekananda, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and a European admirer of Gandhi and Tagore. For Acintyakumar Sengupta (b. 1903), Romain Rolland became a muse who inspired Bengali poetic experimentation: Romy̐a Ral la̐ Dukher dahan-yañje bodhisattwa labhile nirbb¯an., Tom¯ar caran. spar´se mukti p¯ay sabhyat¯a asat¯ı; Bh¯um¯are cinecho tumi amr.ter putra mah¯ıy¯an, Byath¯ar tus.ar puñje bah¯ale a¯ nanda-saraswati! Laha ei bharater akunt.ha aml¯an-namra prem o pran.ati.

Romain Rolland In the sacrificial fire of sorrow, the Boddhisattva attains Nirvana Touching your feet impure civilization finds its freedom You have known the supreme one, you noble son of grace The Saraswati now flows through the accumulated snow of our affliction! Accept India’s generous love and hearty greetings.

Such a poem was not written merely in the mode of a panegyric to a European artist, nor as a didactic instrument for expounding on the significance of Rolland’s art to a Bengali audience. “Romain Rolland” became an instance for experimentation in Bengali verse, and a means to meditate on the thawing effects of literary internationalism on political oppression in India. The world was not a distant geographic realm, but an inherent experiential horizon for Bengali literary modernism.

global conversations A Gadamerian perspective does not picture the third space, or between-world, of encounter in colonial intellectual life as one of contestation or “sly mimicry”, which assumes the divide between colonial vernacular agency and Western knowledge. Instead, third space is a realm of conversation within the context of authority in which antifoundational, perspectival truths arise—ideas that are

and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London, 1995). See “Shantiniketan” in Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 Oct. 1922.

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true for the historical actors in question.88 How, then, were the conversations in Kallol configured, and what kinds of conversational play do we observe? What kinds of authoritative language and what genres of literary production were employed, and who were the conversational partners involved? The study of conversation pushes us to pay attention to modes and genres of expression. Kallol editors, having once published a literary discussion (sam¯alocan¯a) of a foreign artist, or a Bengali translation of his or her work, endeavoured to make direct contact with the author through letter correspondence. English almost always served as the language of correspondence between the Kallol group and their French, Japanese, Norwegian or Spanish contacts. In this way, Indian relations to the world pivoted on the British imperial axis, but were not locked within it. Kallol writers and editors spoke a fused conceptual language, using some technical terms translated from English words, such as b¯astabab¯ad (realism), vi´swa s¯ahitya (world literature) and adhunikat¯a (modernism), but other keywords had much longer local histories and were almost untranslatable into English, such as rasa (the feeling of wonderment) and ´sakti (creative force).89 But even apart from the technical language of literary modernism, it was common everyday Bengali words that the alienated generation employed to brand their project. These were words such as tarun. (young), yubak (youth) and naba naba yug (the new era).90 But it is less the derivation of technical vocabularies and more the uses to which language was put that informs the study of hermeneutics. In addition to intense contact with Romain Rolland, evidenced by the exchange of at least twenty letters,91 Kallol editors also wrote directly to Johan Bojer and Knut Hamsun of Norway, Jacinto Benevente of Spain, Yone Noguchi of Japan, Leonid Andreyev of Russia and Marcel Prévost of France.92 Often the response they received in return was brief—a signal of greeting and recognition sent across the international field of world literature. Jacinto Benavente sent a “thank you with all my heart”, and Johan Bojer sent his “fraternal compliments” in return. Knut Hamsun sent a “thanks for the friendly letter” and Yone Noguchi sent

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Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1993), 102. On the artistic vocabulary of the Swadeshi era see Prathama Banerjee, “The Work of Imagination: Temporality and Nationhood in Colonial Bengal” in Subaltern Studies (2005), 283 ff. “Rushsahitya o tarun bangali” (Baishak 1926), “Rolland o tarun bangla” (Feb. 1925). Various usages of naba (new) are employed throughout, such as “nabayug” (new era), “nabajiban” (new life),“natunatwa” (novelty). ChinmoyGuha, ed., Kalidas Nag and Romain Rolland Correspondence, 71–123. See reprints of letters in Sengupta, Kalloler Yug, 251–3.


not only thanks but also a dedicated poem and a picture.93 When there was more extensive interaction, it focused on questions of modernist aesthetics. With Romain Rolland, they discussed “word music” as a way of combining prose and poetry, as well as the philosophical teachings of Tagore and Gandhi. They also discussed the idea of “semi-realism”, as the pursuit of a critical perspective in art that still affirmed “god in man”.94 But more often Kallol writers had conversations with modernist writers abroad through engagement with their written work. Over six years, there were essays and translations devoted to at least thirty-one foreign modernist artists, most from the small or defeated nations of postwar Europe, or from Russia and Japan. Only three were British and only five were Nobel laureates.95 This selection contrasted starkly with the literary canon of British colonial education, which focused on Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Shelley and Shaw at the college level.96 Of the 636 novels in the Presidency College library in 1909, only seventeen were by non-British authors, and none of those works were modern, but from the Italian, French and German classics.97 Kallol’s exploration of the literary world outside empire, even if it pivoted on English translations, must be understood as a politically charged endeavor. The “world” was not synonymous with Europe, nor was Europe envisioned as a single homogeneous entity among Kallol modernists in the postwar years. “World literature” in Kallol was intended to delimit zones for artistic and political life that opposed literary forms of classic English literature and impugned the moral claims of the British imperial order. For example, an article about Jacinto Benavente from a 1926 issue of Kallol presented him as a renovator of the Spanish dramatic tradition because of his “turn to the East” and his criticism of

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A note in the D.a¯ kghar section of Kallol (1926), 294, mentions that Noguchi sent a pictures of himself, as well as a poem, “I Followed the Twilight”, especially composed for Indians. ˙ a”, Kallol, 1923, 78. “Ralla̐ o tarun b¯aml¯ Knut Hamsun (1924), Maxim Gorky (1924), Jacinto Benavente (1925), Leonid Andreyev (1926), Selma Lagerlöf (1927), Thomas Hardy (1927), André Maurois (1928), Percy Bysshe Shelly (1928), Omar Khayyám (1928), Yone Noguchi (1926), Romain Rolland (1924), H. G. Wells (1924), Leo Tolstoy (1928), Anatole France (1924), William Le Quex (1924), Gabriele d’Annunzio (1927), Emile Zola (1923), Fiona Macleod (1924), Guy de Maupassant (1925), Andre Godard (1925), Koloman Mikszath (1927), Masuccio of Salerno (1925), Louis Couperus (1925), Vladislav Reymont (1926), Marcel Prévost (1927), Anton Chekhov (1927), Karoly Ksifaludi (1929), Joseph Szebenyn (1929), François Coppée (1929), G. S. Viereck (1925), J. M. Barrie (1923), Walt Whitman (1924). See the list provided in Debkumar Basu, Kallolgost.h¯ır Kath¯as¯ahitya, 183–5. “Publications of Professors at Presidency College from 1880–1950”, Presidency College Centenary Volume (Calcutta, 1956), 271, 272. Catalogue of Books in the Presidency College Library (Calcutta, 1907).

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Western imperialism.98 Norway’s Knut Hamsun and Johan Bojer were hailed for “returning a sense of direction to life and awakening their people” through their unflinching depiction of social injustice.99 Leonid Andreyev and Maxim Gorky of Russia were singled out for channeling “creative force [´sakti] and inspiration”.100 They were hailed for transforming stories of human suffering into heroic tales of liberation.101 In an article entitled “Russia and Young Bengal”, the critic asserted that “Russians have invented a national literary tradition in less than a hundred years . . . from which Bengalis take inspiration”.102 In 1925, Dineshranjan Das declared solidarity with Romain Rolland’s pacifism, and praised his ability to visualize a “dream India” (swapna-Bh¯arat), free from colonial oppression, that reflected the “eternal India” alive in Rabindranath Tagore’s writing.103 An essay about Yone Noguchi, the Japanese poet, praised the minimalism of his haikus in communicating “beauty, rasa, sounds, smell and touch”, and hailed the poet as a voice of ethical reflection for his people.104 Other youthful renewers of national culture and ethical thought around the world highlighted in Kallol included Walt Whitman (USA), Vadislav Reymont (Poland), Koloman Mikszath (Hungary) and Selma Lagerlöf (Sweden).105 Many of these figures were praised for their interest in Eastern spirituality, which was said to deepen their “inward journey” into social protest and artistic experimentation. Kallol writers seemed to envision themselves as involved in an important conversation about artistic form, political action and ethical reflection with authors living abroad whom they had only met through literature.

phronesis Conversations took place in Kallol through various modes of critical literary reception. In particular, Kallol authors organized their intellectual labor into the following modes: sam¯alocana (literary criticism), anub¯ad (translation), a¯ locana (discussion), sr..s.tir ull¯as (the publication of new fiction), and d.a¯ kghar (correspondence).

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105

Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, “Jacinto Benavente”, Kallol, 1927, 937. “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1926, 160. Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, “Leonid Andreyev”, Kallol, 1925, 650. Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, “Russahitya o Tarun Bangali”, Kallol, 1926, 61. Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, “Russahitya o Tarun Bangali”, Kallol, 1926, 62. Dineshranjan Das, “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1924, 791. Excerpts from Noguchi’s letters were reproduced in Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, “Noguchi”, Kallol, 1926, 294. Debkumar Basu, Kallolgost.h¯ır Kath¯as¯ahitya, 183.


In Gadamer’s discussion, phronesis—or the skill of application—is not a variety of instrumental or scientific knowledge that can be learned and mastered technically, such as the skills needed for building or for scientific study. Phronesis develops out of common sense (sensus communis or Vernünftigkeit), the awareness of “the good” that is available to us without the need for moral reflection.106 Individuals adopt dispositions while in conversation. The quality of this disposition, whether it is relatively more or relatively less open to a particular conversation, determines the adeptness of the phronemos—the practitioner of phronesis. We might say that the youthful, rebellious literary production of Kallol was the work of a masterful crew of phronemoi. A disposition of openness towards the conversation game in which one is involved, a willingness to receive and engage with the multiple claims at hand, and to create new truth for oneself from those conversations, leads to the fuller expression of phronesis.107 The different modes of reception in Kallol characterize dispositions of reception to the world beyond empire. Sam¯alocana, or literary criticism, was a particular mode of phronesis displayed in Kallol, and there was significant critical reflection in the magazine on just how the art of literary criticism could be developed by the youth of Bengal. “Kallol has often argued that Bengali notions of criticism are confused”, wrote one editor. While older journals had traditionally “simply approved or rubbished literature”, Kallol was seeking a discipline of criticism.108 Such a discipline would require objectivity and broad knowledge, since “this Bengal of ours is now bathing in the waters of the world”.109 Literary criticism in Kallol tended to challenge the values or codes of British imperial culture. For example, in discussing the rhyme of the Bengali poet Sukumar Ray, famous for his wordplay, a critic noted that in English, “nonsense rhymes” are sayings used to lull children to sleep or sayings that children enjoy reciting . But apart from this, they have no other value . . . “Jack and Jill, ¯ went up the hill”, etc. But the effect of Abol T¯abol [by Sukumar Ray] has nothing to do with this. If this is nonsense, then it is the most exquisite kind.

Sukumar Ray is said to exploit the flexibility of the Bengali language in unprecedented ways. His unusual poetic style is even likened to the “new talent”

106

107 108 109

“Phronesis [ist] die verantwortliche Vernünftigkeit.” Hans Georg Gadamer, “Probleme der praktischen Vernunft”, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 2000), 325. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 361. “D.akghar”, Kallol, 1926, 777. “D.akghar”, Kallol, 1927, 78.

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of Countee Cullen, an experimental black American poet.110 The critic continued that just as Maxim Gorky was interested in the absurdity of everyday life, and just as Charlie Chaplin exaggerated human experience through humor in order to reveal something true at its core, Sukumar Ray also raised Bengali everyday experience to the level of the extraordinary. Along similar lines, another literary critic in Kallol argued that the Spanish author Jacinto Benavente was “misunderstood” by British reviewers. While a British critic reportedly wrote that “it is difficult to understand Benavente’s idea in writing his play [The Fire Dragon]”, the Bengali critic launched into a sustained appreciation of Benavente’s drama, especially because of its critique of pompous notions of Western civilization. Benavente mocked Europe’s diplomacy of “Protectorates, War-Indemnity, Civilization and Progress” in the context of the first Agadir crisis of 1911. Benavente’s critique of the West, said the Kallol critic, was reminiscent of Rabindranath Tagore.111 Apart from the work of evaluation and critique, Kallol also established itself as a vessel for the translation (anub¯ad) of modernist world literature into Bengali. “Bengali translation is active. It brings out something new in the original”.112 The development of a library of world literature in Bengali translation would eventually allow for a more direct bridge to the outside world, displacing the need for English as the pivot. The cultivation of Bengali in the 1920s was certainly not aimed at carving out a space of inwardness from the onslaught of globalizing forces. For the young alienated generation, Bengali was not just to remain a vernacular, but was to become a new universal language for trade with the world. That Bengali should be a universal language did not entail the foolhardy wish that it should be spoken everywhere, but rather the much more practical desire that it should be a medium to understand and represent the world. The Calcutta translation industry was at its peak in the 1920s, and it was in this period that the insistence on faithful translations, as opposed to adaptations, first came into vogue.113 Calcutta publishing houses turned out translations of Goethe’s collected works, Friedrich List’s economics, Omar Khayyam’s poetry, Romain Rolland’s prose, Booker T. Washington’s social thought and Albert Einstein’s scientific papers.114

110 111 112 113 114

Basu, “Kabi Sukum¯ar Ray”, Kallol, 1925, 1108–25. Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, “Jacinto Benavente”, Kallol, 1925, 932. “D.akghar”, Kallol, 1926, 560. Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions, 81. Meghnad Saha and S. N. Bose translated Einstein’s 1917 paper on “general relativity” directly from German and published it in Calcutta in 1919. Benoykumar Sarkar translated Friedrich List’s Das Nationale System between 1912 and 1916, and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery in 1913.


The criteria for selecting literature to be translated had as much to do with political considerations as it did with the admiration of any specific set of literary aesthetics or philosophical claims. Indeed, the chosen works spanned centuries, from Omar Khayyam and Kabir to Walt Whitman, and spotlighted the heroic Romanticism of Romain Rolland alongside the heroic realism of Gorky.115 “Literary modernism” for the Kallol writers provided the means to peer outward onto the world and find their own image obscurely reflected back. The phronesis of translation, the way it was applied in Kallol, had a different end than contesting a hegemonic “Western” discourse. Nor can it be understood only as the local articulation of a universal set of concepts about literary value. The transnational association envisioned by Kallol intellectuals was not unbounded or abstract, but framed by the idea of an alternative world order of “young nations” to which Bengal belonged. Almost without exception, the examples of national youthfulness were drawn from outside the British context. And it is also clear that many of the nations highlighted were themselves rising, or else recently defunct, imperial powers, such as America, Japan, France, Soviet Russia and Germany. In other words, the cosmopolitanism of the Kallol group, and of Bengali modernism more generally, did not float above the geopolitical power regime. Rather, it worked through the multipolar global order that existed in the postwar years. This new kind of internationalism in the 1920s is also reflected in the two most widely circulating Bengali review journals, Prabasi and the Modern Review, each of which standardly carried about 20 percent international nonBritish journalistic content in the postwar years.116 Bengali young intellectuals of the 1920s envisioned their own community of nations less as a series of closed cultural or political entities (as with Bankim’s discussion of the Hindu nation) fitting within an established world order, and more as a realm of association among young, self-strengthening, experimental national groups that would recreate the world order. In addition to publishing translations from the repertoire of modernist world literature, Kallol cultivated yet another mode of phronesis, namely the publication of experimental prose and poems by young Bengali authors. The writers featured in Kallol were phronemoi who exemplified openness towards new conversations about aesthetics and value. In addition, these artists demonstrated a willingness to rebel in literature, and to transgress the presumed divides between genres and between cultures. 115

116

“Kabi Omar Khayyam”, Kallol, 1925, 155–60; “Gaibi” (Secret) from Kabir, translated by Radhacaran Chakrabarty, Kallol, 1926, 563. On Rolland’s heroic Romanticism see Dushan Bresky, Cathedral or Symphony: Essays on Jean-Christophe (Frankfurt, 1973), 71–3. Both journals had the same editor, Ramananda Chatterjee. I tabulated the number of internationally themed articles for the years 1923–6 for both journals in order to make this estimate.

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One remarkable practitioner of phronesis in poetry was Mohitlal Mazumdar (b. 1888), a young Bengali Hindu artist, and professor of Urdu and Persian literatures. He began teaching at the newly established Dhaka University in 1921 and translated sections of the Rubaiyat and other Persian poems for the Muslim modernist journal Bulbul. Mazumdar’s famous poem “P¯antha” (The Traveller), first published in a 1925 issue of Kallol, demonstrated his great acumen for phronesis. The poem was dedicated to the “philosopher-sage” Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the most celebrated philosophers in Bengal since the nineteenth century. As a prime example of the connection between phronesis, conversation and circulation, this same poem, first published in 1925, was reproduced in English translation, alongside philosophical essays by Michael Landmann, Otto Pöggeler and others, in a 1960 special issue of the Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Schopenhauer’s death. I have reproduced a portion of the translation made by Charu Chowdhuri, which German philosophers would have encountered in September 1960: P¯antha Jagater bahidw¯arbe parisr¯anta ke tumi pathik? Cale n¯a caran.yug, d¯anj¯aile toran.er tale;

The Traveller Who are you, weary traveler, at the portal of the world, Your legs refuse to move and you wait under the arch, Yete man n¯ahi sare,–jiban ye You have no heart to leave, for life seems maran.-adhik! sweeter than death, Mit.e n¯a pip¯as¯a a¯ r, – j¯ıban ye maran.-adhik! And your thirst hasn’t been quenched by the bitter drink of earth. ... Dispeller of dreams, Schopenhauer What efforts did you not make to dispel ... ˙ are ki s¯adhan¯a taba, the dream?118 Sei swapna bh¯angib¯ 117 swapnahar!

This poem comprises a poetic commentary on Schopenhauer’s thought, but also contains a Bengali wordplay that transforms the lyrical treatise into something experimental and new. Questioning the imagined Schopenhauer about his pessimistic philosophy and his attempts at renouncing the illusion of the world, Mazumdar called Schopenhauer the “stealer of dreams” (swapna har), which, in Bengali, functions as a calque, or a sound translation, of the

117 118

Mohitlal Mazumdar, “P¯antha,” Kallol, 1926, 394. I thank Sugata Bose for providing me with this reference. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 24/3 (1960), 416–22.


German name “Schopenhauer”. Mazumdar’s ability to transfigure, not just translate, a German proper name, as well as the philosophy associated with it, into a Bengali calque, “swapna har” (stealer or dispeller of dreams), which comments on Schopenhauer’s pessimistic thought, showed the inventiveness of phronesis at work. There was no conflict or contortion involved in being both deeply ensconced in Bengali literary traditions and simultaneously thoroughly experimental and open to foreign influences—in fact a global horizon was necessary for Mazumdar’s poetic inventiveness. The binaristic divide between a global realm marked by capitalist logic and a domestic space rooted in culture and local traditions, as informs the approaches of Chakrabarty and Sartori in different ways, effectively misreads acts of phronesis as acts of interrupting (Chakrabarty), or being overcome by (Sartori), global homogenizing forces. In fact, the hermeneutic labor at issue here utilized the lumpy global domain to announce a generation’s distinction from the values of its fathers, and also from British imperial habits of mind, especially as anticolonial Indians experienced unprecedented oppression in the postwar years.119 Mohitlal Mazumdar, a Bengali Hindu, played across the hardening Hindu– Muslim line in the 1920s as he applied the ghazal form—a style of poetry traditionally written in Urdu or Persian—to Bengali with dazzling effect. Mazumdar used a Bengali vocabulary enriched with Urdu and Persian words, and captured the cadences of the Urdu ghazal in such poems as Dildar (Lover):

119

Dildar Peyala ye bhorpur Ay ay, dhar dhar, Beyalay sab sur Kende jhare jhar-jhar!

Lover My cup is full Come, come, take All the notes from this violin Fall like tears

Dil kare hay-hay Dildar ay na Ahah, yena abcay Phire keu yay na! Suggule masgul Bilkul bhar-bhar, Kar caya jyatsnay Sundar! Sundar! ...

My heart weeps Beloved, please come, Ah, what longing! Why does the beloved not return? Enveloped in fragrance Replete, completely. Whose shadow is it in the moonlight? So beautiful! ...

The Rowlatt Act (1919), the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919) and the unprecedented number of conspiracy trials, counterinsurgency reports, emergency laws and executions in the 1920s indicate the level of oppression. See David Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left (Calcutta, 1975).

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Highlighting the flexibility of the Bengali language, and pointing out that the Sanskritized Bengali of the elders’ generation—that used by Bankimchandra— could be countered with a Persianized literary Bengali, was both an aesthetic and a political statement. Rhythms and wordplay such as in “Kende jhare jhar jhar” and “Suggule masgul” represented a willingness to abandon British models of scansion altogether, and to celebrate aesthetic difference from English, as opposed to aesthetic proximity. The poem used quintessentially Persianate images, such as the cup of wine as a symbol of romantic escape.120 Mazumdar was close friends with the Muslim “rebel poet” Kazi Nazul Islam, master of the ghazal form in modern Bengali.121 Mazumdar published a large set of Bengali experimental poems in ghazal form in the early 1920s, such as Hafizer Anusaran.e (After Hafiz), Irani and Beduin, whose very titles exploded the notion that Bengali Hindus should only cultivate Sanskritic themes in their art.122 The experimental ethos was so strong in this postwar internationalist period due to both political and generational crises. Experimentation, as a generation’s pathway to social relevance, is also observed when it comes to women’s writings in Kallol. In a time in which still few women published written work, and when those female authors who reached the reading public were expected to deal with wholesome “feminine” topics, Kallol stridently gave voice to the “new women” of Bengal and their view on men and romantic love. Nrisinghadasi Debi’s “Byath¯ar Tr.pti” (The Pleasure of Pain) was a tale of domestic pathos unusually focused on the emotional life of men in the joint family. She narrates the suffering of a man as he experiences the death of his wife and only son.123 Suniti Debi’s protagonist in “Pon-Bhanga” (Broken Oath) is a woman who discovers that the man she has fallen in love with is not a “war hero” (yuddha phirat) as she had imagined. She decides to marry him anyway.124 Other women whose work Kallol published included Indulekha Debi (“Chabi”, 1923), Santa Debi (“Rabindranath ´ Chot.agalpa”, 1924), Indusobha Debi (“Silper Swarup”, 1925), and Sarojini Naidu. Another mode of reception in Kallol was the discussion article (¯alocana). These articles were used to survey a field of artistic production and identify the main features of new aethestics. An article from 1926 focused on the features of contemporary Bengali theater, for example, and praised the move away from British drama and the proscenium stage, and the return to folk traditions. In Bengal, one sees “the tired culture of theater, too affected by the British influences

120 121

122 123 124

Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions, 41. Bhabatosh Datta, “Mohitl¯aler Jiban o Kabit¯a”, in idem, ed., Mohitl¯al Mazumd¯ar K¯abyasamgraha ˙ (Calcutta, 1997), 13. Mohitlal Mazumdar, Swapan-Pas¯ari (The Keeper of Dreams) (Calcutta, 1922). Nrisinghadasi Debi, “Byath¯ar Tr.pti”, Kallol, 1927, 768–71. ˙ a”, Kallol, 1925, 415–18. Suniti Debi, “Pon-Bh¯an¯


and by the proscenium”, the author noted.125 Another discussion dealt with the prose of Saratchandra and his presentation of the “limits, conflicts and baseness [nicat¯a] of human nature”,126 out of which his characters strive for the “joy of a greater humanity. Saratchandra is not a “realist [bastut¯antrik]”, but a semi-realist “who has the ability to make meaning out of human experience”, commented the Kallol writer.127 And a final mode of phronesis in Kallol is encapsulated in the d.a¯ kghar, or the editorial page, which provided a space in the journal for the editors to reflect directly on the progress of their enterprise. As opposed to a “letters-to-the-editor” page, this was more of a “letter-from-the-editor” section. The editors repeatedly reiterated the founding principle of the journal “to bring a new kind of thinking to Bengal in the pursuit of the uplift of the Bengali people”.128 Dineshranjan wrote in one reflection, “Kallol, this small monthly, has had a quick and profound reception in our country. It has quickened the language and sentiments of Bengal”. The journal was successful to the extent that it was sending out “waves of inspiration and new kinds of sentiment” to its audience.129 Reflecting critically on their work in 1927, the editors wrote, we have made a number of mistakes over the years. This is not unknown to us. We published some unsatisfactory works by young writers . . . Their way of thinking might have sometimes been confused, in some places it may have been lethargic [ml¯an]. Their style of writing may have sometimes been inexpert, but we had to give them a chance . . . In fact, their writings are the reflection of the many troubles affecting their minds.130

There was, then, painstaking labor put into the format in which specimens of world literature were received, interpreted, written, critiqued, translated, discussed and commented upon in Kallol. The aim of this section has been to investigate the modes and practices by which knowledge was produced, and to make clear what the study of phronesis entails. Those colonial intellectuals who participated in conversation games of global breadth and opened themselves to foreign influences were particularly gifted phronemoi. Their intellectual labor can be understood in a way that seeks to describe the modes of reception and interpretation within a differentiated global horizon.

125 126 127 128 129 130

“D.akghar”, Kallol, 1926, 212, 213. Jagatbandhu Mitra, “Saratchandra S¯ahitye – Prem”, Kallol, 1927, 18. Ibid., 19. “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1925, 100. “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1927, 780. “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1927, 79.

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traditions on the move How did tradition and authority constrain the way phronesis took place among representatives of Bengali literary modernism? Kallol authors were certainly not interpreting and applying ideas in a vacuum, but rather in response to and constrained by their historical conditions. Hermeneutic theory tells us that understanding always takes place as a conversation with traditions that are given, not chosen. But tradition, Gadamer proposes, is ¨ not a thing, but an event of handing over (Uberlieferung or traditio) through which individual perspectives on the world are constituted.131 Conversation goes “all the way down” for Gadamer. Just as the between-world of conversation is Gadamer’s focus in the encounter among different points of view, the subjectivity of each individual is shown to emerge out of a conversation, a fusion of horizons, between her historically informed prejudices and the pressing concerns of her present conditions. Gadamer calls this ongoing conversation with tradition the “historically effected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein).132 The Kallol writers in the 1920s vividly show this internal conversation with inheritance, this historically effected consciousness, at work in their persistent reflection on the Bengali literary tradition. As the modernist youth broke from their fathers’ intellectual institutions in the 1910s and 1920s, and decisively moved from an imperial to an internationalist view of the world, they were not breaking from tradition, but were moving in and through tradition. The youth of the 1920s were not introducing something Western into vernacular Bengali literary tradition, since the global dimension was inherent to their interpretive activity. It is not the activity taking place within cultural bounds, but rather the activity taking place across conversational horizons that captures the significance of the Kallol endeavor. The conversational horizons facing young Bengali thinkers in the 1920s were geopolitical, between imperial versus internationalist narratives of Bengal’s place in the world, as well as generational, between parents and children about how to represent the social and political world in art, and how to find meaning in life. Kazi Abdul Wadud (b. 1894), a young teacher at Dacca Intermediate College, wrote on the “Problems of Bengali Literature” (“S¯ahitye Samasy¯a”) in a 1924 Kallol article. He foresaw great unrest in Bengali letters. He spoke of the “obsession” (pradh¯an moha) with “tradition” (samsk¯ ˙ ar) that fails to acknowledge the existence

131

132

Hans Georg Gadamer, “Die Kontinuität der Geschichte und der Augenblick der Existenz,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, 142. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 397.


of “beauty . . . and value outside our tradition”.133 Referring to the canonical great men of Bengali letters, Wadud mused, could the people of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s day have fathomed how he was contributing to Bengali poetry? How much have we understood of Bankim Chandra [Chattopadhyay’s] worship of the mother country [desmatr.kar puja], or of Tagore’s unparalleled ability to make art out of the lifeless, dull [boicitryah¯ın] and routine Bengali life.134

With this understanding, Wadud could easily assert that to reform the Bengali literary tradition required not a return to the past, but the forward-looking use of creativity (sr..s.ti) by artistic geniuses. “History is the witness of continual destruction [dhwamgsa] ˙ . . . as life moves down ever new paths replete with new discoveries [naba naba a¯ bis.k¯ar]”.135 ¯ Wadud, who was a founder of the Muslim modernist Buddhir Muktir Andolan (the Movement to Awaken the Intellectual) in 1926, shared conversation with Hindu counterparts in the interwar years about the revolutionary calling of the youth. A common identity as members of an alienated, world-traveling generation predominated among Calcuttan young intellectuals after the Great War’s conclusion. In Wadud’s formulation, the Bengali literary tradition was not the preserve of cherished cultural goods through time, but rather was a historical pattern of literary experimentation. In intensive discussions about the Bengali literary tradition, and their own place within it, Kallol writers articulated their way of gauging the advantages of Rabindranath Tagore over Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. Tagore’s openness to the world (vi´swa) and his critique of nationalism in famous works such as Gora and Ghare Baire accounted for his greatness. While Bankim had emphasized the role of vijña¯ n (science) and artha (economics) for the intrinsic uplift of Bengalis, Tagore spoke of the transformative power of kalpana (inventive imagination) and rasa (the feeling of wonder) that create extrinsic benefits for Bengalis by building associations with groups worldwide. Tagore is presented in Kallol as establishing a place for Bengal in “world literature”. “Rabindranth invited the views of the world into Bengal”, wrote one commentator. “To understand the basis of Tagore’s poetry, one must keep abreast of all of world literature [vi´swa s¯ahityer khabar]”.136 Another writer explained that Tagore’s message created “branches and connections” with other groups

133 134 135 136

Kazi Abdul Wadud, “S¯ahitya Samasy¯a”, Kallol, 1924, 438. Ibid., 437. Ibid., 439. Dhirendran¯ath Biswas, “K.s.an.ika”, Kallol, 1926, 991.

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worldwide.137 “What is important about Rabindranath is that he employed the Bengali language to plumb the universal experience of being human. He showed that Bengali writing could have universal salience”.138 But now the time had come even for Tagore to be superseded, the writers in Kallol agreed. This was taking place in the new works by Satyendranath Datta and Saratchandra Chatterjee, especially through their turn towards the abject and fallen, instead of the spiritual and transcendent. If Bankim had been a champion of Hindu nationalism and the “ten-armed mother goddess”, and Tagore had replaced Hindu traditionalism with a more world-encompassing message of “sacrifice and devout offering”, younger poets such as Satyendranath were more interested in speaking of “the flux of moods and emotions, just like the flows of our rivers—the Ganga, the Padma and the Tista”.139 Similarly, the famous writer Pramatha Chaudhuri concluded a long appreciative essay on Tagore’s work in Kallol with a devastating final paragraph of critique: And yet, I feel that Rabindranath, with all of these gifts to literature, has nonetheless left out one aspect of life. His heroes and heroines are always presented as filled with purity and immaculateness. In their troubles, they are still bereft of muddiness or filth. But it could be that in that very mud (k¯ad¯a) that Tagore avoids, there reside sparks of a person’s true nature . . . Tagore searches for truth in beauty and has never been tempted to descend into the dirt in order to search for the great truths that may be hidden there.140

Of course, this overt critique of Tagore opened up a raging debate in Bengali literary circles in the 1920s. Tagore himself was embroiled in the discussion. He criticized the embrace of Marx and Freud by the Kallol group, and chided their wish to “flaunt poverty”, celebrate the “unrestraint of lust”, and depict a “curry powder reality”.141 In the very pages of Kallol one hears echoes of the livid reaction against the journal. In a review of Sailajananda’s Atasi, Dhurjatiprasad Mukherji begins by mentioning Sailajananda’s focus on the suffering of coolies, manual laborers and those who live in “messes, bastis and tribal villages”, as opposed to the “well-off” protagonists in Tagore’s stories. The reviewer, himself a sociologist, continues to criticize the turn to psychology (monobijñan), sociology (sam¯ajbijñan) and social history in literature among young writers, since these imposed hard categories that literature should seek to transcend.142 It is worth noting, though, that Dhurjati’s protest did not hinge on a divide between Bengali 137 138 139 140 141 142

“D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1925, 206. Pramatha Chaudhuri, “Kath¯a-S¯ahitye Rabindran¯ath”, Kallol, 1926, 293. “D.a¯ kghar”, Kallol, 1927, 164. Pramatha Chaudhuri, “Kath¯a-S¯ahitye Rabindran¯ath”, 293. Tapobrata Ghosh quotes Tagore in “Literature and Literary life in Calcutta”, 230. “Barttam¯an Gadya S¯ahitye”, Kallol, 1927, 266.


culture versus “Western” science. The “sciences” in question were not taught in colonial universities at the time, and were associated by young Bengalis with the international, not the imperial, domain. The debate had to do with whether perspectives that revealed the fractured nature of the psyche, or showed systemic pathologies of the social order, could displace Tagore’s more spiritual art, or perhaps only supplement it.

“youth” as difference Conceiving of difference, not just as an insulated realm for hermeneutic activity, but as an alternative transborder space, was obviously important to the young leaders of Bengali literary modernism in the 1920s. As Partha Chatterjee pointed out, in order to understand the particular character of colonial thought in the anticolonial nationalist era, the persistent assertion of difference by the colonized must be placed front and center.143 But, crucially, and in contrast to a problematic assumption of the Subaltern School, claims of difference were not only made by reference to the local or the indigenous, or to closed cultural or national categories. Especially from 1880 onwards, in a highly differentiated global domain, new boundaries of difference were configured on a world stage, especially in terms of geopolitical blocs and generational divides. Difference from the colonial master was not produced from a turn inward among the alienated generation born between around 1885 and 1905, but rather by a conversation between proximate and longer-distance influences. From the perspective of imperial liberalism the world may have been a boundless space, but from the perspective of the colonial intellectual it was one with proliferating limits that were encountered with a sense of expectancy. New limits of power on the global stage promised to interfere with the map of the parents’ generation framed by the Britain–India imperial axis. Youthful Bengali modernists were not just trying to find a place for themselves and for Bengal in a world frame, but were simultaneously seeking to explode concepts of imperial geography. Kallol writers saw in the interpretive acts of opprobrious African American, central and eastern European and Asian literary modernists distant reflections of their own fascination with eruptive, and disruptive, creativity. This mirrored space of the world established an alternative realm for recognition outside the imperial educational, administrative and political system from which the 1885–1905 generation had experienced irrevocable alienation.

143

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London, 1986), 21.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, around the world, it seemed that younger generations were taking on new stature as the fount of political and intellectual life. Sons and daughters seemed to be either seeking to use the power structures of their fathers against the grain, or seeking to explode the institutions of their fathers altogether. We need only think of the radical phase of the Swadeshi Movement, the Young Turks, the Indonesian pergerakan, the Annam modernists, the Chinese “found generation”, the Iranian Kave circle, the Italian Futurists, the German expressionists or the Russian Bolsheviks.144 Such convergence can be explained by following how modes of transborder conversation developed, both by the encounters between individual travelers, and by the encounter with foreign texts, material culture and art objects. At a structural level, the actuality of intellectual encounter tends to be subsumed into assertions about discursive formations, or abstract global forces, such as print capitalism or technological globalization. But at a hermeneutic level, the study of transnational conversations cannot be dissociated from an understanding of the intentionality, disposition and interpretive labor of those involved. Gokulchandra Nag died of tuberculosis in 1925, at the age of thirty. Dineshranjan continued editing the journal, but without the visionary Gokul it would soon lose much of its force. More ominous still, Dineshranjan was running out of money. In the November–December (Agrah¯ayan.) issue of 1928, Dineshranjan announced, “in the past few years I have taken on a huge amount of debt. For this reason, I cannot afford to publish Kallol any more. The coming issue (Magh) will, for the time being, be Kallol’s last”.145 Still, the waves created by Kallol in the mid-1920s continued to be felt through the 1930s and onwards, even in the context of the narrowing political culture of Hindu majoritarianism that quickly came to dominate elected office.146 If we read history mainly to extract principles or laws, then we risk not only eliding historical shifts in the history of ideas, but also washing out the intellectual labor and intentionality that constitute conversations. We have considered the internal divide between generations, as well as the external divides between imperial spheres of influence. The turn towards world literature, and from an imperial to an internationalist imagination, simultaneously represents a struggle for relevance in the context of 144

145 146

Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Marilyn Levine, The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties (Seattle, 1993); Tim Epkenhans, Die iranische Moderne in Exil (Berlin, 2000); Ho Tam Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe (Berkeley, 1997); Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-westernism in Asia (New York, 2007). Reproduced in Debkumar Basu, Kallolgost.h¯ır Kath¯as¯ahitya, 9. This history is expertly discussed in Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided (Cambridge, 1994), 130–49.


declining social status among Bengali bhadralok youth, as well as the intention to use mounting global imperial competition against the grain for anticolonial ends. The fin de siècle produced an alienated generation of Bengali youth who revolted against their imperial masters, just as they fought against their bhadralok father figures. In the study of Bengali modernism, as generally in the study of intellectual history within connective and comparative frameworks, the skills of phronesis and the emergence of conversation at congested transborder points of intersection call for an accounting.

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descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy: ferdinand alquie´ versus martial gueroult∗ knox peden Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland Email: [email protected]

This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French academic philosophy between the self-identifying “Cartesian” Ferdinand Alquié, professor at the Sorbonne, and the “Spinozist” Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian tradition and resisted by a commitment to rationalism grounded in a specifically French understanding of Spinozism. Over the course of Alquié and Gueroult’s polemic, however, we nevertheless witness a shared concern to preserve philosophy from the reductive tendencies of historicism and its possible assimilation to theology. What is more, the ultimate impasse of this conflict continues to inform the most innovative projects in French thought in the wake of structuralism and the “theological turn” of French phenomenology.

It is a lasting testament to Michel Foucault’s talent for historical schematics that one of the most helpful frameworks for assessing twentieth-century French philosophy comes from one of the central practitioners of the field. In his essay “Life: Experience and Science,” Foucault observed that the theoretical efforts of his generation had been conditioned by a rift at the center of the preceding one.1 ∗

1

In addition to Tony La Vopa and MIH’s anonymous reviewers, each of whom provided responses crucial to this article’s improvement, I would also like to thank the following readers for their reactions to this piece in various stages of its composition: Leslie Barnes, David Bates, Ray Brassier, Nathan Brown, Carla Hesse, Martin Jay, and Ben Wurgaft. I remain grateful to Peter Hallward for the invitation to present the earliest version of these arguments to an audience at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, then at Middlesex, now at Kingston University, UK. Sam Moyn deserves a special word of thanks for his persistent encouragement. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. M. Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” in idem, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1998), 465–78.

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In Foucault’s view, the arrival of phenomenology in France led to a split between “a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and of the concept.”2 In the first camp stood the giants Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The latter was home to lesserknown, more exclusively academic thinkers, including Georges Canguilhem, as well as Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, and Alexandre Koyré. To be sure, Foucault noted the deeper roots of this division in the nineteenth century, in the discordant relation between Henri Bergson and Henri Poincaré, for example.3 But the fact remained that the introduction of phenomenology in the French context was a seismic event, and that its impact triggered a renewed consideration of the scope and function of philosophy. Despite the familiar oppositions that structured the field—Marxist or non-Marxist, Freudian or non-Freudian, academic or nonacademic—it was the fractured concept of philosophy itself that served as the crucial site of contestation within postwar French thought. In a sense, Foucault’s rubric is more of a heuristic than a historical thesis, one reflective of his own theoretical itinerary, which sought to bring the insights of a philosophy of the concept to bear on the problematics of experience and subjectivity. In this respect, it is striking that Alain Badiou has recently proffered a similar framework that nevertheless omits reference to phenomenology and locates the central fracture of twentieth-century French philosophy in the standoff between a “vitalist mysticism” descending from Bergson and a “mathematizing idealism” grounded in Léon Brunschvicg’s efforts.4 Badiou situates himself in the latter category, along with Cavaillès, Albert Lautman, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan; he places Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, as well as Canguilhem and Foucault, in the former. If it is clear that there is no strict alignment of Badiou’s categories and Foucault’s—again, Badiou’s choices are reflective of his own theoretical agenda, which seeks to make an unabashed “mathematizing idealism” immune to “vitalist” impulses the foundation for a twenty-first-century materialism—then it is equally clear that the notion of a fundamental discrepancy in the concept of philosophy has served, and continues to serve, as a powerful mechanism for French thinkers’ efforts to situate their projects within their own national intellectual history. Indeed, if Foucault considered the concern for what constitutes philosophy per se to be a surreptitious influence throughout the 1960s and 1970s, then

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Ibid., 466. This acknowledgment is the main substantive difference between this essay, finalized in 1984, and its original version, first published in 1978. Cf. M. Foucault, “Introduction,” in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett in collaboration with R. S. Cohen (New York, 1989), 7–24. A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London, 2009), 7–8.

descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy

this concern has become increasingly overt in the last two decades. Deleuze’s final major work before his death in 1995 was a valediction titled What Is Philosophy?.5 As for Badiou, the publication of his magnum opus Being and Event in 1988 was accompanied by a shorter tract titled Manifesto for Philosophy. The publication of Being and Event’s “sequel” Logics of Worlds in 2006 was followed by its own companion volume, titled accordingly Second Manifesto for Philosophy.6 If, despite Badiou’s efforts to tar Deleuze with a vitalist brush that makes him complicit with various phenomenologies of life,7 the two philosophers might still be considered together as thinkers hostile to many of the tropes of phenomenology and its “theological turn,”8 then what is equally striking is to see thinkers in this latter trajectory likewise reaffirming the power and place of philosophy in French intellectual life. Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, arguably the preeminent living French phenomenologist, are cases in point. In 1989, Marion wrote, “In an essential way, phenomenology assumes in our century the very role of philosophy.”9 In his 1990 volume Material Phenomenology, a book which plays a role in Henry’s oeuvre analogous to What Is Philosophy? for Deleuze, Henry is even more emphatic: With the collapse of the Parisian fashions of the last decades, and most notably structuralism, which represented its most widespread form because it was the most superficial, and with the return of the human sciences (which sought to replace philosophy but only offered an external viewpoint on the human being) to their proper place, phenomenology increasingly seems to be the principal movement of the thought of our times. The “return of Husserl” is the return of the capacity for intelligibility, which is due to the invention of a method and, first of all, a question in which the essence of philosophy can be rediscovered.10

Henry specifies that experience itself is and always has been the goal and the ultimate arbiter of philosophy, the essential stuff of Husserl’s rediscovery: “The phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in its view is the pathetic [pathétique] immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself

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G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York, 1994). A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London, 2005); idem, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. N. Madarasz (Albany, NY, 1999); idem, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. L. Burchill (Cambridge, 2011). Cf. A. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. L. Burchill (Minneapolis, 2000). D. Janicaud, La phénoménologie dans tous ses états (Paris, 2009). J.-L. Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. T. A. Carlson (Evanston, IL, 1998), 1. M. Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. S. Davidson (New York, 2008), 1.

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nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality itself.”11 Let us contrast Henry’s claims with the “Definition of Philosophy” Badiou published in 1992: Philosophy is never an interpretation of experience. It is the act of Truth in regard to truths. And this act, which, according to the law of the world, is unproductive (it does not even produce one truth), places a subject without object, open solely to the truths that pass in its seizing. Let us call “religion” everything which supposes a continuity between truths and the circulation of meaning [sens]. Philosophy, then, against all hermeneutics, that is, against the religious law of meaning, sets out compossible truths on the basis of the void. It thereby subtracts thought from all presupposition of a Presence.12

Where for Henry the signal virtue of phenomenology is its capacity to articulate an experience (a moment and site of auto-affectivity anterior to all objectification) that itself provides the ground of sense and meaning, for Badiou the task of philosophy is precisely to take leave of experience and indeed “meaning” in a rationalist program capable of registering the truths produced in the heterogeneous domains of science, art, politics, and love. For Henry, the “essence of manifestation” as such is thoroughly qualitative; for Badiou, the ontology on offer is thoroughly “subtractive,” in that it aims to articulate “Being” as that which in itself is devoid of all qualities, an “inconsistent multiplicity” that only acquires consistency and thus “meaning” through an operation from without. The opposition between phenomenology and rationalism in the respective projects of Henry and Badiou could not be more stark. The task of the current article is not, however, to provide a fuller exposition of these projects, nor is it to parse the inconsistencies of Foucault, Badiou, and Henry’s various categorizations. Rather, the aim is to break through the gauze of these countervailing heuristics in order to show how they were historically conditioned by a long-standing opposition at the heart of French philosophy that was codified in a specific conflict between two institutional dons of the postwar era: Ferdinand Alquié of the Sorbonne and Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. “The (re)turn of philosophy itself,”13 to borrow a title from another of Badiou’s missives, is in fact not a return at all. For all throughout structuralism’s rise and fall, and persisting through phenomenology’s “theological turn,” Alquié and Gueroult’s disagreement over the proper method for writing the history

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Ibid., 3. “Pathetic” should be understood in the generic sense of pathos, or feeling. A. Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. J. Clemens and O. Feltham (London, 2005), 125, translation modified; idem, Conditions (Paris, 1992), 80. Badiou, Conditions, 57–78.


of philosophy, a dispute which became concentrated in the face-off between Alquié’s Cartesianism and Gueroult’s Spinozism, fundamentally set the terms for the fracture which all of these thinkers, despite the variety of their slogans, agree lay at the heart of French philosophy: that between a philosophy which emphasizes the limits of rational thought to the profit of a more primordial, ineffable experience or intuition, and a philosophy which insists upon the capacity of rationalism to transgress the limits of lived experience to articulate conceptual insights of a universal or indeed absolute variety. The thirty-year polemic between Alquié and Gueroult concerning the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza is historically significant insofar as it served at once as a specific manifestation of this conflict in French philosophy, and also as an influence on its development due to the pedagogical impact of the two scholars on the institutional trajectories of phenomenology and a formalist or structuralist rationalism in France. Cloistered academics that they were, their modality of intellectual labor was decidedly abstract, if not arcane. And yet they were key instructors for many of the most viable export commodities of recent French philosophy, including many of the thinkers named thus far. Before moving into the particulars, some further introductions are in order. Ferdinand Alquié (1906–85) once conceded to his auditors at the Sorbonne that he was “a Cartesian, as everyone knows,” and that perhaps this affiliation accounted for the sheer incomprehensibility of Spinoza’s philosophy in his eyes.14 Born in Carcassonne, Alquié received a classical philosophical education in interwar Paris. But he was also close to the Surrealist movement at this time, and good friends with both André Breton and Jacques Lacan.15 With the publication of his book La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes in 1950, Alquié established himself as the author of a potent new reading of Descartes that went against the grain of the Heideggerian critique of the cogito then gaining prominence in France. Alquié emphasized separation and absence as the essential contents of Descartes’s metaphysical discovery of “man.” This argument complemented those of Alquié’s other works of the period, Le désir de l’éternité (1943) and La nostalgie de l’être (1950), books whose titles give some sense of Alquié’s philosophical program, his investment in Descartes, and his affinity with French phenomenology. Alquié’s central position at the Sorbonne from 1952 until his death in 1985 meant that he influenced scores of French thinkers. His work in the history of philosophy, and specifically on Descartes, deeply resonated with the recuperation of Cartesianism within phenomenological philosophy that was inspired by 14 15

F. Alquié, Le¸cons sur Spinoza (Paris, 2003), 207. J. Guitton, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Ferdinand Alquié (Paris, 1989); F. Alquié, Cahiers de jeunesse, ed. P. Plouvier (Lausanne, 2003).

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Husserl’s own late turn to Descartes and the efforts of numerous French thinkers to reinvigorate the phenomenological project in the wake of Heidegger’s “destruction” of metaphysics. Indeed, the similarity between Alquié’s reading of Descartes, with its relentless emphasis on metaphysical separation, and that offered by Levinas in Totality and Infinity a decade later is striking; Levinas acknowledged this proximity with his contribution to a Festschrift for Alquié published in 1983.16 Roughly Alquié’s contemporary, Levinas never knew Alquié as an instructor, whereas Henry and Marion, by contrast, numbered among the latter’s most faithful students. The reading of Descartes pursued in Marion’s trilogy of the 1970s and 1980s has Alquié’s teaching as its essential precondition.17 Marion dedicated the first volume to Alquié and the French Heideggerian, Jean Beaufret; in the preface to Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes, the trilogy’s centerpiece, Marion identified Alquié’s lessons on the creation of the eternal truths in Descartes’s philosophy—the guiding theme of Marion’s study, and in many respects a blueprint for his later phenomenological concerns—as his primary source of inspiration. Where Levinas’s Descartes prefigures Marion’s in several important ways, it is nonetheless Alquié who was signally responsible for producing a comprehensive reading of Descartes in the French context that at once decoupled him from rationalism and salvaged his project from Heidegger’s critique. Finally, beyond the phenomenological domain, Lacan’s reconsideration of the Cartesian subject as the subject of the unconscious riven by an irremediable ontological fracture also bears a patent debt to Alquié’s efforts.18 Unlike Alquié, Martial Gueroult (1891–1976) took a distance from the currents of spiritualism at the Sorbonne that provided such fertile ground for phenomenology’s reception there. Esteemed for his comprehensive readings of Fichte and Ma¨ımon,19 Gueroult was elected to the Collège de France in 1951, occupying a chair in “the history and technology of philosophical systems.” Gueroult’s lessons provided structuralism with a classically philosophical imprimatur by producing readings of the giants of early modern philosophy driven by an avowed “geneticism” and hostility to biographical, psychological, or indeed historical elements as factors in his synchronic analyses.20 As a lecturer 16

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E. Levinas, “Sur l’idée de l’infini en nous,” in J.-L. Marion, ed., La passion de la raison: Hommage a` Ferdinand Alquié (Paris, 1983), 49–52. J.-L. Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes (Paris, 1975); idem, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris, 1981); idem, Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes (Paris, 1986). ´ J. Lacan, Ecrits, trans. B. Fink, with H. Fink and R. Grigg (New York, 2006), esp. 671–702, 726–45. M. Gueroult, La philosophie transcendantale de Salomon Ma¨ımon (Paris, 1929); idem, L’évolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte (Paris, 1930). F. Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, trans. D. Glassman (Minneapolis, 1997), 78–84.


at the Collège de France, Gueroult had no official students of his own, and thus his influence was more inchoate than Alquié’s. Philosophers equally shaped by French epistemology, such as Gilles-Gaston Granger and Jules Vuillemin, were nevertheless unambiguous in citing their debts to Gueroult, as well as the resonance of his methodology with the philosophy of science first put forward by Jean Cavaillès.21 Moreover, despite his investments in analytic philosophy, Jacques Bouveresse ought perhaps to be read as the most prominent living inheritor of Gueroult’s rationalism in the French context. And yet, Gueroult’s impact transcended its confines, decisively inflecting the ´ development of structuralism at the Ecole normale supérieure, an institution as hostile to the spiritualism of the Sorbonne as the Collège de France had become. Gueroult’s methodology found significant support among the students of Louis Althusser, and in particular the editors of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–9).22 One of Gueroult’s essays was reprinted in the journal, and his method was cited as a fundamental inspiration.23 Reflecting on this enterprise, which was emblematic of the moment of high structuralism in France, Alain Grosrichard has remarked that he and his fellow editors “made assiduous use” of Gueroult’s Descartes selon l’ordre de raisons (1953), as did Lacan.24 The normaliens responsible for the journal, in which texts from Derrida and Foucault appeared alongside analyses of Frege and texts of Gödel and Cantor, shared with Lacan and Althusser a notable disdain for phenomenology and substantialist accounts of subjectivity. Badiou was a driving force in this venture, and indeed the ontology of Being and Event enacts a return to the formalism and rationalism of this period after Badiou’s years

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See their contributions to Hommage a` Martial Gueroult: L’histoire de la philosophie, ses problèmes, ses méthodes (Paris, 1964), 43–58, 139–54. For more biographical data on Gueroult, see J. Stoetzel, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Gueroult (1891–1976) (Paris, 1976). On Gueroult and Cavaillès, see G.-G. Granger, “Jean Cavaillès et l’histoire,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 49/4 (1996), 572. The point of departure for any engagement with Gueroult’s voluminous output is C. Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie avec Martial Gueroult (Paris, 1999). This journal is available in full, with a comprehensive annotative apparatus, at Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l’Analyse and Contemporary French Thought, hosted at http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk. Note as well Althusser’s comment on Gueroult’s popularity among his students in The Future Lasts Forever, trans. R. Veasey (New York, 1993), 182. M. Gueroult, “Nature humaine et e´ tat de nature chez Rousseau, Kant, et Fichte,” Cahiers pour l’Analyse 6 (1967). See the avertissement, “Politique de la lecture,” and “La pensée du prince (Descartes et Machiavel),” both authored by F. Regnault, in this same volume. “Interview with Alain Grosrichard,” available at http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/interviews/ grosrichard.html.

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producing Maoist tracts and his lingering commitment to dialectical philosophy in his 1984 volume Theory of the Subject.25 With Lacan, the stand-off between Alquié and Gueroult thus appears quite porous. Indeed, Lacan occupied a peculiar, mediate position between Gueroult and Alquié, affirming the fractured nature of the subject in line with the latter’s teaching, but taking to the formal, nearly logicist methods of the former. More striking still, however, is the case of Deleuze, who was a student at the Sorbonne and produced his doctoral thesis on Spinoza under Alquié’s direction.26 And yet, concurrent with the publication of this thesis, Deleuze produced a glowing review of the first volume of Gueroult’s meticulous reading of the Ethics,27 itself a result of his courses delivered at the Collège de France at the time that Deleuze’s own work on Spinoza was under way. Deleuze seemed to endorse Gueroult’s thesis concerning an “absolute rationalism” in which thought’s full adequation to being was presented not only as a distinct possibility, but also as a philosophical necessity.28 Deleuze’s endorsement of Gueroult’s position squares awkwardly with his admission, in his public defense of his doctoral works, that his idea of philosophy as a specific practice that ruptures with other modes of understanding was a result of Alquié’s influence.29 But this tension we find between Alquié and Gueroult’s respective positions in the singular cases of Deleuze and Lacan does not render the conflict between Alquié and Gueroult inoperative or historically moot. Rather, it suggests that, beyond the institutional discord between phenomenology and structuralism it portends, this conflict was itself integral to some of the most innovative projects in recent French thought. Moreover, it is important to note that phenomenology and structuralism were positions to which Alquié and Gueroult were assimilated—by celebrants and detractors alike—rather than labels the scholars readily donned themselves. What this suggests in turn is that these thoroughly modern categories were by and large grafted onto longstanding philosophical traditions in the French context, or at the very least that phenomenology and structuralism were each viewed through a prism constituted by the key figures in the history of philosophy whose texts provided the cornerstone of a French philosophical education. In this respect, the “history of philosophy” as an academic field ought to take its place alongside the various other disciplines that form the terrain of recent French intellectual history, from

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A. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels (London, 2009). G. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York, 1992). M. Gueroult, Spinoza 1: Dieu (Paris, 1968). G. Deleuze, “Spinoza et la méthode générale de M. Gueroult,” in idem, L’ˆıle déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974, ed. D. Lapoujade (Paris, 2002), 202–16. G. Deleuze, “La Méthode de dramatization”, in ibid., 149.


anthropology to psychoanalysis. Clarifying the stakes and development of the conflict between Alquié and Gueroult might thus provide us with a better purchase on the tension evident in recent French thought tout court, namely that between a rigorous commitment to philosophical rationalism that leaves no conceptual stone unturned (Gueroult’s legacy) and a nevertheless coexisting sense of fracture, incompleteness, and ineffability that characterizes the post-Kantian, or indeed post-Cartesian, subject of the modern age (a position distilled and maintained in Alquié’s works). What follows traces the development of Gueroult and Alquié’s polemic from the former’s appointment to the Collège in 1951, which saw a sequence of lessons on Descartes targeting Alquié’s reading, to the publication of the latter’s Le rationalisme de Spinoza in 1981, a book designed to make evident the flaws in Gueroult’s multivolume study of Spinoza cut short by its author’s death in 1976. Subtending this dispute, however, is a shared concern to define the specificity of philosophy, a concern which has a historical development of its own. In the early stages of their disagreement, Gueroult and Alquié are both intent to preserve philosophy’s universal remit from the corrosive effects of historicism, understood as any attempt to reduce a philosophical position to its contextual trappings. In the latter stages, the primary aim is to produce a concept of philosophy that is distinct from, and inimical to, theology. Here Spinoza serves as the medium for their countervailing charges of theology and “occultism.” With the trajectory and results of Gueroult and Alquié’s decades-long quarrel established, and its parallels with the development of French structuralism and phenomenology manifested, we will conclude by considering the historical sense of the impasse of their dispute for French philosophy today.

descartes and the challenge of historicism Gueroult concluded his inaugural lesson at the Collège de France with a call to “vanquish historicism.”30 In the preceding hour, he had taken numerous philosophers to task—from his institutional predecessors Henri Bergson and Etienne Gilson to the German thinkers Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger— for their tendency to illuminate the sense of a given philosophy through recourse to elements beyond the philosophical text itself. In Gueroult’s view, the main virtue of philosophy as a practice, evidenced time and again in the textual record of its history, was its ability to check “opinion” and mere appearance; that is, that which “gives itself as real without being able to prove itself as such.”31 30

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M. Gueroult, Le¸con inaugurale, faite le 4 décembre 1951, Collège de France, chaire d’histoire et de technologie des systèmes philosophiques (Nogent-le-rotrou, 1952), 34. Ibid., 33.

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For Gueroult, irrefutable demonstration was the key element of a philosophical work: The rationality that grounds any philosophy—whether that philosophy is rational or not . . . has a constitutive function: since the philosophy is not already finished before it is developed, only existing after its completion despite numerous obstacles . . . a double end in one is thus realized: the construction a monument, the demonstration of a truth.32

Truths were plural in history; they were singular and eternal in a given philosophical system. Accordingly, the historian of philosophy was to be “skeptical as a historian, but dogmatic as a philosopher.”33 Gueroult’s antipathy to historicism drew from his belief that the scholar’s conception of philosophy and its history must not be established prior to an engagement with anterior philosophical systems, each of which must be granted its autonomy as a specific “philosophical reality.” In this view, the problem with historicist modes of study was that they were not historical enough, making philosophy’s history subservient to the perspective of the philosophical present. This charge was more fully fleshed out in the Dianoématique (the “study of doctrines”), Gueroult’s multivolume manifesto, which, though only published posthumously, provided much of the substance of his inaugural lesson.34 In the Dianoématique, Gueroult sought to produce a “radical idealism” that would be nothing less than the “reversal of Hegelianism.”35 Where Hegel had made his subjective apprehension of philosophy’s history serve as the very basis for his account, Gueroult wanted to effect an inversion, thus making “the reality of philosophy’s history” the foundation for our systematic assessment of it. This method would dictate a militant fidelity to the letter of philosophical texts, and a practice of reading devoid of hermeneutic intentions. For Gueroult, a philosophical system was not a representation of a truth or reality extrinsic to that system; thus a hermeneutic approach would not only be of no avail, it would also be disastrously misleading. Because a philosophical system could only be judged on its own terms, it could not be held accountable to some deeper truth of which that system was but one aspect. Gueroult contrasted his position with Husserl’s in similar terms, arguing for an efflorescent pluralism against a reductive essentialism whose criteria were located more in the vagaries of a contingent encounter than in the fixed integrity of the philosophical text. Especially when

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Ibid., 22–3. Ibid., 16–17. M. Gueroult, Dianoématique, Livre I: Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, 3 vols. (Paris, 1984–8); idem, Dianoématique, Livre II: Philosophie de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1979). Gueroult, Dianoématique, Livre II, 224.


applied to philosophical texts, the phenomenological concept of intentionality was nothing more than a “mysterious deus ex machina,”36 forsaking analysis and conferring legitimacy upon what might well be the result of a purely contingent encounter between a given consciousness and its “intended” object. In contrast to all of these projects, from Husserlian phenomenology to Bergsonian “subjectivism,”37 Gueroult presents his own project as the essence of rational philosophy. Rational philosophy is to be a flight from the gratuitous in the systematic construction of the work; by extension, the history of philosophy should be approached in the same way, treating the various “monuments” of the field in a way akin to the objects that compel the concern of the art historian appreciative of the singularity of each work.38 Descartes was the first “monument” considered after Gueroult’s appointment to the Collège. This decision was not entirely contingent. Eleven months before his inaugural lesson, Gueroult had sent a letter to Alquié to share his thoughts on the latter’s recently published study. In this work, Alquié argued that, in the discovery of the cogito following the experience of radical doubt, Descartes articulated a universal concept of the human as predicated upon a conscientious fortitude in the face of radical absence, an absence of certainty or confidence in the surrounding, existent world.39 Voicing his displeasure with this reading, Gueroult pleaded with Alquié to abandon this “novelistic philosophy” in which the philosophers of the past serve as mouthpieces for one’s own philosophical convictions. He implored Alquié to make a decision, either for “pure philosophy where you express yourself directly, or the history of philosophy, where you will merely serve the thought of a genius, rather than enlisting him, willy-nilly, to your own service.”40 In 1953, Gueroult published the results of his courses: Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons. The title drew its authority from Descartes’s injunction to be read in such terms; its polemical force lay in its riposte to Alquié’s interpretation. In the opening pages, Gueroult cited Alquié’s statement “we do not believe there is a system in Descartes,” only to follow with the rejoinder: “Descartes thought otherwise.”41 As Alquié was fifteen years younger than Gueroult, there must have been something both harrowing and flattering in being taken to task by such an authority. In a review of Gueroult’s study, Alquié conceded the brilliance of its exquisite reconstruction of Descartes’s philosophy according to the “order

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Ibid., 178. Ibid., 59, 68; Gueroult, Le¸con inaugurale, 18–29. Gueroult, Le¸con inaugurale, 30–2. F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes (Paris, 1950), V–VII. Cited in Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie, 112 n. 22. M. Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, 2nd edn (Paris, 1968), 19 n. 12.

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of reasons,” but he maintained that the truth Gueroult sought to articulate was merely “scientific.” As a result, the Descartes presented therein was not “satisfying.”42 In striking contrast, Alquié’s book had argued that the eternal value of Descartes’s philosophy, and the source of its satisfaction for anyone who encountered it, was the lesson in ontological experience dramatized in the Meditations, namely man’s ability to move beyond the world of objects, gaining closer proximity, not to say convergence, with Being itself. In general, for Alquié, “system” was a term foreign to true philosophical experience. Access to the eternal required an “ontological démarche.”43 Along these lines, in his short book Qu’estce que comprendre un philosophe?, the result of a lecture conceived as a response to Gueroult’s inaugural lesson, Alquié argued that one is not born a philosopher, but becomes one as a reaction against non-philosophical thought and the lack of satisfaction to be found there.44 Philosophy is defined as this “démarche”45 that moves one toward philosophy’s essential discovery of a “subjective universality.”46 “Philosophers,” Alquié argues, “by showing that the world does not contain its own conditions, go toward a Being which is not a world.”47 More emphatically, “nothing disorients us more than philosophy precisely because it takes us out of the world to something that is not a world.”48 Alquié contrasts his position with Gueroult’s, arguing that the constitution of a system has never been the goal of philosophy. Just as the knights of the Middle Ages did not know they were living in the Middle Ages, Descartes did not know that he was “Cartesian.” “In effect,” Alquié writes, “Descartes did not want to establish a system that would be Descartes’s system; he wanted to find the truth, which is totally different, and he sought this truth with complete sincerity.”49 In a move that drives to the heart of Gueroult’s project, Alquié casts Gueroult’s method in the same league as those methodologies—psychological or historicist—that Gueroult so distrusts. According to Alquié, what all of these methodologies have in common is that they make an object out of philosophical truth.50 True, the philosopher must express himself in some way, and this he usually does according to the norms and procedures of the epoch. “For the system is always the interpretation of evidence in the name of that which is not 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

´ F. Alquié, “Notes sur l’interprétation de Descartes par l’ordre des raisons,” in idem, Etudes cartésiennes (Paris, 1982), 15–30. Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie, 117. F. Alquié, Qu’est-ce que comprendre un philosophe? (Paris, 2005; first published 1956), 76. Ibid., 89–90. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 87–8. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 52. See also F. Alquié, Signification de la philosophie (Paris, 1971), 241–3.


obvious [évident].” But Alquié sees in this systematization the greatest risk for the author to express, “despite himself, his time and the errors of his time.”51 The notion that the philosopher’s errors, whatever they may be, conceal some deeper immutable truth is central to Alquié’s conception of philosophy. This conviction was given its clearest expression in La nostalgie de l’être, where it was argued that an “eternal relation” exists between our consciousness and Being.52 Against Hegelianism, and historicism more generally, in which Alquié saw a lack of respect for the “impassible totality of each man,” Alquié claimed, like Gueroult, that philosophies exist in history to be accepted or refused but never to be “exceeded [dépassé].”53 In each true philosophical gesture, however, Alquié detected a profound “nostalgia for Being.” The certainty of Being is thus, above all, certainty of its absence: as such, it is inseparable from the desire to rediscover it, because, as it is not objective knowledge, it can only be manifested in the feeling of our separation, which is itself born from our inclination not to be separated. In this sense, every consciousness is nostalgia for Being, an indissoluble union of certitude and will, and it is no easy task to distinguish in philosophers what responds to the will and what expresses the certitude, ontological construction and metaphysical critique.54

Even if it is no easy task, Alquié will present as heroes those who can withstand the painful sense of separation, responding to this fact rather than to the desire to suture some lost wholeness.55 Indeed, “the nostalgia for Being is at the origin both of critical philosophies, which describe it with exactitude and accept it with courage, and ontologies, which set out to soothe it.”56 Throughout Alquié’s project one can detect echoes of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics insofar as conceptual thought is seen as grounded on a more primordial experience of incompletion, be it as “separation” or “thrownness.” And indeed Heidegger does make it into Alquié’s account, but more as a derivative specimen of Kierkegaardian courage before the nostalgia for Being than as a philosophical authority in his own right.57 In Jacques Derrida’s recollection, Alquié thought himself a worthy rival to Heidegger, whom he

51 52 53 54 55

56 57

Alquié, Qu’est-ce que comprendre un philosophe?, 52–3. F. Alquié, La nostalgie de l’être (Paris, 1950), avant-propos. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 12–13. Cf. F. Alquié, Le¸cons sur Kant: La morale de Kant (Paris, 2005); idem, La solitude de la raison (Paris, 1966). Alquié, Nostalgie, 13. Ibid., 9.

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believed had stolen his idea.58 But the fact remains that if there is a Heideggerian quality to Alquié’s project, it is a strange Heideggerianism that posits Kant and Descartes as exemplary figures and nevertheless develops a project of authenticity grounded in radical absence. The “démarche” central to Alquié’s effort “calls upon an unconceptualizable ontological experience, which cannot be replaced by anything that derives from it.”59 Philosophy “makes explicit a fundamental experience, a non-conceptual presence of being to consciousness, common to the philosopher and everyone. This universal presence is what makes philosophy at once legitimate and necessary.”60 Here Alquié aligns himself in the camp of philosophers who, according to Gueroult, make the philosophical work derivative of an ineffable experience, a trend that Gueroult associates with the “excess of subjectivism” infecting Bergsonism and its phenomenological legacy in France.61 More important still, this démarche of Alquié’s own points to the fundamental disagreement between his and Gueroult’s positions: the primacy of subjective experience or conceptual thought.62

confrontations Nowhere was the dispute between the two scholars clearer than in the confrontation that took place between them at the 1955 colloquium on Descartes in Royaumont, an event largely inspired by their conflicting readings. Alquié began the proceedings with a concession to Gueroult’s emphasis on demonstration in Descartes’s philosophy, while nevertheless maintaining that the demonstrative is important only in Cartesian science, which, as the domain of the homogeneous, merely explains, whereas the heterogeneous realm of metaphysics—that is, Descartes’s “philosophy”—discovers and “observes.”63 Alquié suggests that, despite the myriad avenues by which Descartes can logically lead us to a concept of God, what Descartes really wants to provoke is the ontological experience of separation similar to his own.64 Gueroult’s response to Alquié follows a similar rhetorical tack, ceding ground in its acknowledgment of the “ontological experience” that inaugurates Descartes’s project. But he then launches into an unforgiving offensive against Alquié’s position, centered above

58

59 60 61 62 63 64

D. Janicaud, Heidegger en France 2: Entretiens (Paris, 2005), 92. Alquié’s charge was presumably facetious. Alquié, Signification, 247. Emphasis added. Alquié, Nostalgie, 148. Emphasis added. Gueroult, Le¸con inaugurale, 22. Cf. F. Alquié, L’expérience (Paris, 1957). Cahiers de Royaumont, no. 2: Descartes (Paris, 1957), 15. Ibid., 13, 31.


all on the issue with which Alquié closed his talk: the location of truth in Descartes.65 Gueroult maintains that, for Descartes, the quest for certainty is essential and what takes him “above the plane of the simple lived.” We can too easily be duped by the “multitude of intuitions” present in experience. “In a word,” Gueroult says, “Descartes is absolutely hostile to a philosophy of gratuitousness,” fearing above all to be a victim of “poetic intuition.”66 From this opening gambit, the conversation between Gueroult and Alquié traverses the text of Descartes’s corpus, and quarrels by turns over the status of the “extended thing” versus “extension” or the “thinking thing” versus “thought.” Alquié wants to maintain a metaphysical distinction within both sets of terms where Gueroult sees none; Gueroult claims that Alquié imputes an “extra-intellectual support” with an “occult quality” to Descartes’s argumentation, “a being that is unable to be reached by thought since it would not be thought,” and thus a move that effectively achieves a “negation of Descartes, who fought all his life against those who would place an occult quality either in exterior things or in oneself.”67 Alquié eventually breaks with the banter to avow the following: My whole thesis consists in affirming that, with Descartes, being is not reducible to the concept. Yet the question you are asking me is the following: but what is it, this being that is not reducible to the concept? As I can only express myself, by definition, by concepts, I am unable to respond. But this doesn’t prove I am wrong, because my thesis consists in saying that being is precisely not reducible to the concept. If you are asking me what is this being in the plane of concepts, then I cannot tell you, or provide you with an “attribute” that is adequate to being. I believe that being [and] existence only reveal themselves to thought in an experience that is familiar, but untranslatable. The evidence of the sum is primary, and exceeds [dépasse] the idea of thought.68

But Gueroult maintains his position all the same, ultimately refusing the phrase “reducible to the concept” as relevant to the meaning of “concept” in Descartes’s philosophy.69 He attacks Alquié’s usage of Cartesian concepts as if they are flexible placeholders for intuitions rather than products of rational deduction. As the discussion nears exhaustion, with the hope of any sort of agreement already gone, Gueroult declares the following: We are in a period where many do not like mathematics and mathematical certainty very much, but the problem that Descartes poses for himself, everyone knows, is that of

65 66 67 68 69

See the “Discussion” in ibid., 32–71. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 49.

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certainty, it is not that of ontological experience. What is important at bottom to know [savoir] is not what we know [connaˆıt], but to be sure that we can know [connaˆıtre]. It is to be sure that we can have a science, to have the certainty that the certainty which we grant to science or to metaphysics or to anything whatsoever is not deceptive.70

The Aristotle scholar Victor Goldschmidt no doubt spoke for many in attendance when he noted the “disconcerting impression” left by Gueroult and Alquié’s dispute at Royaumont. “That agreement between two philosophical positions might be difficult is no problem,” Goldschmidt wrote. “But that two interpreters could not come to agree upon the meaning or even the letter of the Cartesian texts, that’s what is disturbing, humiliating even, for any listener who believes in the universality of the intellect.”71 But universality was indeed at stake in the disagreement. As Alquié said, the evidence of the sum in cogito ergo sum is primary and exceeds all conditions which might intervene to obscure it. Gueroult’s untimely celebration of mathematical certainty is directed against the “gratuitousness” he sees at work in this obscure “evidence” and in Alquié’s presentation. In the vehemence of Gueroult’s critique as it was presented, however, we see the intimations of this conflict’s move from the terrain of Cartesianism to that of Spinozism. For Spinoza the factic immediacy of thought itself has priority over the evidence of the “sum” contingent upon the discrete cogito. The axiom “man thinks” is a point of departure for Spinoza that requires no further elaboration.72 What is clear from Gueroult’s contribution to the debate at Royaumont is that, regardless of the potential justification for his claims in Descartes’s texts, Gueroult is infusing Descartes with a decidedly Spinozist position by persistently downplaying the location of Cartesian certainty in the cogito, and the element of discretion and indeed isolation that this localization implies. Many respondents to Gueroult’s work have pointed to the general accord between his hard-line rationalist outlook in the postwar years and Spinozism as a rational system.73 This assessment is provocative, but its implications are of course deeply problematic for Gueroult’s general method. If, as Spinoza argued, truth is its own sign, and the more geometrico gives us the eyes to see this sign, what are the stakes for Spinoza’s intentions and Gueroult’s method if variable truths can be expressed with the same tools? Can truth retain its constitutive and universal qualities in such circumstances? 70 71

72 73

Ibid., 56. V. Goldschmidt, “A propos du ‘Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons’”, Revue Métaphysique et de morale 1 (1957), 67. Spinoza, Ethics, Book II, Axiom 2. Deleuze, “Gueroult,” 216; Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie, 76–82. Cf. D. Parrochia, La raison systématique (Paris, 1993), 27–9.


Alquié and Gueroult would meet again in 1972 at a colloquium in Brussels on method and the history of philosophy where these issues would be addressed more directly. Cha¨ım Perelman orchestrated this event to be a deliberate resumption of the debate begun at Royaumont seventeen years earlier.74 At this stage, the positions of both thinkers have modified slightly, reflecting their scholarly accomplishments in the intervening years. Alquié’s study of Malebranche has taught him the value of historical work that considers a philosophy’s implications beyond its intentions; for example, he sees a strong line of Malebranchist thought stretching into the secular Enlightenment.75 Gueroult for his part maintains his distrust of phenomenology—which he claims locates philosophy’s value in an inaccessible interiority—and rehashes his insistence that a philosophy’s construction is “commanded” by the “reality” at its source, even if that “reality” is one that “requires of reason its own detriment.”76 A new emphasis on plurality nevertheless appears in Gueroult’s contribution to these proceedings. Indeed, Gueroult stresses the “multiplicity of paths, rational or irrational, that give access to philosophy.”77 Once there, however, each philosophy calls upon a “philosophizing reason”—raison philosophante—to justify the reality it discovers. In this way, Descartes’s foreclosure of reason’s reach can be justified by his own “philosophizing reason,” and his philosophy is now understood to be fully sensible according to its own immanent criteria. Gueroult also suggests a new relationship between reality and truth in the exchanges at this conference, yet rooted still in his Dianoématique. “The truth of a philosophy is the affirmation of a certain reality, which it estimates truly to be reality.”78 The systematic philosophical text is not a means of “communication” of a reality independent of it; the chef d’oeuvre is, rather, that philosophy’s “optimum” and “maximum” expression.79 Perelman, a proponent of Gueroult’s method, presses Alquié on how a “démarche,” which is not a proposition, could ever be “true.” Alquié concedes a plurality of truths, but maintains that truth in this sense is merely logical, the effect of a proposition. His reference in support of his own position—and his hesitation to present it as such—is significant. Philosophical truth, for Alquié, is “in the same sense” as Christ’s response to Pontius Pilate that he is “the Truth, 74 75

76

77 78 79

C. Perelman, ed., Philosophie et méthode: Actes du colloque de Bruxelles (Brussels, 1974). F. Alquié, “Intention et Déterminations dans la genèse de l’oeuvre philosophique,” in ibid., 28–42. Cf. F. Alquié, Le cartésianisme de Malebranche (Paris, 1974). M. Gueroult, “La méthode en histoire de la philosophie,” in Perelman, Philosophie et méthode, 17–27. Cf. Gueroult’s exchange with Gianni Vattimo in Cahiers de Royaumont No. 6: Nietzsche (Paris, 1967), 121. Perelman, Philosophie et méthode, 27. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 55.

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the Way, and the Life.”80 The point of this reference, directed against Gueroult’s lecture, is that Christ did not say “truths,” because the genuine referent of truth cannot be pluralized. But Gueroult will persist: though philosophies contain an element of truth in a scientific sense, this truth is only that of a judgment; the truth he is talking about, the one that can exist in the plural, is “an intrinsic truth.”81 The implication of Gueroult’s response is that the concept of truth Alquié ascribes to science is more in line with the latter’s religious example; here truth results from assent. The truth that is intrinsic, that is attendant to philosophical reality as Gueroult understands it, must be recognized as such. That this recognition must take place from the outside is obvious to Gueroult, but this recognition does not involve, or require, assent. In the course of their exchange at Brussels, Alquié argues that even though Descartes, Kant, and Husserl all say “something different” when the first says, “I think, therefore I am,” or the second establishes the transcendental subject, or the third performs his phenomenological reduction, it is equally true that, in a certain manner, they are saying the same thing. And it is that, before whatever objective given, there is a way for the mind [l’esprit] to come back to itself and to consider itself as primary in relation to the object.82

It is this subjectivism that Gueroult finds intolerable. If Descartes was satisfied with his intuition of the cogito, Gueroult asks, why did he not stop there? “The cogito is not the unique truth of Descartes, it is one of the truths of Descartes, a truth to which, from all evidence, his philosophy cannot be reduced.”83 Moreover, the suggestion that with the cogito Descartes is expressing the same “truth” as “Saint Augustine, Kant, Fichte, Maine de Biran, or Husserl, etc.” is not only impossible to endorse or refute, it is irrelevant. “Descartes’s philosophy, that is to say, his system, incites a world of productive reflections that the cogito alone would be unable to incite.”84 Although Gueroult and Alquié find themselves on the familiar battleground of Descartes’s philosophy, it is clear that the terms of their dispute have shifted somewhat. Where previously the argument had concerned the location of immutable truth in Descartes’s philosophy, in the depths of his conscious experience or in the proliferation of his conceptual apparatus, at this stage the dispute concerns the status of “philosophical truth” as either singular or plural, even within a unique philosophical system. As noted, the meeting in Brussels took

80 81 82 83 84

Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 54.


place at a time when each scholar had moved beyond Descartes to engage with other rationalist philosophers. The first volume of Gueroult’s study of Spinoza had already appeared in 1968, and Alquié’s work on Malebranche would be published six years later in 1974, the same year as Gueroult’s second volume on the Ethics.85 The last foray in their protracted conflict would be Alquié’s major study of Spinoza, published in 1981 five years after Gueroult’s death. In their respective readings of Spinoza, we see that theology is regarded as the privileged threat to philosophical activity. In Gueroult’s study, theology goes by the name of the “occult,” which is regarded as the target of Spinoza’s absolute rationalism. For Alquié, Spinozism is itself nothing but a hyperrationalized theology that is by turns naturalist or negative. Alquié’s hesitation to invoke a theological analogy at Brussels belies his own effort to maintain that the separation constitutive of the immutable truth at work in Descartes, Kant, or Husserl is not theological just because it brackets a space in the beyond as unknowable. But it also prefigures his later concern to color Spinozism as theological precisely in its privileging of God, however naturalized, as a fully available object of inquiry.

spinoza and the threat of theology Though Gueroult’s study can be situated amidst the upsurge of interest in Spinozism among French thinkers in the 1960s, Spinoza 1: Dieu is an anomaly in this field. Where for Althusser and certain of his students Spinoza became the privileged theoretical resource for rethinking the Marxist project,86 the concerns of the political, and indeed the ethical, were far from central or even relevant to Gueroult’s study. Similarly, where Deleuze found in Spinoza a concept of ontological univocity that would be foundational for his more politically charged work with Félix Guattari, for Gueroult the peculiarities of Spinoza’s ontology were subservient to the elaboration of the rational epistemology, or gnoseology, to use the Scholastic term Gueroult deploys, that was Spinoza’s chief aim. In one sense, however, Gueroult’s project was of a piece with this broader return to Spinoza. In addition to elaborating the contours of an absolute rationalism, Gueroult’s exegesis is also an attempt to rescue Spinoza’s philosophy from the misreading it has suffered in the hands of Hegel and those who read Spinoza through a Hegelian lens. Gueroult devotes nearly two hundred pages to the opening propositions of Book I of the Ethics in order to refute Hegel’s interpretation of Spinozism as a negative theology wherein the “attributes” serve as determinations of a Substance that would otherwise remain indeterminate 85 86

M. Gueroult, Spinoza II: L’âme (Paris, 1974). E. Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. P. Snowdon (London, 1998); P. Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris, 1980). Cf. A. Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris, 1969).

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without them. Gueroult argues that Spinoza’s decision to have “substance” and “attribute” operate as equivalent—that is to say, synonymous—terms in the first eleven propositions of the Ethics is “genetically” essential for his overall project. Though Substance will later be capitalized to refer to the idea of the infinity of attributes in one concept, the establishment of the “substantial” quality of the attributes in these early steps is necessary to prevent the speculative persistence of an arrière-monde that exists prior to its determination in this world. The error of “classical rationalism” as Spinoza saw it, according to Gueroult, was its reliance on a foundation that was elsewhere, outside the world itself. At one point in his study, Gueroult gives a striking clue as to the complicity of his methodology with his scholarly object in his description of Spinoza’s concept of Substance as “genetic, in other words synthetic.”87 The central paradox of Spinoza’s philosophy that Gueroult’s work seeks to clarify is how there can be a synthetic operation, indeed any concept of synthesis at all, without a foundation for that synthesis that is elsewhere or at the very least external to the synthetic operation itself (e.g. a transcendental subject or a creator-God). The model for the equivalency that Spinoza establishes between “genesis” and “synthesis” is mathematical. Mathematics provides Spinoza a method of reasoning that is intrinsic, driven by wholly internal conditions. A genetic definition, according to Gueroult, is one that expresses the efficient cause of the object in question; in this it is opposed to a definition that merely offers a property. A circle is not to be defined by its roundness; it is a figure described by a straight line of which one end is fixed and the other is mobile.88 In this example, the “comprehension” of a circle as a “being of reason”89 is predicated not on an exhaustive account of all the qualitative differences among all the possible or existent circles, large or small, or red or blue, or whatever properties any given circle may bear. It is “comprehended,” rather, only in terms of its genetic cause. Gueroult’s reading of the Ethics proceeds in similar terms, “comprehending” the text according to its genetic, conceptual construction, beginning with a definition of substance that prohibits recourse to an “outside” and pursuing the consequences of this conceptual foundation. But it is clear that this model of “comprehension” is deemed operative not only within the constitution of Spinoza’s system, but also in the concept of understanding as such that Spinoza seeks to promote. This “comprehension” has as its condition, however, an incommensurable ontological confrontation that results from the argument for the attributes of Thought and Extension, the only two among the infinity of attributes that the intellect can “perceive,” as being “substantially,”—that is, 87 88 89

Gueroult, Spinoza 1, 457. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 413–24.


“essentially”—distinct.90 Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Gueroult’s interpretation for readers used to thinking of Spinozism as a thoroughgoing monism is the insistence on two dualisms at the heart of Spinoza’s philosophy, that between the attributes themselves—Thought and Extension—and that between the attributes and the modes coded in terms of the epistemological difference between cause and effect. For Gueroult, “Substance” is the singular idea of a relation, namely that among the attributes as substantially distinct—hence the importance of Gueroult’s reading of the first eleven propositions—but relating to each other in a unitary frame that is infinite and brokers no beyond. This singular frame accounts for the identity of the attributes in the last instance, despite their essential distinction from one another. “There is no juxtaposition of the attributes, since they are identical as to their causal act,” Gueroult writes, “but neither is there fusion between them, since they remain irreducible as to their essences.”91 The ingenuity of Spinoza’s philosophy, in Gueroult’s reading, is not to allow this incommensurability to function as a placeholder for a void or for some kind of plenitudinous presence marking the separation between “thought” and “being” (or “matter”), but rather to serve as the motor itself for the genesis of synthetic knowledge in Thought and qualitative transformation in Extension. If Thought and Extension are incommensurable due to their “essential”— that is to say, ontological—distinction, then the dualism of cause and effect that takes place in the intellect is essentially epistemological. As the intellect is but one “mode” among others of the attribute “Thought,” for Gueroult the act of knowing—the terrain of the “absolute rationalism” on offer in Spinozism— is decoupled from any kind of ontological questioning that posits a being beyond knowledge that thought is nonetheless compelled to contemplate. But this “modal” knowing, which takes the form of a genetic grasp of the relation between cause and effect in discrete instances (e.g. the circle example noted above), necessarily involves an element of transcendence in Gueroult’s reading. Gueroult thus plays the role of heretical Spinozist twice over, making a case for the function of dualism as well as for the evidence of transcendence in Spinoza’s “gnoseology.” Gueroult insists that the conception of God as immanence in Spinoza’s system—which is but another expression of the idea of Substance as relations without outside—is designed to prohibit a conception of God as

90

91

Spinoza, Ethics, Book I, Definition 4. The evident discrepancy that results from Spinoza’s speculative affirmation of an infinity of attributes and the fact that only two appear relevant to human experience will be central to Alquié’s critique. See the discussion below. For Spinoza’s own most concise justification for why Thought and Extension are the only two attributes “the human mind can attain knowledge of,” see Letter 64, to G. H. Schuller, in B. Spinoza, The Letters, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis, 1995), 298–300. Gueroult, Spinoza I, 238.

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a transient cause—that is, as an entity capable of discrete intervention in the world—and emphatically not to deny the element of transcendence involved in all rational knowledge, including not least the knowledge of the idea of Substance qua immanent “God.” All the same, Gueroult’s endorsement of Spinoza’s absolute rationalism entails that what is known in the transcendent moment of knowing touches on the absolute itself. The argument for this position is extremely complex, giving rise to the more than 1,200 pages of exegesis that comprise Gueroult’s two-volume study. At its heart, however, is precisely the concept of incommensurability as describing at once the epistemological relationship between cause and effect, which is to say the relationship grasped by the intellect between the attributes/Substance on the hand, and the modes on the other, and the ontological relation within the former category between the attributes Thought and Extension. For Gueroult, this biunivocal incommensurable relation is the condition itself of “true” knowledge. In other words, it is the incommensurability between the attributes Thought and Extension that allows us to “know” their relation to one another via their modal expression in discrete instances: “This incommensurability, far from excluding knowledge or the truth of the idea, is on the contrary their condition, for the conformity of the idea, to its object, which defines the idea, or truth, would be impossible without their fundamental distinction.”92 The opposition of the object and its idea, their distinction, even when the idea’s “object” is in fact another idea, is what renders synthetic knowledge possible. Here, the concept is forged not in the overcoming of a radical opposition, and a consequent forgetting of this moment, but rather in a militant attentiveness to the eternal and insistently repeated opposition between the idea and its object. In the insistence on the incommensurability of an idea with its object as a condition for the emergence of a “true idea,” Spinozism becomes for Gueroult not the site of a singular truth in and of itself, but rather an epistemology (gnoseology) which allows for the articulation and understanding of a plurality of “true ideas” to be produced ad infinitum. This investment acquires its full remit only in light of Gueroult’s methodology, which is geared in each instance toward producing the fully adequate “idea”, i.e. his study, of the “object” in question, i.e. a textually extant philosophical system. In his wholesale refusal to tolerate any chiasmic intertwining between ideas and their objects, or a hermeneutics in which the ideas of the reader and the text are ultimately rendered indistinct, Gueroult is at pains to make Spinozism a rigorous antidote to the “mysterious deus ex machina” of phenomenological intentionality that assures their fundamental union. In this regard, the resonance of Gueroult’s Spinozism with the general current of

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Ibid., 285. Emphasis added.


structuralism is patent. At the heart of Saussurean linguistics was the insistence on the pure difference among linguistic signs as constitutive of meaning. At no point was a signifier deemed meaningful due to an essential content to be found in the signified; rather, it was the incommensurability among signs, signifiers, and phonemes that allowed for a proliferation of sense. Gueroult’s reading of Spinozism in terms of its integral incommensurability is not only redolent of structuralism; it is exemplary of it. Paul Ricoeur’s description of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism as a “Kantianism without a transcendental subject”93 is an apt description of Gueroult’s Spinozism as well. We can thus see why Spinozism is so convenient for Gueroult’s method and how formally similar the two “systems” are in their essentials. This proximity turns on the distinction in French between knowing as savoir or as connaˆıtre, a distinction we have seen was important to Gueroult in his defense of the rationalist Descartes. Spinozism is a philosophy purely on the side of savoir; Gueroult writes of “savoir absolu,” not “connaissance absolue.”94 Just because God, or Substance, is “unknowable” in an exhaustive sense does not mean that an “adequate” comprehension of the idea of Substance is impossible. To know in the sense of savoir, which involves an abstracted and genetic understanding, is predicated on the impossibility of knowing as connaˆıtre, which involves an intimacy and familiarity, a kind of burrowing out of the object in question. In Gueroult’s reading, the attempt to know God in the sense of connaˆıtre came to be the hobgoblin of Descartes’s otherwise rationalist project.95 This same epistemological distinction is in play in Gueroult’s reading of past philosophical systems. As conceptual systems, they can be known in the sense of savoir, but it is impossible to “know” a philosopher’s consciousness, his inner or lived experience, in the latter sense of connaˆıtre. Against a fusion of an idea with its object, or mind with world, that would allow for an interminable intuition of properties, Gueroult maintains that it is the immutable incommensurability between the two that is generative of rational concepts qua true ideas. To be sure, this fully “rational” version of the world is arguably anemic, in that it is conceived at a maximal level of abstraction that provides minimal purchase. Indeed, this abstracted world is belied daily by the multitude of feelings and intuitions that are attendant on lived experience. It is for this reason that Alquié finds Spinozism, and in particular the version of it exquisitely presented by Gueroult, completely unacceptable as philosophy. It is a testament to the challenge of Gueroult’s reading, and to the persistence of their dispute, that Alquié saw fit to make the last major study of his own career an 93 94 95

Dosse, History of Structuralism, 237. Gueroult, Spinoza I, 11. Ibid., 9. Cf. Deleuze, Expressionism, 41–51.

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eminently critical work. The advantage of Alquié’s study over Gueroult’s is readily apparent. Where Gueroult concentrated on the first two books of the Ethics, containing Spinoza’s metaphysics and his theory of the soul, Alquié takes the whole of the Ethics for his object. As a result, where the limitations of Gueroult’s study, cut short by his death, offered the convenience of remaining silent on the questions of beatitude that inform the conclusion of the Ethics in Book V,96 for Alquié it is these promises of salvation that structure his interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole. In other words, where Gueroult read each book of the Ethics in “Spinozistic” terms, as structured proofs devoid of teleology, Alquié reads the Ethics in terms of the text’s own material telos, the promise of beatitude. In his Sorbonne courses twenty years earlier, Alquié offered that his failure to understand Spinoza was perhaps a personal one.97 At this later stage, Alquié professes to be more empowered in his critique given that, in his lifetime, he has never met or heard of anyone living a life of beatific salvation as a result of reading the Ethics. What is more, Alquié maintains that his assessment is most faithful to Spinoza’s demands in that other so-called Spinozists must somehow be disingenuous by Spinoza’s own standards. If Spinozism “works,” where is their evidence of the everlasting contentment promised at the end of the Ethics? Spinoza’s readers were not the only disingenuous ones. In fact, the heart of Alquié’s exposé is an accusation of Spinoza’s own disingenuousness in his attempts to produce a rationalism more “absolute” than Descartes’s. The myriad discrepancies in the Ethics, for example those between a God as Nature and a God that remains “personal” in its benevolence, or those inherent in a realist concept of knowledge that produces salvation as a result, draw from Spinoza’s misguided attempt to make fully rational his naturalist intuition concerning God’s immanence. Spinoza’s failure lies less in his intuition per se than in his effort to conceptualize his own inaugural ontological experience. Indeed, his desire to banish the unknown from the domain of human experience by way of mathematical certainty only produces a philosophy more mystifying in spite of itself.98 Where rationalism as a method led Descartes to a concept of God as precisely that which was incomprehensible, in Spinoza rationalism ceases to be a method and becomes a doctrine that is in itself incomprehensible.99 In this move, Spinoza effectively creates a “new theology” whose insistence on God’s full presence paradoxically reinforces a Judeo-Christian image of the

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Cf. M. Gueroult, “Introduction générale et fragment du premier chapitre du troisième tome du Spinoza,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 167 (1977), 285–302. Alquié, Le¸cons sur Spinoza, 206–10. F. Alquié, Le rationalisme de Spinoza (Paris, 1981), 326. Ibid., 325–6.


Deus absconditus.100 The argument runs that Spinoza’s intransigent avowal that God is fully immanent and thus knowable is belied on two counts. First of all, turning Gueroult’s gnoseological argument against itself by testing its ontological implications, Alquié notes that the attributes are effectively transcendent to the modes in Spinoza’s universe, as causes are to effects, despite impressions some passages may give to the contrary. Where for Gueroult this “transcendence” operated in our epistemological grasp of the relation of cause to effect, for Alquié this admission of God qua attributes as functionally transcendent clearly shows that Spinoza’s insistence on God’s immanence fails by his own lights. The second issue is revelatory of the persistent confusion at work in Gueroult and Alquié’s argument over what it means to “know” or to “understand.” Alquié emphasizes that the modes and the attributes are both infinite in number; as such, not even Spinoza himself claims that a complete inventory of these categories could ever be accomplished. For this reason, “the universal intelligibility which his rationalism affirms remains a promised intelligibility. This promise of intelligibility does not cause the transcendence of Being, which remains forever beyond our grasp, to disappear.”101 But the insistence on intelligibility, minus the evidence of it, infuses Spinozism with a “promesse du bonheur” that is essentially theological.102 As Alquié remarks at the outset of his study, Spinoza’s version of salvation never comes. Spinoza’s dissimulation does not stop there, however. In his dogged pursuit of his pantheist conviction, Spinoza achieves a curious slippage which compromises the foundation of his entire system. In Alquié’s reading, Spinoza’s intolerance for the “incomprehensibility” of God in Descartes’s philosophy leads him to strategically displace the “I think,” which inaugurates Descartes’s philosophy and which Alquié believes is the essence of the sum as first evidence, with his own formula: “I am thought by God.”103 The subjective act of thinking does not evaporate in this transition; it is merely transposed to God, which is precisely contrary to the evidence of experience. “With Spinoza, the cogito extends itself, universalizes itself, and eternalizes itself.” The result is a certainty that a Cartesian can always throw into doubt with recourse to the itinerary available to any human being, namely the “‘I think,’ first discovered and affirmed.”104 Hence, even worse than being a theology masquerading as philosophy, Spinozism is effectively a doctrine in bad faith. The roots of Alquié’s critique of Spinozism are evident in La nostalgie de l’être: the exigencies of critical thought and the virtue of rationalism 100 101 102 103 104

Ibid., 160–62. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 325–6. Ibid., 326.

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qua method are submitted to the demands of a will that finds the constraints of finite existence to be intolerable. Much as Gueroult’s Spinozism resonated with the currents of French structuralism, we can see here Alquié’s proximity to the general line of French phenomenology from Levinas to Marion. There is an “otherwise than Being” or a “without Being,” and any attempt to incorporate this “Other” into an ontological or conceptual continuum with worldly existence cannot but collapse into incoherence. In Alquié’s view, the central event of Spinoza’s philosophy is the dissolution of the “I” and its finitude contrary to all evidence. Thus the “seduction of Spinozism”105 is that it answers man’s eternal desire to escape finitude and achieve immortality. This seduction aims for the derealization of man “to the profit of God alone.”106 In effect, Alquié reads Spinoza’s philosophy in terms of its fidelity to an inaugural instinct. He considers Spinoza’s philosophy in light of Spinoza the man’s own desires, elements which Gueroult would no doubt call “gratuitous” and irrelevant to the reality of Spinoza’s philosophy. More importantly, however, in terms of Alquié’s own philosophy, he judges Spinozism’s failure against a singular truth of separation, a once-and-for-all moment to be infinitely reaffirmed that, by virtue of its emphasis on a singularity which trumps the efforts of rational thought to comprehend it, arguably possesses a theological quality in its own right. Alquié made a confession of this sort at Brussels, and it is thus no small irony that with Le rationalisme de Spinoza Alquié reverses the charge against Gueroult, making the affirmation of “absolute rationalism” a surreptitious replacement of philosophy with theology. In the juxtaposition of Gueroult’s and Alquié’s studies, the incommensurability of their respective philosophical agendas is thrown into the sharpest relief. Most revealing is the way that incommensurability itself figures into each thinker’s defense of his own position. For Gueroult, it is the incommensurability of idea and object that is itself generative of absolute understanding. For Alquié, it is this same incommensurability that is evidence of the failure of any project which seeks to overcome it. The fact that Gueroult levels charges of occultism at Alquié, and that Alquié returns the charge, effectively calling Gueroult’s Spinozism antiphilosophical in its theological aims, points to the fundamental short circuit at the heart of their dispute. Anything that smacks of completeness is theological in Alquié’s account; theological for Gueroult signifies the persistence of a domain that is off-limits to rational thought. Each thinker wants philosophy to be autonomous and eternal, and yet not theological. But there is nary an agreement over what it means to be theological between them. In fact, their 105 106

Ibid., 353. Cf. P. Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London, 2006), which pursues a critique of Deleuze along similar lines.


respective versions of this persistent threat to philosophy are mirror images of one another. In the end, their dispute over rationalism appears to collapse into a kind of philosophical decisionism. Alquié, for his part, is perfectly cognizant of this. He writes, The sage of the Ethics “thinks of nothing less than death.” Thus Spinozism can only be constituted by excluding from itself the anguish of our disappearance. We can conclude from this that the idea of death is foreign to truth. If, to the contrary, one holds this idea to be constitutive of our consciousness, it must be admitted that reason cannot suffice to explain man. On this point, one must choose.107

Alquié’s reduction of their dispute to an existential choice is consistent with his entire project. He says as much when he writes, “the truth of a philosophy must stand up to the truth of man, and the truth of man is that of experience. At least such is the thesis that, in all my writings, I have not ceased to defend and support.”108 For Gueroult, as we have seen, philosophical truth must remain intrinsic, unbeholden to a standard external to itself, least of all the “truth of experience.” But Gueroult no less than Alquié acknowledges, inadvertently perhaps, that the foundation of Spinoza’s philosophy is in itself not philosophical when he writes that “absolute rationalism, imposing the total intelligibility of God, key to the total intelligibility of things, is Spinozism’s first article of faith.”109 For all their shared hostility to ‘“history” and “theology” as surrogates, the agreement between Gueroult and Alquié that philosophy must speak to the eternal, that it must be the domain of “philosophical truth,” appears rooted in the evident impossibility of deciding upon the meaning of truth itself.

conclusion—the impasse of philosophy In a brief aside in her recent assessment of postwar French philosophy, Elisabeth Roudinesco describes the division in French thought codified by Foucault in terms of Cartesians versus Spinozists.110 The polemic between Alquié and Gueroult lends historical veracity to Roudinesco’s gloss, which does Badiou’s rejoinder to Foucault one better by displacing the rift from the nineteenth to the seventeenth century. When we consider the history of Gueroult and Alquié’s conflict in light of these various heuristics, however, what we find is a certain fungibility among the concepts and philosophical positions on which they are based, one that accounts for the pliability of the distinction itself. For even

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Alquié, Rationalisme, back cover (attributed to Alquié). Ibid., 5. Gueroult, Spinoza I, 12. Emphasis added. E. Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times, trans. W. McQuaig (New York, 2008), 31.

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as Gueroult and Alquié become increasingly intransigent over the course of their dispute, their positions on Spinoza ultimately approximate one another. Gueroult’s insistence that the absolute rationalism on offer in Spinozism is a matter of conceptual “adequacy” plays into Alquié’s charge that Spinozism is blind to its own failure to provide an “exhaustive” account of ontological experience. Likewise, Alquié’s insistence that there is permanent remainder that cannot be domesticated in conceptual thought remains open to Gueroult’s charge that such a position is an abrogation of philosophy, providing a foundation for philosophical thought that cannot, by definition, be philosophically vouchsafed. The proximity of these positions suggests that at issue between Gueroult and Alquié was perhaps less a definition of philosophy than an evaluation of philosophy’s task. In this respect, their polemic provides a rich depth to what was after all Foucault’s main point in introducing his distinction in the first place, namely to stage it as the resurgence of contending responses to the question “what is Enlightenment?”111 —a respect for the limits of reason in light of the constraints of finitude, or reason’s capacity for transgressing these constraints in the production of “true ideas.” The historical insight gained from a return to Gueroult and Alquié’s polemic is thus dual-sided. Indeed, while the differend traced over the course of this essay is most starkly evident in the generalized nonrelation—to call it a dialogue of the deaf presumes a dialogue—between purveyors of an arguably “theological” phenomenology and an earnestly post-structuralist rationalism, the fact remains that the impasse made manifest in Gueroult and Alquié’s dispute is operative within the most innovative and compelling projects of contemporary French thought. For example, although Badiou belongs in the Gueroult camp in terms of his methods and investments, his long-standing commitment to thinking the emergence of subjectivity as predicated upon an errant “void” within Being clearly bears traces of Alquié’s foundational rereading of Descartes. The “separation” that Alquié found at the heart of Descartes’s “discovery” is no less immutable and singular than Badiou’s ontological void. In this regard, Lacan is the Cartesian mediator between Alquié and Badiou. In Badiou’s system, Descartes is privileged above Spinoza, the latter of whom “forecloses the void” in a metaphysics too given to closure in the last instance, despite its manifest commitment to thinking the infinite.112 Badiou’s distance from Spinozism is one effect of his distance from Deleuze, another key thinker in whom we can discern the striking pertinence of Gueroult and Alquié’s dispute, one that is, as noted, grounded in Deleuze’s philosophical education. At the heart of Deleuze’s multifaceted career lay the attempt to 111 112

Foucault, “Life,” 467–70. Badiou, Being and Event, 112–20.


develop a properly post-phenomenological rationalism for the modern age. Such a rationalism would be grounded in Spinoza’s metaphysics, but it would also accept the general movement that Alquié deemed paramount in philosophical thinking, conceived as a thinking that aims, in Alquié’s own words, “toward a Being which is not a world.”113 The Gueroult–Alquié polemic is in a way exquisitely captured in the title of the central philosophical work of Deleuze’s oeuvre: Difference and Repetition.114 Where scholars have colored this pairing as a Deleuzian translation of “Being” and “Time,” or indeed a reworking of Bergson’s “Matter” and “Memory,”115 we can also read it in terms of Gueroult and Alquié; that is, Gueroult’s primordial incommensurability conceived as essentially generative (“difference”) and Alquié’s infinite and immutable recurrence of the ontological fracture that makes philosophical thought possible (“repetition”). Finally, there is the case of Jean-Luc Marion, a thinker who appears to be wholly committed to phenomenology as a philosophical mode and to developing the legacy of Alquié’s teaching. But even within Marion’s central theological work—God without Being—we find the traces of the rationalist commitment best exemplified by Gueroult. In his preface for the English translation of this book, Marion posits the following question as central to his effort: “can the conceptual thought of God (conceptual, or rational, and not intuitive or ‘mystical’ in the vulgar sense) be developed outside of the doctrine of Being (in the metaphysical, or even in the non-metaphysical sense)?”116 In other words, Marion takes what Alquié precisely conceded to be a “non-conceputalizable experience” in his first public exchange with Gueroult and aims to give it its concept, or indeed concepts: agape, charity, love, givenness. With Deleuze’s death, his thought has passed definitively into a sequence of further development by those inspired by his work. But Badiou’s and Marion’s projects remain works in progress. In all these efforts there lies a tension that stretches beyond the tropes of structuralism and phenomenology, going back to Descartes and Spinoza as foundational figures for modern French philosophy.

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Cf. Hallward, Out of This World. Avoiding engagement with Gueroult or Alquié, Hallward’s critique nevertheless targets both influences in Deleuze’s thought: (1) its tendency to collapse in an incoherent monism, in which all sense of relation is lost (i.e. Alquié’s critique of Gueroult’s Spinoza); (2) the tendency for Deleuzian philosophy to enact a “counteractualization” that takes thought “out of this world” to a theological, or, to use Hallward’s term of art, “theophanic” plane (i.e. Gueroult’s critique of Alquié’s Descartes). G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York, 1994). D. W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” in P. Patton and J. Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze and Derrida (London, 2003), 51; S. Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 179. J.-L. Marion, God without Being, trans. T. A. Carlson (Chicago, 1991), xxiv.

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What is more, this tension was developed in the highest echelons of the academic culture that shaped these contemporary thinkers. Foucault, for his part, was ultimately well aware of the value and importance of this sphere of philosophical discussion. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, he spoke with regret about the “passage of the philosophical question into the realm of the slogan” that had marked French intellectual life in recent decades. “In the past,” he observed, there were two different circuits. Even if it could not avoid all the pitfalls, the institutional circuit, which had its drawbacks—it was closed, dogmatic, academic—nevertheless managed to sustain heavy losses. The tendency to entropy was less, while nowadays entropy sets in at an alarming rate.117

Foucault’s notion that his generation sought to overcome this tension manifested at the heart of the “institutional circuit” stands today as the expression of an unfulfilled desire rather than the marking of an accomplishment. But then again perhaps the signal virtue of returning to Gueroult and Alquié’s dispute lies less in an evaluation of their technical arguments against one another than in a full recognition of its conclusion in an impasse, not an impasse that it would be philosophy’s task to overcome, but one that serves as the constitutive motor for the progress of philosophical discourse itself.

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M. Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” in M. Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 134.



c. wright mills, sociology, and the politics of the public intellectual howard brick Department of History, University of Michigan Email: [email protected]

How are we to grasp the genealogy of the “public intellectual”? When, how, and at whose hands did this term first come into use, framing an ideal of democratic responsibility for those who devote their work life to fostering knowledge and criticism—an image usually raised as a reproach to academic insularity though also sometimes assailed for encouraging an evasion of scholarly rigor?1 At first blush, the phrase seems redundant: the emergence of “intellectual” simpliciter is usually linked to a particular episode—the Dreyfusards’ defense of the French republic—that already implied a commitment by writers, thinkers, and artists to political or civic action.2 From that time and place, the term traveled quickly across borders and before long to the United States, occasioning controversies from the start over who represented the “intellectual” as a social type and who did not, what activities or purposes best defined the role, and whether that role deserved respect, derision, or reinvention. To be sure, the social, cultural, and political world of “modern” societies has always featured individuals noted for scholarly, creative, speculative, or critical work that resonates with literate audiences attuned to key issues of the moment—whether such people were known as ministers, philosophes, journalists, poets, men or women of letters,

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The clearest exponents of these alternative assessments are Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). A great deal of writing on US “intellectual history,” for that matter, concerns figures who made their names and found their audiences outside the academy. If such figures occupied academic posts as well, they nonetheless carried significance (for the historian) by virtue of the effect and influence their work had in social affairs broadly speaking; and so such “intellectuals” were by definition “public.”

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Transcendentalists, or even, in some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century usages, natural philosophers or scientists.3 Nonetheless, the emergence of the noun “intellectual” (and its plural) from the early twentieth century, and its widening use since the 1920s, spawned a persistent and self-conscious discourse concerning the character, value or virtue of such figures.4 A skeptic might conclude that the addition of the modifier “public” has perpetuated old, tangled debates about intellectuals as such, without bringing with it much greater clarity. Words nonetheless are signs of historical troubles and social discontents. Excavating the usages of “public intellectual” over time can highlight some of the dilemmas that have confronted writers, critics, citizens, and political actors, past and present. Locating some of the key historical moments when debates flared brightly over these roles—“intellectual” or “public intellectual”—can mark a first step toward gauging their meanings. In recent US history, it is easy to cite three such moments: (1) at mid-century, broadly speaking from the 1930s through the 1950s, from Depression to Red Scare, when the roles of expert and critic aroused, for varied reasons, both extraordinary hope and recrimination;5 (2) the late 1960s, when the

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On earlier models, see, for instance, Isaac Kramnick, “Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 1–30; and Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 2, The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). As Stefan Collini has demonstrated, the term “intellectual” (as noun) came with “the question of intellectuals”—a field of discussion, full of variation and hard to navigate, that has borne, along with some insight, a host of loaded meanings and misunderstandings. Among the latter lies the reflexive identification of “intellectuals” with a particular kind of politics. The salience of the Dreyfus case in sparking the spread of the neologism has encouraged a presumption that the social figure in view belongs on the leftward part of the spectrum, challenging constituted authorities—though recent historiography concerning ideological components of the American right turn has turned attention to a wide range of conservative intellectuals as well. The most important general account in this respect remains George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976). The trend continues through works such as Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and such exceptionally supple work as Angus Burgin’s “The Radical Conservatism of Frank H. Knight,” Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009), 513–38. For an introduction to the “question of intellectuals,” focused on Britain but having wider reference, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–44. The preoccupations of this period were reflected somewhat later, in summary, in Philip Rieff, ed., On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969); and Lewis Coser, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View (New York: Free Press, 1965).

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antiwar movement excited debates over academic complicity with governmental power and duties to dissent;6 (3) the 1980s and 1990s, when the right turn of American political culture to market fundamentalism as well as disputes over the politics of the academy (especially vis-à-vis feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism) combined with the theoretical revival of civic republicanism to stir discussion of scholars’ contributions, or lack thereof, to the “public sphere.”7 The present time, when the nation’s political discourse appears to be either in suspended animation or peculiarly degraded, even as the recent economic crisis and the 2008 election made reform aspirations more urgent, may count as yet a fourth such moment marked by special concern over intellectuals’ relation to public and political life. It was in the first moment that dissenting sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916– 62) played a significant role in raising the question of the responsibility of “intellectuals” to “publics,” and in the third moment that writer Russell Jacoby— with reference to Mills among one of his chief models—did most to fix the term “public intellectual” in the discourse of academics and (what Mills would have called) the higher journalists.8 Also in Mills’s footsteps, Berkeley scholar Michael Burawoy set off widespread discussion in his own discipline by calling in 2004 for renewed commitment to “public sociology.”9 Recent books by Daniel Geary and David Paul Haney, by revising our understanding of Mills’s career and reprising the professional, disciplinary debates in which he played a prominent role, do a great deal to illuminate, clarify, tease out—and sometimes mix up again—the meanings borne by all these notions of intellectuals, their roles, obligations, and defaults over the past seventy years.

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The arguments were most vigorously stated in Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books, 23 Feb. 1967, reprinted in idem, American Power and The New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969). The reinvigoration of “public” commitments in response to the privatism of market ideology was evident in the conjoint concepts of “civil society” and “public sphere.” See Flora Lewis, “The Rise of ‘Civil Society’,” New York Times, 25 June 1989, 27; John A. Hall, ed., Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), especially the dissenting contribution by feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in ibid., 109–42. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals. Michael Burawoy, “For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70 (Feb. 2005), 4–28.

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c. wright mills as a leader in the refoundation of american sociology For all his notoriety as a rebel in post-World War II intellectual life, C. Wright Mills has received rather little sustained analytical attention as a figure in US intellectual history.10 Daniel Geary’s title, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought, seems intended to strike a slightly discomfiting note: ought a perpetual dissenter to have professional ambitions? Did this malcontent also aspire to share “the authority of experts”? Can a radical also be careerist (without impugning the integrity of his convictions)?11 Since books continue to appear that paint Mills as the archetypal (and legendary) outsider of the postwar academic Establishment, Geary makes a significant claim merely by insisting that a good part of Mills’s early years working in sociological theory and empirical research was occupied by his pursuit of distinctly professional aspirations.12 The figure usually regarded as Mills’s archrival—Talcott Parsons— believed that the advent of modern sociology marked an intellectual revolution in the West, and Mills in the 1940s shared that very sense that sociology represented a new way of thinking with enormous promise for grasping human experience and possibilities for remaking social and political reality.13

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From within sociology, there have been numerous accounts in critique and defense, including Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: Free Press, 1983); and Rick Tilman, C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and His Intellectual Roots (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1984). Among intellectual historians, partial studies have appeared often in many more general accounts, such as Steven Weiland, Intellectual Craftsmen: Ways and Works in American Scholarship, 1935–1990 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991); and Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970 (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2002). The most compelling work in intellectual history regarding Mills, prior to Radical Ambition, could be found in the essays of Richard Gillam, “C. Wright Mills and the Politics of Truth: The Power Elite Revisited,” American Quarterly 27 (1975), 461–79; idem, “Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and the ‘Critical Ideal,’” American Scholar 47 (1977–8), 69–85; idem, “White Collar from Start to Finish,” Theory and Society 10 (1981), 1–30; and his unpublished “C. Wright Mills, 1916–1948: An Intellectual Biography” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1972). Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). The legendary maverick image of Mills appears especially in Keith Kerr, Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st-Century Sociology (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009); and—though actually less romantically—in Tom Hayden, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Time (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006). Parsons remarked on the rise of sociological theory as “a historic breakthrough in Western intellectual history” in his final, unfinished manuscript, “The American Societal Community,” posthumously published as American Society: A Theory of the Societal


Although Mills had not quite the same estimation as Parsons of what it took to “charter” a new field of “science,” he had no less a conviction in the virtues of thinking about “society” in terms that challenged a great deal of intellectual tradition invested in liberal individualism and universalist assumptions about the fixity of human nature and the terms of human relations.14 Geary reminds us that despite a past in works by Comte, Spencer, Sumner, and Ward, and despite the institution-building accomplished by Albion Small, Franklin Giddings, Robert Park, and a raft of “objectivists” between the wars, American sociology was effectively refounded in the 1940s. At least that is how the most dynamic figures in the field imagined their place and their project at the time.15 Beyond simply the dramatic expansion of independent sociology departments during the 1940s and 1950s and the new fascination postwar students showed for courses in the field, an influx of new texts and mentors seemed to set the discipline on a different footing. Both Parsons and Mills, in different ways, vigorously promoted Max Weber’s work as theoretically central to refounding the discipline in the United States,16 and both imagined that new means of engaging theory and empirical research in concert promised great gains to come. At the same time, Geary demonstrates, with the levelheaded clarity and understated brilliance of insight that marks the whole of this book, that Mills’s approach to the discipline’s reconstruction was sui generis in its commitments both to an American pragmatist current of epistemology and to the sociology of knowledge promoted by Karl Mannheim. Whether due to old-fashioned

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Community, ed. Giuseppe Sciortino (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007). See Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 242. Charles Camic, “Structure after 50 Years: The Anatomy of a Charter,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (July 1989), 38–107. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1865–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); Donald Bellomy, “William Graham Sumner: The Molding of an Iconoclast” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1980); Fred Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1977); Martin Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988); Robert Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw Hill, 1937); Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947); idem, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

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objectivism in the discipline or the newer neo-Kantian bases of Weber’s methodology that Parsons embraced, neither John Dewey’s problem-solving rebuttal to the “quest for certainty” nor Mannheim’s perspectival relativism was to carry the day in postwar social thought.17 Mills was one of the few who recognized the possibilities of convergence between Mannheim and Dewey, and he had the vigor and self-confidence, while still only in his early twenties, to go to bat in professional journals on behalf of the sociology of knowledge and, in its terms, for the sociologist’s self-reflexive analysis of his own social-historical placement. Yet this distinctive stance connoted neither a corrosive skepticism of the capacities of modern science nor a congenital renegade’s alienation. Whatever the signs of a youthful rebellious streak, in Mills’s unhappy early experiences in Catholic schools or of the martial rigors at Texas A&M, his intellectual awakening at the University of Texas–Austin and his ambitious rush through graduate training at the University of Wisconsin owed very little, Geary finds, to any self-consciously political dissent. Mills testified, and Geary confirms, that a “politicizing” and “radicalizing” turn came at the end of his graduate training with the approach of US involvement in World War II. As a young Texan, C. Wright Mills had little sense of “Depression Decade” leftism, and by this point around 1942, the radical left in the United States had lost a good deal of its e´ lan and organizational force. Geary wryly notes, “Political conversions are generally accompanied by a rise in political hopes; few are willing to be converted to the service of a lost cause. Mills was an exception.”18 Mills gravitated to socialist politics at a point after much of the storied American radical intelligentsia had already passed through and beyond the Popular Front or the revolutionary anti-Stalinism that had challenged it. In 1942, amid wartime morale campaigns and following a flurry of disillusioned postmortems on “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Marxism,” to be a socialist and a pessimist signaled one characteristic posture of radical opposition.19 In elucidating this sensibility of “disenchanted radicalism,” Geary discerns an intellectual formation crucial to understanding many intellectual figures and groups of the 1940s and 1950s: the maintenance of critical opposition to the social, political, and cultural status quo 17

18 19

On American sociologists’ negative response to Mannheim see David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Secret of These New Times (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995). Geary, Radical Ambition, 66. The break-up of the Popular Front under the force of the Stalin–Hitler pact; the rush of postmortems on the Depression-era left, such as Lewis Corey’s “Marxism Reconsidered,” The Nation, 17 Feb. 1940; and the impulse to chart a reformist position equidistant from left and right made the years around 1940 a first installment of “end-of-ideology” sentiment. See Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism, 143.


combined with little confidence in the extant leftwing parties and deep skepticism that more effective popular movements would soon emerge. This characteristic disposition of Dwight Macdonald’s magazine politics in its heyday had a lingering effect as a harmonic overtone accompanying the more recognizable trend of deradicalization through the 1940s and 1950s.20 Yet relatively few besides Mills sustained the initial temper of disenchanted radicalism, in all its rigor, far beyond 1948. As Geary shows, however, the persistence of that hardheaded skeptical stance was lightened for Mills by occasional moments of enthusiasm for activist revival. Indeed, the oscillation between these two modes of disenchantment and renewed hope served as creative impulse to Mills’s work throughout his short career. Mills’s ambition showed once he left Wisconsin for his first academic job at the University of Maryland, a place he intended to “write [his] way out of” and the base from which he eagerly sought funded research opportunities, such as his work as a staffer for Congress’s Smaller War Plants Corporation. Traveling back to Midwest industrial towns and drafting his report, Mills saw the study as a chance to observe the war years’ acceleration in the centralization of economic power. Within a few years, having already cultivated friendly relations with Columbia Sociology’s young theoretical leader, Robert K. Merton, Mills won an invitation from Paul Lazarsfeld to join Columbia’s new Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR). Mills then believed he had reached the place where he could best combine theory and research. His disenchanted radicalism and his commitment to self-reflexivity in the social sciences had none of the flat antiscientism of Macdonald or even the aggressive antipositivism of the e´ migré leader of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Max Horkheimer, whose suspicion of Lazarfeld’s quantitative and survey methods Mills considered “adolescent barbs at ‘statistics,’ ‘questionnaires,’ and ‘polls’.”21 Ready to use whatever investigative tools came into his hands and lifted by the postwar surge of labor militancy to an uncharacteristic degree of radical hope, Mills was now positioned to begin building his sociological corpus, in a string of books including The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), and The Power Elite (1956). The core of Radical Ambition meticulously dissects the process that built these books and offers

20

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Gregory D. Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); on the politics style of alienation as an element of deradicalizing trends see Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); and idem, “The Disenchantment of America: Radical Echoes in 1950s Political Criticism,” in Kathleen G. Donohue, ed., Liberty and Justice for All? Rethinking Politics in Cold War America (1945–1965) (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming). Geary, Radical Ambition, 81.

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a refined, balanced critique of their achievements and limits—in a trajectory that both brought Mills to the high point of his professional career and saw a steady, alienating drift away from confidence in the profession’s norms, social location, and political promise. Geary’s analytical rendition of that trajectory is a consummate performance of intellectual history at its best. Mills’s first book, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders, emerged from a complex set of affiliations and special conditions: his new research base at BASR as well as participation in an alternative New York City milieu of leftleaning labor intellectuals headed by J. B. S. Hardman; the upsurge of strikes at the end, and in the wake, of World War II and a brief period when talk of a new labor-based third party circulated in non-Communist leftwing circles; and Mills’s gravitation toward the anti-Stalinist Marxists of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. Mills set off on the project intent on using surveys concerning public attitudes toward organized labor as well as observation of union politics— particularly attention to the militant shop stewards who joined Walter Reuther’s UAW faction—and wrote The New Men as he tried, unsuccessfully, to create a symbiotic relationship between unions, their research departments, and a labor branch of BASR. Meanwhile, Mills analyzed social trends toward a highly politicized economy as well as the ideological dimensions of public opinion, in order to argue that labor had the opportunity to stand forth as a politically mobilized competitor to the corporate liberals whom Mills called “sophisticated conservatives.” He urged labor to take up a vision of economic democracy that would provide work to all, forms of workers’ control in industry, and widespread political participation, while averting a corporate-led “garrison state.” Geary astutely recognizes the ambivalence bound up in Mills’s construction of The New Men of Power. Mills’s major goal was to foster what he called “the union of the power and the intellect,” which would combine the new social weight that industrial unions and their most dynamic leaders possessed with the insight intellectuals could bring toward understanding the “big picture” of social trends and fashioning a political program of labor-led change. Even while completing the book, however, Mills was disappointed by the narrow segment of labor’s ranks committed to militancy and by the purely interest-group, administrative (and hence socially subordinate) role most labor chiefs imagined for themselves in the new politicized economy. As Geary notes, Mills was “always inclined to place a high value on ideology,” which he imagined to be the province of intellectuals.22 The book concluded with a thin reed of hope hanging on the prospects of a resurgent labor radicalism amidst a coming slump, but labor was already headed toward the split over Communist-led unions that would deliver

22

Ibid., 102


the bulk of the movement to Cold War liberalism. Mills’s focus on the role of intellectuals as analysts and ideologists—coming from the outside to labor, but rooted in Mannheim’s notion of the social role of a “free-floating intelligentsia” rather than in a Marxist or Leninist disposition—set him on a course quickly to repudiate the “labor metaphysic” he had briefly shared and revert to a stance of marginal critic, the sophisticated oppositionist without constituency. “Disenchanted radicalism” thus returned to the center of Mills’s disposition, as he pursued his grand ambition to devote a series of studies to mapping the basic components of a social structure of class, wealth, and power in the new postwar order. From labor, he moved on to the “new middle classes”—already a hot topic, due to their apparent violation of traditional Marxist schemes of class polarization, among left-leaning and socialist theorists—and then to the strata of the upper crust and national political leadership.23 White Collar and The Power Elite would secure Mills’s reputation as a writer—indeed a writer with a “public” or relatively wide reading audience—while his analysis of the social forces at work for either order or change turned increasingly dismal. Geary admires Mills’s grand attempt to “provide a total picture of modern society from an unflinchingly radical point of view,” but he recognizes that the effort, including Mills’s address to a wide audience with a style of sweeping eloquence and vision, tended to overreach his strictly sociological analysis and fostered a view of the white-collar work force that was “despite its brilliance . . . often disjointed, confused, ambivalent, and exaggerated.”24 In these chapters, Geary’s sympathy and critical acuity combine with great finesse. White Collar sketched the hierarchies that distinguished managers, professionals, and clerical and sales workers, and probed themes of “exploitation . . . less material and more psychological” in maintaining order and loyalty among salaried employees. The book also ventured a full-bore critique of bureaucratization (the key “alien power” he said had replaced the world market in Marx’s scheme as the coercive force beyond control), mass culture as pacifying entertainment, and the ubiquity of powerlessness that turned employees into “cheerful robots” and the citizenry into “idiots”—that is, “if we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as a privatized man.”25 As Geary points out, Mills’s vision hewed more closely to the critique of apathy and massified isolation and passivity than David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd,

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Studies of the “new middle classes” (die neue Mittelstand) had commenced in Germany during the 1920s. The social-democratic scholar Emil Lederer wrote on the subject in 1926, a work translated under the auspices of Columbia University and the Works Progress Administration, as The New Middle Class (New York, mimeograph, 1937). Geary, Radical Ambition, p. 106. Mills, cited in Geary, Radical Ambition, p. 134.

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which is often misunderstood as precisely that kind of melancholic mass-culture critique.26 The quandary of disenchanted radicalism only deepened with The Power Elite, a controversial work on the concentration of power in a tripartite alliance of military chiefs, corporate directors, and the federal authority carried by the top executive-branch decision-makers. While taken to task severely by his professional (sociological) critics, Mills received a wide and relatively fair hearing in the press. Yes, the book stood out for challenging bluntly the ideology of democracy in the “free world,” and was welcomed by leftists for its project of anatomizing power structure. Still, in the mid-1950s, attempting to unmask power-wielders did not necessarily mean the kiss of death for a serious author. The heritage of condemning robber barons, plutocrats, monopolies, and a leisure class rendered Mills’s assault not all that unfamiliar, even though its brashness in recovering such “old-fashioned” attacks (welcome to many dissenters) struck Mills’s professional colleagues as gauche in manners as well as in politics. On the other hand, the book’s thorough disregard of any actual protest in contemporary America (most notably the brewing civil rights movement) may have made the work both “radical” and palatable at the same time. Assailing the concentration of effective power was relatively “safe” as long as one did not suggest it was in any way vulnerable. The Power Elite had its roots in Mills’s initial wartime radical pessimism, influenced by Franz Neumann’s analysis of the conjunction of big business, party, and state in constructing the Nazi regime, and by his savoring (despite Neumann’s specific intent to demonstrate the long-run incoherence and chaotic nature of Nazi order) of the Frankfurt school’s view that totalitarian state capitalism or “administered society” had suspended the dialectic of socialhistorical change. Setting up his portrait of the three components of the power elite, Mills described something like modern “estates,” and the result was an order so structural that it appeared utterly static. Mills’s critics on both his left and his right made note of this feature: that conflict, of a class character or otherwise, was missing; that elites make decisions over substantive issues—hardly examined by Mills—which illuminate the character of central social processes at any particular time; and that power elites presumably do things with power—but what exactly?—which Mills barely specified. Geary recognizes the stasis of the model, but the status of The Power Elite as a twofold provocation to complacency remains. It was not only the description of the concentrated power of undemocratic decision-making that “made” the book. Even more so, alongside his denunciation of “mass-society” passivity, Mills’s evocation of an alternative in “real publics” lent the book a great deal 26

See Geary’s comparative treatment of Mills and Riesman, and his critique of Riesman, at 135–42.


of its critical force. Without seeing any transit between “is” and “ought,” Mills nonetheless suggested that “a public” as such required collective attention to problems exciting common debate, and hence implied a potential energy for remaking its given conditions—the absent key to renewed criticism and agency that charged both Mills’s purpose and his admirers’ appreciation. His definition of “publics” harked back to John Dewey’s defense of democracy and Mills’s initial embrace of the sociological vocation in the early 1940s. The link between these two constituted, for Mills, the profession’s neglected desideratum, as depicted in his critical “settling of accounts,” The Sociological Imagination (1959). There he described the concern that “all classic social scientists” had had “with the salient characteristics of their time—and the problem of how history is being made within it; with ‘the nature of human nature’—and the variety of individuals that come to prevail within their periods.”27 The promise of connecting, for thinkers and readers, “biography and history” (the socially constituted individual and the potential of action for change at any given time) made “the social sciences . . . the common denominator of our cultural period, and the sociological imagination our most needed quality of mind.”28 The devotion to that “quality of mind” had made the young Mills a significant player in sociology’s refounding, but by the late 1950s he had burned most of his bridges to disciplinary colleagues of his entry period. Lazarsfeld and Talcott Parsons were the targets of Mills’s acid mockery for representing the two slack variants of prevailing professional work: “abstracted empiricism” and “grand theory.” In Mills’s sometimes pointed, sometimes unfair renditions, this dichotomy of pettifogging fact-grubbing and airy speculation left out of consideration the real sphere of engagement—social structure as a milieu of agency and change—even though his own work had likewise left agency and change out of the picture for most of that decade as well. His definition of sociology remained aspirational. Throughout his study, Geary notes both the virtues of Mills’s reach for audience and political effect and the weaknesses spawned by his increasingly casual drift away from scholarly standards of marshalling evidence and argument—which Geary argues would not necessarily have tamed but could have reinforced Mills’s political efficacy. In a revelatory final chapter, concerning a period (1958–62) beginning just when The Sociological Imagination signaled Mill’s “free-floating” alienation, Geary sees Mills tipping once again toward engagement and political hope, with ambiguous results. Mills’s last years were inspired by his travels abroad and exposure thereby to a three-part international left intelligentsia— British radicals such as Ralph Miliband around the Campaign for Nuclear 27

28

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 165. See Geary, Radical Ambition, p. 175.

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Disarmament (CND) and the journal New Left Review; the East European dissident and “humanist” Marxists, most notably Leszek Kolakowski (and by contrast the wooden party loyalists he met in the Soviet Union); and Mexican intellectuals and enthusiasts of the Cuban revolution such as Carlos Fuentes—as well as his awakening to decolonization and Third World nationalism as part of a world suddenly astir. From these bases, Mills went for mass-market appeal, in The Causes of World War Three (1958) and Listen, Yankee! (1960); Geary finds them somewhat oversimplified and strident. Meanwhile, Mills speculated on more ambitious sociological studies, one concerning the rise of the “cultural apparatus” in contemporary society and another a global comparative study of the contemporary “Fourth Epoch” (beyond the era of liberal Enlightenment)— both left far from firm conceptual development at the time of his fatal heart attack on 20 March 1962. Throughout this account, Geary’s analysis is like fresh air in its fine-grained, exceptionally judicious intellectual history of a subject so often hailed as legendary, reduced to a posture, and evaluated in either/or terms as vulgar polemicist or heroic pathfinder of critical sociology. There are some costs, however, to Geary’s studied avoidance of biography as such. His portrayal of Mills (and Mills’s own self-representation) as utterly unengaged by the left in the 1930s before his idiosyncratic radicalization in the early 1940s still seems doubtful to this reader, given Mills’s early affiliation to Deweyan pragmatism (at the time when Dewey’s social-democratic politics and antiwar sentiments were most explicit) and his familiarity with Veblen via the UT–Austin radical institutionalist Clarence Ayres. Both these must have left a political residue that set the stage for Mills’s embrace of socialism in a mood both pessimistic and never tightly wedded to proletarian agency (not much different from Veblen’s views). More biographically significant is the downright peculiar character of Mills’s radicalism tied as it was to a remarkable self-absorption and vanity. Mills’s letters of the early and mid-1950s insisted on his acute loneliness in the scholarly and political world and seemed to shoulder the project of awakening radical criticism as his alone—leading us to wonder whether he could have been wholly unaware of the radicals, socialists, anarchopacifists, and civil rights agitators who kept working through the 1950s, evident in the 1956 foundation of the activist Liberation magazine, talk of leftwing “realignment” shortly after the rupture in the Communist Party following Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress speech, and the growing civil-defense resistance protests in the late 1950s.29 Even by 1960, Mills admitted he had never paid much attention to race and civil rights; perhaps, he 29

Mills did have a tentative and before long testy relation with the democratic-socialist intellectuals of Dissent magazine, founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954. See Geary, Radical Ambition, 148, 202–4.


conceded, he should do so now. Such shortsighted dispositions tarnish Mills’s reputation as pathbreaking oppositionist.30 (Mills’s lack of purchase on issues of gender inequality was, alas, much more characteristic of left intellectual men of his time.) To be sure, Geary recognizes these personal traits but refrains from examining them fully or trying to account for them.

science and sociology, redux In contrast to Geary, David Paul Haney holds on to a portrait of Mills as “renegade sociologist,” though his book, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States, effectively places Mills within a larger framework too—in this case, debates over the scientific status of sociology in the second half of the twentieth century.31 Like Geary, Haney’s book focuses on sociology from the period of its refoundation in the 1940s, but it also retraces steps taken in an older literature, including Thomas Haskell on professionalization, Mary Furner on the eclipse of “advocacy,” Robert Bannister on interwar “objectivists” in sociology, Mark Smith on debates over science versus reform, and other accounts of Robert Lynd’s 1939 polemic Knowledge for What?.32 As a result, it remains somewhat unclear what, in Haney’s view, made the science debates after World War II much different from the earlier disputes over objectivity. He depicts “Americanization” as a combination of postwar academic growth in sociology and allied fields, consolidation of the discipline on a stronger national plane than ever before, the seizure of global leadership in social science by United States academics, and the close association of social-science growth with scholars’ national service in World War II as well as the Cold War. Indeed, Haney’s title echoes the 1986 volume The Nationalization of the Social Sciences, which recounted attempts by social scientists, through

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31 32

See David Riesman’s comments on Mills’s vanity, cited in David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), 229. Ibid. Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Thomas Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Bannister, Sociology and Scientism; Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975); Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate of Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).

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the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), to insert their disciplines in the coverage area of federal patronage by the National Science Foundation as the NSF’s founding legislation took shape from 1945 to 1950.33 The main document in that volume, the previously unpublished long draft Talcott Parsons wrote for the SSRC in 1948, “Social Science: A National Resource,” in fact sets the stage for much of the debate Haney wants to recount in his book. Parsons’s rhetorical gambit in his plea for federal foundation support was to compare social sciences directly with natural sciences as experimental disciplines whose discoveries both had already served the nation fruitfully in wartime and demanded public sustenance as a resource for further national and social progress. Haney argues that this disposition defined the dominant positivist ideology of practicing sociologists after World War II—aside from a few outliers and dissenters.34 Notwithstanding Parsons’s argument for public support, Haney asserts that the insistent scientism of the dominant view led the discipline to resist notions of “public responsibility,” accessibility to general audiences, and engagement in public controversies. Sociology was, in other words, a closed world. Despite challenges posed by radical currents to the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, Haney contends that the scientistic cast has remained at the helm. In just the past ten years or so, however, that standard has faced a vigorous (and salutary) alternative in calls by Herbert Gans, Michael Burawoy, and Craig Calhoun, among others, for a new “public sociology” that would break down academic walls and professionalist insularity.35 The postwar expansion of the research university and of public agencies of scholarly funding induced, as Haney rightly recounts, a preoccupation with establishing the “scientific legitimacy” of sociology as a discipline. Haney gives a special cast to that notion, arguing that the kind of positivism marking Parsons’s “National Resource” paper entailed an insistence on expert “exclusivity”—the

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35

Samuel Klausner and Victor Lidz, The Nationalization of the Social Sciences (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). See also, in this regard, Mark Solovey’s careful account, “Riding Natural Scientists’ Coattails onto the Endless Frontier: The SSRC and the Quest for Scientific Legitimacy,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 40 (Fall 2004), 393–422. Herbert J. Gans, “Sociology in America: The Discipline and the Public,” American Sociological Review 54 (Feb. 1989), 1–16; idem, “Wishes for the Discipline’s Future,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Aug. 2005; Craig Calhoun, “Toward a More Public Social Science,” New York: Social Science Research Council, 2004; Michael Burawoy et al., “Public Sociologies: A Symposium from Boston College,” Social Problems 51 (Feb. 2004), 103–30; Burawoy, “Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas, and Possibilities,” Social Forces 82 (June 2004), 1603–18; idem, “The Critical Turn to Public Sociology,” Critical Sociology 31 (2005), 313–26; and idem, “For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70 (Feb. 2005), 4–28.


sociological discipline as a special preserve impervious to popular and public examination, kept behind high walls by a turn to arcane quantitative methods, and reinforced both by the self-conscious alienation of social scientists due to their disappointments in the slowing of social reform and by their designation of public life outside as a mindless “mass society” hostile to intellectual inquiry. Fitting all these dimensions into the same frame of sociology’s exclusivity unduly homogenizes the dispositions of diverse practitioners in the field— most evidently in a critic like Mills who fully shared the “mass-society” dispositions that Haney credits to the positivist establishment. The best parts of Americanization nonetheless help to explain a bit of sociologists’ hypersensitivity on the “science question,” as Haney relates the record of sociology-bashing appearing in the press and from scholars in other disciplines through the 1950s and 1960s: William H. Whyte’s attack on scientific sociology as a species of bureaucratization, condemnation of the anti-democratic implications of B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist utopia Walden Two by Reinhold Niebuhr and Joseph Wood Krutch, conservatives’ complaint about uses of social-scientific arguments in the Brown decision, Malcolm Cowley on the discipline’s linguistic barbarism, Murray Kempton on the triviality of its findings, and so forth.36 At the same time, Haney also offers an illuminating discussion of the pressures facing academics striving for wider audiences: Lewis Coser described Vance Packard’s work as sociological kitsch, and David Riesman—whose depiction on the cover of Time magazine after publication of The Lonely Crowd might have connoted sociology’s achievement of public repute—regularly faced insinuations by more “scientifically” minded practitioners that his work, like Margaret Mead’s, amounted to shallow “popularization.”37 Still, there is something stilted in Haney’s account of a battle between the “established” view of “sociology-as-science” and a besieged minority of dissenters seeking what Burawoy et al. would later call “public sociology.” Haney fixes Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton as ringleaders of the dominant view, with little attention to their differences or to the inappropriateness of regarding either as a garden-variety “positivist.” There is no question that Parsons wanted to “charter” sociology, in Charles Camic’s phrase, as a scientific discipline, and that through a good part of his career he evinced a striking confidence in the steady maturation of his field.38 Yet his notion of science arose from a critique of positivism that both recognized the key role of theory as “frame of reference” for investigation and highlighted the centrality of subjectivity in analyzing social affairs. That is why H. Stuart Hughes hailed Parsons’s Structure of Social Action as the inspiration 36 37 38

Haney, The Americanization of Social Science, 172–202. Ibid., 203–21. Camic, “Structure after Fifty Years.”

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for his landmark intellectual history Consciousness and Society (1958), which began by recounting the “revolt against positivism” in turn-of-the-twentiethcentury European intellectual life—and why Thomas Kuhn’s notions of the social structure of science owed a good deal to Parsonsian views of frameworks and theoretical transformations. More recently, Joel T. Isaac has brilliantly outlined Parsons’s method as an instance of a fairly general epistemological stance distinctive to postwar intellectual life: a new platform for inquiry, based on various propositions about the centrality of “theoretical” frames and an associated “analytic” (not correspondence) notion of addressing reality—a platform that in retrospect appears as an intermediary between the old empiricism (prior to mid-century) and the more recent postmodern approaches that provide a sharp critique, or deep social/cultural contextualization, of scientific procedure.39 Haney tends simply to assume the dubious proposition that a high degree of “scientific” self-consciousness rules out attention to publics or to political relevance. Historically, claims to value-neutral scientific procedure often served not as confirmation of a status quo in hidden affiliation with bearers of power and influence, but instead as a means, first, to shield free inquiry and dissenting thought from heavy-handed political intrusion and, second, to provide generally acceptable tools capable of promoting particular goals of social reform. Thomas Stapleford demonstrates the latter point in his recent account of New Dealers’ striving to calculate a statistical “cost-of-living index” that would help calculate the legitimate needs of wage earners and thus promote improvements in their material welfare.40 Stapleford aims to disclose the illusions and counterproductive consequences of trying to “technicize” social standards in that manner, but the history of such practices must lead us beyond reflexes that see claims to scientific status as the enemy of relevance, critique, and social change. American traditions of seeing science as ally of democracy (in Andrew Jewett’s work), the early Vienna circle’s confidence that strict science was consistent with socialist reconstruction, the ardent claims of scientific rigor and specialist expertise voiced by Franz Boas and others who also vigorously intervened in public disputes: such examples should caution against rigid dichotomies between science and the public.41 39

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Joel T. Isaac, “Cold War Modern: Epistemic Design and the Postwar Human Sciences,” paper delivered at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology, Budapest, Hungary, 30–31 July 2009; idem, Knowledge by Design: Crafting the Human Sciences in Modern America (forthcoming, Harvard University Press). Thomas Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Andrew Jewett, “Science and the Promise of Democracy in America,” Daedalus 132/4 (Fall 2003), 64–70; Jewett, To Make America Scientific: Science, Democracy, and the University before the Cold War (forthcoming); Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Janek Wasserman,


In Haney’s narrative, the model of sociology-as-science survived the rise of radical critique in the late 1960s and 1970s, even as observers sensed a prolonged “interregnum” following the fall of the Parsonsian “functionalist” paradigm and the lack of a successor to serve as the discipline’s center.42 Nonetheless, Haney finds that the steady accumulation of advanced technical means and the patterns of gate-keeping and graduate training have only perpetuated the inwardlooking expert circle of practitioners shielding themselves from public intrusions. Against these standards, the calls for “public sociology” have marked a stout challenge.43 Haney sees a new “public-spiritedness” among some sociologists who, he suggests, should strive to recast entirely the meaning of “science,” as social inquiry becomes more intertwined with “democratic discourse.”44 Yet it is highly uncertain what today’s talk about scholars’ relevance to a “public” really means and why its invocation should be a solvent for the perceived narrowness or conventionality of academic life. Given the impoverished state of political discourse in the nation at large, it might appear that more aggressive initiatives by scholars to join public debate can serve to elevate, inform, and enrich the civic sphere. Such is a worthy goal, no doubt, though it evokes as much an “elitist” as a “democratic” understanding of intellectuals’ roles. It would seem the better part of scholarly humility to assume that much more political work needs to be done—which scholars are welcome to join, as citizens, along with other actors— in order to rebalance social forces and challenge some of the means by which democratic debate is currently limited, skewed, and debased. In fact, numerous “public intellectuals” already populate the landscape, in throngs of think tank “fellows” (representing a more or less narrow span of liberal, moderate, and conservative views) who appear in print and on talk shows—viz. the “intelligent talk” of National Public Radio. And ever since the concerted campaign of the right to endow extra-academic centers of intellectual production began thirty or forty years ago, there is no shortage of those who recognize that ideas have political

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“Black Vienna, Red Vienna: The Struggle for Intellectual and Political Hegemony in Interwar Vienna, 1918–1938 (PhD dissertation, Washington University in St Louis, 2010). Norbert Wylie, “The Current Interregnum in American Sociology,” Social Research 52 (Spring 1985), 179–207. Haney cites recent literature on “public sociology” as a key inspiration for his critique of “sociology-as-science,” although the most vocal proponent of “public sociology,” Michael Burawoy, carefully distinguishes his advocacy of public engagement from blanket denunciations of academic sociology. In Burawoy’s nuanced view, “public sociology” assumes its place and purposes in an ongoing interaction with “professional sociology” as well as with two other types of work he names “policy sociology” and “critical sociology.” See especially Michael Burawoy, “For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70 (Feb. 2005), 4–28. Haney, Americanization of Social Science, 232, 250–51.

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consequences. If scholars in academic institutions believe their own “public” commentary can check the biases introduced by “kept” think-tank fellows, they thereby only recapitulate the doctrine of scholarly disinterestedness that Haney, as critic of “sociology-as-science,” considers the problem.45 At the same time, university websites are all too eager to publicize the number of media references to scholars and their achievements—though it is debatable whether this means scholarship is more “public” or more “commercialized.”

who’s a public intellectual? who cares? In the late 1950s, Barrington Moore Jr, an iconoclastic and politically oriented scholar whose books never made very easy reading, provided a publisher’s report on Mills’s The Sociological Imagination that argued that the book actually “does not convey much of a notion of the richness and diversity in present-day work in sociology.”46 Furthermore, Moore wrote, Mills’s talk of addressing a vital “public” soft-pedaled the actual partisan intent lurking behind Mills’s critique of empiricist/theoretical irrelevance: “His critique is thereby blunted and his positive recommendations become rather pale.” Despite Moore’s reasonable suspicions of Mills’s trimming, it is not too hard to recognize Mills’s real motives. As Geary points out, one of the first times that Mills introduced the idea of “publics” in the plural, it did not refer either to an open field of disinterestedness or to a mere constituency rallied together to lobby in favor of an interest. Rather, in a 1947 essay on the politics of labor and industry, “Five Publics the Polls Don’t Catch,” the term referred to definite ideological positions, which he named the practical conservatives, the sophisticated conservatives, the liberal center, the independent left, and the far left.47 At that point, insofar as Mills was a political man inclined to go beyond his purely professional purposes toward action, he would have sought to address, awaken, and mobilize one or both of the latter two “publics.” In

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The shift of policy-oriented knowledge production outside universities to privately funded but governmentally connected think tanks has marked an epochal shift in the relations between institutions, power, and democracy. See the discussion of the “Powell report” in David Hollinger, “Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century after McCarthyism: Universities amid the Force Fields of Capital,” in idem, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); and the conclusion to Joy Rohde, “Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Democracy in the Cold War,” Journal of American History 96 (June 2009), 99–122. Moore, quoted in Haney, Americanization of Social Science, 147–8. Apologies for the title of this section to Laurence Veysey, “Who’s a Professional? Who Cares?” Reviews in American History; 3/4 (1975), 419–21. Geary, Radical Ambition, 96–7.


other words, he imagined not merely a general service by public-spirited scholars dedicated to the civic good by enriching democratic debate; rather, he sought to help mobilize a definite partisan cause and advance a vision of dramatic social change. At his best, C. Wright Mills is appealing because he struggled with a period of political disappointment for the radical left and strove, in the gap, to discover “what is happening in the world” in order to regain his (and the left’s) footing, while he worried that the ascendancy of his political enemies had degraded public discussion by excluding from salience any widespread talk of radical alternatives.48 I suspect that the present resurgence of interest in Mills stems from a sense that we now occupy a moment like his, but even worse, when a former radical left (for us, that which was active from the 1960s through the 1980s, with a brief resurgence around the time of the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999) stands virtually defeated, and public debate, for the lack of an alternative rooted in such movements, appears vacant—suggesting that our way of life has become a “hollowed-out democracy.”49 Such claims are often susceptible to exaggeration in moods of deep pessimism, as Mills’s were at a time when a left revival was actually brewing around him, from the mid- and late 1950s on. Applied today, however, Mills’s gloomiest views of radical prospects may strike a chord, while his willful sustenance of radical critique, against the current, evokes admiration. For Mills and perhaps for many of his admirers today, the troubling issues came to a focus at the conjuncture or hoped-for rejuvenation, as Daniel Geary puts it, of “the Left and American Social Thought.” Does the public need public intellectuals? It can’t hurt. But more than that, the public needs a left.

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Showing additional current interest in Mills, John H. Summers has edited a superb anthology of Mills’s (mostly hitherto unpublished) writings and speeches, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Stanley Aronowitz compiled a marvelous three-volume compendium of commentary on Mills’s work, C. Wright Mills, in the series of Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought (London: Sage Publications, 2004). New biographical-critical studies of Mills are forthcoming from both Summers and Aronowitz. Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2009).

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the warren commission and the dons: an anglo-american microhistory∗ colin kidd School of History and Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast Email: [email protected]

Distortion in intellectual history is not a direct function of distance from the present. The recent past can create its own problems of perspective. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a case in point. Is the controversy surrounding the assassination a worthy subject for an intellectual historian? After all, there is now little serious debate as to what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Mainstream historians regard the case as closed,1 an issue settled by the exhaustive and fair-minded deliberations of the Warren Commission, whose report, issued in the autumn of 1964, concluded that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a sad and unsettled individual from a dysfunctional background, had killed the president. However, as we know, the topic remains, almost half a century later, a matter of huge fascination, but only outside the gates of the academy. The study of Kennedy’s assassination is now best known to academics

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I should like to thank Sheila Turcon at the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario; Jim Lesar, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, DC; Judith Curthoys, the curator of the Dacre Papers, Christ Church, Oxford; and Norma Potter and Gaye Morgan at the Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford. Material from the Dacre Papers is quoted by permission of the Literary Estate of Lord Dacre of Glanton. Several individuals helped with queries, and most of the academics among them managed to keep their eyebrows in check when they realized the nature of my project: Blair Worden, John Clarke, Cliff Davies, Simon Green, Robin Briggs, Robert Franklin, Jonathan Steinberg, Peter Pulzer, Sir Fergus Millar, Sir Keith Thomas, Lord Lawson of Blaby, Hugh Brogan, John Robertson, Ed Hundert, Robert Silvers, Jeremy Popkin and Knud Haakonssen. Last but most definitely not least, Adam Sisman was lavishly generous in passing on information while researching his biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper. An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a Chichele Lecture at All Souls College, Oxford, in June 2009. G. Posner, Case Closed (New York, 1993).

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as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility and common sense. Indeed, this disjunction between the obsessions of amateur historians, known as buffs,2 and the reluctance of academic historians to lose caste by exploring subjects such as the Kennedy assassination which the wider public—but only the wider public—seems to find worthy of further research and explanation is, as Professor W. D. Rubinstein notes, an interesting sociological and historiographical phenomenon in its own right.3 Writing in 1994, Max Holland, the journalist and intelligence historian, noted that the history of the Kennedy era was “bifurcated”. For academic historian writing on the Kennedy presidency the assassination is “treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all”, while “very few of the more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose the vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians.”4 Yet our current assumption that the assassination has long attracted only mavericks tends to obscure the topic’s former salience among intellectuals. Matters were, it is sometimes forgotten, rather different in the mid-1960s, when the Kennedy assassination was also an issue of pressing concern to historians, philosophers and jurists. It raised central questions about the authority of sources, the reliability of evidence and the basic procedures of investigation, whether scholarly or juridical. Was the report of the Warren Commission to be taken at face value? Was it not, rather, to be treated like any historical document—set in context and subjected to rigorous historical analysis? Nowhere did the Warren Commission provoke more high-level intellectual engagement than among Britain’s university dons.5 Indeed, it was in the United Kingdom that serious reservations about the Warren Commission first surfaced in the academic mainstream. In an apparently hyperactive dotage, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), the renowned mathematician, philosopher, Nobel Prize-winner for literature and former fellow and lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge, established a British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee in 1964. Or, at least, as we shall see, a committee of this sort was set up under his supposed auspices, but whose principal begetter was, most probably, Russell’s amanuensis, the American political activist Ralph Schoenman (b. 1935). One of the members of the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), the Regius

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C. Trillin, “The Buffs”, New Yorker, 10 June 1967. W. D. Rubinstein, “Oswald Shoots JFK: But Who Is the Real Target?” History Today (Oct. 1999), 15–21. M. Holland, “After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination”, Reviews in American History 22 (1994), 191–209, 191. Cf. N. Annan, The Dons (London, 1999).

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Professor of Modern History at Oxford, was prolific and outspoken in his public challenges to the orthodoxies of the Warren Commission. In turn, Trevor-Roper’s outspokenness elicited a series of vigorous rebuttals from John Sparrow (1906– 92), the warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Other leading intellectuals played a part in the debates. Among the defenders of the Warren Commission were Sir Denis Brogan (1900–74), a pre-eminent expert in modern French and American history who held the chair of political science at Cambridge University; Sir John Foster (1904–82), an MP and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, since 1924; and Arthur Goodhart (1891–1978), the American jurist who attained academic distinction in England first for a remarkable fifty-year stint as editor of the Law Quarterly Review and then as master of University College, Oxford, the first American to become head of an Oxford college. Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), the historian, prophet and author of the mammoth multivolume A Study of History (1934–61), declined Russell’s invitation to join the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, but is thanked, along with Trevor-Roper, in the acknowledgements of the best-selling critique of the Warren Commission by Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment (1966). Moreover, both Trevor-Roper and Sparrow, as well as their friend, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire (1914–2004),6 had connections to or corresponded with Professor Richard H. Popkin (1923–2005), the pioneering American historian of philosophy and expert on the sceptical tradition in Western thought, who was also one of the most dogged critics of the Warren Commission within the American intelligentsia. Indeed, it was Hampshire who brought Popkin’s interpretation of the assassination to the attention of Robert Silvers (b. 1929), the editor of the New York Review of Books, in which it was first aired.

∗∗∗ The prevailing culture of paranoia was all too apparent at the time of the assassination itself. Indeed, the American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) first presented his influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at the University of Oxford on 21 November 1963, the very day before the assassination.7 In January 1964 Brogan, a prescient commentator on American affairs, noted, ‘What legends will grow up around

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Hampshire, who would later become Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and was knighted in 1979, had been a don at All Souls, Oxford (1936–40, 1955–60) and at New College, Oxford, (1950–55) and was Grote Professor at London (1960–63), but from 1963 to 1970 was based in the USA as professor of philosophy at Princeton. Oxford University Gazette, 31 Oct. 1963, 243. R. Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style”, in idem, The Paranoid Style in American politics and other essays (Cambridge, MA, 1996; first

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the death of John Kennedy it is too early to say.’8 Yet within a few months—after an initial flurry of speculation and rumour-mongering had died down—the first wave of conspiracy theorists turned out to be few in number, uninfluential and largely confined to the margins of American culture. The main outlet for conspiracy theorists was a small, independent, New Jersey-based alternative monthly entitled the Minority of One, run by the Polish-born activist and political scientist M. S. Arnoni (1922–85), which began to run a number of pieces on the assassination from January 1964.9 Indeed, only two books advancing conspiracy theories had been published by the time of the Warren Commission Report’s appearance in September 1964. The first, by Thomas Buchanan, an American communist expatriate living in Paris, was more influential in Europe than in America. Indeed, in the published version of “The Paranoid Style”, Hofstadter noted in a footnote that “conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy’s assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States”.10 The other book to appear, which coincided with the report’s publication, was Joachim Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?. Joesten was a German-born Communist who had come to the United States to escape the Nazis, and who still retained strong leftist attachments, and the book was published by Carl Aldo Marzani (1912–94), an Italian-born American communist and Soviet frontman who, according to the evidence of the defector Vasili Mitrokhin, was in receipt of subsidies from the KGB.11 Predictably, Joesten attributed the assassination to a right-wing conspiracy, which happened to be the prevailing interpretation of the events of Dallas in senior Soviet circles. Another marginal figure who was quick to question the conventional interpretation of events was the progressive lawyer and minor New York politician Mark Lane (b. 1927).12 In December 1963 a small, progressive paper, the National Guardian, carried a piece from Lane which was ostensibly the brief for Oswald’s

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published 1964). For Hofstadter’s career see D. S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2006). D. W. Brogan, “The Presidency”, Encounter 22 (Jan. 1964), 3–7, 7. V. Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York, 2007), 993. Later, from 1967, another obscure niche magazine, Ramparts, became the leading vehicle for conspiracy theorists. Hofstadter, “Paranoid Style”, 7 n. C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive (London, 2000; firat published 1999), 294–6; Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, 990. For Lane’s career see R. W. Lewis, The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report (New York, 1967), 19–54; J. Kelin, Praise for a Future Generation: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the First Generation of Critics of the Warren Report (San Antonio, TX, 2007), 15–29; J. Moore, Conspiracy of One, rev edn. (Fort Worth, TX, 1991), 79–81; Bugliosi, Reclaiming history, 1001.


defence.13 Oswald had, of course, already been killed by Ruby, and there was no need for a legal defence. Nevertheless, as a result of the publicity which the piece attracted, Lane’s name and offer to represent Oswald came to the attention of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, who retained Lane as Lee Harvey Oswald’s defence counsel, at least for a short time. By April 1964, however, Marguerite Oswald and Mark Lane had fallen out. At this point Lane found a new vehicle for his championship of Oswald’s cause, founding the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry, a populist counterweight to the Warren Commission, which was easily depicted as a select group of Establishment insiders. Lane, through his connection with Bertrand Russell’s amanuensis, Ralph Schoenman, played a critical role in the enlistment of key members of the British intelligentsia to the cause—at least at first—of due process and scepticism about the secret machinations of the Warren Commission, which met behind closed doors. In 1964 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation brought Lane to London. The key figure in this process was Schoenman, who ran the British branch of Lane’s Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry and, it is reasonable to assume, was the moving force behind the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee. Schoenman was known to family and friends of the philosopher as “Russell’s viper”. In the words of Ray Monk, Russell’s biographer, Schoenman had “bright staring eyes and a carefully trimmed beard that, with no accompanying moustache, looked like a helmet-strap.”14 Schoenman had studied philosophy at Princeton, and had come to the London School of Economics to do postgraduate work under the supervision of Ralph Miliband (1924–94), an influential figure on the New Left. He had first come to Russell’s attention in the summer of 1960 when he wrote to the philosopher advocating a campaign of mass civil disobedience against nuclear weaponry. As he later confessed in a document disowning Schoenman, Russell was “by no means immune to flattery” which, somewhat surprisingly in the case of a Nobel Prize-winner, was “so rare as to be sweet” to his ears.15 By this stage, Russell had modestly assumed the role of a non-governmental spokesman for mankind in general. The philosopher’s court at his cottage in Wales had assumed the role of an independent arbiter of international affairs whose standing came from Russell’s intellectual and—more controversially—moral authority. What mattered was not so much the actual words the philosopher might compose on a particular issue so much as his general endorsement of a stance. Nor did it matter much, it seemed, if Schoenman and his other amanuenses at Plas Penrhyn composed statements in Russell’s name. Did not 13 14 15

“Defense Brief for Oswald”, National Guardian, 19 Dec. 1963. R. Monk, Bertrand Russell, vol 2, 1921–70 The Ghost of Madness (London, 2000), 401. C. Moorehead, Bertrand Russell (London, 1993; first published 1992), 539.

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other world leaders have their secretariats who drafted public utterances on their behalf?16 During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 Russell, in his self-appointed role as spokesman for civilization, bombarded world leaders with telegrams urging them to desist from war. Curiously, in the light of his later interest in the Kennedy assassination, the tone of Russell’s remarks to Kennedy was terse— “Your action desperate. Threat to human survival. No conceivable justification . . . End this madness”—and much less conciliatory than his communication with Khruschev.17 Notwithstanding the apparent contempt for Kennedy he showed during the Cuban missile crisis, or perhaps because the successful resolution of that episode indicated a willingness on the part of the neophyte politician to listen to and learn from the spokesman of civilization, Russell was disconcerted by the assassination of Kennedy. During the late spring and summer of 1964 Russell contacted a number of British luminaries in the arts, higher education and politics with the aim of setting up a committee of the great and good which might keep a watch on the proceedings of the Warren Commission. Foster was among the figures who declined Russell’s invitation.18 Nor was every sympathizer approached willing to participate in the work of the committee. Toynbee replied to Russell on 29 May 1964, I am sure that the right reaction to this is the setting up, in the United States, of the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into the Death of the President. I feel, though, that the creation of corresponding committees in foreign countries might be likely to put the Americans’ backs up and so make them less willing rather than more willing, to insist on there being a genuine and thorough inquiry.19

Less temperately, Sir Denis Brogan, the most eminent British academic at work on modern American politics, who was wholly out of sympathy with the project, bluntly refused to have anything to do with the committee.20 Toynbee and Brogan were right to suspect that the committee might do more harm than good, and might come to be perceived as an anti-American front organization. For example, the poet and literary critic Professor William Empson (1906–84), who endorsed the rationale of Russell’s committee and agreed that it would be “harmful to let the matter remain in its present state of evident confusion”, could not resist an anti-American dig at the level of policing and governance in Texas: “The case for a gradual development of self-government among colonial peoples has always

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Monk, Ghost of Madness, 435. Ibid., 441–2. List in Edith Russell’s hand, McMaster University, Bertrand Russell Archive, RAI class 640. Toynbee to Russell, 29 May 1964, Bertrand Russell Archive, RAI 640. Brogan to Russell, 11 June 1964, Bertrand Russell Archive, RAI 640.


seemed to me strong, and whatever one may think about Kenya or the Congo valley it does seem clear that the liberation of Texas was premature.”21 The British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee comprised, from the world of the theatre, the left-wing playwrights John Arden (b. 1930) and J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), and the critic Ken Tynan (1927–80); from the realm of science, the nutritionist Lord Boyd Orr (1880–1971)22 and the gerontologist and sexologist Dr. Alex Comfort (1920–2000), who was later to achieve celebrity with The Joy of Sex (1972); the radical publishers John Calder (b. 1927) and Victor Gollancz (1893– 1967); Caroline Wedgwood Benn (1926–2000), the American wife of the British Labour politician Anthony Wedgwood Benn; the film director Tony Richardson (1928–91); the Labour politician and man of letters Michael Foot (1913–2010); the comic novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972); Mervyn Stockwood (1913– 95), the radical bishop of Southwark, who was committed both to alleviating the plight of the poor and to representing the Gospel message in the godless salons of the social and literary elite; the journalist and former editor of the New Statesman Kingsley Martin (1897–1969); the art critic Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968); and Empson and Trevor-Roper, as well as Bertrand Russell as chairman. Despite the media excitement which surrounded the formation of the committee,23 it does not appear to have functioned as a collective, and the dignitaries who agreed to join it were simply adornments on a letterhead. According to Trevor-Roper’s recollection a decade later, “the ‘committee’ never met; it certainly never sat as a tribunal; and its ‘business’, as far as I could see, was simply the propagation of the Lane–Schoenman views under the aegis of other names.”24 While most of the Committee’s members were sleeping partners, a few—as individuals—displayed zeal in the cause. During the early summer of 1964 Caroline Benn gave a television interview to the American network CBS and wrote an article on Mark Lane for Tribune, the Labour magazine.25 When the Warren Commission Report appeared in the autumn Empson would write to the New Statesman complaining that those who criticized the report were unfairly smeared as cynics.26 The attack on the Warren Commission began before its report had been published, and its first major critic was Bertrand Russell—or in this case, an

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J. Haffenden, William Empson, vol. 2, Against the Christians (Oxford, 2006), 497. Boyd Orr joined despite misgivings about Russell’s Committee. See N. Griffin, ed., The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914–1970 (London, 2001), 576–8. See e.g. The Times, 10 June 1964. See Hugh Trevor-Roper to Tom Miller, 4 Sept. 1976, Dacre Papers, Christ Church, Oxford. T. Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Dairies 1963–67 (London, 1988; first published 1987), 119, 122. Haffenden, Empson, 498.

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informal committee of Russell, his American amanuensis Ralph Schoenman and Lane. At any rate, an article appeared under Russell’s name in the September 1964 issue of Arnoni’s Minority of One, entitled “Sixteen Questions on the Assassination”.27 Whether or not Russell was the principal begetter of “Sixteen Questions on the Assassination”, the thrust of the piece was in keeping with Russell’s earlier involvement in left–liberal campaigns in the United States against apparent miscarriages of justice, and the Sacco–Vanzetti case in particular. Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti were executed on 23 August 1927 for an armed robbery and murder of a pay clerk in South Braintree, near Boston, committed in 1920. There were widespread fears that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the Sacco–Vanzetti case. Both Sacco and Vanzetti were followers of Luigi Galleani (1861–1931), the Italian anarchist, who had been deported from the United States, with some of his followers, in 1919. On his trips to the United States during the interwar era Russell had been a staunch advocate of the innocence of the Italian anarchists and had joined members of the American intelligentsia in the loud and prolonged campaign on their behalf. Russell continued to campaign on behalf of their cause long after the men had been executed.28 Nor was the Sacco–Vanzetti case an unparalleled example of the persecution of intellectual dissent. Russell had also been interested in the case of Morton Sobell (b. 1917), an atom spy on behalf of the Soviet Union, who had fled to Mexico where he was abducted by armed men who took him to the border and turned him over to the FBI. Sobell was then sentenced to thirty years in jail, though he was to be released in 1969 after spending over seventeen years in Alcatraz.29 Schoenman exploited Russell’s sympathy for the dissident. In 1963 Russell contributed a fevered article entitled “The Myth of American Freedom” to Arnoni’s magazine Minority of One, in which the author denounced the FBI as “a secret political police”, questioned the convictions of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, and described how America’s hysterical media and its government bureaucracy connived in “the persecution of men of independent mind”, for there political and intellectual dissent were equated with wickedness and ipso facto were intolerable: “I am utterly convinced that if the conflict with the Soviet Union had never existed a different menace

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“Sixteen Questions on the Assassination”, Minority of One (Sept. 1964), 6–8. Also published separately as pamphlet in USA. See K. Blackwell and H. Ruja, eds., A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (3 vols., London and New York, 1994), I, 264–5. Also reprinted in Russell, Autobiography, 3 vols. (London, 1967–9), 3: 197–204. See e.g. B. Feinberg and R. Kasrils, eds., Bertrand Russell’s America, 2 vols. (London, 1973– 84), 1: 110; Russell, Autobiography, 1: 16; 2: 177; Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 15 (London, 2000), 327; Moorehead, Russell, 349, 385, 431. Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 29 (Abingdon, 2005), 182–6.


would have been adopted for the purposes of political persecution.”30 Sacco and Vanzetti, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Sobell, Hiss and Oswald were, to Russell, as well as to Schoenman, victims of secularized witch-hunts, parts of the apparatus of the old benighted confessional state which persisted in modern society. Yet, notwithstanding the concerns of Russell and Schoenman, the mainstream leftist intelligentsia within the United States welcomed the Warren Report, including the radical journalist and pamphleteer I. F Stone (1907–89) and the Trotskyite heavyweight of American letters Dwight Macdonald (1906?–82). Both turned out to be staunch defenders of the Warren Commission’s conclusions.31 There were similar voices of sanity in the British intelligentsia. In the December 1964 issue of Encounter, Sir Denis Brogan reviewed the Warren Commission Report, noting—pointedly—that while the bulk of his article had been written within five days of getting a copy of the Warren Commission Report, he was not as quick off the mark as “Lord Russell, Mr Ralph Schoenman and Mr Mark Lane, who had their opinions ready even before the Report was issued.” Nevertheless, while Brogan had nothing but contempt for the charlatanry of the conspiracy theorists, he recognized that some legitimate worries had arisen in the public mind about the killings in Dallas, and suggested how “confusion” might have arisen. It arose in large measure from the widespread assumption that the assassin or assassins “must” come from the right. Kennedy was a symbol for progressive forces in American politics and society, and his death did not, Brogan recognized, “bring tears everywhere”. Surveying the American political scene, Brogan argued that “if there were any motives for murdering the President, they were motives only on the Right”. The fact that the crime took place in Texas was of enormous political significance, for Texas was “the centre not only of violently reactionary doctrine but of reactionary power”. It was also the heartland of an emerging movement of “stern and unbending reactionaries, usurping the title ‘conservative’, who hoped to win Texas for a new Republican party owing more to John C. Calhoun than to Abraham Lincoln.” Acutely sensitive to the nuances of American politics, Brogan accurately prophesied the southern realignment which was to be such a transforming feature of American politics over the next forty years. Moreover, in the particular case of Kennedy’s assassination there was, Brogan discerned, a creative dissonance between expectations and apparent reality. The reasonable assumption that, if there were a political motive

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“The Myth of American Freedom”, Frontier (April 1963); and Minority of One (May 1963), reprinted in Feinberg and Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America, 2: 356–60. See Blackwell and Ruja, Bibliography, 2: 251. D. D. Guttenplan, American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone (New York, 2009), 415; M. Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York, 1994), 388–9; Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, 992 n.

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to eliminate Kennedy, and in Dallas of all places, it must come from the right, ran up against the supposed fact that the apparent killer was a minor leftwing ne’er-do-well, a self-proclaimed Marxist who had even gone to live for a period in the Soviet Union, but this disjunction—and the very completeness of Oswald’s left-wing curriculum vitae—merely reinforced the suspicion that therefore Oswald must be the left-wing patsy who would take the blame for a right-wing coup. Unsurprisingly, noted Brogan, “when this improbable villain was murdered he was in the hands of the police, and the cry of ‘frame up’ and ‘cover up’ was inevitable.” Moreover, it was clear that due procedures had not been followed in the immediate aftermath of the president’s death. The autopsy should have taken place in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed, but, understandably, in the hurry and panic of the moment some of the required procedures had not been followed. Yet, however excusable, the fact that certain procedural lapses—illegalities, indeed—had occurred in the aftermath of the assassination, Brogan argued, had presented an irresistible opening for “the speculators, rumour-mongers and mischief-makers”. Indeed, it appeared that “the hasty examination made at Dallas differed from the thorough autopsy made at the Naval hospital at Bethesda”. Brogan confessed that when news of Kennedy’s assassination had first broken, he had speculated on television about the likelihood of a right-wing conspiracy, a serious possibility given the extremist politics of Texas in the early 1960s and the marked antipathy there to Kennedy’s liberal brand of politics. Nevertheless, Brogan concluded, “unlike some people, I can learn.”32 Among the slower learners, it might appear, was the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper. Notwithstanding his doubts about the conclusions of the commission and his association with conspiracy theorists such as Lane, it would, nevertheless, be crudely reductionist to describe Trevor-Roper as a conspiracy theorist. Rather Trevor-Roper—already, of course, a member of Russell’s Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, and as such disposed a priori to be suspicious of the commission’s methods—perceived that the Warren Commission provided the occasion for a fascinating public exercise in applied historiography. How did the historian transmute raw evidence into firm conclusions? The parallel with the ways in which the compilers of the Warren Commission turned the 20,000 pages and twenty-six supporting volumes of raw evidence into the Warren Commission Report and conclusions was all too obvious, and irresistible to the historian. Trevor-Roper is an anomalous figure among the early critics of the Warren Commission, most of whom belonged to the political left. By contrast,

32

D. W. Brogan, “Death in Dallas”, Encounter 23 (Dec. 1964), 20–26.


Trevor-Roper belonged to the right, and sometimes his views were provocatively conservative, though this conservatism was eccentric and devoid of narrow conformism. At the core of his academic ethos was a commitment to intellectual freedom. It was this principle which had made him a troublesome anti-anticommunist during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. Moreover, unlike other historians of the right, he recognized an element of truth—at least at the level of general explanation—in the Marxist theory of history, which, in other respects and at the level of detailed political narrative, he found sorely wanting.33 Trevor-Roper was by nature inclined to buccaneering. His reputation, indeed, derived not from undoubted distinction in his primary field of seventeenthcentury history, but from daring and ingenious exploits in the aftermath of the Second World War. In September 1945 he was commissioned by Dick White (1906–93) of the British Security Service to counter pernicious Soviet-backed rumours about Hitler’s supposed whereabouts by patiently reconstructing, from interviews with the surviving participants, the grisly finale of the Third Reich leadership in the Berlin bunker in late April of that year.34 Trevor-Roper’s report formed the basis of his best-seller, The Last Days of Hitler, published in 1947. The experience also gave him the confidence to ask how hurried investigations of this sort in the heat of events might—or, unavoidably, might not—be executed to the standards of the academic historian. As with his own brief in 1945, the Warren Commission’s remit was in some ways a political one; and, though he thought that political pressures, haste and expediency had contributed to the deformities of the commission’s report, in substance Trevor-Roper’s critique of the commission, though far from apolitical, was largely historiographical and of a theoretical nature. How did a miscellaneous set of testimonies from a variety of witnesses, some more reliable than others, assessed in private by a commission of political grandees, or more probably their staffs, become—against a rushed political deadline—the basis of a compelling—or even acceptable—historical interpretation of an event? Moreover, Trevor-Roper, as should by now be vividly apparent, did not care for stifling orthodoxies, whether in public life or in historical interpretation. Indeed, although he chastised errors in other scholars, at the same time he despised—and recoiled from—pedantry. In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Oxford he had made the point—unwelcome, almost certainly, to some in his audience— that mistakes could sometimes be fruitful, could indeed generate fascinating and

33

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C. Kidd, “Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment”, Scottish Historical Review 84 (2005), 202–20, 211–12; B. Worden “Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, 1914–2003”, Proceedings of the British Academy 150 (2007), 247–84, 257. Trevor-Roper’s investigations are described in Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: A Biography (London, 2010), 132–7.

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unexpected lines of enquiry to the overall benefit of the discipline. “In humane studies,” Trevor-Roper contended, “there are times when a new error is more lifegiving than an old truth, a fertile error than a sterile accuracy.”35 Trevor-Roper was by inclination a risk taker. Troubled as he was by some underexplained elements of the assassination and of the commission’s report, he was brave enough to draw attention to the issues causing him puzzlement, whatever the cost to his academic standing. Furthermore, Trevor-Roper had firm views about the authority of scripture and of the proper role of the historian when confronted by a document. He believed that it was not the job of the historian to give assent to the truth of the Warren Commission Report, but to explain its context, how it had been put together, and its purpose. To do otherwise, it seemed, involved adopting an unhealthily prostrate position of quasi-religious deference to a human composition. It so happened that in the autumn of 1964 Trevor-Roper was on sabbatical in the United States, as a senior research fellow at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles. On 13 December 1964 the Sunday Times carried an article on the Warren Report by Trevor-Roper, whose authority was presumably fortified by the fact that the Regius Professor had cabled it to London from the USA. Under the headline “Kennedy Murder Inquiry Is Suspect”, Trevor-Roper worried away at the Warren Commission’s reluctance to address the major lacunae in the evidence presented to it. Why, asked Trevor-Roper, were the original notes for Kennedy’s autopsy destroyed? Why was the original paper bag destroyed which had supposedly been used by Oswald to bring his rifle into the book depository under the pretence that he was carrying curtain rods? Moreover, “to complete this record of suppression and destruction, there is the destruction of the most important living witness, Oswald himself”. Trevor-Roper remained aghast at the murder of Oswald, “while under police protection, by Jack Ruby, an intimate associate of the Dallas police”. This further killing called out for closer attention than it had received from the commission. Nor were there any notes, stenographic records or tape recordings of Oswald’s interrogation in Dallas by Captain Fritz and his associates in the Dallas police. This remarkable absence too called out for further analysis, not the “culpable indifference” displayed by an uninquisitive Warren Commission in its “vast and slovenly Report”. TrevorRoper was disappointed in the Warren Commission’s “uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of evidence” and “its reluctance to ask essential questions”. On the other hand, Trevor-Roper was well aware, as he reminded his readers, of the true

35

“History Professional and Lay”, reprinted in H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden, eds., History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), 13.


purpose of the Warren Commission: to calm the fears of a democratic nation in an election year.36 In the following week’s Sunday Times an article by Trevor-Roper’s Oxford colleague, John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls, left much of the Regius Professor’s original case in shreds. Sparrow respected cleverness, but despite his headship of an Oxford college his professional background was as a chancery lawyer, and he had little or no time for academic concerns, such as the historical sensitivities which appeared to have motivated Trevor-Roper. Whereas the academic historian worried about the somewhat arbitrary processes by which raw evidence was transmuted into narrative, Sparrow perceived only commendable due process given the circumstances and the lack of any convincing alternative to the narrative proposed by the commission. At the outset Sparrow confessed his admiration for Trevor-Roper’s “intellect and ability”, but, with a show of regret, felt compelled to point out that the original article was a “travesty”, a piece “so marred by bias and blotted with inaccuracies that it is hard to believe that it was written by the honest and intelligent man that he is.” Few members of the public would have the stamina, inclination or opportunity to read the Warren Report, but now that the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford had lent his name to the cause of “the crackpots and the credulous” it would be harder to dispel the miasma of suspicion which had begun to enshroud the report. Unfortunately, Trevor-Roper had been slapdash in his handling of the evidence, and it came ill from him to be so critical of the commission in this very respect. Trevor-Roper was mistaken on the question of Kennedy’s supposed frontal entrance wound. More seriously for Trevor-Roper, though the matter itself was of negligible significance overall, he had misinterpreted the issue of the large, brown paper bag. The police had handed in the original bag, as well as constructing their own replica. “Of course,” Sparrow summarized fairly, “this misrepresentation of the evidence was not deliberate, he just misread or misinterpreted it, being obsessed with what he calls a ‘pattern’ of ‘suppression’ and ‘destruction’ of evidence by the police, a pattern that exists not in the facts, but in his own mind”. However, Sparrow concluded, Trevor-Roper could “perhaps, take comfort from the reflection that it is not the first time that a respected figure has come a cropper in public through slipping up upon a paper bag”.37 Trevor-Roper replied to Sparrow in a further article in the Sunday Times of 3 January 1965. He was insistent that he had no interest in advancing a “rival theory” to that advanced in the Warren Report; nor did he mean either to “propose” or even to “suggest” some kind of “vast conspiracy”. As a historian

36 37

Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Kennedy Murder Inquiry Is Suspect”, Sunday Times, 13 Dec. 1964. “John Sparrow on the Warren Report”, Sunday Times, 20 Dec. 1964.

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he was temperamentally suspicious of “conspiratorial solutions”. Indeed TrevorRoper pointed out that he had never suggested that “the conclusions of the Warren Report were necessarily wrong”. They might even be correct. Rather, his concerns were technical and lay with the composition, procedure and methods of the Warren Commission. As a historian he was fascinated by the ways in which evidence was arranged in a “pattern”. Trevor-Roper drew certain conclusions from the gruelling timetable which lay behind the report’s evidence gathering, composition and rushed publication. The commission had begun work in February 1964, and was still taking evidence on 15 September—evidence that amounted to twenty-six supporting volumes comprising around 20,000 pages; yet the final report was handed to President Johnson on 24 September and could be found in bookstores two days later. “Clearly,” reasoned TrevorRoper, the report’s “main conclusions had been reached, and its separate chapters composed, before the last witnesses had been heard.” Trevor-Roper insisted that several “essential questions” remained unresolved, notwithstanding the Warren Commission Report: “precisely how the President was shot”, “whether Oswald had accomplices”, and “the real motives, or connections, of Ruby”. Nevertheless, he confessed that as far as the paper bag was concerned, Sparrow was absolutely correct in his criticism. Trevor-Roper would, in his own words, have to “eat humble pie”.38 Alas, these modifications were insufficient to appease Sparrow. In the Sunday Times of 10 January 1965 Sparrow replied once more to Trevor-Roper: “Concerning his treatment of evidence, Professor Trevor-Roper says he has had to ‘eat humble pie’. I am afraid I have to offer him a second helping: his further article is as full of inaccuracies as his first.”39 Behind the public combativeness, however, private relations between TrevorRoper and Sparrow were warmed by an affectionate clubbiness which did not preclude a degree of irritation with, as well as a sneaking regard for, the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the other.40 While public sparring was undoubtedly paralleled by private frictions, there was a measure of cordiality in what deserves to be termed a friendship, and collusion between the pair extended beyond their private responses to the Warren Commission affair. Their intellectual hobby horses were not entirely dissimilar, nor were their attitudes to style, expression and wit; though there were clear differences between the methods and sensibilities of the historian and the chancery lawyer. Sparrow was keen to repair his friendship with Trevor-Roper. On 25 January 1965 the warden of All Souls wrote an apologetic letter to Trevor-Roper: “Surely 38 39 40

Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Warren Report Controversy”, Sunday Times, 3 Jan. 1965. John Sparrow, “Making Mysteries about Oswald”, Sunday Times, 10 Jan. 1965. See e.g. R. Davenport-Hines (ed.), Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2006), 204 n; Worden, “Trevor-Roper”, 278.


we can continue to disagree, and even perhaps to argue about this vexed question, and remain friends?” Sparrow regretted that, while Trevor-Roper had taken the first public rejoinder in good part, the second had struck a nerve. Sparrow hoped it was not the “mild joke” about “humble pie”, “which I would certainly have omitted if I had thought you would take it seriously”.41 Trevor-Roper conceded to Sparrow in a letter of 19 February 1965 that he did not “agree with Mark Lane, who looks at the evidence, in my view, with a distorting prejudice, which isn’t necessary”.42 Sparrow wrote a further conciliatory letter to Trevor-Roper on 22 February 1965, hopeful that they could discuss the Warren Commission “later on when the smoke, or din, of battle has died down”. In one thing, however, they were agreed, Lane was not a “worthy ally” of Trevor-Roper’s.43 This estimate of Trevor-Roper’s standing was not universally shared in the common rooms of Oxford. Unconvinced by Trevor-Roper’s grasp of the American political and legal systems,44 the jurist Arthur Goodhart, the former master of University College, Oxford, launched a robust defence of the Warren Commission’s procedures.45 There were “sound reasons”, Goodhart believed, why the Warren hearings had been held in private. After all, the commission had not been engaged in the trial of an accused; rather it had gathered evidence and reached conclusions. A public hearing might have been unfair to third parties, because the witnesses were allowed—“and even encouraged”—to give evidence regarding any rumours they had heard, which might generate leads for further investigation. Moreover, the commission needed to guard against the danger that malicious witnesses might seek to smear innocent parties. Once again, the demands of privacy were thoroughly justified. Witnesses “seemed to gain confidence in the quiet atmosphere of a private hearing”. Nor were there any problems associated with the airing of hearsay evidence in an open setting. In particular, there was the need to avoid compromising the trial of Jack Ruby, which had not concluded until 14 March 1964. Goodhart had no concerns whatsoever about the actions of the US authorities. Indeed, what struck the jurist were the similarities between the procedures followed by the Warren Commission and the British Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921.46 41

42 43 44 45

46

Sparrow to Trevor-Roper, 25 Jan. 1965, in Sparrow Papers, All Souls College, Oxford, Box 49 (i). Trevor-Roper to Sparrow, 19 Feb. 1965, Sparrow Papers Box 49 (i). Sparrow to Trevor-Roper, 22 Feb. 1965, Sparrow Papers, Box 49 (i). See Goodhart Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng c 3061–3. Arthur Goodhart, “The Warren Commission from a Procedural Standpoint”, New York University Law Review (May 1965), 404–23. Arthur Goodhart, “Where Warren’s Critics Fail”, Sunday Telegraph, 25 Sept. 1966. See also idem, “The Mysteries of the Kennedy Assassination and the English Press”, Law Quarterly Review (Jan. 1967), 22–63.

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Yet not all English jurists agreed. Goodhart’s defence of the commission was queried by an anonymous writer in the New Law Journal.47 Moreover, Sir John Foster of All Souls,48 a robust defender of the commission from the smears of the buffs, nevertheless raised concerns about the medical evidence of Kennedy’s wounds and about Ruby’s access to Oswald. Foster took seriously the far from unjustified anxieties of those bystanders in Dallas—a reasonable cross-section of the population—who had witnessed Kennedy’s assassination or the Tippit murder,49 and who, according to Lane, had since then either been violently assaulted or been threatened with violence by persons unknown. Such incidents, surely, were “coincidental”, but this only went to reinforce the point about the endemic violence in Texan society, and the need to investigate properly the various threats of assassination which had been circulating at the time of Kennedy’s visit to Dallas. Was Oswald guilty? Foster concluded that “if the archaic rules of evidence obtaining under the English and American legal systems had been followed, if hearsay had been excluded, and if witnesses had been able to claim immunity, as Mrs Lee Oswald, as a wife, could have done, the guilt of her husband might not have been established according to the rules of a Texan or English criminal trial.” The procedures adopted by the Warren Commission were admirably designed to get at the truth, Foster believed, except in one crucial respect: “it would have been better to have had some form of crossexamination”. What was needed, he contended, was “an advocate for Oswald”. Foster found some plausibility in Lane’s theory that the commission started out with the idea that Oswald was a lone assassin and therefore “disregarded evidence which ran counter to that assumption”. Despite his distance from the Warren buffs, Foster felt that Lane in particular was “justified in bringing forward points of criticism”, and that, while such criticisms certainly deserved to be answered, it was wrong to brand such critics “neurotics”. The assassination was a “world-wide tragedy” which would continue to “excite men’s imaginative speculation”.50

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“Myths and Myth-Makers: The Kennedy Assassination and the English Press”, New Law Journal no. 5269 (19 Jan. 1967), 77. Goodhart’s reply is in the New Law Journal no. 5271 (2 Feb. 1967), 136–7. Cf. R. A. Cline (pseud.), “Postscript to Warren”, Spectator, 27 Jan., 1967. For Foster, see M. Rothschild, “John Foster”, in P. Fraser, ed., Memorial Addresses of All Souls College Oxford (Oxford, privately published, 1989). According to the official version of events, Warren Commission Report (New York, 2003; first published 1964), 6, Oswald shot J. D. Tippit, a Dallas police officer, in a separate incident less than an hour after the assassination. John Foster, “Kennedy: Unanswered Questions”, Daily Telegraph, 22 Sept. 1966.


∗∗∗ In the course of 1966 conspiracy theories became a less peripheral concern of the American media, though the British intelligentsia continued to play a crucial role. Stuart Hampshire, who shared with Richard Popkin an interest in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy,51 drew the attention of Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, to Popkin’s researches on Oswald. Popkin’s book, The Second Oswald (1966), would begin life as an essay in the New York Review of Books.52 Popkin worried at knots in the evidence, not least at what seemed to be reliable sightings of Oswald in two places at once in the months before the assassination. This prompted the conjecture that Kennedy had been shot by two gunmen, one an Oswald-lookalike, with Oswald the fall-guy for the killing. It was a daring and controversial thesis, but Trevor-Roper was able to reassure Silvers of Popkin’s high scholarly standing in early modern intellectual history.53 In spite of the growing acceptability of the conspiracy theorists in the United States media, Mark Lane continued to encounter serious problems with New York publishers. Dwight Macdonald vetted the manuscript of Lane’s Rush to Judgment for the Viking Press,54 who declined to publish it, as did a number of other publishers. The book was rescued by Bodley Head in the United Kingdom, which published it in 1966. The book went on to be a global best-seller, with 225,000 copies on the market by January 1967. Trevor-Roper’s support for Lane undoubtedly played a significant role in the book’s publication, though by now the historian had become somewhat suspicious of Lane and his methods, and was at last prepared to say so in private and—sotto voce—in public. Trevor-Roper confessed his doubts about Lane to a Finnish judge with whom he corresponded on matters pertinent to the Kennedy assassination: Mark Lane, the American lawyer who has given most publicity to the defects of the Report, has now written a book, which will be published shortly. I have read it, and may write a foreword to it. I do not always agree with Lane, who seems to me rather extreme, and too apt, as an advocate, to put a sinister interpretation on discrepancies of evidence which could equally easily be caused by human error; but some of his arguments are very powerful. What does perplex me is the fact that, in America, no one will face these arguments. They all say that Lane is “discredited”, and under this convenient formula they

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54

Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza (London, 1951). Richard Popkin, “The Second Oswald: The Case for a Conspiracy Theory”, New York Review of Books, 28 July 1966, 11–22; Popkin, The Second Oswald (New York, 1966). See Silvers to Trevor-Roper, 10 March 1966; Trevor-Roper to Silvers, 25 March 1966; Silvers to Trevor-Roper, 31 March 1966, all in Dacre Papers. Popkin was the pioneering author of The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, 1960). Wreszin, Rebel, 389.

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simply refuse to consider any of his arguments. Believing, as I do, that arguments are good and bad in themselves and that the authority of their proponent is a secondary matter, I find this attitude strange and depressing.55

Trevor-Roper did indeed supply an Introduction to Lane’s book, notwithstanding his doubts.56 By a further irony, in his acknowledgements Lane thanked both Trevor-Roper and Toynbee,57 whose historical work and capacity for balanced and discriminating assessment of evidence Trevor-Roper had savagely assailed on more than one occasion.58 Was Trevor-Roper’s Introduction to Rush to Judgment to be understood as an endorsement of the book’s argument? Trevor-Roper urged Lane’s readers to be just as critical when they read Lane as when they read the Warren Commission Report. “Amateur detective work” of the kind peddled by Lane was “always a little suspect”. Lane and Trevor-Roper were, however, operating on different planes. Trevor-Roper’s focus—unlike Lane’s—was not limited exclusively to the report itself; rather, he viewed the report as a window onto larger historiographical problems. There was a similarity between the ways in which historians turned evidence into narrative and then into conclusions, and the ways in which the Warren Commission had transformed a vast amount of raw evidence into apparently definitive findings. To follow particular details through the twenty-six volumes of Warren Commission hearings, then through the report itself, and on to the report’s summary and conclusions, according to Trevor Roper, was “to see, sometimes, a quiet transformation of evidence”. The Warren Commission might be “defective”, without the need to attribute any “sinister” motive to the chief justice, his fellow commissioners, or the commission staff. An “innocent” explanation would suffice, whereby the commission merely “overlooked inconvenient evidence”. Consider the time pressures under which the commission worked. Consider the huge quantity of material out of which it had to draw its conclusions. It seemed natural enough to Trevor-Roper that, like historians overwhelmed by vast quantities of data, the commission and its staff had “invariably accepted the interpretation which supported the conclusion which had already been accepted when the material was presented to them.” A “pattern” had been “coaxed and forced by a process which, had there been an advocate on the other side, might have been totally discredited before judgment could be given”. How was one to draw a line between “subjective and objective evidence”? Experts could err. Did the commission do enough 55 56 57 58

Trevor-Roper to Paavo Soukka, 13 Oct. 1965, in Dacre Papers. Lane’s book would be reviewed by Sparrow in Town, Nov. 1966, 21–2. Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment (London, 1966), “Acknowledgments”. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Testing the Toynbee System”, Sunday Times, 17 Oct. 1954; idem, “Arnold Toynbee’s Millennium”, Encounter 8 (June 1957), 14–28.


to interpret notionally “objective” evidence? Historical interpretation was not, argued Trevor-Roper, a zero-sum game. Of course, if the choice before readers was a simple alternative between accepting the commission’s report or believing that Chief Justice Warren was complicit in a vast conspiracy to cover up Kennedy’s assassination, “then moderate, rational men naturally (and in my opinion rightly) prefer to believe the former proposition.” However, rarely was the historian faced with such stark alternatives: “between complete acceptance of a questionable argument and the assumption that such an argument is deliberately fraudulent, there are many gradations; and miscarriages of justice, or misinterpretations of history, when they arise, generally arise not from corrupt purpose but from human error”. In particular, there was a tendency towards “simplification” at work—the pressure to reach some sort of conclusion from a huge “amorphous mass of testimony”. But what if, in sifting the evidence, one found the pattern “too soon” and then read the remaining evidence exclusively in the light of the pattern one had discovered? Even the “most reputable scholars” fell into errors of this type. Why not the Warren Commission?59 Trevor-Roper’s fullest account of the Warren Commission Report and its flaws came in an extended essay-cum-review article in the French popular magazine L’express in early September 1966, under the title “Qui a tué Kennedy?” (Who Killed Kennedy?). Here Trevor-Roper confessed that he had never believed the Warren Report, not least because the commission had not got round to asking whether—but only why—Oswald had killed Kennedy. Moreover, within the report he had detected “des lacunes nombreuses et graves” (“a number of serious omissions”) in the section devoted to the identity of the assassin. The report was not “un honnête résumé” (“a fair summary”) of the testimony of the twenty-six volumes of supporting evidence. Had not twenty-three out of twentysix bystanders testified that the shooting had come from “une butte herbeuse” (“a grassy knoll”) in front of the presidential limousine? Did not the doctors at Parklands Hospital give evidence that the bullet had entered the front of Kennedy’s head? But the report concludes that Kennedy was shot from behind. Furthermore, could all those shots have been fired so quickly and so accurately? Even for a demotic French magazine audience Trevor-Roper raised technical historiographical issues. The Warren Report should be subjected to what the Germans called Quellenkritik, or source criticism. The investigation needed itself to be investigated. What were the report’s purposes? How was the evidence collated and the report formulated? Revealingly, Trevor-Roper, an anticlerical of long standing who derived sport from cheeky questioning of Christian dogma’s

59

Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Introduction”, Lane, Rush to Judgment, esp. 11–17.

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basis in historical evidence,60 compared the Warren findings to “textes sacrés” (“holy scriptures”). He drew parallels between the perception of the Olympian omniscience of Chief Justice Warren and his colleagues and the view that the Bible was a product of the Holy Spirit. It had become heresy to question any aspect of the report, however minor the quibble: “ceux qui n’acceptaient pas le Rapport avec une foi aveugle e´ taient automatiquement taxés d’impiété” (“those who did not accept the Report with a blind faith were automatically charged with impiety”). By contrast, Lane and Popkin, whose books Trevor-Roper was reviewing for L’express, he bracketed with enlightened critics of scriptural inerrancy. Trevor-Roper’s irreligion informed his suspicions of the reverence shown in most quarters of the establishment towards the Warren Report.61 However, by the end of 1966 Trevor-Roper’s association with Mark Lane was causing him increasing personal embarrassment. The New York Times of 21 November 1966 reported that, although Lane himself had had no communication from Senator Robert Kennedy in the course of his researches, Lane claimed that “Robert Kennedy sent a message to Professor Trevor-Roper, who wrote the introduction to my book in which he said to keep up the good work”.62 The New York Times went on to record Trevor-Roper’s firm and unequivocal denial that any such message had been received. This might have been the end of the matter. However, Lane’s repetition of this claim during an interview published in the February 1967 issue of Playboy magazine was to cause Trevor-Roper considerable personal anxiety, a worry which recurred at various points throughout the year. The Playboy interviewer led Lane towards one of the most obvious weak points in the case for a conspiracy—how to make sense of the silence of the Kennedys. Playboy: . . . if what you’ve had to say about the assassination is true, if the President was really killed by a conspiracy, wouldn’t the Kennedys be the first to speak out? Lane:

The Kennedys are beginning to speak out, although rather softly . . . Hugh TrevorRoper published a major attack on the Warren Commission report in the London Sunday Times. He told me later he indirectly received a message from Senator Robert Kennedy saying, “Keep up the good work.”63

Playboy was presumably not a familiar sight in Oxford senior common rooms, and Trevor-Roper could easily have brazened out the ensuing fuss. Indeed, in a letter of 28 March 1967 to Sparrow Trevor-Roper announced definitively: “I shall take no public notice of Playboy.” However, things were not so straightforward, as he 60

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See e.g. the anticlericalism of Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645 (London, 1940); Worden, “Trevor-Roper”, 251, 256–7. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Qui a tué Kennedy?” L’express, 5–11 Sept. 1966, 58–70, at 60–63. New York Times, 21 Nov. 1966. “Mark Lane Interview”, Playboy, Feb. 1967, 41–68, at 68.


revealed in that same letter: “Lane’s statement is the result of a misunderstanding by him of an indiscreet observation made not by me but by another person in my presence, who had got the facts wrong.”64 Who might this person be? The answer is revealed in a further anxious letter on this topic from Trevor-Roper to Sparrow on 30 October 1967: “The villain of the piece is Xandra [Lady Alexandra Trevor-Roper]. She made a double mistake: first, she indiscreetly repeated a private conversation; secondly, she got it wrong.” Trevor-Roper urged Sparrow not to refer to this in print as it would draw attention fact that Trevor-Roper’s wife “had made a muddle”,65 and Sparrow chivalrously agreed.66 Sparrow’s survey of the assassination literature, “After the Assassination”, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 14 December 1967 as a lengthy piece of around 18,000 words,67 and was published in the USA by Chilmark Press the following year as a short book of seventy-seven pages under the title After the Assassination: A Positive Appraisal of the Warren Report. Sparrow remained discreet, of course, about the Playboy revelations, but in a spirit of mischief described Trevor-Roper as “Mr Lane’s disciple”, knowing full well that TrevorRoper’s relations with Lane were somewhat more ambiguous. Sparrow traced linkages between Lane’s American Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry and the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, between Trevor-Roper and Lane, and throughout the network of buffs. Of course, Sparrow conceded, there was no dastardly conspiracy at work among the critics of the Warren Commission, so “no need to suppose any concerted plan of action on the part of the critics or to impute sinister motives to any of them: to do so would be to fall into their own besetting error.” He drew the lesson that “the intellectual”—not a class he admired despite, or perhaps because of, his headship of an Oxford college—“can be duped as completely as the man in the street”. Sparrow noted that “those who attacked the Report enjoyed an advantage over its defenders: they find a more exciting story to tell.” Sparrow shrewdly perceived where the true intellectual attraction lay in this topic for future historians—in the world of conspiracy theory associated with the assassination, not in the assassination itself. The “real mystery” concerned “not the doings of the protagonists in Dallas during the fatal week”, but “the subsequent performance of the mystery-makers themselves and the success of their campaign”. Posterity would ask, Sparrow prophesied, what

64 65 66

67

Trevor-Roper to Sparrow, 28 March 1967, in Sparrow Papers, Box 49 (i). Trevor-Roper to Sparrow, 30 Oct. 1967, Sparrow Papers, Box 49 (i). Sparrow to Trevor-Roper, 1 Nov. 1967, Sparrow Papers, Box 49 (i). See also Trevor-Roper to Sparrow, 23 Nov. 1967; Sparrow to Trevor-Roper, 6 Dec. 1967; and Sparrow to Trevor-Roper, 21 Dec. 1967, all in Box 49 (i). The exact nature of the “muddle” is not revealed. John Sparrow, “After the Assassination”, Times Literary Supplement, 14 Dec. 1967, 1217–22.

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provoked this outbreak of “demonology, and how were its exponents able to cast their spells so widely and compel belief in their lurid denunciations?”68 In his TLS piece Sparrow had made particular sport with Professor Popkin and his arguments, not least because Popkin’s primary interest in the philosophy and history of scepticism rendered him such an obvious target for Sparrow’s wit: “Such intense scepticism as Professor Popkin’s needs a great deal of credulity to support it: in order not to believe the probable there is so much of the improbable that he has to believe in.” In the manner of those pseudo-scholars who attributed the works of Shakespeare to the ghost-authorship of Francis Bacon and thought that they had discovered within Shakespeare’s supposed oeuvre some “hidden cipher”, Popkin followed “the clue wherever it leads him, oblivious of attendant inconsistencies”.69 Yet the day after the publication of Sparrow’s onslaught on the buffs in the TLS, he wrote to Popkin, whom—in private at least—he had singled out as an opponent of a different stamp from the others he had cited: “We are both friends of Stuart Hampshire’s and you may remember paying a visit here a year or so ago, when we discussed a subject that fascinates us both.” Popkin had visited England during the summer of 1966. Sparrow wanted to make clear to Popkin that his critique of The Second Oswald was different in kind from his general denunciations of the assassination buffs: My general reason for writing is that I want to say that I very much hope that you won’t think I’ve been unfair to you and to your arguments—and that you will not suppose that I class you with the demonologists. Nothing that I say about them—and no words, or hardly any words, are too bad, I think, for them—is meant to apply to, or to reflect on, you or your book.

Sparrow also made it clear to Popkin that his letter was not meant to disarm him, and that he was not on that account to “pull [his] punches” in reply.70 Unfortunately—both for Trevor-Roper and also for Sparrow, who was now a co-conspirator with Trevor-Roper in the cover-up of Xandra Trevor-Roper’s faux pas regarding Robert Kennedy—Sparrow’s TLS piece raised again the Robert Kennedy issue. On 22 December 1967 John P. Roche, a special consultant to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote to the TLS from the White House to congratulate the paper for Sparrow’s demolition of the conspiracy theorists:

68 69 70

Ibid. Ibid., 1220. Sparrow to Popkin, 15 Dec. 1967, Popkin Archive, Box 2, at the Assassination Archives and Research Center, Washington, DC.


The Dallas demonologists have had the field essentially to themselves for too long largely— as John Sparrow noted in his superb analysis—because few of us have the fanatical energy necessary for the demonstration that the world is not flat.

Roche noted that “a sane society operates largely on common-sensical notions of trust and leaves conspiratorial black masses to a priesthood of marginal paranoids.” This was gripping copy—and on White House notepaper. The TLS was keen to publish the letter straightaway. Yet Roche, in the course of his letter, touched on the response of Robert Kennedy to the assassination and its investigation: Those of us who have any knowledge of the relationship between President Kennedy and his brother have assumed from the outset that had there been the slightest trace of a conspiracy, the Attorney General would not have slept or eaten until he had reached the bottom of the matter. And any fair analysis of Senator Robert Kennedy’s abilities, his character and of the resources at his disposal as Attorney General, would indicate that if there was a conspiracy, he would have pursued its protagonists to the end of the earth.71

Sparrow welcomed the endorsement from the White House, but it revived the issue which had been niggling Trevor-Roper ever since Lane’s Playboy interview, and Sparrow felt it necessary to write again to Trevor-Roper on 18 January 1968 to assuage his concerns.72 Sparrow’s discreet but vigorous firefighting on behalf of his supposed rival appears to have worked, and the question of Trevor-Roper’s relations with Robert Kennedy died away. By the 1970s the donnish protagonists at the British end of the Warren debate regarded it as a spent controversy, and none would make any serious contribution to the ongoing debate on the Kennedy assassination. Sparrow, who retired from the wardenship of All Souls in 1977, never retracted his defence of the Warren Commission, and continued both to correspond with anti-buffs and to demolish conspiracy theories as they appeared.73 Nor did Trevor-Roper, it seems, ever change his own views on the assassination. Now ennobled as Lord Dacre of Glanton and elected master of Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse, in 1980, he happily lent his name to a sensationalist account of the assassination by the journalist Anthony Summers.74 On this occasion, Sparrow did not dish out a further helping of “humble pie” to his friend. Nevertheless, Trevor-Roper’s

71

72 73 74

For Roche’s letter, 22 Dec. 1967, see Sparrow Papers, Box 49 (i); Times Literary Supplement, 4 Jan. 1968. Sparrow to Trevor-Roper, 18 Jan. 1968, Sparrow Papers, Box 49 (i). John Sparrow, “Whodunnit in Dallas?”, Times Literary Supplement, 8 Oct., 1982. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy (London, 1980); Cf. Summers to TrevorRoper, 28 Feb., 1980; and Trevor-Roper to Summers, 10 Mar. 1980, both in Dacre Papers.

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endorsement seems considerably more cavalier than his rushed authentication— quickly recanted—of the Hitler diaries three years later, for which he was forced to eat more humble pie than he really deserved.75

∗∗∗ This curious case study in intellectual history exhibits major figures in the world of philosophy, history and jurisprudence debating issues which were— within a matter of a decade or so—to dwindle into the stuff of modern folklore and the trivia of the monomaniacally obsessed. Ironically, the part played by British intellectuals in debating the merits and flaws in the commission’s report conferred a crucial measure of legitimacy on its early critics, who were, for the most part, well outside the mainstream of the American intellectual establishment. The story also cast a rare light on what might be called the secret history of intellectual debate. It turns out that, notwithstanding their public mudslinging, Sparrow and Trevor-Roper maintained back channels of communication which reinforced their solidarity as dons and a surprising degree of detachment from their publicly stated positions. The dons—irrespective of their gladiatorial disagreements in public—had a strong sense of their corporate identity as a polite and collegial mandarinate, which set them apart even from their own purported allies among the non-academic laity. Warren Commission buffs have long complained that the intellectual establishment does not take them seriously; indeed that the academic establishment reinforces the Warren Commission conspiracy by marginalizing its critics. There was, of course, no academic conspiracy to rubbish the critics, but the amateur buffs would not be misguided in finding the academic community suspiciously close-knit.

75

For Trevor-Roper and the Hitler diaries see R. Harris, Selling Hitler (London, 1986).



texting a nation? david s. shields Departments of English and History, University of South Carolina Email: [email protected]

Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) Since its publication in 2007, Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print has earned a reputation as a trenchant critique of the vision of the pre-1876 United States as a state whose national integrity depended upon the dissemination of print. Commentators fixed particularly on its argument that the early republic never manifested that degree of integration of internal improvements, roads, print technology, and local interests to materialize the Federalist vision of nationhood. In some circles it was hailed as a salutary counter to historians who embrace Benedict Anderson’s account of the national imaginary—a virtual nationhood irradiating citizens’ imaginations through reading newspapers and novels that impute national being. Loughran marshaled evidence that no newspaper, certainly no novel, and not even that most legendarily popular imprint, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, enjoyed sufficiently broad distribution to invoke even a coherent fantasy of national identity. In print-culture studies she has emerged as the most vocal chronicler of the fragmented republic. She has earned the respect of those political historians who have pondered the incapacity of public-sphere historiography to account for the republic’s drift into the contending sections of the 1830s and the warring states of the 1860s. The Republic in Print combines an investigation into the printing and distribution of two founding texts, Paine’s Common Sense and The Federalist, to demonstrate that any claim that they gave voice to “the people” calling into being a consensus on behalf of independence or ratification has little concrete evidence supporting it. Calling into doubt Paine’s claims about the number of copies of pamphlets printed and their universal availability before 4 July 1776, Loughran charts the reprintings, mailings, excerptings, and citings of Paine’s 435

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work, in a systematic, empirical way that recalls the work of William J. Gilmore.1 The evidence bears out her main contention: Common Sense did not invoke a continental popular opinion on behalf of independence—it was never read by or to enough people to do so. Rather, it supplied a rhetorical superstructure that gave representatives of the Continental Congress sufficient warrant to favor independence as a responsible course. Loughran here gives some material heft to a kind of argument that has enjoyed currency among literary scholars—I think of Robert Ferguson’s discussion of the rhetoric of public documents in the American Enlightenment particularly—that attends to the strategies for eliding present conflict in favor of future comity, particular interests in favor of general principles and desires.2 Loughran finds more guile than Ferguson does in the prospective character of Common Sense. For Loughran it inaugurates an effort at virtual nationbuilding that would mature in the Federalist strategy to exploit the distances and inefficiencies of communication in America to design a centrally administered extensive republic in the control of an eastern white propertied elite. If you proclaim a continental public and repeatedly invoke it in print, it will become the imagined space that they will inhabit whenever they can lift their minds out of the local ambit of self-interest and neighborhood anxiety. Loughran sees Federalism as a politics that employed media and ideology to eradicate the range of mediating communal formations between the self and the public, the provincial locale and the metropolitan center whence print emanated. Legislation, knowledge, news, and opinion did not so much circulate in these schemes as disseminate from a center, with ineffective means of returning people’s ideas to the center. Print—particularly the eighteenth-century newspaper—was in Loughran’s view an ineffectual vehicle of public debate, or even dissemination. Loughran’s assault on the effectiveness of print as a medium of information and opinion is coupled with a critique of Michael Warner’s picture of the anonymous authority of print—that influential discussion in Letters of the Republic which found in authorial anonymity and pseudonymity a means of abstracting the self (and self-interest) of the author from the text, freeing it to be taken up by a reading public as a disinterested or abstract presentation.3 By citing several incidents in the publication of the Federalist series, wherein readers, particularly anti-Federalist rivals, attempt to discern the particular persons

1

2

3

William J. Gillmore, Reading Becomes Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993). Robert Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 124–49. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 97–117.

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and interests operating behind the mask of Publius, Loughran indicates that pseudonymity was a more difficult condition to achieve that Warner suggests. A point well taken. Less well substantiated is her claim that certain persons suspected anonymity as a cowardly hiding of one’s views. In sum, “Too many people did not read or did not have access to the same texts or, in some regions, to very many texts at all, and far too many people mistrusted printed accounts.” While it is true that after the rise of Grub Street in the 1690s, that truth was not automatically linked in English-speaking territories to printedness, the consumer of information nonetheless recognized a meaningfulness in what came off the press. The fact that someone capitalized the representations made in print automatically raised them in importance over rumor, for “talk is cheap.” Nigel Smith, in his discussion of the emergence of the newspaper during the English Civil War, made the point that the newspaper became popular precisely in distinction to the chaotic welter of talk.4 That someone would bankroll an item of intelligence gave it a raw kind of credit—not necessarily as truth, but as a register of wish or conviction. It is a kind of political knowledge to be acquainted with the current bankable views. I see little evidence in the 1780s or 1790s of any marked resistance to print qua print. Indeed, the scarcity of imprints in parts of the interior so scrupulously documented by Loughran had the effect of vesting metropolitan items with curiosity value. What was problematic on the margins was the market for materials by the country printer. Did the coastal cities yearn to hear the voice of the frontierspeople? Dubious. One way to test Loughran’s characterizations of the print world of the early republic is to turn the focus away from such canonical expressions of national/metropolitan vision as Common Sense and The Federalist. Consider, instead, the testimony of Philip Freneau, the most traveled writer/editor/publisher/printer in the early republic, who opposed the consolidating program of Hamilton and John Adams. In 1793, in the midst of a paper war with the Washington–Adams contingent over the attempts of Martha Washington to create national consciousness by creating a national governing class by marriages between the states’ great families (the provocation for the spate of aristocracy scare stories of the period), Philip Freneau, editor of the Jeffersonian democratic National Gazette, published his “The Country Printer,” nominating the rural pressman as the binding force of the republic, not the attendees of Martha’s Republican Court.5 His portrait was decidedly antiheroic, and in many regards validates Loughran’s picture of print culture. The country printer inhabits an interior town—a minimal place—tavern, mill, blacksmith’s 4

5

Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 54–8. Philip Freneau, “The Country Printer,” Poems Written between the Years 1768 and 1794 (Monmouth: Philip Freneau, 1795), pp. 421–4.

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shop, meetinghouse, and a market house built on spec, but a stillborn enterprise, “its fabric mouldering down.” The printer is not a representative citizen, but “an odd and curious wight” who loves his native place, yet hungers for the three weekly visitations of the stage, the “printer’s harvest-time of news.” He engages strangers in conversation, but most covets glimpses of the contents of the postboy’s leather budget. “All is not Truth . . . that Travellers tell,” but his readers want stories, more than facts. “If he prints some lies, [they] his lies excuse. / Earthquakes and battles, shipwrecks, myriads slain / If false or true-alike to him are gain.” The scope of the news is “whate’er is done on madame Terra’s stage.” He gives the world to the locality. “One while, he tells of monarchs run away; / and now, of witches drown’d in Buzzard’s bay.” Freneau is no mouthpiece for Enlightenment platitudes about the press as the instrument of reason and guardian of truth. So far Freneau limns a Loughranesque world, yet in the final stanzas of his portrait Freneau offers something more; the country printer had been “the patriot” in the town, who incited his neighbors to Revolution: “Rous’d by his page, at church or court-house read, / From depths of woods the willing rustics ran.” The narrative breaks off to directly address officials of the American government: Since to the pen and press so much we owe Still bid them favour freedom’s sacred cause, From this pure source, let streams unsullied flow; Hence, a new order grows on reason’s plan, And turns the fierce barbarian into—man.

What does Freneau reveal in these lines? First, despite the ineffectuality of print and the desuetude of the provinces, writing and print remain the chief instrumentalities of the civilizing process. Second, freedom is the pure source from which reason emerges. Freneau conceived reason in terms of judgment, order, measure. Only in the untrammeled contestation between various views, interests, could human judgment improve beyond ferocity, instinct, and barbarism. The greatest danger to this freedom lay in the laws that the legislators frame. Print, being historically more tractable to legal control and curtailment than conversation, was particularly vulnerable. I am interested that the most voluble anti-Federalist detected in print—and print in the territorial margins particularly—is a necessary instrument to the health of the “new order” (he does not use the term “nation”). Why so important in 1790? Since I approach Loughran’s account of the early republic from a knowledge of the transatlantic print world of the colonial era, and not from the viewpoint of someone concerned with the literature of the United States (whether from a national or a transnational perspective), I am puzzled by the felt

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need for print in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. For me that answer to the first of her inaugurating questions, “how do we account for nation formation in the material absence of a national print culture,” is readily answered by the old imperial formula—by a code of written laws, administered by an officialdom, and enforced by some armed company, whether army, militia, or constabulary. During the colonial era the frontier disorders occasioned by the lack of these structures provoked the Regulator agitations and the formation of an armed posse comitatus that forced coastal oligarchies to extend courts and protection to the interior. The potency of law did not depend upon print, for the colonial legislature’s journal of its Proceedings and Acts possessed determinative authority as the legal record. All subjects/citizens were obliged to abide by the provisions whether they read the record or not, and liable to punishment for any violation; ignorance was no defense. Print might enhance conformity to law by making its provisions broadly available; it might amplify the prestige of the legal code, by collecting and designing the laws in impressive volumes, such as Thomas Bacon’s 1765 Compilation of Laws for Maryland. Yet the mere fact that summary collections of statutes did not appear until 1710 for New York, 1730 for Rhode Island, 1732 for New Jersey, 1733 for Virginia, 1736 for South Carolina, 1742 for Pennsylvania, and 1765 for Maryland indicates that these polities operated for decades without needing printed codes. Some colonies never printed their legal code—Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire. Something happens with the Revolution— perhaps the anxiety over legitimacy may explain the strange compulsion toward published constitutions and the employment of the press both as an instrument of government and a medium for public expression. I take the strange case of the failed state of Franklin (1784–8). A group of settlers in the Wautaga basin of present-day Tennessee found themselves so far removed from the institutions of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina that they compacted themselves, declared independence from North Carolina, gathered to organize a government, and composed two Constitutions. The Constitution was prepared by a local scrivener and copies were distributed to the local militia companies, the most coherent institutional structure with which to communicate information on the frontier. The citizenry gathered in convention to ratify the document. The initial Constitution was deemed untenable after the Confederation Congress failed to approve Franklin’s petition for admission as a state. A second was prepared, on the model of Vermont and Pennsylvania, with a unicameral legislature to promote egalitarianism. But what was most fascinating about this charter was its provision that the press be the vehicle for insuring the say of the People in government. It would enable a plebiscite democracy of sorts, with participation rather than representation. Two key provisions:

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Sec 6. The votes and proceedings of the General Assembly shall be printed weekly, during their sitting, with the Yeas and Nays on any question, vote, or resolution . . . when two members require it. Sec 7. That the laws, before they are enacted, may be more maturely considered, and the danger of hasty and injudicious determinations as much as possible prevented, all Bills of a public and general nature shall be printed for the consideration of the people, before they are read in the General Assembly the last time, for debate and amendment; and except on occasions of sudden necessity, shall not be passed into laws before the next session of the Assembly.6

Later, to insure that the citizenry understood the Constitution, the legislature had to employ someone to create a catechism for use in schools. Furthermore, the state would insure that “a sufficient number of the Constitution be printed, and that each citizen may have one, as the inviolable charter of his privileges” (Sec. 42). These constitutional mandates required printing to be a function of the process of citizen assent when no press and no pressman existed in the territory declaring independence. In as radical an imagined democratic polity as existed in the early republic, the press was envisioned as the engine or order. My point is this: while Loughran rightly charts the fantasy among Federalists of print culture as the means of developing a national public tractable to administration, radical democrats also had their fantasy of the press as the medium by which citizens might be aggregated into the People to participate in government and legislation. Writing on printed drafts of laws, submitting them to the district registers (a local official who instructed elected representatives), presented expressions of popular will inscribed over the representations of legislatures that might be incorporated into law. This was the other potentiality elaborated in early national politics. The press seemed bound to the political future in the imaginations of a broad spectrum of political actors in the 1780s and 1790s. In their visions print would bind the local to the general. A word about Loughran’s concept of locality. While she is thoroughgoing and self-conscious in her demythologizing of the idea of the pre-1830 United States as an integral nation, she maintains a mystique of the local. In her argument, locales possess materiality, fixity, actuality, integral identity, and separation. They are inhabited by specific humans moved by discrete interests. This is not necessarily the view held by current theorists of American material culture. “Presence of place” in locales, according to Bernard L. Herman, author of important works on urban material conditions (Town House) and rural situations (The Stolen House), is found in “comportment”—the particular ordering in space of materials and

6

Samuel Cole Williams, History of the Lost State of Franklin (Baltimore: Geneaological Publishing Company, 2009), 301–3.

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practices to a set of conditions on the ground and perceived functions.7 Much of what characterizes a building in any locality partakes of a general customary practice (the size and manufacturing method of bricks, the size of wood shingles, the rafter system, and so on) that is altered only incidentally in local application. So locality is irradiated with generality. It is not so isolate and autochthonous as Loughran would have us believe, if we are to think about it materially. Loughran’s reconstruction of the Federalist ideology of expansion into the continental interior is curiously constrained by the kind of internal, national perspective that she critiques. The international, diplomatic dimensions of the questions who will occupy the continent and how will the territory be governed are sidelined. The weakness of the Spanish administration of Louisiana in the 1780s and 1790s; the anxiety that French designs to take over the territory, particularly during the Genet episode, inspired; the perceived threat of the closure of the Mississippi River as a conduit of transport for agricultural goods produced in the interior regions of the United States; the fear of secret diplomatic negotiations transferring vast North American territories—all gave the question of extension a fateful weight. It is for this reason the Jeffersonians as much as the Federalists opted for expansion. If the United States government did not take the initiative, certain adventurers would. We must not forget that filibustering was almost a pathological enterprise during the period Loughran treats, with a high percentage of US and state officials as principle movers—senator William Blount’s conspiracy in Florida, Aaron Burr’s march on New Orleans, the West Florida revolution, William Bowles’s Muskogee republic, the Natchez republic. Generals George Rogers Clark and James Wilkinson, Senator Adair of Kentucky, Governors Quitman and Sam Houston all grew impatient with American diplomatic policy, and surrendered to their inner Napoleon.8 I have laid out these two major conceptual shortcomings of Loughran’s book—here myopia about the political communities backing expansion and her inattention to the binding power of law in polities regardless its being printed— not with the desire to confute her thesis. From the viewpoint of colonial printculture studies, her claim that a transregional infrastructure and printing industry of sufficient scale to constitute a national public did not exist until the 1830s seems sensible. That public intellectuals in the last quarter of the American eighteenth

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Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005), 3–5; idem, The Stolen House (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992). David S. Shields, “‘We Delare You Independent Whether You Wish It or Not’”: The Print Culture of Early Filibusterism,” in David S. Shields and Carolina Sloat, eds., Liberty, Egalite! Independencia! Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas, 1776– 1838 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2007), 13–30.

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century imagined a national public and an extended republic also seems amply supported. I do not, however, think faith in print’s power to bind localities to metropolis, and state to state, a peculiarly Federalist belief. As to the additional claim that when a national print culture did emerge it gave rise to a consciousness of difference, and promoted sectional identity rather than national, I think that the case cannot be proven conclusively by focusing on the printed literature that most aggravated sectional sentiment. The controversial literature over slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law should not be the sole evidentiary corpus. Loughran may ultimately be correct, but that cannot be determined until another print corpus, less explicitly divisive, is examined. I would nominate the literature of agriculture, since every region of the United States depended upon grazing and farming, since the 1830s to 1860s saw the vast expansion in titles, journals, and authors; since a fair amount of cross-regional re-publication of articles took place; and since it recognized in its contents local, regional, national, and international registers of discussion. If Loughran combines a hermeneutic focus on a relatively few texts and a broad survey of local scenes of print production and reception to explore the disparity between imagined nationhood and materialized community, Eric Slauter in his The State as a Work of Art explores the US Constitution as a text that depends greatly on a body of images and ideas about artifice and works of art shared by a transatlantic community of writers in order to construct a state. If Loughran entertains an anti-Federalist suspicion of the artifices of imagination in Federalist Constitution making, Slauter takes it for granted, and indeed naturalizes it as an appropriate means of making a nation. Besides shared material practices and shared manners, many Euro-Americans had a shared aesthetics. To reveal the employments of this aesthetics Slauter follows an expository method different from those of the many legal historians and historians of political ideas. If one were to describe the form of Slauter’s scholarship, J. G. A. Pocock’s term “a scholarly ecology” would best suit.9 Each chapter has a thesis, but the point is demonstrated by something more historical and symbological than thick description. An argument takes place by the intensive exploration of an image or a term—“representation” in chapter 3, for instance—showing the range of usages in both the central and peripheral writings of the various contestants over the Constitution. From these usages Slauter identifies two prevailing models of representation: the miniature painting and the oral transcript. Then Slauter supplies a detailed history of the theory and practice of miniature painting and the transcription of institutional proceedings. Circulating through texts, paintings, and transcribed proceedings, Slauter reveals the way political controversy pulled 9

J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, vol. 1 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10.

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the terms in various directions. The slippages, “inconsistencies,” and ambiguities reveal the degree to which consensus or dissensus reigned in the framing of a plan for the national edifice. Slauter’s method of plotting a map of expressive possibility around the language of the United States Constitution is purposely less denotative in its approach to the meaning of the text than the parsings of terms and survey of applications found in constitutional history and legal history. It does, however, bear some relation to the terminological contextualizations found in the thickdescription practitioners of the history of political thought, Quenten Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. What distinguishes Slauter is his willingness to range into discursive areas farther afield than those examined by thick contextualizers. Indeed, his willingness to explore the eighteenth century’s penchants for linguistic and visual wit has him pondering the sexual innuendos of the founders’ choice of the word “erection” to characterize state building and their iconographic obsession with representing states as standing or tumbling columns. For those who regard the country’s founding charter as quasi-sacred writ and its authors as men of single-minded seriousness (B. Franklin excepted, of course), Slauter’s free way of bringing contemporary lexical and graphic usages to bear on the text will no doubt seem aggravatingly messy to some scholars. Yet like word-cloud analysis of texts or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophical investigations circulating through the plethora of common language uses of terms, Slauter’s ecology of aesthetic expression performs the service of bringing to view dimensions of a text not remarked heretofore. When Slauter recalls the way “representation” comprehended “transcription” and “report” it develops ambiguities of inflection that make its political meaning something other than cut and dried. The refreshment of the language of the Constitution is a remarkable achievement since the text has been subjected to analysis by generations of brilliant expositors. Perhaps the most conventional dimension of his analysis is his lexical inventory of terms employed by the framers of the Constitution that expresses their work on that compact as an artificial construction. His exploration of terms in this inventory reveals the extent to which the written Constitution captured the taste, manners, mores, and sensibilities of its transatlantic Euro-American culture. What are the consequences to Slauter’s recovery of the Federal Constitution as a compact that conceived the state as a work of art? It depends on your investment in the concern about the framers’ original intent, for he demonstrates that the framers originally intended the Constitution to change. If the national compact was designed to register the manners, tastes, and culture of a people, and if those manners and tastes change, as history indicates they invariably do, then the compact should change. Slauter’s recontextualization of the original conception of the Federal Constitution as an artificial construction discovers an “original intent” that does not fix provisions into legal or political dogma—into the sacred

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writ of an American civil religion. This finding will be of interest to more than literary scholars, intellectual historians, and students of American culture. Other persons have attempted to show the interpenetration of American culture of the Revolutionary era and the political ideals imbedded in the United States’ founding charters—Kenneth Silverman in The Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976) and Robert Ferguson in The American Enlightenment (1997) come immediately to mind. Slauter’s account surpasses Silverman’s classic work with the elegance, orderliness, and economy of its argument, and eclipses Ferguson’s with its range of reference and greater attentiveness to the issues of race, slavery, and the place of God in Constitutional discourse. It shares with both works a lucidity of style that invites readers from beyond the disciplines of literary study and political thought. Part of the success of Slauter’s historicized aesthetic analysis lies in his strategy of conducting concurrent iconographic and tropological investigations. Findings in the graphic art of the period confirm discoveries made in his search of texts about, for instance, the supplanting of images of the state as a body politic with that of a building (chapter 1), or the participation of women in the judgments of taste, and the role of taste in understanding the character of representation in its manifold political and aesthetic significances (chapter 2). As a decoder of images, Slauter has an acumen like that possessed by the best of the newer scholars of the American fine arts—on a par with art historians Maurie McInnis at the University of Virginia and Wendy Bellion at the University of Delaware. The readings of John Trumbull’s painting The Declaration of Independence and the European mezzotint Washington Giving the Laws to America strike me as being particularly masterful, deploying a newer, more nuanced understanding of the multiform ways that neoclassicism became a figurative mirror for the framers’ ambitions. This iconographic expertise is matched by a deep knowledge of the current scholarship in material-culture studies and early American visual culture. Among the sharpest delights of Slauter’s book are the self-contained historical set pieces, such as the learned survey of the transatlantic history of transcribed deliberations of public bodies, or the reconstruction of how neoclassical imitation became identified with enslavement. From chapter to chapter a reader encounters different topoi and different zones of specialized knowledge, and sometimes a different methodological tool. While I admire the extraordinary ingenuity and labor evinced in this book, there remain parts of it that stand improvement. Why was there no citation of the ample mid-eighteenth-century Masonic literature linking building and civic organization? Surely this literature was familiar to more than a few of the framers. While Slauter usefully explores the way in which the Pauline picture of the church as the body of Christ predisposes colonial constructions of the body politic, he forgets that scripture also presents the body of Christ as a building, “This Temple . . .” So scripture warrants to a certain extent the transmutation of

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bodies into buildings. There are works of secondary literature, too, that should appear, for instance Vincent Carretta’s important piece on the black savant “Francis Williams”10 (who figures in Slauter’s argument in chapter 4), or the 1981 article “Happiness in Society” in chapter 5, “Being Alone.”11 These are minor points. No one—no historian nor legal expositor of the Constitution (and I include Jack Rackove in this assessment) has read as deeply in the controversial literature directly concerned with the ratification, and as broadly in those texts and pictures that illuminate the terms of argument in the controversy. This is a book that creates new knowledge about both of the key documents of the American founding. In Part II of The State as a Work of Art, Slauter touches upon the concern that will drive his next major project and has engendered a preliminary meditation, “Written Constitutions and Unenumerated Rights”—the spread of the conviction among every class of persons in Anglo-America that they possessed innate rights. Slauter’s proposed “A Cultural History of Natural Rights in America, 1689– 1789” promises to use the same procedures used in his first book to discover how women, disenfranchised white males, resident aliens, African American slaves, and even Native Americans over the course of the eighteenth century absorbed and refracted a body of beliefs about rights and applied them to their political circumstances. While I think that Slauter overstates the restricted nature of current inquiry into the history of natural rights (Michael Zuchert’s investigations strike me as particularly wide-ranging and supple),12 I do not doubt that he could produce a study that would revise our understanding of the relationship between local context, universal norms, and political modernity— provided Slauter exercises the same sort of skeptical inspection of local scenes and attentiveness to the imperfect transmissions of texts and ideas through American space that Loughran has displayed in The Republic of Print. The one danger of expressive ecology as a method is that it pays insufficient regard to the material connections between speech acts, occasions, and texts. Only the boots-on-theground analysis of transmission and communication conducted by the materialist wing of the book-history movement can counteract the tendency to vaporousness that expressive ecologies inflate into. Fortunately, Slauter has spent sufficient time at the American Antiquarian Society and done the sorts of quantitative and spatial work that would be required. So I hope for the best.

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Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?”, Early American Literature 38/2 (2003), 213–37. David S. Shields, “Happiness in Society: The Development of an Eighteenth-Century American Poetic Ideal,” American Literature 55/4 (Dec. 1983), 541–59. Michael Zuchert, “Natural Rights and Imperial Constitutionalism,” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Dycus Miller, Jeffrey Paul, eds., Natural Rights: Liberalism from Locke to Nozick (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28–55.

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who were the sans-culottes? ruth scurr Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University Email: [email protected]

Who were the sans-culottes? What were their concerns and purposes? And what role did they play in the unfolding of events collectively known as the French Revolution? Michael Sonenscher first engaged directly with these questions in the 1980s (in an article for Social History 9 (1984), 303) when social historians were experimenting with the possibilities opened up by discourse analysis, and when the traditions of eighteenth-century civic, or republican, language seemed particularly exciting: The social history of the French Revolution owes much to the deepening insistence with which the discourse of the Revolution itself referred to, and postulated, necessary connections between everyday circumstances and public life. From Sieyes’ equation of aristocratic privilege with unproductive parasitism in 1788 to the Thermidorian caricature of the architects of the Terror as the dregs of society, the Revolution produced its own “social interpretation.”

Sonenscher argued that while the identification of the figure of the sans-culotte with that of the artisan was “the achievement of the generation of historians— Richard Cobb, George Rudé and Albert Soboul—who reintroduced the popular movement into the historiography of the French Revolution”, there was always something problematic (or circular) in the underlying assumption that it was possible to equate the representation of artisan production found in the political language of the sans-culottes during the Revolution with what actually existed in the workshops of Paris or other towns of eighteenth-century France. Back in the 1980s what Sonenscher hoped was that a more accurate understanding of the actual dynamics of workshop production would produce “a better explanation of the meaning of the language of the sans-culottes”. His own expectation, as a social historian, was that the causality, in both explanatory and historical terms, would run from the social to the political sphere. Over the last twenty-five years, the most exciting work on the French Revolution has arisen from revisiting the relation between society and politics, and mapping—through discourse or otherwise—the specifically political causes 447

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of events. Furet, famously and decisively, signaled this change of direction in Penser la révolution fran¸cais (1978), but others have continued, complicated and revised his work. As someone who has transformed himself during this period from a distinguished social historian to a leading expert on eighteenthcentury political thought, Sonenscher’s professional career mirrors the trajectory scholarship of the Revolution has taken in his lifetime. In his new book on the sans-culottes, he says that one of the things he hopes to do is to redress “some of the gaps or mistakes” in his earlier work. In fact, the new book is the result of twenty-five years’ patient advancing of what it is possible to know about the French Revolution and, at its heart, the elusive sans-culottes. In his 1984 article, Sonenscher quoted at length a definition provided by the sans-culotte Vingternier, in May 1793, on the eve of the journée that purged the Convention and brought the Jacobins to power. The document can be found among those collected by Soboul and Walter Markov in Die Sansculotten von Paris (Berlin, 1957, 306): A sans-culotte, you rogues? He is someone who always goes about on foot, who has not got the millions you would all like to have, who has no châteaux, no valets to wait on him, and who lives simply with his wife and children, if he has any, on the fourth or fifth storey. He is useful because he knows how to till a field, to forge iron, to use a saw, to roof a house, to make shoes, and to spill his blood to the last drop for the safety of the Republic. And because he is a worker, you are sure not to meet his person in the Café de Chartres, nor in the gaming houses where others plot and wager, nor in the National Theatre, where L’Ami des Lois is performed, nor in the Vaudeville Theatre at a performance of Chaste Susanne, nor in the literary clubs where for two sous, which are so precious to him, you are offered Gorsas’s muck, with the Chronique and the Patriot Fran¸cais. In the evening he goes to the assembly of his Section, not powdered and perfumed and nattily booted, in the hope of being noticed by the citizenesses in the galleries, but ready to support sound proposals with all his might and ready to pulverise those which come from the despised faction of politicians.

Towards the end of his new book (361), Sonenscher revisits this quotation, setting it alongside the satirist Antoine-Joseph Gorsas’s own definition of a sans-culotte, from a poster of early 1793: A sans-culottes, a sans-culottes, well, since I have to tell you, today’s sans-culottes is a sans-culottes who has fine breeches, but who still wants to get hold of the breeches of those who do not have breeches, so as not to give a thread or a penny, or even any breeches, to those poor devils who have no breeches, the sans-culottes.1

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Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

who were the sans-culottes?

Gorsas’s point, Sonenscher explains, was that, whatever the sans-culotte had been earlier in the Revolution, by 1793 a sans-culotte was a fake sans-culotte, “whose demagogic rise to revolutionary prominence was likely to hide a very shady past”. And worse still, whereas Gorsas had previously waged a coherent campaign to turn an old salon joke about trousers and patronage into a weighty political weapon, by 1793 he was by no means the only judge of what a sansculotte was. From Vingternier’s definition, it might have seemed obvious who the sans-culottes were, but Gorsas’s convoluted, obscure and trenchantly politicized account is closer to the truth that Sonenscher’s book uncovers.

∗∗∗ There are two main levels of analysis. The first is tightly framed within the years 1791 to 1793 and focused on the process by which the term “sans-culotte” became prominent in Revolutionary discourse and politics. The second is broadly famed within the development of eighteenth-century political thought in France, with particular emphasis on the contribution of Rousseau and the complex reception of his texts. Sonenscher’s book is structured to begin and end with the first level of tight causal explanation, with intervening chapters assembling the evidence for the intellectual resources that were available to political actors and commentators in 1789 and afterwards. Only a historian of ambition and scholarly fastidiousness would attempt to combine two such disparate modes of analysis in the same book. There is inevitably some tension between them at a textual level. Some of the material Sonenscher assembles to make his overarching argument is so dense and difficult to make sense of that the reader intermittently loses his or her grip on the point that is being made. But this is a book that repays rereading, and the point of running the causal explanation alongside the panorama of intellectual resources is a very serious one. Ultimately, Sonenscher aims to get behind the nineteenth-century philosophies of history and the “master concepts” of class or sovereignty that have dominated French Revolutionary historiography. His proposals for what might take their place are subtle but not tentative: Pushing nineteenth-century philosophies of history out of the historiography of the French Revolution does not mean that there were simply no philosophies of history available before or after 1789. Here, the themes of progress and corruption, decline and fall, ruin and recovery, or barbarism and civilization could be fitted into as rich and varied a range of conceptual matrices as anything that the nineteenth century was able later to supply. (363).

Gorsas is a key figure in the causal explanation Sonenscher offers of the elevation of a joke about trousers to an emblem of Revolutionary consequence. This transformation occurred during the autumn and winter of 1791–2, in the

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aftermath of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes, the split in the Parisian Jacobin club that it precipitated, and the subsequent massacre on the Champ-de-Mars. The transformation was the work of Jacques-Pierre Brissot and his Girondin, or Brissotin, political allies. Gorsas was among these allies: a journalist, man of letters and art critic who was well versed in the Cynic school of satire before the Revolution. He brought to the electoral campaigns at the end of 1791 (the elections in question were to the first Legislative Assembly under the new Constitutional Monarchy, and to posts in departmental administration) a strong strain of moral disapproval directed against the Feuillant candidates, who were suspected of being in sympathy with the court and representative of the rich and propertied. Gorsas presented the alternative to the Feuillant as being genuinely popular candidates: the sans-culottes. Sonenscher suggests that by 1792 “Gorsas had begun to turn the word sans-culotte into a synonym for the ordinary people of Paris” (355). But economic causes also had a part to play: the shortages of sugar and other products arising from the slave insurrection in San-Domingo and price-fixing riots in Paris early in 1792. By the spring of 1792, the “new buzzword sans-culotte” was the name of one side of an economic and political divide: the poor or indigent and propertyless against the comfortable and advantaged, the Brissotins against the Feuillants. Sonenscher’s central point is that the term “sans-culotte” acquired its connotations, which are usually associated with the politics of the Year II and the first French Republic, much earlier (in Revolutionary, if not in temporal, terms). The connection between Robespierre and the sans-culotte is obviously important in any narrative of the Revolution, but notoriously difficult to pin down. Sonenscher’s contribution in this regard is important, but hard to unravel. The starting point is a textual variant in the reports of a speech Robespierre made to the Convention on 10 April 1793, attacking Brissot’s faction. In the version published in Robespierre’s own publication, Lettres a` ses commettants, he accused the Brissotins of hiding their ambition under the mask of moderation: “They separated the interests of the rich from those of the poor; they presented themselves to the former as their protectors against the sans-culottes; they attracted all the enemies of equality to their party”. Sonenscher explains that the implication here was that Robespierre and his Jacobin allies were the true protectors of the sans-culotte, while Brissot and his allies were the protectors of the rich. However, there is another version of this speech in the Logotachigraphe (which was meant to be a verbatim record of what was said in the Convention) where Robespierre is reported to have said the exact opposite: “namely, that Brissot and his supporters had presented themselves not as the protectors of the rich against the sans-culottes, but as the ‘protectors of the sans-culottes’ against the rich” (283). Sonenscher reads this textual discrepancy (which is of a kind that occurs very frequently in the


reports of Convention speeches) as “a clue to the real sequence of events that lay behind the transformation of the salon joke from an emblem of urbanity into an emblem of virtue” (283). What he means by this is that Robespierre, contra what appeared in his own journal, might actually have said in the Convention that the transformation of the joke about breeches into a political emblem was largely the work of Brissot and his Girondin, or Brissotin, political allies. This would make better sense of the fact that the ministry dismissed by Louis XVI in June 1792, which was composed of Brissot’s friends and allies, was known as the ministère sans-culottes. It would also explain why, during the Parisian insurrection that followed the dismissal of that ministry, banners bearing the words libres et sans-culottes were first displayed. The causal argument is deepened by Sonenscher’s suggestion that the Brissotin alliance, which originally gave the term “sans-culottes” its political meaning, rested on a broad consensus about the ways in which public finance might be used to stabilize a form of republican government in France. This involved a level of agreement between Brissot and others about the desirability of making property generally available to reflect deserved social distinction inside a meritocracy, and of using the power of modern finance to promote equality. Sonenscher locates the original foil for this consensus back in 1789, where there were two main alternatives against which the consensus took shape: one associated with Mounier and the Monarchiens, the other with the abbé Sieyès and his dwindling political allies. In this respect, Sonenscher’s book on the sans-culottes needs to be read as a companion to his earlier book, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (2007). What the new book emphasizes is that the consensus associated with Brissot—the vision of a modern republic secured by modern finance—fell to pieces in the maelstrom of the Revolution, and into the space left behind stepped Robespierre with a different vision of the republic and a new understanding of who, or what, the sans-culottes really were. The big question, of course, is why did the consensus fall apart? Here what Sonenscher offers is a combination of the conventional explanation (war and circumstance) and an original contribution: part of the collapse can be explained through “the array of historical and political investigations that Rousseau’s conjectures helped to ignite” (363). It is not news that Rousseau’s thought had a role to play in the French Revolution, but Sonenscher’s detailed tracking of that role, and his painstaking reconstruction of the intellectual resources Rousseau (and critics of Rousseau) provided for the revolutionaries, is novel and important.

∗∗∗ Sonenscher directs much energy and many pages to disentangling Rousseau’s ideas from those of his critics, but not so as to argue that these were two

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independent strains of intellectual resource. This move strengthens his particular argument, and the general case for taking ideas seriously in explaining the Revolution, because it deals with the powerful objection that is often directed against such arguments: namely, given that Rousseau is so hard to understand, how many of the participants in the Revolution were really in a position to draw meaningfully on what he had had to say earlier in the eighteenth century? Did even Robespierre really understand the Social Contract? Sonenscher emphasizes the extent to which Rousseau was understood by his readers— both appreciative and critical—to be exemplifying Cynic moral and political independence, and therefore drawing on the ancient model of the Cynic way of life. Confusingly, what Sonenscher calls “the Cynic label” was also frequently applied to Rousseau’s critics, especially Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Louis-Bertrand Castel, the Anglican moralist John Brown, and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, among others. All, Sonenscher shows, were Cynics in so far as they could be loosely described as “enthusiasts of virtue”, though there were myriad subtle differences. Without glossing those differences, Sonenscher assembles evidence for his overall argument which is most clearly stated in these terms: “In a remote yet still a real sense, the sans-culottes could be described as the product of Cynic criticism of Ciceronian moral philosophy, as both were construed in the eighteenth century” (26). We are reminded that Kant called Rousseau “that subtle Diogenes”, and that Rousseau needs to be understood against the strand of eighteenthcentury thought that was originally called “naturalism” and afterwards became “primitivism”. Jacobin ideology was constructed against this backdrop of political satire and moral politics, a backdrop that has largely disappeared from the historiography of the Revolution. Sonenscher connects Rousseau’s interest in the relations between nonpolitical institutions (like festivals), public opinion and the power of legitimate government with a much older interest in singing, dancing, morality and government. Here Cynic philosophy was useful for uncovering “those naturally human moral capacities that the unequal distribution of wealth and power had come to obscure”. Sonenscher draws out the connections between these moral preoccupations and Physiocracy (the group of French early economic thinkers who tried to model a way of having modernity’s wealth, culture and moral potential without the accompanying inequality, injustice and warfare.) He argues that in the wake of the practical failure of Physiocratic-inspired policies in the 1770s, Physiocrats persisted with their moral concerns by searching for new ways to engineer reform without relying directly on government power or intervention. He goes on to argue that the ideological origins of the French Revolution “had as much to do with long-standing visions of royal reform as with opposition to absolute government, since the first were not necessarily at odds with the second” (213).


This line of enquiry gives rise to a cumulative sense of how little purchase the analytical distinction between monarchies and republics had in the debates that surrounded the question of reform on the eve of the Revolution. Earlier in the century, Fénelon had subsumed both the terms “monarchy” and “republic” under the broader genus res publica, and this practice continued well beyond 1789 (examples can be found in the writings of both Sieyès and Robespierre). Sonenscher’s reconstruction of the moral debates that took place in the decade following Rousseau’s death and Physiocracy’s failure in the 1770s opens up the possibility of a more accurate understanding of the conception of the first republic than there has ever been before. Here the relation between nature, morality and politics remains central, but what is newly foregrounded is the established use of moral criticism and moral understanding as a means of achieving social stability and justice independently of the formal configuration of government power. Unsurprisingly, property was a central preoccupation in the pre-Revolutionary debates about social stability. Rousseau, famously, had stated in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society”. His argument was that there could be no stability in a society based on an already existing system of private property, which could only serve to turn the strong and the weak into the rich and the poor. Legitimate ownership could only be state-based, not the result of spontaneously occurring systems of ownership. Sonenscher shows how problematic this proved to Rousseau’s readers and critics, and how many fell back on natural rather than contractual explanations of the origin of private property. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, for example, drew on the vitalist explanations of natural society to be found in Charles Bonnet and Johann Caspar Lavater’s work. Catholicism provided further alternatives with its rich traditions of theological explanation for the institution of private property. Mably, on the other hand, disagreed with Rousseau’s dismissal of natural sociability, insisting that humans were equipped with a mixture of intelligence and emotions that made society their natural habitat. Such natural endowments had been the basis for a real system of common property, before the corruption of magistrates or the problem of free-riders started to break it down. For Mably, the only solution was a well-constituted republican government to neutralize the passions private property had unleashed. Sonenscher points out the superficial similarity between Rousseau and Mably in this recourse to an emotionally austere solution to the problem of private property, but also two significant differences: Mably’s way of neutralizing the passions was much more drastic than Rousseau’s, and Rousseau did not share Mably’s conviction that such measures would produce a stable political outcome. Thinking forwards to the Terror, it is clear that these differences turned out to be crucial. With a view to understanding how and

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why the revolutionaries drew on the thought of Rousseau and of Mably, it is extremely helpful to have their ideas situated in the broad sweep of French eighteenth-century moral thought that Sonenscher has assembled.

∗∗∗ Beyond noticing that Sans-Culottes is a companion book to Sonenscher’s earlier Before the Deluge, it is worth asking where, taken together, these two substantial volumes leave us now. Such a question cannot be properly addressed in the confines of a review essay, but there seem to me to be three main points that can be made. First (and most importantly), Sonenscher’s books have transformed the terrain of scholarship in French eighteenth-century political thought. The single most striking transformation in Sans-Culottes is the emphasis placed on Cynic philosophy and the role it played in the development and interpretation of Rousseau’s ideas. This is a line of enquiry that will have as many resonances for scholars in the field as Sonenscher’s painstaking reconstruction in Before the Deluge of the eighteenth century’s intellectual resources for addressing the problem of the public debt. Laid side by side, Sonenscher’s books provide the most comprehensive account to date of the development of republicanism in late eighteenth-century France. They are a major resource for all interested in explaining the historical fact that when the Revolution began in 1789 no one in the National Assembly was aiming to establish a republic in France, but by 1792 there was no alternative. What Sonenscher offers is a panoramic view of the backdrop of political, social and moral ideas against which that radical regime change took place. Second, there is the challenge, and potential reward, of integrating the achievement of both books. At the most general or abstract level, the relation between the two books can be captured in terms of the problem of inequality: Before the Deluge mapped the ideas of Mounier and the Monarchiens, on the one hand, and those of the abbé Sieyès and his dwindling political allies on the other. Sans-Culottes completes the picture by exploring the alternative to both: the broad patriot consensus in favour of using the assignat and deficit finance to promote a mixture of political stability and social equality. There is much work to be done now in combining the insights into Rousseau’s political thought that emerge from both books. The same is true of Physiocracy. It is likely that future work by Sonenscher and others building on his achievement will find unexpected connections and conflicts in simply drawing together the new material both books have unearthed. Third, there is the question of what kind of causal narrative of the French Revolution is compatible with the intellectual and imaginative thought


framework that Sonenscher has reconstructed. This is the hardest question of all, touching as it does on the relevance of political thought to what actually happened in the French Revolution. Other reviewers of Sans-Culottes have warned readers that they will be sorely disappointed if they think they are going to be encountering even a single example of a sans-culotte, traditionally understood as a pike-bearing man of the street. The sans-culottes of Soboul’s work are seemingly nowhere to be found in Sonenscher’s book. The oddity of this can be understood as an index of the new ground that has been broken. The sans-culottes are offstage, rather than absent, because the point of Sonenscher’s book is to show that that they might not have been who or what we have hitherto assumed they were. But on this way of looking at things, Sonenscher still has everything in play. He has shown that there is a vista between the Marxist and revisionist historiographical approaches to the Revolution, and the history of late eighteenth-century political thought in France. Now the question is: can he work his way back from the detailed tapestry of ideas and arguments he has uncovered to a narrative that makes sense of 1789, the Terror and what happened in between? That is an awful lot to ask of anyone, and the mere fact that the question arises is a reflection of the depth of Sonenscher’s achievement so far.

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reading liberal theology j. david hoeveler Department of History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Email: [email protected]

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006) Gary Dorrien has presented to all who have an interest in religion, and religious ideas especially, a magnificent piece of scholarship. These three volumes on liberal theology in the United States have value in the massive amount of writings they bring under study and into the mainstream of American intellectual history. To that extent they address a historiographical gap; conservative thinking in the long evangelical tradition down to the contemporary “religious right” has received greater attention.1 Liberal theology, as Dorrien treats it, interconnects with a wide range of ideas—in philosophy, science, and history most importantly, and other topical maters like feminism and race. This trilogy should attract the attention of intellectual historians not only for its rich content but also for the suggestions it has for this discipline itself; that is, for practicing intellectual history and recognizing some of the contrasting approaches to its subject matter. At the outset, one point, however mundane, deserves mention: these books are very large. The shortest of the three, the first, has 410 pages of text in (regrettably) very small print; the largest, the second, has 566 pages. Ample endnotes add more length, and much value, to these monographs. Form affects substance in this instance. His publishers give Dorrien a license to range expansively in narrating a history that dates from the early nineteenth century with Unitarianism and carries into the twenty-first century and postmodernism. He seizes that opportunity and supplements his discussions of changing ideas in American theology with an 1

On the significance of liberal theology see the review essay by David A. Hollinger in the inaugural issue of this journal. He discusses four recent books about American religion. “Jesus Matters in the USA,” Modern Intellectual History 1 (2004), 135–49.

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abundance of biographical material. Life histories give a location to the ideas and provide them with associations of often remarkable personalities. This “narrative approach with a strong biographical dimension that allows each thinker to speak in his or her own voice” (1805–1900, xxiv), as Dorrien puts it, serves this study well. Thus we learn that William Ellery Channing, leading theological voice of the early nineteenth-century Unitarians, had a troubled youth. Hellfire sermons, with their lurid depictions, unsettled him. The contradictions, in his own family, of devotion to liberty and tolerance of slavery, made him uneasy. He retreated to the seaside for many hours of a day, removed from family and friends. As a student at Harvard, Channing experienced a profound uneasiness, both at the fashionable vogue for French radicalism among the students and at the troubling implications he saw in the empirical epistemology of John Locke. Discovering the Scottish philosophers, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid especially, assured Channing of a positive moral sense in all human beings and of a spiritual realm of being differentiated from material reality. Channing felt delivered from an intellectual crisis and brought into a “new spiritual birth,” as he described it. Furthermore, he now had the building blocks—a dualist idea of reality and a religion rooted in morality—for the Unitarian system he would defend the rest of his life. Or, from the second volume, consider two other cases. Walter Rauschenbusch attended the Baptist Seminary in Rochester where his father, the domineering August, taught a version of Calvinist scholasticism in the 1880s and where orthodoxy generally reigned. Rauschenbusch discovered the early expressions of social Christianity in Washington Gladden, Richard T. Ely, and Josiah Strong. He also found in Horace Bushnell a liberal theology morally inspiring and rationally persuasive. But Rauschenbusch had no idea how the pastoral career to which he aspired would accommodate such ideas, especially among the conservative German American Baptists of his family’s identity. After a term of service in Louisville, Rauschenbusch found himself in New York City, a knife’s throw from Hell’s Kitchen and the Tenderloin district. Gangs, gambling, and prostitution flourished here. Rauschenbusch’s church building, “ugly, run-down, and depressing, like its neighborhood,” Dorrien reports, (1900–1950, 80) served a congregation of mostly German immigrant laborers. But Rauschenbusch took heart and resolved to live in the same conditions as his parishioners and strive to bring them the promise of Jesus’ salvation. It took no little courage to maintain his commitment while all the while he suffered from the progressive loss of his hearing. Rauschenbusch had as yet no theology of the Social Gospel nor of the Kingdom theme that would mark his major contribution to theological liberalism. He had before his eyes, however, the stark vision of a world to which, above all, that growing understanding would speak.

reading liberal theology

By comparison, Rauschenbusch’s ally in the Social Gospel, Vida Scudder, came to the movement from a much different path. She urged a social reconstruction informed by Marxism and inspired by the social cohesiveness she found in High Church Anglicanism and Catholicism; the individualism of liberal Protestantism would never suffice to effect massive social change, she insisted. But until she left the United States to attend Oxford University in 1884 her Christianity had mostly an aesthetic recommendation for her. At Oxford, though, she encountered John Ruskin in his late turn to socialism. She later wrote, “Something within me stirred, responded, awoke” (1900–1950, 130). She vowed to give the rest of her life to the needs of the poor, and did. And finally, an illustration from the third volume. Langdon Gilkey grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park area where his father, the well-known Charles Gilkey, pastored its prestigious Baptist church and where his mother enjoyed a wide recognition for her feminist views. Gilkey forsook for a while the religiosity of his parents but maintained their social idealism. At Harvard he embraced ethical humanism. In Europe in 1939 (with the Harvard tennis team), he barely escaped the Nazi invasion. For a while, however, the war meant little to him. His vehement antiwar feelings led him to view indifferently the fate of those who fell to Hitler’s aggression and he maintained a cynical detachment from the conflict. His father, however, had become a close friend of Reinhold Niebuhr and had succumbed gradually to Niebuhr’s searing critique of liberal religion and the bourgeois sentimentalism that he believed underscored its Social Gospel correlative. So one day, Charles, now vexed at his son’s naive pacifism, said to Langdon, “go hear Reinie preach sometime.” When Niebuhr visited Harvard, Gilkey did just that. The sermon sent him reeling. Niebuhr tore apart Gilkey’s ethical humanism and instructed him in moral ambiguity. It was a conversion experience. “Suddenly,” Gilkey later wrote, “as the torrent of insight poured from the pulpit, my world in disarray spun completely around, steadied, and then settled into a new and quite firm and intelligible structure” (1950–2005, 272). Gilkey heard Niebuhr preach twice more during the Harvard engagement and then read all his works. He spent the war years as a prisoner in China where he had joined a Presbyterian missionary group. The experience confirmed him in neo-orthodoxy, the next chapter in his varying intellectual career. Biography always enriches intellectual history. To be sure, Dorrien never overdetermines his subject. Personal experiences and the influence of family, class, education, and geography shape the life and thought of individuals but do not deprive them of autonomy. And it would be wrong to associate Christian liberalism with only the more cerebral approaches to religion and assign to the evangelical wing its greater emotive force. Liberal biography documents aplenty the transforming experiences that shape whole careers.

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However much it provides some location for the origin and reception of ideas, though, this history requires more in order to explain their dissemination. Dorrien supplies a second focus for his study by the considerable attention he gives to the institutional location of liberal theology. Here the narrative moves from the pulpits in the early nineteenth century to the divinity schools and theological seminaries in the twentieth. The great figures of the first era were churchmen—Channing, Theodore Parker, Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Abbott, Washington Gladden. To be sure, the divinity schools of the early and mid-nineteenth century had critical roles in marking the parameters of American Protestantism. Harvard made its move to Unitarianism in 1805 and rival, orthodox Andover Theological Seminary rose to combat that influence three years later. Yale played an important part in moderating Calvinist orthodoxy under the system formulated by Nathaniel William Taylor, and Princeton Theological Seminary remained throughout the citadel of Calvinism in the United States. For Dorrien’s purposes, three schools have special significance as houses of the liberal Protestantism of the twentieth century, in all its intriguing varieties: the University of Chicago Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and Boston University (later School of Theology). One case from the Boston experience demonstrates the value of the institutional focus. Boston philosopher Borden Parker Bowne introduced one of liberal theology’s most important forms, personalism. Bowne came from a family of devout Methodists and grew up in New Jersey. He graduated from New York University in 1873 and then studied in Europe, most significantly with Hermann Ulrici at Halle and Rudolph Hermann Lotze at Göttingen. Bowne’s early career thus exemplifies the crucial role played by Germany in shaping American religious thought. From Kant to Friedrich Schleiermacher, to David Strauss, to Albrecht Ritschl, and many others, German thinkers influenced the shaping of liberal theology through its first stage. To the religious conservatives they constituted the “German infection” and this group resisted the intrusion in every way it could. For himself, Bowne followed Kant to a point, but judged him insufficient for the interests of true religious understanding. Kant, he believed, in restricting knowledge to phenomena, shut off human knowledge of God, while Bowne believed that reason embraces a positive notion of a transcendent spiritual reality. Drawing on forms of philosophical idealism, Bowne attributed personality to all that is real. From that basis, in his book Theory of Thought and Knowledge (1897), Bowne resisted all mechanistic interpretations of life and kept up the attack in the many books that mark his prolific scholarship. Bowne saw purpose and direction in life as assured by a guide whose nature all humans share. From this understanding Bowne issued a statement of liberal Protestantism’s view of life: “The central thing,” he wrote,


is the recognition of the divine will in all life, and, the loyal, loving effort to make that will prevail in all life: first of all in the hidden life of the spirit, and then in family life, in social life, in political life, in trade, in art, in literature, in every field of human interest and activity. (1805–1900, 390)

Well into the next century, Boston divinity stood for personalist theology. Dorrien gives much attention to Albert C. Knudson, Francis J. McConnell, and Edgar S. Brightman in the second book, and to Harold DeWolf and S. Paul Schilling in the third. Boston personalism made a historic impact through its association with Martin Luther King Jr. King’s father, worried that his son’s roots in the southern Baptist tradition were eroding, did not encourage his interest in studying for the doctoral degree at Boston. The young Baptist wanted to study with Brightman, though, and he joined a flow of black students to BU in the 1950s. He took a course on the philosophy of religion from Brightman and three others from DeWolf. He emerged from Boston thoroughly instructed in personalist theology and quickly found in it a motivation and inspiration for his leadership in the civil rights movement. “This personal idealism,” he wrote in his autobiography, remains today my basic philosophical position. Personalism’s insistence that only personality—finite and infinite—is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality. (1950–2005, 154)

King brought Christian judgment against racial segregation as above all a degradation of personhood. Conventional wisdom would probably, as in the case of King, associate liberal theology with liberal or progressive politics and reformist social attitudes. Today, conservative or “fundamentalist” religion evokes the Religious Right. But liberal religion has not always embraced progressive social ideas. The Unitarians, with their large presence in the Boston area, feared the possible extensions of the French Revolution to America, allied themselves with the Federalist Party, and, in sizeable number, recoiled from the anti-slavery feelings of Channing and Parker. Channing himself had no love for William Lloyd Garrison and his rabble ilk among the abolitionists. Bushnell, whom Dorrien calls “the theological father of mainstream American liberal Protestantism” (1805–1900, 111), believed, even as he labeled slavery a crime, that blacks represented an inferior civilization and posed an obstacle to American progress. Jews, Indians, Catholics, and the Celtic Irish also faired poorly in Bushnell’s racial and religious assessments. Furthermore, this Hartford theologian, who inspired so many in the liberal theological movement, had nothing good to say about women’s emancipation. Women, he believed, should assist men, not compete with them. He saw only corruption of the essential

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female nature should women enter into the arenas of American public life. Lyman Abbott, as late as 1903, supported southerners’ denying blacks the suffrage. AngloSaxonism prevails thematically in Josiah Strong’s Our Country and informatively in much of early liberalism. Rauschenbusch intimated a Teutonic–Anglo alliance in the United States, these views emerging amid his concern for declining German representation in the changing ethnic makeup of immigration to America. Rauschenbusch also feared that feminism threatened family values. Much of this record, however unprogressive, shows how much the American liberals reflected dominant opinion in their own time and place. Dorrien writes, “Liberal theology was a product of middle-class anxiety and privilege, it was easily drafted for nationalistic causes, and it gave the sanction of progressive Christian reason to racial and sexual discrimination” (1805–1900, 409). Dorrien pretty much leaves the matter at that, and wisely so. He avoids reductionism by a too-close juxtaposition of the social location of liberal theology and its intellectual content. So the third category of inquiry respecting this subject concerns liberal theology as an intellectual movement, a forum of ideas. What does this liberalism say about God, human nature, the means of salvation, the authority of Scripture, morality and the Christian life, dogma, church? Of course, these three volumes show that liberal religious thought was the stuff of infinite variety. One moves a long way, for example, from a Theodore Parker in the nineteenth century to a Henry Nelson Wieman in the twentieth. In the one we see absolute confidence in an intuition that connects us to a divine indwelling, the vehicle of an “absolute religion” whose “Temple is all space.” In the other we hear the demands for religion rigorously rational and empirical, intolerant of any idealism, and acceptable only by the standards of modern scientific method. Wieman eventually judged it futile to search for infinite being that transcended existence. So Dorrien plays it safe, shunning any precise intellectual formulation of liberalism. He does, however, give liberal theology a descriptive normality by placing it always as a middle ground, a “third way” between orthodoxy on the one hand and materialism or secularism on the other. At any of the eras under study, liberalism reacted to save religion and a rational defense of spirituality from the new currents of thought or the new components of modern culture that appeared threatening. In this effort it looked to the natural and social sciences especially, but personal experience, too, had for many liberal religionists a validating base for theology. The liberals would adapt, borrow, reformulate, refine, or accommodate as needed, as they made their way into new understandings of the faith. Here one recognizes the “mediationist character” of liberalism. For a major obstacle to religion’s wellbeing, liberals believed, came also from religion itself. Conservatism, in the form of dogma and creed, biblical literalism, and often a visceral disdain for modernity itself, always threatened to lock religion into obsolescence, liberals


asserted. Such an awareness, however, often blinded liberals to threats of their own making. In the first era one matter above all challenged the liberals. They confronted in the rationalism and materialism of the Enlightenment a universe of mechanical law and material fact. And however much the Scottish Common Sense thinkers, who dominated American academic philosophy well into the nineteenth century, preserved a base for religion by their stark ontological dualism of mind and matter, spirit and nature, the liberals grew restless with this static dichotomy. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” and the course of German philosophy afterwards had much promise for the liberal Americans. These new intellectual currents inspired liberalism’s first great effort: to break down the barriers of the material and the spiritual worlds, the natural and the supernatural. Emerson and the Transcendentalists led the way and Dorrien offers a lengthy and informative discussion of Parker as the emblematic voice in the movement. Horace Bushnell, however, stands out even more as a transformational thinker in American Christianity. He had gained much public attention with his Christian Nurture in 1847, but many consider his Nature and the Supernatural (1858) of even greater significance. Dorrien describes the treatise as “a sprawling, discursive, apologetic case for his picture of the world as the medium of divine and human selfcommunication” (1805–1900, 158). Bushnell knew his audience, those middle classes fearful of the ascendent materialism in modern intellectual currents but uninterested in combating them by older theologies. Bushnell strove to show that the natural and supernatural are the complementary vehicles of divine activity in the world. Such an effort to dispel middle-class doubt also describes the work, and the great appeal, of Henry Ward Beecher, a figure of national renown, and himself influenced by Bushnell. Beecher pursued the project under the auspices of evolutionary thought. Evolution became the master concept of liberal theology in the late nineteenth century. It enabled the liberals to embrace the “essential” truths of science and bring their theology into accord with modern thought. They could maintain a loyalty to Scripture, while seeing it not as a historical document frozen forever in a past time, but as the first record of God’s progressive manifestation and disclosure to the human mind over time. The liberals read evolution as a manifesto of progress, the work of the cooperating activities of God and humanity. Evolution demonstrated to them the unity of all creation and God’s role in guiding the advancement of the human race. “One thing comes from another,” wrote Theodore Munger, “assumes a higher and finer form, and presses steadily on towards still higher and finer forms” (1805–1900, 299). Many liberals embraced a theology of immanence, of God’s progressive immersion in human history. Now liberal theology became emphatically teleological. And herein lay the challenge to Christians: to join in and advance God’s expanding activity in the world, to

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embrace its mission of justice and moral improvement, yes, even to save the cities and improve the lot of working people. Out of evolutionary theology came the Social Gospel of the early twentieth century, embraced by most voices of this “new theology.” But just how far were the liberal theologians prepared to go in merging the natural and the supernatural? In fact, they had started to move in a direction from which they knew not how to stop, or indeed often had no desire to stop. In his introduction to the second volume Dorrien writes that the next generation of liberals created standards for a theology heavily naturalistic and empirical in nature. Several hundred pages follow that illustrate the many manifestations of the new criteria and before long a reader might begin to wonder just what is going on in American theology. What is left of God or the spiritual, or the soul, or higher moral truth, or universal authority of any kind in religion? The Chicago thinkers had the major role here. They maintained that a huge chasm separates the modern world, its mind and culture, from the biblical world. The modern mind could not have invented the Trinity. The new liberals embraced evolutionary thinking as incorporated by the American pragmatic philosophers—Peirce, James, and Dewey. They located religion and religious values in mental habits and confined their meaning to measurable experiences. Theology, many of them believed, would have to use the standards of science. An early leader at Chicago, and always a controversial figure, George Burman Foster, denounced all “authority religion” and, in Darwinian and Hegelian prescriptions, recognized no permanent or substantive realities as legitimate for religion. The divine reality is a process of becoming, Foster believed, a work in progress, so to speak. The soul, Foster maintained, is not a substance either, but “a passing moment in the dialectic process of reality, a fleeting thought of the Thought” (1900–1950, 165). Ponder this. Shailer Mathews, a major figure in Chicago liberalism, also highlighted the temporal divisions that made early Christianity so distant to modern consciousness. Early in his career, Mathews wrote that theology must reinterpret the primitive elements of Christianity in modern terms, removed from an ancient and abandoned cosmology. He looked for a religion of measurable use, that is, in effecting social change. Simple morality could not inspire the power needed for this change, but Christianity, in its devotion to the historical Jesus, did have regenerative consequences for the individual and for society. Mathews thus for a while preserved an evangelical ingredient in his liberalism (not alone among the liberals in doing so), but in his later writings a dominant naturalism emerged. He demanded now that “the use of the methods of modern science” prevail in deriving (as opposed to confirming) religious truths. How do they serve “the needs of living persons?” he would ask. Mathews dissociated religion from any dogma, and sanctioned beliefs only to the extent that they served a contemporary


purpose. By the mid-1920s he had turned to social psychology as theology’s academic partner. It supplied, in the idea of personality, the divine–human nexus, so that he could conclude that “there must be personality-evolving activities in the cosmos . . . That is the law of life itself ” (1900–1950, 206, 211). But in fact it was becoming difficult to discern in Mathews where the natural and the supernatural stood apart. Ambiguity did not describe Edward Scribner Ames at Chicago. Empiricism, the only valid standard in modernity, “attaches no validity to the old dualism of the natural and supernatural, the human and the divine,” he avowed. We cannot see ourselves as connected to the divinity of Christ, he wrote, only to his goodness and worth. Ames believed he spoke for “all who truly dwell in this new world of the natural and the social sciences” and who seek to establish “the new orthodoxy” built on them (1900–1950, 232, 233). Well, one can site many indices of this brand of religious modernism. Douglas Clyde Macintosh wanted an even more refined and precise empirical theology, built strictly on “verified theological material” (1900–1950, 246). That material signified for him religious experience, expansively defined and having nothing to do with the nature of God or even the existence of God. Wieman in turn reinforced Chicago’s diminution of the deity and urged that theology become as scientific as possible. Defining religion strictly by its moral content and the ethical communities it created, Wieman found God in the “functioning unity” that makes society operate with moral purpose, and added that “it alone can save us.” Here we have liberal theology’s God in total descent into the world, and often its disintegration in it. For Wieman the only objects of religious inquiry are “the actual processes of human existence”(1900–1950, 275, 280). Well before Wieman, liberal theology had set itself up for frontal attack. J. Gresham Machen issued his polemical but trenchant critique in 1923 with his Liberalism and Christianity. He made several indictments of liberalism: its humanization of Christ (we have no access to Jesus as a personality, he said), its immersion of God in the world and in human history (God must be understood as fully transcendent), its equating religion with life adjustments (the real issue is not the integrated personality; it is human sin), the recourse to understanding religion by means of the scientific method (central to Christianity are the biblical miracles), and in general the obliteration of the distinctions of natural and supernatural (nothing “natural” can be the source of our redemption). In short, Machen attested, “liberal Christianity” was not Christianity. More, of course, followed. Dorrien gives extensive attention to Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and others who inveighed against liberal theology. Niebuhr considered it a corruption of Christianity in its humanistic content and thoroughly poisoned by its cohabitation with modern culture. Niebuhr recoiled from the moral idealism of liberalism. Christians’ pacifism in the face of

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aggressive Nazi paganism he judged a bad combination of gospel perfectionism and bourgeois utopianism, and the mark of a “very, very sick” civilization (1900–1950, 470). All that had followed from Christianity’s accommodation to evolutionary theory—the theology of immanence, the ideas of a redemptive history, the Social Gospel—Niebuhr maligned. His brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, excoriated liberalism as a correlative of modern materialist consumerism and as subservience to modernity. The church, he urged, has no obligation to tune its faith to the temporal shifts of history and the relativist aspects of modern civilization. Dorrien uses the term “neo-liberal” rather than the customary “neoorthodox” to describe this revolt, although the “neo” in “neo-liberal” has an uncertain reference.2 That they do belong in the tradition of liberal theology, however, becomes clear when one considers the really great challenge that had come to liberalism after World War I, the jolt delivered by Karl Barth. That encounter also highlights another theme in liberal theology’s history in the United States—one, I believe, that makes some suggestions about the parallel universe of intellectual history. Barth attacked theological liberalism on all fronts. The Swiss pastor who took up his work in Safenwil in 1911 had first combined his religious ideals with his passion for socialism. World War I left him bitterly disillusioned, the more so as he saw so many of Germany’s great liberal religionists, his mentors among them, embrace nationalism and war. Some important addresses now severely faulting this liberalism came from Barth before he issued his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, the Römerbrief, in 1919, followed by the more militant second edition a few years later. Liberalism in theology signified for Barth the triumph of subjectivity and individualism and the loss of all external authority on the one hand, and the diminution of God in the historical process (as in God’s absorption into nationalism) on the other. Barth wanted to see through and beyond history and find God in Scripture. He became fixed on the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and man. If theology does not so locate itself, he believed, it will have only anthropomorphic measures of God, and indeed for Barth modern Christianity had become a wholly human-centered religion and essentially a human construct (“Man is the centre and measure of all things”). For Barth, God never becomes one with human history and neither does he become known to us by nature or metaphysics. Barth denied that we can speak of God in any meaningful sense. All understanding of God begins in a faith that alone makes God accessible to us through his word in Scripture. Barth placed the Renaissance, Cartesianism, the Enlightenment, Schleiermacher, 2

Dorrien claims that he is the first to place Reinhold Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, and Tillich in the camp of liberal theology. But Richard Wightman Fox had done so previously. See his Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 147.


and contemporaries like Adolph Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch among the guilty parties, but they had plenty of company.3 Barth’s role is crucial for Dorrien’s study of liberal theology. Readers in fact will better understand his discussion of the neo-liberals by consulting Dorrien’s own book on Barth, which provides a rich intellectual setting for the “Barthian revolt” that he describes in modern theology.4 Liberals, of course, had many reasons to fault Barth and to fear his dramatic impact in Europe and the United States. Dorrien summarizes the conflict: One way or another, liberal theology always took its stand on the verdicts of modern knowledge and experience without bowing to external authority claims. Liberals of all kinds decried the Barthian ascendancy as biblicist, dogmatic, authoritarian, provincial, and irrational. They accepted the naturalistic premises of modern historiography and the modernist valorization of objective knowledge. They specialized in cultural accommodation and religious progressivism. Every liberal theologian sought to bring Christian claims into line with beliefs derived from modern critical consciousness, and thus every liberal theologian from Schleiermacher to Macintosh took for granted that the authority of reason makes the mythical aspects of Christianity problematic for modern theology (1900–1950, 534).

Thus the Barthian impact effectively gave liberalism a cohesiveness (even if by way of a negative identity) that existed among its many diverse currents. It clarified things in an important way, for even those neo-liberals who urged return to a transcendent God (but one who is nonetheless in history), a God of judgment, and a humanity rooted in sin, had profound disagreements with Barth. Tillich charged that Barth expounded a one-sided supernaturalism. He found his theology dangerously deficient and void of any social or political ethics. “He, like all pessimistic supranaturalists,” Tillich wrote, “is not interested in history as such nor in a social transformation for the sake of humanity.”5 Niebuhr had more in common with Barth than did Tillich but by the late 1940s Niebuhr was marking his distance from him, especially as Barth displayed a Cold War neutrality and detached the churches from any partisan or judgmental role in the US–Soviet rivalry. Niebuhr had faulted the naive idealism of the Social Gospel but had always found a large relevance for Christian understanding in shaping the moral condition of the world. Niebuhr also believed that Barthian neo-orthodoxy deprived Christian belief of all the fortifications it needed from modern knowledge and rendered it helpless in its confrontation with modern 3

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Quoted in David L. Mueller, Karl Barth (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1972). See also the discussion of Barth, at 13–53. Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000). Quoted in Dorrien, Barthian Revolt, 133.

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culture. Eventually Niebuhr so despaired of the Barthian redirection of theology that he expressed “regret” at his own earlier attacks on liberalism.6 Some concluding remarks will take the discussion of liberal theology from this juncture and the clarifying effects that the Barthian impact made on liberalism into some reflections about intellectual history. As Dorrien has pointed out, by the time of the third generation of American liberals, their enterprise had located itself in academia—the theological seminaries and divinity schools. Their work had become scholarship, marked by expansive research and all the scaffolding and apparatus of academy publications. The field had its several stars and superstars and institutions competed to attract them. (However much Barth belittled liberal theology’s vast metaphysical and sociological enhancements, he wrote massive volumes on church dogmatics and held professorships at Göttingen, Münster, Bonn, and Basel). Theology, like other academic disciplines in the humanities, often reflects certain mentalities that distinguish the kind of scholarship they produce and that fuel intradisciplinary rivalries. The kinds I have in mind describe, on the one hand, pursuit of an object of study in its pure, undifferentiated, and often hermetic state, and, on the other, pursuit of that subject in its extended, interconnected relationship to external realms of being, usually in specifically social or economic locations. The Barthian theological intervention in the 1920s and thereafter brought these two habits of mind into bold relief. For well over a century, liberal theologians, in the manner of Dorrien’s extensive accounts, had brought God into history; had fused, to varying degrees, the natural and supernatural; and had tried to locate the divine presence in the wide expanse of human experience, from the urban ghettoes in its social contexts to the healthy personality in individuals. They had conjoined God to the national purpose or to the changing directions of the modern intellect. Liberal theology’s God was always an extended deity, never strictly contained by the Scriptural word alone, but given a large temporal and spatial activity. Liberals liked to observe their God in the messier realities that make human life what it is and provide all the challenges to it. This God of the diaspora gave liberalism its rich pluralism, its immense variety. And however much liberals thus differed one from the other, they had this quality of thought that made them stand apart from Barth. Barth spoke for a theological tradition that saw God as detached from humanity, remote (but not exclusively uninvolved) from its history, uncomplicated by any identity with society and politics, and, as Barth said, qualitatively differentiated from human nature. This divine being is self-contained; it has a unique selfhood, an intrinsic nature wholly unrecognizable by anything external to it. Reinhold Niebuhr referenced, in criticism, the “absolute

6

Dorrien, Barthian Revolt, 135–9.


purity” of Barth’s theological strain, the uncontaminated, undiluted, inscrutable character of Barth’s God.7 Other academic disciplines have also displayed these two mentalities. In literature, for example, the New Criticism enjoyed an academic hegemony in the two decades or so after World War II. The New Criticism imposed a strict formalism on the study of literature. It tried to find the synthetic unity of a poem or novel by close attention to its textual structure; it wanted to describe the special qualities that associated that text with the unique quality of experience that one labels aesthetic. To that extent it permitted no external references— to biography, to social class, to history—that might otherwise explain the text’s salient features. New Criticism’s autotelic subject set itself directly against Marxist or psychological interpretations that insisted on contextualizing the literary edifice within any number of external associations and influences. Similar rival strategies have always existed in intellectual history and are familiar to individuals in this discipline. I will just provide one recent illustration. In the same inaugural issue of this journal cited earlier, Lloyd Kramer contributed an essay review that considered two books: Donald R. Kelley’s The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (2002) and Mark Bevir’s The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999).8 Both books, as Kramer effectively describes, attest to a long-standing differentiation among intellectual historians respecting especially how they conceive the object of their study, ideas. The tradition of intellectual history that Kelley recounted “sought to bring ideas ‘down’ from the realm of timeless, transcendent truths into the complex historical realities of social experience, collective or personal identities, human institutions, and the struggle for power.”9 They believed that ideas are best understood, and disclose their “real” meaning, when placed in region, class, economic, and other contextual situations. Thus Kelley describes the “descent” of ideas into wider dimensions of life and the “eclectic” character of this form of intellectual history. Scholars in this externalist mode of intellectual history created the party of pluralism. As Kramer summarizes, it welcomes all efforts “to enter into historical dialogue 7

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Theological liberalism, to be sure, always had a certain fault line, one that might merit attention in a larger discussion of this subject. Thus William Dean, in his 1986 book American Religious Empiricism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), distinguished between liberals who appeal to a transhistorical realm of spirit and liberals who place God in the historical process and believe his true nature is revealed teleologically (2, 13). I suggest here, though, that these differences point to two kinds of liberalism that nonetheless existed within large commonalities and that these parties coalesced in opposition to Barthian theological “purity.” Lloyd Kramer, “Intellectual History and Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History 1 (2004), 81–95. Kramer’s words; ibid., 81.

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with the widest possible range of ideas, cultures, and interpretations of human experience.”10 Its practitioners moved intellectual history from “internal” to “external” focus and understood ideas as integral components of an extended social and cultural milieu. They are the intellectual parallels of the liberal theologians. But if eclecticism seems to have become the preferred practice among intellectual historians, the purists still have their voices and Bevir speaks powerfully for them. As Kramer notes, Bevir does not like contextualism. He embraces a methodology that does not reference the lives or the historical experiences of individuals or groups, and he contains his investigations within the “logic of ideas” or the “web of ideas” prevalent in a particular historical moment. Bevir would like intellectual historians to have a greater concern for understanding a text than for explaining it. That concern would take us back to the purer text as opposed to the messier context. Here we find a Barthian theological parallel to intellectual history in its internalist mode.11

∗∗∗ Dorrien has produced a grand chronicle, a major contribution to American intellectual history. Liberal theology in his discussions always reaches out to take stock of the changing world, to see where it is going in its new ideas and changing social and political conditions, and thus often to direct or influence it. In so chronicling this activity Dorrien has valuably bought liberal theology into the mainstream of American intellectual history. He has shown that liberal theology is where religion does its creative thinking.

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Ibid., 85. I am trying to highlight points of emphasis drawn from the review essay. Both Kelley and Bevir mediate these differences somewhat in the larger, more subtle points they make in their books, and, to be sure, other mediating practices have found their way into intellectual history writing. A recent forum on the status of intellectual history gives a new illustration of its eclecticism. Now, Daniel Wickberg suggests, intellectual history has become essential to other modes of historical inquiry. “Today,” he writes, “there is evidence everywhere that intellectual history speaks to the dominant historiography of our day; its insights and methods have become part of the common coin of the most significant work currently being done.” But, paradoxically, Wickberg believes, it has done so somewhat at the expense of its own identity. “Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study?”, in “The Current State of Intellectual History: A Forum,” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 10 (Sept. 2009), 14–15.

Modern Intellectual History, 8, 2 (2011), pp. 471–484 doi:10.1017/S147924431100028X


religion, science, and political religion in the soviet context michael david-fox Department of History, University of Maryland Email: [email protected]

Paul Froese, The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) The intellectual movement to interpret fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism as “political religions” has generated lively debates and an intensive publication program for over a decade.1 The scholarly trend has been closely associated with a revival of the concept of totalitarianism, reconfigured to account for the popular appeal and violent fervor of twentieth-century mass movements of the extreme right and left. As theoreticians of political religion have been preoccupied with arguments about the definition of religion and the problems of comparison, two stumbling blocks have become increasingly apparent. First, historians of Soviet communism, who since the early 1990s have empirically and conceptually transformed the study of Stalinism and Soviet history, have either exhibited “utter neglect” of the political-religion concept or have shunned it due to the scientism and official atheism of the regime. As a result, comparisons in the political-religion mode have generally been carried out by scholars not expert in

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Emilio Gentile’s 1990 article “Totalitarianism and Political Religion,” Journal of Contemporary History 25/2–3 (1990), 229–52, is often credited with sparking scholarly interest in developing the concept in the anglophone world; among his major works are idem, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge, MA, 1996). The journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions was launched in 2000 by Michael Burleigh, who later published Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York, 2007). The most comprehensive compilation resulting from the scholarly embrace of political religions is the three-volume collected edited by Hans Maier, Totalitarianism and Political Religions (vol. 2 co-edited with Michael Schäfer), trans. Jodi Bruhn (London and New York, 2004–7). See also Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion (London, 2005).

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Soviet history.2 Second, and closely related to this, even sympathetic critics have found secular religion too blunt a tool and too generic a concept to probe the “novel, supranational, but historically specific . . . sense of mission” produced by radical interwar regimes.3 Soviet communism as a project, more than fascism, was deeply invested in viewing its own ideology as genuinely scientific. In the Soviet context, then, a combined analysis of the troika of religion, science, and ideology assumes great significance. For one thing, the politicalreligion concept hinges on the definition of religion and its applicability, albeit in modern or secular guise, to Soviet ideology. Soviet science was intimately linked to ideology; the regime is notorious for its suppression of entire scientific fields and promotion of ideologically charged pseudo-science such as Lysenkoism. Indeed, the role and nature of ideology—integral to the cults of Lenin and Stalin, high doctrine, the development of new rituals and the propaganda of atheism, and “faith” in science, not to mention mass emotional zeal and the justification of political violence—has itself long represented a Sphinx’s riddle in the study of Soviet history.4 As the books under review suggest, however, sustained investigation of two of the three parts of the triad may be commonplace, but all three are rarely, if ever, considered together. The ideological mission to suppress religion and inculcate atheism is the focus of historical sociologist Paul Froese’s Plot to Kill God. Focusing on religion and ideology, he treats science only in passing. By contrast, the relationship between science and ideology, and Stalin’s personal

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Ulrike Ehret, “Understanding the Popular Appeal of Fascism, National Socialism and Soviet Communism: The Revival of Totalitarianism Theory and Political Religion,” History Compass 5/4 (2007), 1236–67, quotation at 1252. An exception is the German sociologist Klaus Georg Riegel’s interpretation by analogy of Leninism as a messianic “virtuoso religion” led by the vanguard party as “Messiah” and Stalinism as an inquisitorial “institutional church” (Riegel, “Marxism–Leninism as Political Religion,” in Maier and Schäfer, Totalitarianism and Political Religions, 61–112). However, there have been a range of serious investigations of the relationship between revolutionaries and religion, such as Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2008); Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1998); Avram Brown, “The Bolshevik Rejection of the ‘Revolutionary Christ’ and Dem ian Bednyi’s The Flawless New Testament of the Evangelist Dem ian,” Kritika 2/1 (Winter 2001), 5–44. David D. Roberts, “‘Political Religion’ and the Totalitarian Departures of Inter-war Europe: On the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical Category,” Contemporary European History 18/4 (2009), 381–414, quotation at 406; see also Ehret, 1248. For my own discussion of the debates in Soviet history see Michael David-Fox, “On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5/1 (Winter 2004), 81–106.

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role in shaping postwar scientific debate, is the heart of Ethan Pollock’s archival investigation, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. He touches on religion only en passant. But the two authors are willy-nilly forced to confront, if only implicitly, the unmarked third side of the triangle. Froese cannot avoid science in the guise of “scientific atheism” and the ideology’s claims on scientific truth, and Pollock cannot entirely ignore religion in the context of the apogee of the Stalin cult and the Marxist–Leninist exegesis of canonical texts. What does the study of religion and science in the Soviet context suggest about the nature of the ideology and its particular “sense of mission”? Froese’s Plot to Kill God is a bold attempt to synthesize the existing literature on Soviet antireligious campaigns and “scientific atheism” over the entire sweep of Soviet history. It makes a special effort to cull quantitative data on secularization before and after the fall of communism in 1991 and, above all, to interpret the “Soviet experiment in secularization” in light of the contemporary and theoretical social-science literature on religion. Froese observes that the Soviet antireligious project was unique and unprecedented, because it attempted not merely to suppress religious institutions and everyday expressions of spirituality but to expunge belief in a supernatural realm. But for him the singularity of this “plot to kill God” only makes it all the more exemplary: like a researcher who has stumbled across some bizarre and anomalous phenomenon and makes it the exception that disproves the rule, Froese takes the Soviet experience as a test case for social-scientific generalizations about secularization and religion. In six stimulating, engagingly written chapters, Froese challenges and modifies the notion of Marxists and social scientists alike that modernization itself inevitably produces secularization. He cogently suggests how numerous factors, including the content and appeal of otherworldly faith, influenced outcomes and the durability of the religious impulse. In an argument relevant to those maintaining that the sacralization of politics filled a vacuum created by secularization, Froese hits hard against Durkheimian functionalism, arguing that the Marxist–Leninist architects of revolutionary rituals to replace religious rites shared with Durkheim the flawed notion that religious emotions were “detachable from their conceptual religious framework” (170). The multipronged Soviet attempt to maintain an exclusive ideological monopoly foundered, he argues, because it “ignored something that appears to be the singular unifying element of most worldviews . . . the idea of a caring God [and] a desire for a personal relationship with the supernatural” (186). However, by strip-mining Soviet history for material with which to test social-science postulates, rather than approaching religion and atheism under communism as one evolving component of a sometimes contradictory civilization in the making, Froese opens himself up to the very same critique leveled against the political-religion literature (about

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which he is blissfully unaware): that he extracts and simplifies one element of the ideology without grasping the complexity of the whole.5 This is ironic, because Froese rejects the notion that communism can be considered a religion. When the author notes that some scholars have called Marxism–Leninism a religion, he refers not to the mass of post-2000 politicalreligion scholarship but to a 1943 work by Joseph Schumpeter (203 n. 33). Froese goes on to argue against the application of “civil religion” to the Soviet case because “unlike any other civil religion, it did not infuse national culture with supernatural meaning” (16, see also 139). Here he tilts against applying a concept sidestepped by advocates of political religion themselves.6 Civil religion as applied by historians of the United States, for example, refers to applying the symbolic vocabulary of religion to practices of citizenship or the nation (when promoting, for example, reverence for the Constitution or the flag) in the context of the separation of church and state. The etatist, totalizing regimes of interwar Europe attempted far more: the forging of the “new man,” which had Christian antecedents but an Enlightenment genealogy.7 At this point the debates over the definition of religion within the concept of political religion become important. A number of scholars maintain that the “secular religions” of the twentieth century do not involve the transcendent, and that the use of “religion” in political religion is merely a heuristic device or metaphor.8 Others would maintain that communism, more than fascism, promised a form of salvation and that this was the key link between traditional religion, Christianity in particular, and Marxism or communism. As Tucker wrote in his study of Marx, “deeply embedded in Marxism is a theme that corresponds to the master-theme of salvation of the soul in the Christian theology of history. Marx, of course, does not use the word ‘salvation.’ Yet, he has the concept of a total regeneration of man.”9 Igal Halfin argued that Marxism shared with Christianity an eschatological master narrative, tempered by a return to a Gnostic Christian tradition of viewing knowledge as the key to salvation. But in a key distinction, he wrote, “Any comparison I suggest between Christianity and Marxism serves an analytical, not historical, function. My reference to biblical terms throughout is no more than a heuristic device intended to evoke the deep plot of the eschatological 5

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On this point see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995). Emilio Gentile, “Civil Religions and Political Religions,” chap. 2 of Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, 2006). Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, 2009), 302–44. Roberts, “Political Religion,” 390–92. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, 3rd edn (New Brunswick, 2001), 24.


master narrative.”10 The key issue for another recent scholar is that the ideology could mobilize “passions and zealotry among heretofore ‘average’ human beings” and generate atrocities in the name of a higher morality in a fashion “akin to religious sentiment at its most intense.”11 The question is thus whether religion in political religion is a heuristic device or something more, and whether the concept of political religion furthers our understanding of this twentieth-century zealotry and violence. Rather than maintaining that Marxism–Leninism cannot be considered a civil religion because it did not embrace the supernatural, Froese would have been on firmer ground arguing that the concept of political religion may not fully capture the specific, syncretic, and evolving thrust of the ideology, which incorporated large doses of utopianism and scientism but not spirituality. Froese is no position to launch that critique because he himself takes one part of Soviet ideology and conflates it with the whole. Party elites in the interwar period, he writes, did not wish merely to undermine traditional religious beliefs but to convert the population to a new belief system: scientific atheism. Several passages in the book demonstrate how he implicitly treats scientific atheism as the equivalent of the ideology as a whole (e.g. 6, 140). Froese has thoroughly researched Soviet antireligious policies and institutions, but like some of the comparativists of the political-religion school he does not display deep knowledge of the Soviet system.12 Notably, he discusses at length how propagandists of atheism failed to connect with their audiences, how they were not versed in the attractions of religion and made crude assumptions that poorly understood scientific nostrums would easily combat superstition.13 But there is almost no consideration of the particular attraction or plausibility of the regime’s ideology to significant portions of the population. At this point, in fact, he likens communist tactics to those of an extremist cult rather than a traditional religion: “By bullying and tricking their captives into worshipping them, Soviet elites sometimes succeeded in their goal of dominating the minds of their citizens”

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Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000), 42. Angela Kurtz, “God, Not Caesar: Revisiting National Socialism as ‘Political Religion,’” History of European Ideas 35 (2009), 236–52, quotations at 239–40. To give one example, Froese equates the resilience of religion to the surprising persistence of “nineteenth-century” national and ethnic identities despite all the reeducation and propaganda efforts of the Communist Party (162). For two decades scholars have discussed how the Soviet system in fact promoted and even created national identities. One of the first major statements in what is now the dominant approach was Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993). Here he draws effectively on Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998).

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(136). Without reference to evidence or chronology, he writes that “the Soviet system did not brainwash its citizenry but rather produced a population teeming with halfhearted loyalists and silent malcontents” (17). The pioneering work of Jochen Hellbeck on diaries during the Stalin era, the most significant and widely discussed exploration of how the grand historical transformation and intense collectivist ethos of the revolutionary society exerted a powerful pull on individuals attempting to transform themselves into “new people,” finds no place in his study.14 Bullying malcontents implies only top-down coercion, of which there is plenty in Soviet history. But leaving aside the ideological agents of the regime, of which there were also many, the appeal of participating in the creation of a new world, of carrying out heroic feats in a momentous historical transformation, of becoming “cultured” and enlightened, and joining the collective not only drew in loyalists but could even influence critics and victims. This world view hinging on collectivist historicism was novel and particular, something potentially not captured by the concept of political religion and still less by Froese. What portion of the Soviet population was affected by its allure remains a topic of considerable dispute, but its reach and nature cannot analyzed solely in terms of the flaws of the antireligious propaganda drive. “Secularization” was not the major way the Bolsheviks went about altering consciousness; that was called building socialism. Froese rightly underscores the exclusivity of Soviet ideology and the strength of the ideological conviction demonstrated by communism’s ultimate aim of eradicating religion. However, the specifics of the antireligious propaganda drive can only be understood in terms of the Bolshevik theory and practice of agitprop. Starting in the 1890s, well before the great-power propaganda revolution of World War I, revolutionary Russian Social Democrats elaborated their own distinctive system of mobilizing the population based on a hierarchical ladder of consciousness. Oral “agitation” was the lowest rung, while written propaganda would reach literate and therefore higher-up “elements” of society, and political enlightenment involved a course of study to become more initiated into the movement. The rarified realms of high theory and science, it was assumed, were for intellectuals and theoreticians. In the early Soviet “propaganda state,” different genres with their own styles and conventions were further elaborated within the context of this hierarchy. It was assumed, therefore, that different

14

Hellbeck produced a series of influential articles starting in the 1990s; his book, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006), describes successive “Enlightenment” and “Romantic” registers of Soviet ideological self-fashioning that are not easily shoehorned into the notion of political religion.


levels of the ideology would reach different audiences.15 Mass campaigns would employ a far different tone and logic than limited-circulation publications for elites or restricted access publications for the Party leadership. However, these distinctions were unstable and in periodic upsurges of ideological militancy the boundaries came under attack. During the frenzy of infighting and the assault on the non-Party intelligentsia of the Great Break at the end of the 1920s, for example, scholarship and theory came under pressure to adopt some of the style and conventions of agitprop.16 The basic fact that the Bolshevik intellectuals associated religion with backwardness and rural populations, however, consistently placed many branches of official atheism at the lowest end of the hierarchy. This explains much about the sporadic “campaign mode” in which atheist propaganda was disseminated, the poor qualifications of its bumbling cadres, and its mechanical, bureaucratic nature. It is intriguing to think about this hierarchy of consciousness at the heart of the communist approach to knowledge in tandem with the spatial, economic, and juridical hierarchies that much recent research finds at the heart of Soviet “socialist construction.” Large cities and key areas designated as “regime” spaces—purged of social and political “aliens” and far better supplied in the command economy—were in effect designated as bastions of socialism.17 In keeping with this long-standing sociopolitical and geographical pecking order, which was also linked to an ethnic hierarchy, Soviet data from the late 1960s found that “religious believers were overwhelmingly rural, illiterate, and unskilled” (124). Froese, who teaches at Baylor University, a Christian school affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, suggests at numerous points throughout the book that “humans have a natural religious instinct” (184, 128, passim) that is in part “biological or genetic” (185). He calls this a “largely” (yet apparently not completely) “untestable proposition” but insistently promotes his view that the Soviets’ resounding failure to secularize is the “best available test” of it (184). In

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Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917– 1929 (New York, 1985); David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932 (New York, 1961); Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, 1997). Michael David-Fox, “Science, Political Enlightenment and Agitprop: On the Typology of Social Knowledge in the Early Soviet Period,” Minerva, 34/4 (Winter 1996), 347–66. David Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932–1952,” Journal of Modern History 76 (Dec. 2004), 835–81; idem, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven, 2009), chap. 8; Kate Brown, “Out of Solitary Confinement: The History of the Gulag,” Kritika 8/1 (2007), 67–103, on internal zones see 80–88; T. S. Kondrat’eva and A. K. Sokolov, eds., Rezhimnye liudi v SSSR (Moscow, 2008).

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my reading, the book itself provides evidence that it was such a decisive a failure only in terms of the totalizing Bolshevik view that religion could be completely and rapidly eradicated. While all the available quantitative data are decidedly flawed, it is clear that larger numbers of people claimed to be atheists than in any other country, perhaps a fifth or more in 1970; the same late 1960s survey in Voronezh showed a relatively low level of religious believers (22 percent, 124). However, despite decades of effort and ideological monopoly it is also clear that significant numbers of believers remained. One of the most interesting dimensions of Froese’s study is that he considers not only Orthodoxy but Catholicism, Islam, and sectarianism and the interrelationships among them. For example, in Lithuania as it was sovietized after World War II Catholicism became associated with national resistance and, with help from the international church, remained the only relatively autonomous institution in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic (88). By contrast, Islam was especially well adapted to go underground, and in Central Asia the Party fused with Islamic tribal structures. Strikingly, Muslim identity remained strong even among those who publicly professed atheism (111). Less convincingly than these arguments about differentiation, Froese takes the large-scale religious revival after the fall of communism as clinching the argument about decisive Soviet failure. If, again, one considers the broader context of ideology as a whole, the late Soviet decline of ideological fervor and post-Soviet inversions of communist ideological norms make extrapolating backwards a perilous enterprise. If one were able to differentiate socially and geographically over time in the same way that Froese does by national and religious groups, one would surely find disparities between the bastions of socialism and the rest of the country. Inevitably, science intrudes into Froese’s discussion on several occasions. He finds that the low-prestige academic discipline of “scientific atheism” produced little research and few students (131). In atheist universities, scientific findings were “presented as correct or incorrect” based on their “supposed ideological positions” (59), while poorly informed antireligious propagandists invoked science while applying “no actual scientific methods to demonstrate their antireligious assertions” (132). In other words, scientific atheism became a faith; science in Froese’s discussion is simply a cover for ideology. By the absence of scientific methods, he means that “the science of Marxism–Leninism did not include what one normally thinks of as science—the rigorous testing of hypotheses using empirical data” (68). This recalls the notion of the sacralization of science invoked by the theorists of political religion, but several objections arise. First, antireligious propaganda was not science per se. Rather, it was a frequently clumsy and heavy-handed effort to popularize science which, as a broader effort, did have notable effects, although predictably they were much


more tenuous in rural areas.18 Faith in science, sometimes dubbed scientism, has also been commonplace in modern Western countries; it neither undermines the importance of science in Soviet history nor proves the persistence of some sort of religious phenomenon.19 Finally, social historians of science have for decades shown the importance of extrascientific and ideological beliefs in the development of science. The leading historian of Soviet science, Loren R. Graham, has repeatedly attempted to show how serious engagement with Marxist–Leninist philosophy on the part of scientists inspired valuable and lasting work in fields including physics and psychology.20 If, once again, one does not conflate the propaganda of scientific atheism with the many-leveled phenomenon of Marxism–Leninism as a whole, then the centrality of science to the Soviet mission and the complexity of the relationship between science and ideology are less easy to dismiss. This proposition is resoundingly demonstrated by Ethan Pollock’s Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Pollock mirrors Froese’s statement about the uniqueness of the Soviet case: “the USSR went further than any previous state in placing support of science at the center of its stated purpose” (3). But instead of the sociologist Froese’s sweeping treatment of the whole Soviet era, Pollock delves deep into postwar Stalinism; instead of using historical material to test big assumptions, the historian Pollock inductively amasses a wealth of detail to support a few generalizations. At the heart of Pollock’s elegant and focused study are six postwar public “discussions” in philosophy, biology, physics, linguistics, physiology, and political economy. Pollock’s approach is to analyze in rich detail the archival paper trail behind each discussion, highlighting Stalin’s personal role as only one, albeit decisive, factor in shaping the results. The sheer scale of these discussions, involving thousands of leading scholars and apparatchiki, in many cases massive press coverage for mass audiences, the reordering of entire disciplines, and, not least, Stalin’s own extensive involvement even as key Cold War international crises unfolded, underscores the high importance both ideology and science assumed in Stalin’s time. Pollock wishes to avoid taking Trofim Lysenko’s triumph in the 1948 biology discussion as paradigmatic for the rest. Examining each disciplinary case in detail does convincingly reveal that the discussions were interconnected, that

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James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934 (College Station, TX, 2003). Roberts, “Political Religion,” 408. Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York, 1972), enlarged as Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York, 1987); see also Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, 1998).

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actors were very much aware of precedents, but there was no dominant model. Establishing this allows Pollock to stand back and speak about important commonalities among them all. For example, the basic purpose of the discussions was to reverse the unusual autonomy that scientists enjoyed during the all-out crisis of World War II, to reestablish Party discipline, and to finalize what Stalin in particular viewed as the harmony of Marxist–Leninist ideology and science. Clearly, as well, the incipient Cold War was crucial: the Russocentrism and antioccidentalism that came to the fore during the late Stalin period was manifested with particular force in science, as international contacts and theories became suspect and academic politics revolved around codifying orthodox readings of Russian scientific icons such as Ivan Pavlov. Anti-cosmopolitanism became another common factor, involving both ideological xenophobia and a novel component of official anti-Semitism. Domestic high politics was intimately involved, as rivals among Stalin’s lieutenants, notably Andrei Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov, and Lavrentii Beria, jockeyed to retain the dictator’s favor and protect their own bailiwicks. Stalin’s personal interventions and the Stalin cult, which dictated that the leader’s revealed opinions (or guesses as to what those might be) trumped everything else, are in almost all the discussions shown to have had decisive import. Stalin’s interventions could be drastic and public: in linguistics, he in one stroke destroyed the dominant (and stridently Marxist) theories of academician Nikolai Marr, whom everyone had assumed would be the equivalent of “patriotic” authorities Pavlov and Michurin; in biology, he decisively endorsed Lysenko and edited his texts. Stalin’s involvement could be kept behind the scenes, as when he gave repeated tongue-lashings to the country’s top economists, mocking their attempts to compose an authoritative textbook on political economy. But in that case, he chose not to put his thumb on the scale during an endless and frustratingly inconclusive 1951 Central Committee discussion. Because Stalin is so central to the book, Pollock could have done more to trace his world view, particularly his approach to ideology and science, beyond the immediate context of the postwar period.21 But no one reading this book can come away thinking that Stalin did not take the ideas of Marxism–Leninism seriously: “His memos and top secret documents are saturated with the same Marxist–Leninist language, categories, and frames for understanding the world that appeared in the public discourse” (3). At the same time, the seriousness with which Stalin took science was to him also connected with ideology: Stalin was “determined,” at times “even 21

As other historians have done with great success: see, for example, Erik van Ree, “Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character,” Kritika 8/1 (Winter 2007), 41–65; Alfred J. Rieber, “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,” American Historical Review 106/5 (2001), 1651–91.


desperate,” to show the scientific basis of Soviet Marxism and to reconcile the doctrine with scientific thought (3). Much of the utility of Pollock’s work stems from its ability to consider each scientific discussion as a complex event in which Stalin’s interventions were but one of a range of factors determining outcomes. These factors included the disciplinary histories and configurations of each field; the personal, scientific, and ideological issues at stake; and the strategies and approaches of scientific and political actors at the discussions themselves. “Each discussion,” he concludes, “included a painful, dangerous, and sometimes imaginative search for acceptable ways of presenting a worldview that was compatible with both canonical texts and scientific discoveries” (213). Despite the common themes that the discussions illustrate, their practical outcomes were in fact wildly different, confusing actors about their ultimate implications and highlighting the contradictions of late Stalinism. Lysenko triumphed in biology, whereas the conference in theoretical physics was canceled in part, Pollock adroitly suggests in his intervention into a long controversial subject, because of fears it would hamper the Soviet atomic bomb project, then at a crucial stage. The “atomic shield” protecting quantum physics from those pushing to make it the equivalent of the now-verboten genetics was, however, not the only factor at play: so was the fact that a conference would not settle scientific–ideological controversy, which was the purpose behind the discussions, but only exacerbate it (91). “Leave them in peace,” Stalin supposedly told Beria, who was in charge of the bomb project, “we can always shoot them later” (91). By the same token, Stalin enabled Lysenko to triumph because he genuinely believed that the agronomist was correct scientifically and that the “future belonged to Michurin” (the Russian breeder of fruit plants Lysenko claimed as the founder of a neo-Lamarkian Soviet biology), as the dictator told the “people’s scientist” in a personal letter from 1947 (48). Stalin’s editorial changes to Lysenko’s landmark published speech at the Agricultural Academy in 1948 replaced the text’s older notions of class-based (proletarian and bourgeois) science to give it a more universalist, objectivist feel.22 “Stalin’s comments show that he was engaged in the actual substance of the debate and felt himself enough of an expert to school Lysenko,” Pollock observes (52). In general, Stalin’s willingness to rebuke and instruct leading scholars and scientists across so many disciplines demonstrated an astonishing degree of arrogance. But, Pollock argues, most readers of Pravda were unaware of Lysenko’s errors and understood the affair as a celebration of science. Lysenko’s triumph, now notorious, ironically signaled the rising prestige of science in the USSR at the time (71). 22

On all Stalin’s editorial changes see Kirill O. Rossianov, “Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the ‘New’ Soviet Biology,” Isis 84/4 (Dec. 1993), 728–45.

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Where, then, did ideology end and science begin? Pollock’s study suggests that in some respects they were so closely intertwined that they cannot be disaggregated, but in others they were distinguishable not just to scientists, but to contemporary Party and state officials (216). One long-standing division was between the natural sciences and the Marxist social sciences. When Lysenko wrote that “any science is class-oriented in nature,” Stalin wrote in the margins, “HaHa-Ha!!! And what about Mathematics? And Darwinism?” (57). The relationship between Marxism-as-science and the Soviet natural sciences is an exceedingly complex issue, and far more attention to its development beyond the immediate postwar discussions, starting with efforts to “proletarianize” natural science in the 1920s, would be needed to clarify it. For example, Stalin’s marginalia against proletarian science in this period appear as an homage to Lenin, who in the early 1920s ridiculed the theoreticians of the proletarian culture movement.23 One of Pollock’s main conclusions is that the postwar discussions underlined the objective nature of science—what he calls a “new hybrid of Russocentrism and objectivity” (134)—and that this paved the way for thaw-era claims for more autonomous science and the eventual clash between science and ideology. A major theoretical step toward establishing the objective status of science was Stalin’s famous thesis in his pamphlet on linguistics: destroying the class-based theories of Marr, the dictator declared that language was neither part of the base nor the superstructure. Strengthening the objectivist credentials of science was also closely connected to the question of genres that Froese neglected in the case of scientific atheism. In the first, philosophical, discussion of 1946, Stalin berated leading philosopher and political figure Georgii Aleksandrov for his dry, academic, and nonmilitant tone. He specifically invoked Lenin, who as early as his 1908 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism had developed what some have jokingly called the “quote-and-club” method of polemic against bourgeois and reactionary science. By contrast, in the linguistics and political economy discussions of 1950 and 1951, Stalin was equally adamant that scientific debate be open and at least in appearance not subject to predetermined conclusions; he condemned disciplinary mini-dictators in scientific fields. In direct contrast to his earlier advocacy of a militant tone, he berated the political economists for their propagandistic popularizing, which one economist then termed the “shrieking and vulgar style of cheap, political agitation” (182–3, 196). In the book’s conclusion, Pollock implicitly acknowledges that we are dealing with two subperiods: in the immediate postwar years, Stalin was attempting to “integrate all thought into Soviet ideology,” but after 1949 he turned toward reinforcing

23

V. V. Gorbunov, V. I. Lenin i Proletkul’t (Moscow, 1974).


objective knowledge. Implicitly and tentatively, science was being established “as a subject beyond the Party’s ideological reach” (221). As in the case of Froese, a broader grasp of the development of the Soviet system as a whole could clarify this issue. The Soviet system evolved in cycles of militant attack and retrenchment, crackdown and thaw, stagnation and reform. The conflict between “reds” and “experts” is one of the great themes of Soviet history and was closely connected to these cycles. Periods of ideological militancy tended not only to inject the conventions of propagandistic genres into science but to empower understandings of knowledge as determined by class (“proletarian culture” and “proletarian science”) or the Party (science as political “weapon”). When ideologues were reigned in, as in 1931–2, the authority of specialists was bolstered and more objectivistic theories of knowledge could come to the fore. Pollock’s focused postwar study cannot capture or dissect the cyclical quality to these alternations.24 But even the ideological crackdown of the immediate postwar years, the so-called Zhdanov period, was followed after Zhdanov’s decline in 1947 and death in 1948 by the ascendance of a technocratic faction led by the previously embattled Malenkov.25 Integrating these cycles into our conception of Stalinism remains a challenge, as is interpreting their shifting parameters and their ramifications across politics, culture, and science. What, then, about religion? There was a bitter irony in Stalin’s demands for free and nondogmatic academic debate during the very apogee of the Stalin cult, when the venerated leader was hailed ecstatically as the “coryphaeus” of science. The dictator’s instantaneously canonized interventions calling for scientific debate led inevitably to its further restriction. To Pollock, this is a key paradox of science and ideology under Stalin, but he sometimes has to resort to religious terminology to explain it. His analogy for the vision of the political-economy textbook was a “Soviet New Testament” to supersede the Marxist bible for the age of socialism; Lysenko, whose chief goal was to annihilate his scholarly rivals, is dubbed a “zealot” (187, 59). But even these analogies are rare. Whether it goes under the rubric of political religion, political culture, or something else, more attention to the workings of veneration in the Stalin cult on various levels could amplify Pollock’s already illuminating study. Stalin’s role as absolute arbiter of ideological–scientific controversies derived from fearsome political power and the logic of Marxism–Leninism, but also not least from the quasi-sacred aura that enveloped him in the cult. Even so, one earnest schoolteacher, certain that Stalin’s call for free and creative scientific debate meant that the leader would welcome criticisms of his own works, went so far as to explain to Stalin: “amicus 24 25

Here see Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997). On divisions between “technicists” and “revivalists,” see David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia (Oxford, 2007).

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Plato, sed magis amicus veritas” (Plato is dear, but the truth is dearer) (129–30). As such reactions suggest, there were obvious tensions between Stalin the demigod and Stalin the scientist. Science and faith were both integral to Bolshevism and Stalinism. Sometimes they worked in tandem; sometimes they clashed. This discussion has tried to suggest that there were significant contradictory tendencies within what we conventionally yet simplistically label Stalinism, just as there were radically different subperiods within the Stalin period. Juxtaposing these two stimulating works suggests that probing science, ideology, and religion (or phenomena associated with it) at once and in tandem is a necessary next step in the Soviet field, for as a conceptual move it can avoid the pitfall of smoothing out those contradictions. Faith, science, and ideology were all pillars of that particular “sense of mission” set in motion by the Bolshevik Revolution. No discussion of Soviet faith can be convincing or complete if it does not give sufficient weight to science.



sartre, multidirectional memory, and the holocaust in the age of decolonization jonathan judaken Department of History, University of Memphis Email: [email protected]

Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London and New York: Verso, 2010) Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) Jacques Derrida’s memorial reflections on the impact of Sartre’s journal Les temps modernes in shaping his generation’s projects highlighted the legend of the courier from Marathon who died while running to deliver his message of victory to the Athenians.1 Sartre alluded to the fable in his manifesto for engaged writing. “It’s a beautiful myth,” Sartre wrote in his précis for the politics of commitment, for it shows that for a little while longer the dead act as if they were living. A little while—one year, ten years, maybe even fifty . . . and then they’re buried a second time. This is the standard we offer for the writer: as long as his books provoke anger, embarrassment, shame, hatred, love . . . he shall live!2

This moment in Sartre’s text captured Derrida’s attention for he sought to point out that political involvement often has effects that are deferred. It is these detours of memory—signals and signatures from a once-buried moment that

1

2

J. Derrida, “‘Il courait mort’: Salut, salut: Notes pour un courier aux Temps modernes,” Les temps modernes 587 (March–May 1996). J.-P. Sartre, “Ecrire pour son e´ poque,” Les temps modernes 33 (June 1948), 2113–21, part of which is reprinted as “We Write for Our Own Time,” in The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2, Selected Prose, ed. M. Contat and M. Rybalka, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL, 1974), 178.

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ramify politically anew in different contexts3 —that are wound into the complex circuitry of what Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memory.” And it is the signature of Sartre, whose anticolonial provocations remain prescient and provocative, that enable us to link these two books that are united by the word “decolonization” in their subtitles. Each tome is a touchstone for new openings at the intersection of postwar French intellectual history, postcolonial theory, and critical race and Holocaust studies. Both books ask us to reconsider racism and empire; memory, alterity, and history; temporality and trauma; identity both individual and collective; and the singularity versus the generalizability of instances of oppression and calls for liberation. Each beckons us to do so in light of the unfinished project of coming to terms with Europe’s colonial legacy in a globalized world.

∗∗∗ In his lively and thought-provoking overview of Sartre’s oeuvre, BernardHenri Lévy suggested that Sartre was the anti-ambassador to the Third World.4 Sartre’s sustained engagement with the Arab–Israeli conflict, the negritude writers and their journal Présence Africaine, anticolonialism in Indochina and later Vietnam, the French–Algerian war, Cuba, the Congo, and his final years of political activism involving immigrant Africans in France, show that he merits the epithet. Nourredine Lamouchi’s groundbreaking thèse published as JeanPaul Sartre et le tiers monde documented and evaluated these interventions.5 Paige Arthur provides the first English-language monograph detailing the links between Sartre’s philosophical work and his anticolonialist stance. In doing so, 3

4

5

On how texts and concepts “ramify” see P. E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 3–4. B.-H. Lévy, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge, 2003), 21. As is often the case, Lévy borrows the idea unacknowledged, in this case from A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 1905–1980 (Paris, 1999), 654–93. While Arthur copiously cites Lévy’s book even as she overlooks much other Sartrean scholarship, I think she misses, as have others, the real insight of Lévy’s take on Sartre, which is to insist that there were two Sartres. Sartre is Janus-faced, Lévy argued, a Jekyll-and-Hyde schizo-character: the antihumanist, libertarian, individualist, antimetaphysical, dystopian, pessimistic, existentialist Sartre and the humanist, communitarian, metaphysical, utopian, optimistic, Marxist Sartre are two souls that share the same body of works. This complicates a persistent debate in Sartrean scholarship about whether there was a Kehre in his thought between an earlier existentialist and later Marxist stance. For an alternate reading of Lévy’s text see J. Judaken, H-France Review 6/59 (May 2006), available at http://hfrance.net/vol6reviews/judaken3.html. N. Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde: Rhétorique d’un discours anticolonialiste (Paris, 1996).

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she complements the belatedly translated volume of Situations V (Colonialism and Neocolonialism), the fire and brimstone of Sartre’s decolonizing vision.6 Arthur’s book nuances Lamouchi in critical respects. For instance, she faults his periodization of Sartre’s anticolonialism for following too closely the bible of Sartre scholars, Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka’s The Writings of Sartre, rather than tracking closely the links between Sartre’s interventions and those being written by other authors in Les temps modernes.7 We learn from Arthur, for example, that between 1945 and 1951 alone, Les temps modernes had already published thirty-one articles on colonialism and seven others related to the theme. Alongside her deft exposition of Sartrean works in light of his anticolonialism, Arthur’s thoroughgoing immersion in Les temps modernes as the key means for advancing his political agenda is one of the merits of her study. But the key challenge of her work is the striking disparity she notes between Sartre’s pivotal role in Third World liberation movements, at least in the orbit of the European cultural imagination, and the dearth of work in the AngloAmerican- and South Asian-dominated (i.e. English-language) discourse of postcolonial studies. Announcing yet another unfinished project left to be taken up by others, Arthur ends her study on this note: This absence is remarkable for four reasons which would seem to make Sartre pertinent: the radical anti-essentialism of Sartre’s philosophy; his direct relationship with (and sometimes influence on) foundational thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, and foundational institutions such as Présence Africaine; his attempt, like that of so many in the field of postcolonial studies, to theorize individual agency in some productive relationship with Marxism; and the fact that he was, at one time, the world’s most famous intellectual supporter of movements in the non-European world.8

Indeed, for those few who have not passed over Sartre’s seminal contributions to these concerns in silence, he has even been dubbed “an African Philosopher.”9 6

7 8

9

Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. A. Haddour, S. Brewer, and T. McWilliams (London and New York, 2001). Arthur, Unfinished Projects, 49–50. Ibid., 228. There are some exceptions to this silence on Sartre and postcolonialism. See, for example, J. Judaken, ed., Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Albany, 2008). It is odd to note that while Arthur’s chap. 10, “Sartre, the Left, and Identity in Postcolonial France,” was first published as a chapter in this work, she makes no reference to the important contributions of others in the volume even when their work bears directly on her own. So to mention only one glaring example among many, there is no discussion of Judith Butler’s important essay “Violence/Non-violence,” which squarely focuses on Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth even though the latter is discussed at length by Arthur. Arthur, Unfinished Projects, xvi. See V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, 1988) who titled the section of his

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While Sartre offered no overarching tract on the subject, the signposts of the roads to freedom he walked alongside anticolonial theorists clearly ought to mark out a central place in postcolonial theory for his work, including on the important theme of rethinking the interplay between cultural identities and social structures. Arthur’s book begins with this problematic. She asks what constituted the shift in the meaning of the “Other” from an interpersonal relationship to an intercultural dyad. In other words, when and how did the problem of the cultural “Other” take hold and does it make sense even to formulate intercultural relations in these terms? Writing in the wake of post-structuralism, this conundrum has been a central preoccupation for this generation of intellectual historians, especially those we might refer to as the California school of intellectual history.10 Arthur suggests that the tipping point for referencing an intercultural Other was the convergence of two intersecting trends: first, the impact of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity on figures like Jacques Derrida, the nouveaux Philosophes, and Tzvetan Todorov, whose 1982 work The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other “was one of the first major publications to have the word ‘Other’—defined as the cultural Other—in its title.”11 Second, there was the turn by the left toward human rights and a new universalism. Arthur reads this concern back into Sartre’s thought, posing as a problem how “[could] a methodological individualist like Sartre, who granted no ontological status to

10

11

book on Sartre “J-P. Sartre as an African Philosopher.” Robert J. C. Young picked up on this designation in his preface to Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism. Young is among the rare postcolonial commentators to take Sartre’s work as central, for example in his critical chapter “Sartre’s Extravagances” in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York, 1990), and in his mammoth Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001). See also Cohen-Solal’s chapter “Prophète du tiers-monde et penseur du post-colonialisme” in Sartre: Un penseur pour le XXIe siècle (Paris, 2005), as well as Lewis Gordon’s reflections on “Sartre and Black Existentialism” in Judaken, Race after Sartre, 158. Gordon’s chapter serves as a guidebook for all interested in further work on the topic of Sartre and Africana existentialism, an emerging area of Sartre scholarship. To cite only a few explicit examples, see S. Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, 2005) and J. Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln, 2006). This question is also buried in other works of the California school of intellectual history preoccupied by Heidegger’s Jewish question like E. Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosphy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, 2005) and P. E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, 2003). The Jewish Question underlies as well E. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, MA, 2006) The general question of the ethical relation to the Other in French thought is central to J. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal and Kingston, 2007). Arthur, Unfinished Projects, xxvi.


groups, recognize and account for collective identities?”12 She then correlates this development with Sartre’s politicization in the postwar period. In doing so, she repeats the oft-cited claim that Sartre’s experience during World War II marked his turn toward politics. But what is more distinctive is her repetition of Sonia Kruk’s original contention that Simone de Beauvoir and specifically The Second Sex (1949) “must be credited with criticizing Sartre’s notion of the absolute freedom of consciousness and his eventual turn toward a concern with collectivities.”13 Both sides of this argument, however, are uncompelling. Sartre was never the “methodological individualist” that Arthur contends he was. Already in Being and Nothingness, Sartre had acknowledged that freedom was constrained.14 The whole second half of his magnum opus is a phenomenological ontology of “being-for-others” where this is not only described in terms of a dialectic of the gaze between two individuals. Indeed, the outline of Sartre’s broader social theory was already intimated in his conception of “the situation.”15 Arthur even cites passages that make this evident. Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness, for example, The primary fact is that the member of the oppressed collectivity, who as a simple person is engaged in fundamental conflicts with other members of this collectivity (love, hate, rivalry of interests, etc.), apprehends his condition and that of other members of this collectivity as looked-at and thought about by consciousnesses which escape him.16

Before World War II, in short stories like “The Wall” (set in the Spanish Civil War), then most emphatically in his underappreciated “The Childhood of a Leader” (about a young boy who becomes involved with the rabidly anti-Semitic Camelots du roi, the shock troops of the extreme-right Action Française), Sartre had set these situations in fictional form. He did so in ways that clearly indicated his politicization in the midst of the rise of fascism and by responding to the widespread negative representations of Jews and Judaism in the late 1930s.17 In his postwar play The Respectful Prostitute (1946), whose plot was loosely based on the events of the 1931 Scottsboro Trial, Sartre once more dramatized group formation in terms of a racialized Other.18 Arthur also recognizes that The Notebooks for 12 13 14

15 16 17

18

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 16. Arthur’s first chapter is titled “Putting Constraints on Freedom: A Philosophy of Marginal Groups.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York, 1956), 619–707. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 544. Arthur, Unfinished Projects, 26. For a detailed development of this argument, see Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, chap. 1. See S. Martinot, “Skin for Sale: Race and The Respectful Prostitute” in Judaken, Race After Sartre, 55–76.

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an Ethics, his posthumously published work from 1947 to 1948, “demonstrate[s] that Sartre was at the very least aware of the ethnocentric bias of the Hegelian dialectic, and they also show him using the word ‘Other’ in a collective sense.”19 This is patently clear in “Black Orpheus,” his famous preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue fran¸caise (Anthology of African and West Indian Poets Writing in French, 1948), which served to introduce the negritude writers to the world. Consequently, contra Arthur and Kruks, Sartre had long been developing a vocabulary for discussing the relationship between freedom and oppression, individuality and collectivity in terms of an existential analytic of the dialectic of the gaze worked out philosophically both for the individual and within a broader social ontology. He had done so in his philosophy, but also in some of his literature and plays, which are snippets from life in which group identity is key. All this preceded Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This claim is in no way to undermine the massive influence Beauvoir had on the development of Sartre’s thought. Certainly Sartre refined and nuanced his understanding of collectivities and alterity, racism and colonialism over time. Surely he learned from Beauvoir’s The Second Sex about some of the limits of his earlier social theory. But Sartre’s existential analysis did not entail “contradictory argumentation,” or necessitate the integration of a “social theory that seems incompatible with existentialism,” even if there are “certain tensions both in Sartre’s thinking and in the discourse available to describe collective phenomena (and, in particular, the relationships Europeans have with non-Europeans).”20 Arthur’s book takes us through Sartre’s postwar engagements with nonEuropeans in four periods that make up the four parts of Unfinished Projects: his ostensible politicization from 1945 to 1954; his most developed theoretical account of colonialism in the years from 1954 to 1962 within the contours of his “verbose, heavy, and shapeless book,” as one critic described the Critique of Dialectical Reason; his turn toward Third Worldism between 1962 and 1968; and Sartre’s irredentist stance in the context of the post-1968 shift toward human rights and the critique of Third Worldism by many within the socialist orbit in the aftermath of the bloody and often dictatorial outcomes of wars of national liberation.21

19 20

21

Arthur, Unfinished Projects, 28. Ibid., 21–2. In fact, one might consider the extent to which these are built into the logic of generalization and the structure of language, not to mention the differences between the theoretical purview on the individual and on collectivities. On this last phase see Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010).


In thus periodizing Sartre, his interventions within the contingent circumstances of colonial history are integrated into his overarching philosophical concerns. In some of the best moments of the book, these are interrelated with other positions in the intellectual field, sometimes through reanimating the debates Sartre’s work engendered. A good case in point is how Arthur balances the damning response to the Critique by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind with the counterweight provided by the now less well-known political anthropologist Georges Balandier, a rival of Levi-Strauss, whose Third Worldism was significantly influenced by Sartre.22 Valuable also are Arthur’s quick reception histories of works like Situation V or her detailed overview of how the Critique was assessed at the time of its publication.23 Among other insights along the way, Arthur complicates our understanding of Sartre’s famous preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. She insists upon rereading it as the polemic it was, written at a heated moment in the French–Algerian conflict. The Fanon preface was tempered by Sartre’s more sophisticated assessment of revolutionary violence in the face of the systemic violence of colonialism in the Critique and elsewhere. This is important given that the Fanon preface is often held up as the definitive statement by Sartre on revolutionary violence, which is a claim that Arthur shows does not hold water.24 Further, Sartre’s appraisal of the US war in Vietnam and his support for Che-style guerrilla warfare in the Third World is complicated by Arthur’s summation and commentary on Sartre’s “ethics of global responsibility” in his little-known 1964 “Rome Lecture,” which is still an underexplored frontier for Sartrelogues. The upshot of Arthur’s book is that in our own post-Cold War, postcolonial, and supposedly postracial world, Sartre’s insights continue to provide philosophical resources to trouble the somnambulant conscience of the neocolonial, neoliberal world order. As such, like the Marathon messenger upon whom he commented, Sartre remains alive as a still irrepressible memory.

∗∗∗ Michael Rothberg’s book, like Arthur’s, has a lucidity that is often lacking in works grappling with new theoretical terrain. As his title lays bare, his project is

22

23 24

For an account of this debate as a key moment in the shift from existentialism to structuralism as the vanguard in French philosophy see A. D. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosphy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Oxford, 2006), 47; and F. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2 vols., trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis, 1997), 1: 7. Arthur, Unfinished Projects, 94 n. 39 and 96–102. This more nuanced view is evident in the title of R. E. Santoni, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent (University Park, PA, 2003).

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to rethink collective memory multidirectionally and transnationally, specifically when it comes to the Holocaust in our postcolonial era. This entails rethinking history and memory in nonlinear terms, and ultimately reevaluating what JeanFrançois Lyotard called “the politicization of memory” in the “memorialization of the past.”25 Rather than think of memory via the model of the tree, grounded with evident roots and branches, Rothberg’s approach to memory is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call in A Thousand Plateaus “rhizomic,” shooting in many directions, with memory-like weeds often popping up unexpectedly, disrupting easy systems for the ordering of the collective past. Rothberg’s reexamination of collective memory is related to group identity. Akin to what Arthur suggests about how we conceptualize collectivities, the result is that he problematizes any homogenizing uniformity of group constitution or monolithic version of “collective memory.” Central to his project is his interest in undoing the way the memory of victimization and oppression is often discussed in the public sphere competitively—as a zero-sum game. As if comparing the mass murder in the Congo to the Holocaust, for example, necessarily dilutes the uniqueness of each event. Or, worse, that comparative frames inherently banalize or instrumentalize, as guardians of Holocaust memory sometimes claim. Multidirectional Memory consequently makes the case for “‘decolonized’ Holocaust memory” that is capable of addressing the “shared histories of racism, spatial segregation, genocide, diasporic displacement, [and] cultural destruction.”26 To do so is to appreciate that the singularity of events is the necessary basis upon which any comparison can be made. To this end, Rothberg gathers together an archive of texts written primarily in the immediate post-Holocaust period where one finds a sensitivity to multiple registers of memory in books often “located at the intersection of discourses that coexist uneasily.”27 Their point of intersection is found in their linkage of the Holocaust to colonialism and anti-Semitism to racism. As such, Multidirectional Memory brings “together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time in a book-length work.”28 Opening with his theoretical Introduction, Rothberg emphasizes memory’s inherent relationality: how it undulates through modes of perception often in uncanny ways, which means that it necessarily produces ripple effects. This is evident even in Rothberg’s own mode of writing, which traverses from one textual or theoretical object of analysis to another. He thickens his speculative points as 25

26 27 28

J.-F. Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. A. Michel and M. S. Roberts (Minneapolis, 1990). Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 22, 23. Ibid., 118, 73. Ibid., xiii.


he moves along. So, for example, Rothberg’s discussion of Hannah Arendt’s reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in her Origins of Totalitarianism discussed in chapter 2 is resumed in his analysis of Aimé Cesaire’s invocation of Hitlerism in Discourse on Colonialism in chapter 3. Rothberg shows that the trope of the choc en retour, the boomerang effect between the Holocaust and colonialism, was a figure of thought that marked both texts. He then takes this a step further by turning his analysis of Césaire on his reading of Arendt and vice versa. First, Rothberg considers how Arendt recapitulates the primitivism that Conrad applied to Africans. Then he shows how exactly these stereotypes were squarely in Césaire’s crosshairs. But at the same time, he assesses the limits in Césaire’s account of the genocide of European Jewry in an Arendtian vein. A further ripple is a section on how Césaire and Frantz Fanon bear upon trauma studies influenced by the work of Cathy Caruth. Caruth has been criticized by postcolonial theorists, Rothberg tells us, for her “‘accident’-based model of trauma” that assumes the circumstances of white, Western privilege, and for downplaying the “everyday, repeated forms of traumatizing violence.”29 Each ripple furthers the call in Multidirectional Memory for “a comparative theory that would track the interconnectedness of different perpetrators and different victims in overlapping, yet distinct, scenarios of extreme violence.”30 None of the texts Rothberg draws upon for resources to develop his arguments are without their weaknesses, however. In the case of Césaire and Fanon, each is faulted for adhering to a universalist metanarrative derived from Marxism that fails to account for Jewish particularity. The irony here for those familiar with Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” essay in Black Skin, White Masks will be evident: this is precisely what Fanon had claimed about Sartre’s lack of understanding about the lived experience of blackness. One of the most intriguing assertions Rothberg makes about multidirectionality is that it is “not simply a terminological shift” but that the “move from universalism to multidirectionality has serious implications for the ethics and politics of memory.”31 For it deconstructs the binary logic of universalism, and pries apart “the too-easy collapse of the transnational, the global, and the comparative into the universal.” Parsing these tensions sensitively along multidirectional lines, Rothberg maintains, leads to a cosmopolitan and progressive position. “A more heterogeneous understanding of moral action” results, he claims, “that recognizes the importance of comparison and generalization while resisting too-easy universalization [which] may not produce

29 30 31

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 263.

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a global moral code, but may produce the grounds for new transnational visions of justice and solidarity.”32 As he develops these points, Rothberg offers a set of important new readings of classic texts, provocatively rethought around his thematic. But he also includes reflections on less well-known works, including interpretations of paintings like Boris Taslitzky’s Riposte and André Fougeron’s Atlantic Civilization; minor but nonetheless remarkable prose pieces like W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” which “rethinks the color line from the ruins of Warsaw” (chapter 4); uncelebrated novels like André Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude discussed alongside contemporary Caribbean British novelist and travel writer Caryl Phillips (chapter 5); experimental films like the documentary Chronicle of a Summer (chapter 6) and Caché (chapter 9); as well as the documentary-style prose that serves as a form of “counterpublic witness” in Charlotte Delbo’s Les belles lettres (chapter 7).33 This blurring of genres, national contexts, periods, and types of witness is in keeping with Rothberg’s “methodology of putting into question taken-for-granted assumptions about which fields and authors belong together and which do not.”34 In thus linking the Holocaust and European colonialism, Rothberg carves a niche subfield that might be called “post-memory studies” located at the intersection of post-Holocaust and postcolonial studies.35 Ultimately, Multidirectional Memory makes its theoretical points by establishing a pantheon of theorists and textual moments that suggest the arguments that Rothberg then develops. His work serves as a manifesto for others to add to the new archive that he has built to house post-memory studies. His chapter on Du Bois elegantly serves to illustrate the methodology. In 1949, Du Bois wrote his relatively unknown and brief article in Jewish Life, a Communist Party journal. It was about the utter devastation that he witnessed when he visited Warsaw, site of the iconic struggle of Jewish resistance, now a wasteland of ruin, Jewish life eviscerated. Through rescuing this source and elevating its significance, Rothberg is able to walk a line “across a series of overlapping spaces: that of cold war America, that of the Left and, in particular, the Jewish Left, and that of African American and African diaspora experience in an era of segregation at home and decolonization abroad.”36

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36

Ibid., 265. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 136. Marianne Hirsch first used the term “postmemory” in an unhyphenated form to discuss the specific relation of children to the traumatic events experienced by their parents. Multidirectional Memory significantly expands the contours of what might be termed “post-memory” in its hyphenated form. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 121.


Du Bois in exile from Jim Crow America testified to how the desolation of Warsaw forced him to rethink the color line, bearing witness to “legalized segregation as part of a shared logic of biopower.”37 Du Bois’s account, according to Rothberg, was also attuned better than either Césaire’s or Arendt’s thought to the differences between Europe and America. Developing this contention, the Du Boisian category of “double consciousness” is then generalized by Rothberg, as no longer only a condition of African American life or even Jewish life in Europe. It becomes “a conceptual, discursive, and aesthetic structure through which the conditions of minority life are given shape in order to ground acts of resistance to the biopolitical order.”38 From his close reading of this minor essay, then, Rothberg teases out the whole nexus of concerns he raises in Multidirectional Memory: “multiple categories and experiences [that] collide and coexist: histories of slavery, colonialism, and genocide; the politics of the cold war; extreme and everyday forms of violence; the marginal cultural identities of European Jews and American blacks; the aesthetics of exile and resistance.”39 There is clearly a powerful ethical, political, and hermeneutic insight in such work. But what are the epistemological limits of multidirectional memory? Rothberg acknowledges that his approach requires “a certain bracketing of empirical history.” If all of the comparisons Rothberg considers are based on “imaginative links between different histories and social groups” and “these imaginative links are the substance of multidirectional memory,” then one wonders if Rothberg has thrown out important epistemological criteria in the pursuit of the ethical and political questions he wants to raise.40 His critique of Yehuda Bauer’s distinction between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, for instance, focuses on the binaries in Bauer’s analysis. Bauer maintains that what differentiates the two was the axis of rationality and pragmatism at work in the Armenian genocide as opposed to the “‘nonpragmatic and irrational’ ideology of National Socialist antiSemitism as one of the things that led to ‘an unprecedented form of genocide.’” For Rothberg to suggest that “this instance presupposes European frameworks of evaluation—the Holocaust is unique based on modern European criteria of 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 18, emphasis added. These epistemological issues have, of course, been raised at great length in discussions of the Holocaust, perhaps most famously in some of the essays included in S. Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA, 1992). It should be noted that Rothberg is eminently aware of these problems, as is clear from N. Levi and M. Rothberg, eds., The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (New Brunswick, 2003); and M. Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis, 2000). The issue of these epistemological considerations in the comparative frames that Rothberg urges in Multidirectional Memory is another problem, however.

495


rationality”—rings hollow. For surely what is unique and general in these two instances of genocide cannot be wholly settled on conceptual grounds. This points to an important set of epistemological considerations that might yet form the next conversational frame for post-memory studies, for it remains unclear what criterion of truth is brought to bear in parsing when multidirectional memory is valid and when it is an imaginative act that does not have enough substantive relation to experience to warrant linking different events or processes.41 For all the merits in Rothberg’s exploration of their points of analogy, moreover, some attention to the differences between racism and anti-Semitism should not be ignored. Léon Poliakov, the doyen of scholars of anti-Semitism and pioneering researcher of racism, suggested that the master tropes in these interlaced discourses indicated that they ultimately functioned differently. Perhaps the key antiblack racist motif across history is the “beast of burden,” for the work of racism has been primarily to justify the exploitation of labor, so blacks are bestialized. On the other hand, suggested Poliakov, the master trope of antiSemitism is demonization, emerging from its origins in the theological category of evil, so Jews are claimed to be the minions of the devil. While these metaphors were bounced back and forth in racialized discourse, some further epistemological consideration of this divergence is warranted. To paraphrase Rothberg’s own critical question about Arendt, then, would be to ask a fundamental question of comparative history and multidirectional memory: “Does the attempt to go beyond Europe in providing a global frame for European history risk displacing” some epistemological criteria that need to be brought to bear on the links but also the disconnections between imperialism and the Holocaust?42 To raise these issues is merely to insist on the obvious point that multidirectional memory must be explored multidirectionally, considering both similarity and difference, singularity and generalizability. Nested therein one finds the complex of concerns raised by these works about the individual and the collective, the alternate but related modes of racialization and paths of violence experienced by Jews and blacks, and the contextual specificities but also the entangled histories of the Holocaust and decolonization. Sartre, like the Marathon man, ran with the message of these intertwined issues across the twentieth century, theorizing their connections, but not always as satisfactorily as their disaggregations. He died before he was done. But his unfinished project is also ours.

41 42

Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 49–50. Ibid., 64.

Modern Intellectual History, 8, 2 (2011), p. 497 doi:10.1017/S147924431100031X


CORRIGENDUM CORRIGIBILITY, ALLEGORY, UNIVERSALITY: A HISTORY OF THE GITA’S TRANSNATIONAL RECEPTION, 1785–1985 - CORRIGENDUM MISHKA SINHA doi: 10.1017/S1479244310000089, Published by Cambridge University Press 1 July 2010. Two dates were listed incorrectly on p. 314 of the article by M. Sinha, 2010.1 The author apologises for these errors. Page 314, paragraph 1, line 2; [1936] should be [1935]. Page 314, paragraph 2, line 1; [1931] should be [1932].

1

Mishka Sinha, “Corrigibility, allegory, universality: a history of the Gita’s transnational reception - 1785–1985,” Modern Intellectual History 7 (2010), 297–317, doi:10.1017/S1479244310000089.

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modern intellectual history Editors Charles Capper, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA Email [email protected] Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, USA Email [email protected] Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge, UK Email [email protected] Assistant Editor Andrew J. Ballou, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Editorial Board David Armitage, Harvard University, usa C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge, uk Thomas Bender, New York University, usa Ruth Bloch, UCLA, usa Julian Bourg, Bucknell University, usa Richard Bourke, University of London, uk Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, usa Howard Brick, University of Michigan, usa Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, usa Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge, uk Jeffrey Collins, Queen’s University, Ontario, canada Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, uk Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore Peter Gordon, Harvard University, usa Malachi Haim Hacohen, Duke University, usa David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School, usa Thomas A. Haskell, Rice University, usa David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley, usa Daniel Walker Howe, UCLA, usa Gerald N. Izenberg, Washington University, St Louis, usa Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley, usa Mary Kelley, University of Michigan, usa Aileen Kelly, University of Cambridge, uk James T. Kloppenberg, Harvard University, usa László Kontler, Central European University, Hungary Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania, usa Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London, uk Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge, uk Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University, usa Tracie M. Matysik, University of Texas at Austin, usa Michael O’Brien, University of Cambridge, uk Lewis Perry, St Louis University, usa Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University, usa Helena Rosenblatt, City University of New York, usa Dorothy Ross, The Johns Hopkins University, usa Emma Rothschild, Harvard University, usa/King’s College, Cambridge uk Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, usa Andrew Sartori, New York University, usa Jerrold Seigel, New York University, usa James Turner, Notre Dame University, usa Caroline Winterer, Stanford University, usa

Modern Intellectual History publishes scholarship in intellectual and cultural history from 1650 onwards, with primary attention to Europe and the United States but also to trans-national developments that encompass the nonWest. Subscriptions Modern Intellectual History (ISSN 1479-2443) is published three times a year, in April, August and November. Three parts form a volume. The subscription price, which includes delivery by air where appropriate (but excluding VAT), of volume 8, 2011, which includes print and electronic access, is £165.00 (US $268.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) for institutions; £26.00 (US $39.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) for individuals, which includes print only. Students ordering direct from the publishers and certifying that the journal is for their personal use can subscribe to the print version at £19.00 (US $29.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico). The electronic-only price available to institutions is £141.00 (US $232.00). Single parts are £55.00 (US $90.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) plus postage. EU subscribers (outside the UK) who are not registered for VAT should add VAT at their country’s rate. VAT registered members should provide their VAT registration number. Japanese prices for institutions (including ASP delivery) are available from Kinokuniya Company Ltd, P.O. Box 55, Chitose, Tokyo 156, Japan. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. This journal issue has been printed on FSC-certified paper and cover board. FSC is an independent, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests. Please see www.fsc.org for information. © Cambridge University Press 2011 ISSN 1479-2443

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vol. 8

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Editor’s Announcement Articles John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America JACK TURNER

299–326

History as Form: Architecture and Liberal Anglican Thought in the Writings of E. A. Freeman G. A. BREMNER AND JONATHAN CONLIN

327–359

From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism KRIS MANJAPRA

361–390

Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy: Ferdinand Alquié versus Martial Gueroult KNOX PEDEN

411–434

457–470

Reading Liberal Theology J. DAVID HOEVELER

471–484

Religion, Science, and Political Religion in the Soviet Context MICHAEL DAVID-FOX

485–496

Sartre, Multidirectional Memory, and the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization JONATHAN JUDAKEN

497

Corrigendum

Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at:

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august 2011

Who Were the Sans-Culottes? RUTH SCURR

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447–455

no. 2

Review Essays Texting a Nation? DAVID S. SHIELDS

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august 2011

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issn 1479–2443

modern intellectual history

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435–445

Essays C. Wright Mills, Sociology, and the Politics of the Public Intellectual HOWARD BRICK The Warren Commission and the Dons: An Anglo-American Microhistory COLIN KIDD

no. 2

vol. 8

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