Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism

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Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism

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Daniel S. Malachuk

PERFECTION, THE STATE, AND VICTORIAN LIBERALISM

© Daniel S. Malachuk, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6835–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Malachuk, Daniel S. Perfection, the state, and Victorian liberalism / Daniel S. Malachuk. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6835–7 1. Liberalism—History. 2. State, The. 3. Perfection. I. Title. JC574. M25 2005 320.51—dc22

2005040466

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vi

List of Abbreviations

vii

Introduction

1

Chapter One

Perfection

11

Chapter Two

The State

47

Chapter Three Experience Chapter Four

Culture

86 120

Conclusion

151

Notes

162

Bibliography

185

Index

194

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must first thank my parents, strangers to professional academe, for supporting me in the ways good parents support children who wander into unexpected fields. Most of all, though they may not always recognize it in these pages, the moral compass that I follow here remains fundamentally the one they gave me years ago. I appreciate the help of the staff of the Baddour and the Dimond Libraries, as well as the staff at Palgrave Macmillan’s New York office, especially Anthony Wahl, Heather Van Dusen, Erin Ivy, and (at Newgen) Maran Elancheran. I note in the introduction how long this book was in coming, and, for their responses to much earlier versions of my arguments, I thank Charles Hersch, George Levine, James Livingston, Barry Qualls, Bruce Robbins, John Ulrich, and Don Wellman. For better or worse, this specific book was written during three very solitary summers, and I alone am responsible for the consequence. Those years, 2002 through 2004, were dark times for the left, but also my first as a father.What hope is to be gleaned from these pages is due to my son, Paul, who awakened in me the complicated but powerful aspirations parents everywhere have for this world in which all of our children must live. Finally, no one knows better the irony of my writing a book about perfection. For her patience, generosity of heart, and unabashed statism, I thank Katie most of all.

LIST

OF ABBREVIATIONS

CPW

Arnold, Matthew. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, edited by R. H. Super. 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1960–1977.

CW

Mill, John Stuart. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by F. E. L. Priestley and subsequently John M. Robson. 33 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991. The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material. Matthew Arnold by Lionel Trilling. Copyright 1939 by Lionel Trilling, reprinted with the permission of the Wylie Agency. Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust. Copyright Isaiah Berlin 1958. From After Virtue:A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre. Copyright 1984 by Alasdair MacIntyre. Published by University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame and Duckworth, London. Used by permission. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Knowing the Past:Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Suzy Anger. Reprinted with the permission of Cornell University Press. Liberalism and the Good edited by R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald R. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson. Copyright 1990. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

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Introduction

To rely on the individual being, with us, the natural leaning, we will hear of nothing but the good of relying on the individual; to act through the collective nation on the individual being not our natural leaning, we will hear nothing in recommendation of it. But the wise know that we often need to hear most of that to which we are least inclined, and even to learn to employ, in certain circumstances, that which is capable, if employed amiss, of being a danger to us. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. Eyeing this book’s title, the skeptical reader may wonder if the author really believes three wrongs can make a right. While perfection in the philosophical sense intended means something slightly different than it does in everyday usage—mainly, the realization of objective moral goods by all human beings—the idea generally is as unpopular among philosophers as it is among almost everyone else. Perfectionism, it is believed, is an ambition in need of restraint, or medication, not encouragement. The state, too, must rank among the least admired concepts, especially if we are to judge by the words and deeds of the politicians we (in Britain and the United States, the national contexts of this book) routinely vote into office. It’s been decades, after all, since someone got elected for their explicit commitment to the state—indeed perhaps as long ago as the Victorians. Which somewhat obliquely recalls the kinds of misgivings most people have about the third element in my title. It is precisely the Victorian liberals’ earnest convictions about ideas like the state and moral perfection that make us moderns (as I label all the generations since about 1880) so wary of that political and moral culture created by Britons and Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century. Given the layered and reinforced prejudices against the three topics of this book, I confess to more than a little trepidation in writing about

2


them here with genuine sympathy. For my argument is indeed that the core conviction of Victorian liberal theory—mainly, that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection— is one that deserves our serious reconsideration today. Have we reached a point in our intellectual history where such an argument might again be, if not embraced with open arms, at least heard with open ears? That is my hope, though such is the challenge here that I have tried to take every measure I can to meet that skeptical reader at least halfway. In this introduction, for example, I have dispensed with any coy wanderings around my main points in favor of workaday rehearsals of the arguments found in each chapter. I then conclude with a few remarks about my terminology and method. * * * Because of the degree to which my subjects are misunderstood, Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism spends as much time illuminating the sources of this misunderstanding as it does describing its subjects.Victorian liberalism is a significantly neglected episode in liberal history, because two of that episode’s keynotes, perfectionism and statism, have been so misunderstood in the twentieth century. Investigating these misunderstandings of perfection and the state in the first two chapters, I trace them finally to what I call the modern culture of skepticism, an oversimplification to be sure, but one that bluntly conveys the breadth, depth, and length of the problem. Chapter one, “Perfection” resists political theory’s and Victorian studies’s Whiggish official histories of themselves in order to describe the deep and consistent skepticism about moral perfectionism that one finds throughout the last century in both of these academic fields. Chapter two,“The State,” finds a similar skepticism in more diverse twentieth-century writing about the Victorian state, skepticism due to an ideological individualism so resentful of all authority that I follow Alasdair MacIntyre in calling it “emotivism”—the idea that anyone’s or any institution’s “evaluative judgments . . . are nothing but expressions of preferences” (and therefore non-authoritative).1 The fundamental source of our misunderstandings of both perfectionism and statism, then, is this modern culture of skepticism. I promised a workaday summary of the chapters here, though, so allow me to rehearse each of these chapter’s arguments in slightly more detail, for they are both somewhat complicated yet crucial to setting the stage for the descriptions of Victorian liberalism that follow in chapters three and four.The first chapter begins by reviewing a very familiar narrative

Introduction

3

in contemporary political theory. If liberals spent the 1970s developing a “neutral” brand of liberalism, seemingly indifferent to the moral programs of individuals, the (crudely but conveniently labeled) “communitarians” spent the 1980s bemoaning that indifference. In the 1990s, liberals responded not with regret for that indifference but rather by aggressively retooling their theory to render explicit that indifference to moral programs, going so far as to reject their own earlier “neutral” phase as mistakenly “comprehensive” (in pursuing an implicit moral as well as an explicit political program) rather than appropriately and strictly “political.” This shift from comprehensive to political liberalism supposedly leaves one set of theorists, political liberals, triumphantly attune to the necessity of pursuing a political program absolutely divorced from any moral one. Political liberals quite zealously deny that the communitarian critique of liberal amoralism had anything to do with this transformation. Rather, the account of this transformation most often offered is one that I call “the account of the fact of pluralism.” Faced with a heterogeneous world, political liberals argue, a theory that provides only a political framework to protect this heterogeneity and that eschews divisive moral programs is the only responsible kind of theory to put forward today.We must therefore accept the complete separation of our private heterogeneous moral beliefs from our public homogeneous political ones. However, I argue that it is not just the political liberals but virtually all of the other dominant schools of political theory—including modus vivendi and “virtue” liberals (I define these in the chapter) as well as communitarians—who have determined that the political and the moral must be divorced. And the reason for this nearly universal determination is precisely because the communitarians have been so successful in persuading liberal theorists to adopt their version of the self as immutable: that is, the self as incapable of altering in any way its private conception of the good. The fact of pluralism is only daunting, in other words, if you assume nobody ever changes his mind about moral questions. And lurking in that widespread assumption about the self ’s immutability, I contend, is less a deep respect for pluralism than a deep disenchantment with reason. An alternative account of the recent transformation of liberal theory, then, might be called “the account of the fiction of reason,” according to which contemporary liberal theorists are overwhelmed by pluralism mostly because they are underwhelmed by reason, specifically reason’s ability to locate compelling universal moral goods. This account, too, of the fiction of reason (or the “interpretive turn” or the “end of Truth” or “postmodernism”—there are many different names) can be found throughout contemporary liberal theory (as it also can

4


be, of course, throughout academic writing in the humanities and social sciences). And, yet, despite the widespread acceptance of this skeptical position, liberal theorists (I show) still fantasize about reason regulating not only political but moral life. It is in this (often scarcely suppressed) desire to return to a comprehensive program that contemporary liberals reveal themselves, despite the much celebrated transformation to strictly political programs, to differ little from the neutral liberals of the 1970s (quietly wedded to a comprehensive vision) or, for that matter, most twentiethcentury liberals—from, say, Bertrand Russell forward. With a renewed appreciation of this great continuity in modern liberalism, a small quirky band of contemporary perfectionist liberals suddenly seems more significant than otherwise, for only these liberal theorists explicitly defend the moral goods of a liberal state about which other liberals only (but almost inevitably) fantasize. I conclude by noting that a similar shift may be underway in Victorian studies, where, for the first time, the Victorian aspiration toward not just moral objectivity but objectivity in general is now (with significant qualifications) admired by a small group of critics, rather than—in the three major moments of Victorian studies—derided (in Bloomsbury criticism), denied (in mid-century Victorian studies), or denounced (in Foucauldian cultural studies). Though it has not been announced as such, this sidling up to objectivism represents, I think, a potential paradigm shift within Victorian studies, a shift, which combined with renewed appreciation for perfectionist liberalism, enables us for the first time to read the Victorian liberal aspiration toward moral objectivity and perfectionism with genuine appreciation. For all the contentiousness that comes with making a claim on behalf of moral objectivism, there are today at least real (though still emerging and too often muted) debates in both liberal theory and Victorian studies about these topics to structure my own argument in the first chapter. There are no real debates about the state, I argue in chapter two, but rather only competing varieties of antistatism. Because in its pursuit of these different kinds of antistatism this chapter moves mostly outside of the abstract realm of political theory, and into the (conceptually) messier realms of political journalism and literary criticism, the versions of modern liberalism under examination change too. Rather than working with the array of relatively new and sophisticated political theories, as in the first chapter, the second chapter sorts the different kinds of antistatism into the more familiar categories of the left-right political spectrum.2 In three successive arguments, chapter two reveals antistatism to be the norm across that spectrum, embraced by neoconservatives

Introduction

5

(called right-liberals here), welfare liberals (left-liberals), and Marxists and especially postmodernists (non-liberals). Interestingly, each of these three groups has found support for their antistatism by misreading the Victorians. The first group, right-liberals, has over the last twenty-five years effectively turned most of the U.S. and British electorates against the state by (in significant part) misrepresenting the Victorians as our important antistatist predecessors.This transatlantic “Victorian values” debate of the 1980s and 1990s subsequently turned most left-liberals away from the Victorians and toward a rival historical period, the early-twentieth-century rise of the welfare state.The second argument is that this seeming statism of leftliberalism (in embracing the rise of the welfare state as its story, contra the right-liberals and their Victorian orphanages etc.) is illusory, something I expose by reference to an enduring interpretation of the Victorians among left-liberals: the damning of the liberal statist Matthew Arnold as no different really from illiberal authoritarians like Ruskin and Carlyle. Faced then with antistatism as the norm for both right- and left-liberals in the twentieth century, I outline a fairly familiar account explaining this modern liberal antistatism as the result of a principled philosophical position called “methodological individualism.” The third argument, however, is that antistatism informs the work of modern non-liberals, too, theorists who do not (explicitly at least) proceed methodologically like liberals from a fundamental commitment to the liberty of the individual, including Marxists and (especially) postmodernists (I emphasize Foucault’s work on “governmentality” in the nineteenth century). In short, the ubiquity of modern antistatism—across the political spectrum, including non-liberals— reveals the explanatory limitations of methodological individualism, so I argue instead (following MacIntyre, though there are many similar accounts one could use) that our “emotivism” makes all knowledge subjective and (consequently) all authority illegitimate. I contend finally that this emotivist culture not only has rendered antistatism commonsensical for us moderns but has also made the statism of Victorians (who did not inhabit an emotivist culture) unintelligible. In this way, the antistatism of chapter two, like the anti-perfectionism of chapter one, can be traced back to a modern culture of skepticism. Having hopefully cleared the way in these first two chapters for that open-eared reconsideration of Victorian liberalism I have proposed, the remaining two chapters are more straightforward in ambition, less analytical and more descriptive. My main objective in both is to outline the various policies the Victorian liberals recommended that the state employ in the perfection of human beings. I divide these policies into two major “pedagogies,” as I call them, making use of a standard distinction in

6


educational theory: policies that utilize experiential pedagogy, and policies that utilize didactic pedagogy. In an effort to elucidate the different ways in which these policies were articulated, these two chapters mostly involve close attention to the writings of the Victorian liberals, especially Arnold and Mill. In consistently pairing these two particular authors together, I challenge the long-standing view that Arnold and Mill represent the two extremes of Victorian state theory (i.e., authoritarianism and libertarianism), contending instead that their common commitment to the state in the pursuit of an objective moral perfection represents an overlooked midnineteenth-century consensus that we can simply call Victorian liberalism. In chapter three,“Experience,” I focus on the set of state policies that the Victorian liberals promoted to make democratic practices perfectionist in outcome. I call this the experiential pedagogy of the state. Emphasized more by Mill but explicit in Arnold as well, this experiential pedagogy included the democratic practices of “municipalism” (as exemplified by the ancient Athenians), the “best self ” (through means like the open ballot), reformer minorities (what Henry Thoreau called the minority of conscience and Arnold called “the saving remnant”), and the pursuit of equality. I conclude by returning to a distinction developed in the first chapter between perfectionist liberals and those “virtue” liberals most often mistaken for the same, arguing that, unlike virtue liberals, who emphasize the importance of democratic practices to the preserving of the state’s political framework, the Victorian liberals believed democratic practices should ideally perfect human beings. Chapter four, “Culture,” examines a second pedagogy of the perfectionist state offered by Victorian liberals: a didactic pedagogy, or what the Victorian liberals often called “culture.” I begin again by contrasting contemporary virtue liberals (who use culture to promote state-preserving virtues) with the Victorian perfectionist liberals (who use culture for moral perfection). I then review how Mill was the norm among the Victorian liberals in ultimately preferring the experiential to the didactic pedagogy: I trace in a number of other Victorian liberals (especially the major American transcendentalists Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thoreau) a common shift in their writings from the didactic to the experiential pedagogy.While not entirely alone in this regard, the major exception in consistently favoring the didactic pedagogy over the experiential is Arnold, who, very much aware of the predominant liberal critique of didacticism, was careful to develop a culture program that would not degenerate into mere “machinery” (as Thoreau called it). Finally, I defend Arnold’s theory of culture, especially as developed in Culture & Anarchy, as a perfectionist program of the liberal state.

Introduction

7

In the conclusion, I first reiterate one of my fundamental claims that the most important line to draw in the history of liberalism is not at 1993 (and the publication of John Rawls’ Political Liberalism) or 1968 (and the fictionalizing of reason) or 1945 (and the formulation of the politics of redistribution), but much earlier—sometime around the advent of modernism at the turn of the century. Modern liberalism has for the last century, in short, sought (quite unsuccessfully) to cultivate skepticism about its own moral ambitions and (quite successfully) to resent any form of authority (such as the state) that seemed to challenge that skepticism, two positions quite at odds with the perfectionism and statism at the core of Victorian liberalism. If one accepts this as the fundamental divide within the last two hundred years of liberal history at least, the question then becomes this: can we today trust reason (and subsequently a reasonable state) more than we have throughout the modern period? Can we leave the modern culture of skepticism behind and appreciate Victorian liberalism as having a contemporary as well an historical significance? I contend that we can, and that there are two ways in which we can proceed with this work. One is to develop a liberalism committed to moral goods that enjoy metaphysical status, not unlike the theological claims made by some contemporary human rights advocates for the goods described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.While liberals for a century have looked down their noses at this (what Isaiah Berlin called) “deep and incurable metaphysical need” as “a symptom of [a] . . . moral and political immaturity,” the fact is (as argued in the first chapter) that many modern liberals themselves have pursued post-metaphysical programs only to consistently backslide into making metaphysical claims for moral goods (or at least fantasizing about doing so). From this standpoint, Mill’s final provocative (and neglected) writings on the utility of religion are particularly suggestive, especially when one considers the era in which he reached this pragmatic conclusion to have been arguably less dominated by religious extremism than our own: that is, if Mill anticipated in the late nineteenth century that liberals might need to compete in the realm of metaphysics with various religio-political rivals, certainly contemporary liberals might at least contemplate this approach in a world where increasingly all the shots seem to be called by Southern Baptists and Wahhabi Muslims.3 The other way we can proceed, and the one that I sketch in more detail, is to develop a perfectionist liberalism committed to the universal realization of objective moral goods that are nevertheless not metaphysical. This involves defending a human essence that rests not upon otherworldly

8


claims but historical and social facts, a philosophical anthropology that a number of liberal theorists are pursuing today and that was (I finally argue) pioneered by the Victorian liberals. * * * Two clarifications of terminology should be made here, along with some final comments on my method. Regarding terminology, first, I note again the distinction I make throughout the book between “Victorians” (the generation or two that dominated British and American culture from, roughly, 1830 to 1880) and “moderns” (all generations since, including our own). Second, there is my use of the adjective “Victorian” to describe the liberalism developed in this book. Some will find my use of that adjective to be somewhat reckless, as I describe a position that is derived primarily from the work of just two British Victorian intellectuals, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold. However, because Mill’s and Arnold’s versions of liberalism have almost always been taken by moderns to represent the extreme poles of Victorian political thinking, and because I am instead able to establish Mill’s and Arnold’s common ground as liberals, moral perfectionists, and statists, I believe I am justified in referring to the theory they articulate together as that of the “Victorian liberals.” Perhaps my inclusion of a half-dozen other major Victorian liberal writers (American as often as British) to elucidate this liberal theory will mollify those readers still troubled by this choice of terminology. Finally, I offer a few words on my method, anticipating, however, that I may satisfy few on this score, particularly the (shall I say) disciplinarians who dominate the academy. Perhaps the biggest myth in contemporary academia is its commitment to “interdisciplinarity.” By and large, in whatever ways academics in the humanities and social sciences have altered their reading and analytical habits over the last few decades, these habits still seem very much determined by each discipline, and are evinced in all kinds of practices, from teaching to hiring to publishing. Most importantly, though, disciplinary habits shape not only how we solve “problems” but, before that, how we define the very problems that we seek to solve. Terminally naïve about such matters, I have approached the writing of this book quite differently, starting not with an allegiance to a discipline and its pre-approved problems, but rather with a problem that—as far as I have been able to understand it—has no one discipline. I have already described that problem as I have consequently framed it, but, for reasons I discuss momentarily, I would like to emphasize here how that problem

Introduction

9

originally presented itself to me outside of any disciplinary context.Why (I asked myself back in the mid-1980s as an undergraduate first encountering authors like Carlyle, Ruskin, Eliot, and Emerson) do these Victorians speak to me? Why does what they wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century have any appeal to someone coming of age at the end of the twentieth century? In my early graduate work in English, I tried to frame this “why the Victorians?” problem using the work of Michel Foucault, contending that these Victorian authors challenged an otherwise absolute “system.”As anyone fluent in postmodernism will have guessed, though, I gradually learned that no one really challenges “the system,” particularly the “non-PC” (such was the terminology back then) authors with whom I made the mistake of sympathizing. In my later graduate work, I tried a different tack, and turned to what intellectual historians define as the modern republican tradition, finding in certain Victorian authors similar concerns, particularly the importance of civic virtue to the flourishing of the polity. While this approach kept me busy through my dissertation, the deeper I read into the historiography of the republican tradition, the more I grasped that republicanism and liberalism were not distinct and jealous rivals (as the first historians of republicanism had contended) but rather tendencies of thought that jostled side by side, even within single essays by authors like Mill or Emerson,Arnold or Thoreau. Those readers familiar with the contemporary renaissance in liberal theory—particularly following the years of the communitarian-liberal debate (in many ways the political theorists’ version of the historians’ republican–liberal debate)—will immediately understand why I found that work so useful. Unlike historians, who are—properly so—hesitant to adopt new frameworks without amassing masses of empirical data first, political theorists, I discovered, were mixing and matching liberal and communitarian approaches with great finesse, just like the Victorian authors I still admired, though certain of these authors were now emerging as more important than others. I thus embarked on yet more reading in a new discipline, familiarizing myself with the strange habits of political theorists, just as I had done before with intellectual historians and Victorian studies scholars. This led to a new frame for understanding Victorian liberalism as perfectionist and statist, as I have already described. Confessing one’s intellectual floundering is not what one usually does in introducing an academic book, but I have done so to convey as plainly as I can that this truly is a book driven by a problem—why, today, the Victorians?—rather than by a discipline, and that I consequently plead not only guilty but indifferent to the inevitable criticism that I do not do full justice to any of the disciplines I have ended up using: not political

10


theory, not Victorian studies, not intellectual history. The real test for me will be whether I have learned enough from these disciplines to at least make “my” Victorian problem now recognizable to you (my presumably more disciplined reader) as a “real” problem, and one that you might try to solve, too. Hopefully the approach I have decided in the chapters to follow will achieve this, but allow me here in this introduction, finally, to make a few other suggestions, for there are any number of other—and perhaps better—ways to approach the problem examined here. For example, my own long-standing preference was actually to situate my claims about nineteenth-century liberalism within American studies as well as Victorian studies (and subsequently to feature certain nineteenth-century American authors more than I do now), in order to push more strongly the transatlantic dimensions of nineteenth-century perfectionist liberalism. Historians reading this book might recognize more and better ways in which Victorian perfectionist liberalism was richly preceded by well-known eighteenth-century perfectionist movements (e.g., the Continental Enlightenment, or the Romantic-era utopians like Godwin or Coleridge) or more fully developed in the periods that followed (e.g., the New Liberals in England, or the Progressives in the United States). And, political theorists might see better than I just how closely related were nineteenth-century liberalism and socialism, once the perfectionist tendencies in both are drawn out, and that one might subsequently make the provocative argument that a great nineteenth-century secular and perfectionist consensus once dominated Western political thought (not just Mill and William Morris, in other words, but Mill and Karl Marx), a kind of moral-political oasis before modern theorists marched lockstep into the ideological wasteland of the Cold War. I wrote a different book, with different strengths and different weaknesses. May it find some open-minded readers working within the academic disciplines I engage, and maybe even a few of those fabled readers utterly indifferent to disciplines—readers, in any case, with better minds than my own, who can grasp what was most significant about the Victorian liberals, most likely to assist us in a radical renewal of the liberal imagination.

CHAPTER

ONE

Perfection

It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilization: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognized, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. Isaiah Berlin,“Two Concepts of Liberty.”

In this chapter and the next I show how two different expressions of the modern culture of skepticism keep us from reading the Victorian liberals with either understanding or sympathy. My main topic in this first chapter is how this culture of skepticism has subtly conditioned most contemporary political theorists to respond to pluralism with only a narrow range of modest programs, and to treat more normatively ambitious programs, primarily perfectionist liberalism, as utopian at best.Though my primary focus in this chapter is contemporary political theory, I also consider in conclusion how scholars in Victorian studies, too, have been deeply influenced by this culture of skepticism, rendering them incapable of appreciating the Victorian “aspiration toward objectivity” until very recently, and even then only out of a kind of post-postmodern cri de coeur. By identifying, in examples from these two fields, the widespread academic tendency to reject out of hand the claim that human beings can achieve

12


an objective moral perfection, I hope to begin to clear the way for the work of reconstruction in the latter two chapters. * * * The unfortunate occasion of John Rawls’s passing in 2002 confirmed, in case anyone still wondered, how fundamental his work has been to defining what is at stake in contemporary liberal theory. Joshua Cohen’s reflection that “[h]is achievement in moral and political philosophy is certainly the largest achievement in the English-speaking world since John Stuart Mill’s” was not untypical of the accolades found in the many obituaries. At a minimum, political theorists agree that Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice (hereafter Theory) renewed a tradition of normatively ambitious political theory that had indeed been dormant since Mill’s day. Theory, Martha Nussbaum wrote in a 2001 retrospect,“revive[d] the tradition of setting political thinking on a foundation of moral argument.”1 Between the publication of that book and the completion of several others at the end of his career, most importantly Political Liberalism (1993), the nature of Rawls’s significance changed, however.Where the first book was hailed as a bold return to political theory’s grand tradition, the latter is praised according to different criteria. Political Liberalism’s importance lies not in its normative ambition but rather in returning theory to a more realistic relationship to facts on the ground, or, as Patrick Neal puts it,“provid[ing] a shot of adrenaline into the liberal ideological tradition” (as opposed to the liberal theoretical tradition, that is).While Rawls and other “political liberals” prefer to describe this new program as one of “realistic utopia,” others, like Neal, are blunter in differentiating the ideological pragmatism of this new form of liberalism from the older theoretical “comprehensive liberalism” of Theory and other books of that era. “Comprehensive liberalism as a framework for political order is a dinosaur under conditions of robust pluralism,” Neal writes,“and liberalism as [a] successful political ideology will require a purely political expression.”2 What I want first to examine here is the way in which this transformation of the ambition of political theory has been almost unanimously welcomed not only among most liberal theorists but their most significant rivals, those theorists crudely but conveniently labeled communitarian. This near unanimity is not immediately obvious, for the differences among the most influential contemporary liberal theories are naturally more interesting to those closely involved in this field. Nevertheless, stepping back somewhat, it becomes clear that nearly all the major liberal and

Perfection

13

communitarian theories share one fundamental assumption: that political theory must involve itself in either a political program or a moral program, not both. Once this assumption is acknowledged, the relationship of contemporary political theory to a longer modern culture of skepticism begins to come into focus. One way to demonstrate this unanimity about the need to divorce political and moral programs (as well as to review basic developments for nonspecialists) is to recount and then challenge the narrative of this radical transformation of political theory over the last thirty-five years. That narrative, comprised of three moments, has been so often reiterated by political theorists that it enjoys now the kind of undisputed status in the field that, say, the death of the canon narrative has in literary studies. Such narratives are essential, of course, to the work of disciplines, but they also represent intellectual habits, which, like all habits, resist critical consideration and can be hard to break. The first moment of this narrative involves the invention by liberal theorists of the principle of state neutrality in the 1970s.While Rawls did not use the term “neutrality” in Theory, that book describes a hypothetical situation—the “original position”—wherein principles of justice are chosen by representative individuals behind “a veil of ignorance,” a procedure designed precisely to keep personal conceptions of the good from influencing the principles chosen.As a recent chronicle of the rise of the neutrality principle in political theory puts it,“[e]xcluding knowledge of conceptions of the good in this way, in effect, carries with it a commitment to state neutrality since the parties in the original position have no motivation to opt for principles of justice that would favor some conceptions of the good over others.” Neutrality as a fundamental characteristic of the new liberal theory became more explicit with the publication of Ronald Dworkin’s essay “Liberalism” in 1978. Here he described “neutral liberalism” as the notion that “governments must be neutral on what might be called the question of the good life.” Since the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions [of what gives value to life], the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to another, either because the officials believe that one is intrinsically superior, or because one is held by the more numerous or more powerful group. Governments must fastidiously resist making such preferences. The framework of a just society must describe only what is just, not what is good.3

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The second moment of the narrative describes the challenge, mounted in the early 1980s, to the principle of neutrality. Rawls and the other liberals had contended that a neutral state necessarily puts (in the emerging terminology) “the right” before “the good,” in that describing what is politically just (or “the right”) does not also mean having to describe what is morally good (called “the good”). But a diverse group of theorists, eventually lumped together as “the communitarians,” challenged this, contending that reflection upon or deliberation about the nature of the right cannot proceed without reflection upon or deliberation about the nature of the good. One way in which the communitarians, particularly Michael Sandel, showed the inseparability of considerations of the right and the good was by demonstrating how Rawls’s own supposedly “neutral” framework seemed itself to have been developed on behalf of a specific conception of the good life.Toward the end of Theory, Rawls had described that good life.“We should not attempt to give form to our life by first looking to the good independently defined,” he explained,“[f ]or the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it.” The “moral person” is, quite simply,“a subject with ends he has chosen”—moral not for what he has chosen to do in life, but quite simply because he has chosen for himself what to do, rather than passively serving ends prescribed by others. (Rawls’s moral program in Theory is often referred to as committed to the “Kantian”or “deontological”as well as (the word I use) “autonomous” self.) Sandel pointed out, though, that in order for such a person to be so autonomous, so entirely independent of preexisting ends, Rawls must therefore theorize a state that makes no moral demands upon its citizens. In other words, it is a moral ideal—of autonomy—that really drives Rawls to develop his political program—of “neutrality”—in the first place. For Rawls, as Sandel contended, “[i]t is precisely because we are free and independent selves, capable of choosing our own ends, that we need a framework of rights that is neutral among ends.” The moral program of autonomy demands the political program of neutrality.4 The third moment in the narrative, and the one in which we still abide, involves the transformation by liberals of the “comprehensive” theory of the 1970s into the “political” theory of the 1990s and today. What is perhaps most significant about this moment, however, is not the actual transformation (i.e., how Rawls and most other liberals abandoned their moral program of autonomy in pursuit of a “freestanding” political program). Rather what seems more significant is the fact that these new political liberals deny that the communitarian critique had anything to do with their radical winnowing of agenda.5 Instead, the account of this winnowing of agenda favored by political liberals is one that is presented

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as a response to the “fact of pluralism,” and for this reason I call this account (somewhat clumsily) the account of the fact of pluralism. According to this favored account, responsible liberals since the 1990s have had no choice but to abandon the comprehensive theory of the 1970s, because the fact of pluralism simply demands it. In order that we may develop a truly neutral framework (unlike the failed framework of the 1970s), we must learn to completely bracket or “privatize” (the latter being the communitarian MacIntyre’s blunter coinage) our moral convictions, be those convictions about Kantian autonomy or Christian charity. According to this favored account, only with this radical disconnection of the private from the public can citizens develop and sustain the public framework of justice that allows people of such profoundly different private convictions to coexist in stability and peace.6 What I hope to demonstrate now, however, is that the favored account of that winnowing of the agenda—the account of the fact of pluralism— reveals in subtle ways that liberal theorists have not so much actively dropped their own moral program as passively adopted the communitarian’s. By and large, that is, liberal theorists seem to have abandoned the moral ideal of autonomy (the person choosing his own ends in life) for that of nonautonomy, the person “encumbered” (in Sandel’s phrase) with ends in life. It is this (relatively) quiet adoption of the communitarian self by liberals that largely explains, I believe, the indomitable quality of pluralism in their justifications of the new liberal theory. Pluralism is such an indomitable fact, in other words, because people—according to both liberals and communitarians alike—simply cannot change their ends.We all are encumbered with built-in ends, needs, wants, and purposes (be these religious, familial, ethnic, etc.) that completely prohibit us from choosing new ends, and so on. Pluralism is irreducible because people are immutable.This is the nearly unanimous assumption that has made commonsensical to theorists of all stripes the tough but necessary divorce of political and moral theory.7 Consider the remarkably consistent representation of pluralism in the work of some of today’s most important and supposedly distinct theories, particularly communitarianism and three forms of liberal theory: political liberalism, modus vivendi liberalism, and (what I call) virtue liberalism. For Alasdair MacIntyre, perhaps the only major “communitarian” theorist who really deserves the name, it is clear that the fact of people’s immutability is what makes the fact of pluralism insurmountable by any political program. In MacIntyre’s view, immutability makes any political program impossible. No framework can bring together people who do not already share the exact same beliefs about what is good. Because

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beliefs about the good are non-revisable, what holds people together are their traditions, that is, beliefs about the good that are passed on from generation to generation. Given our deep immutability, MacIntyre suggests balkanization should be encouraged, not resisted: [M]odern nation states which masquerade as embodiments of community are always to be resisted. The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other hand as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf [, which] . . . is like being asked to die for the telephone company. . . . [T]he liberal critique of those nation-states which pretend to embody the values of community has little to say to those Aristotelians, such as myself, for whom the nation-state is not and cannot be the locus of community. As Ronald Beiner notes, “[f ]or MacIntyre, the modern state, far from being redeemed by its redistributive function or its provisions for social welfare, is a monstrosity of liberal–bureaucratic impersonality.”8 All the major versions of contemporary liberal theory can be ranged against MacIntyre on one point at least: contemporary liberals do not consider the state to be a monstrosity, and none countenance the kind of extreme moral balkanization MacIntyre encourages.That said, there are some important similarities between MacIntyre and his various liberal opponents that are too often overlooked. Consider political liberals, first of all. Political liberals recommend the bracketing or privatization of moral doctrines precisely so that some kind of public framework can be developed. For champions of political liberalism, this courageous defense of even minimal frameworks—when so many other non-liberal intellectuals (including not only MacIntyre but also many postmodern theorists) cannot imagine life beyond the local and relative—is not to be dismissed lightly.9 Rather than heap yet more praise upon these brave frameworks, though, I want to emphasize the oft forgotten cost: the surrender of liberal theory’s moral program of autonomy, and the quiet acceptance of immutability as the moral norm. This acceptance is indeed a quiet one, so it can be difficult to see initially.When Rawls first describes the fact of pluralism in Political Liberalism, for instance, he suggests that most of us have private conceptions of the good that are indeed revisable, capable of being changed (which is

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roughly what he means by “reasonable”).“A modern democratic society,” he writes, “is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines.” He acknowledges that, “[o]f course, a society may also contain unreasonable and irrational, and even mad, comprehensive doctrines” and that “[i]n their case the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity and justice of society.” But the implication here, at least, is that these unreasonable comprehensive doctrines are the exceptional minority, and that most people have conceptions of the good that they are willing to bracket for the purposes of public deliberation.10 Further along in his argument, however, Rawls develops an historical narrative that implies our contemporary situation to be more dire. During the Reformation, Rawls explains, the “transcendent element” entered into our ideas of the good, “not admitting of compromise.” For liberals, the consequences are desperate: This [transcendental] element forces either mortal conflict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion, or equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. Except on the basis of these last, firmly founded and publicly recognized, no reasonable political conception of justice is possible. Political liberalism starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent conflict.11 Because of our modern transcendental versions of the good, in short, we can either develop a framework for moderating deliberation among all of us, or we can enter into mortal combat. In Rawls’s version of modern history, the moral program of encouraging people to become autonomous does not merit consideration, for that would mean ignoring the “absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent conflict.” Liberals must accept that people’s private moral beliefs, because they have been transcendental since at least the Reformation, cannot be changed, only bracketed. This insistence upon our moral immutability is by no means restricted to Rawls. Indeed Rawls’s suggestion that since the Reformation the communitarian version of the encumbered self has been the norm is notably even-tempered in tone compared to similar suggestions made by other political liberals. For example, compare Shaun Young’s case for political liberalism, which focuses specifically on the contemporary scene: Given the potential consequences of a failure to address adequately the increasing sociopolitical tension, conflict, and subsequent

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instability generated by the ever-expanding diversity that characterizes contemporary societies and exacerbates the continuing struggle for power, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the principal concern of political philosophers . . . should be the development of a viable regulatory framework which holds the promise (or at least the possibility) of being able to engender and facilitate the peaceful establishment and maintenance of widespread, enduring political stability both in and amongst the plurality of societies that presently inhabit the world. If such a framework cannot be developed, it seems increasingly unlikely that the world, at least as we currently know it, will survive to witness the end of the new millennium.To suggest that this is a melodramatic prediction is, I believe, to bury one’s head in the sand and wait in blissful ignorance for the inevitable calamity; to fail to acknowledge the urgent need to address the problems of stability produced by the increasing fragmentation and polarization of humanity is to leave a festering infection untreated and suffer the consequences of this neglect. The fact of pluralism is here portrayed much more vividly than in Rawls’s account, as not only “the ever expanding diversity that characterizes contemporary societies” but “the increasing fragmentation and polarization of humanity,”“a festering infection.”12 Once one has ears to hear it, indeed, it is remarkable how often an apocalyptic tone creeps into the political liberal’s account of the fact of pluralism. To take another example, Jonathan Schonsheck’s characterization of our contemporary situation moves gradually to the contention that the human tendencies of “in-group amity” and “out-group enmity” can be traced not only to contemporary political developments but also to our very sociobiology. “The argument begins,” he writes,“with the simple yet profound observation that for more than 99 percent of our species’ history, our ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer bands. For hundreds of thousands of generations, they were subjected to the selection pressures of the hunter-gatherer environment.We are descended from those who succeeded.” And those who succeeded were (not to put too fine a point on it) the best haters and killers of everyone outside of the in-group. This brings us to the confluence of Rawlsian liberal democracy and sociobiology. We have inherited the propensity for bifurcation, for in-group amity and out-group enmity. It benefited our ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of generations, in the hunter-gatherer environment. In our environment, it threatens us with extinction.13

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But perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the indomitable fact of pluralism for political liberals is to be found in Burton Dreben’s defense of this theory in the Cambridge Companion to John Rawls. A self-described “apostle” of Rawls’s political liberalism, Dreben responds to a query about what constitutes appropriate deliberations for political liberals as follows: To ask me to argue about benevolent totalitarianism, or whatever, is to miss what is basic to the way Rawls now does political philosophy. Neither Rawls nor I am going to argue with Dostoevsky. We feel we have enough problems. I am quite serious. . . . What Rawls is saying is that there is in a constitutional liberal democracy a tradition of thought which it is our job to explore and see whether it can be made coherent and consistent. This is hard enough to do.We are not arguing for such a society. We take for granted that today only a fool would not want to live in such a society. One of the virtues of Rawls is that he does not waste time arguing about autocracy or totalitarianism. . . . I do not spend my time or energy arguing against it; I dismiss it. . . . Too many philosophers, even today, spend too much of their time trying to argue in the abstract for political liberalism against, say, totalitarianism and so forth.This does not seem to me to be a worthy philosophical enterprise. If one cannot see the benefits of living in a liberal constitutional democracy, . . . then I do not know how to convince him. To be perfectly blunt, sometimes I am asked, when I go around speaking for Rawls,What do you say to an Adolf Hitler? The answer is [nothing]. You shoot him.14 In short, in their account of the fact of pluralism, political liberals, like communitarians, reveal (often as much in their tone as in their arguments) their deepest assumption to be that pluralism is constituted by immutable persons with non-revisable conceptions of the good, so immutably different that, if our political framework fails to hold us together in peace, we may need to resort to death squads to rid ourselves of the non-liberals among us. Otherwise, the human race faces extinction. Two other versions of contemporary liberalism, which differ in some important respects from political liberalism, nevertheless share with political liberalism and communitarianism the assumption that pluralism is constituted by immutable persons. Consequently, neither of these alternative versions of liberalism proposes that liberal theory should reclaim its moral program; rather, both emphasize like political liberals (though

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unlike the balkanizing communitarians) that we simply must establish some kind of minimal framework to hold us together in peace. These versions of liberalism differ only in the kind of frameworks they recommend, and even here the difference is sometimes only apparent. One of these supposed rivals to political liberalism is known as modus vivendi liberalism. In Political Liberalism, Rawls pointedly distinguishes his theory from this challenger. For the ancients, religion was civic religion, and it was left for philosophy to work out a doctrine of the good. For the moderns, religion was the salvation religions of Christianity, which, as Catholic and Protestant, clashed in the Reformation; and these already included a doctrine of the good—the good of salvation. But resting on the conflicting authorities of Church or Bible, there was no resolution between them, as their competing transcendent elements do not admit of compromise.Their mortal combat can be moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion, or by equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. Circumstance and exhaustion lead to a modus vivendi; equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought . . . may sometimes lead to the more hopeful possibilities of a constitutional, and then to an overlapping, consensus.15 Rawls and other political liberal contend that “overlapping consensus”—a political consensus of reasonable people who dutifully privatize their different beliefs about the good—is possible. Less optimistic liberal theorists, however, strongly believe that “circumstances and exhaustion” make only a modus vivendi liberalism possible today. John Gray is this best-known living proponent of this approach. “The aim of modus vivendi,” Gray writes, “cannot be to still the conflict of values. It is to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common.We do not need common values in order to live together in peace.We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist.”16 There are important differences between political liberalism and modus vivendi liberalism, but it is also important not to exaggerate them. One of these exaggerated differences between the two theories is their respective approaches to pluralism. In Gray’s telling, political liberalism represents only one of the two major strands of the liberal tradition, the one which seeks “a rational consensus on the best way of life.” Modus vivendi, in contrast, represents the other, original but forgotten strand of liberalism, the one which seeks only common institutions, not common values. Political liberals misunderstand the nature of pluralism, Gray contends, by reducing it to “mean the diversity of personal ethical beliefs and ideals,” which can

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simply be “swe[pt] . . . under the rug, . . . by privatizing them fully, to make them as politically insensitive and marginal as preferences for ethnic cuisines.” What political liberals do not recognize is just how diverse we have become. Late modern societies are notable for the diversity of ways of life they contain. Immigration and the partial erosion of the cohesive national cultures that were constructed earlier in the modern period have increased the number of ethnic and cultural traditions that coexist in the same societies. At the same time, continuing cultural experimentation has produced a number of new styles of life. These historical realities demand that we return to liberal theory’s roots in modus vivendi. It should be clear, however, that Gray’s characterization of political liberalism is overdrawn.The fact of pluralism is, for both versions of liberalism, the dominant reality to which they must conform their theory.17 Another exaggerated difference between the two liberal theories concerns their political frameworks. There are some differences. Where Rawls in developing his framework looks for inspiration to the invention of liberal toleration following the religious wars of the Reformation period, Gray looks to the period prior to those wars, to the “millet” system of the Ottoman empire. Communities—not individuals—were granted autonomy within that empire, which is of course not a liberal solution but still “was one way of resolving very difficult, intractable and recurrent conflicts that . . . go with the territory of being human.” But, much of this is difference is only rhetorical, I think. Like an earlier twentiethcentury liberal who was overwhelmed by the fact of pluralism, Isaiah Berlin, Gray seems to suggest a return to the Middle Ages mostly to shock more mainstream liberal opinion out of their complacency: [D]espite the systematic inequalities of power and privilege, and systematic discrimination against minority religions and traditions, I tend to share Isaiah Berlin’s judgment that in some respects the Middle Ages were more civilized and more peaceable than our time. And that is precisely because all those plural jurisdictions had to negotiate with each other over their powers and interests, none powerful enough to simply dominate the other.18 I think this is mostly bluster, because in the end Gray does not embrace balkanization. He is quite careful, in fact, to distinguish his position from that of communitarians like MacIntyre (Gray writes that “the Balkans are

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the prime horror of the communitarian theory.”). Instead, Gray, like the political liberals, is ultimately committed to a single, if perhaps more minimal, system of justice to hold together immutably different people. “Universal human rights,” Gray writes,“are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different . . . [,] a benchmark of minimal legitimacy for societies whose values are different.” Insisting that what these rights are will always be debated, “[t]here are [nevertheless] some rights that all regimes must meet if they are to be reasonably legitimate in contemporary conditions.” Here in his description of thin frameworks, as in his description of thick pluralism, Gray’s difference from political liberalism seems very much one of degree rather than kind.19 Finally, analysis of the differences between political liberalism and a set of liberal theorists I call virtue liberals too often overshadows recognition of their common assumption that pluralism is constituted by immutable persons and that a moral program is therefore impossible to combine with a responsible political problem.Virtue liberals initially seem close to communitarians in advocating the public cultivation of certain goods, primarily civic virtues.20 Do virtue liberals, like communitarians, go so far as to contest the priority of the right over the good? The editors of an important 1990 volume, Liberalism and the Good, suggest as much. Rather than an argument “about whether liberals can endorse any single version of the good and still remain liberal, the focus of discussion now would appear to be shifting in the direction of the rather different question of whether they can embrace a vision of the good that is deeper and thicker than one that dwells on freedom alone and still be faithful to the liberal purpose.” Peter Berkowitz, in his 1999 book Virtues and the Making of Modern Liberalism, claims that virtue liberals now understand, as some communitarians explained and most political liberals (initially at least) denied, that certain goods must be cultivated publicly. Virtue liberals nowadays are championing “a richer and more flexible liberalism that is less embarrassed to acknowledge its dependence on institutions, practices, and beliefs,” a liberalism that is willing “to respect the role of moral virtue, civic association, and even religious faith in the preservation of a political society based on free and democratic institutions.”21 That said, Berkowitz’s characterization of virtue liberals as being “less embarrassed” about these values is telling, for there is in virtue liberalism, as there is in the other versions of liberal theory already discussed, a palpable sense that to play with goods is always to play with fire. None of the virtue liberals recommends virtues, for example, that are more than instrumental. These liberals are quite clear that the virtues are being

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cultivated strictly for the “preservation” (as Berkowitz puts it) of the polity, not for any intrinsic moral purpose. The values recommended, too, by the important virtue liberal William Galston, are only “thin” values, for example, “defin[ing] a range of normal, decent human functioning” but “fall[ing] short of defining a full way of life.” Or the values are said (by Berkowitz) to be cultivated only in “extraliberal institutions,” such as the family or in private associations, and thus can be understood to be at a safe distance from the political framework, which remains strictly neutral. Indeed, Galson, a long-time advocate for the liberal promotion of virtues, has lately been even more explicit that the regimen of virtues for which he has always argued is entirely compatible with the fact of pluralism. “Pluralism,” he writes,“does not abolish civic unity. Rather, it leads to a distinctive understanding of the relation between the requirements of unity and the claims of diversity in liberal politics.” Politics may be instrumentally rather than intrinsically good, and partial rather than plenipotentiary, but it is nonetheless essential.There is no invisible civic hand that sustains a system of liberty; such a system must be consciously reproduced.There are limits that education conducted or required by a liberal pluralist state must not breach. But within those bounds it is legitimate and necessary and must be robust. Galston’s instrumental virtues are explicitly intended, like the minimalist political frameworks advocated by the other liberals, merely to support the framework or “system of liberty.” He is not advocating a moral program, in other words, just “robust” attention to that political framework. To this extent, virtue liberals, like the other liberals and communitarians, assume pluralism to be constituted by immutable persons.22 In short, there is a broad consensus today among most liberal as well as communitarian theorists that either political programs (for the balkanizing MacIntyre) or moral programs (for all three sets of liberals) must be abandoned—that we must do one or the other.This is a consensus that emerges not usually in explicit statements but in a common account of the fact of pluralism as being constituted by immutable persons—that is, persons with privatized (or, for MacIntyre localized) and absolutely non-revisable goods.23 * * * For a number of reasons, it is very daunting to challenge the account of the fact of pluralism. For one, the account is supported by a very broad

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consensus, enjoying, as my brief summary above should suggest, the support of many of the finest political theorists working today. Even more daunting is the fact that, in response to this fact of pluralism, these theorists render, with minor differences, the same account.We live in an increasingly diverse—and divided—world, they say. We cannot naively wish that away. To continue to pursue some kind of comprehensive political theory—that is, one that unites a political and a moral program—is not just pointless; it is reckless.When the consensus view is presented this way, the liberal pursuit of a strictly political program seems responsible and courageous, and the communitarian pursuit of a strictly moral program (in MacIntyre’s case) perhaps more jaded, but at least pragmatic. Most daunting, these approaches honor diversity; any comprehensive program seemingly does not.24 Given all of these daunting reasons, then, rather than challenge this account head on, I want to draw attention instead to a different account of the radical winnowing of the liberal agenda over the last couple decades.This account I interpret to be the weaker flank of contemporary theory, an account not of the fact of pluralism but of (what I somewhat mischievously call) the fiction of reason. This is the shadow account to the one about pluralism, and it is a fairly straightforward operation to revisit the four theories just described and find in their inflation of pluralism a corresponding deflation of reason. For MacIntyre, the only consensus that can be reached about the good life is a very local one, based upon tradition, not upon reason: we are simply that different. Gray reaches basically the same conclusion. “Rational inquiry in ethics does not yield consensus on the best life,” Gray argues.“It shows that the good life comes in many varieties.”And, while Gray may prefer to charge rival liberal theorists as still approaching pluralism with regret rather than as a fait accompli, I do not find that tone there. Rawls, for example, clearly states that, in political liberalism, “pluralism is not seen as a disaster but rather as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions.”As Dreben puts it, Rawls “is asserting that it is inevitable—not inevitable because of some faults in us, but inevitable to the free use of human reason—that reasonable and rational people will inevitably differ on fundamental doctrines.” And, virtue liberalism in pursuing a set of only instrumental goods, also leaves the fact of pluralism untouched.“While we may want . . . more ambitious forms of theory, we cannot have them,” Galston writes. “[P]luralism . . . [is an] aspect of the moral universe we happen to inhabit. Pluralism is not a confession of philosophical incompleteness or incapacity; it is an assertion of philosophical truth.” In short, one could say of all of these positions what

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Rawls says of political liberalism: it “starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent conflict [among conceptions of the good].” Reason simply cannot plumb this absolute depth.25 Still, despite the near unanimity among theorists about the fiction of reason, too, it clearly is not the favored account; it is rarely the lead argument, that is, in a defense of communitarianism or one of the forms of liberalism at issue. For, if the account of the fact of pluralism can (and often does) gesture toward the tough empirical facts of pluralism in domestic politics (e.g., Rawls on the abortion debate) or international relations (e.g., Gray on Al Qaeda), the account of the fiction of reason can only point to the tender world of academic fashion. I do not mean to belittle academic work, but it is notable how squishy this account about reason sounds when one comes to it straight from the other about pluralism. Consider William Sullivan’s otherwise model version of the account of the fiction of reason. Once, he explains, political theorists aimed “[l]ike the natural sciences, . . . to produce compelling, even selfevident accounts of the reasons underlying social arrangements”: These accounts, in order to be judged rational by scientific standards, strove to invoke no social or cultural loyalties beyond those “impartial” norms which would seem reasonable to unassociated but selfinterested beings in the state of nature. By these procedures, liberals aimed to provide an unassailable foundation for the “natural rights” of individuals independently for any social or cultural membership. Like many chroniclers of the deflation of reason, Sullivan implies that this first stage includes all of political theory from the Enlightenment forward, but his exemplary text—as it is for so many versions of this account—is just Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.That book’s version of the state of nature (the “original position”) “served to secure the impartiality and rationality of his theory of justice.” Sullivan, writing in 1990, then describes the next stage, our own: Recently, however, many liberals, including John Rawls, have joined many of their academic colleagues in taking an interpretive turn. The move away from reliance upon a presumably self-validating and universal method of reasoning toward an acknowledgment that rationality is always embedded in contingent cultural understandings radically revises the way liberals now view their own commitments. In the revised account liberalism is presented straightforwardly as a moral–political understanding in conscious contrast and

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competition with others. Here the factual and normative questions become tightly joined. As Rawls himself described our new situation (in the 1980 “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory”), what justifies a conception of the right for us is not its congruence with the truth but only “its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us.”26 In short, the account of the fiction of reason puts liberal theory’s desertion of the moral program in a different light—as indeed a rather provincial academic bias as opposed to a virtuous show of restraint. Contemporary liberals (and communitarians) are overwhelmed by pluralism only because they are underwhelmed by reason. It is not that pluralism is such an impressive problem, in other words, but rather that political theory has been unable to offer impressive solutions. One can put a good face on all this and say, as Sullivan does, that now the normative is tightly joined to the factual, but one could as easily say that the normative has become (with only the fiction of reason to draw upon) little different (and little better) than the factual.27 Simply because an account smells of the seminar room is, of course, no reason to dismiss it. Rather, I am emboldened to do just this because so many other liberal theorists—theorists who are otherwise ready defenders of the account of the fiction of reason—seem at times to do so themselves. In other words, if the many recitations of the account of the fact of pluralism suggest a remarkable consensus about the need to end comprehensive theorizing, one draws precisely the opposition conclusion from the many recitations of the account of the fiction of reason. One could muster a fairly damning case against the account merely by stringing together all the times that liberal theorists, in the midst of explaining reason’s limitations, nevertheless momentarily grow wistful at the mention of a more normatively robust theory,moments like Galston’s (as quoted above) “While we may want . . . more ambitious forms of theory, we cannot have them.” (And I offer just a few more such instances toward the end of the chapter.) But, much more damning I think are the cases where theorists blatantly contradict themselves, vigorously disavowing the hope of a rational consensus about the good while nevertheless pursuing just that. Consider, for example, the work of the self-described “minimalist liberal” Richard Rorty. On the one hand, because it is entirely upfront about the death of universal truth and the radical repercussions of that

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historic development, no philosopher’s account of the fiction of reason is more persuasive, even bewitching, than Rorty’s plainspoken version. “I am,” he writes in one essay, a “minimalist liberal”—that is, one who “frees politics from moral philosophy.” For many theorists, his 1988 essay “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” stands as the quintessential expression of why liberal theory has shifted—due to the fiction of reason— from a comprehensive (political and moral) program to a strictly political program. Pointing as always to the dominant trend within academic theory, Rorty writes in this article that “[c]ontemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.” Rather, we now understand “human beings as historical all the way through.” It’s no use pining after some universal timeless truth—all we have and can ever have are religion, myth, and tradition. Political theory thus amounts to a defense of certain traditions. Pointing to Rawls’s transitional period, Rorty writes that Rawls’s theory now “no longer seems committed to a philosophical account of the human self, but only a historic-sociological description of the way we live now.” Rawls has made the turn like the rest of us, Rorty argues; he “is not attempting a transcendental deduction of American liberalism or supplying philosophical foundations for democratic institutions, but simply trying to systematize the principles and intuitions typical of American liberals.”28 Contemporary liberalism now must find its justification not in reason but in history. Our social experiments have resulted in institutions that “work”: they can be defended historically, but not rationally. What is “reasonable,” then, is to accept the one historical fact of plural goods and the other historical fact of minimal frameworks of rights.29 On the other hand, however, Rorty suggests in other writings that we might indeed achieve some kind of rational consensus about the good. It is a complex good life that Rorty defends as his “utopia,” but a single good nonetheless.30 Perhaps the clearest instance of this is in the Introduction to his 1989 book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Here Rorty summarizes quite brilliantly the kind of person who will inhabit the liberal polity once all of us are converts to the fiction of reason, the “liberal ironist”: I borrow my definition of “liberal” from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires— someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something

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beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.31 In starkly labeling the two sensibilities that inform contemporary liberalism this way, Rorty candidly reveals not only the ironic sensibility that supports the privatization of deep beliefs, but also that liberal moral beliefs must also (for some reason) still be present. His utopia, in other words, brings back into contemporary liberal theory the moral program it was supposed to have left behind. Let me explain this more carefully, because to see what is happening here in Rorty’s work is crucial to understanding why the entire project of divorcing moral and political programs has failed. Both of the dominant accounts—of the fact of pluralism and (as Rorty emphasizes here) the fiction of reason—require that we be ironists. In other words, both accounts teach us that we are historical through and through, and that we certainly cannot use reason (because it is too weak, or because pluralism is too strong: take your pick) to ground our polity on some final truth— some single conception of the good. So that we must be ironists we already knew. But why, we must ask Rorty, should we also be liberal? Why should we care about the suffering of others? Wherefore this sudden moral concern? It is not because reason teaches us such moral concern, Rorty insists: he attempts to stick to the fiction of reason account and make it clear that our sympathy for others is not rational. No, he contends, we should learn to hate suffering through the cultivation of imagination, so that “they” do not seem so very different from “us.” But the question really cannot be shaken so easily: why, then, should I cultivate my imagination? Does not contemporary liberal theory otherwise teach us that our differences are of absolute depth, and that no amount of rationalizing will make those differences go away? Aren’t we simply supposed to privatize all our real beliefs and abide by some chilly public framework? Isn’t that the best we can hope for? Apparently not: for here is Rorty still fundamentally contending that we all might still revise that conception of the good and become “liberal.” Now, according to the account of the fiction of reason, this should not be happening in Rorty’s work. Explicitly according to that account (and implicitly according to the other one about pluralism), while reason is capable of achieving a consensual political framework, it is not capable of achieving a consensual moral framework. We can agree, as Gray argues, that certain rights are universal rights, but we cannot agree that, say, the

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good of autonomy is a universal good. But this division of reason’s tasks—between the political and the moral—strikes a few critics at least as exceedingly arbitrary. George Sher is one.32 [M]any liberals have concluded that reason’s scope is drastically limited.Though still confident about our ability to reach universally applicable conclusions about justice and rightness, these thinkers are much less sanguine about the prospects for reaching reasoned conclusions about goodness or value. What is notable about Rorty’s proposing the liberal ironist is that in doing so he seems at some level to be having second thoughts about this distinction between what reason can accomplish politically and what it can accomplish morally.33 I take Rorty’s momentary desire to return to a comprehensive theory here to be emblematic of a widespread but rarely enunciated desire among contemporary liberal theorists. In such moments, one begins to suspect that the account of the fiction of reason is misleading, and that there is a much greater continuity between the comprehensive liberals of the 1970s and the political (and most other) liberals of today. This suspicion is encouraged when one does some direct comparisons of, say, Rorty’s advanced liberal ironist to Rawls’s old dinosaur (to recall Neal’s word), the moral person from Theory.We could look at these two ideal types as divided by that “interpretive turn” that Sullivan and Rorty and Rawls all describe taking place sometime after Theory.We would then emphasize that Rawl’s old “moral person” (“a subject with ends he has chosen”) chooses his private ends within the public constraints demanded by the priority of the right, while Rorty, writing after the turn, sees those public constraints—because they are only justified by history rather than reason— as having no impact upon our private ends.34 Emphasizing this point, Rawls’s moral person would indeed seem different from Rorty’s. After all, given the significance of the public constraints that Rawls describes in Theory, it is hard to imagine Rawls’s moral person seriously reading Heidegger and Nietzsche in private, as Rorty often provocatively describes his liberal ironist doing. But, we could also make much less of this difference and instead emphasize the deeper similarity: that both theorists are basically encouraging us to adopt the moral ideal of autonomy, the subject with ends he chooses. Indeed, the further one steps back from all the buzz about the shift from comprehensive to political programs, the more this supposed transformation of liberal theory starts to seem like a well-intentioned but

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self-deluding moment in the course of twentieth-century political philosophy, rather than the defining moment that most political theorists nowadays make it out to be.Taking into consideration the entire twentieth century, instead of the last few decades of it, Rawls’s moral person of 1971 and Rorty’s liberal ironist of 1989 look like just two of a long line of similar portraits of a modern autonomous ideal.Though I can do no more here than sketch this alternative history, my intention is to at least blur that line that so dominates the two accounts (the line that we crossed when we supposedly learned to forgo moral programs), and to suggest instead that there is a much earlier and more important line, between the modern and the Victorian liberals, that deserves our attention today. Modern liberals, arguably since at least the period between the world wars, have sought to describe an autonomous self in opposition to the dogmatic selves favored by major ideological rivals like fascism and collectivism. As Anthony Arblaster has argued about this period, following World War I, as nationalism, imperialism, and militant socialism especially began to dominate politics, liberals began to cultivate not just a new version of their politics, but an entirely new sensibility: It was not only the content, but also the ethos and temper of these movements that repelled the liberal. She found herself out of sympathy with their militancy and conviction, their apparent readiness to impose their beliefs and visions upon humanity, even, if necessary, against its will.The religious fanaticism and dogmatism against which the liberal Enlightenment had fought—not without success—seemed to be reappearing in sinister secular shapes—the more dangerous because the technology and organization for imposing conformity and persecuting dissent were now so much more effective and extensive.The twentieth century looked like another Age of Faith, or what Bertrand Russell called “an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is now called an ‘ideology.’ ” Most liberals agreed with E. M. Forster in finding it uncongenial—“extremely unpleasant really”—because, like him, they did not “believe in Belief.” As suggested above, Russell understood this new sensibility to be a kind of return to liberalism’s true roots, but, as Arblaster argues,“the image of the liberal as at best open-minded and coolly reasonable, and at worst hesitant, vacillating, non-committal and ineffectual, is essentially a twentiethcentury phenomenon.”35 This period, as Arblaster’s The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism amply demonstrates, is rich in characterizations of this new liberal

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sensibility—so different from its nineteenth-century predecessors, and yet so clearly continuous with the autonomous figures put forward by both Rawls and Rorty. When we learn that Russell wrote that the “genuine liberal does not say ‘this is true,’ he says ‘I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best,’ ” we hear the predecessor to Rorty’s celebration of wishy-washiness.The same can be said of Leonard Woolf, who wrote in this way: The belief in the importance of truth and the impossibility of absolute truth, the conviction that, though things rightly matter profoundly to you and me, nothing matters, this mental and emotional metaphysic or attitude towards the universe produce the sceptical tolerance which is an essential part of civilization.36 We hear this today constantly, as when Galston writes (and I cite for the last time), “[w]hile we may want . . . more ambitious forms of theory, we cannot have them.” Civilization demands it. To take an even more straightforward example, isn’t what Yeats was trying to get across in his 1920 lines—about the best lacking all conviction and the worst being full of passionate intensity—of the same family of ideas as Rawls’s and Rorty’s conception of autonomy, a person whose single conviction is that we do not have convictions, and yet that we choose whatever ends we like so long as we remain first and foremost liberals, committed to justice (Rawls) or avoiding cruelty (Rorty)? Russell and Woolf, too, emphasized skepticism with one breath, while promoting admirable moral–political positions in the next, and W. H. Auden developed the ironic citizen who moved “between Perfect State and no State.”37 The figure who best pulls together this alternate history, one embracing Russell and Woolf as well as Rawls and Rorty, is Isaiah Berlin, who captures this modern liberal sensibility perfectly in a 1958 essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty”: [T]he very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.“To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions,” said an admirable writer of our time,“and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.” To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.38

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To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions (i.e., to be an ironist) and yet stand for them unflinching (i.e., to be a liberal) is fundamentally, I would suggest, what liberal theory has stood for throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first. In sketching this alternative account, I can only hope to provoke readers to question the importance of the much-ballyhooed comprehensiveto-political transformation. I can only hope to persuade readers to find for themselves this far greater continuity among liberals, reaching back to the years between the wars even, than the dominant narrative—supported by its two accounts—allows. Reading Rorty alongside Berlin, Rawls alongside Russell, does it not seem to be the case that for almost a century liberals have consistently sought to cultivate a sensibility that paradoxically matches liberal convictions with an ironic understanding of all convictions, and consistently hoped for a society one day awash in these types of people: people who stand for liberal values but with a sense of the contingency of those values, of the historical rather than rational status of those values? Whatever differences one can find among them, is there not this simple but fundamental similarity among Russell and Woolf and Berlin and Rawls and Rorty? It would seem, in short, that what really matters about contemporary liberal theory today is not at all the loss of its moral program but rather the way that this moral program continues to emerge, here and there, and that, whatever flirtations it has had with academic trends, most liberal theory today remains as committed to the cultivation of a paradoxical sensibility—and a unique conception of the good—as it was in the beginning of the modern period. * * * What I would like to do at this point is to build upon Isaiah Berlin’s prognosis in that same 1958 essay, a remarkable statement that also serves as this chapter’s epigraph. “It may be,” he wrote, “that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilization: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognized, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension.” If Berlin—like Russell or Rawls, Woolf or Rorty—hoped that civilization would one day be awash in liberal ironists, Berlin also recognized (as these liberals perhaps did not) such an experiment might also fail, and that posterity would look back upon it with curiosity. I do not think we have yet reached that moment of curiosity. As I have argued, if contemporary liberals often

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decry Berlin’s and Rawls’s autonomous ideal, they still reveal themselves— often despite themselves—to be very much committed to it. No, by and large, liberal theory, though it does not acknowledge it often enough, remains deeply indebted to Berlin and other mid-century liberals who created the culture of skepticism they still inhabit. However, there is a small set of contemporary liberal theorists that I have not yet discussed, who do seem to eye Berlin’s legacy with curiosity. Indeed, they seem to consider Berlin and the modern culture of skepticism—or at least the status of moral goods within our modern culture—from the other side, so that they, standing just after this culture can provide us with a way to begin to reconsider those standing just before, the Victorian liberals.These are the perfectionist liberals. Quite simply, perfectionist liberals contend “that the state should favor valuable conceptions of the good.”39 But note that there are two claims being made here: that the state is more than neutral, and that all conceptions of the good are not equally valuable. Both claims need elaboration, but too often in discussions of perfectionist liberalism there is an exclusive focus on the first claim, and a neglect of the second. My aim in this section of the chapter is to illuminate that there is this exclusive and distracting focus on the first claim, and to try to turn our attention to the second claim, because it is this second claim that (if accepted) would put us beyond the modern culture of skepticism and into a position from which we can read Victorian liberalism with some sympathy for the first time. In part, the preeminence of the first claim today is thanks to John Rawls, who in Theory brought the term “perfectionist” into circulation in order to describe an inimical tendency in politics, mainly states that uphold “a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture.” In Rawls’s account, it was the coercive nature of such states—their putting the good of excellence before the right of autonomous individuals—that deserved our admonition. But, while his coinage is perhaps original, Rawls’s account of perfectionism is very much consistent with that developed by Cold War liberals.Again, I can only gesture at some of the forgotten predecessors here. In 1952, for example, Carl J. Friedrich, the German-born Harvard professor of political science, produced a definition of totalitarianism involving five central factors, including (in addition to a mass party, monopolies of force and mass communication, and “terroristic police control”) “an official ideology . . . covering all vital aspects of man’s existence . . . [and] characteristically focused in terms of chiliastic claims as to the ‘perfect’ final society of mankind.” The history of modern liberal

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anti-perfectionism seems to be intimately involved with the history of modern liberal antistatism: Rawls was in this regard just echoing liberals from the Cold War and even earlier when he made the case against perfectionism. It must suffice to say here that contemporary considerations of perfectionism (pro and con), for all their sophistication, continue to focus on coercion, missing what is most forward- (or perhaps backward-) looking in the theory itself, its moral objectivism.40 This neglect of perfectionism’s moral objectivism can be demonstrated in at least three ways. First, I show how neglect of the question of epistemology has led many theorists to confuse forms of communitarianism and virtue liberalism (particularly those associated with the republican tradition) with perfectionist liberalism. While perfectionism shares with these theories a willingness to advocate a state that departs from strict neutrality about the good, perfectionism stands apart from these others because of its objectivist epistemology. As I argued above, virtually all liberal and communitarian theorists abide by the account of the fiction of reason, an account that perfectionist liberals (more often implicitly than explicitly) reject.That parenthetical remark leads to my second demonstration of the neglect of epistemology in contemporary accounts of perfectionism. Today, the major theorists who identify themselves as perfectionist tend to avoid making explicit arguments on behalf of an objective moral good, focusing rather on answering everyone else’s concerns about state coercion.While this work is extremely important in helping to situate perfectionism within the liberal tradition (which rightly values noncoercion), the relative neglect of the radically different epistemological status of the good in perfectionism represents a missed opportunity to present what is truly distinctive about perfectionism.The focus on coercion leads many, especially academics outside the field, to conclude that perfectionism is merely another species of the several contemporary political theories (like virtue liberalism and communitarianism) that contemplates a somewhat non-neutral state. And, third, I demonstrate this contemporary neglect of perfectionism’s moral objectivism in a kind of case study, in which one extremely influential theorist, Martha Nussbaum, has dropped the bold perfectionist liberal theory she developed in the 1990s precisely because she seems to have lost sight of that distinctive moral objectivism of perfectionism. In Nussbaum’s case, this development is quite surprising, for she began her career as a political theorist not at all afraid to lambaste the pernicious moral relativism that accompanies all political theories that abide by the account of the fiction of reason. Yet, because her focus on moral objectivism seems to have dissipated in recent years, her own liberal theory has consequently

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withdrawn slowly but surely back from the normatively ambitious to join the mainstream of theories described above, dutifully abiding by the accounts of the fact of pluralism and the fiction of reason.41 Consider, first, how neglect of the nature of perfectionism’s epistemology has led commentators to confuse perfectionism with versions of communitarianism or virtue liberalism. Perfectionists claim that conceptions of the good can be rationally identified as valuable or not. Communitarianism, while involving a “public ranking of the value of different ways of life,” as Kymlicka describes, does not involve a rational ranking. As Kymlicka notes, communitarians rank those goods “according to their conformity to existing practices.” In this way, communitarians fully abide by the account of the fiction of reason. Perfectionist liberals do not.42 With even greater emphasis, the same distinction needs to be made between perfectionist and virtue liberal theories, two theories too often assumed to be synonymous.While many virtue liberals, like political and modus vivendi liberals, content themselves with maintaining a minimal framework and differ only in their preferred means of maintenance (i.e., the cultivation of civic virtues), there are other virtue liberals who depict their theory as departing more significantly from the rival contemporary liberal theories.This seems particularly true of virtue liberals who draw upon the republican tradition, as developed by historians in the 1970s and 1980s.43 Michael Sandel in his 1996 Democracy’s Discontent, for example, contrasts his “republican” position, focused upon “sharing in selfgovernment,” with the “liberal” one focused on “the capacity of persons to choose their values and ends.”Where liberalism only requires of citizens that they choose their own ends, republicanism requires citizens to develop their knowledge of public affairs and a sincere concern about the common good—even “a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake.” Republicanism, Sandel writes, is in this way a “formative politics,” “a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires.” What is wrong with “the liberal vision of freedom” on its own is that it “lacks the civic resources to sustain self-government”: What egalitarian liberalism requires, but cannot within its own terms provide, is some way of defining the relevant community of sharing, some way of seeing the participants as mutually indebted and morally engaged to begin with. It needs a way of answer Emerson’s challenge to the man who solicited his contribution to the poor—“Are they my poor?”

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Sandel has since reiterated that the formative project he derives from the republican tradition “rejects the idea that government should be neutral toward the values and ends its citizens espouse.”44 Without detracting from the cogency of Sandel’s argument for the importance of virtues to the sustenance of the public framework, this is all that he is offering: developing the framework that can ensure justice, without encouraging anyone to revise their conception of the good. As I argued above, the immutability of the self ’s moral core is in no way challenged by virtue liberals like Sandel. Rather, virtue liberals are much better understood as political liberals who emphasize (in pursuit of that minimal framework) certain policies (to do with cultivating civic virtue) as opposed to other policies. Indeed, even that distinction between virtue and political liberal theories is a specious one. For, political liberals, too, have shown how the republican tradition, with its instrumental conception of the virtues, is quite easily incorporated into a strictly political program, its “formative politics” easily adopted for strictly public purposes, without seriously violating our privatized goods. “Classical republicanism,” Rawls himself writes in Political Liberalism, is “the view that if the citizens of a democratic society are to preserve their basic rights and liberties [i.e., the framework], they must also have to a sufficient degree the ‘political virtues’ (as I have called them) and be willing to take part in public life.” So understood, there is “no fundamental opposition” between republicanism and political liberalism: At most there can be certain differences on matters of institutional design and the political sociology of democratic regimes . . . But there is no fundamental opposition because classical republicanism does not presuppose a comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine. “[R]epublicanism,” Sandel writes,“seeks social and political arrangements that cultivate in citizens certain habits and dispositions, or civic virtues.” Rawl’s “classical republicanism” does too.45 Rawls contrasts what he calls “classical republicanism” with a different tradition that he terms “civic humanism,” which is a “a form of Aristotelianism [contending] that man is a social, even a political, animal whose essential nature is most fully realized in a democratic society in which there is widespread and vigorous participation in political life.” Rawls’s rejects civic humanism as being, unlike classical republicanism, comprehensive, even perfectionist. However, because the role of reason in determining the good is not obvious from Rawls’s description, it

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seems that this form of Aristotelian republicanism, too, should be categorized as communitarian, rather than perfectionist, as it seems to abide within the account of the fiction of reason.46 Readers may have noted in the previous paragraph some slipperiness between “comprehensive” and “perfectionist,” and I think that is indeed the case today. For my part, to be absolutely clear, the same distinction I am making between perfectionism and the various forms of republicanism (adopted by virtue liberals and communitarians alike) would apply to those contemporary theories identified by their authors as “comprehensive,” by which I take these theorists to mean that their theories promote both a moral and a political program. Sandel, for example, has sometimes emphasized that his republicanism is a comprehensive theory: for example, “[i]t gives up the aspiration to neutrality and promotes liberal virtues like autonomy and individuality as comprehensive moral ideals, qualities of character that figure prominently in the good life.” Galston, too, presents his most recent theory as “comprehensive/pluralist.” In both cases, however,“comprehensive” has come to mean something different than it does when used in reference to liberalism’s grand theory from the 1970s. Because the “moral” component of these more recent “comprehensive” theories is rendered as modestly as in most political liberal theories in order to abide by the dominant accounts (of the fact of pluralism and the fiction of reason) and thereby respect the immutability of persons, neither Sandel’s nor Galston’s theory moves into that realm I am reserving as the distinctive preserve of perfectionism today, where values are objectively ranked by reason and the self ’s moral beliefs are entirely mutable. In short, on this one crucial point, the difference between “political” and “comprehensive” theories, just like the difference between liberals and communitarians, is one of degree not kind.47 Turning to my second example of the neglect of moral objectivism in perfectionism, because they too often soft-pedal their objectivist epistemology, contemporary perfectionist theorists have not helped to clarify this crucial difference between perfectionist liberalism and all other forms of liberalism as well as communitarianism. In the most important book on perfectionist liberalism, Joseph Raz’s 1986 The Morality of Freedom, Raz makes it clear that what is good is not good because I chose it but because it is valuable. In other words, the good, for perfectionists, is an objective value. But how do we determine what values are objective or not? The book does not make this clear, as Patrick Neal suggests in a revealing review.There is an epistemological claim buried in Raz’s discussion of value that is not handled forthrightly, Neal argues. While Raz effectively answers the usual questions about coercion that anti-perfectionists

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have for perfectionists—showing that his version of perfectionism would uphold “value pluralism” to allow individuals to choose different life paths, and that it would feature a democratic and noncoercive government— Neal explains that what is really troubling in Raz’s theory is how “some large and sovereign thing called Reason . . . underwrit[es] the decision to draw the lines of inclusion/exclusion” (i.e., draws the line between what is good and what is not). In not abiding by the account of the fiction of reason, Raz is clearly at odds with mainstream contemporary theory examined above, and Neal is so surprised by this that he suggests that Raz himself might be unaware of this. I do not think Raz is unaware of his moral objectivism, at all, but Neal’s uncertainty is quite understandable, given how abrupt Raz is in his discussion of the objective nature of moral goods in his own theory: Nowhere in this book will general moral skepticism be discussed. General moral skepticism claims either that there never is a better moral reason for one action rather than another, or that one can never have good grounds for believing that one action is better supported by moral reason than another. If either of these claims is true then nothing in this book is of any value, nor is there room for any discussion of the morality of political action. From this passage, it is clear that Raz understands that what is distinctive about perfectionist liberalism is its moral objectivism, but at the same time he seems genuinely uninterested in defending this claim that actions can be distinguished by “moral reasons.”48 Among the few other self-identified perfectionist liberals working in political theory today, one finds a similar unwillingness to discuss their objectivism. For example, Steven Wall writes in his 1998 Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint that while “a complete defense of perfectionism must include a theory of value . . . despite its importance, no attempt will be made in this book to provide or defend a theory of value. The excuse for this omission,” he writes,“is that such an attempt would take us far afield from the questions I want to address.” Wall thus concedes that the arguments he makes are “based on the undefended assumption that it makes sense to say of an ideal of human flourishing that it is sound.” Given the fact that so much of contemporary theory rejects out of hand the possibility of determining whether an ideal of human flourishing is sound or not,Wall’s hesitancy seems extraordinary.49 Finally, a distinctive example of the skittishness about the objectivism associated with perfectionist liberalism is the work of Martha Nussbaum.

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Independently of other perfectionist liberal theorists, Nussbaum forged her own perfectionist liberal theory throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one which seemed much bolder than other perfectionist theories in its readiness to simply enumerate the rational characteristics of a good life.50 In a series of writings over the last decade or so, Nussbaum refined a list of explicit “capabilities” that all human beings should have the opportunity to fulfill, including (in one of the later versions) life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation with other humans; relationships with other species; play; and control over one’s environment (both political and material).Additionally, through the 1990s, another compelling aspect of Nussbaum’s theory was its vigorous defense of reason’s ability to determine our human essence. Here again Nussbaum, in her acute awareness of the culture of skepticism that she was challenging, seemed to forge her way independently of not only mainstream liberal theory, still enmeshed within that culture of skepticism, but also self-identified perfectionist liberals who nevertheless avoided drawing attention to their objectivist epistemologies. Her 1992 article,“Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,” is exemplary in this regard, and I make extensive use of it in the conclusion.51 By 2000 or so, however, Nussbaum admitted a new influence, John Rawls, and her incipient perfectionism was gradually transformed into yet another form of political liberalism. In a special 2000 issue of Ethics dedicated to her political philosophy, Nussbaum was careful to note in response to several suggestions that her work was perfectionist that she in fact does not “advocate a comprehensive theory of the human good as giving a set of appropriate goals for politics.” So, while her list of capabilities is explicitly concerned with establishing some objective moral goods to which all liberals should be committed, in recent years, out of her concern for human autonomy (i.e., out of her fear of coercion), Nussbaum has stopped short of developing a perfectionist liberalism. Like most contemporary liberals today, Nussbaum now seems very concerned that her theory fit within the parameters determined by the account of the fiction of reason. Nussbaum makes clear that her latest version of “essentialism” works only with “provisional fixed points” in our own judgments: the intuitions that enable us to make evaluations about our human essence. Nussbaum credits Rawls’s Political Liberalism for this terminology, and she, like Rawls, carefully emphasizes that these “provisional fixed points” are not to be taken as equivalent to a comprehensive “human nature;” rather, for Nussbaum they are mostly settled ways of thinking for humans, ways of thinking that might include particular

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judgments, such as humans believe slavery is always wrong, or, more generally, that humans can use practical reason or human beings are sociable. In short, the self-proclaimed “essentialist” of 1992 had become by 2000 another political liberal, in describing our internal judgments not as “fixed points” but only “provisionally fixed points,” so wary has she become of seeming to abandon for even a moment that old liberal culture of skepticism.52 Nussbaum hinted in that 2000 Ethics article that she might eventually turn to “what should be done when citizens are above the threshold,” that is, when globally we can afford to move beyond capabilities to some more complete realization of our human essence. But other recent work suggests that we should only expect a version of Rawls modified by her (important) concerns for global human rights and feminism. In her 2001 “Political Objectivity,” for example, Nussbaum writes that she “support[s] the arguments of John Rawls and Charles Larmore, who claim that the fact of reasonable pluralism supports a type of regime that they call ‘political liberalism,’ a regime, that is, that builds its principles around a partial moral conception that is ‘free-standing,’ not provided with any particular set of metaphysical or epistemological foundations.” It is notable that Nussbaum here, in contrast to her earlier work, now presents reason as incapable of delivering not only metaphysical foundations but epistemological foundations, as well.53 Like Rorty and Rawls and nearly all the other modern liberals I have discussed in this chapter, Nussbaum now contends that a liberalism that abides by the account of the fiction of reason can nevertheless achieve a kind of political objectivity. Still, perhaps because she (unlike so many of these others) has so recently forsaken a more uncomplicated version of objectivity, Nussbaum tellingly conveys the real limitations of the “objectivity” modern liberal theory can deliver. Contrasting the bold epistemological claims made about “self-evident” truths in the Declaration of Independence to Rawls’s defense of equality as only political and not at all “built upon a deeper truth about human beings,” Nussbaum concedes that, in reading first the Declaration and then Rawls, “you may feel an abrupt descent from the heights of lofty moral aspiration to a kind of tepid pussyfooting.” She feels this herself, she admits. Personally,“I do believe that men and women are truly metaphysically equal, that the equality of black and white is a fact, and so on.” So, why, she asks,“shouldn’t we say that this political judgment is grounded on deep facts about what human beings are? Isn’t it cowardly,” she asks, “to make such concessions to sexist and racist doctrines?” In her response, Nussbaum carefully accommodates her philosophy to the account of the fact of pluralism, with all the associated costs.

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I believe that the equality of male and female is a metaphysical fact, but if someone’s religion says otherwise, I believe that this view should be respected, provided that this person is prepared to sign on to (and genuinely, not just grudgingly, affirm) the political doctrine that men and women are fully equal as citizens—with all that follows from that. In other words, Nussbaum holds up, as liberals for nearly a century have held up, the promise of bracketing. If only non-liberals would bracket their conceptions of the good! If only all would become ironists about their own beliefs! When Nussbaum contrasts the rejoinders made by imaginary comprehensive and political liberal U.S. Presidents to a convention of sexist Southern Baptists—the first a crisp eight lines of Lincolnesque text, the second a full page of “pussyfooting”—and then still sides with the pussyfooters, we seem to be listening to Bertrand Russell explain once again that the “genuine liberal does not say ‘this is true,’ he says ‘I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best.’ ”54 In 1990, Brian Barry likened the tendency of liberal to not only pussyfoot about their own goods but to ask non-liberals to do so as well to the pursuit of “unilateral disarmament.” “I do not think that liberals can afford [this] luxury,” Barry wrote.“[W]e have to abandon as illusory the hope that people might be left undisturbed in their dogmatic slumbers while somehow being cajoled into accepting liberal policy prescriptions.”55 But the “fact of pluralism” and the “fiction of reason” stand directly in the way of our abandoning the hope that all of us might one day be liberal ironists. Now, I could end this section by refashioning the historical arguments— and the requisite dire tone—used by liberal theorists today to justify these other accounts (of pluralism and reason) to make my own counterargument. I could ask, in other words, have wishy-washiness and pussy footing ever really triumphed over the facts of fascism, fundamentalism, and any of the other forms of irrationalism that beset us today? Nearly a hundred years after Yeats made the case for the best lacking conviction, can we really say this has worked, or that this sensibility is still worth pursuing when we liberals remain as surrounded by those full of passionate intensity as Yeats was nearly a century ago? But I end with this provocation instead. I wonder if there is not, in the contemporary liberal valuing of pluralism over justice—in valuing the right of Southern Baptist men to (privately, of course) oppress their women over the rights of women—a kind of perverse aestheticism at

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work. As summarized by Ronald Beiner, Alan Ryan has noted of Isaiah Berlin, the godfather of today’s value pluralism, that his tendency was to value “lots of illiberal cultural possibilities [ just] to keep the world an interestingly pluralistic bazaar of different cultures.” Sympathetic to this aestheticism, Ryan asks “[w]hat happens if liberals eventually win the global fight for liberalism [and t]hey . . . find themselves inhabiting a world composed universally, and boringly, of liberals like themselves?”56 Call me full of passionate intensity, but I confess to having lost my patience with this aestheticism, and I instead argue that we need a lot more of what Ryan characterizes as the Millian approach to pluralism: a world where illiberal communities may not be coerced into liberal ways but are certainly “challenged by a bit [or more, I’d say] of verbal haranguing from the liberal.” Ryan notes, as a caution, that “a world where liberalism eventually triumphed over pluralism so conceived would seem to Mill not such a bad outcome.” To sympathize with Mill here, and to resist the pluralism fetish, is to step beyond the culture of skepticism.57 * * * To read Mill, and other Victorian liberals, with any sympathy means stepping beyond the modern culture of skepticism. For political theorists to take such a step, I have suggested, they need to recognize that their two favored accounts, of the fact of pluralism and the fiction of reason, are part of a relatively unexamined legacy of an earlier liberalism, one formed by the ideological struggles of the mid-twentieth century. This version of liberalism has had nearly a century to convince people to adopt its moral program of autonomy—of ironic liberalism—and it has still not succeeded. Far from it, in fact: while occasionally fantasizing still about a society of ironic liberals, most theorists today prefer to tinker with the workings of a minimal liberal framework superimposed upon a society of immutably dogmatic non-liberals. For many readers, I fear, my call to step beyond the culture of skepticism will be read as hopelessly, even dangerously, naïve. What I have called the account of the fiction of reason, after all, is just one version of a postmodern turn that most academics working in the humanities and social sciences have taken. Indeed, the turn taken by political theorists is notably hesitant, at least compared with other disciplines in the humanities, where the belief that truth is made not found—or constructivism—is so deeply ingrained as to count as a “professional habit” more than an “intellectual thesis.”58 I conclude this chapter, however, with the suggestion that political theorists (the perfectionist liberals) are not, actually, the only academics

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peering beyond the culture of skepticism, and that one can find, in fact, the murmuring of a new interest in objectivity in the belly of the postmodern beast itself, English Departments.The subject of this brief investigation has the additional interest of being more specifically within the field of Victorian studies, where, for the first time since the Victorians themselves, the Victorian aspiration toward objectivity is being read with understanding and even sympathy. Until very recently, of course, there has been very little debate about the Victorian aspiration toward objectivity: the consensus has long been that that particular Victorian aspiration was one of the period’s most egregious faults. Indeed, the dismissal of Victorian objectivity (about moral goods and other truths) was essential to the very identity of early modernists like those within the Bloomsbury group, a kind of “oedipal revulsion,” George Levine has written, “against social realism and its attendant moralism.” The revulsion started slightly earlier, of course, in the final decades of the nineteenth century. “[T]he lesson of the plays” of Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1891, for example, is that “the real slavery of today is slavery to ideals of goodness,” and thus Ibsen offers instead a “Diabolonian ethics” “drag[ging] duty, unselfishness, idealism, sacrifice, and the rest of the anti-diabolic scheme to the bar.” As Stefan Collini notes, “the impact of Wilde’s paradoxes depended upon hitting the same target—what he called ‘the sickly cant about Duty’ and that ‘sordid necessity of living for others.’ ” Nietzsche’s infamous remark in the 1889 Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols) that “[f]or the Englishman morality is not yet a problem” seems in retrospect to exemplify the modernist perspective, though it is Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians that is often taken to be the official starting point of this modernist rejection of Victorian moral objectivity, characterized as Strachey’s book is by a “tone [that] is frequently ironic, dismissive, condescending, even derisive—as if his Victorian predecessors were amusing young children (or, better, senile dotards), dabbling in the nursery, playing with the weighty issues (respectively) of faith, social action, education, and imperialism.” Most of all, “[i]n Strachey’s treatment, England’s ‘earnestness’ during the last century is flippantly dismissed.”59 The great postwar scholars who finally did return our serious attention to the Victorians in all their earnestness succeeded in this primarily (it must be said) by reinventing the Victorians as moderns themselves, so that the culture once dismissed as too earnest became the culture now embraced as just as skeptical as the postwar culture itself. For example, Jerome Buckley’s The Victorian Temper (1951)—the book universally recognized as the first to seriously challenge the condescension of Strachey’s

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generation—exaggerated the degree to which the Victorians shared the existential sensibility of mid-century moderns, and read into the Victorian debates the “suspicion of extremes” that Cold War liberals found so attractive.60 Reading the Victorians as the first moderns was a tactic not only among the historians within Victorian studies, but the literary critics as well, as Levine explains: One strategy . . . was to reimagine formalist criteria and offer the Victorian writers as sophisticated alternatives to a sophisticated modernism. Another, not necessarily opposed strategy was to show that the Victorians were modernists after all—a project that has continued through the quarter century, modified in its later days by demonstrations that the Victorians were also postmodernist after all. The enterprise of criticism of Victorian literature throughout, however, was an attempt somehow to reconcile modernist sensibilities with Victorian engagement, even when it was not identified as Victorian.61 In the last quarter century, however, a new scholarship has effectively revived the Nietzschean-Bloomsburian tendency to deride and denounce Victorian objectivism. Whatever sympathetic identification the midcentury scholars had with the Victorians-as-modernists is lost now.Victorian realism is again mocked for “never relinquish[ing] its foundational assumption that the object was more primary and real than any representation.” Those elitist sages—like Mill and Arnold and Marx—who were troubled by the obliteration of their facts by the majority’s fictions are particularly reviled by the postmodern critics, who side instead with Victorian (and contemporary) popular culture as knowingly subjectivist and antifoundationalist.62 Yet, while condescension is the keynote in scholarship on this topic in Victorian studies, this is changing. If full-blooded defenses of Victorian objectivism have yet to appear in print, some scholars are at least publicly questioning the contemporary postmodernist’s condescension to the Victorian objectivist.After all, such condescension assumes a lot.There is the philosophical assumption, first of all, that subjectivism is somehow not as precarious a philosophical position as objectivism: philosophers do not assume this (thus, for example, the preeminence of not only Rorty but Raz in political theory), but almost everyone else working in the humanities does. There is also the moral assumption that skepticism is the position of virtue. As Suzy Anger suggests in her introductory essay to the 2001

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collection Knowing the Past:Victorian Literature and Culture, there are good reasons to question this assumption, particularly given the skeptic’s own weakness when it comes to establishing normative ideals for herself against which to judge others’. Anger “propose[s] a shift in the ethical valences, a reconceiving of the pursuit of understanding and adequate knowledge as itself moral—a move that might be seen as Victorian.” Anger’s formulation of her proposed shift—as almost a switch in allegiance from the moderns to the Victorians—is echoed in the recent work of at least two other critics.“Struck by how ‘objectivity’. . . has become a curse word . . . ,” George Levine describes his 2002 Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England as “something of a defense of those impossible [Victorian] strivings toward disinterest and an implicit attack on the view that all attempts at objectivity are disingenuous and politically suspect.”Amanda Anderson, also, writes that one of the central aims of her 2001 The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment “is to take seriously the specific ways in which individual Victorians constructed their ideals, to consider not only the limits but also the distinctive virtues of their conceptions of enabling detachment,” and in so doing to “go against the grain of much recent work in literary and cultural studies.”63 As these citations suggest, Anger, Levine, and Anderson are careful to present this proposed shift in allegiance as really a kind of thought experiment, even just a teasing jab at the subjectivist orthodoxy in Victorian studies (and the humanities more generally) than anything else.To varying degrees, these critics find theoretical inspiration in the work of postmodernist theorists who are finally starting to wonder whether it is possible to put forward any coherent moral program without making some kind of epistemological claim of objectivity: Anderson in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s second thoughts about the hermeneutics of suspicion taking on such “sacred status,” Levine in Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s belated recognition that “essentializing reifications . . . seem to reflect cognitive tendencies that are, in certain respects, valuable or indeed indispensable,” and Anger in Satya P. Mohanty’s complex articulation of a “postpositivist realism . . . attentive to the postmodernist’s cautions about the social and historical entanglements of knowledge [while] provid[ing] us with a sophisticated and usable notion of objectivity as an ideal of inquiry.”64 Acknowledging the subtle differences of course, all of these theorists adopted to reappraise the Victorian aspiration toward objectivity are working well within a postmodernist theory, a theory that—as I already suggested above in my critique of the account of the fiction of reason— does not have a version of reason that can provide us with the kind of

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objectivity that liberal theory needs today. The culture of skepticism is too old and too deep, I think, for this heavily conditioned postpostmodern objectivity to have much significance in itself.That said, the development initiated by these three critics is to be heartily welcomed, I believe, because they begin to situate contemporary Victorian studies in relation to the Victorians in a way that, over the course of four or five generations, we have never actually considered: the Victorians as our moral and political peers. In this new situation, perhaps, we will be able to begin to read with some understanding and even sympathy the Victorian aspiration toward objectivity, including a moral objectivity, the particular concern of this book.

CHAPTER TWO

The State

Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra. I wrote in the introduction that an accurate and sympathetic reading of the Victorian liberals hinges on appreciating the worthiness of both their perfectionism and their statism. The work of this chapter is to examine the major obstacle that prohibits an appreciation of the latter. Modern antistatism, I argue, is another expression of the same modern culture of skepticism that sustains the vehement anti-perfectionism described in chapter one. Besides examining a different facet of that culture of skepticism, this chapter differs from chapter one in examining this facet in a broader and somewhat messier context than that of political theory, though, by way of transition, I begin with a brief consideration of antistatism in contemporary political theory. In this field, the state is often imagined to be a primary agent behind that minimal framework of laws and policies that, as I have contended, nearly all contemporary liberals and communitarians now believe should be freestanding: that is, free of any moral program, perhaps to the point of being little more than a telephone company (to take the most extreme example from Alasdair MacIntyre, cited in chapter one). The nearly universal conviction among contemporary political theorists that humans are immutable—their conceptions of the good non-revisable—leads theorists to propose, at most, a state that provides a framework for justice and stability.1 While this second chapter does circle back now and then to the abstracted antistatism one finds in contemporary political theory, my

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investigation here primarily works its way through several sets of modern texts that evince a similar sentiment but in somewhat cruder forms. Many of the texts themselves are sophisticated, it should be said, but they are primarily the work of politicians, historians, or (most often) cultural critics. Their representations of the state are correspondingly somewhat less considered than those of political theorists. Now, to focus on antistatism in these kinds of texts may seem arbitrary and unfair, like picking out any kind of bias, such as anti-Semitism, and showing how that bias infects, in one way or another, all of modern literary criticism. In other words, if there is any truth in this accusation of anti-Semitism, one might say, it is a marginal truth and does not really yield any insight into the major intentions of that criticism.And, it is true that one of my purposes is simply to suggest, through the use of one set of texts that would seem unrelated to the entire topic of the state, that antistatism represents a significant modern prejudice (ideology is the word I use) that deserves much more attention than it has received. However, I also believe in this case, the case of modern political and cultural criticism about the Victorians, that modern antistatism is more than incidental and has played a significant role in shaping how we have read the Victorians for the last century. Specifically, in this chapter, I first draw attention to the modern antistatism at the root of three major misreadings of the Victorian state: the right-liberal misreading of the Victorian state during the “Victorian values” debate of the last two decades, the left-liberal misreading of the Victorian state in the “authoritarianism” of Matthew Arnold, and the non-liberal misreading of the Victorian state in contemporary postmodernist analyses of the Victorians. I then argue that this ubiquitous modern antistatism is in fact a function of a larger ideological individualism (what I follow Alasdair MacIntyre in calling “emotivism”) that characterizes a modern culture of skepticism. After examining, finally, as in chapter one, a few examples of post-postmodern analyses of Victorian statism, I conclude that, until we fully acknowledge and overcome our own emotivism, the full worth of that statism will continue to elude us. One final point needs to be made before turning to the first modern misreading of the Victorian state. In chapter one, my focus on contemporary political theory required that I make use of a host of newly coined terms for various political positions, such as “political liberal,” “comprehensive liberal,” “virtue liberal,” “modus vivendi liberal,” “perfectionist liberal,” and “communitarian.”To simplify somewhat, much of this new terminology is the product of a major shift in political theory from

49

The State 2

“the politics of redistribution” to “the politics of recognition.” As argued in chapter one, in this new politics, the main concerns are the fact of pluralism and the consequent creation of political frameworks that honor diversity and offer stability. It is essentially only in the balancing of these two requirements that all of the theories examined in chapter one differ: the requirement of diversity (i.e., the sanctity of the immutable moral self, consistently upheld by all of the theories except perfectionism) and the requirement of stability (i.e., the political framework, which ranged from somewhat thick for the virtue and perfectionist liberals to quite thin for the modus vivendi liberals and communitarians). As I have written, there is significant suspicion about the state as a specific expression of this political framework among all of these contemporary political theorists (again, excepting the perfectionists), so that even among virtue liberals who emphasize a fairly thick framework there is much more interest in cultivating that framework within, say, the spheres of civil society or the family than through the state itself. It therefore would be a fairly straightforward operation to return to all of the positions described in chapter one and show in their accounts of “the fact of pluralism” and “the fiction of reason” an implicit antistatism, particularly if I were to emphasize (as I did only in passing in chapter one) how quickly all of these rival theories pounce on the statism (rather than objectivism) of the perfectionist liberals. However, because I have chosen instead in this chapter to illuminate modern antistatism as it operates in a different set of texts, ranging from across the twentieth century and generally not involved in this new politics of recognition, I need to make use of the older and (for readers outside of political theory) more familiar terminology of the politics of redistribution.As readers may have already noted, in my summary of this chapter above I refer to three different positions, left-liberals, right-liberals, and non-liberals, alluding to the familiar spectrum of redistribution.That spectrum includes (on the far right) the most libertarian of individualists to (on the far left) the most interventionist of collectivists. In between lie the liberals, committed to both the liberty and the equality of all individuals: the right-liberals (those Americans call “neoconservatives,” and the British “neoliberals”), willing to sacrifice some equality in order to maximize liberty; the left-liberals (those Europeans call “social democrats,” and Americans “welfare liberals” or just “liberals”), willing to sacrifice some liberty in order to maximize equality. By non-liberals, I mean postmodernists and Marxists.This spectrum has its own problems, of course, but it is the spectrum that has dominated political writing throughout the

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twentieth century, so, for better or worse, I have used it to structure this chapter’s successive arguments. * * * Until recently, modern political debate has in large part yielded contentious answers to a single question: when should the state intervene in the market? For a half century, at least, the range of answers to this question has defined the political spectrum, from the “individualist” right to the “collectivist” left. During the Cold War, the primary debate was about the degree of intervention: the comparatively modest interventions of the liberal welfare state in a free market economy, or the comprehensive interventions of the totalitarian communist regime. Since the end of the Cold War, the debate has shifted notably to the right, to one about the necessity of state intervention at all.3 There are a number of ways to explain this shift. One way would be to credit economic forces and point to globalization, meaning the process through which national economies become more open and thus subject to supranational economical influences.4 Another would be to credit theory and point to that classic rivalry between welfare and libertarian liberal theorists, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and claim the latter has (in the realm of practice, at least) finally triumphed. But here, instead, I want to examine the role of culture (loosely defined), and point to how nonintervention came to be common sense for most people today through a variety of public discussions, all of which reinforced this point.5 I begin with my most mainstream example of this kind of discussion, and the one that has had the biggest influence on public opinion, which has been decidedly right-liberal for at least two decades. Why does the veritable absence of the state so enchant the political imagination of most people living in democracies in the post–Cold War era? A major reason must be the right-liberal cultural crusade against the welfare state, initiated in the late 1970s by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, a crusade that has made antistatism the lingua franca of not only the British Conservative and U.S. Republican Parties but also the most politically successful wings of the Labor and Democratic Parties, too.And, a major reason why this right-liberal revolution has been so successful must be the Victorians. For, strange as it may seem, it has been the Victorians—understood to be the architects of the last great pre-welfare society—that the right-liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have most often cited as the best model for our own post-welfare society.

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What, precisely, has been the appeal of Victorian society to right-liberals? To answer this question means examining a debate that lasted from roughly 1980 to 1990 in Britain (as the “Victorian values” debate) before crossing the Atlantic and dominating the political imagination of the United States from the Gingrich revolution of 1994 through the “compassionate conservatism” of the first George W. Bush administration. The debate began around 1982, when Margaret Thatcher announced during her election campaign that “Victorian values were the values when our country became great.” This was a surprising claim for a politician to make at the time, given that “Victorian” had been little more than a term of opprobrium for many decades.6 But Thatcher’s rhetoric spoke to many people, as this excerpt from an April 15, 1983 interview with Thatcher in the Evening Standard suggests: I was grateful to have been brought up by a Victorian grandmother. . . . We were taught to work jolly hard; we were taught to prove ourselves; we were taught self-reliance; we were taught to live within our income. . . . You were taught that cleanliness is next to godliness; you were taught self-respect; you were taught always to give a hand to your neighbor; you were taught tremendous pride in our country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values.7 Thatcher and her right-liberal allies understood their political movement to be one on behalf of individualism and against the collectivism of the modern welfare state.They believed themselves to be deliberately returning liberalism to “the nineteenth-century version of the creed,” one dedicated to the individual and not the state.8 While the other national leader of the right-liberal revolution, Ronald Reagan, tended to locate his own political utopia in a vaguer “small town” past,9 the next significant leader of the right-liberals in the United States followed (in this regard at least) Thatcher rather than Reagan. During the 1994 conservative “revolution” in the House, Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich often explained his movement as a return to Victorian values (he was even heard to call himself a “Victorian liberal”), by which he meant reliance upon the individual rather than upon the state. In a 1995 article for Newsweek, Gingrich pointed out that “[o]ur modern leaders have forgotten that government cannot substitute for private initiative, personal responsibility, or faith.”10 “With proper leadership and incentives,” he wrote, “we can turn around our culture.” To clarify this idea for the mainstream American readership, Gingrich referenced two recent books.

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One was Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, a 1992 screed contrasting the tough love of nineteenth-century philanthropists to the anonymous handouts of the modern welfare state (a claim fieldtested by the author himself, who went undercover for two days as a beggar in the streets of Washington D.C.).The “compassionate conservatism” so prominent in George W. Bush’s campaign for the 2000 election can be traced directly to Olasky’s version of the Victorians.11 More significant, at least for drawing the academic left into the fray, was the other book Gingrich recommended in his Newsweek article, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values.12 A respected historian of the Victorians who began in the 1990s to write opinion pieces for influential right-liberal journals, Himmelfarb supplied Gingrich and the other right-liberal revolutionaries with the winning details about Victorian society. For example, when Gingrich first suggested orphanages as a solution to the growing number of single-parent families, and senior Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos then mockingly proposed sending copies of Oliver Twist to all Republican members of Congress, Himmelfarb quickly came to Gingrich’s defense in a January 9, 1995 editorial in the New York Times. Noting the “liberal press’s”consistent addition of “Dickensian”to every description of Gingrich’s plan, Himmelfarb patiently explained that “Victorian England was not nearly as ‘Dickensian’ as Dickens’s novels would have us believe.” In particular, the privately run orphanages were “generally more humane than the public ones.” The series of Victorian examples that Himmelfarb then provided—welfare that excluded the “able-bodied,” civic-spirited charity, an emphasis upon cleanliness as well as shame—were all suggestive of a society (unlike ours) that knew that the individual must come first, a society uncorrupted by the collectivist mentality bred by more than a half century of the welfare state.13 “Today we have so thoroughly divorced social policies from moral principles,” she opined in an editorial in USA Today a couple months later,“that we are threatening to demoralize not only the poor but all of society.”14 For Himmelfarb, as for Thatcher, those moral principles of the Victorians stemmed from individualism: the Victorians were stalwart individuals, self-reliant but not self-indulgent.15 In The De-Moralization of Society, Himmelfarb emphasized the virtues that the Victorians held, including honesty, integrity, courage, politeness, hard work, sobriety, frugality, and prudence.16 These, she wrote, were the virtues appropriate to a liberal society. By putting a premium on ordinary virtues attainable by ordinary people, the Victorian ethos located responsibility within each

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individual. . . . In the evolving democracy that was Victorian England, all individuals were assumed to be free moral agents, hence their own masters. It is no accident that the Victorians put such a premium on the self—not only on self-help and self-interest but also on self-control, self-discipline, self-respect. A liberal society, they believed, required a moral citizenry. Like Thatcher, Himmelfarb believed that the cultivation of individual virtues would render the welfare state unnecessary. In a chapter titled after a famous expression of the nineteenth-century Methodist John Wesley, “Gain All You Can . . . Save All You Can . . . Give All You Can,” Himmelfarb explains this to be “the perfect expression of the apparent paradox behind the Victorian ethos: the fact that the most individualistic of countries was also the most philanthropic-minded.” Of course, to Himmelfarb’s way of thinking, this paradox was indeed only apparent. The true individualist would be committed not only to exercising the various virtues himself but also encouraging—through charity—others to exercise the same.17 Emphasizing the “individualism” of the Victorians, Himmelfarb helped to clarify the interpretive paradigm that her opponents on the left would adopt as well. These critics did not question this association of theVictorians with individualism; rather, they made the same claim, differing from the right-liberal commentators only in judging that Victorian individualism quite negatively, especially in contrast to the “collectivism” of the successor modern welfare state.Throughout the 1980s, in response to Thatcher, left historians dedicated books and special editions of journals to exposing the actual heartlessness of Victorian individualism.18 Here and there, one gets a sense of the core of the debate that was emerging. For example, the historian Gareth Stedman Jones explained in a review of the Poor Laws for a 1983 special issue of New Statesman,“if ‘independence of government’ was indeed a distinctive feature of Victorian society, for most people it was fear of falling rather than hopes of advancement which provided the spur,” as if the Victorians were deep down just waiting for the safety net to be invented. Deep-down collectivist desires were also implicitly attributed to contemporary Britons in the same issue by the historian and liberal philosopher Michael Ignatieff, who sought to reassure readers that if Thatcher is winning the ideological war “it is not . . . because the Victorian rhetoric touches a chord with some primeval individualism in the British electorate.”19 But it was Himmelfarb’s book in 1995 that really helped to clarify what was at stake in the debate. In his review of her book in Dissent, the

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British intellectual historian Stefan Collini provided a quick schematic history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that entirely confirmed Himmelfarb’s contention that the nineteenth century was the individualistic foil to the collectivist twentieth century. Collini merely drew the opposite conclusion: that it is the latter that is truly valuable, not the former.Victorian Britain, as “the first society to attempt to come to terms with the social consequences of industrialism,” drew upon the legacy of Protestant Christianity to combine individualism and moralism.“In fact,” Collini continued, even to speak of “combination” understates the extent to which . . . the individualism was always and already moralized, just as the moralism was fundamentally and pervasively individualistic. Questions of social and economic policy tended to be discussed in terms which accorded priority to individual character and duty operating in an environment that was largely taken as given or otherwise beyond analysis. In contrast, Collini explained, between 1880 and 1980, political thought can be characterized as “exhibit[ing] a sustained, if uneven and often inconsistent, attempt to remedy the inadequacies of this individualistic approach.” This involved, above all, identifying the structural elements in the determination of individual fates, and using the power of the community as a whole to prevent or redress some of the most inefficient or unjust consequences of these structural forces. . . . . [T]hose in search of the contemporary “relevance” of Victorian England might reflect that it was in this period that we find the beginnings of legal protection of trade union activity, collective provision of essential services, regulation of working hours and conditions, publicly funded schools, libraries, and museums, death duties on inherited wealth, taxes on higher incomes, and so on. In the course of the twentieth century an extensive network of such measures was constructed as the analysis of the structural forces at work deepened.20 In fairness to Collini, the blunt polemic of Himmelfarb likely seemed to require a response in kind.What is remarkable, however, is the readiness with which both of these major historians endorsed the simplistic interpretive paradigm (Victorian individualism versus modern collectivism) introduced by politicians such as Thatcher and Gingrich.

The State

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Indeed, on both sides of the Victorian values debate, one finds mostly exasperation, as if both sides are astounded to find themselves arguing yet again about fundamentals that should have been settled long ago. Left historian James Walvin concludes his essay, for example, by patiently explaining that the “Victorian emphasis on individualism” was even by the end of the nineteenth century a minority position. We all know, Walvin states matter-of-factly, that the end-of-century collectivist solutions “enabled millions of [late] Victorians to enjoy a better life than earlier generations. Supporters of untrammeled and unrestricted individualism continued to rail against the restrictions of the late Victorian state. But they were increasingly voices in the wilderness.”21 And yet, somehow, Walvin wonders, these nearly forgotten individualist ideologues from the end of the nineteenth century are now being touted by right-liberals at the end of the twentieth century.Why, left commentators like Walvin ask, are we returning to individualism when history clearly shows that collectivism is the future? And, why, ask right commentators like Himmelfarb and politicians like Gingrich and Thatcher, with equal incomprehension of their opponents, should we continue to pursue this hopeless collectivist utopianism, when history clearly shows that individualism is the future? In short, Gareth Stedman Jones’s hope, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the end of the Cold War would mean the end of our reducing the Victorians into “the common genealogical source of the conflicting visions of the Cold War era” has yet to come to pass.22 On the contrary, right-liberals continue to perceive the Victorians as the epitome of modern individualism and therefore the best justification for a strenuous antistatism. Left-liberals perceive the Victorians as (at best) the seedbed of modern collectivism. * * * Prominent as it has been, the Victorian values debate, structured by the individualist–collectivist axis of the politics of redistribution, is not the only modern debate about the Victorians.As it happens, another important (though notably less mainstream) debate about the Victorians has been structured by a different axis of the politics of redistribution, the libertarian–authoritarian axis.This second axis is well-known to Victorian specialists and their students as a convenient way to define the difference between those Victorians who theorized and enacted the laissez-faire state, preeminent among them John Stuart Mill, and the smaller group of “sages” who theorized a rival authoritarian state, especially Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold.23

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Referring to the minor but ongoing debate about the significance of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, one might assume the positions of both left-liberals and right-liberals on the libertarian–authoritarian axis could be fairly quickly summarized. For, in recent years, particularly since the 1994 republication of the book within Yale University Press’s Rethinking the Western Tradition series, the debate has been straightforward. Arnold’s defense of “the best which has been thought and said in the world” has been touted by right-liberals as the kind of authoritarian bulwark we need to stop the spread of social and moral anarchy.“Why, a century and a quarter after its initial appearance, should we read Culture and Anarchy?” cries Samuel Lipman, the publisher of The New Criterion and editor of the Yale edition of Culture and Anarchy. “Because we need culture, and we have anarchy.” Broadly agreeing with the diagnosis, leftliberals such as Edward Said reject the prescription. Arnold’s concept of culture is little more than a form of social control, more subtle than a truncheon-wielding police force, certainly, but for that very reason insidious and finally despicable. “[A] very rigorous apology for a deeply authoritarian and uncompromising notion of the State” is about the best that can be said for Culture and Anarchy from this, the libertarian, side of the battle line.24 This seemingly straightforward debate—between right-liberal authoritarians and left-liberal libertarians—grows more complicated, however, when one attempts to square that debate with what’s said in the individualist–collectivist debate.This has been a favorite tactic of the left, which often notes that the right likes to stand for “individualism” (and its corresponding antistatism) in economic matters and yet embraces statist authoritarians like Arnold in social matters. I think it is indisputable that the contemporary right can indeed be described as a fragile (at best) alliance of economic individualists and social authoritarians. However, I do not think the left’s charge of hypocrisy sticks to the more thoughtful commentators on the right, at least those who embrace the minimalist state and yet still embrace Arnold, such as Lipman, for Lipman at least is in fact quite careful to divorce his embrace of Arnold’s authoritarian culture from Arnold’s statism: [Arnold] understood the anarchy of his day, and he predicted much of ours; he understood the need for high culture in his time, and that need has not changed until today. But he woefully misconstrued the State. . . . He entirely failed to see that the State bore within itself the seeds of monstrous tyranny.25

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Lipman’s position, which one can find in a number of other right-liberal commentaries, is not finally a coherent one, I later argue, but for now I think it is fair to say that the most respectable opinion on the right does attempt to square its economic individualism and its social authoritarianism by appeal, finally, to the common ground of antistatism. The situation on the left is the reverse and just as complicated.As with the right, one at first wonders which axis best represents the true left: its embrace of the state for economic collectivism, or its rejection of the state for social libertarianism? Unlike the right, the left has a short and well rehearsed answer to this paradox, which is the neutral liberal answer described in chapter one: the state intervenes economically so as to enable individuals to enjoy the autonomy with which to pursue their own definition of the good life, about which the state is resolutely neutral. In this light, Edward Said, serving as our representative left-liberal commentator, objects to Arnold’s clear willingness to forgo that state neutrality and establish cultural homogeneity by force. Into Arnold’s ready use of the term “best” (as in Arnold’s state standing for “the best that has been thought and said”) Said reads necessary violence: best “means a contest fought through and won[; i]t means not all the ideas of the English, but only those that have been left after a lot of other less good ideas have been weeded out and discarded.”26 In Arnold’s case, in other words, his authoritarianism alarms the left more than his incipient collectivism might mollify them. Had Arnold more clearly recommended a welfare state along with his culture state, this argument proceeds, Said’s response would correspondingly be more nuanced, following (most likely) the argument of other neutral liberals: for economic intervention, against social intervention. I believe, however, that neither the right nor left position is in fact that nuanced, and that at the bottom of both the right’s and the left’s attempt to square their contradictory positions on the two axes of the modern politics of redistribution one finds a common antistatism. Few will challenge this charge of right-liberal antistatism; the Victorian values narrative rehearsed in the previous section is just one of many that could be pointed to in support of this charge: the near-elimination of the state, in the imagination of Gingrich and Thatcher, for example, allows both economic individualism and intense social (rather than state) authoritarianism to thrive (and shame the homeless, and so on). But the charge of left-liberal antistatism is less familiar, and there are, to my knowledge, no well-known narratives about left-liberal antistatism to rehearse here. So, at the risk of trying to fit too many eggs in one basket, I now make more

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complete use of a narrative that I believe illustrates not only the left-liberal tendency to recur to antistatism but also to misread the Victorians.That narrative is the twentieth-century history of left-liberal commentary on the Victorian liberal Matthew Arnold, which should begin (for reasons that will become clear momentarily) with Plato’s Republic. In his Republic, Plato develops his idea of the state. His central conclusion, as articulated by the character of Socrates, is infamous: Unless communities have philosophers as kings . . . or the people who are currently called kings and rulers practice philosophy with enough integrity—in other words, unless political power and philosophy coincide . . . —there can be no end to political troubles, my dear Glaucon, or even to human troubles in general, I’d say, and our theoretical constitution will be stillborn and will never see the light of day.27 The coincidence of power and philosophy, or of the state and culture, was of course the keynote of the major totalitarian movements of the first half of the twentieth century, fascism and communism. As entire nations apparently surrendered themselves to the absolute rule of philosopher kings like Lenin and Hitler, many British and American liberals worried that this union of culture and state would seduce their own fellow citizens. In his 1931 investigation of this “communal psychology,” After the Deluge, Leonard Woolf worried that the philosophical state had gained a “mystical” hold over Western democrats, and that this mysticism was taking us further and further away from the minimal state that is truly consonant with democracy. The democratic revolutions, after all, had begun with demands for liberty as well as self-government. From this perspective,Woolf wrote,“the State should . . . be regarded . . . as on the same level as a drainage system or a power-station,” a mechanism for distributing goods fairly to individuals. But fewer and fewer democrats seem capable of this purely administrative understanding of the state, Woolf wrote, while more and more are drawn to a new and different vision, what Woolf calls “neo-authoritarianism.” Neo-authoritarianism can be observed as the most active element in the communal psychology of the modern democratic state, of modern patriotism, nationalism, imperialism. It has permeated the whole of socialism and the different sects of socialists; it has given new foundations to conservatism; it is part of the inspiration of communism; it is the whole theory and practice of fascism. Like all

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active and creative factors in communal psychology, it exists primarily as a mental attitude and only secondarily condenses into political beliefs, a social philosophy, or an economic formula. Where the true democrat rightly regarded the state “as mere social machinery, means to an end,” the seduced democrat and fledgling neoauthoritarian begins to worship the state “as an end in itself, something mystically greater and better than the individuals which compose it.”28 Significantly, Woolf charged none other than Matthew Arnold with betraying the democratic revolutions. For Arnold was the first sincere democrat to be seduced by authority and to set up the state as a new kind of God.When Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy that a “basis for a firm State-power” lies in “our best self,” Woolf contended,Arnold entered into a realm of thought best described as “political mysticism.”29 The functions of the state suddenly are no longer “analogous to those of the currency system, power-stations, and water-closets,” Woolf charged; now “they occupy the position and perform the functions previously occupied and performed by Moloch, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad.” “Matthew Arnold,” he continued, “already had begun to believe that the State must be wiser and more civilized than the individuals of whom the State is composed, and whereas this attitude was rare in 1850, it is today almost universal.”30 Readers familiar with the history of commentary on Arnold will know that Woolf is responding here not so much to Arnold on his own as to Arnold as relayed through his most vocal champions between the wars, primarily T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. For T. S. Eliot, Arnold’s thinking about the state was indeed faulty only to the extent that it fell short of the absolute elitism of Plato’s state—that exact coincidence of philosophy and power in the rule of philosopher kings recommended in Republic. In April 1929, just a few years before Woolf ’s book, Eliot wrote in the Criterion that “[i]n our ideal Platonic Republic the country would be governed by those who can best write and speak its language—those, in other words, who can best think in that language.” By the time of a December 1943 article, “Responsibility and Power,” published in the Christian News Letter supplement, Eliot’s Platonism structured his view of the whole of society. “The commonality is in good health,” he wrote, “when there is an effective harmony of interests, such that the rulers, acting in their own interest, are also acting in the interest of those whom they rule.” That harmony always exists “when any ruling class is flourishing in undisputed power,” Eliot observed, “even with a great deal of incidental selfishness, exploitation and oppression.” However, while “[a] healthy ruling

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class may be said to have an ‘unconscious’ sense of responsibility[,] . . . I do not think that such a class can thrive long unless it produces individuals, superior to itself, who have a high and very conscious sense of moral responsibility both to their fellowmen of all classes and to God.” Only with this moral consciousness on the part of the ruling class, this perfect union of philosophical reflection with absolute power, is the Platonic state achieved:“[t]his pattern of powers in society, in which each individual, and each group of individuals, exercises an appropriate power and to the proper exercise of other powers gives its assent . . . seems to me to illustrate the nature of ‘justice’ in the Platonic sense.”31 In Eliot’s Platonic sense, Arnold was quite wrong in concluding that philosophy might still reign supreme within a democracy, where power is distributed more equitably. For power, as Eliot argued in 1943, was the prerequisite to philosophy, and real power therefore had first to be consolidated in one class if that class’s rule was to be eventually philosophical in spirit.As he put it in his 1949 Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, culture quite simply “requires the persistence of social classes.”Arnold, Eliot argued, was therefore mistaken in focusing on the perfection of individuals; he should rather have focused on the perfection of each of the three classes he otherwise accurately identifies: Arnold is concerned primarily with the individual and to the “perfection” at which he should aim. It is true that in his famous classification of “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace” he concerns himself with a critique of classes; but his criticism is confined to an indictment of these classes for their shortcomings, and does not proceed to consider what should be the proper function or “perfection” of each class.32 Arnold’s call for the pursuit of perfect knowledge was correct, Eliot argued around the same time, in “The Aims of Education” (ca. 1950), but his ambition to broadly disseminate this knowledge throughout all the classes, and thus effectively to eliminate the classes, was wrongheaded: What I plead for is what Matthew Arnold spoke of as “the knowledge of the best that has been thought and said in the world” . . . ; that this knowledge of history, in the widest sense, should not be reserved to a small body of expert—reserved to them and parceled out among them—but that it should be the common possession of those who have passed through the higher grades of nonspecialized education.33

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Eliot was not alone in his sympathy for a Platonic state. His colleagues in the Moot, which sought during its twenty or so meetings between 1938 and 1945 to develop a Christian response to fascist and communist totalitarianism, consistently expressed the same basic idea: that only some powerful elite could effectively impose philosophical rule. For example, as some members argued at an early 1939 meeting, the elite might write “a Christian parallel to Mein Kampf,” and quickly make use of the state apparatus to propagate that message. “I regard it as no more inherently impossible that our society should be converted to Christianity,” one member announced in 1938, “than for the Germans to be converted to Nazism. I believe that in any form of society a ruling class is necessary; in my view it is possible and urgently desirable that the ruling class in our modern society should be preponderantly composed of men of Christian imagination.”34 Within the circle to which both Woolf and Eliot belonged, the Bloomsbury group, Clive Bell announced (in his 1928 Civilization) a similar faith in authoritarianism, a result of the Great War. This war “revealed the, to my generation, startling fact that military despotism is not only a still possible, but, during the next fifty years, a probable form of government.The war has reminded us,” Bell wrote,“that the true source of power remains what it ever has been: not the will of the people, but a perfectly armed and disciplined body of men which can be trusted to execute unquestioningly the orders of officers.” This crudely Platonic understanding of the nature of power led Bell—as it would Eliot and the Moot—to advocate the formation of a “civilized nucleus” to serve as a more gentle ruling order, leading by example rather than military might. As a means to good and a means to civility a leisured class is essential; that is to say, the men and women who are to compose that nucleus from which radiates civilization must have security, leisure, economic freedom, and liberty to think, feel and experiment. If the community wants civilization it must pay for it. It must support a leisured class as it supports schools and universities, museums and picture galleries.This implies inequality—inequality as a means to good. On inequality all civilizations have stood.35 Arnold’s connection to this way of thinking was also made by another Platonic authoritarian, F. R. Leavis. Long before Eliot wrote (in his 1949 Notes Toward the Definition of Culture) that “our own period is one of [cultural] decline . . . [,] that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity,” and that there is “no reason why the

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decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture,” F. R. Leavis wrote (in his 1930 Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture) that “the modern phase of human history is unprecedented,” and that “it is enough to point to the machine”— meaning, in the loose Arnoldian sense, cars, popular media, films, advertising, and so on—for evidence that England itself is “being Americanised” (another of Arnold’s key terms, as noted early in chapter three). As in Eliot, one can find in Leavis a response to this decline that depends heavily upon Arnold’s terminology and Plato’s philosophy. His Mass Civilization begins with an epigraph from Culture and Anarchy: “Culture is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civilisation of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so.” But, Leavis argues in his opening paragraphs, whereas Arnold believed that culture could still be broadly grounded in the populace because of their continuing and shared sense of culture’s consonance with “the will of God” and “our true selves,” Leavis believes only “a very small minority” actually hold these anchor concepts upon which “the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends.” Pace Arnold, then, culture’s survival as a ruling philosophy depends entirely upon an elite. Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which to go, that the centre is here rather than there. In their keeping . . . is the language, the changing idiom, upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By “culture” I mean the use of such a language.36 Taking into consideration the positions of Eliot, Leavis, and the others, Leonard Woolf appears insightful and even prophetic in identifying in 1931 not only a growing fascination with the state among “neo-authoritarians,” as he dubbed them, but also a tendency among these neo-authoritarians to find in Arnold the prelude to their own statism. I say prophetic because I believe the same debate continued beyond World War II, into the postwar period too, although the players changed. This change of players has, in most histories of modern liberalism, been interpreted in fact as the start of a new game. After all, according to this

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dominant interpretation, through World War II, liberals struggled with totalitarianism on the right (fascists abroad and sympathizers like Eliot at home), while postwar liberals instead struggled with totalitarianism on the left (communists abroad and at home). In other words, the liberal struggle with fascists and the liberal struggle with communists differed in the fact that the ends the fascists pursued were largely social (and thus deserving the repudiation of the emerging neutral liberal consensus) while the ends the communists pursued were largely economic (and thus deserving some sympathy from neutral liberals committed to their own welfare state). Without denying these obvious facts, I do believe this older history of modern liberalism obscures an important part of the story, which is the consistency of left-liberal antistatism through the twentieth century, regardless of opponent. In its debates with both fascists and communists, it should be noted, liberals prided themselves on the limits of the state intervention they advocated, what I call the libertarian position, in direct contrast to their totalitarian opponents, who were understood to welcome complete state intervention and thus to embrace authoritarianism. In support of this continuity thesis, consider how closely the important postwar liberal Isaiah Berlin’s objections to (communist) authoritarianism in 1958 parallel Leonard Woolf ’s objections to (fascist) authoritarianism in 1931. In his “Two Concepts of Liberty,” his inaugural lecture as the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, Berlin begins, like Woolf, by drawing attention to the fact that the assigning of unitary political ends to individual lives—whether those ends be Christian, fascist, communist, and so on—has become frighteningly commonplace, all across the political spectrum.“Where ends are agreed,” he writes,“the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines like arguments between engineers or doctors. That is why those who put their faith in some immense world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian revolution, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into technological ones.”37 This kind of “rationalism” (Berlin’s key term), which leads to a state obsessively dedicated to a single end, is easy enough to locate in contemporary non-liberal regimes, Berlin notes. Much like Woolf, Berlin points to how this thinking defines the different kinds of extremist politics of the day: how it is “at the heart of many of the nationalistic, communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day.” Also like Woolf, however, Berlin is most concerned by the seduction such “rationalism” (Woolf called it “political mysticism”) holds for liberals. Berlin points to

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a number of good and humane philosophers who were seduced into this way of thinking, philosophers who concluded something like this: “[i]f the universe is governed by reason, then there will be no need for coercion; a correctly planned life for all will coincide with full freedom—the freedom of rational self-direction—for all.This will be so if, and only if, the plan is the true plan—the one unique pattern which alone fulfills the claim of reason.” Guilty of this way of thinking are such liberal predecessors as Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Burke, and Rousseau, and, most often, they end up thinking this way with some seemingly innocent remarks about education, the most insidious form of coercion. Berlin marvelously parrots this kind of thinking, which he suggests, led even the preeminent libertarian liberal, John Stuart Mill, astray: If you cannot understand your own interests as a rational being, I cannot be expected to consult you, or abide by your wishes, in the course of making you rational. I must, in the end, force you to be protected against smallpox, even though you may not wish it. Even Mill is prepared to say that I may forcibly prevent a man from crossing a bridge if there is not time to warn him that it is about to collapse, for I know, or am justified in assuming, that he cannot wish to fall into the water. . . . The sage knows you better than you know yourself, for you are the victim of your passions, a slave living a heteronomous life, purblind, unable to understand your true goals.You want to be a human being. It is the aim of the state to satisfy your wish. “In this way,” Berlin warns, “the rationalist argument, with its assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logically valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible, from an ethical doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-perfection to an authoritarian state obedient to the directives of an élite of Platonic guardians.”38 Readers familiar with Berlin’s “Two Concepts” may be quick to come to his defense, for, where Woolf ’s essay ends with the anti-Platonic prescription of a complete divorce of power and philosophy (the sewer system state), Berlin’s does not. Instead—and, as suggested in chapter one, Berlin’s contemporary champions among political, modus vivendi, and virtue liberals find Berlin’s “values pluralism” to be his most profound idea—Berlin recognizes in the closing pages of his essay that some compromise of liberty is inevitable in even the most careful of liberal regimes. “The extent of a [people’s] liberty to choose as they desire must be weighed against the claims of many other values,” Berlin wrote, enumerating other

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values like equality, justice, happiness, security, and public order. “That we cannot have everything is a necessary, not a contingent, truth.”39 However, the profundity of this conclusion, I would argue, depends very much on accepting the somewhat less profound premises, the same premises one finds in Woolf, which are that power and philosophy are ideally divorced and that (in lieu of this sadly impossible ideal) liberals must endure the occasional and pragmatic coincidence of power and philosophy. In short, whether in 1931 or 1958, the left-liberal tendency is to object ultimately not to the specific ends of the authoritarians (the social ends of the fascists, the economic ends of the communists) but to the methods of these authoritarians, which, as in Plato’s ideal Republic, involve the coincidence of power and philosophy. It is in this regard that Matthew Arnold was objectionable to left-liberals throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps this claim can be most efficiently substantiated by pointing to the two prefaces to Lionel Trilling’s Matthew Arnold, the first in 1939, the second in 1949. In both, Trilling makes it clear that he is promoting liberalism as an alternative to the totalitarian coincidence of power and philosophy. In the 1939 Introduction, citing Nazi Germany’s Minister of Education on the purpose of science being not to learn the truth but (it is implied) to serve the state,Trilling pointed to Arnold as a valuable voice for objectivity and human reason. In the 1949 Preface to the Second Edition,Trilling wrote again that “[w]hat the Minister of Education said about science in German we can now hear being said in Russian, and as the accompaniment of the same absolutism that, ten years ago, horrified us in Germany.” However,Trilling continues, “although we perhaps fear the force of that absolutism even more than we formerly did, we are rather less sensitive than we were a decade ago to the perversions of mind it necessarily makes.” Sounding very much like Woolf on “political mysticism” and Berlin on “rationalism,” Trilling describes how “the external force” continues to seduce even the most liberal of minds, turning them from the pursuit of truth to the promotion of statist ideology. “Our liberals and intellectuals, almost as if at the behest of the external force, have become even less eager than ten years ago to see the object as it really is, less willing to believe that in a time of change and danger openness and flexibility of mind are, as Arnold said, the first of virtues.”40 Readers familiar with Trilling will note, of course, that in both the 1939 and 1949 prefaces Trilling consistently and insistently puts Arnold in the libertarian, not the authoritarian, column. But the fact is that the claims Trilling made for Arnold in the opening pages are not supported by the bulk of his book. Like Berlin,Trilling’s thinking about power and

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philosophy is entirely within the Platonic paradigm, so that (in Trilling’s mind) even the most restricted, provisional, and pragmatic overlaying of power and philosophy—think of Berlin’s condemnation of poor Mill, pulling the man from the broken bridge—is liable to slip into rabid absolutism.This is most clear in Trilling’s chapter about Culture and Anarchy, which he ominously and tellingly titles “Culture or Anarchy.” For this is indeed in Trilling’s view an either/or proposition.Trilling’s critique begins with clear rejection of Plato’s “philosophical politics,” which calls for the coincidence of philosophy and power: The everlasting question of philosophical politics is how to place power and reason in the same agent, or how to make power reasonable, or how to endow reason with power. Clearly a State—which implies power—is required because some classes or individuals refuse to conform to reason and must be coerced for the good of the rest. But the recalcitrants, while forced to admit the power of the coercing agent, will naturally deny its reason.Therefore, if Arnold is to make his State both logically and practically valid, he must say that some people may have reason and others not and that the possession of reason by some people gives them the right to coerce others. He must, therefore, declare that reason is ascertainable and show that it is.41 For Trilling, Arnold was finally just wrong in believing reason to be ascertainable, wrong to then believe that some people use it and others do not, and wrong to finally conclude that these elites have a right to coerce others. Step by step, Arnold’s chain of reasoning is depicted by Trilling just as Berlin would depict the chain of reasoning followed by other well-meaning but ultimately authoritarian philosophers. Trilling’s implication, like Berlin’s, is that the very first step is faulty: that reason is ascertainable. Rather, reason is never fully ascertainable and thus the state can never be rational and must therefore be kept to an absolute minimum. In other words, given the impossibility of Plato’s republic, a fierce libertarianism is the only alternative. Trilling mirrors both Woolf and Berlin in using Plato as the paradigmatic authoritarian, but he also mirrors Berlin in using Mill to represent that ideal libertarian alternative, the perfect noncoincidence of power and philosophy. Focusing on On Liberty, Trilling writes “Mill so firmly believed in reason that he thought that nothing, apart from its exercise and free utterance, might be done to establish it. Arnold, on the other hand, believed so firmly in reason that he was certain it justified the use

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of its antithesis, force, without which it was powerless.”And thus are born two very different understandings of the state. Upon this difference in their estimates of reason Arnold and Mill founded their opposing theories of authority and the State. . . . Mill’s social theory is essentially an atomic [meaning atomistic] one; the shades of a rather primitive contract-conception hover unexpressed over his thought. He is inclined to see the individual, fullgrown, fully endowed, joining an aggregation of other individuals for mutual protection, surrendering certain rights, but not others, in order to make the contract effectual. In Arnold’s more organic conception of society, the individual is scarcely a member of an aggregate, but, as it were, a particular aspect of an integral whole. His individual does not join society, but springs from it, is endowed by it; therefore it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of his rights as against or apart from the rights of society as a whole. Locked into this dualism, Trilling is compelled to contrast Mill and Arnold on point after point, until he reaches the conclusion that Arnold’s “vague and half-mystical retreat” to the state “exposes him to the charge . . . of apologizing for a reactionary if benevolent absolutism.” The “spirituality” of Arnold’s intention does not defend him from such a charge; the cat of “spirituality” may jump in too many directions. “The people is the body of the state,” says Mussolini, for instance,“and the state is the spirit of the people.” Or Carlyle’s Hero is, in effect, the individualized “best self ” of his nation, in touch with the purpose and movement of the universe, showing his countrymen how to fulfil their own best selves through his authority. Out of the belief that the best self, Hero or State, is in touch with the order of the universe, with right reason, with the will of God, may flow chauvinism, imperialism, Governor Eyre, the white man’s burden—all the things which make us turn to Mill and skepticism, well-nigh willing to rest in “anarchy.”42 Consider another of the most influential postwar books on Arnold by another of the most influential postwar left-liberal critics, Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958). Like Trilling’s, Williams’ libertarian paranoia about the state is much closer in tone to Berlin’s than to Woolf ’s, but it is paranoia nonetheless. Even more than Trilling,Williams accepts

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the version of Arnold handed down to the period by Eliot and Leavis. For example, Arnold, in Williams’ view, “popularized” a “vulgar” critique of Philistine society, infusing this critique with the “priggishness and spiritual pride” that would find its true heirs in Eliot and Leavis.43 Reading Arnold entirely through the lens of Eliot and Leavis, then, Williams is consequently deaf to Arnold’s own subtleties, darkly concluding, for example, that the exaggerated snobbery of Arnold’s campy character Arminus toward the middle class is, in the end, “very similar in function to Mr Eliot’s ‘Camden Town and Golders Green.’ ” “The fact is,” Williams writes, “that in the developed social structure of a fully industrialized society few reactions of any kind could escape an admixture of largely self-regarding feelings of class.”44 As did Trilling,Williams refuses to take Arnold’s proposed classless state seriously (e.g.,“[culture] seeks to do away with classes,” etc.): where Arnold (like Eliot) sides with the selfish exercise of absolute elite power,Williams (like Woolf or Trilling) implicitly recommends abstaining from the exercise of power entirely. Referring to Arnold’s reasoning that “without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection” in Culture and Anarchy,Williams concludes instead that “[i]t is here, at so vital a point, that we see Arnold surrender to a ‘stock notion or habit’ of his class”—that Arnold, in conceding the need for order, recurs to a “simple authoritarianism.”45 Williams’ complete distrust of Arnold’s recommendation of the state seems to have been of a piece with his personal distrust of the English middle-class’s reverence for the state in general, or what he calls “the idea of service.” Recognizing the “real personal unselfishness” of many middleclass men and women who feel they are called to serve,Williams nevertheless pointed to the “larger selfishness” to which this service was ultimately dedicated—the maintenance of the status quo against the claims of a rival class.46 As an alternative to middle-class “service” Williams offers workingclass “solidarity,” which he is careful to portray as immune to authoritarianism due to its deep commitment to liberty.“The making of a community is always an exploration,” Williams writes, and “[a] good community . . . will, because of this, not only make room for but actively encourage all and any who can contribute to the advance in consciousness which is the common need.” Wherever we have started from, he writes, alluding like Berlin and Trilling to Mill’s On Liberty in order to define the libertarian alternative to Arnold’s authoritarianism,“we need to listen to others who started from a different position.” The practical liberty of thought and expression is less a natural right than a common necessity.The growth of understanding is so difficult

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that none of us can arrogate to himself, or to an institution or a class, the right to determine its channels in advance. . . . We have to plan what can be planned, according to our common decision. But the emphasis of the idea of culture is right when it reminds us that a culture, essentially, is unplannable.47 The word “unplannable” had obvious antistatist connotations in the middle of the twentieth century, and Williams expands upon these in ways quite similar to Berlin. We react to danger by attempting to take control, yet still we have to unlearn, as the price of survival, the inherent dominative mode. The struggle for democracy is the pattern of this revaluation, yet much that passes as democratic is allied, in spirit, with the practice of its open enemies. It is as if, in fear or vision, we are now all determined to lay our hands on life and force it into our own image, and it is then no good to dispute on the merits of rival images. . . . We project our old images into the future, and take hold of ourselves and others to force energy towards that substantiation.We do this as conservatives, trying to prolong old forms; we do this as socialists, trying to prescribe the new man. . . . Yet only in the acknowledgment of human individuality and variation can the reality of common government be comprised.48 Trilling,Williams, and a few other left critics are largely responsible for the postwar transformation of Arnold’s significance. Celebrated by critics such as Eliot and Leavis in the first half of the century to the degree that it approximated Plato’s Republic, Arnold’s statism by mid-century was considered by even relatively sympathetic left-liberal critics to be the Platonic misstep within the writer’s otherwise carefully articulated defense of liberal culture. In the next decades, this Platonic slip was treated as Arnold’s dirty little secret by his dwindling left-liberal champions. In contrast, among his Marxist detractors, that slip became the centerpiece of a popular exposé of Arnoldian culture in narratives about “the rise of English.” That phrase was used first by the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in his 1983 Literary Theory, which argued that English literature replaced religion as the dominant instrument of social control in the second half of the nineteenth century. Religion’s loosening grip on the masses “was particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological control.”

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[A]ny social ideology which is unable to engage with such deep-seated a-rational fears and needs, as T.S. Eliot knew, is unlikely to survive very long. . . . It provides an excellent social “cement,” encompassing pious peasant, enlightened middle-class liberal and theological intellectual in a single organization. . . . [R]eligion, at least in its Victorian forms, is a pacifying influence, fostering meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative inner self.49 “English,” Eagleton argued, employing the modern shorthand for the academic study of literature to sharpen the point for his primary audience, was created by the Victorians to replace religion. “As religion progressively ceases to provide the social ‘cement,’ affective values and basic mythologies by which a socially turbulent class-society can be welded together, ‘English’ is constructed as a subject to carry this ideological burden from the Victorian period onward.The key figure here,” Eagleton announced dramatically, “is Matthew Arnold.”50 Chris Baldick reached the same conclusion, first in a 1981 dissertation (which Eagleton relied upon for his own book), and again in the 1983 The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932. Baldick, like Eagleton, focused on culture as a means of ideological control; he also, however, pointed to the power wielding this means, the state.Take away the obfuscation of culture, Baldick argued, with its claims to stand for the “best self,” and Arnold is essentially stating that “the citizen must see the state which represses him as ‘himself.’ ” Culture from this perspective is merely the “supplementary . . . agency . . . needed throughout society to come to the aid of the state.”51 Later in the chapter I consider the significance of this Marxist libertarianism in its own right, but for now it is important to note just how much this reading of Arnold has influenced left-liberal commentary in the last two decades. Where critics like Trilling were once able to hold Arnold’s statism just slightly to the side while still championing Arnold’s theory of culture, since the 1980s left-liberal critics, like the Marxists, seem to have found Arnold’s culture simply too compromised by his statism.52 Only right-liberals, such as Lipman (as noted earlier), seem bold enough to simply divorce Arnold’s culture and his statism entirely, shrugging off whatever consequence this has for our understanding of either. The left-liberal commentators have been much less bold, showing themselves mostly willing to let the Marxist smear of Arnold as a duplicitous authoritarian stand unchallenged, even if it means no longer taking Arnold’s culture theory very seriously at all.The result has been twenty years of very wishy-washy appreciations of Arnold by left-liberals. For example, chiding Lipman for his attempt to resuscitate Arnold’s culture

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by divorcing it entirely from Arnold’s statism, left-liberal commentator Eugene Goodheart seems content to let Arnold sink to the bottom with the other quaint Victorian neo-feudalists. “In turning to the State,” he writes, “Arnold, Carlyle, and Ruskin left an ambiguous legacy: on the one hand, a law and order rhetoric that liberals and radicals find repressive and on the other, a justification for necessary political reforms like the regulation of child labor, social security.”53 Commenting on Culture and Anarchy, biographer Clinton Machann is similarly able to offer only hand-wringing, finding at its heart “a tension between apolitical individualism and desire for community,” drawn naturally to the first but repelled by the “apparent anti-libertarian bias identifying culture with the State and ‘law and order.’ ”54 “Tension,” too, summarizes Edward Said’s appreciation of Arnold.There is Arnold’s “cosmopolitan cultural outlook” on the one hand, and then there is his “authoritarian and uncompromising notion of the State” on the other.55 “[W]hat I find particularly interesting about Arnold,” Said admits, “is that in an unmistakably frank, not to say brutally honest manner he connects his persuasive, even seductive thought about the virtues of culture with the coercive, authoritarian violence of the national State.” Like nearly all left-liberal commentators on Arnold in recent years, by “particularly interesting” Said seems to mean “quaint and alarming.” Like the Marxists, Said warns that “[o]ne could march forward from Arnold and end up showing how his ideas lead to Orwell’s Big Brother state in 1984 and perhaps even the Stalinist and Hitlerite states of recent memory.” Like the other left-liberals, though, Said resists this temptation and offers this highly conditional “appreciation” instead: Arnold more clearly than most brings together the individual and the collective inside an identifiable and authoritative entity which he calls culture[; his] ideas about culture share with nationalists and patriots of the time a sort of reinforced sense of essentialized and distilled identity, which, in a much later context of twentiethcentury genocidal wars and wholesale persecutions, Adorno saw as leading to “identitarian thought.”56 * * * If my analysis of the Victorian values debate (as one structured by the individualism–collectivism axis) brought to light the antistatism of rightliberals, my analysis of the major modern commentary on Arnold

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(as structured by the libertarian–authoritarian axis) has revealed the antistatism of left-liberals, too. So how do we explain the ubiquity of antistatism in modern Anglo-American liberalism? As I mentioned in opening the chapter, few have wondered about ubiquitous antistatism, but rephrase the question to ask about the ubiquity of modern atomistic individualism, resentful of all authority (including the state), and a number of accounts come to mind. In order to explain modern liberal antistatism, I consider two representative accounts here, one which explains atomistic individualism as an evolving philosophical position within modern liberalism, the other which portrays it as a modern ideology.While both accounts have their merits, I ultimately endorse the latter account as the more accurate, and therefore the more effective in describing the individualist and subsequently antistatist tendencies that have kept us moderns from making a fair assessment of the perfectionist state of Victorian liberal theory. The first of these accounts treats modern atomistic individualism (and antistatism) as the reasonable if unfortunate product of developments with twentieth-century liberal thought. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, liberals began to think about the state in essentially one of two ways: as “individualists” or as “collectivists.” Historians have persuasively shown that this way of thinking about the state did not begin until the 1880s, and, while there were a range of positions within the debate, the two poles were clear to everyone. Individualists, the most prominent being Herbert Spencer, supported a state that was restricted in its activities to the protection of individual liberty, or “the nightwatchman state” in the parlance of the day. Collectivists, in contrast, were prepared to support state intervention, in both economic and social life, on behalf of collective considerations.57 This debate, a mostly political one that allowed for any number of compromise positions, became by the middle of the twentieth century entwined with a different debate, one which did not so easily allow for compromise.This new debate was about methodological individualism and collectivism—basically whether philosophical considerations of society should begin with individuals or collectives. Those with a pronounced preference for individuals as the starting place for political and social thought initiated the debate, compelling collectivists to rearticulate their position as one based upon an a priori social holism.The primary historical context for this new debate was of course the rise of collectivist states that were radically different from the incipient welfare state of the late Victorian collectivists: brutally illiberal fascist and communist totalitarian regimes. Faced with this new kind of collectivism on the ground, liberal

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individualists found methodological individualism to be an increasingly compelling position to take. The kind of state that methodological individualism could support was consequently one that was extremely restrained in its activities: given the premise that the individual was ontologically prior to the collective, legitimate state activities could only be on behalf of individuals.58 Colin Bird has persuasively shown that the “Cold War liberals” who developed this principled individualism cast a long shadow, in which liberal theory even today continues to labor.As I have already suggested, one can hear echoes of these Cold War liberals in the rhetorical flourishes of the right-liberals in the Victorian values debate. But Bird also convincingly uncovers this methodological individualism at work not only in the libertarian liberalism of Robert Nozick, but also in the welfare liberalism of John Rawls. Bird notes especially how Rawls’s objection to utilitarianism is on methodological individualist grounds: utilitarianism fuses the preferences of individuals “into a single social whole [i.e., the greatest happiness], with the state acting as its agent.” I would add that methodological individualism also helps to explain the vehement insistence of other 1970s liberals, such as Ronald Dworkin in 1978, that “governments must be neutral on what might be called the question of the good life.”59 After all, a state intervening on behalf of “the good” would clearly violate methodological individualism, a method which begins not with the good but with the individual’s good, whatever that may be. And, as I argued in chapter one, this resistance to state intervention on behalf of any good has only grown more pronounced with the shift from comprehensive to political liberalism, a resistance particularly evident in the fact (discussed in chapter one at length) that what preoccupies both perfectionist and anti-perfectionist theorists today is the question of coercion rather than the question of moral epistemology. But methodological individualism is even more insidious, for it can be found even at the root of the liberal defense of state intervention in the market, or what is sometimes called “welfarism.” Right-liberal defenses of the market are, of course, often driven by methodological individualism: individual choice is sacred and the iron laws of supply and demand are founded upon that choice. But left-liberal defenses of the welfare state are themselves often driven by methodological individualism, too. As Martha Nussbaum, one of a few important left-leaning critics of welfarism, explains, “[w]elfarism springs from respect for people and their actual choices, from a reluctance to impose something alien upon them, or even to treat the desires of different people unequally.” In other words, the welfare state will simply enable all individuals to participate within

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that market. Benefits should come without strings attached, because a fundamental respect for the subjective preferences of individuals is the starting point of methodological individualism.The kind of welfare state that results is one that strenuously restrains itself from influencing in any way the existing preferences of individuals for fear of imposing its will— the collective will, so to speak—upon the individual.60 This first of my two representative accounts, then, persuasively traces the individualism of postwar liberalism (both right- and left-liberal versions) to not only a political commitment to individualism over collectivism but to a philosophically radical methodological individualism, which, in emphasizing not just the political superiority of but the ontological priority of the individual to the state, rejects any state not strictly respectful—like the market itself—of the existing preferences of individuals. The weakness of this first account, however, lies in its inability to explain the radical individualism, and corresponding antistatism, that have characterized important postwar political positions either that define themselves as politically collectivist as opposed to individualist, or that reject the individualist–collectivist axis of debate entirely: mainly, Marxists and postmodernists respectively. Given the prominence of the latter especially in contemporary intellectual life, this seems to me to be a glaring deficiency of this first account. Before considering the second account of modern antistatism (i.e., individualism as an ideology rather than a principled philosophical position), I need to show this deficiency of the first account in more detail. So I now complete my portrait of the ubiquity of modern antistatism with this third and final example of the misreading of the Victorian state, a misreading that has been sponsored primarily by non-liberals. Above, there was already the suggestion of antistatism in the Marxist critiques of Arnold’s state, which (as I noted then) often have been at heart as libertarian in spirit as those offered by Woolf or Trilling. For Chris Baldick, for example, what is most threatening about Arnold’s culture (and the culture promulgated by his heirs, Eliot, Leavis, and Richardson) is its argument “that the fullest development of personality can be achieved most easily by handing over one side of it to an established authority in the form of subcontract.” “What is consistently characteristic of this line of critics,” Baldick concludes,“is less the institutional guarantee of order (which can vary from Arnold’s state to Eliot’s church to Richardson’s League of Nations) than what might be called its subjective correlative: the equation, that is, of social and cultural orders with a certain balance or harmony of the individual mind.”61 Baldick, like the left-liberals Woolf and Trilling, senses the presence of Plato in all this. Arnold’s dangerous “tendency to

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collapse together the social and the psychological” (such as his “use of the term ‘best self ’ to describe the state”) can be traced back to the “mind/community analogy” of Plato’s Republic. In all this, particularly in the elimination of class as an intermediary check on state power, Baldick sees the surrender of the individual to the state. “Arnold’s purpose,” he writes, “was to eliminate conceptually those intermediary social institutions and loyalties which obstructed the full communion of individual to state.”62 In recent decades, however, the most vehemently radical individualists and antistatists have been the postmodernists, particularly those influenced by Michel Foucault.63 It is this body of work that I primarily use to illuminate the third misreading of the Victorian state. As with so many of the other political positions described above, individualism and antistatism reinforce each another in complicated ways in postmodern writings, so much so in this case, however, that it can be very difficult to recognize that there are in fact two separate claims being made. More, postmodernist analyses are generally very hard to pin down in terms of what they stand for, making postmodernism’s overall relationship to other political traditions difficult to gauge. One gets the sense that postmodernists prefer it this way, as Terry Eagleton suggests in this withering parody of postmodernist evasiveness. Who needs to launch a detailed critique of left-wing thought when you can argue, much more grandiosely, that all social discourse is blinded and indeterminate, that the “real” is undecidable, that all actions beyond a timorous reformism will proliferate perilously beyond one’s control, that there are no subjects sufficiently coherent to undertake such actions in the first place, that there is no total system to be changed in any case, that any apparently oppositional stance has already been pre-empted by the ruses of power, and that the world is no particular way at all, assuming we can know enough about it to assert even that?64 As Eagleton suggests, to interrogate postmodernism about traditional political positions—such as its understanding of the state or of the individual—is to refuse to abide by its extreme skepticism. Nevertheless, even pressing ahead in this fashion, one will not find clearly stated positions on these topics, only tendencies. One can say, then, that antistatism is a notable tendency in postmodernist theory, but it is probably more accurate to call it antiauthority. In his early and most influential work, Foucault was more interested in

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analysis of “practices” than institutions per se. In Discipline and Punish, for example, his 1975 study of modern prison reforms (published in English in 1978), Foucault found in the changing nature of prisons evidence of a much broader societal change in the exercise of power: At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.65 Discipline and Punish has been incredibly influential within Victorian studies in the last two decades, to the point that the period has been almost completely rewritten as the disciplinary society par excellence. As some scholars have very recently shown, however, there are very good historical reasons to challenge the relevance of Discipline and Punish, a book “written from a presentist perspective with French contexts foremost in mind,” to the study of the Victorians.66 Additionally, and more importantly to my own argument, there are good reasons to understand the great appeal of Foucault to scholars within Victorian studies as, also, having less to do with the nature of Victorian society than the nature of our own. Marc Edmundson suggested back in 1997, for example, that the great appeal of Foucault to contemporary humanist academics is part of a larger obsession he labels “American Gothic,” the cultural expression of anxiety about the social transformations let loose by the 1960s, the end of the Cold War, the (then) approaching millennium, and (ultimately) the death of God. While Edmundson’s portrait of postmodernism may be somewhat exaggerated, it does have the merit of situating postmodernism (which as a whole can be so slippery) within a recognizable socio-political context—that of American paranoia, as originally identified by Richard Hofstadter—a context that has deep associations with antistatism.67

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Some of Foucault’s later work, however, requires a refining of Edmundson’s thesis. Particularly in an important 1978–1979 lecture series (made available in English in the 1991 collection, The Foucault Effect), Foucault’s analysis of the rise of the “disciplinary society” matured into a more explicit analysis of the rise of the modern state. As summarized by one of the editors of that volume, Colin Gordon, Foucault in these lectures wove into his Discipline and Punish narrative the historical emergence of the liberal state, which made use of the same kind of “generalized surveillance” techniques as the modern prison did. This new liberal state sought to reconcile competing commitments to self-interested individualism and juridical sovereignty. Foucault describes these practices as “governmentality,” and they are the work of not only the state bureaucracy but civil society as well.68 For the student of antistatism, this is the most fascinating aspect of Foucault’s later work. On the one hand, Foucault’s erasure of the distinction between the state and civil society seems at times to align him with communitarians like MacIntyre, the result being a similar defeatism in the face of a monstrous all-encompassing system. As Gordon puts it, while “[i]t is in fact in vain to look for the hand of the state everywhere pulling the strings of micro-disciplinary powers in nineteenth-century societies[,] . . . these largely privatized micro-power structures none the less participate, from the viewpoint of government, in a coherent general policy of order.” The major difference between Foucault and MacIntyre in this regard is that MacIntyre is energized by such systems, so long as they are relatively small (in the spirit of Aristotle), for then the political can be completely subsumed by the moral. Foucault and the postmodernists are less enthusiastic about these airtight communities; there is a deep fatalism to this strain of postmodern writing. Ignoring the difference in tone,Terry Eagleton has observed that both communitarianism and postmodernism “highlight the cultural and historical fashioning of the self to the point where to submit those forces to radical critique would involve . . . some leap into metaphysical outer space,” a leap that both theories prohibit. In any case, according to this reading, Foucault in this later work did not move very far at all from early work like Discipline and Punish, except to explicitly implicate the state and civil society in this total and seamless system, and to neutralize somewhat the paranoid tone that once accompanied his descriptions of it.69 On the other hand, though, Foucault in his later work does not seem as eager to collapse the distinction between civil society and the state. Indeed he often seems to jealously guard that distinction, which suggests

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to me at least that his later work might be more profitably read not as a continuation of the communitarian fatalism of Discipline and Punish but rather in relation to the contemporaneous right-liberal recuperation of Victorian civil society. One might read Foucault’s lectures on governmentality, in other words, alongside the kind of right-liberal opinion produced at the same time, books, for example, like that of the former editor of the right-liberal Economist, Ian Bradley’s 1980 The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism, which emphasized, like Thatcher or Himmelfarb, that the robust “voluntaryism” of Victorian civil society had a very significant power in shaping individual lives, not least in protecting them against the burgeoning state.70 There is some evidence to suggest that Foucault in his last writings took a similarly optimistic view of this civil society, so that his antistatism brings him into the orbit of right-liberals rather than communitarians. Gordon, again, suggests this alternative reading: [Foucault was] sufficiently respectful of the historical effectiveness of liberalism as an art of government to doubt the liberal (and Marxist) nightmare of an ever-expansionist and despotic tendency within the state. Although not enamoured of minimalist anarcholiberal individualism in the manner of Robert Nozick, Foucault does seem to have been (at least) intrigued by the properties of liberalism as a form of knowledge calculated to limit power by persuading government of its own incapacity; by the notion of the rule of law as the architecture of pluralist social space; and by the German neo-liberals’ way of conceiving the social market as a game of freedom sustain by governmental artifice and invention.71 That Foucault was more fascinated than appalled by this “relativization of the notional boundary line between state and society”—that Foucault should be read more as an optimistic right-leaning virtue liberal rather than a fatalistic communitarian—becomes even more compelling when one recalls his well-known libertarian portrait of the individual.72 Lauren Goodlad has made an argument close to this one in her analysis of the political valence of Foucault’s late term “pastorship.” When Goodlad writes that both Mill and Foucault understood “pastorship—the means by which to build individuality without homogenizing individuals—[to be] the central problematic of a modern liberal society,” she brings Foucault into close alignment with the virtue liberals, those liberal theorists described in the first chapter who advocate the cultivation of civic virtues in order to maintain a minimal framework that does not challenge each

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individual’s immutable conception of the good. The editors of a recent collection of essays on Foucault’s late work encourage a similar if less precise reading of Foucault as a theorist who has, like most liberal theorists today, determined that a legitimate political program must eliminate any traces of a moral program, as when they write that for Foucault liberalism is like “an ethos of government, . . . a restless and dissatisfied ethos of recurrent critique of State reason and politics,” committed to the idea that “by governing over-much, rulers thwarted the very ends of government.”According to this reading, Foucault fits quite well into the spectrum of liberal theories that abide by the two accounts (of pluralism and of reason) described in the first chapter.74 Foucault’s commitment, like that of contemporary liberals, to that immutable individual has been well documented by other commentators, a commitment at times so fierce that it threatened (as it does in the case of most liberal theorists, as argued in this and chapter one) to render only the most minimal framework tolerable.75 Particularly late in his career, Foucault was quite forthcoming on this topic, such as when he noted in a 1982 essay that “[a]t the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.”76 Like his great philosophical predecessor, Nietzsche, Foucault believed in a radically subjective will.Yes, our supposed moral judgments are no more than the expressions of this will, Nietzsche argued, but we should revel in this. “We want to become,” Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science (1887),“human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.”77 Foucault’s radical individualism was equally subjectivist, as revealed in an April 1983 interview: M.F. What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or life.That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? Q. Of course, that kind of project is very common in places like Berkeley where people think that everything from the way they eat breakfast, to the way they have sex, to the way they spend their day, should itself be perfected. M.F. But I am afraid in most of those cases, most of the people think if they do what they do, if they live as they live, the reason is that they know the truth about desire, life, nature, body, and so on.

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In this fascinating exchange, when he is politely charged by his interlocutor with merely advocating consumerism, Foucault suggests that he indeed is advocating this, though with the hope that people shop with the understanding that in so doing they are discovering nothing about their essence—“the truth about desire, life, nature, body, and so on.” Rather, as he concluded in the same interview,“[f ]rom [Nietzsche’s] idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”78 Given his extraordinary commitment to radical individualism, reading Foucault as a right-liberal, deeply involved in a recuperation of Victorian values as a means of cultivating enough civic virtues to maintain a minimal state while preserving a society committed to radical individualism, seems to me to be the most compelling interpretation.79 And postmodernism in this light thus seems to have at its heart something less considered, something more ideological, than methodological individualism at work. Methodological individualism is a deliberate, philosophical decision to make the individual the starting place for political and social calculation. Subjective individualism, in contrast, is as thoughtless as a trip to the shopping mall. Examined as a culture, so to speak, rather than as a philosophical movement, our modern individualism—as revealed in these three misreadings of the Victorian state—seems to rest upon changes in attitude deeper than a history of ideas such as Colin Bird’s can uncover.A second account would therefore examine these attitudes as ideological, rather than philosophical. Representative would be Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, but only representative: my aim here is not to convince readers of every detail of MacIntyre’s thesis—indeed, it should be clear from chapter one that I disagree completely with MacIntyre’s relativist and antistatist communitarianism—but merely to bring into my own argument the suggestive power of MacIntyre’s description of our “emotivism,” which offers the kind of bold tonic necessary to awaken us to the true ideological depths of our own individualism and (subsequent) antistatism.80 Like Foucault, MacIntyre understands Nietzsche to be the key to our age. But where Foucault finds in Nietzsche the glittering philosophical ideal yet to be realized by the shopping masses, MacIntyre finds instead an accurate prediction of the tawdry reality of modern individualism. MacIntyre summarizes Nietzsche’s argument from The Gay Science as follows: [I]f there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such

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fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. I myself must now bring into existence “new tables of what is good.” The rational and rationally justified autonomous moral subject of the eighteenth century is a fiction, an illusion; so, Nietzsche resolves, let will replace reason and let us make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will.81 MacIntyre believes such reasoning to be at the heart of what he calls our culture of “emotivism,” meaning “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments . . . are nothing but expressions of preferences[,] . . . attitude or feeling.” The sociological aspect of this culture of emotivism is “the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations.” [E]valuative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others. I cannot genuinely appeal to impersonal criteria, for there are no impersonal criteria. I may think that I so appeal and others may think that I so appeal, but these thoughts will always be mistakes. The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences, and choices of another with its own. Others are always means, never ends. Pointing to authors such as Diderot, Kierkegaard, and Henry James, MacIntyre persuasively shows how this kind of social world—which is “nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preference and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction”—has been the target of moral commentary for more than two centuries.82 What kind of authority can govern such a social world? Here MacIntyre believes Max Weber to hold the answer.Weber famously defined the state as that which possesses a monopoly of “legitimate” violence. However, MacIntyre points out, for Weber, as for Nietzsche, legitimacy is ultimately impossible to establish, for there is no fundamental truth or end by which means (like the state) can be made legitimate. For both Weber and Nietzsche, “[q]uestions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. Instead one must simply choose—between parties, classes, nations, causes, ideals.” Weber’s state thus justifies itself by the efficiency of its

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execution: that is, as a superior means to any other society might offer. “[O]n Weber’s view no type of authority can appeal to rational criteria to vindicate itself except that type of bureaucratic authority which appeals precisely to its own effectiveness.And what this appeal reveals is that bureaucratic authority is nothing other than successful power” Governance, be it at the level of the state or the corporation, thus amounts to the most effective manipulation of others—no more: “it is by appeal to his own effectiveness [at manipulating others] that the manager claims authority.”83 As a culture, therefore, emotivism not only determines the moral character of individuals but also the sociological character of our institutions of authority. Each of us believes our self to be the sole author of our existence; none of us believe any other authority to be legitimate. The social order is necessarily an uneasy one, and MacIntyre, writing in 1981, is impressed by the ability of his thesis to explain the mass irrationality masquerading as political protest in the 1960s and 1970s: Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises.And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalism of the Left as well as of the Right.84 Here then is our explanation for the antistatism to be found across the modern political spectrum: the radical subjective individualism that understands all authority over it to be “legitimate” only because of its more efficient exercise of power, not by its possession of objective truth. As described earlier in the chapter, Plato’s state was based upon the rule of philosopher kings—the perfect coincidence of absolute power and truth. Modern liberalism, in direct contrast, believes the pursuit of power and the pursuit of truth must be separate; power must be restrained, minimized, neutralized: whatever chastening of power is necessary in order to allow individuals to pursue their private truth unmolested. I have further argued, however, that moderns, not just liberals but across the political spectrum, continue to feel molested by the state, no matter how chastened its power (neutralized by left-liberals, devolved by right-liberals).

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Why is this? MacIntyre provides one version of the most compelling thesis. Because we inhabit an emotivist culture, we, despite our liberal intentions, cannot actually distinguish between the exercise of power and the pursuit of the truth.Truth is not so much pursued by individuals as created, or “constructed,” to use the preferred term. And constructing truth is just another act of will, another exercise of power. So rather than the state exercising (chastened) power and the individual pursuing truth, as optimistically posited by modern liberal theory, we, ultimately, as emotivists, see only the state exercising power and the individual exercising power: we see only rivals exercises of power. From this point of view, modern liberalism, despite its best intentions, returns again and again to the endless, resentful struggle of wills: those speaking for the state vainly trying to restrain, minimize, neutralize its power, those speaking for individuals nevertheless persuaded that any exercise of power by the state infringes on the self. * * * While within Victorian studies today the three major modern interpretations of the Victorian state—as nonexistent à la Himmelfarb, as authoritarian à la Said, or as part of a larger punitive power à la Foucault— still remain preeminent, this book is not entirely alone in its reconsideration of that state. Bruce Robbins’ work, for example, reexamines the Victorian state in the light of not only Foucault’s exposé of governmentality but the contemporary result of the last two decades of rabid rightliberal antistatism. In a 2001 article, Robbins contrasts the antistatism of the postmodernists with his own (highly qualified) statism. Foucault’s success within Victorian studies, Robbins argues, “has less to do with ultimate philosophical positions . . . than with a politically motivated twentieth-century estrangement from nineteenth-century narratives of scientific rationality, human liberation, the extension of democracy, and the reform of government.” Robbins sympathizes with this estrangement, but only to a point. Foucault saw the present as unfortunately all too continuous with the nineteenth century; his choice of Nietzsche over Hegel was an imperative to break with a legacy of panoptical surveillance, multiplying bureaucratic apparatuses, the illusion of progressive reform. . . . If I am more inclined here to take Hegel’s side [in support of the emergence of the modern state], it is not on philosophical grounds, but because still more recent history, especially in the United States,

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has revealed unsuspected virtues in the object Foucault taught us to look at so critically: Victorian reformist governmentality.85 By “still more recent history,” Robbins means the unrelenting success of right-liberal devolution, the dismantling of the welfare state that commenced under Reagan and Thatcher and has continued ever since, regardless of the parties in power.Taking for granted Robbins’ distinction between political and philosophical arguments for the state, my argument mirrors his politically. One of my own left-liberal motivations in writing this book is to suggest that the contemporary hegemony of antistatism— left, right, and postmodern—is reason enough to reconsider Victorian statism. Robbins, more generous in finding something of value in the postmodern critique of governmentality, nevertheless agrees that statism deserves a new hearing. Philosophically, however, our arguments are very different. Robbins makes a complicated case for the welfare state, one that I cannot do justice to here.This portion of his thinking seems crucial, however: [My] argument has tried to point toward a salvage of the upward mobility story in general. . . . It has done so on the grounds that, though the genre seems to favor the individual at the expense of the social, it is actually about democracy . . . , and about making democracy real to imperfect, desiring individuals. . . . [The] narrative [Great Expectations] that seems directed against the welfare state reveals itself to be . . . part of a complex pedagogy whereby desire is taught to adjust to the emergent conditions of the welfare state, to recognize forms of socially mediated “merit” and act on behalf of new forms of “welfare” that correspond to neither the best nor the worst of which contemporary conditions are capable.86 Robbins’ support for the welfare state is tepid at best. He defends the state only for its ability to socialize people, for its use of a “pedagogy” that “adjust[s]” desire and lowers expectations. Recognizing that such a state is not unlike the pedagogies of social control that have so troubled postmodernist readers of the Victorians, Robbins seems to be suggesting that, nevertheless, such a state is better than the state of nature the devolving and privatizing right would return us to. In its willingness only to readjust desires rather than refine or even redefine them, and thus to leave its citizens as “imperfect” as it found them, the Victorian state in Robbins’ telling is not unlike the welfarist state that I described above.

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In the next two chapters I describe a perfectionist liberal state that is much more ambitious than this welfarist one that Robbins seeks to recover in the Victorians. Unlike Robbins’ version, the perfectionist state of the Victorian liberals that I outline in the next chapters is not at all satisfied with “making democracy real to imperfect, desiring individuals.” Rather, the Victorian liberal state operates on the principle that all human beings are potentially perfect, and it employs at least two pedagogies to realize that potential. If with this book I therefore join a few other commentators like Robbins in making a political case for reconsidering the Victorian state, my second claim, about the worthiness of Victorian statism, makes a very different philosophical case for that state, locating in Victorian liberalism not the roots of modern welfarism but an ambitious perfectionist liberalism that has never received—and finally deserves— modern consideration. Crucial to considering that philosophical case is a willingness to step beyond the modern culture of skepticism I have only sketched in the last two chapters, first as a skepticism about the role of reason in conceiving the moral good, then as a skepticism about the role of reason in formulating states capable of assisting us in the pursuit of that moral good.The Victorian liberals did not have this skepticism.They did not believe that authority cannot be legitimated by truth; they did not share our conviction that there is no truth except that created by each individual. Rather, they shared Plato’s belief that the exercise of power and the pursuit of truth are two different things, and they shared his ambition to effect a careful coordination of these two things, rather than their complete divorce.Truth, for the Victorian liberals, was human perfection, an ideal that could be objectively known; I return to this claim a number of times in the pages to come. Power, properly coordinated to assist in the realization of this objective ideal of perfection, was democracy. How the democratic state can assist in the realization of perfection is the formal subject of each of the next two chapters: the state assists in the perfectionist program through two kinds of education—that of experience and that of culture.

CHAPTER THREE

Experience

The first of the duties that are at this time imposed upon those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy. . . . A new science of politics is needed for a new world. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Against Arnold’s authoritarianism, modern critics have long held up John Stuart Mill’s libertarianism, particularly as expressed in On Liberty.Where Arnold, like Plato, was all too willing to sacrifice individuals on behalf of a mystical state, Mill (this argument goes) clearly and consistently treated individuals as ends in themselves. In this way, Mill, unlike Arnold, properly sought (in the terminology of chapter two) the divorce of power and philosophy.What power the state had would be entirely free from philosophy, and thus every individual would enjoy complete liberty of “thought and discussion” and “of individuality,” to refer to the major chapter headings of On Liberty. So, Lionel Trilling argued for instance, where Arnold the authoritarian “believed that the task of the enlightened was to bring opinion to a conformity with right reason,” Mill the libertarian believed “any diversity of ideas was to be cherished” in and of itself. The state, from this perspective, should be little more than “a convenience,” to recall Leonard Woolf ’s language, “part of the machinery of civilization like a water-closet or an electric power-station, which are under modern conditions necessary if the individual is to live a civilized life, but whose functions are best performed when they work so silently and so far in the background that they never appear to obtrude themselves on the individual’s life.”1 As the previous chapters have argued, however, the neutral state is impossible, a fantasy of our modern antistatist ideology (as in chapter two)

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and our skittishness about moral programs (as in chapter one): in short, a fantasy produced by our modern culture of skepticism. Power, even as exercised in the form of electric power stations and water closets, necessarily entails the imposition of beliefs. Simply to concede, as Woolf does, that the state is “necessary if the individual is to live a civilized life” is to concede that the state’s authority is exercised legitimately because it stands for the values of “civilization,” values including health, efficiency, convenience, hygiene even—whatever values are at work when the state imposes power stations and water closets upon individuals. Understanding neutrality to be impossible, then, an interpretive paradigm that sets the Platonic marriage of power and philosophy at one end and the complete divorce of power and philosophy at the other is nonsensical, for all the positions along this supposed spectrum can be shown to involve the significant coincidence of some kind of power and some kind of philosophy. Given this inevitable coincidence, in short, what really must be examined are the natures of the power and of the philosophy that are to be coordinated. If modern liberals have neglected these two essential tasks, as I argued in chapters one and two, the Victorian liberals took these tasks up with a gusto that still awaits our careful attention, as I argue in this chapter and the next.2 Perhaps no single passage in the canon of Victorian liberal theory best captures this intention to attend both to the nature of power and to its ruling ideas as one by James Fitzjames Stephen, in his short 1862 Cornhill essay, aptly titled “Liberalism.” The word, Stephen noted, has two contemporary meanings, and thus identifies perfectly the two proper hopes of true liberals:“moral excellence” and “democracy.” “The historical reason of the connection between the two is,” he argued,“that those who first introduced the words [liberal and liberalism] in their present sense complained of the narrow-mindedness and bigotry of the state of things then existing, and proposed to introduce a higher conception of the ends and means of public life by an appeal to the people at large.” Stephen then asked the question that all Victorian liberals asked: can the pursuit of moral perfection and democratic reform really proceed hand in hand? Popular power has increased vastly during the last half-century in our own country. In America and France it reigns without control, though under different forms; but the great political problem of the day—a problem infinitely more important than all party questions put together—is whether the second half of the hopes of the original liberals will be as widely fulfilled as the first; whether they will

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succeed not merely in increasing the power of the popular voice, but in raising thereby the general tone of public life, and in causing it to be pervaded by a higher conception of the objects of national existence. If they do succeed in this, they will have done a great thing; if they do not, they will have inflicted upon mankind the greatest of all curses—a permanent degradation of human life.3 This same question motivated the core theoretical work of the two Victorian liberals at the center of this study,Arnold and Mill. Contrary to their frequent portrayal as political opposites, these two perfectionist liberals were in fact in perfect agreement that the two great challenges facing their era were to redefine the nature of power in England and to ensure a certain philosophy coincided with that power. Looking at the nature of power, Mill and Arnold both concluded that democracy was preferable to aristocracy, for a host of reasons, and they therefore sought to ensure that the shift from aristocracy to democracy would be a peaceful one. Looking at the nature of philosophy, they agreed again that the truth is humans are capable of achieving moral perfection. In short, as democrats and as perfectionists, Mill and Arnold were united.4 There are important historical reasons these two authors were so closely aligned in their thinking about democracy, as I discuss below, but one efficient way to establish that alignment (as well as to set up the agenda for this chapter and the next) is to emphasize the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville upon both. While Tocqueville’s influence upon Mill’s vision of democracy is well known, not least by Mill himself, Tocqueville’s influence upon Arnold has been less noticed.5 In the Introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America (1835),Tocqueville had observed that, while “[i]t is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on among us . . . [, t]o some it appears to be novel but accidental, and, as such, they hope it may still be checked. . . . [T]o others,” however, “it seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency that is to be found in history.” Tocqueville counted himself among the latter, of course; “[t]he gradual development of the principle of equality” was for him “a providential fact.”6 This was the understanding of basically all Victorian liberals, as well as some non-liberals, too.7 And Mill and Arnold were no exception. When Mill reviewed Tocqueville’s first volume for the London Review in October 1835, he began by reiterating the claim that democracy is a matter not of “if ” but of “when.”8 Arnold, writing much later in 1861 in his Introduction to Popular Education in France (herein referred to as the 1861 Introduction), emphasized, like Tocqueville and Mill, the providential

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quality of democracy, going so far as to call the desire for democracy a fact of human nature. Those who bemoan “the encroaching spirit of democracy,” Arnold insists, “are complaining of human nature itself,” which “consists . . . in the effort to affirm one’s own essence; meaning by this, to develop one’s own existence fully and freely, to have ample light and air, to be neither cramped nor overshadowed. Democracy is trying to affirm its own essence; to live, to enjoy, to possess the world, as aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it.” However, we understand now, Arnold continues, that aristocracy prohibits too many people from affirming their human essence.“[A] philosophic observer,”Arnold writes, referring to Tocqueville,“has been constrained to remark, that ‘the common people is more uncivilised in aristocratic countries than in any others;’ because there ‘the lowly and the poor feel themselves, as it were, overwhelmed with the weight of their own inferiority.’ He has been constrained to remark,”Arnold continues citing from the first volume of Democracy in America,“that ‘there is such a thing as a manly and legitimate passion for equality, prompting men to desire to be, all of them, in the enjoyment of power and consideration.’ ” “Can it be denied,” Arnold asks,“that to live in a society of equals tends in general to make a man’s spirits expand, and his faculties work easily and actively; while, to live in a society of superiors, . . . in general tends to tame the spirits and to make the play of the faculties less secure and active”—in short, “that to be heavily overshadowed, to be profoundly insignificant, has, on the whole, a depressing and benumbing effect on the character?”9 In addition to being an unjust exercise of power, aristocracy in the nineteenth century was objectionable to Mill and Arnold for another reason: it no longer coincided with philosophy—any philosophy. In a letter of 1847, Mill wrote of the aristocracy that while they “mean well” and “have grown good even to goodiness,” “every year shows more & more their pitoyable absence of even that very moderate degree of intellect, & that very moderate amount of will & character which are scattered through the other classes but of which they have certainly much less than the average share, owing to the total absence of the habit of exerting their minds for any purpose whatever.”10 One can find the same observation in Arnold’s writing, too, culminating of course in his sustained analysis in Culture and Anarchy of the class of “Barbarians” and their “insufficiency of light.” A decade earlier, in 1859, for example, Arnold wrote his sister Jane (called “K”) that “the true type of the British political nobleman is Lord Derby—with eloquence, high feeling, and good intentions—but the ideas of a school-boy.” That same year, in his first political essay “England and the Italian Question,”Arnold articulated

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this idea in more polite detail. He wrote that “[t]he ideas of religious, political, and social freedom, which are commonly called the ideas of 1789” have “leavened for seventy years the populations of Europe”; no ruler should be in ignorance of these ideas—for example,“the abolition of privilege, the right of the people to choose its own government, the claims of nationalities”—and yet the remaining European aristocracies are indeed just that. “The English aristocracy,” Arnold concluded, “is no exception.”11 Finally, for both Mill and Arnold, power needs philosophy: democracy needs the ideas of 1789. Again, Tocqueville pioneered the paradigm for achieving this union: The first of the duties that are at this time imposed upon those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy, to reawaken, if possible, its religious beliefs; to purify its morals; to mold its actions; to substitute a knowledge of statecraft for its inexperience, and an awareness of its true interest for its blind instincts, to adapt its government to time and place, and to modify it according to men and to conditions. A new science of politics is needed for a new world.12 The challenge for the nineteenth-century state is, in this way, an educational one. In his 1861 Introduction, Arnold understood the situation very similarly:“[o]n the one hand, then, the masses of the people in this country are preparing to take a much more active part than formerly in controlling its destinies; on the other hand, the aristocracy . . . is losing also that influence on the spirit and character of the people which it long exercised.” “On what action may we rely to replace,” he continued, “for some time at any rate, that action of the aristocracy upon the people of this country?” In other words, [Arnold continued,] and to use a short and significant modern expression which every one understands, what influence may help us to prevent the English people from becoming with the growth of democracy, Americanised? I confess I am disposed to answer: On the action of the State.13 In 1861, the same year that Arnold offered his first published recommendation of “the State,” Mill offered his most considered recommendation of “the government,” also squarely within Tocqueville’s paradigm. Our goal, Mill writes in Considerations on Representative Government, being a society rich in the “particular attributes in human beings which seem to

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have a more especial reference to Progress” (mainly “mental activity, enterprise, and courage”), “the best government is that which is most conducive to Progress.” To evaluate governments, then, two criteria must be taken into consideration, the first of which is clearly perfectionist in intention, the second of which is (indirectly) democratic: (1) “the degree in which it [the government] tends to increase the sum of good qualities in the governed, collectively and individually,” and (2) “the degree in which it is adapted to take advantage of the amount of good qualities which may at any time exist, and make them instrumental to the right purposes.”14 To paraphrase Mill and Arnold, then, within Tocqueville’s paradigm: if democracy is the right form of power, and perfectionism (for Arnold, not to be “Americanised;” for Mill, to maximize “good qualities” and “right purposes”) is the right philosophy, the state or government’s role is to educate democratic citizens toward perfection. Having established this degree of equivalence between Arnold’s “state” and Mill’s “government,” I use just Arnold’s term from here forward and proceed to an important difference, one which I propose be used to differentiate among the various perfectionist policies recommended by the Victorian liberals. If Mill and Arnold both understood the state as a perfectionist education of democratic citizens, they favored different pedagogies: the experiential and the didactic. The democratic state’s experiential pedagogy requires policy-making that ensures that the experience of democracy is an educational, even perfecting, one for citizens.This is the pedagogy favored by Mill (though, as I show, by no means ignored by Arnold) and the focus of the remainder of this chapter. The democratic state’s didactic pedagogy requires policy-making that ensures that any perfectionist institutions or associations considered philosophically authoritative must enjoy only limited power. This is the pedagogy favored by Arnold (though by no means ignored by Mill), a pedagogy Arnold called “culture” and the focus of chapter four. * * * The rest of this chapter will be given over to describing the kinds of policies the Victorian liberals proposed to make the democratic experience a morally perfecting one. Before proceeding to this work of description, however, I want to briefly sketch how Mill, the major figure here, developed his version of experiential education from his revision of utilitarianism through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. I do this to suggest that there is a valuable theory of education latent here, as well as

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to provide some important historical contexts that may help readers to appreciate the Victorian liberal achievement in this regard. I know very well that these few paragraphs do not do justice to either this theory or history; for better or worse, I have decided to skimp on both of these in order to dedicate many more pages to describing the policies of Victorian liberals. Mill’s radical commitment to “experience” (or “association”), as opposed to “intuition,” as the sole source of human knowledge is well known, as is his acute sense of the consequent limits of a future science of human beings. It is not that there are sometimes no real causes to human actions, as Mill puts it in “On the Logic of the Moral Sciences,” Book VI of his System of Logic (1843); there are always causes. But those causes can sometimes be very difficult to identify empirically, given that these causes are a complex function of both circumstances and character. Nevertheless, we do have access to enough empirical data about social circumstances and character formation that we can form propositions that, “whenever it is sufficient to know how the great majority of the human race . . . will think, feel, and act, . . . are equivalent to universal ones.” “For the purposes of political and social science,” Mill concludes there, “this is sufficient.”15 Like most utilitarians in first half of the century, Mill’s empiricism was united to a radical politics, a not unexpected union, for if we can know the circumstantial and character causes of human actions, why should we not attempt to shape circumstance and character so as to lead to the best human actions? “The aim of practical politics,” Mill writes in Book VI of the Logic, “is to surround any given society with the greatest possible number of circumstances of which the tendencies are beneficial and to remove or counteract, as far as practicable, those of which the tendencies are injurious.” Mill’s heady union of science and morality impressed many other Victorian liberals deeply. “Perhaps the sum of all his distinction,” wrote John Morley in his 1873 essay “The Death of Mr. Mill,” “lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of rigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous hope.” Indeed, Morley conjectured in that essay that Mill’s “completeness” in this way “was one of the secrets of [his] peculiar attraction for young men.” Mill “satisfied the ingenuous moral ardour which is instinctive in the best natures, . . . and at the same time he satisfied the rationalistic qualities, which are not less marked in the youthful temperament of those who by-and-by do the work of the world.” For many decades, for both Mill and his growing band of supporters, this commitment to a rigorous empiricism and a perfectionist reformism proceeded hand in hand.16

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However, Mill’s significance grew cloudy for several of his former disciples in the years leading up to and immediately following the 1867 Reform Bill. This is a very challenging political period to understand, given the intensely polemical nature of what so many of the major players then wrote, not least John Morley, who as late as 1917 still summarized all those who opposed the Reform Bill more than forty years ago as having surrendered to “a Tory instinct . . . against theories of liberty, equality, and fraternity” (against, that is, the “ideas of 1789”). Certainly some of the major voices in the debates of the 1860s did surrender to such a instinct, such as that “violent Tory of the old school” Ruskin, or, even more, Carlyle, who (again in Morley’s words) merely “poured malediction on the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong man, a king, a hero, a dictator.”17 However, there are also many genuine liberals made nervous by some of the reforms proposed during that decade, particularly the one reform that threatened to render enlightened government itself impossible: the expansion of the franchise. K. J. M. Smith has summarized the “deep philosophical fissures” among liberals in the 1860’s as between the “new progressive—or populist— elements, seen as only too willing to compromise and kow-tow to popular clamour and the unprincipled politics of the hour” and “the old-style classical liberalism represented by those such as Robert Lowe within Parliament and Fitzjames Stephen outside [for whom] . . . politics was a matter of effective and efficient government coupled with an individualism intended to allow full rein to ability and enterprise.”18 However, this summary hews too closely to Stephen’s understanding of events: mainly, that at the extremes there were populist mobocrats and feudalists, surrendering entirely to their unfounded intuitions, while the sensible center was dominated entirely by strict utilitarians and anti-democrats like Stephen, consistently committed to a political theory based upon empirical facts. The problem with this assessment is that it cannot make sense of Mill, not only Mill’s political proposals but (underlying these) his own consistent commitment to experiential education as the best hope for achieving (eventually) both democracy and moral perfection. And, for all his incredible influence upon opinion during this particular decade, Mill was indeed just as often completely misunderstood. Reading Mill’s various programs for continuing to limit the expansion of franchise, conservatives mistook him for an ally, but even former disciples—who recognized that Mill’s franchise limitations, unlike the conservatives’, were based upon education, rather than on property—themselves believed Mill’s later work to represent an irresponsible departure from what

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experience teaches us. Other former disciples, like Stephen, found in Mill’s other, more progressive, political commitments the same kind of evidence: the great author of “On the Logic of the Moral Sciences” and Principles of Political Economy (1848) was slipping over to the other camp, the Intuitionists.19 While acknowledging some maturation of his specific political commitments during this period, Mill completely rejected the charge that he had betrayed the empirical program first described in the Logic.20 In Utilitarianism (1861), Mill reiterated his commitment to this program— that is, to discern and adjust as best as possible the circumstantial and character causes of human actions—but he also made clearer the challenges involved here.While most of the sciences can proceed deductively, in ignorance of their first principles, the human sciences must begin with some assertion of moral fundamentals. [T]hough in science the particular truths precede the general theory, the contrary might be expected to be the case with a practical art, such as morals or legislation.All action is for the sake of some end, and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and colour from the end to which they are subservient. When we engage in a pursuit, a clear and precise conception of what we are pursuing would seem to be the first thing we need, instead of the last we are to look forward to. Those moral ends are not given to us by intuition. Mill is as emphatic about this here in Utilitarianism as he was nearly two decades before in the Logic. Rather, we can, by careful examination of those moral beliefs that have attained some “steadiness or consistency,” learn the “tacit influence of a standard.” That tacit standard, Mill believed, was the standard of utility, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It could be shown, he wrote, that the pursuit of happiness is “a most material and even predominant consideration in many of the details of morals” in all schools of thought.21 What changed between the Logic and Utilitarianism, though, was Mill’s assessment of what human beings actually mean by happiness. In that earlier work, as well as the first edition of Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill had followed the consensus among utilitarians then that human happiness involved only the satisfaction of individual interests, what Jonathan Riley summarizes as the “old radicalism.”22 Then, as Mill himself famously described in his Autobiography, came his “mental crisis,” which resulted in (among other things) his complete reappraisal of the

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nature of human happiness. “I had now learnt by experience,” he wrote there, “that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided.”23 Both of these points in Mill’s portrait of his great lesson need emphasis. One is that human happiness includes not only the satisfaction of selfinterest (i.e., active capacities) but also the cultivation of feelings (passive susceptibilities), feelings that Mill described elsewhere as “the conscientious feelings of mankind,” or “the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures.” As I have suggested, such a revised form of human happiness, as the telos of Mill’s utilitarianism, was perceived by many of his former disciples to be a transcendental departure from strict utilitarianism, though, as I examine in the conclusion, Mill showed that his new portrait of human happiness was carefully grounded in empirical facts.24 The other point in Mill’s portrait of his great lesson that needs emphasis is that a richer version of human happiness demands a more complex set of institutions to shape our circumstances and characters, institutions, to cite Mill again, that “nourish and enrich as well as guide.” Mill’s investigation of the many institutions of our perfection is so wide-ranging that I have necessarily had to choose just three to focus attention upon below: free expression, the franchise, and municipalism. But before moving to these, I must note one other as well as cite Mill’s optimism about their eventual collective success. One additional institution that Mill hoped might be transformed from merely guiding to actively nourishing our happiness was political economy itself. In the revised editions of Principles of Political Economy, Mill returned again and again to impoverished vision of human happiness at the heart of contemporary political economy. “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on,” he wrote in Book IV, “Influence of the Progress of Society on Production and Distribution”: “that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.”A society dedicated only to the satisfaction of self-interest increasingly seemed to Mill a dreary but necessary transitional state, hardly the dernier mot of social improvement as he wrote in his Autobiography. In the Principles, Mill wrote that while capitalism “may be a necessary stage in the progress of civilization, . . . it is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realizing. Most fitting,

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indeed, is it, that while riches are power, and to grow as rich as possible the universal object of ambition, the path to its attainment should be open to all, without favour or partiality. But the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.” For Mill, capitalism was merely a means to an end, the end being a world of equal opportunity and equal distribution that rendered the mere pursuit of wealth inane. Instead, “[t]here would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.” Mill’s late socialism was thus hardly an aberration but the natural conclusion of his rethinking of the nature of human perfection and the kinds of institutions necessary to achieve it.25 And, really, Mill had little doubt that all institutions could be reformed so as to make the Art of Living achievable by all, as he wrote in Utilitarianism: Now there is absolutely no reason in the nature of things why an amount of mental culture sufficient to give an intelligent interest in these objects of contemplation, should not be the inheritance of every one born in a civilized country. As little is there an inherent necessity that any human being should be a selfish egotist, devoid of every feeling or care but those which centre in his own miserable individuality. Something far superior to this is sufficiently common even now, to give ample earnest of what the human species may be made. Genuine private affections and a sincere interest in the public good, are possible, though in unequal degrees, to every rightly brought up human being. Mill’s program of institutional reforms is breathtaking, but entirely consistent with his perfectionist aim of achieving universal human happiness, as he came to understand it. In the same passage from Utilitarianism, Mill emphasizes the importance of liberty, eradication of disease, and protection against poverty. “[N]o one whose opinion deserves a moment’s consideration can doubt,” Mill asserts here, “that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits.” All the grand sources, in short, of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care

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and effort[,] . . . though their removal is grievously slow—though a long succession of generations will perish in the breach before the conquest is completed.26 Mill believed, as he wrote in his Autobiography, in the “extraordinary pliability of human nature,” a perspective that shares much more with Mill’s Enlightenment heroes, like Condorcet, than it does with our own modern liberalism. I looked forward, through the present age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions, to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also, convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and generally unanimity of sentiment, and so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.27 In short, Mill’s commitment to the development of a political and moral program based upon the empirical facts of human circumstances and character led him to understand our experiences to be not only the only appropriate measure of human happiness (or perfection) but also the most appropriate means of achieving that happiness. Institutions of the state, as primary agents in shaping human experience, played a crucial role in this project of human perfection, for Mill. Considerations is the most important book in this regard.As mentioned above, here, Mill proposes two criteria of good government: how much the state tends to increase the good in people, and how much the state utilizes that good in its own work.28 Mill explains that a government can be deemed “negatively defective” if it fails to meet either of these criteria: if it, first of all, does not grant authorities enough power to do their work, but, also, “if it does not sufficiently develope by exercise the active capacities and social feelings of the individual citizens.” Mill notes that this second negative defect of a government—“that of not bringing into sufficient exercise the individual faculties, moral, intellectual, and active, of the people”—has generally been examined as one of “the distinctive mischiefs of despotism.” But the presence or absence of this negative defect can also be used to evaluate democracies, or

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“popular governments”: As between one form of popular government and another, the advantage in this respect lies with that which most widely diffuses the exercise of public functions; on the one hand, by excluding fewest from the suffrage; on the other hand, by opening to all classes of private citizens . . . the widest participation in the details of judicial and administrative business; as by jury trial, admission to municipal offices, and above all by the utmost possible publicity and liberty of discussion, whereby not merely a few individuals in succession, but the whole public, are made, to a certain extent, participants in government, and sharers in the instruction and mental exercise derivable from it.29 While Mill had organizational reasons for dividing into two these three means of diffusion of public functions—on the one hand the franchise, and on the other hand municipalism and liberty of discussion—they can be considered here more straightforwardly as three means of, in Mill’s terms, “bringing into sufficient exercise the individual faculties, moral, intellectual, and active, of the people,” or, in this chapter’s terms, three of the most basic aspects of the experiential pedagogy of the state: liberty of discussion, expansion of the franchise, and municipalism. Considering liberty of discussion first, it may come as a surprise to readers primarily familiar with On Liberty to see liberty justified in Considerations on instrumental rather than strictly intrinsic grounds: that is, liberty of discussion as a means to the end of human perfection, rather than as an end in itself. For Mill, though, liberty was both. In Considerations, Mill emphasized the instrumental uses of liberty. But, of course, there are places in On Liberty—the most well-known places actually—that present liberty of discussion as intrinsically valuable, not least in the thesis paragraph in the first chapter, which states “[t]hat the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”And it is absolutely true that for Mill liberty was an intrinsic aspect of human perfection, and the major reason he, like liberals throughout history, sought to minimize state intervention was so that each individual could cultivate his liberty. Morley, for one, understood exactly the perfectionist intent of Mill’s emphasis upon the intrinsic value of liberty: On Liberty, he wrote, proclaims that “human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”30

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Just as prominent in On Liberty, however, once one has eyes for it, are Mill’s instrumental defenses of liberty, not unlike those found in Considerations, such as the famous defense of “experiments in living” in the earlier book, which Mill phrases this way (with my emphasis):“As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living.” In other words, different opinions and experiments of living are useful means to the end of the perfection of “mankind.” There is little indication even in On Liberty that Mill was attracted—as I charged contemporary liberals with being at the conclusion of chapter one and as Stephen charges Mill—to diversity of opinion as a kind of aesthetic good in itself. Stephen found Mill in On Liberty to “worship mere variety,” but Morley pointed out that Mill believed such variety to be good strictly as an instrument: “because it [variety] furnishes most chances of new forms of good presenting themselves and acquiring a permanent place.” Morley, like Mill, believed “that unity in religious belief as in other things will slowly draw nearer, as the result of the gradual acceptance by an increasing number of men of common methods of observing and interpreting experience.” Morley goes further than Mill in explicitly stating his own uncertainty about whether such a final unity is valuable in itself. But my point is that Mill at no time claims for diverse opinions anything more than instrumental use. At most, Mill’s view might be considered the same as Bagehot’s that spirited discussion can create a kind of individual intelligence that is hard to achieve in any other way. But I can find no place in On Liberty, or Mill’s other writings, where he defends debate as a good in itself.31 Mill made similar instrumental arguments for the reform of the second institution at issue here, the franchise.“People think it fanciful to expect so much from what seems so slight a cause—to recognise a potent instrument of mental improvement in the exercise of political franchises by manual labourers,” he wrote.“Yet unless substantial mental cultivation in the mass of mankind is to be a mere vision, this is the road by which it must come.” (And,“[i]f any one supposes that this road will not bring it, I call to witness the entire contents of M. de Tocqueville’s great work.”) For Mill, the extension of the franchise would introduce “people, who have [the] fewest intellectual stimuli of other kinds . . . to large, distant, and complicated interests.” Their improvement as citizens is the happy result: It is by political discussion that the manual labourer, whose employment is a routine, and whose way of life brings him in contact with no variety of impressions, circumstances, or ideas, is taught that remote causes, and events which take place far off, have a most sensible effect even on his personal interests; and it is from political

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discussion, and collective political action, that one whose daily occupations concentrate his interests in a small circle round himself, learns to feel for and with his fellow-citizens, and becomes consciously a member of a great community.32 It is probably not a coincidence that Mill found similar political and moral goods yielded by the instrument of professional life, too, as he described his own career at the East India Company in the Autobiography. “[T]he occupation accustomed me to see and hear the difficulties of every course,” Mill recalled,“and the means of obviating them.” [A]bove all it was valuable to me by making me . . . merely one wheel in a machine, the whole of which had to work together. . . . I was thus in a good position for finding out by practice the mode of putting a thought which gives it easiest admittance into minds not prepared for it by habit; while I became practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything. As in the discussion of the franchise in Considerations, Mill finds in this professional experience both intrinsic and instrumental goods. “I have found, through life, these acquisitions to be of the great possible importance for personal happiness, and they are also a very necessary condition for enabling any one, either as theorist or as practical man, to effect the greatest amount of good compatible with his opportunities.”33 It was precisely to accentuate these educational effects of the franchise— that is, to “develope by exercise the active capacities and social feelings of the individual citizens”—that Mill advocated, against most progressive opinion at that time and since, an open rather than secret ballot. “Everybody has as many different interests as he has feelings; likings or dislikings, either of a selfish or of a better kind,” Mill argued, and the open ballot would ensure that the better interests and feelings would dominate. “A great number of the electors will have two sets of preferences—those on private, and those on public grounds. The last are the only ones which the elector would like to avow. The best side of their character is that which people are anxious to show.”34 However, as instruments of human perfection, liberty of discussion and the franchise were not nearly as important, in Mill’s view, as a third aspect of the experiential pedagogy of the state, the direct practice of self-government, or “municipalism” as Mill meant the word. A term not used today, the OED defines municipalism to mean “preference for the

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municipal as opposed to the centralizing principle in local government.” This is too simplistic. In the wake of the 1832 Reform Bill, two important measures reforming the administration of local government were passed, and each suggested a very different understanding of the relationship between local and central government.The 1834 Poor Law Act followed the recommendations of Jeremey Bentham that a strong central office should make use of local representatives (elected by qualified local ratepayers); in this case, a central Poor Law Board determined how to combine parishes for the most efficient provision of relief and then directed local representatives to be elected to serve as the administrators of that program (the Poor Law Guardians).The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, in contrast, affirmed the value of existing local borough governments, requiring them not to answer to a central government but instead to allow more democratic participation in the local elections. In verifying the independence of local government, the 1835 Act validated an entirely different understanding of local government from that of the 1834 Poor Law Act, one most forcefully articulated by the neo-feudalist Toulmin Smith in Local Government and Centralisation (1851) and The Parish (1854).This would be municipalism proper, as defined in the OED. As Dilys Hill summarizes, “the [1834] poor law was governed by the new utilitarian spirit of centralisation, with local bodies as virtual agents of the centre[, while t]he [1835] borough reforms . . . gave new life to the old tradition that local inhabitants had a constitutional right to manage their own affairs.”35 However, as Hill argues, there was a third view of local government, one associated with Tocqueville and his greatest English champion, John Stuart Mill. Rather than understanding local and central government to be at odds, Mill presented local government as part of a greater political education of citizens to ensure the well-being of the entire state.36 This would become Mill’s definition of municipalism, nearly unique among English Victorians. In his 1835 review of the first volume of Democracy in America, Mill writes that “in no one point has M. de Tocqueville rendered a greater service to the European public, than by actually giving them their first information of the very existence of some of the most important parts of the American constitution.We allude particularly,” Mill continues, “to the municipal institutions; which, as our author shows, and as might have been expected, are the very fountain-head of American democracy, and one principle cause of all that is valuable in its influences.”37 Citing a long passage from Democracy in America about New England local government, Mill summarizes “[i]n this system of municipal self-government . . . our author beholds the principal instrument of that political education of the people, which alone enables a popular government

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to maintain itself, or renders it desirable that it should.” Mill develops the idea: It is a fundamental principle in his [Tocqueville’s] political philosophy, as it has long been in ours, that only by the habit of superintending their local interests can that diffusion of intelligence and mental activity, as applied to their joint concerns, take place among the mass of a people, which can qualify them to superintend with steadiness or consistency the proceedings of their government, or to exercise any power in national affairs except by fits, and as tools in the hands of others.38 Again citing a lengthy passage of Tocqueville’s on the pedagogy of local government, Mill concludes that “M. de Tocqueville considers local democracy to be the school as well as the safety-valve of democracy in the state,—the means of training the people to the good use of that power, which, whether prepared for it or not, they will assuredly in a short time be in the full exercise of.” Mill then justifies the experiential pedagogy of the state explicitly: There has been much said of late—and truly not a word too much— on the necessity, now that the people are acquiring power, of giving them education, meaning school instruction, to qualify them for its exercise.The importance of school instruction is doubtless great; but it should also be recollected, that what really constitutes education is the formation of habits; and as we do not learn to read or write, to ride or swim, by being merely told how to do it, but by doing it, so it is only by practising popular government on a limited scale, that the people will ever learn how to exercise it on a larger.39 In his 1840 review of the second volume of Democracy in America, Mill reiterates that those interested in “national education” must consult Tocqueville, where they will learn that “[t]he main branch of the education of human beings is in their habitual employment”; actions, rather than books, are the true teachers in a democracy. And, at the conclusion of an 1851 review of a conservative work on political economy by Francis William Newman, Mill reiterates local and central government should not be understood to be at odds with one another. “[Newman] insists much on the value of provincial legislatures, to transact the local business now performed by private Acts of Parliament,” Mill writes.“We are of the same opinion; not however for the sake of remedying what he deplores,

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‘the loss of local patriotism’; for the provincial spirit, in every country where it exists, is a mere hindrance to improvement. In the United States, which Mr. Newman justly holds up as a model of local self-government, the local institutions do not engender local, but general patriotism; or (to call it by a better name, because unconnected with ideas of narrowness,) public spirit, and intelligent interest in public affairs.”40 Mill most thoroughly develops his municipal ideal in Chapter Fifteen of Considerations,“Of Local Representative Bodies.” Most activities, Mill writes, such as “[r]eading newspapers, and perhaps writing to them, public meetings, and solicitations of different sorts addressed to the political authorities,” give more practice “in thinking than in action, and in thinking without the responsibilities of action; which with most people amounts to little more than passively receiving the thoughts of some one else,” Mill wrote. This cannot be said of serving in local administrative bodies: In these positions they have to act, for public interests, as well as to think and to speak, and the thinking cannot all be done by proxy. It may be added, that these local functions, not being in general sought by the higher ranks, carry down the important political education which they are the means of conferring, to a much lower grade in society.The mental discipline being thus a more important feature in local concerns than in the general affairs of the State, while there are not such vital interests dependent on the quality of the administration, a greater weight may be given to the former consideration, and the latter admits much more frequently of being postponed to it, than in matters of general legislation, and the conduct of imperial affairs. As one historian has remarked, Mill had “an almost Mazzinian zeal for the cultivation of civic virtue,” but this zeal, which found most eloquent expression in his nearly unique understanding of municipalism, was part of a greater commitment to this experiential pedagogy of the state.41 Because it provides a nice segue to Arnold’s understanding of municipalism, it is worth considering a more typically Benthamite view of municipal government. In A History of the Commonwealth of Florence from the Earliest Independence of the Commune to the Fall of the Republic in 1531 (1865),Thomas Adolphus Trollope (the famous novelist Anthony’s older brother) recognizes that Florence and other Italian cities hold great interest for Victorian liberals, because they have remained utterly free of the “feudal system, planted . . . by Frankish conquerors” (which north of the

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Alps “tinge[d] quite ineffaceably all their institutions”).42 Nevertheless, he concludes that Italy herself was “strangled by the municipal system.” “Few thinkers,” Trollope wrote,“would be found to doubt, at the present day, that the municipal system, as it was developed in Italy, possesses capabilities of carrying social life to a larger and higher degree of civilization, and of approaching more nearly to our present ideal of it, than the competing theory of organization,” that is, feudalism. “But the path, that seemed to promise so much,” Trollope continued, “came treacherously and suddenly to a most fatal ending.”43 “Why did the path of civilization on which Italy entered, and which led her so far, and seemed to promise well for carrying her so much farther, come to a sudden end” he asks, answering with a final rhetorical question: “Is there some latent vice, some predisposing tendency to decay and dissolution in the constitution of the municipal form of social organization, by which the phenomena of the case can be accounted for?”44 That latent vice of the municipal system was its disabling the Florentines from ever understanding true individual liberty. “[Their] theories of liberty were falsified,” Trollope writes,“by the influence of ideas deposited in every mind of the Latin race by the ancient municipal system so ineradicably and deeply as to be beyond the sounding of self-consciousness.The intensity with which this system produced and fostered the sense of, and a love for, communal rights and franchises, excluded all due care for individual liberty.”45 Reviewing the four hundred years of Florence under consideration (the medieval and Renaissance periods), Trollope finds “no attempt can be traced to secure any of the most ordinary guarantees of individual freedom.” Rather, “[t]he constant aim and object in all the ever-recurring constitutional changes was the settlement of the question, who should be admitted to share in the desirable privilege of tyrannically governing the general body of the society.”46 This is the fault of municipal government, which is really oligarchy by another name.47 The result is an inability to progress: Habits of self-reliance and independent action are not found to be common among the subjects of paternal governments.The development of that virile vigour which is needed for the achievement of success in any career of effort and struggle, cannot take place in men whose due development has been stunted in other directions. . . . [A] condition of society which prevents the free action of intelligence in any and every direction will soon be found to have been also fatal to the social and intellectual qualities which mark the communities in which great mercantile careers have been common.48

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Sharing Mill’s liberal trust in the individual, Trollope nevertheless concludes that municipalism, or “paternal government,” is in principle opposed to such, and therefore opposed to progress itself. And, given the long English experience of local government as paternal government, it is not at all surprising that Mill’s municipalism was indeed very much the minority view among the English liberals. It is thus all the more remarkable that another Victorian liberal, Matthew Arnold, seemed to share Mill’s, rather than Trollope’s, view of local government.While rarely mentioned in his works, municipalism, apparently, was for Arnold quite important, as he made clear in the 1879 lecture to the Ipswich Working Men’s College, “Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes.” “For twenty years,” he announced, “I have felt convinced that for the progress of our civilisation, here in England, three things were above all necessary: a reduction of those immense inequalities of condition and property amongst us, of which our land-system is the base; a genuine municipal system; and public schools for the middle classes.”49 His first mention of municipalism was indeed twenty years earlier. In his 1859 “England and the Italian Question,” Arnold reached a conclusion about Italy’s municipal heritage exactly opposite that of Trollope’s. In his view, it was precisely that municipal heritage that had kept the towns of Italy stubbornly independent while the rest of Europe was crushed beneath the yoke of feudalism. Through all the anarchy of barbarian invasion there had survived in the towns of Italy the remains of the ancient Roman curia, of the system of municipal administration founded by the Romans. As time went on, and the Italian towns, with the re-establishment of order and trade, began to grow in wealth, prosperity, and power, these vivacious remains more and more developed themselves. The habits of municipal action, of local self-government, the great legacy to modern nations of the reason of the ancient world, are essentially opposed to the habits of feudalism.Their gradual development in Europe has been the gradual emancipation of Europe from feudalism.50 To be sure,Arnold was critical of the modern Italians.As he wrote to his mother when inspecting schools there in June 1865,“this is a mere fairweather kingdom,” “want[ing] back-bone, serious energy, and power of honest work to a degree that makes one impatient.”51 The point is, however, that unlike Trollope, Arnold understood Italian municipalism to represent the vanguard of progress, crucial to the rest of Europe’s emancipation from feudalism.

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In the book resulting from that same 1865 tour of Continental schools, the 1868 Schools and Universities on the Continent, Arnold’s view of municipalism seems even closer to Mill’s. While the English are coming to understand that popular education is necessary, Arnold points out that too many talk about “obligatory instruction” without understanding the basic municipal foundation upon which such schools must rest. But what is the capital difficulty in the way of obligatory instruction, or indeed any national system of instruction, in this country [i.e., Great Britain]? It is this: that the moment the working class of this country have this question of instruction really brought home to them, their self-respect will make them demand, like the working classes on the Continent, public schools, and not schools which the clergyman, or the squire, or the mill-owner calls “my school.” And what is the capital difficulty in the way of giving them public schools? It is this: that the public school for the people must rest upon the municipal organisation of the country. In all the major nations of the Continent, Arnold reports, the public schools have their foundation in municipal government. “But we in England have our municipal organisation still to get; the country districts, with us, have at present only the feudal and ecclesiastical organisation of the Middle Ages, or of France before the Revolution.” “The real preliminary to an effective system of popular education,” he concludes, “is, in fact, to provide the country with an effective municipal organisation; and here, then, is at the outset an illustration of what I said, that modern societies need a civil organisation which is modern.”52 Clearly,Arnold is not siding with the conservatives.And, while it may sound here like he is siding with the Benthamites, who favor local governments only as executives of the central government (Arnold states in a footnote that municipalism would be a step toward the goal of “the national organisation of our elementary schools”53), it becomes clear in a later work that Arnold actually held Mill’s more rare view of municipalism as an experiential pedagogy of the state, where local and central governments are united in their experiential pedagogy of perfectionism. In “Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes,” Arnold points out that “[n]o one in England seems to imagine that municipal government is applicable except in towns,” expressing the common frustration of democratic reformers who sought to replace the oligarchic magistrates and vestries of the parishes with the same democratic councils established for boroughs in the 1835 Municipal Corporation Act (something that would not be accomplished

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until the Local Government Acts of 1888, which established county councils, and of 1894, which established urban district, rural district, and parish councils). In contrast, Arnold notes, municipal government has been fruitfully extended to the country on the Continent and thus become “the basis of all local affairs, and the right basis.” Besides a more effective way of governing local schools,“municipal life,” for the agricultural laborer, “is a first and invaluable stage in political education; more helpful by far, because so much more constant, than the exercise of the parliamentary franchise.”54 The most important common source for Mill’s and Arnold’s trust in the experiential pedagogy of the state, and in the educational and perfecting power of municipalism in particular, was the example of the ancient world.The “habits of municipal action,” as Arnold had written in 1859, were “the great legacy to modern nations of the reason of the ancient world.”55 Ancient Athens was the main inspiration. For Mill, one need only look to his two reviews (1846 and 1853) of his friend George Grote’s depiction of ancient Athens in his History of Greece (1845–1856). Mill’s first point in both reviews is that, while the Greeks cannot be judged to be the people “who have approached nearest (if such an expression may be used where all are at so immeasurable a distance) to the perfection of social arrangements, or of human character,” they are standing proof that the human race can be “progressive” as well as “stationary.”56 For the Greeks, the Athenians in particular, are in fact “alone among nations, so far as is known to us, [in having] emerged from barbarism by their own efforts, not following in the track of any more advanced people.”57 “[H]istory,” Mill writes in the second review,“points out no other people in the ancient world who had any spring of unborrowed progress within themselves.”58 In search of the source of this progressive nature, Mill, in the second review, focuses on Athenian democracy. Recognizing that Athenian democracy was far from ideal in its sanctioning of slaves and the exclusion of women, Mill nevertheless emphasizes the inclusion and even dominance of “poor persons” who made up the ranks of the electorate, as well as “a government of boundless publicity and freedom of speech,” which, Mill writes, is “far more practically important than even the political franchise.”59 Most importantly, the democratic experience was an educational one: Every office and honour was open to every citizen, not, as in the aristocratic Roman republic (or even the British monarchy), almost nominally, but really: while the daily working of Athenian institutions (by means of which every citizen was accustomed to hear

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every sort of question, public and private, discussed by the ablest men of the time, with the earnestness of purpose and fulness of preparation belonging to actual business, deliberative or judicial) formed a course of political education, the equivalent of which modern nations have not known how to give even to those whom they educate for statesmen.60 Writing a few years later in Considerations of the evidence “in every page of our great historian of Greece [i.e., Grote],” Mill concludes that participation teaches the individual “to feel himself one of the public, and whatever is for their benefit to be for his benefit.”61 At the same time, very much anticipating the condemnation of municipalism as paternalism by the likes of more libertarian liberals like Trollope, Mill is careful to note in his review of Grote that while “the public interest was held of paramount obligation in all things which concerned it . . . that part of the conduct of individuals which concerned only themselves, public opinion did not interfere [with].”62 Indeed Mill cites Grote at such great length on “the stress which [Pericles] lays upon liberty of thought and action at Athens” that the review begins to “look like an introduction to On Liberty” as one commentator puts it.63 Arnold’s portrait of ancient Athens is nearly identical in its emphases. Arguing in the 1863–1864 A French Eton that civic virtue and consequent perfection can only be achieved with the assistance of the state, Arnold quickly adds—again, as if in response to Trollope’s fear of paternalism— that “State-action is not in itself unfavourable to the individual’s perfection. So far from it, it is in ancient Greece, where State-action was omnipresent, that we see the individual at his very highest pitch of free and fair activity.”Arnold’s reasoning draws out the perfectionist quality of Millian liberty. This is because, in Greece, the individual was strong enough to fashion the State into an instrument of his own perfection, to make it serve, with a thousand times his own power, towards his own ends. He was not enslaved by it, he did not annihilate it, but he used it.Where, in modern times, the State has maimed and crushed individual activity, it has been by operating as an alien, exterior power in the community, a power not originated by the community to serve the common weal, but entrenched among them as a conqueror with a weal of its own to serve. Just because the vigour and sturdiness of the people of this country have prevented, and will always prevent, the State from being anything of this kind, I believe we,

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more than any modern people, have the power of renewing, in our national life, the example of Greece. I believe that we, and our American kinsmen, are specially fit to apply State-action with advantage, because we are specially sure to apply it voluntarily.64 Even with their shared belief in the perfecting power of municipalism, particularly as exemplified by the ancient Athenians, Arnold’s and Mill’s versions of the experiential pedagogy of the state might be said to differ significantly in that Mill clearly understood municipalism to be just one aspect of a pedagogy that included the expansion of the franchise and liberty of discussion, not to mention political economy and other programs not discussed here.Arnold, in contrast, wrote about municipalism in relative isolation from the rest of his political reflections.There is some justice to this criticism; one still turns to Mill, after all, not Arnold, for a comprehensive consideration of the value of democratic participation.Nevertheless,though Arnold did not pull together most of the aspects of his experiential pedagogy in the same way that Mill does in Considerations, say, there are indeed other aspects to Arnold’s experiential pedagogy, and some of these aspects have their near equivalents in Mill, too. Consider, for example, the expansion of the franchise. Arnold, it is clear, had no great interest in the expansion of the franchise. Indeed, what comments he makes in his published writings about it suggest he thought it unimportant: an overvaluing of machinery (as if “having the vote,” he wrote in Culture and Anarchy,“like . . . having . . . large muscles, has in itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature”65). However, as is well known, Arnold was quite interested in the evocation of the best self, in ways that are quite suggestive of Mill’s description of the open ballot eliciting “the best side of [the people’s] character” (as cited above). In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold writes that, while we too often “imagine happiness to consist in doing what one’s ordinary self likes,” our best selves “disentangl[e] themselves from machinery” and “simply concern themselves with reason and the will of God, and [do] their best to make these prevail;—for the pursuit, in a word, of perfection.”66 Whereas in Mill’s work it is clear that the way in which this disentangling occurs is through the open ballot, in Arnold we do not get that kind of detailed policy prescription. Nevertheless,Arnold does suggest that an increase in best selves is indeed a job for policy rather than mysticism (as so often charged).The number of people living as their best selves in a democracy, he writes, “is capable of being diminished or augmented . . . in proportion both to the force of the original instinct within them, and to the hindrance or encouragement which it meets with from without.”

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In other words, we can shape the democratic experience so as to encourage more people to live as their best selves:“it becomes of vast importance to see whether or not the things around us are, in general, such as to help and elicit our best self, and if they are not, to see why they are not, and the most promising way of mending them.”67 How do we shape or “mend” the democratic experience to accomplish this, to accomplish what he later describes as “mak[ing] the State more and more the expression . . . of our best self ”?68 For Mill, the answer included an expanded franchise and an open ballot. For Arnold, the answer, while not as clear, was also one of policy.69 Consider also the third of Mill’s aspects of the experiential pedagogy of the state from Considerations, the liberty of discussion. Here, again, the contrast with Arnold is not initially flattering to Arnold’s credentials as either a Victorian liberal or a policy wonk.Arnold is openly dismissive of liberty of discussion and individuality, referring to the concept consistently and reductively throughout Culture and Anarchy as “doing as one likes.” Particularly to our own ears, accustomed as we are to contemporary “rights talk,” Arnold’s ranking of freedom with coal, population, railroads, wealth, and religious organizations as mere “machinery” toward the end of perfection is off putting, as is his rejection of the idea of rights entirely when criticizing the Real Estate Intestacy Bill, not for what it seeks to accomplish (an end to primogeniture) but how it seeks to do so by “assign[ing] to all a man’s children a right to equal shares in the enjoyment of his property after his death.” “Now does any one,”Arnold asks,“if he simply and naturally reads his consciousness, discover that he has any rights at all? For my part, the deeper I go in my own consciousness, and the more simply I abandon myself to it, the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all; only duties.”70 This can sound, as I say, downright alarming, until one recalls that the rights asserted by Mill in On Liberty are themselves also presented often as instruments for a greater end. Keeping in mind, then, the instrumental purpose of Mill’s own liberty of discussion (e.g., “it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions”), Mill’s description of the work of such discussion (e.g., “[w]rong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it”) sounds a lot like Arnold’s own idea of culture in Culture and Anarchy: that is,“culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”71

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Another approach to Arnold that shows him to be very close to Mill in understanding the liberty of discussion as shaping the democratic experience into a perfectionist pedagogy is to compare their discussions of minority representation. Mill’s concern with minority representation is well known and an integral part of his understanding of liberty of discussion. It is indeed “the tyranny of the majority” that makes emphasizing liberty of discussion so important today, Mill argues in the first chapter of On Liberty, for example.72 The seventh and eighth chapters of Considerations are occupied with various policies for ensuring that minority interests are fairly, and sometimes unfairly, represented, including Thomas Hare’s scheme of “personal representation” and, much more controversially, “two or more votes” for those in the “liberal professions.”73 Before turning to Arnold it is worth considering another Victorian liberal’s recommendations in this area, Henry David Thoreau in “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). This essay’s opening line (“I heartily accept the motto,—‘That government is best which governs least,’ ”)—must stand with Emerson’s “are they my poor?” in “Self-Reliance” and Arnold’s “fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock” in Culture and Anarchy as among the most unfortunate moments in Victorian liberal prose, at least so far as modern commentary has been concerned. Moving past that polemical introduction, the remainder of the essay makes clear that Thoreau is in fact advocating not anarchy but a state ruled by a government of conscience, which, like Mill and many other Victorian liberals, Thoreau believed must be a government beholden to its conscientious minority. Currently, where the majority of citizens serve the state “not as men mainly, but as machines,” a minority “serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part.” For this minority to accept majoritarian democracy, Thoreau contends, is to forsake what is right: All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.The character of the voter is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.74

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Like Mill, Thoreau is concerned that majoritarian democracy actually suppresses our best selves, compelling us to follow only what is “ordinary.” Thoreau seeks to act upon what he calls “character,” which will entail true action: “Action from principle—the perception and the performance of right.” Such action is “essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.” These citizens, who act upon their best or “divine” rather than diabolical selves, form a “wise minority” which the state should “cherish.”75 The democratic state, currently a tyranny of the majority, does not cherish this wise minority, however, and the minority must therefore forsake “the law” whenever it is at odds with “the right.”76 In “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), where Thoreau’s animus against the state is even more striking, he makes the same challenge to the state: that individuals must “recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.” Thoreau hints at some new kind of state here when he writes that “[t]he fate of the country . . . does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”77 However, ultimately, Thoreau in “Slavery in Massachusetts” seems to look beyond the state to the individual: The question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God,—in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor,—by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.78 Back in 1849 in “Resistance,” though,Thoreau does in conclusion imagine a kind of state based upon this higher law of the individual conscience, a kind of minoritarian democracy: The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to,—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well,—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.The progress from

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an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further toward recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellowmen. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.79 It is alongside Mill’s policies for and Thoreau’s visions of a state that shapes democratic experience to ensure the prominence of perfectionist minority voices that Arnold’s own theorizations of “aliens” and “remnants” should be read.While there are a few references to such minorities earlier in his career, including the “aliens” in Culture and Anarchy who are the first of the populace (but not the last, as too often interpreted) to know their best selves, the most substantive defense of a minority to be found in Arnold’s oeuvre is in the late essay,“Numbers; or The Majority and the Remnant” (1884).80 Here, Arnold argues, very much like Thoreau, that while democracy is an improvement over aristocracy, it is still “very faulty,” for majority rule “lacks principle . . . [and] persistence,” what Thoreau called “conscience” and “the right” and “the higher law.”Turning to the most fearsome critic of democracy, Plato,Arnold agrees with that philosopher that Athens fell because “the majority were bad, and the remnant were impotent.” Turning then to the prophet Isaiah, Arnold argues that the remnant ideally “saves the State.”81 When it comes to Arnold’s saving remnant, even sympathetic critics have been at a loss. Brendan A. Rapple has recently concluded that “Arnold’s doctrine of the ‘aliens’ and ‘remnant’, though stimulating, is highly ambiguous.”Are they a think-tank, Rapple asks, or agents in civil society, or a branch of the state? Moreover, “[t]he existence of a clerisy would seem to signify a meritocratic rather than an egalitarian society,” contradicting Arnold’s commitment to democracy. Rapple concludes

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that Arnold is simply unclear about the nature of the remnant, “apart from maintaining that the ‘aliens/remnant’, whoever they were, would somehow, transcending all individuals and social classes, embody the collective ‘best self ’ of the State, that is the ‘nation in its collective and corporate character’, and in so doing help to lead the ‘ordinary self ’ of the majority to true culture and perfection.”82 Rapple is correct insofar as Arnold is vague about the actual implementation of his remnant (though not as vague as the cagey Thoreau’s “still more glorious and perfect State”). Arnold once again does not measure up to Mill as a policy wonk. Nevertheless, at least two points suggest Arnold was in “Numbers” essentially defending the rights of the minority within a democracy. First, Arnold explicitly states that the sole reason the remnants in ancient Athens and Judah were unsuccessful was not due to their small proportion to the majority, for “the remnant always bears a small proportion to the majority.” Rather, “[t]he grave thing for States like Judah and Athens is, that the remnant must in positive bulk be so small, and therefore so powerless for reform.” To be a voice outside the State, speaking to mankind or to the future, perhaps shaking the actual State to pieces in doing so, one man will suffice. But to reform the State in order to save it, to preserve it by changing it, a body of workers is needed as well as a leader;—a considerable body of workers, placed at many points, and operating in many directions.83 Arnold’s emphasis that the remnant works within the state, and seeks only to “reform” it (“preserve it by changing it”), suggests that his remnant is something like what we might call a third party, working for change within a democracy, rather than for revolution, which one demagogue could lead (as in Plato’s description of the end of democracy in Republic). The remnants in the ancient states were simply too small to effect this kind of gradualist change, but “in our great modern States, where the scale of things is so large, it does seem as if the remnant might be so increased as to become an actual power, even though the majority be unsound.”84 Secondly, and sounding here very much like Thoreau, Arnold argues that this remnant must be guided by “righteousness” (Thoreau’s preferred term was “conscience”) rather than by politics. Citing Philippians 4:8 (i.e., “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things honest, whatsoever things just, whatsoever things pure, whatsoever things lovely, whatsoever things of good report . . . think on these things),Arnold writes that “the matters just enumerated do not come much into the heads of most of us,

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I suppose, when we are thinking of politics. But,” he adds,“the philosophers and prophets maintain that these matters, and not those of which the heads of politicians are full, do really govern politics and save or destroy States.” He then emphasizes that this righteous minority nevertheless still works politically. And because these matters are what do really govern politics and save or destroy States, Socrates maintained that in this time he and a few philosophers, who alone kept insisting on the good and the righteousness and the unprofitableness of iniquity, were the only real politicians then living. I say, if we are to derive comfort from the doctrine of the remnant (and there is great comfort to be derived from it), we must also hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really govern politics, overrides with an inexorable fatality the combinations of the so-called politicians, and saves or destroys States.85 These two points, then—that the remnant is sizeable and reformist, and that the remnant are “the only real politicians”—suggest that Arnold, like Mill and Thoreau (in “Resistance,” at least), is indeed arguing that democracy be shaped to ensure minority representation and thus become an effective experiential pedagogy for all the people.86 So, while not as systematically presented as in Mill’s Considerations, Arnold’s policies for the shaping of democratic experience into a perfectionist pedagogy included municipalism, the evocation of our best selves, and the protection of reformist minority voices.There is one other way in which Arnold advocated the shaping of democratic experience into a perfectionist pedagogy and that is through equality.While Arnold is not completely clear on the degree of equality he means, his recommendations imply not only political but greater economic equality, a position that Mill himself advocated in many of his writings on political economy, especially (as noted above) the posthumously published Chapters on Socialism (1873). The importance of equality to Arnold’s perfectionism is first found in Culture and Anarchy.87 When defining culture in the section “Sweetness and Light,”Arnold argues that culture is more than the kind of individual curiosity valorized by Montesquieu, and that it must also involve “the moral and social passion for doing good.”88 That is, while culture, like religion,“places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality, in the ever-increasing efficaciousness and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make

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the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature,” that internal condition is only achieved through a broader social collaboration: And because men are all members of one great whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest, or to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated: the individual is obliged, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march toward perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward.89 “[C]ulture, or the study of perfection,” Arnold writes again toward the end of the book, “leads us to conceive of no perfection as being real which is not a general perfection, embracing all our fellow-men with whom we have to do.” (That last phrase—“with whom we have to do”—is misleadingly restrictive, for Arnold goes on to write that “[i]ndividual perfection is impossible so long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along with us,” or, as Edmond Scherer puts it in a sentence Arnold included in his 1866 Note-Book: “L’œuvre de notre perfectionnement est une œuvre collective et éternelle.”)90 Arnold can be understood in these passages to be stipulating how the democratic experience must be shaped if it is indeed to perfect us, mainly by creating a society of equals. Referring in Culture and Anarchy to the way in which the living and working conditions of the poor are currently dismissed, as they are in The Times, by reference to “nature’s simplest laws” (i.e., free trade),91 Arnold concludes differently: “all our fellow-men, in the East of London and elsewhere,” he writes, “we must take along with us in the progress towards perfection, if we ourselves really, as we profess, want to be perfect.” “[W]e must not let the worship of any fetish, any machinery,” he continues,“such as manufactures or population” (or, as he writes earlier “our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our maxim of ‘every man for himself ’ ”),“which are not, like perfection, absolute goods in themselves,” obscure our true end.92 I have already noted that Arnold argued in the 1879 “Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes” that one of the three things England must effect to achieve true civilization is, in addition to the cultivation of municipalism and the building

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of public schools for the middle classes, “a reduction of those immense inequalities of condition and property amongst us, of which our landsystem is the base,” and this essay does include some development of this idea;93 but the more complete development of the idea is to be found in an essay from the year before,“Equality.” Here, Arnold starts by exploring the English prejudice against the idea of equality, specifically William Gladstone’s recent claim that in England inequality, not equality, “ ‘is an active, living, and life-giving power, which forms an inseparable essential element in our political habits of mind, and asserts itself at every step in the processes of our system.’ ”94 Arnold contends that this assumption is provincial, and that a more global survey of thought on the subject leads one to the opposite conclusion.And for good reason: the pursuit of social equality leads, as it has in the case of modern France, to the height of “civilization,”Arnold’s later term for a more perfect society.“Civilisation,” Arnold explains,“is the humanisation of man in society. To be humanised is to comply with the true law of our human nature. . . . To be humanised is to make progress towards this, our true and full humanity.”Arnold draws upon Burke to complete this argument: And to be civilised is to make progress towards this [“our true and full humanity”] in civil society; in that civil society “without which,” says Burke, “man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it.”To be the most civilised of nations, therefore, is to be the nation which comes nearest to human perfection, in the state which that perfection essentially demands.95 Equality, in short, is necessary for sociability, and sociability, or “the power of social life and manners,” is “truly . . . one of the great elements in our humanisation,” exemplified by the French and the ancient Athenians (others elements being Hebrew-like rectitude, Greek-like intellect, English-like conduct, etc.).96 Without sociability, we are incomplete, and fall short of perfection, and “[t]hat instinct of perfection,” is not to be denied, for it “is the master-power in humanity.” “Certainly equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilisation,” Arnold concludes. “But, with such inequality as ours, a perfect civilisation is impossible.”97 * * * Recalling my summary in the first chapter of the major positions in contemporary liberal political theory, some may be tempted to situate

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Arnold’s and Mill’s recommendations for the modification of the democratic experience on the side of “virtue liberalism,” rather than “perfectionist liberalism”—or even more precisely, within the robust tradition of participatory democracy theory, particularly as articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762). In order to cultivate the general will—in order to ensure that the engaged citizens of a democracy act upon the general rather than their own interest—Rousseau recommended policies in many of the same areas as Arnold and Mill.This is true particularly in the areas of civic participation (which Rousseau stated should be within the activities of a small central state itself ) and social equality (“no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself ”).98 But Rousseau, like Arnold and Mill, was also concerned about public discussion (making use of censorship to “uphold morality by preventing opinion from growing corrupt”), majorities and minorities (both to be proscribed as permanent parties so that there is “no partial society in the State and that each citizen should express only his own opinion”), and (what is the focus of chapter four) didactic education—what Rousseau called civil religion and Arnold called culture.99 One of the most fecund and complex of philosophers, Rousseau has many heirs today, but in this one matter—that of the importance of shaping the democratic experience—his true heirs today are those I identified in the first chapter as virtue liberals, those theorists who (to recall the words of Peter Berkowitz) “articulate a richer and more flexible liberalism that is less embarrassed to acknowledge its dependence on institutions, practices, and beliefs,” or “to respect the role of moral virtue, civic association, and even religious faith in the preservation of a political society based on free and democratic institutions.”100 Mill’s and Arnold’s deliberate shaping of the democratic experience would seem to fit nicely into this tradition, at least as far as policy instruments are concerned.101 But the ends Mill and Arnold seek are much different than those of the virtue liberals.Where the virtue liberals seek, as Berkowitz puts it, the “preservation of a political society,” Mill and Arnold sought the perfection of humanity, which will include not the preservation of a political society but indeed its eventual dissolution (I discuss this more in chapter four). In treating the state itself as merely a means to the perfection of humanity, Mill and Arnold evince an entirely different political mentality than the virtue liberals, whose preeminent interest in the stability of the state harkens back to the republican tradition of the eighteenth century

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(including Rousseau). Certainly virtue liberals, like all modern liberals, differ from the republicans in believing that stability can in fact become permanent: but that is all of their ambition.The Victorian liberals believed that the state, and eventually humanity without the state, could achieve much, much more.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Culture

To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. Ralph Waldo Emerson,“Politics.” More than thirty years ago, one of the most influential liberal proponents of the neutral state specifically identified state-supported culture as inimical to this neutrality. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls recognized that “there are standards in the arts and sciences for appraising creative efforts” and that “[c]omparisons of intrinsic value can obviously be made.” But support of the intrinsically best was not the work of Rawls’ liberal state (the scheme he called “justice as fairness”): While justice as fairness allows that in a well-ordered society the values of excellence are recognized, the human perfections are to be pursued within the limits of the principle of free association. Persons join together to further their cultural and artistic interests in the same way that they form religious communities. They do not use the coercive apparatus of the state to win for themselves a greater liberty or larger distributive shares on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value. Perfectionism is denied as a political principle. Thus the social resources necessary to support associations dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences and culture generally are to be won as a fair return for services rendered, or from such voluntary contributions as citizens wish to make.1 State-sponsored culture is equivalent to state-sponsored religion and should thus be proscribed by neutral liberalism.

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In practice, this strict neutrality regarding culture has not at all been the case, as Samuel Black has pointed out, and some contemporary liberals, those I call virtue liberals, have consequently mustered arguments for state-sponsored culture in the pursuit not of perfection (as Rawls, in 1971 at least, assumed culture to pursue) but simply the virtues necessary to preserve the state. For example, as noted by Black, Ronald Dworkin has argued current generations must ensure that future generations inherit a fair share of social resources, which includes “high culture,” and that high culture therefore should be supported because it is (in Dworkin’s words) “fecund and nourish[es] other forms of culture.” These cultural resources are, it seems, merely state-preserving rather than humanperfecting in intention.2 Concluding chapter three, I argued that it is tempting but inaccurate to equate the Victorian liberal interest in an experiential pedagogy of the state to the modest ambitions of virtue liberalism: inaccurate because, where the latter seeks simply to preserve the state, the former sought to perfect humankind by means of the (temporary) state.The same temptation exists, I think, when it comes to interpreting the Victorian liberal interest in culture, or what I also call the didactic pedagogy of the state. That is, the culture programs proposed by the Victorian liberals might also be sympathetically interpreted as intended merely to preserve the state (not to perfect humans).This interpretation initially seems to have some merit, as I first show before then reexamining these culture programs as truly perfectionist—a reexamination that will illuminate the preeminence of moral perfection over state preservation in Victorian liberal theory by (rather drastically) exposing how the state itself in that theory is ultimately but a provisional means to the end of perfection. First, though, there are examples in Victorian liberalism that seem to present culture as intended only to preserve the state. In his 1872 review of the third volume of Ernst Curtius’s The History of Greece,Arnold’s primary criticism of ancient Athens appears to be the Athenians’ foolish neglect of basic policies of state-preservation. His critique emphasizes the point—central to Arnold’s own liberal theory—that the carefully shaped democratic experience (i.e., the experiential pedagogy of the state described in chapter three) is not sufficient for preserving that state. So, while Athens’ robustness can be attributed in part to her democratic experience, where “every individual is developed, stimulated, improved to the uttermost, because every individual feels that he is alive, that he counts,” that robustness was also due to “the gravity, the steadiness, the centripetal influence tending to a common Hellenism, to religious fixity, and to conservative habits, which Athens imbibed from the discipline

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Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism 3

of Delphi.” Arnold thus introduces as equally important to statepreservation a different kind of state pedagogy, a didactic one in which citizens are educated in virtue by a set of traditional institutions and beliefs, rather than through the individual experience of democracy itself. In this essay, Arnold refers to this set of traditions within a society not as culture but as “Halt,” a term for “steadiness”Arnold finds in Goethe.4 Prior to the advent of democracy in Athens, Arnold argues, Halt was to be found in Athens’ religion and its aristocratic families; once Athens became a democracy, Halt was to be found in the example of Pericles himself. “[H]aving destroyed the permanent conservative influences of the Athenian state, the influences of family, property, and office, [Pericles] did undoubtedly substitute for them, in his own personality, a governing influence even stronger, while it lasted.” But of course, it did not last, and with Pericles’ passing that preserving force of Halt was lost. “That is to say,”Arnold writes,“as long as some remains were left of that nondemocratic order which the party of progress was for eradicating, the Athenian State had still something to hold it together, had elements of permanence and stability; when they were gone and democracy was left to itself, the pulverizing and dissolving forces in it worked fully.”5 Arnold’s fundamental concern in the review of Curtius does indeed seem to be that a “steadiness” within the state—that is, a didactic culture— is necessary only to ensure that the state is preserved, and not that its inhabitants are perfected. Looking for other examples among the Victorian liberals, one certainly finds steadiness (and not perfection) to be the predominant concern throughout James Fitzjames Stephen’s work, as in his discussion in the 1862 “Liberalism” of the need for the new ruling class of liberals to grasp that they can no longer simply be “critics” (a pulverizing and dissolving force) but “are now to be authors.”6 But I think Arnold’s true peer in this case would be another Victorian liberal reader of Goethe, Margaret Fuller, who consequently came to the same conclusion about democratic states as Arnold. In the Preface to her translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1839), she recognizes that Goethe was an aristocrat and that (for American readers especially) “hostility arises instinctively against one who does not believe in the people and whose tastes are in favor of a fixed external gradation. My sympathies,” she continues, “are with the great onward movement now obvious throughout the civilized world.” However, the democratic Fuller concedes that the aristocratic Goethe had a point: [M]y hope is that we may make a fair experiment whether men can be educated to rule themselves and communities [can] be trusted to

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choose their own rulers. This is, it seems, the present tendency of the ages; and had I influence, I would not put a straw in the way. Yet a minority is needed to keep these liberals in check and make them pause upon their measures long enough to know what they are doing; for as yet the caldron of liberty has shown a constant disposition to overboil.7 As we have seen, several decades later, Arnold’s concerns were much the same: only the metaphor has changed. Athens, with the death of Pericles, was an invaluable lesson in democracy’s tendency to “pulverize and dissolve” (as opposed to “overboil”).“What Athens lived upon, in her brilliant Periclean period,”Arnold surmised, were “the stores of Halt and character that accumulated through less seen and less heard generations, these stores being moved and used by the new, vigorous force of democracy, by a whole gifted people with the fresh sense of being alive and astir.” Whereas Curtius, the historian under review, concludes stoically that when these stores were used up “then came the end [and] here is our moral,” Arnold, committed like Fuller and other Victorian liberals to progress, is not satisfied. In response to Curtius’ consolatory thought that at least Pericles “was aware that the true greatness of an epoch is not dependent on the time of its endurance” and that at least “the realization of the loftiest ideal of a Hellenic community in Athens would be a possession for ever,”Arnold politely rejects this ancient fatalism and responds very much as a child of the liberal Enlightenment: This is nobly said, but it does not quite satisfy the aspirations of a good citizen, who demands of the builders of his State to make it stand permanently, not in spirit only, but in palpable body. And though to permanence of this kind human things can but approximate, yet these aspirations of a good citizen are, we cannot but think, natural and just; the true builder of a State should and will procure for them satisfaction.8 But Arnold’s concern with state permanence also seems to come here with an indifference to human perfection. It would seem, in other words, that Arnold’s sole objection to democratic experience is that such experience, however carefully shaped, cannot preserve a state, due to its tendency, as Fuller wrote, to overboil. Rather, to preserve itself, the state must also employ a different pedagogy, a more didactic one that will generate and protect “stores of Halt and character,” able to withstand the “dissolving forces” of raw democratic experience.

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A glance at Mill, too, might again bring one to the same conclusion about the Victorian liberals’ fundamental intention with culture: not perfection, but preservation.9 One could point to a number of writings, particularly early in his career, where Mill argues that, if a state is to preserve itself, it has the need: for “most men . . . [to] fall back upon the authority of still more cultivated minds” (in the 1831 “Spirit of the Age”); for “the existence of a leisured class . . . [as] the great and salutary corrective of all the inconveniences to which democracy is liable” (in the 1835 essay on Tocqueville); for at least “the study of Greek and Roman literature” by citizens (in the 1840 essay on Tocqueville).10 But the key text in this regard is his 1840 essay on “Coleridge.” In that essay, Mill acknowledges, in the spirit of Coleridge, that “the existence, in some form or other, of the feeling of allegiance, or loyalty” is necessary to the “permanent political society”:11 This feeling may vary in its objects, and is not confined to any particular form of government; but whether in a democracy or in a monarchy, its essence is always the same; viz. that there be in the constitution of the State something which is settled, something permanent, and not to be called into question; something which, by general agreement, has a right to be where it is, and to be secure against disturbance, whatever else may change. Mill’s examples show that he is not thinking exactly of culture as Arnold would develop it, but the didactic purpose these examples are shown to serve is very much like Arnold’s culture. So, too, is the emphasis upon preservation of the state. Mill notes that the ancient Jews had this “something which is settled” in their God; other societies have “certain persons . . . deemed . . . the rightful guides and guardians of the rest” (maybe, like Arnold, thinking of the Athenians’ Pericles), or perhaps “ancient liberties, or ordinances.” The only likely form for this steadiness to take in a modern democracy, Mill then adds, will be “the principles of individual freedom and political and social equality as realized in institutions which as yet exist nowhere, or exist only in a rudimentary state.”12 For Mill, these principles serve democracy in the same way that, for Arnold, Halt serves democracy: as “the anchor-chains by which the ship of State [is] held,” as Arnold put it in the review of Curtius.13 Mill’s description of these anchor principles within an otherwise robust democratic society is strikingly similar to Arnold’s description of Halt amongst those pulverizing and dissolving forces of democracy, and Fuller’s description of the minority watching carefully to be sure that the cauldron

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of liberty does not overboil: [I]n all political societies which have had a durable existence, there has been some fixed point; something which men agreed in holding sacred; which, wherever freedom of discussion was a recognised principle, it was of course lawful to contest in theory, but which no one could either fear or hope to see shaken in practice; which, in short (except perhaps during some temporary crisis), was in the common estimation placed beyond discussion.And the necessity of this may easily be made evident.A State never is, nor, until mankind are vastly improved, can hope to be, for any long time exempt from internal dissension; for there neither is, nor has ever been, any state of society in which collisions did not occur between the immediate interest and passions of powerful sections of the people.What, then, enables society to weather these storms, and pass through turbulent times without any permanent weakening of the securities for peaceable existence? Precisely this—that however important the interest about which men fell out, the conflict did not affect the fundamental principles of the system of social union which happened to exist; nor threaten large portions of the community with the subversion of that on which they had built their calculations, and with which their hopes and aims had become identified. But when the questioning of these fundamental principles is (not the occasional disease, or salutary medicine, but) the habitual condition of the body politic, and when all the violent animosities are called forth, which spring naturally from such a situation, the State is virtually in a position of civil war; and can never long remain free from it in act and fact.14 If their metaphors differ slightly, in short,Arnold, Fuller, and Mill (not to mention Stephen) all seem equally concerned that liberal states establish not only democratic experiences but also didactic traditions (fixed points, stores of Halt, etc.) in order to ensure that democratic liberties do not run amuck and that the state is preserved. No mention is made, in these examples, of the perfection of citizens; rather, as in the theory of contemporary virtue liberals, the emphasis is upon cultivating the civic virtue of citizens in order to preserve the state. However, this reading of Arnold, Fuller, and Mill as virtue liberals is finally inaccurate, for their ultimate concern is indeed not the preservation of the state at all but the realization of human perfection. While hardly discounting “steadiness” or a “fixed point” as a means for cultivating civic virtue and ever thus preserving the state,Arnold, Fuller, and Mill ultimately

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viewed both civic virtue and even the state itself as only temporary means to the ultimate end of human perfection. “The worth of a State, in the long run,” Mill wrote in the final paragraph of On Liberty,“is the worth of the individuals composing it,” and, in certain sentences—like that from “Coleridge” above (that “[a] State never is, nor, until mankind are vastly improved, can hope to be, for any long time exempt from internal dissension”), or, from On Liberty as cited in chapter three (“[a]s it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions”), or, from the Autobiography when describing his approach to political economy (as “regard[ing] all existing institutions and social arrangements as being . . .‘merely provisional’ ”)—one ascertains that for Mill the state itself was merely a means to the end of human perfection.15 For, when the state is indeed finally free from internal dissension and all its citizens perfect and of the same opinion, whatever political organization still exists would not be a state in the sense we normally speak of. Similarly, to return to a few passages cited in chapter three, when Arnold first introduces the state as a replacement for the aristocracy in the 1861 Introduction to Popular Education in France, he carefully writes “we [may] rely to replace, for some time at any rate, that action of the aristocracy upon the people of this country” with the state.16 What then will come after the state? Apparently nothing, according to Arnold, who cites with approval in Culture and Anarchy Ernest Renan’s suggestion that “[a] Liberal believes in liberty, and liberty signifies the non-intervention of the State,” even if “such an ideal is still a long way off from us.”17 Enclosed with a gift copy of A French Eton, Arnold included a letter to William Gladstone agreeing that “the perfect end to reach at last is that individuals should do all things well and rightly for themselves” but adding that “I cannot but think that before reaching that end, and in order that we may reach it, we in this country shall have to use the State’s help much more freely than we have hitherto done.”18 And, in her last dispatch for the New York Daily Tribune, written with the bittersweet exuberance of an eyewitness to Rome’s near but failed rebirth as a republic, Margaret Fuller’s vision of the aftermath of “the next revolution” suggests, also, some kind of society where, if there are states, they are not ones we would recognize. “Joy to those born in this day,” she writes at the conclusion of this long, overwrought dispatch, for they can be “happy in the thought that there come after them greater than themselves, who may at last string the harp of the world to full concord, in glory to God in the highest, for the peace and love from man to man is become the bond of life.”19 Mill,Arnold, and Fuller were by no means alone among the Victorian liberals in their understanding of the state as a temporary expedient: indeed,

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they may have been among the more conservative, both in their implied estimations of the state’s duration and in their ambiguous phrasing of the state’s demise. Emerson, as one might gather from this chapter’s epigraph, was at the other end of the spectrum. In 1844, for example, Emerson wrote in “Politics” that “[t]he antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.” Emerson was not antistatist, if we understand the state to mean a kind of perfectionist education. Rather, he was exceedingly optimistic about the rate at which that state pedagogy would render itself unnecessary, superseded entirely by his preferred means to perfection, character: That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king.To educate the wise man,the State exists;and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires.The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary.The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy,—he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.20 Read alongside the other Victorian liberals, Emerson’s “Politics” is striking not for its antistatism (as many commentators have contended) but rather the opposite: that the state is clearly acknowledged here as a means (though a temporary and relatively minor one) of perfecting citizens. Thoreau makes a similar point in the “Conclusion” to Walden (1854), where he invents a legend of “an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection.” Planning to carve a staff, the artist, “[h]aving considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, . . . said to himself, It shall be

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perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.” Thoreau then relates how the artist’s friends died while he patiently searched for the perfect stick, that “the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin” when he first began to peel the stick, that the dynasty of the Candahars came to an end before he had yet shaped it into a staff, and that “Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times” before he finally completed the work.“But why do I stay to mention these things?” Thoreau asks. When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain.The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful? Even more than Emerson’s state, Thoreau’s was ultimately incidental to the work of human perfection.21 In short, the Victorian liberals perceived the state to be a temporary means to human perfection, differing only in their implicit timetables for the state’s expiration or absolute transformation.And, so, the conclusion reached at the end of chapter three—that the nineteenth-century liberals were not virtue liberals in advocating an experiential pedagogy of the state because they understood the state as a means to human perfection—is again the conclusion reached here: the Victorian liberals were not virtue liberals in advocating a didactic pedagogy of the state, for their ambition was human perfection and the state was only a means to that end.22 What can be argued, however, is that many of the Victorian liberals made roughly the same distinction I am making, between experiential and didactic pedagogies of the state as different means for achieving human perfection, and that many of them, I suggest, did conclude that an experiential pedagogy of the state was preferable to a didactic one, with the important exception of Arnold.Why did so many Victorian liberals develop such reservations about the didactic pedagogy? And why did Arnold alone remain so committed to this pedagogy, or what he

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called culture? These two topics will be the focus of the remainder of the chapter. * * * Mill’s career, I think, can be concisely summarized as moving from the didactic to the experiential: from the recommendations made in “Coleridge” (1840) to those made in the two books I examined in the most detail in chapter three, On Liberty (1859) and Considerations (1861).23 The thinking of another Victorian liberal, Emerson, seems to have evolved in a fashion roughly equivalent to Mill’s, though his versions of both didactic and experiential pedagogies were notably less indebted to the state than Mill’s. Early in his career, Emerson often advocated a didactic pedagogy as the best way to perfect the citizens of a democracy. In an 1835 lecture entitled “On the Best Mode of Inspiring a Correct Taste in English Literature,” for example, Emerson anticipated a new kind of state, dedicated not to “War, Antimasonry, or Commercial bubbles” but to reading, which will be pursued with the same revolutionary “zeal” that once “fired the nation’s leaders . . . [and] bore up an entire generation upon its swell.” To this end, Emerson promoted a few specific “mechanical means,” including some that might be called voluntary (such as urging his audience to take up seventeenth-century authors—like Milton and Harrington—instead of the daily newspaper, or to form new literary societies after the example of the English coffeehouses) but others that seem to be state-sponsored, such as a brigade of scholars to teach that “[r]eading must not be passive” and is “the lifeblood of the literary republic,” and cheap editions sent up the Mississippi. A couple of years later, in 1837, in an address for the opening of the Greene Street School in Providence, Emerson developed one of these mechanical means in more detail. Explicitly following Coleridge’s recent recommendation for the emerging English democracy in On the Constitution of Church and State (1830), Emerson concluded his remarks with a call for “a learned class— a clerisy—composing . . . the clergy, the literary men, the colleges, the teachers of youth as the fosterers of the superior nature of men.”24 Over time, however, Emerson seems to have become less and less interested in not only a didactic pedagogy of the state but a didactic pedagogy generally. Experience alone became in his mind the great and perhaps only instructor in human perfection. However, it would be inaccurate to conclude also that by experience Emerson meant exclusively the experience of the individual. Certainly individual experience is emphasized in Emerson’s theory, particularly in what might be regarded

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as the culminating essay of his early period, the 1844 essay “Experience.” Here, in conclusion, Emerson carefully distinguishes between two perfectionist experiences, a social and an individual one, and opts for the latter: But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe, that, in the history of mankind, there is never a solitary example of success,—taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, why not realize your world? But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism,—since there never was a right endeavor, but it succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. . . . [I]n the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.25 Emerson’s experiential pedagogy is obviously oriented toward the individual and to the internal life (“in the solitude to which every man is always returning”), all in the pursuit of perfection—that is, “victory . . . for all justice” and “the true romance which the world exists to realize.” However, in the same year as the publication of “Experience,” Emerson, in his first antislavery address, “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” symbolically turned away from this fierce focus on the individual and toward the civic experience, a concern that finds its best expression in his later career, particularly in reform lectures such as those collected in Emerson’s Anti-Slavery Lectures. This concern with the value of civic experience for citizens of a new democracy can also be found in his description of culture in the 1860 essay by that name. Even more than Arnold would in 1869, Emerson uses “culture” as a blanket term, covering both didactic and experiential pedagogies, but it is clear by the end of the essay that the experiential quality of “culture”— rather than the old didactic projects he proposed in 1835—is now the more important for Emerson. The essay begins with a humorous but damning criticism of our “individualism” as biologically necessary but ultimately a dead end.“The antidotes against this organic egotism,” he writes,“are, the range and variety of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with

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the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude.”26 Together, these amount to culture, which, like Arnold’s version, extends our sympathies beyond our organic egotism (what Arnold will call “the ordinary self ”) to all of humanity (the concern of what Arnold will call “the best self ”). Here is Emerson: Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities, through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.27 Reviewing the different forms culture can take, Emerson does spend some time elaborating a didactic pedagogy, what Emerson calls “education” and which he hopes might one day render politics unnecessary: Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching.We are always a little late.The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education.What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Education.28 Emerson goes on to review the worth of books in this regard, but he quickly returns again to experience as the more valuable instructor, with some pointed criticism of parents who emphasize books to the exclusion of all else (“Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and . . . these will not serve him [the child] less than the books”).29 Emerson then takes the time to articulate the value of cities, in terms not unlike Arnold’s discussion (reviewed in chapter three) of “the power of social life and manners . . . in our humanisation” in “Equality.”30 “Cities give us collision,” Emerson writes. “ ’Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and social.”31 While this civic experience must (of course) be balanced with solitude,32 Emerson is careful to remark upon the civic aspect of even solitary experience, too.“The saint and poet seek privacy to ends

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the most public and universal,” he notes, “and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.”33 In either case, Emerson’s clear interest by the conclusion of the essay is in an experiential more than a didactic culture, an interest he sees validated in (returning to an old theme of his) the method of nature itself: Man’s culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave.And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefits.34 Emerson’s perfectionism—his belief in the “impulse to the Better in the human being”—is sanctioned by nature, in his view, and it led him to be sometimes hostile to but mainly indifferent to the role of the state. Experience, in other words, did not need to be shaped by the state—in the ways that Arnold and Mill recommended, as reviewed in chapter three—in order for it to be a valuable instructor for the participants in a democracy: nature’s “organic effort . . . to mount and meliorate” would provide shaping enough. The same shift from didactic to experiential pedagogy can also be found in Margaret Fuller’s writings, though her shift is, more in keeping with Mill’s, due to a growing belief in the pedagogical worth of the specifically political experience provided by democracy. Fuller began her career committed to the kind of didactic programs recommended by her friend Emerson.As a new employee of the Greene Street School, she attended Emerson’s 1837 dedicatory address there advocating a Coleridgean clerisy and wrote afterward to a friend of her attraction to this didacticism: the address “was a noble appeal in behalf of the best interests of culture.”35 Fuller’s interest in The Dial seems kin to the early interest Emerson showed in mechanisms like the coffeehouse. In 1840, Fuller wrote to an unknown correspondent about the new magazine. “Since the Revolution,” she began,“there has been little, in the circumstances of this country, to call out the higher sentiments.” Rather, most Americans are obsessed with the machinery rather than the true end of the machinery, perfection. A “small minority,” however, is in “a violent reaction . . . against a mode of culture that rears such fruits.They see that

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political freedom [one kind of machinery] does not necessarily produce liberality of mind.” Fuller expressed her faith in the perfectionism of the Transcendentalists who will be the main sponsors of the new magazine. “Their hope for man is grounded on his destiny as an immortal soul, and not as a mere comfort-loving inhabitant of earth, or as a subscriber to the social contract. . . . No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual.”36 Fuller made similar pronouncements about another experimental institution, Brook Farm, the utopian community, during an 1841 visit. Disconcerted somewhat by the “sans-culotte tendency in their manners,—throwing themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they had heard enough,” Fuller,“accustomed to deference,” “did not speak with as much force as usual.” Nevertheless, she made her points: In the evening we had a general conversation, opened by me, about Education, in its largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and others. I took my usual ground:The aim is perfection, patience the road.The present object is to give ourselves and others a tolerable chance.37 In her 1845 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller, after expressing some skepticism about the Goethe’s recommendation that a “senate of the matrons . . . should decide what candidates were fit for admission to their houses and the society of their daughters,” does finally endorse and expand upon the idea, writing that “one such Senate in operation would affect the morals of the civilized world.”38 As preparatory to the Senate, I should like to see a society of novices, such as the world has never yet seen, bound by no oath, wearing no badge. In place of an oath they should have a religious faith in the capacity of man for virtue; instead of a badge, should wear in the heart a firm resolve not to stop short of the destiny promised him as a son of God.Their service should be action and conservatism, not of old habits, but of a better nature, enlightened by hopes that daily grow brighter.39 Unlike most of her earlier mechanisms of experiential pedagogy, this Senate seems to be a direct creature of the state rather than the voluntarism of civil society. In all of these instances, however, the method of instruction is didactic, rather than experiential. In her dispatches from Europe in the late 1840s for the New York Herald Tribune, however, Fuller was much inspired by the democratic

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movements she saw afoot there.Writing from Rome in October 1847, Fuller announced that “[f ]rom the people themselves the help must come, and not from princes. . . . From the aspirations of the general heart, from the teachings of conscience in individuals, and not from an old ivy-covered church, long since undermined, corroded by Time and gnawed by vermin, the help must come.”40 Like Mill in On Liberty, Fuller thought important the vibrant range of opinion to be found in new journals in Tuscany as well as the formation of a militia,“so valuable, first of all, as giving occasion for public meetings and free interchange of thought between the different classes,” indeed the first step toward “a new covenant of brotherly love, where each should act for the good of all.”41 As the revolution commenced in Rome, Fuller became convinced that nothing prepared people—Americans as well as Europeans—for democratic life better than the experience of democracy itself.As her June 23, 1849 dispatch suggests, a didactic culture could not effect the changes that she saw effected in the Italians by their experience of democracy: When I first arrived in Italy, the vast majority of this people had no wish beyond limited monarchies, constitutional governments. They still respected the famous names of the nobility; they despised the priests but were still fondly attached to the dogmas and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. It required King Bomba, it required the triple treachery of Charles Albert, it required Pio IX and the “illustrious Gioberti,” it required the naturally kindhearted, but, from the necessity of his position, cowardly and false Leopard of Tuscany, it required the vagabond “serene” meanness of Parma and Modena, the “fatherly” Radetzky, and finally the imbecile Louis Bonaparte,“would-be emperor of France,” to convince this people that no transition is possible between the old and the new.The work is done; the revolution in Italy is now radical, nor can it stop still Italy become independent and united as a republic.42 Fuller herself became a fervent actor in the municipalism of the Romans during the 1849 siege by the French. And, while one can only imagine what this experience, with more time for reflection, might have enabled Fuller to produce if she had survived the trip home to America in 1850, it seems safe to conclude that her vision of the state’s role had shifted decidedly away from the didactic pedagogy Emerson announced at the Greene Street School in 1837 and toward the kind of experiential pedagogy Mill would definitively espouse in the 1861 Considerations.

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Even Thoreau, like his Transcendentalist peers Emerson and Fuller, began his career with some interest in didactic culture, though he moved more quickly and completely than Emerson and Fuller to a dedication to an experiential culture that, even after the supposed turn in 1851 to a more environmental or even ecocentric vision, is markedly civic in character (though not, as reviewed in chapter three, state-oriented). At the beginning of his career, there is the remarkable case of “The Service,” an article Thoreau attempted in 1840 to publish (as recommended by Emerson) in the newly formed Dial but which was rejected by the editor Fuller for being disorganized.The essay, first published in its entirety in Reform Papers (1973), shows Fuller’s judgment to be accurate, but the main idea of the essay is not hard to find. Mainly, Thoreau recommends a kind of moral equivalent of war as necessary for true “service,” aspects of which are investigated in different sections of the essay: “Qualities of the Recruit,”“What Music Shall We Have?”,“Not How Many But Where the Enemy Are.” Several times,Thoreau likens this martial experience to a cultural one, explaining, for example, that “the brave man, without drum or trumpet, compels concord everywhere by the universality and tunefulness of his soul,” and that his “deeds” are kin to “masterpieces.”43 While what the “the campaign” itself stands for is not clear (more clear is what it is against: mainly the love of machinery and corruption later lambasted in the “Economy” chapter of Walden (1854)), that it deserves to be understood as a didactic pedagogy—a “palaestra” Thoreau calls it, referring to the Greco-Roman schools for sports—is clear: Of such sort, then, be our crusade, which, while it inclines chiefly to the hearty good will and activity of war, rather than the insincerity and sloth of peace, will set an example to both of calmness and energy. . . . Nor let our warfare be a boorish and uncourteous one, but a higher courtesy attend its higher chivalry, though not to the slackening of its tougher duties and severer discipline; that so our camp may be a palaestra, wherein the dormant energies and affections of men may tug and wrestle, not to their discomfiture, but to their mutual exercise and development.44 A somewhat less obscure but equally playful description of a different didactic culture is offered in the chapter “Reading” in Walden. Here Thoreau recommends for the United States very much what Arnold recommends for England in the 1861 Introduction to Popular Education in France: that “[i]n this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine

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Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism 45

arts.” Imagining the combined education of a Lyceum, international newspapers, reports of all learned societies, and “whatever conduces to [the nobleman’s] culture,—genius—learning—wit—books—paintings— statuary—music—philosophical instruments, and the like,”46 Thoreau argues that the village should “not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, and a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these.” To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means our greater than the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all.That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.47 At the same time, however, earlier in Walden, in the opening chapter “Economy,” Thoreau harshly criticizes the didacticism of the university in denying the students the actual experiences that would prove most educational. Students “should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How,” Thoreau continues, anticipating the phrase that Mill would make so famous in On Liberty,“could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?”48 A didactic college education,Thoreau concludes, is like “a hundred ‘modern improvements,’ ” “but improved means to an unimproved end” such as the magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas (“Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate”).49 Thoreau was not unwilling to consider the worth of some machinery as means to a greater end—witness his complex appreciation of the railroad in the chapter “Sounds” in Walden50—but he was also quite unwilling to mistake such machinery as more than just a means to an end. In this regard,Thoreau was very much like Arnold, both of whom understood liberty itself to be but a means to human perfection. In a lecture delivered in 1854, as “Getting a Living,” and published in 1863 at “Life Without Principle”Thoreau wonders “[w]hat is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?” and, very much like Arnold, asks “[w]hat is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?” With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans.We are provincial,

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because we do not find at home our standards,—because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth,—because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.51 Where Thoreau departs from Arnold, however, is in ultimately rejecting didacticism as a kind of machinery that is hopelessly inimical to the end of human perfection. For Thoreau, finally, only an experiential pedagogy is the appropriate means to that end. In this way, the passages in Walden execrating university education and imagining (as cited above) “an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection” independent of all assistance finally outweigh the playful suggestion in “Reading” that village lyceums tutor the new democracy.52 Particularly in the heady years of abolitionism,Thoreau rejected any kind of machinery that smacked of the didactic—as well as any kind of experience tainted by association with the state. Where he once retained some hope in “Resistance” (1849), for example, for a state that “cherishes its wise minority” (as examined in chapter three), by the time of his 1860 address, “The Last Days of John Brown,”Thoreau bitterly concludes that so long as the state remains pro-slavery none of its citizens are capable of being educated, of living according to their best selves as Arnold would put it: We seem to have forgotten that the expression, a liberal education, originally meant among the Romans one worthy of freemen; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. In a slaveholding country like this, there can be no such thing as a liberal education tolerated by the State.53 Heartily disgusted by the state, Thoreau retreated to the experiential education of nature, which, as in the case of Emerson’s “Experience,” seeks perfection in a kind of civic solitude.54 As proposed earlier, then, there is support for the argument that many Victorian liberals did seem to make a distinction between didactic and experiential pedagogies and did come, over the course of their careers, to prefer the latter to the former. There is the suggestion, particularly in Emerson and Thoreau, that the reason for this shift is that didacticism as a means is simply at odds with human perfection as an end—that to rely

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upon this kind of machinery, as Thoreau in particular would write, is to become machines ourselves. Arnold’s peculiar value to us today is that, while no one more than he recognized the threat of machinery becoming more than a means, he was nevertheless not convinced by arguments like Emerson’s or Thoreau’s.While in perfect agreement with the other Victorian liberals that the democratic experience must be carefully molded into a perfectionist pedagogy, Arnold in effect asks, why should we not make use of other kinds of machinery, another kind of pedagogy, in the pursuit of our perfection? That is, why should we freely embrace experiential machinery either associated with the state (municipalism, the franchise, liberty of discussion) or not (solitude, nature), or even didactic machinery associated not with the state but with civil society (books down the Mississippi, The Dial, noble villages), and yet eschew didactic state-based machinery dedicated to the same end: machinery like the university, the church, or “culture”? Can we not, in short, create cultural authorities that are not inimical to democracy—that in fact enrich democracy just as the various tools of experiential pedagogy do? Because he stands alone among the Victorian liberals in his continued willingness to ask these questions of us, compelling us in short to ask ourselves why we will condone state intervention in an experiential pedagogy but not in a didactic one—or, to recall the opening idea of this chapter, why we remain antistatist in this one singular way—Arnold is uniquely valuable to contemporary liberals, presenting us with a robust defense of statesponsored culture that is sorely lacking today. * * * Arnold’s investigation of a didactic pedagogy of the state commenced in earnest around 1859, when he first began writing as (what we would now call) a political theorist.55 From his remarks even at this early point in his thinking, it is clear that Arnold was much more at ease with didacticism than the other perfectionist liberals.Arnold’s ease with didacticism, however, has been much misinterpreted by modern critics in particular, as reviewed in chapter two, and any fair analysis of Arnold’s didactic pedagogy of the state must be, first of all, acutely aware of Arnold’s sophisticated use of rhetoric to promote that pedagogy. Consider Arnold’s first published recommendation of the state in the 1861 Popular Education in France. This book was originally written as a report on continental European primary education for a Royal Commission, a task for which Arnold was appointed.Writing the report in 1860 after touring the continent in 1859, Arnold decided it might also make a valuable book for

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the general public, and, before revising it for this different audience, he sought the assessment of Harriet Martineau, an ideal reader, as she was an opinion-maker for the middle-class Dissenting liberals (i.e., the Philistines) who would be Arnold’s primary audience.56 In a letter of July 24, 1860, Arnold thanked her for her criticism of the report, which apparently focused most of all on the tone (her side of the correspondence is lost). “I am very far,” Arnold answered, “from presuming to set up my own estimate of what is rational as a law for all the world,” as apparently Martineau took his tone to imply,“and if I appear in my Report to do so I must try, before I publish, to divest myself of that appearance.” But perhaps you do not sufficiently consider that in this Report I am addressing myself particularly to a body of men the majority of whom may be supposed to have a certain common standard—the standard of what may be called the “governmental mind”—on certain disputed questions. . . . If I were addressing myself immediately to religious partisans [i.e., Dissenting liberals, or “Philistines”] I should proceed in another manner.57 Martineau wrote Arnold back, and, from Arnold’s response to this second letter, it becomes clear that in addition to his tone Martineau is quite annoyed by Arnold’s recommendation that the state intervene in the education of the middle class. Arnold had explained that he had not in writing his report taken the time to make its proposed intervention more palatable, because, writing for the “governmental mind,” such rhetoric was unnecessary. But, for readers like Martineau, fiercely opposed to state intervention, this point was exactly where Arnold needed to adjust his approach. And, one can see his first attempts at such an adjustment in his July 30 response to her second letter. “I shall take your advice so far as carefully to strike out anything which may be considered offensive in my form and mode of statement,” he wrote, “and to explain. . . . views, which I cannot abandon, because I believe them to be true, but which will gain no admittance if they merely excite irritation.” Arnold then attempted anew to explain his view of the state, carefully attempting now not to excite Martineau’s irritation. He begins by emphasizing their common ground before carefully explaining their differences: I believe we agree more than you suppose both as to the fact of what the government of England has hitherto been, and as to the benefits which that mode of government has conferred on the nation. But we are on the eve, I believe, of great changes: and a theory of

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government which did very well when only a small part of the nation took part in governing, will no longer serve when democracy enters into possession. At least I have never read of any democracy which truly succeeded except by entering into that alliance with the best intelligence and virtue within itself, and submitting to that guidance from it, which aristocratic and oligarchic government managed to get on without. American democracy was never truly great but under Washington, nor Athenian but under Pericles.58 One can see in Arnold’s polite use of “I believe” and “[a]t least I have never read” the kind of tone that will characterize his consistent recommendation of state intervention in schools in the important essays he was soon to write: this revised report (the 1861 Popular Education in France), the 1862 “Twice-Revised Code,” and the 1863–1864 A French Eton. No doubt, Martineau still continued to squirm at Arnold’s willingness to recommend that democracy not only “all[y] itself with the best intelligence and virtue within itself ” but “submit to that guidance from it.” But the important point to recognize is that Arnold very consciously adapted the rhetoric of his argument for state intervention to suit different audiences. Completing the second part of A French Eton in January 1864, for example, the section in which he criticizes the English tendency to treat the statement “the State had better leave things alone” as an “absolute maxim,”Arnold confessed to his good friend Louisa Lady de Rothschild that the writing has been “an anxious business, because I want to recommend State-intervention in secondary instruction, without giving such offence and calling forth such yells of outcry as do more harm than good.” To his mother, during the same month, Arnold wrote that “I really want to persuade on this subject, and I have felt how necessary it was to keep down many and many sharp and telling things that rise to one’s lips.” And persuasion was without question Arnold’s goal, as he wrote his mother a year earlier (October 28, 1863):“partly nature, partly time & study have also by this time taught me thoroughly the precious truth that everything turns upon one’s exercising the power of persuasion, of charm; that without this all fury, energy, reasoning power, acquirement,—are thrown away.”59 In addition to the tone, the actual arguments that Arnold makes, revealing his ease with didacticism, must also be considered in proper context. For in addition to the positive arguments for a didactic pedagogy of the state, or culture (which I turn to in a moment), Arnold also developed a number of negative arguments for the state, arguments that are not essential to his final thought about the state and culture, but rather

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were used specifically to charm his primary audience, the libertarian Philistines. For example, twice in these first essays on the state Arnold argues that, because the English have converted a healthy suspicion of the state into an “absolute maxim,” they can afford to moderate their suspicion of the state slightly so as to tolerate the state as a necessary evil: in the 1861 Introduction and A French Eton. Also twice in these essays (in the 1861 Introduction and The Twice-Revised Code) can be found the argument that would give Arnold the title to his 1869 argument for state-supported culture, Culture and Anarchy: that is, that the alternative to state-supported culture is “anarchy.”60 This is an argument that, as uncharming as we find it today, was indeed intended to charm his philistine readers back then, for Arnold calculated that the only thing that might persuade the libertarian middle classes to give up their age-old resentment of the state was their equally age-old fear of lower-class revolution. This particular negative argument for the state has distracted many commentators from the positive argument for Arnold’s state, so it must be dealt with here.The argument appears in several places in Culture and Anarchy, but nowhere more pungently than in the “Conclusion.” Following upon the claim (not terribly unlike Mill’s own claim in “Coleridge” that an unchallenged “fixed point” is what “enables society to weather these storms, and pass through turbulent times without any permanent weakening of the securities for peaceable existence”) that “without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection,” Arnold notoriously continues,“[w]ith me, indeed, this rule of conduct is hereditary.” I remember my father, in one of his unpublished letters written more than forty years ago, when the political and social state of the country was gloomy and troubled, and there were riots in many places, goes on, after strong insisting on the badness and foolishness of the government, and on the harm and dangerousness of our feudal and aristocratical constitution of society, and ends thus: “As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!”61 Despite Arnold’s attempts to moderate the sentiment—by clarifying that his father advocated this extreme policy only as part of his greater advocacy of democracy, by immediately adding (in sentences that follow those above) that his real animus is for the Liberal party leaders who maliciously encourage such riots as a way to win points when their

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arguments cannot succeed on their own merits—this passage has been epiphanic for too many Arnold commentators: the smoking gun in the case against Arnold the authoritarian. In context, though, the passage seems clearly intended to be so many other things than a serious policy recommendation: an attempt to assure his Philistine readers that he, too, felt their fear of class revolt; an attempt to shake the old reputation of being a “dandy” by confessing to the desire to take a hard line; and (perhaps most of all) an ironic suggestion meant to impute a very subtle but (for Arnold) very important difference between him and his father. In any case, Arnold thought the better of it and removed the passage entirely from the second (1875) edition. An honest tally, then, of Arnold’s ease with didacticism requires the careful subtraction of an occasional unctuousness of tone and (especially) the various negative arguments for the state, techniques that Arnold, with a more open-minded audience, would most likely not have felt compelled to employ. Minus these incidentals, what would then remain is the didacticism advocated in his positive argument for a certain kind of state intervention, which he would eventually call culture.That positive argument is that the state, through culture, perfects us.This was not Arnold’s original position, it seems, in his first published defense of state intervention, the 1861 Introduction. Here, Arnold argues that the state provides democracy with “an ideal of high reason and right feeling, representing its best self, commanding general respect, and forming a rallying-point for intelligence and for the worthiest instincts of the community, which will herein find a true bond of union.”62 All of this sounds much like the argument for Halt that he would make some years later in his review of Curtius (described above): that the state through culture can preserve itself (a “true bond of union”).There is no mention of the state through culture perfecting its citizens. Indeed, Arnold wrote (somewhat contradictorily) in conclusion that “[p]erfection will never be reached” and that “to recognise a period of transformation when it comes, and to adapt themselves honestly and rationally to its laws, is perhaps the nearest approach to perfection of which men and nations are capable.”63 The contemporary English state is out of joint with the modern age and must adapt to the “laws” of that age: that is all. Three years later, however, when Arnold published the conclusion to A French Eton in June of 1864, the state’s purpose is more clearly ambitious, for Arnold now emphasizes “an infinite expansion of human powers,” as Joseph Carroll notes. “The idea of ‘expansion,’ ” Carroll writes of this shift in Arnold’s thinking,“has been extended from a social and cultural phase into an absolute ideal.”64 In A French Eton, Arnold

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writes (with the kind of charm he told his mother about) that historically the middle class “secured for itself that centre of character and that moral force which are . . . the indispensable base upon which perfection is to be founded” through “its vigour in resisting the State, when the State tried to tyrannise over it.”“In this sense,”Arnold notes, quite deftly,“it may be said to have made way towards perfection by repelling the State’s hand.” Having coaxed from his middle-class reader consent that the principle aim of the middle class has always been perfection, Arnold then continues that today the middle class actually now needs the state in order to reach that perfection. “[I]f the State can (as it can) be of service to the middle class in the work of enlarging its mind and adorning its spirit, it will now make way towards perfection by taking the State’s hand.”65 Here, the new part of Arnold’s argument for the didactic pedagogy of the state becomes clear.The state no longer simply helps us adapt to a period of transformation (“the nearest approach to perfection of which men and nations are capable”) but helps us achieve perfection. The exact reasons for Arnold’s shift in understanding of the ambition of the state in the early 1860s—from an adaptation to history to nothing less than perfection of humankind—are elusive. However, if only to better situate Arnold’s perfectionist state in relation to some important predecessors to Victorian liberalism, I elaborate here upon a few possible influences.66 First, there is at least one tantalizing suggestion that the decided shift in Arnold’s thought about the state when completing A French Eton in 1864 was due to some deliberate recollection of his father’s views. On February 11, 1864, as he completed A French Eton, he wrote to his mother that “[i]n my notions about the State I am quite Papa’s son, and his continuator; I often think of this, the more so because in this direction he has had so few who felt with him.”67 And “Papa’s” notions about the state were indeed perfectionist, explicitly so. Consider Thomas Arnold’s Introductory Lectures on Modern History, delivered at Oxford in 1841, which his son Matthew most likely attended as a student. In the Inaugural Lecture the elder Arnold’s argument for a certain kind of history of the state quickly evolves into an argument for a certain kind of state, one that does not pursue the evil ends of power and wealth but the good end of perfection. That end appears to be the promoting and securing a nation’s highest happiness; so we must express it in its most general formula; but under the most favorable combination of circumstances, this same end is conceived and expressed most purely, as the setting forth God’s glory by doing His appointed work.And that work for a nation

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seems to imply not only the greatest possible perfecting of the nature of its individual members, but also the perfecting of all those acts which are done by the nation collectively, or by the government standing in its place, and faithfully representing it.68 In an appendix included with the published lectures, the elder Arnold explained that his theory of the state is offered as an alternative to the dominant Warburtonian theory that “the object of political society is the preservation of body and goods.” “The Warburtonian theory,” Arnold argues, “appears not to be the natural conclusion of inquiries into the object of governments, but an ingenious device to enable us to escape from some difficulties which we know not how to deal with.” Conceding the realities of these difficulties, Arnold nevertheless maintains that his (Arnold’s) is “the true theory of government, and that by acknowledging it to be so, and keeping it therefore always in sight, we may be able at last to approach indefinitely near to it.”69 Refashioning Vico’s idea of “a Caesar,”Arnold believed the state to be the only salvation to a nation that has sunk into discord.70 In this way, Arnold’s state was also the Church, but a very broad Church. Thus, he wrote in the appendix, this state should be understood to be seeking not “religious truth” ( by which he means dogma open to sectarian interpretation) but “man’s highest perfection” (an end Arnold apparently thought less controversial), which the state achieves not through dogma but through law. “The question then which is sometimes asked so indignantly,—Is the government to impose its religion upon the people? may be answered by asking again,—Is the government to impose its own laws upon the people.” These laws, “in a perfect state,”“would be the law of the people, the law of their choice, the expression of their mind.”71 The two indispensable sources for Thomas Arnold’s own idea of the perfectionist state were Coleridge and Burke, both of whom proved (somewhat indirectly in the case of Coleridge) indispensable to Matthew Arnold, as well. “[T]hat kingdoms of the world not only may, but are bound to provide for the highest welfare of their people according to their knowledge”72 was a proposition supported,Thomas Arnold argued in the appendix, by no less than Coleridge and Burke. Coleridge’s ideas about the Church and about “Reason” were woven inextricably into the fabric of the elder Arnold’s thought.“I think,” he wrote to a friend,“with all his faults, old Sam was more of a great man than any one who has lived within the four seas in my memory.”73 Arnold followed “old Sam” Coleridge in making a distinction between the Christian religion and the Christian Church, the former being permanent and incorruptible

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and broad, the latter the opposite on all counts. Both Coleridge and Arnold believed the state, rather than the Christian Church, should be dedicated to the realization of the Christian religion, or what Coleridge called in On the Constitution of Church and State (1829) the “nationality.” This is Coleridge’s term for that fixed ideal which Mill speaks of as necessary in all permanent political societies, and which in Coleridge’s own words is “consecrated . . . to the potential divinity in every man, which is the ground and condition of his civil existence, that without which a man can be neither free nor obliged, and by which alone, therefore, he is capable of being a free subject—a citizen.”75 That potential divinity is “Reason,” our essential human nature, which can be perfected through participation in the nationality.76 Burke, in Thomas Arnold’s somewhat surprising view, also championed a perfectionist state. In the appendix, he cited Burke’s “Speech on the Unitarian Petition” (1792), which contends that “in a Christian commonwealth, the church and the state are one and the same thing, being different integral parts of the same whole.”“Religion,” continues Burke, “is so far, in my opinion, from being out of the province or duty of a Christian magistrate, that it is, and it ought to be, not only his care, but the principal thing in his care; because it is one of the great bonds of human society, and its object the supreme good, the ultimate end and object of man himself.”77 At odds with his father about Burke’s interpretation of the French Revolution, as several critics have noted,78 Matthew Arnold was in complete agreement with his father about the appeal of Burke’s perfectionist state, choosing to use Burke’s Reflections in A French Eton to answer whether “a citizen’s relation to the State [is] that of a dependent to a parental benefactor”:“By no means,” the younger Arnold wrote;“it is that of a member in a partnership to the whole firm. The citizens of a State, the members of a society, are really a partnership;‘a partnership,’ as Burke nobly says, ‘in all science, in all art, in every virtue, in all perfection.’ ”79 The most important idea that Matthew Arnold inherited from Burke was the one his father inherited as well, the idea that the state should embody the nation in its “collective and corporate character,” a phrase the younger Arnold attributed to Burke (though perhaps not exactly Burke’s, as it turns out) and which he first used in the 1861 Introduction and then fifteen more times in his published work.80 If his father, Coleridge, and Burke provided Arnold with a hearty conservative vision of the perfectionist state, Matthew Arnold found more details about perfection from many of the French and German writers with whom he was so familiar, particularly Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Ernest Renan.81 Herder, whose

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Ideas Toward the Philosophy of History (1784–1791) Arnold read and wrote about in his Note-books while he conceived and composed Culture and Anarchy (between 1867 and 1869), provided Arnold with the crucial idea of Bildung, “the willed harmonious development in the individual of all aspects of the human . . . potential.”82 Also influencing Arnold’s idea of perfection in the late 1860s was Humboldt, whose The Sphere and Duties of Government describes “[t]he true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.” Mill, of course, would cite this and the sentence that follows in his own On Liberty: “Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential— intimately connected with freedom, it is true—a variety of situations.”83 In Culture and Anarchy,however, Arnold very carefully separates Humboldt’s libertarianism from his perfectionism, the former being merely the means that Humboldt believed most appropriate, given his context, for achieving human perfection: Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most beautiful and perfect souls that have ever existed, used to say that one’s business in life was, first, to perfect oneself by all the means in one’s power, and, secondly, to try and create in the world around one an aristocracy, the most numerous that one possibly could, of talents and characters. He saw, of course, that, in the end, everything comes to this,—that the individual must act for himself, and must be perfect in himself; and he lived in a country, Germany, where people were disposed to act too little for themselves, and to rely too much on the Government. But even thus, such was his flexibility, so little was he in bondage to a mere abstract maxim, that he saw very well that for his purpose itself, of enabling the individual to stand perfect on his own foundations and to do without the State, the action of the State would for long, long years be necessary.84 This last idea, already discussed, that the role of the state in the perfection of humanity is a long but fundamentally temporary one, is an idea Arnold believed found best expression in the work of Ernest Renan. Arnold’s and Renan’s “common purpose as thinkers, critics and reformers,” writes one commentator,“was the wish for the individual’s greatest perfection, the fullest development of man’s personality in all directions.”85 In his first mention of Renan in his correspondence, in a December 1859 letter

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to K, Arnold suggests the same, recommending she read Renan because “between [his] line of endeavour and my own I imagine there is considerable resemblance. . . . The difference,” he continues, “is perhaps, that he tends to inculcate morality, in a high sense of the word, upon the French nation, as what they most want, while I tend to inculcate intelligence, also in a high sense of the word, upon the English nation, as what they most want.”86 Arnold’s inculcation of intelligence would reach its zenith, of course, in Culture and Anarchy as “Hellenism,” but he still saw fit there to turn to Renan for help explaining perfectionism overall and the special role of the state in its realization: In France the action of the State on individuals is yet more preponderant than in Germany; and the need which friends of human perfection feel to enable the individual to stand perfect on his own foundations is all the stronger. But what says one of the staunchest of these friends, Monsieur Renan, on State action . . . ? Here are his words: —“A liberal believes in liberty, and liberty signifies the nonintervention of the State. But such an ideal is still a long way off from us, and the very means to remove it to an indefinite distance would be precisely the State’s withdrawing its action too soon.”87 From the beginning of his career as a political writer, then,Arnold can be seen to be highly engaged by a didactic state, a state with a pedagogy that, when one keeps Arnold’s tone and argumentation in context as well as his primary intellectual sources in full view, is markedly liberal as well as perfectionist, at least from A French Eton forward. Still, the question of didacticism’s appropriateness within a democracy remains. When Mill writes that democracy requires “the principles of individual freedom and political and social equality, as realized in institutions which as yet exist nowhere, or exist only in a rudimentary state,” or when Emerson writes that “[t]o educate the wise man, the State exists; with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires,” one does not feel compelled to ask Karl Marx’s question: and who will educate the educators? This is because Mill and Emerson make it clear that what is “settled” (to recall Mill’s phrase) in a democratic state is not omnipotent: that other powers exist—the power of free discussion in Mill, the power of free individuals in Emerson—which clearly limit the power of the state. In contrast, when Arnold writes of culture, particularly in Culture and Anarchy, many critics have felt compelled to ask nothing but Marx’s question. And the answer is admittedly not obvious. Sometimes in Culture and Anarchy, as several commentators have noted, Arnold assumes the state to already have culture: but how did

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the state get culture?88 At other times he suggests that culture will convert us (into our best selves) and we will then in turn become or reform the state: but how will culture initially convert us? The conclusion of the third section, “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,” seems to presume an existing state (and cites two Continental theorists, Humboldt and Renan, who would also make such a presumption) that will use culture to educate democracy.89 In contrast, the conclusions of both the second section, “Doing as One Likes” and the fifth section, “Porro Unum Est Necessarium,” are that our best self “knows that it is stablishing the State” or that the state is more or less established and that culture will persuade those in power to “seek culture” “in their actual operations for the removal of certain definite evils.”90 In short,Arnold seems to be claiming at some times that the state (apparently by definition) already has culture and will didactically impart it to the people, while at other times that those who know their best selves will either bring culture to the existing state or actually “stablish” the state. There is another way to understand this seeming confusion than as a failure of Arnold’s logic, however, one that links Arnold to Mill and Emerson in advocating a didactic pedagogy specifically for a democracy. One could read Arnold’s reluctance to connect culture to any one single institution as consistent with the democratic need to limit the power of didacticism. That Arnold was attuned to this concern is easily shown from evidence elsewhere in Culture and Anarchy. Only a few pages into the Preface Arnold carefully describes a culture whose “very life and essence” is an “inward operation,” not a specific institution (“I have indeed expressly declared that I wanted no such thing”). And two paragraphs into the Introduction he announces “[n]ow for my part I do not wish to see men of culture asking to be entrusted with power.” And, when he first announces the role of the state as “summing up the right reason of the community, and giving effect to it,”Arnold also implies that he is highly aware of the possibility of a tyranny resulting. “I think I see my enemies waiting for me with a hungry joy in their eyes,” he writes playfully, referring to his many critics ready to shout tyranny,“[b]ut I shall elude them.”91 For the state, and its tool of culture, are not the exclusive power of any single class: Carlyle’s aristocracy, Lowe’s middle class, or the Reform League’s working class.92 Rather (and to return to the Platonic paradigm with which I began these latter two chapters), whatever power culture coincides with will be limited and balanced by other powers.This becomes clearer in the way that Arnold describes his relationship, as an advocate of culture, to the

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Liberal politicians, in the sixth section “Our Liberal Practitioners”: Everything, in short, confirms us in the doctrine, so unpalatable to the believers in action, that our main business at the present moment is not so much to work away at certain crude reforms of which we have already the scheme in our own mind, as to create, through the help of that culture which at the very outset we began by praising and recommending, a frame of mind out of which really fruitful reforms may with time grow.At any rate, we ourselves must put up with our friends’ impatience, and with their reproaches against cultivated inaction, and must still decline to lend a hand to their practical operations, until we, for our own part at least, have grown a little clearer about the nature of real good, and have arrived nearer to a condition of mind out of which really fruitful and solid operations may spring.93 Though it is not exactly clear whether “we” refers to just Arnold or to all advocates of culture, it seems clear that Arnold imagines culture in dialogue with other philosophies, and not at all dictating the nature of perfection from on high.Arnold’s own biography lends some support to this interpretation.As both a state employee advocating more state intervention in schools in his reports and a public intellectual advocating a state-supported culture, he obviously conceived his work in both fields to be in the name of the state.94 Arnold also was close friends with at least one like-minded Liberal MP, his brother-in-law William Edward Forster, and, in his correspondence with him and his wife K,Arnold would liken his intellectual work to Forster’s political work, as in this letter to K of November 14, 1863: I think in this concluding half of the century the English spirit is destined to undergo a great transformation—or rather, perhaps I should say, to perform a great evolution and I know no one so well fitted as William, by his combined intelligence and moderation, to be the parliamentary agent and organ for this movement.That will be a post well worth a man’s ambition to fill. I shall do what I can for this movement in literature.95 Unlike Plato’s philosopher kings, then, the didactic pedagogy of Arnold’s state, or culture, works through a variety of mechanisms or “machinery,” democratically checked and balanced by other machinery.

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Culture itself is essentially independent of “machinery,”Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy, but it makes use of it flexibly and creatively.96 That machinery would include pedagogical techniques I have identified in chapter three as experiential, such as liberty of discussion. But, for Arnold more than the other Victorian liberals, that machinery also includes pedagogical techniques that I have identified as didactic. For example, while Arnold is clear that culture does not necessarily require some institution such as the French Academy, he is also clearly interested in the worth of “establishments” for producing the “great works by which . . . the human spirit has manifested its approaches to totality, and a full, harmonious perfection, and by which it stimulates and helps forward the world’s general perfection.”97 Arnold is therefore unique among the perfectionist liberals studied in this book in that it is a didactic pedagogy of the state, rather than an experiential pedagogy of the state, that can be found at the apogee of his career, Culture and Anarchy. It is for his theory of culture that Arnold has remained so provocative today—indeed even “talismanic,” as Stefan Collini so aptly puts it.98 As frustratingly vague as this didactic pedagogy of the state can be in places, it is an idea of great potency for contemporary liberals, well worth considering anew as we move beyond the modern culture of skepticism. But the possibility of that move itself is the subject of my conclusion.

Conclusion

To the other inducements for cultivating a religious devotion to the welfare of our fellow-creatures as an obligatory limit to every selfish aim, and an end for the direct promotion of which no sacrifice can be too great, [the Religion of Humanity] superadds the feeling that in making this the rule of our life, we may be co-operating with the unseen Being to whom we owe all that is enjoyable in life. John Stuart Mill,“Theism.” Intervening to defend human rights will never have anything more than conditional legitimacy, even when the cause is just and the authority right.We all aspire to perfect legitimacy.We want to live in a world in which we do the right thing, and know we are doing the right thing, and believe that the whole world will accept that we have done the right thing.There is no such possibility. Indeed, it is a dangerous utopia. Moral perfectionism is always the enemy of the possible and the practical. Doing the right thing appears to require the tenacity to do it when half the world thinks you are wrong. Michael Ignatieff,“Intervention and State Failure.” The core conviction of Victorian liberal theory, I have argued, is that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection. In the introduction, I divided this conviction into two major claims: one about the worthiness of Victorian moral perfectionism, the other about the worthiness of Victorian statism. Chapters one and two showed how a modern culture of skepticism keeps us from appreciating or even understanding these two claims of Victorian liberalism. Chapters three and four showed how Victorian liberals sought to make good on these claims with complementary pedagogies of perfectionism.

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At several points in the book, I have emphasized the difference between perfectionist liberalism and virtue liberalism. I have done this for two reasons. One is that the distinction is blurred in contemporary political theory, which often treats both versions of liberalism as merely promoting the preservation of the state through the cultivation of certain virtues in citizens. And so, I argued in the first chapter that the more important and too often forgotten quality of perfectionist liberalism is not its potential coerciveness (which it shares with virtue liberalism) but its moral objectivism. The second reason I have emphasized this distinction between perfectionist and virtue liberals is that there now exists a temptation (in the case of studies of Mill) and there may later exist a temptation (in the case of studies of other Victorian liberals) to find in Victorian liberalism only virtue liberalism, emphasizing the cultivation of virtues for the preservation of the state. I have tried to show that, on the contrary, the Victorian liberals ultimately did not even care to preserve the state, but aimed finally to perfect human beings. The state was just one expendable means to that end. But there is another objection to perfectionist liberalism, thus far less often made than the objection to coercion, but potentially much more devastating, and that is to question whether we can in fact know human perfection: whether moral objectivity is even possible. I want to consider two answers to this question here, neither of which—it should go without saying at this point—will be “no.” The first is, “yes, we can achieve moral objectivity, and that objectivity is metaphysically sanctioned.”The second is “yes, we can achieve moral objectivity, and that objectivity is accessible to us through empiricism and intuition, and does not require metaphysics to support it.” Both answers are to be found in the Victorian liberals, and both are worth considering today, though I argue finally that it is the second answer that we should pursue. * * * I think one of the most unfortunate myths in academe today is the one that draws a bold line around 1968 and sorts into two camps all kinds of convictions accordingly. It would be too crude to suggest that we should instead just draw the line about fifty years earlier, and I have half-heartedly resisted simply bifurcating liberal theory into “Victorian” and “postVictorian” brands, for there are all sorts of interesting differences to be found between a liberal like Michael Ignatieff and one like Isaiah Berlin and one like E. M. Forster. Still, I stand by the claim that there is indeed a modern liberalism, which for the last century has abided by an account

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of reason that is quite different from the account of reason one finds in the Victorian liberalism I have just described. One of my principle aims in this book was to convey the great unanimity of modern liberalism on this score, and how so many of the differences among modern liberals— for example, political versus comprehensive liberals in the first chapter, right- versus left- versus non-liberals in the second chapter—are quite superficial in comparison. With the exception of contemporary perfectionist liberals (about whom I have nevertheless already expressed some dissatisfaction), there are very few political theorists and even fewer scholars of Victorians studies who have announced themselves open to a fair consideration of the kind of liberalism we find embraced by so many Victorians.1 Still, there are a few such theorists and scholars, and I think it is important to remember this once more. Another of my principle aims in the first two chapters especially was to draw attention to the fact that some working in academe are beginning to question how moderns have fashioned both liberalism and the Victorians. In the first chapter, I sought to illuminate how some contemporary liberal theorists, despite the obsessive reiterations within that field of the two accounts that supposedly justify an exclusive focus on political philosophy, nevertheless do pursue (inadvertently, ironically, what have you) a moral philosophy, or at least frankly wonder again and again why they do not. Similarly, both chapters one and two concluded with instances of scholars working withinVictorian studies struggling against the almost overwhelming force of disciplinary habit to reconsider the merit of Victorian objectivism and statism. And, while I prefer not to cite anything in blithe support of this only passing observation, I still note that my reading and working as an academic over the last decade or so has convinced me that there are enough similar movements in different fields that we may indeed soon step beyond the hoary modern culture of skepticism. And if we academics finally refuse to take that step? Well, perhaps there are more significant signs of the times to be found elsewhere. If progressive academics are only beginning gingerly to question that culture of skepticism,there are other progressives,it seems to me,who long ago moved beyond it, or perhaps never entered it.There is a history that needs to be told about the many programs of moral perfectionism that came of age, remarkably, in the heart of Cold War skepticism: the movements on behalf of repressed minorities, of course, but also, and particularly because it nearly alone has not yet sputtered into more compromised forms, the global human rights movement.With all due respect for Michael Ignatieff ’s sharp critique in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry of the moral

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perfectionism at the root of that movement, and the ways in which such “idolatry” often backfires, can we not pause for just a moment before swallowing that whole movement—like the others—into the culture of skepticism? To consider that, perhaps, progressive moral perfectionism, such as that found in the global human rights movement, is something we need more of, not less? To embrace moral perfectionism troubles many contemporary progressives like Ignatieff because they assume that moral perfectionism necessarily rests upon metaphysical or “idolatrous” claims, and that such claims necessarily lead one into the extremist politics we associate with religious fundamentalists today. As Ignatieff puts it, “[b]ecause . . . ideas about . . . human sacredness appear to confuse what is with what ought to be, they are controversial, and because they are controversial, they are likely to fragment commitment to the practical responsibilities entailed by human rights instead of strengthening them.”2 In conclusion, I want to challenge both of these assumptions in reverse order: the usually explicit assumption among progressives that a metaphysical moral perfectionism is necessarily extremist, and the usually implicit assumption that moral perfectionism is necessarily metaphysical in nature in the first place. Consider the first assumption: that metaphysical moral perfectionism is necessarily extremist because such idolatrous moral claims lead ineluctably to the kind of uncompromising fundamentalism we know all too well today. Exceedingly familiar with this reasoning himself, Mill, in the great though often misunderstood essay, “Theism,” nevertheless wondered after all whether the metaphysical or “external” sanction of a full-fledged religion of humanity might not be the best route for liberalism to pursue, given the sociological fact that “supernatural hopes . . . may still contribute not a little to give to this religion its due ascendancy over the human mind.” It is a pragmatic argument that Mill makes, one that seeks only to bolster liberalism’s advantage with arguments that might be more persuasive to people still enamored of “supernatural hopes.” Mill suggested doing this in a very precise way. His own proposed external power would not be omnipotent, but rather a God that actually needed human assistance to complete our joint work.The story such an externally sanctioned liberalism could then tell, Mill thought, might be well-nigh irresistible, for in this story we humans would know “the feeling of helping God—of requiting the good he has given by a voluntary cooperation which he, not being omnipotent, really needs, and by which a somewhat nearer approach may be made to the fulfillment of his purposes.” The conditions of human existence are highly favourable to the growth of such a feeling[, Mill argued,] inasmuch as a battle is

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constantly going on, in which the humblest human creature is not incapable of taking some part, between the powers of good and those of evil, and in which every even the smallest help to the right side has its value in promoting the very slow and often almost insensible progress by which good is gradually gaining ground from evil, yet gaining it so visibly at considerable intervals as to promise the very distant but not uncertain final victory of Good. Mill’s greatest advocate in the final decades of the nineteenth century, John Morley, was profoundly disappointed by all this. Far from winning new converts to the program of liberalism, Morley worried, Mill’s public consideration of the pragmatic use of such wanton metaphysics to sanction liberalism’s progressive program would completely backfire. Fundamentalists, Morley reckoned,“will nourish a certain private thankfulness for the buckler with which Mr. Mill has furnished them against the fiery darts of the dogmatic unbeliever.They will henceforth believe themselves to have his [Mill’s] authority for retorting on the denier, that he, and not they, is the irrational person, the offender against the laws of evidence.” “So long as this domain of the supernatural is left to them in one quarter or another,” Morley cried,“they will feel that nothing is lost.”3 I think it is only fair to admit that who was right here (about the strategic use of external sanction) is in fact anybody’s guess.4 More significant, I think, is that Mill presented the proposal almost entirely as a strategic—rather than philosophical—one, and that Morley almost entirely responded to it in the same way, and I wonder whether the time has not come for a similarly candid reconsideration of the strategic deployment of a religion of humanity today. Indeed, I remembered here the modern human rights movement—what Elie Wiesel calls our new “world-wide secular religion”—precisely to provoke the consideration that such a progressive deployment of external sanctions is already underway and deserves our consideration as a deliberate strategy rather than reckless “idolatry,” and, further, to politely ask academic readers, skeptical of this strategic deployment, if they have any other ideas, given the fact that even after a near century of modern liberal skepticism much of the world still seems intent on any given day on carving itself up into rival fundamentalisms that are all too idolatrous. Humans still seem to need “supernatural hopes,” as Mill long ago noted, and perhaps the time has come, as Mill long ago suggested, for progressives to start to describe those hopes themselves.5 However, I do think there is another idea, which is to pursue liberalism’s moral program of perfectionism without recourse to the supernatural, without recourse to metaphysics, a program that most progressives today

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implicitly assume to be impossible but that Victorian liberals like Mill and Arnold did not. It is clear, first of all, that Victorian liberals did indeed perceive their idea of moral perfection to be an objective one. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold showed how there were right and wrong understandings of perfection. If “[t]he final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man’s perfection or salvation,” both were still needed.Alone, Hebraism (which prizes “conduct and obedience”) is not enough; one needs Hellenism (“to see things as they really are”) as well.6 And, in On Liberty, Mill sought an objective moral ideal that could serve as a guide for the perfection of humanity, for “[a]mong the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying,” he explained, “the first in importance surely is man himself.”7 Mill, too, was convinced that perfection—as the ideal of “character”—was now defined not objectively but subjectively by the majority.8 That definition of character was Hebraic, or what Mill called “Calvinistic.” Like Arnold, Mill argued that it is “a great error to persist in attempting to find in the Christian doctrine that complete rule for our guidance.” “[W]ell-meaning persons,” in assuming Christian ethics to be a moral training, are creating “a low, abject, servile type of character,” a “pinched and hidebound type of human character,” particularly in teaching individuals to submit to a “Supreme Will” at the cost of “sympathizing in the conception of Supreme Goodness.” Like Arnold, Mill believed that this Hebraic or Calvinistic type was only one part of an objective definition of character, and that the other parts had to be recovered, which could then work “side by side with Christian ethics to produce the moral regeneration of mankind.”9 But, even if the Victorian liberals perceived their idea of moral perfection to be an objective one, were they right? Was their “objective philosophical anthropology,” as John Skorupski describes it in Mill’s case,10 indeed objective? The main challenge made against philosophical anthropologies is the same one made against any essentialist theory: that the claims the essentialist makes about reality are in fact not objective at all, but subjective, perceptible by only some observers. Most often, this false reality is often presented as metaphysical in character.When the essentialist claims to ascribe truth to an objective reality, he often ascribes truth to something meta-physical, some “essence” that is other than the reality we actually experience. An objective philosophical anthropology is, in the end, only metaphysics by another name. Is this in fact a just charge against all essentialisms, including the Victorian liberals’ philosophical anthropologies? In a very useful 1992 article, before her shift to a strictly political liberalism (as described in the

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first chapter), Martha Nussbaum argues no. Metaphysics contends that “[a] description of the world is true just in case it corresponds to that independently existing structure, false insofar as it does not so correspond.” In practice, knowledge of the essence of human beings, while trumpeted as objective reality within philosophical anthropologies, is often metaphysical, tracing “the way the human being essentially is [to] a part of the independent furniture of the universe, something the gods can see and study independently of any experience of human life and human history.” And, as most intellectuals working after the interpretive turn (described in chapter one) agree,“this sort of metaphysical truth is not in fact available.”11 However, Nussbaum continues, this does not mean that all essentialisms are necessarily illegitimate, metaphysics parading as objectivity. She makes a careful distinction between metaphysics and essentialism: If [metaphysics is impossible and thus] the only available . . . picture of reality is one in the derivation of which human interpretations play a part, if the only defensible conceptions of truth and knowledge hold truth and knowledge to be in certain ways dependent on human cognitive activity within history, then the hope for a pure unmediated account of our human essence as it is in itself, apart from history and interpretation, is no hope at all but a deep confusion. . . . But one might accept these conclusions and still be an essentialist. One might, that is, believe that the deepest examination of human history and human cognition from within still reveals a more or less determinate account of the human being, one that divides its essential from its accidental properties.12 How, without metaphysics but rather “from within,” can we separate what is essential about being human from what is accidental? As an example, Nussbaum suggests that we can confidently take away properties X,Y, and Z from a person (a suntan, a knowledge of Chinese, and an income of $40,000 a year) and still have what we would count as a human life. However, take away properties A, B, and C (the ability to think about the future, the ability to respond to the claims of others, the ability to choose and act) and we might no longer have a human life. “Separating these two groups of properties,” Nussbaum explains, does not require metaphysics; rather it “requires an evaluative inquiry: for we must ask, which things are so important that we will not count a life as a human life without them? Such an evaluative inquiry into what is deepest and most indispensable in our lives need not presuppose an external metaphysical foundation, clearly: it can be a way of looking at ourselves,

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asking what we really think about ourselves and what holds our history together.”13 Somewhat more carefully than Mill in Utiliarianism, Nussbaum calls this “internalist essentialism,” for the view of a human essence that it supports is based on “internal”—that is, historical and sociological— truths, not metaphysical (or “external”) truths. As a method, internalist essentialism can be understood as “internal” in two senses, as Nussbaum has more recently explained. One is the sense of internal just described: to determine what is essential about being human we consider ( like historians and sociologists) all the evidence internal to human existence, our “human beliefs and practices,” rather than some external evidence, that “independent furniture of the universe.”14 But this method can be “internal” in the more popular sense of that word, too, in that we determine what to make of these various human beliefs and practices (i.e., which of these beliefs and practices are indeed essential and which are accidental) by referring to the “fixed points” in our own judgments, the intuitive or internal points that enable us to make evaluations.15 These fixed points are to be taken as mostly settled ways of thinking for humans, ways of thinking that might include particular judgments, such as the judgment that slavery is always wrong, or, more generally, that humans can use practical reason or human beings are sociable.16 In this way, having gotten rid of the vain hope for a metaphysical grounding for our human essence, we are able to develop an internal definition of human essence, which would require us to reflect both upon the unruly mass of historical and sociological evidence about human life as well as upon the judgments that we almost always make when evaluating that evidence.17 The philosophical anthropology of the Victorian liberals was, by and large, an “internal” one rather than an “external” one.18 In other words, the Victorian liberal idea of moral perfection rested not usually upon metaphysics but rather upon an understanding of human nature garnered from intuitions and from history and sociology. Mill particularly trusted in history and sociology when developing his philosophical anthropology.19 Consider, very briefly, in this regard, one of his most important early essays, the 1836 “Civilization.” Referring to this essay, the English historian J.W. Burrow has argued that Mill’s understanding of ideal character can be traced to the historical and sociological critique he learned from the country republican tradition. Reviewing the critique Mill makes of contemporary civilization in that essay, particularly that individuals are losing their independence due to both the increasing anonymity of urban areas and the increasing sophistication of technology, Burrow sees three characteristic republican concerns: the loss of virility, the loss of

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independence, and the thwarting of self-fulfillment. All of these concerns can be rephrased as positive aspects of the human essence outlined in Mill’s philosophical anthropology: virility, independence, the pursuit of self-fulfillment. Looking closely at the “remedies” Mill offers in that essay for the improvement of civilization, remedies drawn also from the republican tradition, we can derive two additional aspects of human essence in Mill’s philosophical anthropology.The first remedy, a call for “greater and more perfect combination among individuals” as individuals are increasingly “lost and . . . impotent in the crowd,” suggests civic engagement as an aspect. The second remedy, “national institutions of education, and forms of polity, calculated to invigorate the individual character,” which has become “relaxed and enervated,” suggests a final aspect that might be summarized as “the intensest love of truth,” which these institutions would cultivate.The philosophical anthropology developed in this essay, then, is based upon Mill’s historical and sociological observations, particularly as recommended by the republican tradition, not by any random metaphysical speculation.21 Arnold ground his philosophical anthropology mostly in history and sociology, too, I think. Arnold initially called this work “criticism,” or, as he put it in “The Function of Criticism” (1864),“a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”22 Later, he called this work of discerning the best “culture.” As Joseph Carroll writes, the later Arnold “broaden[s] the idea of criticism to include the regulation and direction of the whole collective life of humanity according to the ideal of ‘perfection’ that criticism itself establishes.”23 Culture establishes this ideal by seeing past the machinery that too many people accept as an end in itself.“[W]hat an unsound habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the greatness of England,”Arnold writes in Culture and Anarchy, “and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating delusion of this kind and fixing standards of perfection that are real!” It is the Hellenism of culture that can help us here, “to see things as they really are.”“[T]he bent of Hellenism is to follow, with flexible activity, the whole play of the universal order, to be apprehensive of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another, to slip away from resting in this or that intimation of it, however capital.”24 More so than Mill, though, Arnold was also willing to make use of intuitions to establish the objectivity of his philosophical anthropology. He began publicly to formulate a theory of intuitions as early as the 1857 lecture “On the Modern Element in Literature,” his inaugural lecture as Poetry Chair at Oxford. Here Arnold claimed the supreme characteristic

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of the modern to be “the intellectual maturity of man himself; the tendency to observe facts with a critical spirit. . . . to judge by the rule of reason, not by the impulse of prejudice or caprice.”25 By the time of a June 1863 lecture,“Heinrich Heine,”Arnold’s fundamental trust in this “rule of reason” as the key to understanding humanity is clear. The moderns find themselves surrounded by “an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules.” The sense of discrepancy between reason within and custom without defines “the awakening of the modern spirit,” exemplified by Goethe. Goethe’s profound, imperturbable naturalism is absolutely fatal to all routine thinking; he puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favour of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, “But is it so? is it so to me?” Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt Goethe’s influence most deeply.26 By this time, though, Arnold recognized a different obstacle to our trust in our rational intuitions. In addition to irrational custom, the refuge of reactionaries, there is logic itself, the tool of supposed progressives, but which in its disrespect for intuitions Arnold believed to be nearly as inimical to human progress as custom itself. He made this clear in his Preface to Essays in Criticism (1865), where he argued for his approach to truth—“to try and approach truth on one side after another” and thereby discover it—as opposed to the “logicians” who boldly construct truth for themselves: [T]he truth is, I have never been able to hit it off happily with the logicians, and it would be mere affectation in me to give myself the airs of doing so. They imagine truth something to be proved, I something to be seen; they something to be manufactured, I as something to be found. I have a profound respect for intuitions, and a very lukewarm respect for the elaborate machine-work of my friends the logicians. I have always thought that all which was worth much in this elaborate machine-work of theirs came from an intuition, to which they gave a grand name of their own. How did they come by this intuition? Ah! if they could tell us that.27

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Be they hidden beneath irrational custom or “logical” constructions, intuitions are for Arnold an important window upon our human essence. This defense of the objectivity of Victorian moral perfectionism is only a sketch. I offer it really as a prod to myself and to others working in Victorian studies, liberal theory, and related fields. For, as we begin to reconsider the possibility of an objective philosophical anthropology and the kind of progressive political programs such an anthropology can sponsor, we will find ourselves, I believe, returning again and again to those who first developed—in a democratizing, industrializing world like our own, at least—liberal political programs resting upon such anthropologies. In other words, the more we appreciate the liberal possibilities of moral objectivism—which is to say the less fanatically modern we content ourselves with being—the more we will understand the past and future significance of Victorian liberal theory, especially the role of the state in the pursuit of moral perfection.

NOTES

Introduction 1. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 11–12. 2. As I explain at the beginning of the second chapter, understanding modern antistatism means exploring the older “politics of redistribution” (with its familiar left–right spectrum) rather than the newer “politics of recognition” favored by contemporary theorists, with its own terminology, such as “political,” “comprehensive,” “modus vivendi,” etc. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 327–335 for a summary of the difference. 3. Berlin,“Two Concepts of Liberty,” 172.

Chapter One 1. Cohen is quoted in Hoffman, “Distinguished Philosopher, Professor Dies at 81.” Nussbaum, “The Enduring Significance of John Rawls.” For a concise review of the academic measure of Rawls’s significance over the last three decades, see Young, Beyond Rawls, 51–52. 2. Neal, “Three Readings of Political Liberalism.” The phrase “realistic utopia” is Rawls’s own, meaning when political philosophy “extends what are ordinarily thought of as the limits of practical political philosophy”: see Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 6. 3. Wall and Klosko, “Introduction,” 3; Dworkin, “Liberalism,” 127. For a very concise summary of this moment in the narrative, see Wall and Klosko,“Introduction,” 2–6. 4. The challenge to neutrality, as Sandel notes, takes two forms, only the dominant form of which will be examined here.The other form focuses on the question of the priority of the individual or the collective, which I examine in the next chapter, specifically as articulated by Alasdair MacIntyre, another of the communitarians. For a summary of that other debate, see Sandel, “A Response to Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” 185. For another important description of these two communitarian challenges to neutral liberalism, as relating to ontology and to advocacy respectively, see Taylor, “Cross-Purposes,” 159–163. Cited and paraphrased material is from Sandel,“A Response,” 186–187; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 491. 5. For denials of communitarian influence, see Freeman, “Introduction,” 28; Mulhall and Swift, “Rawls and Communitarianism,” 463; and Rawls, Political Liberalism, xix. 6. MacIntyre, “The Privatization of the Good,” 344–361. Rawls first used the phrase “fact of pluralism” in a 1988 essay, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good.” See Rawls, Collected Papers, 449–472. He refined it (for his purposes) in Political Liberalism into “the fact of reasonable pluralism.”As will become clear, the unrefined version is more useful for my purposes.

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7. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 236 for a nice summary of this fact: i.e., that political liberalism amounts to people being “communitarians in private life, and liberals in public life.” 8. Sandel is another theorist often called communitarian, though I read him as a virtue liberal below. The passage is from MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” 302–303, which Beiner cites and discusses in Beiner, “The Quest for a Post-Liberal Public Philosophy,” 3–4. My focus here is on MacIntyre’s moral relativism as typical of not only communitarians but liberals, too; I turn to the antistatism expressed here in the next chapter. 9. See e.g., Neal,“Three Readings of Political Liberalism.” 10. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xviii, xviii–xix. 11. Ibid., xxviii. 12. Young, Beyond Rawls, 13–14. 13. Schonsheck,“Rudeness, Rasp, and Repudiation,” 175, 180. 14. Dreben,“On Rawls and Political Liberalism,” 316, 328–329. 15. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xl–xli. 16. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 5–6. Gray claims Isaiah Berlin as a predecessor, though Berlin’s “value pluralism” can also be found at the heart of William Galston’s work (a virtue liberal theory discussed momentarily) not to mention John Rawls’s political liberalism. See Gray, Two Faces, 30–33; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 48–62; Rawls, Political Liberalism, 303n. I draw two lessons, both elaborated upon below, from this nearly unanimous embrace of Berlin’s legacy, the first of which is that the various liberal theories have much more in common than their proponents allow. The second is that Berlin’s moral ideal of the skeptic remains the unacknowledged moral program of most contemporary liberal theory. 17. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 1, 11, 12, 11–12. Gray does not name names, but I assume that he means Rawls’s political liberalism when he writes in 2000 that “[t]he hope of a rational consensus on values supports the liberal philosophies that prevail today” (2000, 3), for political liberalism is by far the prevailing form of liberalism today. In a more recent book, Gray expands his claim (making it even less persuasive) to contend that not only political liberalism but the West itself is reluctant to accept the reality of pluralism. “Western societies are governed by the belief that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign,” Gray explains.“As societies become more modern, so they become more alike.At the same time they become better. Being modern means realising our values—the values of the Enlightenment, as we like to think of them.” But “the suicide warriors who attached Washington and New York on September 11th, 2001, did more than kill thousands of civilians and demolish the World Trade Center. They destroyed the West’s ruling myth.” And “[t]he flaw in the modern myth,” Gray writes, “is that it tethers us to a hope of unity, when we should be learning to live with conflict” (2003, 103). See Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, 1, 103. 18. Gray,“Modus Vivendi,” 12, 19. 19. Ibid., 10; Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 21, 106.This similarity between modus vivendi liberalism and political liberalism is particularly notable in their very modest programs for global law. Compare Gray’s proposals in Two Faces to those in Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 3–10. 20. Perfectionist liberals often are confused with both virtue liberals and communitarians on this count, and I return to this again later in the chapter. 21. Douglass and Mara,“The Search for a Defensible Good,” 277; Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 23.Virtue liberalism is discussed in a number of places, though with different names: see, e.g., Rosenblum,“Introduction,” 5–6 (on “moral idealism liberalism” as opposed to “modus vivendi liberalism”); Kymlicka and Norman, “Return of the Citizen,” 297–300 (on “liberal virtue theory”); Berkowitz, Virtue, 24–32 (on “modern liberalism”); and Galston, Liberal Purposes, 213–237 (on “liberal virtues”). 22. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 177; Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, xiii; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 10. 23. Emphasizing, like all of these theorists, the irreducibly pluralist nature of contemporary civil society, Robert Post and Nancy Rosenblum have very recently summarized this same spectrum

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25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.


of responses to that pluralism. While their intention is to mark out the variety of theories available today, mine is to note their fundamental sameness in simply assuming pluralism to be irreducible. See Post and Rosenblum,“Introduction,” 12–15. Ronald Beiner has also noted that liberal theorists often surrender their moral program with a sense of virtue rather than loss. Liberals, it is assumed, avoid “passing judgment on the moral substance of a way of life,” for to do so “violates the overwhelming ‘fact of pluralism’ that surrounds us. For liberals, pluralism—the condition whereby individuals are committed to irreconcilably different moral ideals, personal aspirations, visions of the good life—is a sociological given in all modern societies.” See Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, 7. On the only local significance of reason for MacIntyre, see Nussbaum,“Non-Relative Virtues,” 33. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 3; Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxvi; Dreben, “On Rawls and Political Liberalism,” 318; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 13; Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxviii. Sullivan,“Bringing the Good Back In,” 152; Rawls, Collected Papers, 303–358. Beiner has described this same normative restraint in contemporary theory and traced it to theorists’ unwillingness to recognize that “theory must be animated by imperatives of its own that are distinct from our need, as citizens, for salubrious maxims of political practice”— that theory is not freestanding but involves a “search for ground”: see Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, x, xi.Though our proposals ultimately differ, Beiner’s book also finds political theory’s weakness precisely in what is nowadays so widely considered to be its strength, and for this reason I found the book’s very existence reassuring while developing my critique of the account of the fiction of reason. For other examples of Beiner’s criticism of political theory’s readiness to adapt itself the status quo instead of vice versa, see the first half of the book, especially “Preface:The Theorist as Critic,” “Liberalism in the Cross-Hairs of Theory,” and “Reconciling Liberty and Equality”: Beiner, Philosophy, xii–xiii, 4, 9–10, 16, 22–24. Rorty, “A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” 118; Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” 258, 265, 268. Like many liberal theorists who focus on the account of the fiction of reason, Rorty enlists Rawls, not least I think with the hope that some of the gravitas of Rawls’s account of the fact of pluralism might lend itself to this other account. Others contend, though, that Rawls himself, in Political Liberalism, backed away from the radical historicism of his transitional writings of the 1980s. See, e.g., Sandel,“A Response to Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” 194–195. For the purposes of my argument, I obviously prefer Rorty’s version of events to Sandel’s. For more criticism of this demotion of theory to handmaiden to history, see also Beiner’s judgment of Rorty and Galston’s of Rawls: Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, 10, 11, 55–56; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 42–45. As Beiner puts it,“[w]hat distinguishes Rorty’s liberalism is its higher degree of candour, which at least acknowledges that a liberal vision of things, far from being ‘neutral’ toward rival ideas of the good, is implicated in the defence of a particular way of life”: Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, 52. As argued below, I do not always find candor in Rorty, which is why I find his example so useful to demonstrate more generally liberal theory’s essentially suppressed (or perhaps repressed) desire to retain a moral program. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv. See also Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 160: “is there reason to think that one is more likely to be wrong about the character of the good life than about the sort of moral considerations which all agree should influence political action such as the right to life, to free expression, or free religious worship? I know of no such arguments.” In contrast, Sandel also questions this distinction between what reason can do in the moral versus the political sphere but in order to emphasize that reason’s effectiveness is limited in both spheres. See Sandel,“A Response to Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” 202–210, where he essentially argues that people’s ideas about the right are as immutable (i.e., as resistant to reason) as their ideas about the good. Because they both emphasize the importance of goods in a liberal society, perfectionist liberals (like Raz and Sher) are often lumped with virtue liberals (like Sandel). But perfectionist liberals believe reason to have


33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

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a major role in both political and moral programs, while virtue liberals believe history, not reason, to play a major role in both programs. Because there is so much confusion on this particular point (which consequently has dulled contemporary perception of the significance of perfectionist liberalism), I return to this distinction toward the end of this chapter, as well as emphasize it several times in my presentation of the Victorian liberals as perfectionist rather than virtue liberals in chapters three and four. Sher, Beyond Neutrality, ix. Rorty is always careful to disassociate his efforts in encouragement from anything like the pursuit of truth, but it is hard to see his program as anything less than a moral one. In reference to the abortion debate, e.g., Rorty recommends in a different essay that we move away from “when does human life begin” to “how can some unprincipled and wishy-washy consensus about abortion be hammered out.” This sounds like a strictly political move. But he continues: “Try to get them [opponents of abortion rights] to be as flexible and wishy-washy as possible, and to value democratic consensus more than they value almost anything else.” How exactly do we “try to get them” to become like this? Will people really be persuaded to convert to this kind of moral sensibility (one that cherishes deep flexibility as a good way of living one’s life) strictly by appealing to shared political values? I just do not think so: Rorty is really proposing a moral good behind all his casually political propositions. See Rorty,“A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” 120. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 493–494; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xiv. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, 299–300. Russell and Woolf are both cited by Arblaster: The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, 300, 302. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 131; Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, 302–303; Caserio, “Auden’s New Citizenship.” Arblaster does not push the point, but he does note that this modern liberal skepticism was reinforced by modern moral philosophy, including G. E. Moore’s, which stressed the subjective and individual nature of judgments about goodness, or what Moore called “emotivism”: see Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, 303. I come back to this point, which MacIntyre develops so marvelously, in my discussion of the widespread contemporary acceptance (by most liberals as well as non-liberals) of emotivism in chapter two. Berlin,“Two Concepts of Liberty,” 172. Wall and Klosko,“Introduction,” 13. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 285–286; Friedrich is cited in Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, 317.The three fundamental areas of contemporary work on perfectionist liberalism all have to do with the problem of coercion: moral pluralism, autonomy, alienation costs. See Wall and Klosko,“Introduction,” 17–21.Antistatism in modern liberalism is the focus of chapter two, and I respond to this challenge (the dominant one) to perfectionism there. Here, again, I simply expose its distracting dominance. Some may wonder why I do not use for my case study a better known “perfectionist” theorist, Stanley Cavell. However, Cavell’s “moral perfectionism” comes out of a Nietzschean tradition of perfectionism that, unlike Nussbaum’s theory, has never aspired to moral objectivism. Indeed, that tradition is aggressively subjectivist (not to mention antiliberal), and so I am not considering it here except as an example of the Nietzschean emotivism that I find at the heart of modern antistatism in chapter two: in other words, Cavell’s perfectionism is just another aspect of the modern culture of skepticism that stands between us and a sympathetic reading of the Victorians.And, unfortunately, that is literally the case here. I would have no special quarrel with Cavell were it not that he and so many of his champions have sought to find this kind of perfectionism throughout not just the twentieth century but the nineteenth as well. So here I must explicitly disassociate my claims for a Victorian perfectionism, emphasizing as it does a moral objectivism, from others’ claims for a Victorian perfectionism, emphasizing as they do a moral subjectivism. See Andrew H. Miller’s writings for a reading of perfectionism in the British context explicitly indebted to Cavell: Miller,“Reading Thoughts,” 79–98; Miller,“John Henry Newman, Knowingness, and Victorian Perfectionism,” 92–113. For a critique of Cavell

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43.

44. 45.

46.

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48. 49.


and his more numerous champions in nineteenth-century American studies, particularly their role in the program of “de-transcendentalism” generally, see Malachuk, “Transcendentalism, Perfectionism, and Walden,” 283–303. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 220. Interestingly, like perfectionist liberals, Marxist perfectionists “rank ways of life according to a trans-historical account of the human good,” according to Kymlicka. See also Kymlicka’s account of this set of contemporary Marxist theorists: Contemporary, 190–195. As I suggested in the introduction, the relationship between Marx and Victorian liberalism needs to be seriously reconsidered in light of their shared moral program of perfectionism. While undoubtedly enriching our understanding of the range of political theories that dominated the early modern period, the republican tradition has often been hijacked for political purposes for the last three decades. For a critical review of the use and abuse of the republican tradition by political theorists, see Williams, “Notes of a Jewish Episcopalian,” 99–113: e.g., “[i]f republicanism had never existed, we would have had to invent it.” I myself may or may not have been guilty of such hijacking in a 2000 article about Rorty, though in my defense Rorty’s moral ambitions (what I then called republican, what I here call modern liberal) need to be insisted upon in order to expose the moral program buried in contemporary liberal theory: see Malachuk,“ ‘Loyal to a Dream Country,’ ” 89–113. I thank Krister Dylan Knapp for compelling me to consider that I may indeed have hijacked the republican tradition in that article. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 5, 6, 17; Sandel,“Liberalism and Republicanism.” Rawls, Political Liberalism, 205; Sandel, “Liberalism and Republicanism.” Even Rorty, the selfproclaimed “minimalist” liberal, recognizes the instrumental value of civic virtues: see Rorty, “A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” 117–125. Several other articles in the collection edited by Allen and Regan examine the extensive common ground shared by political liberalism and Sandel’s “republicanism”: see Beiner, “The Quest for a Post-Liberal Public Philosophy,” 1–13; Kymlicka,“Liberal Egalitarianism and Civic Republicanism,” 131–148; and Elshtain and Beem, “Can This Republic Be Saved?,” 193–204.This last, on Sandel’s avoiding the objectivist epistemological claims that would actually make his republicanism distinctive from the rest of contemporary theory, was very useful to me in formulating the crucial epistemological difference between perfectionism and other theories. Aristotle himself was a perfectionist according to my definition; his ranking of values was based upon reason. His gesture toward that philosopher duly noted, Rawls nevertheless writes that civic humanists believe that “taking part in democratic politics is . . . the privileged locus of the good life”; in so doing, he continues, civic humanists give “a central place to what Constant called the ‘liberties of the ancients’ and [therefore have] all the defects of that.” I read this as Rawls’s simply echoing Constant’s critique of the historical inanity of civic humanism rather than Rawls’s chastising the rational claims of civic humanism: see Rawls, Political Liberalism, 206. Kymlicka, incidentally, makes the same distinction among forms of republicanism, dividing the theory into those that promote virtue as an instrumental good (Rawls’s classical republicans and Sandel’s republicans) and those that promote virtue as an intrinsic good (Rawls’s civic humanists): see Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 294–302. However, the role of reason in the latter theory is in Kymlicka’s presentation, as in Rawls’s presentation of civic humanists, not clear to me, so I do not concede that civic humanists are perfectionists as I am describing perfectionists here. Sandel,“Liberalism and Republicanism”; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 9. Eamonn Callan challenges the line between comprehensive and political theory, too: see Callan, Creating Citizens, 12–42. In contrast, Sher contends that communitarianism is perfectionist because it is objectivist, which is precisely the factor that needs consideration, in my view, though I am not persuaded that the communitarians are in fact objectivist: see, Sher, Beyond Neutrality, 156–175. Neal,“Perfectionism with a Liberal Face?”, 31, 34, 52, 53; Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 160 Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint, 10. In fairness, Wall notes in the same place a few books on moral theory that do defend this assumption, but my point is that perfectionist liberals,


50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

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for some reason, have not seen a defense of their epistemology to be an important priority. In contrast, see Philip Kitcher on the importance of perfectionists making this defense, and on Thomas Hurka’s distinctiveness among perfectionists in this regard: Kitcher, “Essence and Perfection,” 59–83. For an appreciation and critique of this distinctive quality of Nussbaum’s work, see Yuracko, Perfectionism and Contemporary Perfectionist Values, 41–46. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 78–80. See Nussbaum, “Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities,” 102–140 for Nussbaum’s own review of her work in political theory between 1980 and 2000. Nussbaum,“Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities,” 126, 128, 118–119, 120. Ibid., 126; Nussbaum,“Political Objectivity,” 887. Nussbaum,“Political Objectivity,” 899, 901.Though Nussbaum would vehemently disagree, her work has become quite similar to Rorty’s, at least in their shared frankness about their deliberate suppression of their moral ambitions, their shared bitterness about having to do so, and their shared self-mockery in the kind of liberalism that results (what Rorty calls being “wishy-washy” and Nussbaum “pussyfooting”). For more examples from Rorty, see “A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” 120, 124–125. Galston notes that, historically, these kinds of strictly political and pussyfooting defenses are always dropped during moments of political crisis. Pointing to Lincoln’s philosophical defense of equality during the Civil War), Galston recommends that defenses of the liberal framework must be based upon a comprehensive theory instead, but Galston’s own understanding of comprehensive theory (as abiding by the account of the fiction of reason) is not at all like that of Lincoln, a Victorian liberal unfortunately left out of this book: see Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 41. Barry,“How Not To Defend Liberal Institutions,” 57, 53. Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, 45, 49. Ibid., 45. Bauerlein,“Social Constructionism,” 229. Levine, “Victorian Studies,” 136. See Collini, Public Moralists, 88, 90 for the Shaw, Wilde, and Nietzsche references. Fisher, “The Victorian Temper,” 86. Whatever the significance of Strachey’s book, for clarity of contrast with the Victorian liberals, Nietzsche is my preferred starting point. Consider this, also from Twilight of the Idols, 541: “Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic—every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.” On Buckley’s challenge to Strachey, see Fisher, “The Victorian Temper,” 86. On Buckley’s exaggeration of Victorian existentialism, see Kelvin, “The View from Here,” 83. On Buckley’s Cold War liberalism, see Maynard,“The Dialectical Temper,” 81.All three of these sources were part of a recent celebration and reconsideration of Buckley’s book. Levine,“Victorian Studies,” 137. Armstrong, “Postscript,” 316. Armstrong also exemplifies this new allegiance to Victorian popular culture:“Postscript,” 316–317.As several commentators have remarked, the overwhelming predominance of scholars of fiction (as opposed to poetry or nonfiction prose) in Victorian studies has no doubt had much to do with this reversal of allegiances. See Levine, “Victorian Studies,” 150–151 and Shires,“Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies,” 481–486. Kucich argues that the extraordinary career pressures in the field of English studies have compelled younger scholars to publish too quickly, resulting in the replication rather than reconsideration of dominant academic fashions: see Kucich,“Cultural Studies,Victorian Studies, and Graduate Education,” 477–480. I return to this third period in Victorian studies in chapter two in an examination of Foucauldian antistatism. Anger,“Introduction,” 13; Levine, Dying to Know, 13;Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 5.

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64. These postmodern theorists are quoted respectively in Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 8n; Levine, Dying to Know, 287n; and Anger, “Introduction,” 10n. In a recent review of a book by John McGowan, Frederick Luis Aldama has also identified this new effort to “yoke together a humanist belief in universals—to know those facts that make our world unjust and that are necessary for us to fight for true democracy—with a belief that reality is indeterminate and socially constructed.” See Aldama,“Review of Democracy’s Children.”

Chapter Two 1. To be clear, I am referring to the state as depicted in liberal theory since the divorce of moral and political programs described in the first chapter.To build a state committed to the comprehensive theory of, say, Rawls’s Theory would be a step toward justice such as the world as never seen.The problem is that theorists are heading in the other direction. For a description of the disjunction between the kind of state promised in Theory and the kind of state increasingly offered by liberal theorists too anxious to accommodate their theory to contemporary antistatist realities, see Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 88–96. 2. As cited in the introduction, see Ibid., 327–335 for a summary of the difference between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. 3. That this shift has occurred is indisputable, and, if the “choice” of candidates on our ballots is not enough evidence, it is also described in many recent books. See e.g., Pierre and Peters, “Introduction,” 1–7; Stehr and Ericson,“The Ungovernability of Modern Societies,” 3–5. 4. This definition is a paraphrase of Mishra, Globalization and the Welfare State, 3. 5. Perhaps I should note that, if social conservatives (a vocal minority within the U.S. electorate especially) actually prefer an activist state when it comes to “moral” legislation (e.g., restricting abortion services, restricting marriage rights), they do not at all understand their agenda to be in essence a plea for state intervention.What matters for my argument here is the widespread belief within the electorate that the state is never the right answer. I return to this particular case below. 6. Cited in Sigsworth, “Introduction,” 1. On “Victorian” previously being an insult, see Samuel, “Mrs.Thatcher’s Return to Victorian Values,” 9. 7. Cited in Briggs,“Victorian Values,” 10. 8. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, 8. If Thatcher’s appropriation of the adjective Victorian to describe her politics was new, her interest in the period was not. As early as 1977, in her book Let Our Children Grow Tall,Thatcher had pointed with approval to the author of the 1859 best-selling Self-Help, Samuel Smiles, for his support of her proposition that “the sense of being selfreliant [sic], of playing a role within the family, of owning one’s own property, of paying one’s own way, are all part of the spiritual ballast which maintains responsible citizenship”: see Samuel,“Mrs.Thatcher’s Return to Victorian Values,” 11–12. 9. On Reagan’s deliberate if less precise use of history to propagate right-liberal ideology, see Kaye, “The Use and Abuse of the Past,” 346–347. 10. Gingrich, “What Good Is Government,” 22. For Gingrich’s self-identification as a Victorian liberal, see Hadley,“The Past Is a Foreign Country,” 7. 11. “Marvin Olasky reminds us . . . that in the 19th century, there was a volunteer for every two poor people,” Gingrich wrote. “They actually knew the person they were trying to help. An automatic reaction to a homeless person was to demand,‘Are you willing to work?’ If they were not, you had a moral obligation not to support them. If all you were doing was subsidizing their alcoholism or drug addiction, that itself was immoral”: see Gingrich, “What Good Is Government,” 23–24. The book had been recommended to Gingrich by former Secretary of Education William Bennett, another vocal neo-Victorian within the Republican Party. Bennett hailed Olasky’s book as nothing less than the “most important book on welfare and social policy


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in a decade,” and Gingrich promptly distributed it to all of the newly elected House Republicans. Justifying the Republican revolution to a national audience for the first time, Gingrich declared that “[o]ur models are Alexis de Tocqueville and Marvin Olasky. We are going to redefine compassion and take it back.” For that citation and a summary of Olasky’s influence on George W. Bush, see Grann,“Where W. Got Compassion,” 64. Himmelfarb reminds us, Gingrich wrote in Newsweek,“that in Victorian England they reduced the number of children born out of wedlock by almost 50 percent.They didn’t do this through a new bureaucracy. They did it by re-establishing values, by moral leadership, and by being willing to look people in the face and say, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself when you get drunk in public.You should be ashamed if you’re a drug addict.’ ” See Gingrich,“What Good Is Government,” 23–24. Pressed by critics to explain the uses of shame in public policy, Gingrich retorted “[i]t ain’t that hard to understand. Read Himmelfarb’s book. It isn’t that complicated.” For the citation, see Collini,“Cultural Fantasies,” 414. Gingrich promoted this book as required reading for his Congressional colleagues as well: see Hadley, “The Past Is a Foreign Country,” 7–8. Himmelfarb,“The Victorians Get a Bad Rap,”A15. Himmelfarb,“Queen Victoria Was Right,”15a. For the connection, see Collini,“Cultural Fantasies,” 416. Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society, 50. Ibid., 51, 143. My final sentence paraphrases The De-Moralization, 168–169. Publications included a 1983 edition of New Statesman edited by Raphael Samuel; the 1987 book Victorian Values by James Walvin produced to accompany a Granada Television series that same year; a 1988 volume of essays, In Search of Victorian Values: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society, edited by Eric M. Sigsworth; a 1990 volume entitled Victorian Values:A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy edited by T. C. Smout; and a 1990 volume Victorian Values: Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Society edited by Gordon Marsden, published in a second edition in 1998. Jones,“Poor Laws and Market Forces,” xiii; Ignatieff,“Law and Order in a City of Strangers,” x. Collini,“Cultural Fantasies,” 417. Walvin, Victorian Values, 165–166. Jones,“The Changing Face of 19th-century Britain,” 37. This is one of the most established interpretive habits in Victorian studies. For a brief sketch of its history, see Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, 10–12.There is, of course, real merit in the habit, which has its sources after all in the Victorians themselves (e.g., Ruskin’s mischaracterization in Unto This Last (1862) of Mill’s political economy as libertarian). I only recall here the point that, like all habits, this one tends to simplification, particular in relegating Arnold and Mill to extreme positions neither really held. Examples of this, in addition to those examined below, include Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, 291–294 and Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, 232–266. Lipman,“Why Should We Read Culture and Anarchy?,” 213; Said,“Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation.” Lipman,“Why Should We Read Culture and Anarchy?,” 225. Said,“Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation.” Plato, Republic, 193. Woolf, After the Deluge, 290, 290–291, 291. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 292. Both the Criterion and Christian News-Letter citations are from Kojecky, T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 116, 149–150. Eliot, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, 13, 20. Cited in Kojecky, T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 26. Ibid., 166. Kojecky makes the connection to Mein Kampf: T.S. Eliot’s, 169.

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35. Cited in Johnson, The Cultural Critics, 68–69, 91. Indeed, Bell takes his thinking one step further than Eliot’s, in thoughtfully considering whether this requisite inequality might also legitimize slavery.“All else being equal,” he concludes,“I should prefer a civilization based on liberty and justice: partly because it seems to me the existence of slaves may be damaging to that very élite from which civilization springs; partly because slaves too deeply degraded become incapable of receiving the least tincture of what the élite has to give”: see Johnson, The Cultural, 91–92. 36. Eliot, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, 17; Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, 6, 7, 3, 95. 37. Berlin,“Two Concepts of Liberty,” 118. 38. Ibid., 144, 147, 149–150, 152. 39. Ibid., 170. 40. Trilling, Matthew Arnold, np. 41. Ibid., 253. 42. Ibid., 260, 260–261, 277 43. Williams, Culture and Society, 116. 44. Ibid., 117. 45. Ibid., 124. For the suggestion that culture seeks to do away with classes, see 48. 46. Ibid., 329. 47. Ibid., 335–336. 48. Ibid., 336–337. 49. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 23. 50. Ibid., 23–24. 51. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 37, 43–44. For his acknowledgment of Baldick’s dissertation, see Eagleton, Literary Theory, 218. 52. Compounding the problem is the fact that Arnold’s invention of English has become “received dogma,” as Bill Bell has put it, making commentators working within English departments exceedingly uncomfortable with their own apparent complicity in the propagation of culture on behalf of the state. See Bell,“The Function of Arnold at the Present Time,” 203–219; Collini, Arnold, 112–114. 53. Goodheart,“Arnold Among the Neoconservatives,” 456–457. 54. Machann, Matthew Arnold, 88. 55. Said,“Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation.” 56. Ibid. 57. On the general hostility toward and absence of consideration of the state during the midVictorian period, see Roberts, Paternalism and Early Victorian England, 46, 272; Roberts, The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians, 11, 26–27; and Meadowcraft, Conceptualizing the State, 1–16. On the invention of the individualist–collectivist axis in the late Victorian period, see ibid., 211–215; Collini, Liberalism and Sociology. 58. This paragraph paraphrases Bird, The Myth of Liberal Individualism, 7–15. 59. Ibid., 16; Dworkin,“Liberalism,” 127. 60. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 117. Her critique of welfarism stems from the work of the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen. Recalling my own critique of Nussbaum from the end of chapter one, here is an excellent example of Nussbaum’s nearly singular readiness among liberal theorists to chastise the predominance of moral subjectivism throughout our political culture, an ability that once made her such a strong advocate for a perfectionist liberalism characterized by a robust moral objectivism.As I argued in chapter one, however, her theory has lately replaced this robust moral objectivism with a political liberal’s readiness to work with “provisional fixed points” when developing the political framework. I admit to finding a readiness to work with only provisional fixed moral points little different from welfarism in substance. 61. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 55, 213.


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62. Ibid., 213, 221. For an illuminating explanation of the similarity between Marxist theories of exploitation and libertarian theories of self-ownership, see Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 177–187. 63. I have chosen to work with Foucault because of his obvious importance to Victorian studies. For another example of postmodern antistatism, see Bourdieu,“Rethinking the State,” 53–75. 64. Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 27–28. 65. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 209. 66. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, 7. See the entire first chapter of this book for a pointed summary of the irrelevance of Discipline and Punish to the Victorians. 67. Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street, 63–68. For examples of antistatist ideology throughout American political history, see Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State, 11–15. Edmundson’s argument is restricted to American examples of postmodernism. 68. Gordon,“Government Rationality,” 23. 69. Ibid., 27; Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 86. 70. Bradley, The Optimists, 183–199. 71. Gordon,“Government Rationality,” 47. 72. Ibid., 36. 73. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, 30. Goodlad’s presentation of Mill as a virtue liberal, however, while not unlike some others offered in the last decade or so, is not as compelling from my perspective. I present Mill instead as a perfectionist liberal in chapter three. 74. Barry et al.,“Introduction,” 8. For this reason, commentators like David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, committed to the more anarchic spirit of the early Foucault, find his late love affair with governmentality to “veer towards a virtual positivism that lacks any real analytical capacity”: see Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 4. 75. In “Foucault’s Hyper-Liberalism,” Beiner sees Foucault tending toward anarchy in the extremism of his individualism: see Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, 68–78. See also Taylor, “Living with Difference,” 224; Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 85–88; Lilla, The Reckless Mind, 137–158. Eagleton has recently described Foucault as a “shamefaced libertarian”: see Eagleton, After Theory, 13–14. 76. Cited in Gordon,“Governmentality,” 5. 77. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 265–266. 78. Foucault,“Politics and Ethics,” 350, 351. 79. While somewhat overdrawn, this is the conclusion reached by Eagleton recently as well. “Both postmodernists and neo-liberals,” Eagleton writes (using the British term for rightliberals), “are suspicious of public norms, inherent values, given hierarchies, authoritative standards, consensual codes and traditional practices. It is just that neo-liberals admit that they reject all this in the name of the market. Radical postmodernists, by contrast, combine these aversions with a somewhat sheepish chariness of commercialism.” See Eagleton, After Theory, 29. 80. For reasons that will become clear, I prefer the Nietzschean context MacIntyre provides to situate this radical individualist ideology, but there are other interesting alternatives here, including what the historian Christopher Lasch has called the “culture of narcissism,” the philosopher Charles Taylor “the ethics of authenticity,” and the sociologist Robert Bellah “expressive individualism.” For a less theoretical discussion of the same general idea, see the analysis of “the culture of autonomy” in Gaylin and Jennings, The Perversion of Autonomy, 4–9. 81. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 113–114. 82. Ibid., 11–12, 23, 24, 25. 83. Ibid., 26, 26, 74. 84. Ibid., 114. 85. Robbins,“How to Be a Benefactor without Any Money,” 173–174. 86. Ibid., 191.

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Notes to Pages 86–88 Chapter Three

1. Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 262;Woolf, After the Deluge, 289–290.There is a long history of modern commentary on Mill that reads him primarily as the noninterventionist, libertarian author of On Liberty. This is the “traditionalist” interpretation, epitomized by F. A. Hayek’s reading of Mill in The Road to Serfdom: see the summary in Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, 4. Others who read Mill this way include Isaiah Berlin and C. L. Ten: see Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, 4n. 2. I note in passing here that my concern in this book will be with those British and American Victorians exclusively interested in both tasks: i.e., a political program of democracy and a moral program of perfectionism.Those invested in both I call Victorian liberals.There were Victorians interested in democracy but not perfectionism, of course, and there are many existing studies of these Victorians. There were also Victorians interested in perfectionism but not democracy, the most obvious ones being (and I simply list them here without evidence) Carlyle (in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1840), Ruskin (in Unto This Last, 1862), and Newman (in The Idea of a University, 1873). Here, though, we need more studies.While I noted in chapter one my differences with Andrew H. Miller’s definition of perfectionism (based as his is upon Stanley Cavell’s emotivist brand of “perfectionism”), Miller does provide I think an important first step in coming to terms with the depth and breadth of Victorian perfectionism: see Miller, “Reading Thoughts,” 89–93. 3. Stephen,“Liberalism,” 49, 50, 50–51.Throughout this chapter and chapter four, I will often find moral perfectionism in language—such as Stephen’s “a higher conception of the objects of national existence”—that other commentators have tended to treat more simply as evidence of the Victorian liberal commitment to “tradition.” While not disputing the importance of tradition to the Victorian liberal vision of what comprises perfection, it is the moral perfectionism often buried in such appeals to tradition that I believe to be the more important aspect of Victorian liberalism, at least for the theoretical purposes I have in mind here. For a brief summary of the other, more common approach to this material, see Stapleton, “Introduction,” 7–10. I admit, however, that Stephen in his later writings especially is a marginal case, sometimes evincing this dual commitment to moral excellence and democracy, but often times abandoning both for commitments to tradition qua tradition (and not as exemplifying moral excellence) and aristocracy (not democracy), as discussed later. 4. My admittedly Whiggish assessment of modern commentary on Mill is that the perfectionist liberal reading represents its proper and most recent culmination. Beginning in the 1960s, a rival Mill was proposed, one who advocated not libertarianism (as the “traditionalist” Mill was said to—see the note above) but its opposite: “moral progress” in sympathetic books like Robson, The Improvement of Mankind, ix; “moral totalitarianism” in critical ones like Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, 104. Subsequently followed a period of “revisionist” commentary that sought ways to reconcile the “two Mills”: for summaries, see Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, 4n; Morales, Perfect Equality, 22.The first such commentator, Himmelfarb, was content to wonder at the two Mills—the amoral libertarian and the moral authoritarian—in tension: Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, xi. Later commentators, however, made use of the two “languages” of early modern Anglo-American political history described by historians like J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon Wood—republicanism and liberalism—to interpret Mill as a republican to the extent he emphasized morality (that is, civic virtue) so as to preserve a state that, as a liberal, he imagined zealously protecting individual liberty.This is essentially to interpret Mill as a virtue liberal, and representative books and articles would include much of what was written about Mill’s political thought during the l980s and 1990s, including: Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (1984); Burrow, Whigs and Liberals (1985); Collini, Public Moralists (1991); Justman, The Hidden Text of Mill’s On Liberty (1991); Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism (1992); Biagini, “Liberalism and Direct Democracy” (1996); Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1999); and Goodlad,


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10. 11.

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Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003). Though with different terminology, Mill the perfectionist liberal (i.e., a liberal committed to the political realization of both an objective moral excellence and democracy) emerges in the more recent commentaries: see Capaldi,“John Stuart Mill’s Defense of Liberal Culture” (1999, which shows Mill’s commitment to the development of liberal culture based upon a philosophical anthropology); Gibbins, “J.S. Mill, Liberalism, and Progress” (1990, which explains Mill’s vision of the perfectible human self within a liberal state); Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, 225–234 (1999, which shows Mill’s moral ambitions for humankind to be significantly greater than those of the virtue liberals, or what he calls “communitarian liberals”); Kurer, John Stuart Mill (1991, which explicitly shows Mill’s perfectionism to be lost in the “two Mills” accounts); Ryan, “Mill,” 519–520, 523–524 (1998, which contrasts Mill’s perfectionism to the liberalism of Rawls); Skorupski, “Introduction,” 22–25 (1998, which describes in detail Mill’s “classical liberalism,” or what I am calling “perfectionist liberalism”); and Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, 130–133, 160–161 (2002, which assumes Mill’s perfectionism and references several of the above as doing the same).The narrative of Arnold commentary from chapter two could be reiterated in this light, too, though the “tension” between the two Arnolds (as described in Goodheart, Machann, and Said) has yet to coalesce into something approximating the virtue liberal reading, let alone the perfectionist liberal reading offered here. For Mill’s own assessment of Tocqueville’s influence upon his thinking about democracy, see Mill, CW, 1.199–201. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 3, 6. “Every thinker now perceives that the strongest and most durable influences in every western society lead in the direction of democracy,” John Morley wrote in his 1873 essay “Mr. Mill’s Doctrine of Liberty,” “and tend with more or less rapidity to throw the control of social organization into the hands of numerical majorities.” See Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 117. Stephen’s assurance on this score is evident in the 1862 essay “Liberalism,” cited above, but see also the much more qualified appreciation of democracy’s inevitability in the 1873 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Stephen, Liberty, 212. Both of these assessments are a world apart from nonliberal considerations of the same, such as Thomas Carlyle’s dark assessment of democracy’s rise since the events of 1848 in the first number of Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). Mill, CW, 18.50–51. Arnold, CPW, 2.71, 2.9, 2.8. Arnold would allude to the same passage of Tocqueville’s in a fascinating correspondence with the MP Richard Cobden in early 1864, mainly to argue that, as the English aristocracy makes the lower class miserable, the only practical solution is to reform the middle class first to prepare it for a more just rule. See Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 2.273. For another example of Arnold’s conviction that the transition from aristocracy to democracy was irreversible, see Arnold, Letters, 1.452, his May 14, 1859 letter from France to his wife about the degree to which “[t]he Revolution has cleared out the feudal ages from the minds of the country people to an extent incredible to us.” See also Arnold, Letters, 1.447, the May 9 letter to his mother about the same. Mill, CW, 13.712. Arnold, CPW, 5.142; Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1.456; Arnold, CPW, 1.81–82. Because of aristocracy’s injustice and its allergy to philosophy, Mill and Arnold were both absolutely opposed to the neo-feudalism of Carlyle, Ruskin, and others. Mill’s objections here are well known, but Arnold has too often been lumped in with the neo-feudalists.The counterevidence is legion, though; for an early and rarely cited example, see Arnold, Letters, 1.503–07, an 1859 letter to The Times against the use of Gothic architecture in modern State buildings. Because, as Arnold suggests, the phrase “ideas of 1789” was commonly used by Victorian liberals to quickly designate their philosophy, I will often use it here the same way. This is a simplification, of course, and for every Walter Bagehot, who deploys the phrase offhandedly like Arnold to signal his liberal commitments, there is a Lord Acton, who investigates much more closely how the ideas of 1789 have operated in national and international affairs

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15. 16.

17.

18. 19.


ever since: see Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 22; Acton, “Nationality,” 76. If James Fitzjames Stephen seemed to signal his allegiance to the liberal coordination of democracy and the ideas of 1789 in “Liberalism” in 1862, he made it clear eleven years later how distant his idea of “moral excellence” was from those ideas of 1789 in his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, words that are the “creed” of a new “religion.”“I do not believe it,” he wrote in the opening pages.“I am not the advocate of Slavery, Caste, and Hatred,” he wrote, but “these words [from 1789] are ill-adapted to be the creed of a religion, [for] the things which they denote are not ends in themselves, and that when used collectively the words do not typify, however vaguely, any state of society which a reasonable man ought to regard with enthusiasm or self-devotion.” See Stephen, Liberty, 52–53. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 7. Arnold, CPW, 2.15, 2.15–16. Mill, CW, 19.385, 387, 390, 390–391.Though I really shouldn’t be, given the conclusion of my study of the subject in chapter two, I confess to being astounded by those modern critics who have read Mill as an antistatist, an operation which usually requires reading certain sentences from Principles of Political Economy completely out of context, and ignoring long passages from the same book that make Mill’s commitment to an interventionist state perfectly clear. Mill was at pains to position himself between English antistatists and Continental centralizers in Principles: see Mill, CW, 3.799, 3.936–945, as well as (in the Autobiography) CW, 1.201–203. For the passage most often cited to show Mill’s supposed commitment to laissez faire, and a summary of what Mill really meant, see Mill, CW, 3.944–945; Riley, “Introduction,” viii–xiii. Perhaps the first great misreading of Mill in this regard is Stephen in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a book that, in its contention that Mill was unwilling to consider any kind of coercion legitimate, is best described as a brilliant exercise in consistently missing the point. Mill’s statism will become clear in the policies of his that are described in this chapter and the next. Mill, CW, 8.847. Ibid., 8.898; Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 103; 104. In a 1906 appreciation of Mill, “A Great Teacher,” Morley found the origins of this union in Mill’s Logic, which Morley described then as “an elaborate attempt to perform the practical task of dislodging intuitive philosophy, as a step towards sounder thinking about society and institutions; as a step, in other words, toward Liberalism”: see Morley, Oracles on Man and Government, 13. For a summary of Morley’s life-long appreciation of Mill’s union of science and moral hope, see Alexander, John Morley, 23. For his part, Mill traced his own commitment to perfectionist education (meaning the careful control of associations) to his father, James Mill, whose “fundamental doctrine was the formation of all human character by circumstances,” Mill recalled in his Autobiography,“through the universal Principle of Association, and the consequent unlimited possibility of improving the moral intellectual condition of mankind by education.” See Mill, CW, 1.109–110. Cited by Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 101; Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 118. Morley completes the critique, in the 1873 “Mr. Mill’s Doctrine of Liberty,” this way:“How [this strong man, king, hero, dictator] was to be found, neither the master [that is, Carlyle] nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell us. The scream of this whole school is a mockery.” For a somewhat cooler assessment of Ruskin’s and Carlyle’s role in the debates of the1860s, see Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 103–104. Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 101–102. As he himself describes, Mill’s opposition to the “programme of manhood suffrage” was mistaken by conservatives as akin to theirs, even though Mill proposed franchise limitations based upon education, not property: see Mill, CW, 1.278, 1.288, 1.261–262.Though he does not mention Mill by name, A. C. Dicey criticizes all liberals for their “transcendentalism”—i.e., their departure from utilitarian empiricism—in devising various ways to limit the franchise: see, Dicey, “The Balance of the Classes,” 97–110. See also Smith’s summary of the franchise debate between Dicey and some of the other authors of Essays on Reform (1867) and Mill: Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 107–113. Stephen’s most strenuous (though entirely unpersuasive) case against Mill’s progressive politics (particularly his commitments to equality and fraternity) as a


20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

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Rousseau-like lapse from empiricism into a “metaphysics of rights” are to be found in the chapters “Equality” and “Fraternity” in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Stephen, Liberty, 179–261. See also Smith’s summary of Stephen’s charges against Mill: Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 164. As Collini notes, Morley was almost alone among Mill’s former disciples in defending Mill’s philosophical consistency: see Collini, Public Moralists, 177–178. Morley strongly supported Mill’s education-based limitation on the franchise, famously complimenting On Liberty as “one of the most aristocratic books ever written (I do not mean British aristocratic)” (Morley, NineteenthCentury Essays, 125): see also Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 192. However, Morley, too, understood Mill to have seriously compromised his utilitarian credentials in his later work, particularly Mill’s explorations of socialism and theism. See respectively Morley, Oracles on Man and Government, 12 and Alexander, John Morley, 25; Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 166–169, 204. Mill always believed himself to be on the side of empiricism against “transcendentalism” or intuitionism; for his description of this philosophical contest as the “foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion in an age of progress,” see Mill, CW, 1.269–270. Mill describes his changing understanding of two of the principal means (political economy, democracy) to achieving moral perfection in his Autobiography: from capitalism to socialism in the case of one, and from direct to indirect democracy in the case of the other. See Mill, CW, 1.199. Ibid., 10.206, 207, 207. Riley,“Introduction,” vii–xii. Mill, CW, 1.147. Ibid., 10.229, 231. As already noted, Stephen dismissed all of Mill’s rereading of human nature as rank metaphysics masquerading as empiricism, not unlike John Henry Newman in his Grammar of Assent (1870): “[t]here are in these days many speculations by very able men, . . . which can all be resolved into attempts to increase the bulk and weight of evidence by heating it with love.” See Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 265. Stephen, incidentally, stuck carefully to the portrait of human nature recommended by the old radicalism, but then explicitly introduced into the formula a Calvinist metaphysics because he worried that self-interest alone would eventually unravel any political regime. See 232–261. At this point, Stephen’s criticism of Mill seems to waver between chastising Mill for abandoning a strict empiricism and (because Stephen himself explicitly abandons the same) arguing the practical merits of upholding a vengeful God as against Mill’s humanist religion. As I argue in the conclusion, Mill himself explicitly considered the liberal possibilities of positing a loving but fallible “God” in his posthumously published writings on religion but ultimately contended that empiricism does square with humanism, a position I take as well and recommend as representative of Victorian liberalism’s successful union of political and moral programs.Whether I, like Newman, am guilty of heating evidence with love I leave to my readers to determine. Similarly impressed by Mill’s ability to resist the transcendental seduction, Morley once wrote that “the wonder” is that Mill’s reaction against his father’s education “was not of the most violent kind” and “did not land him in some of the extreme forms of transcendentalism”: see Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 141. Stephen, incidentally, abandoned his pragmatic Calvinism in his later years and returned to the agnostic position he once so viciously mocked in Mill: see Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 212–214. Mill, CW, 3.754; 1.175; 3.754; 3.756. On socialism as the ultimate economic program for Mill, see in the Principles, CW, 3.775–776, 3.791–792, 3.793–794, the “chapters on socialism,” CW, 5.703–753, and in the Autobiography, CW, 1.239. I note here again the interesting and still to be explored convergence of Mill and Marx as nineteenth-century perfectionists. Mill, CW, 10.216, 216, 217. Ibid., 1.187; 1.173. Following the lead of Mill’s two famous essays, commentary on Mill’s intellectual origins still tends to overemphasize Bentham and his circle on the one hand and Coleridge and the other Romantics on the other, to the exclusion of reading Mill (and those otherVictorian liberals, like Arnold, also influenced by the French Enlightenment) as a nineteenthcentury continuation of the perfectionism of the Enlightenment. On the influence of

176

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.


Condorcet, specifically, on Mill and Morley, see Mill, CW, 1.115; Morley, Oracles on Man and Government, 25; and Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 160. Mill understood his father to be “the last of the eighteenth century” but Mill himself seems much more at ease with that tradition than the transcendentalism of the Germans and Carlyle: see Mill, CW, 1.213, 1.233. Morley shared Mill’s understanding of Victorian liberalism as a scientific endeavor, indebted to Condorcet and Turgot: see Alexander, John Morley, 22, 26–33, Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 43. I consider some of Arnold’s Enlightenment (and Romantic) perfectionist predecessors in chapter four. Mill, CW, 19.390–392. Ibid., 19.435, 436. Ibid., 18.223. Another elegant defense of individual liberty as something to be cultivated as a good unto itself can be found in Mill’s Principles of Political Economy and Autobiography: see CW, 3.942–944, and (as cited above) CW, 1.173. Morley is cited in Alexander, John Morley, 24. Mill, CW, 18.260–261; Stephen, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, 83; Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 127, 129. For Bagehot’s description of this ideal type of “animated moderation,” see Physics and Politics, 145–147. Regarding Mill’s view of diversity, one might challenge my claim here by pointing to that one moment in the Autobiography where Mill confesses to having once been “seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations”: see Mill, CW, 1.149. Incidentally, Mill’s two-sided understanding of liberty in On Liberty was the major “problem” that led to the two Mill thesis. For statements of the problem, see Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, 255; Berlin “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” 190; and Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, 225–234. For other perfectionist readings demonstrating more thoroughly than I how the instrumental and intrinsic defenses of liberty complement one another, see Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, 130–133; Skorupski,“Introduction,” 5. Mill, CW, 19.468, 469, 469. Ibid., 1.87. Morley concluded his review of the Autobiography with this passage as most suggestive of the essence of Mill’s character: see Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 163.Though he did not agree that the exercise of the franchise would have these beneficial effects, Stephen did agree with Mill that the trials of professional experience were an important political and social education, as he discussed in his short 1859 essay, “Doing Good.” See Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 301: “[i]n any calling of this permanent kind there is, and always must be, endless instruction.” Mill, CW, 19.435, 494. As Mill notes, the latter citation originated in the 1859 pamphlet, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform. Jury duty is recommended for the same reason. See Mill, CW, 19.412: it “must make them . . . very different beings, in range of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a counter.” Hill, Democratic Theory and Local Government, 48. Ibid., 23. See Mill’s 1835 article on the Municipal Corporation Reform: CW, 24.769–774. Incidentally, the contention that local and state government work in concert is also at the heart of the only recent analyses of Victorian municipalism that I could find, scholars of Foucault’s governmentality, who of course take a far darker view of the consequences of this coordination than either Mill or Tocqueville. For a summary of this scholarship and an example of municipalism as an effort “to fashion cities into spaces within which civil conduct could be both secured and publicly displayed,” see Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable,” 1. As I argued in chapter two, however, after reading these analyses of the disciplinary society, one is left wondering what, short of anarchy, the alternative might be. Mill describes the value of local government in a similar way in Principles, where he also makes the point, first developed by Condorcet, that, mathematically speaking, the common good will be better served by allowing them to vote: Mill, CW, 3.940–942;Wolff, Introduction to Political Philosophy, 82. Mill, CW, 18.58. Ibid., 18.60.


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39. Ibid., 18.63. 40. Ibid., 18.168, 18.169, 5.457. See also 5.432–437 for Mill’s 1851 letter to the Metropolitan Sanitary Association recommending municipal control, with central government oversight, of the water supply, and 29.1.162–165, 29.1.273–276, 29.2.437–542 for Mill’s work between 1866 and 1868 on the Select Committee on Metropolitan Local Government while an MP. 41. Ibid., 19.535, 536; Biagini,“Liberalism and Direct Democracy,” 23. 42. Trollope, A History of the Commonwealth of Florence . . . , 1.2. 43. Ibid., 1.2–3. 44. Ibid., 1.4. 45. Ibid., 4.100–101. 46. Ibid., 3.443. 47. Ibid., 3.445. 48. Ibid., 3.452–453. 49. Arnold, CPW, 9.7. 50. Ibid., 1.66–67. 51. Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 2.430, 2,431. 52. Arnold, CPW, 4.306. 53. Ibid., 4.307n. 54. Ibid., 9.12.Though without stating its educational value, Arnold recommends expanding local government in Ireland in the 1885 “A Word More About America”: see Arnold, CPW, 10. 210–211. Arnold’s personal investment in municipalism is suggested, though rather mysteriously, by his serving in the Westminster Rifle Volunteers in 1859 during a crisis in British relations with France: see Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1 507–508. 55. Arnold, CPW, 1.67. 56. Mill, CW, 11. 273, 11.313. 57. Ibid., 11.315–316, 11.273. 58. Ibid., 11.313. 59. Ibid., 11.324. 60. Ibid., 11.324. 61. Ibid., 19.411, 412. 62. Ibid., 11.319. 63. Biagini,“Liberalism and Direct Democracy,” 33. 64. Arnold, CPW, 2.314. 65. Ibid., 5.108. 66. Ibid., 5.145. 67. Ibid., 5.146. 68. Ibid., 5.224. 69. The one clear answer that Arnold does give in one place in Culture and Anarchy is statesupported culture:“[the best self ] is the very self which culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to develop in us; at the expense of our old untransformed self, taking pleasure only in doing what it likes or is used to do”: see Arnold, CPW, 5.134–135. I examine culture, or what I also call the didactic pedagogy of the state, in chapter four. 70. Ibid., 5.96, 5.201. 71. Mill, CW, 18.260, 231;Arnold, CPW, 5.233. 72. Mill, CW, 18.219–223. 73. Ibid., 19.454–456, 474–475. 74. Thoreau, Reform Papers, 66, 66–67, 69–70. 75. Ibid., 72, 73. 76. Ibid., 65. 77. Ibid., 104. 78. Ibid., 103. 79. Ibid., 89–90.

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80. See also the 1876 review of Curtius’s History of Greece and the 1882 “A Word About America”: Arnold, CPW, 5.291–292, 10.6–7. 81. Arnold, CPW, 10.145, 10.144, 10.147, 10.148. 82. Rapple,“Matthew Arnold and the Role of the State,” 174, 175. 83. Arnold, CPW, 10.149. 84. Ibid., 10.150. 85. Ibid., 10.152. 86. In St. Paul and Protestantism, Arnold wrote that Paul had “a preponderantly mystic side, and nothing is so natural to the mystic as in rich single words, such as faith, light, love, to sum up and take for granted, without specifically enumerating them, all good moral principles and habits . . .”: see Arnold, CPW, 6.24. In “Numbers,” Arnold’s own “rich single word,” “the remnant,” seems indeed to have mystified audiences. One of his staple lectures when touring America, Arnold was correctly perceived to be criticizing majoritarian democracy but incorrectly perceived to be advocating an aristocracy. See Long,“Matthew Arnold Visits Chicago,” 34–45. 87. There are in fact earlier indications of equality’s importance to Arnold. See, e.g., Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1.86–87, a March 1, 1848 letter to his close friend Arthur Hugh Clough:“[i]f the rule is—everyone must get all he can—the capitalist understands by fair profits such as will enable him to live like a colossal Nob: & Lancashire artisans knowing if they will not let him make these,Yorkshire artisans will. . . . But an apostolic capitalist willing to live as an artisan may surely divide profits on a scale undreamed of Capitalisto nobefacturo. And in a country all whose capitalists were apostolic, the confusion a solitary apostle would make, could not exist.” See also Arnold, The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, 37, an entry in 1866:“ ‘The feeling between classes’ but the distinction of classes should die away and we should be one people.” 88. Arnold, CPW, 5.91. 89. Ibid., 5.94.The emphases are Arnold’s.While Arnold implies in Culture and Anarchy that religion, unlike culture, fails to promote equality, in his 1877 Preface to Last Essays on Church and Religion Arnold summarizes the “natural truth” of the Christian idea of charity to be “solidarity.”While we are every day tempted to conclude that “every man for himself [is] the rule of happiness,” “at least it turns out as a matter of experience . . . that the only real happiness is in a kind of impersonal higher life, where the happiness of others counts with a man as essential to his own,” and that “[he] that loves his life does really turn out to lose it” as promised in the New Testament: see Arnold, CPW, 8.156–157; John 12:25. Compare Mill, CW, 1.145–147, in his Autobiography: “Those only are happy . . . who have their minds fixed on some objects other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind even in some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.” 90. Arnold, CPW, 5.215;Arnold, The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, 38. 91. Arnold, CPW, 5.213. 92. Ibid., 5.95, 5.216. 93. Ibid., 9.7; 9.7–12. 94. Ibid., 8.279. 95. Ibid., 8.286. 96. Ibid., 8.288, 8.289, 8.286–287.The unrivaled virtues of the French people were for Arnold the real measure of equality as a social policy; references to such are found throughout his political writings in the 1860s, but see a series of letters regarding “this wide & deepspread intelligence” to Clough, Arnold’s mother, and Arnold’s sister K in early March 1848: Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1.89, 88–97. Many Victorian liberals came to a similar conclusion, including George Eliot. Writing to a friend in 1848 of the events in France, Eliot admits that she has “no hope of good from any imitative movement at home,” for, while “[i]n France the mind of the people is highly electrified—they are full of ideas on social subjects,”“[h]ere [there is only] selfish radicalism and unsatisfied brute sensuality,” a theme elaborated upon in the infamous “Address to Working Men” from Felix Holt (1866), of course. See Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, 1.254.

Notes to Pages 117–124 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

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Arnold, CPW, 8.290, 8.304. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 199, 204. Ibid., 267, 185, 268–277. Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 23. In a note at the beginning of the chapter, I listed some of the many commentators who read Mill this way and suggested that the “tensions” in Arnold’s thought might also be reconciled through this kind of reading.

Chapter Four 1. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 288, 289. 2. Black, “Revisionist Liberalism and the Decline of Culture,” 247, 255. Perfectionist liberals like Joseph Raz are not convinced that culture will survive without a more explicit recognition of culture’s perfectionist purpose: “[s]upporting valuable forms of life is a social rather than an individual matter [and] perfectionist ideals require public action for their viability. Antiperfectionism in practice would lead not merely to a political stand-off from support for valuable conceptions of the good. It would undermine the chances of survival of many cherished aspects of our culture.” See Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 162. 3. Arnold, CPW, 5.275, 5.274. 4. Ibid., 5.274. 5. Ibid., 5.2776–2777, 5.278. 6. Stephen, “Liberalism,” 64. And, of course, see also Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 119. K. J. M. Smith has noted that both Arnold and Stephen, for all their mutual antagonism toward one another, had a number of similarities, including “favour[ing] a strong meritocracy to provide firm enlightened leadership”: see Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 106. As will become clear, I am very hesitant to find similarities between Stephen and Arnold beyond this, given Arnold’s long (and wrong) association with the kind of excessively coercive state championed by Stephen especially in Liberty, a state so coercive and so indifferent to individual liberties that I think Stephen at times drifts out of Victorian liberal theory and into the neo-feudalism of Carlyle.The same cannot be said of Arnold, though of course many have said exactly that. 7. Cited in Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth, 177–178. 8. Arnold, CPW, 5.281. 9. Of the many virtue liberal commentators who read Mill this way, see Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 137:“throughout his writings Mill saw that political society based on freedom and equality could not preserve itself unless it had available effective means for the cultivation of certain necessary virtues.” 10. Mill, CW, 22.244, 18.86, 18.195n. 11. Ibid., 10.133. Given my emphasis in chapter three upon Mill’s consistent empiricism, I should note in passing that Mill cites this exact same material from the “Coleridge” essay in Book VI of the Logic, presenting it there as empirical data about the human need for things of permanence, rather a political intuition of his own (which is closer to how Coleridge himself presents it). See Mill, CW, 8.921–924. I emphasized in chapter three Mill’s consistency on this score. Despite the importance of this debate between empiricism and intuitionism to Mill and Arnold (evidence of that to come), in the conclusion I make use of the early work of Martha Nussbaum, as well as examples from both Mill and Arnold, to argue that both the empirical and intuitive approaches to ascertaining human nature and subsequently formulating moral perfection can be done without recourse to metaphysics, thus negating the main reason Mill and the utilitarians feared the Intuitionists: their readiness to give metaphysical sanction to the merest passing fancies, dressing whims up as universal truths. 12. Mill, CW, 10.133–134.

180 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.


Arnold, CPW, 5.277. Mill, CW, 10.134. Ibid., 18.310; 10.134; 18.260; 1.241.The emphasis in the citation from On Liberty is mine. Arnold, CPW, 2.15–16.The emphasis is mine. Ibid., 5.162.The emphasis is Arnold’s. Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 2.311. Of the six quotes Arnold included in his Note-Books from Curtius’s History of Greece is “Solon knew that he himself, wishing to educate truly the citizen of the state, could no more than the teacher who aims at the highest end of education look forward to a speedy result corresponding to his efforts”: see Arnold, The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, 84. Fuller,“These Sad But Glorious Day,” 322–323. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 568. Thoreau, Walden, 327. I explore the perfectionism of this passage and Thoreau’s political theory in general in Malachuk,“Transcendentalism, Perfectionism, and Walden,” 283–303. I draw attention once more to the parallel between Victorian liberals and Marx, who also wrote of the withering away of the state; both theories were ultimately interested with human perfection, not state preservation. This statement must be qualified by exempting the posthumously published Three Essays on Religion, particularly “Theism” which makes the case for God as a kind of didactic pedagogy. I examine this essay’s contemporary significance in the conclusion. Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1.210, 1.213–216, 2.202. I examine these didactic strategies in more detail as exemplifying Emerson’s early debt to the republican tradition: see Malachuk,“The Republican Philosophy of Emerson’s Early Lectures,” 404–428. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 492. Ibid., 1016, 1019. Ibid., 1018. Ibid., 1020. Ibid., 1020–1021, 1021. Arnold, CPW, 8.288. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 1024. Ibid., 1028. Ibid., 1029. Ibid., 1033–1034. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth-Century, 357. Cited in Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth, 181–184. Ibid., 313. Fuller, The Essential Margaret Fuller, 332, 333. Ibid., 333–334. Fuller,“These Sad But Glorious Days,” 156. Ibid., 156–157, 157, 159. Ibid., 278. Thoreau, Reform Papers, 11, 16. Ibid., 17. Serving the public good was a common theme in Thoreau’s earliest writings. See also Thoreau, Early Essays and Miscellanies, 7 for a December 20, 1834 essay: e.g.,“[s]mall, very small, is the number of those who labour for the public good. . . . He is worthy of all praise: his is indeed true greatness . . . nor is he troubled with his strings of conscience.” Thoreau, Walden, 109. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 115–122.

Notes to Pages 137–144 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

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Thoreau, Reform Papers, 174–175. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 151. Thoreau wonderfully describes that civic solitude in the chapter “Solitude”: Walden, 129–139. It was in 1859 that Arnold published “England and the Italian Question,” his first publication about an explicitly political topic. In chapter three, I discussed this essay in relation to Arnold’s commitments to the “ideas of 1789” and to municipalism. Remarking on the herd mentality of the English “of the last 100 years” and Martineau’s ability to speak to it, Arnold wrote his mother that “I cannot but praise a person whose one effort seems to have been to deal perfectly honestly and sincerely with herself—although for her speculations into which this effort has led her I have not the slightest sympathy”: see Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1.315. Ibid., 2.12–13. Ibid., 2.14–15. Ibid., 2.260, 2.266, 2.238. See Arnold, CPW, 2.18 and 2.299, and 2.25–26 and 2.227–229. Ibid., 5.526. R. H. Super, the editor of the 1965 volume of Culture and Anarchy for the Collected Prose Works, simply includes this passage with all the others that Arnold removed when revising the individual Cornhill essays into the 1869 book. In a sign of our times, Samuel Lipman, the editor of the 1994 Yale Edition of Culture and Anarchy and vigorously antistatist right-liberal, follows the same (standard) editorial practice as Super except for this one passage, which he restores into the main text: see Lipman,“Culture and Anarchy:A Publishing History,” xvi. Arnold, CPW, 2.19. Ibid., 2.29. Carroll, The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold, 78. Arnold, CPW, 2.313, 2.314. As with my cursory review of Mill’s Enlightenment predecessors, what I offer here is very modest, and mostly to emphasize again (as I did in the introduction and in chapter three) the need for a more thorough examination of Victorian liberalism’s continuities with the perfectionist aspects of the Enlightenment as well as the Romantics. Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 2.281. T. Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History . . . , 34. Ibid., 64, 64, 65. Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 52. T. Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History . . . , 67, 69, 69.Thomas Arnold’s influence on other Victorian liberals deserves more investigation, too. Though with some admiration, Bagehot declares Arnold’s union of Church and State to be “excellent for the old world from which it was learnt” but “wrong for the modern age to which it was applied.” Bagehot connects Arnold’s proposals to other ancient political pursuits of civic obedience and concludes that these are now irrelevant to modern politics, guided as these new politics are by “the principles of 1789” (as discussed in chapter three).The principles of 1789 are “fitted only to the new world in which society has gone through its early task [of establishing obedience],” Bagehot writes, “when the inherited organization is already confirmed and fixed; when the soft minds and strong passions of youthful nations are fixed and guided by hard transmitted instincts.” See Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 19, 22.While Matthew Arnold agreed that modern states are committed to the realization of the ideas of 1789, he clearly disagreed with Bagehot that modern states could take for granted political unity: this is, in part, the purpose of the didactic pedagogy of culture. Though he does not cite Thomas Arnold in his major book, much of what James Fitzjames Stephen writes in defense of the union of Church and State—to achieve not only stability but also (in a rare moment for Stephen in this book) human perfection—seems indebted to the elder Arnold’s line of thought at least: see Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 86–96. T. Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History . . . , 83.

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73. Cited by apRoberts, Arnold and God, 60. 74. Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 56. 75. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, 52. I discuss Coleridge’s influence upon Victorian liberalism in more detail in Malachuk,“Coleridge’s Republicanism and the Aphorism in Aids to Reflection,” 397–417 and Malachuk,“Labor, Leisure, and the Yeoman in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s 1790s Writings.” 76. Critics agree that Coleridge’s influence on Matthew Arnold was, through the influence of his father, tremendous: see apRoberts, Arnold and God, 57–58, and Collini, Arnold, 103.There is no evidence, however, that Coleridge’s clerisy directly influenced Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture. While appreciating Coleridge’s clerisy as “a beautiful theory,” Arnold in the 1863 “The Bishop and the Philosopher” (like Emerson in the 1856 English Traits) expresses some skepticism that such can be installed within the Church of England: see Arnold, CPW, 3.51–52; Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 901–902. I examine Coleridge’s morally ambitious clerisy as a function of his republicanism in Malachuk, “Coleridge’s Republicanism and the Aphorism in Aids to Reflection,” 397–417. 77. Cited by T. Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History . . . , 78n. 78. Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 55; Collini, Arnold, 91. 79. Arnold, CPW, 2.300. 80. Ibid., 2.26, 5.425. 81. Other sources for Arnold’s perfectionism would be his Christian upbringing of course and also, intriguingly, his poetry. See Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1.402, his September 6, 1858 letter to sister K about the challenge of writing Merope: “People do not understand what a temptation there is, if you cannot bear anything not very good, to transfer your operations to a region where form is everything: perfection of a certain kind may there be attained or at least approached without knocking yourself to pieces.” 82. apRoberts, Arnold and God, 42, 43. 83. Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, 16. 84. Arnold, CPW, 5.161. 85. Bachem, “Arnold’s and Renan’s Views of Perfection,” 229, 230. As Bachem notes, besides his essay on “Renan” in Essays in Criticism, Third Series, Arnold mentioned Renan in twelve different essays or books and one hundred and twelve times in his Note-books. 86. Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1 515–516. 87. Arnold, CPW, 5.161–162.The emphasis is Arnold’s. 88. Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, 258;Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 254. 89. Arnold, CPW, 5.160–162. 90. Ibid., 5.136, 5.191. 91. Ibid., 5.234, 5.88, 5.123–124. 92. Ibid., 5.124–134. 93. Ibid., 5.221. 94. Hopkinson,“Matthew Arnold’s School Inspections,” 100. 95. Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 2.243–244. 96. Arnold, CPW, 5.253–255. 97. Ibid., 5.234, 5.237. 98. Collini, Arnold, 110.

Conclusion 1. Eagleton has recently concluded that the irrationalism of modernism and postmodernism, as against “top-heavy Victorian rationalism,” has dangerously enfeebled the left. See Eagleton, After Theory, 70–73. I confess to not following all of Eagleton’s arguments in this book, so I am reluctant


2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

183

here to note anything beyond our shared belief that the left’s best hope today against the forces of fundamentalism and capitalism lies in a return to rational foundations, not in a continuation of the irrationalism and antifoundationalism that have characterized so much of not the last decades but the last century of left thought. Ignatieff, Human Rights, 54. Here also is Thomas W. Lacqueur’s summary of Ignatieff ’s argument in that book: “Human rights activism has been insatiable in its demands and insatiably disappointed because it fails to define the limits of its reach.With a horizonless view of the potential of the human rights movement and of the efficacy of military and other forms of intervention, we in the West have put the legitimacy of the rights standard itself into question and in some situations have even made bad situations worse.” See Lacqueur, “The Moral Imagination and Human Rights,” 130. Ignatieff ’s and Lacquer’s “slippery slope” arguments against metaphysical defenses of human rights is reminiscent of Berlin’s argument against “positive liberty,” which I examined in chapter one. Mill, CW, 10.488; Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, 167. Mill’s immediate heirs, the New Liberals like T. H. Green, arguably adopted the strategy recommended in “Theism,” using “immanentist theologies” to sustain their moral idealism and social reformism. Rather than read the New Liberals as forging a new secular religion as a response to their own loss of faith, a reading that harkens back to Beatrice Webb’s formulation that for the Victorian “the impulse of self-subordinating service was transferred, consciously and overtly, from God to man,” Mark Bevir argues that the New Liberals at least often rationally adopted immanentist theologies to support their moral program, widely recognized, incidentally, as a perfectionist one. See Bevir,“Welfarism, Socialism, and Religion,” 639–661.Webb’s statement is cited by Collini, Public Moralists, 84. Ignatieff cites Wiesel’s claim as evidence of human rights “idolatry”: Ignatieff, Human Rights, 53. Arnold, CPW, 5.164, 5.165. Mill, CW, 18.263. For an explanation of how character’s two definitions in the OED at the time (an evaluative one and a descriptive one) tended to be blurred together in everyday usage, see Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” 33–37. Mill, CW, 18.256, 265, 257. Skorupski,“Introduction,” 5. Nussbaum,“Human Functioning and Social Justice,” 206. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 207–208. Nussbaum,“Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities,” 118. Ibid., 118–119. In the first chapter, I explained how Nussbaum, like Rawls, handles these “fixed points” as provisional, signaling her shift to a liberalism that abides by the account of the fiction of reason. I have chosen to overlook that significant difference here, and use her phrase “fixed points” without reference to the crucial adjective “provisional.” Nussbaum,“Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities,” 120. Nussbaum,“Human Functioning and Social Justice,” 212–213. I focus only on Mill and Arnold here, for it may indeed be that the American Transcendentalists offered a moral perfectionism more often externally than internally sanctioned (as “transcendentalism” itself suggests), though I believe this deserves more unbiased attention than it has thus far received. In any case, I make the pragmatic argument that a moral perfectionism now and then sanctioned by transcendentalism is still more beneficial and less dangerous than a moral relativism that is strictly detranscendental: see Malachuk,“Transcendentalism, Perfectionism, and Walden,” 297–298. As already discussed in chapter three, Mill’s view of intuitions was quite negative. As he wrote in the Autobiography,“[t]he notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions”: see CW, 1.233.

184


20. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, 86–95. I examine Mill’s debt to the republican tradition as late as his public speeches of the 1860s and 1870s in Malachuk,“John Stuart Mill’s Platform Populism, the Republican Tradition, and Victorian Liberalism,” 110–121. 21. Mill, CW, 18.136, 18.140–141. 22. Arnold, CPW, 3.283. 23. Carroll, The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold, 62. 24. Arnold, CPW, 5.97, 5.165. See also his reiteration of culture’s role in the 1873 Preface to Literature and Dogma:Arnold, CPW, 6.151–162. 25. Ibid., 1.24. 26. Ibid., 3.109, 3.110. 27. Ibid., 3.535–536.

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INDEX

academe, skepticism in 2–4, 11–12, 25–27, 32, 42, 152–53, 155; disciplinarity in 8–9; paranoia in 76; see also political theory, postmodernism, Victorian studies account of the fact of pluralism, see pluralism account of the fiction of reason, see reason Acton, Lord 173–174n aestheticism 41–42, 99; see also pluralism aliens, see minorities America, see United States of America American Transcendentalists 6, 133, 165–66n, 183n; see also Emerson, Fuller, metaphysics,Thoreau, transcendentalism anarchy 56, 67, 105, 111, 141, 171n, 179n ancients, the, summary of argument concerning 6; perfectionism of explained by Rawls 20, 166n; non-mechanization of hailed by Leavis 62; municipalism of suspected by Trollope but celebrated by Arnold and Mill 104–109; saving remnant of critiqued by Arnold 113–114; equality of celebrated by Arnold 117; culture preservation of explained by Arnold and Mill 121–125; see also Aristotle, Greeks, Pericles, Plato, republicanism

Anderson,Amanda, and Victorian objectivity 44–46; see also Victorian studies Anger, Suzy and Victorian objectivity 44–46; see also Victorian studies anti-perfectionism, concerned with coercion rather than objectivism 33–34, 37–38, 73; see also neutrality, political program antistatism, summary of argument concerning 1, 4–5, 47–50, 71–72, 86–87, 162n, 163n, 165n; anti-perfectionism and 33–34; right-liberals and in the Victorian values debate 50–55, 56–57; left-liberals and in the modern commentary on Arnold 57–71; methodological individualism and 71–74; non-liberals and 74–80, 167n, 171n; emotivism and 80–83; contemporary Victorian studies and 83–85; instrumental statism of Victorian liberals versus 126–127, 174n, 181n; didactic pedagogy and 138; see also state aristocracy, superiority of democracy to for Victorian liberals 88–90, 107, 113; temporary role of for Victorian liberals 122, 126, 140–41, 173n; perfection of self requires 146, 175n;Victorian sages and illiberal versions of 148, 172n, 178n Aristotle, as communitarian 77; as perfectionist 166n

Index Arnold, Matthew, summary of argument concerning 5–8, 48; right-liberals and 55–57; left-liberals and 57–58; history of modern commentary on 58–71, 169n, 170n, 173n; exemplifies Victorian liberalism in commitment to democracy and perfectionism 88–91, 173n; commitment of to experiential pedagogy in: municipalism 105–109, 177n; evoking the best self 109–110, 177n; minorities 110–111, 113–115, 178n; equality 115–117, 178n; perfectionist liberalism not virtue liberalism of 118–119, 178n; culture of and state preservation 121–125, 180n; state only an instrument for 125–126; uniqueness of in commitment to didactic pedagogy 137–138; use of rhetoric by to promote didactic pedagogy 138–140, 181n; negative arguments of for didactic pedagogy 140–142, 181n; development of culture as pedagogy by 142–143; sources of culture as pedagogy for 143–147, 182n; culture of 147–150; essentialist perfectionism of 155–156, 159–161, 179n; France and 178n; Stephen and 179n; Bagehot and 181n Arnold, Matthew, major writings of, “England and the Italian Question” (1859) 89, 105, 181n; Introduction to Popular Education in France (1861) 88–89, 90, 126, 135–36, 141–42, 145; A French Eton (1863–64) 108, 126, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147; Culture and Anarchy (1869) 56, 59, 62, 66, 68, 71, 89–90, 109–110, 113, 115–116, 126, 141, 146, 147, 148, 150, 156, 159, 177n, 178n, 181n Arnold,Thomas, authoritarianism of 141–142; perfectionist state of 143–145, 181n association, see experience Athens, see ancients

195

authoritarianism, see T. S. Eliot, fascism, feudalism, libertarian-authoritarian axis, Stephen,Victorian sages,Woolf autonomy, in comprehensive liberal theory 14–17, 37; in political liberal theory 27–32, 39, 42, 57; in Nietzsche’s theory 81, 171n Bagehot,Walter 99, 173–174n, 176n, 181n Baldick, Chris, on Arnold 70, 170n; as antistatist 74–75 balkanization, in communitarian theory 16, 19–20, 21–22, 23; see also immutability, framework, pluralism ballot, open 6, 100, 109–110; see also policy Bell, Clive, on Arnold 61; on slaves 170n Beiner, Ronald 16, 42, 163n, 164n, 171n Bentham, Jeremy, and municipalism 101, 103, 106, 175n Berkowitz, Peter, virtue liberalism of 22–23, 118, 163n; reads Mill as virtue liberal 179n Berlin, Isaiah, anti-metaphysics and individualism of 7, 31–32; pluralist aestheticism of 21, 41–42, 64–65; anti-authoritarianism and antistatism of 63–65;Trilling and 66–68; Williams and 69; see also autonomy, liberal history best self, summary of argument concerning 6; as authoritarian for modern commentators 59, 67, 70, 75; as kin to Mill’s open ballot 109–110; relation of to minorities policy 114; relation of to culture policy 131, 142, 148, 177n; see also policy bracketing, of goods 15–17, 41; see also goods, neutrality Britain 1, 10, 50–55, 62, 88–90, 105–106, 116–117, 135–136, 139–140, 159, 169n

196

Index

Buckley, Jerome, on Victorian skepticism 43–44, 167n; see also Victorian studies Burke, Edmund, Berlin on 64; perfectionism of 117, 144–145 Bush, George W., compassionate conservatism of and Victorian values 51, 52, 169n Calvinism, Mill’s and Arnold’s objections to 156; Stephen’s support of 175n; see also Hebrew and Hellene Carlyle,Thomas 5, 9, 55, 67, 71, 93, 148, 172n, 173–174n, 176n, 179n; see also Victorian sages capitalism, Mill on 95–95, 175n;Arnold on 178n; perfectionist liberal response to 182–183n Cavell, Stanley, perfectionism of 165n, 172n; see also emotivism character, Sandel on 37; Collini on 54, 183n; MacIntyre on 82;Arnold on 84–90, 123, 156; Mill on 92–97, 100, 107, 109, 156, 158–159, 174n;Thoreau on 111–112, 135, 143; Emerson on 127 Christianity, as fact of pluralism for contemporary liberals 20; as source of Victorian values for left-liberals 54; as T. S. Eliot’s counter to fascism 59–61; as collectivist threat to modern liberalism 63; as perfecting for Coleridge and Burke 144–145; as not perfecting enough for Mill and Arnold 156, 178n, 182n; see also God, religion cities and towns, in Trollope’s theory 103–105; in Arnold’s theory 106–107; in Thoreau’s theory 127–128, 135–137; in Emerson’s theory 131; in Mill’s theory 176n; see also municipalism civilization,Woolf on 31, 86; Berlin on 32; Bell on 61, 170n; Leavis on 62; non-neutrality of 87; Mill on 95–96, 158–159;Trollope on 104; Arnold on 116–117

civic humanism, Rawls opposed to 36–37; versus perfectionist 166n; see also republicanism civic virtue, republicanism and virtue liberalism and 9, 22–23, 35–36, 166n; Foucault and 78–80; Mill and 103, 172n;Arnold and 108;Victorian liberals and state preservation and 125–126 civil society, virtue liberals and 49; Foucault and right-liberals on 77–78; Arnold and Burke on 117; Fuller on 133;Victorian liberals on experiential pedagogy of 138; modern liberals on irreducible pluralism of 163–164n class,T. S. Eliot on 59–61; Bell on 61, 170n; Leavis on 62;Williams on 68–69; Eagleton on 69–70; Baldick on 75;Arnold on 89, 106, 139, 141–143, 148, 173n; Stephen on 122; Mill on 124; Emerson on 129; see also clerisy, culture, equality, minorities classical republicanism, Rawls on 36–37; see also republicanism clerisy,Victorian liberals and 113, 129, 132, 182n; see also Coleridge coercion, focus of commentary about perfectionism 33–34, 37–39, 42, 120, 152; modern liberal obsession with 64–66, 71, 73; postmodernist obsession with 76; Stephen’s obsession with 174n, 179n; see also anti-perfectionism, Foucault Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, perfectionism of 10; Mill’s state theory and 124–125, 129, 141, 179n;Thomas Arnold’s state theory and 144–145; clerisy theory of Victorian liberals and 132, 182n Cold War, as ideological 10, 55, 153; question of intervention during 50; modern liberals and 33–34, 44, 73, 167n collectivism, see communism, fascism, individualist-collectivist axis,

Index nationalism, patriotism, religious fundamentalism, socialism, totalitarianism Collini, Stefan, on Victorian objectivity 43, 167n;Victorian values debate and 54–55, 169n; on Arnold’s culture policy 150 communism, collectivist threat of to modern liberalism 50, 58–66, 69, 72–73; see also collectivism, Marx, welfarism comprehensive liberalism, summary of argument concerning 3–4; succeeded by political liberalism in response to communitarianism or pluralism 12, 14–15, 17; difficult to recommend today due to reason’s restricted range 24, 26–27; unrecognized desire for and consequent continuity of modern liberalism 29–30, 32, 166n; republicanism as 36; difference of from perfectionist liberalism 37, 167n; Nussbaum’s rejection of yet desire for 39, 41; origins in politics of recognition 48; loss of with rise of right-liberals 73, 168n; see also moral program, political program communitarianism, summary of argument concerning 3, 80; liberalism versus 9; divorce of moral and political programs in liberalism and 12–13; liberal adoption of immutability from 14–15, 17, 162n, 163n; balkanization of 19–20, 21–22; virtue liberalism compared to 22–23, 34–37, 166n; place of in politics of recognition 48–49; comparison of to Foucault’s theory 77–78 Cobden, Richard 173n Condorcet, Marquis de, importance to Mill of 97, 175–76n; see also Enlightenment conservatives (modern), see religious fundamentalism, right-liberals, Victorian values

197

conservatives (Victorian), see feudalism, Victorian sages Conservative Party, the 50; see also right-liberals Considerations on Representative Government, see Mill, John Stuart, major writings of constructivism, see essentialism, postmodernism, skepticism conviction, modern liberals against 1, 15, 30–32;Victorian liberals for 2, 41–42, 97, 151 cruelty, see suffering cultural studies 4, 45, 167n; see also academe, postmodernism,Victorian studies culture, summary of argument concerning 6, 85, 91, 118;Arnold’s according to modern commentators 56–71, 74; Mill on 96, 110;Arnold’s perfectionist and state-sponsored program of 114, 115–116, 138–150, 177n, 178n, 181n, 182n, 184n; Rawls’s opposition to state-sponsored versions of 120–121, 179n;Victorian liberal interest in not for state preservation but for perfection 121–125;Victorian liberal interest in succeeded by interest in experience 129–138; see also didactic pedagogy, moral program, state Culture and Anarchy, see Arnold, Matthew, major writings of democracy, summary of argument concerning 6, 161; political liberals and 17–19, 27, 36, 164n, 165n, 166n; perfectionist coercion and 38; threat of Arnold’s state to per Woolf 58–59; mistake of Arnold to favor per T.S. Eliot 60;Williams on 69; Robbins on 83–85;Victorian liberal commitment to 87–90, 172n, 173n, 174n;Victorian liberal interest in education of 90–99; Mill’s and Arnold’s commitment to 93–111, 113–117, 173n, 175n; comparison of

198

Index

democracy—continued that commitment with Rousseau’s 117–119; insufficiency of to preserve state 121–125; Emerson on education of 129–132; Fuller on education of 132–134;Thoreau on education of 111–113, 135–137; Arnold on 138–142, 147–150, 178n; see also didactic pedagogy, experience Democratic Party, the 50; see also right-liberals Dicey,A. C. 174n didactic pedagogy, summary of argument concerning 5–6, 91; in Mill’s theory 129; in Emerson’s theory 129–132; in Fuller’s theory 132–33; in Thoreau’s theory 135–136; in Arnold’s theory 138–150; see also culture, education, experience, state disciplinarity, see interdisciplinarity discussion, liberty of, in Mill’s experiential pedagogy 98–99; in Arnold’s experiential pedagogy 110–111; see also experience, policy diversity, contemporary liberal theory and 18, 20–23, 49, 50; modern commentary on Mill and Arnold and 86; Mill and 99–100, 176n; Emerson and 130–131;Arnold and Humboldt and 146; see also discussion, pluralism, thought Dworkin, Ronald, neutrality of 13; methodological individualism of 73; defense of culture of 121 Eagleton,Terry, on Arnold 69–70, 170n; on postmodernism 75–77, 171n, 182–83n Edmundson, Marc, on Foucault and postmodernism 76–77, 171n education, summary of argument concerning 5–6, 85; virtue liberalism and 23;T.S. Eliot’s agenda for 60; modern liberals suspicious of 64, 65; Victorian liberals and 90, 91; Mill’s

experiential versions of 91–93, 97, 174n; Mill’s franchise and 100, 174–175n; Mill’s municipalism and 101–103;Arnold’s municipalism and 106–108, 177n, 180n; Emerson’s state and 127, 131; Fuller on 133; Thoreau on 135–137;Arnold on 137–140, 159; see also didactic pedagogy, experience elite, see class Eliot, George 178n Eliot,T. S., on Arnold 59–63; as Arnold’s modern representative 68, 69–70, 74; see also Christianity Emerson, Ralph Waldo, summary of argument concerning 6; stands for radical individualist 35, 111; instrumental statism and 127–128; shift of from didactic to experiential pedagogy 129–132; comparison of to Thoreau and Fuller 132–137; objects to didactic pedagogy of the state 137–138, 147;Arnold and 148; republicanism and 180n; clerisy and 182n; see also American Transcendentalists emotivism, summary of argument concerning 2, 5, 48; modern antistatism and 80–83, 165n; Cavell and 165n; see also methodological individualism empiricism 92, 152, 174n, 175n, 179n; see also experience, utilitarianism England, see Britain Enlightenment, the, modern liberal opposition to 25, 27, 30, 163n; Victorian liberal embrace of 10, 97, 123, 175–176n, 181n epistemology, neglect of in contemporary perfectionist philosophy 34–42, 73, 166n, 167n; neglect of in contemporary Victorian studies 45; see also objectivism equality, summary of argument concerning 6; political liberals and non-metaphysical status of 40–41, 65;

Index Victorian liberals and providential status of 88–89, 93, 167n; commitment of liberals to liberty and 49; Bell’s objection to 62, 170n; Arnold’s policy of 115–117, 178n; Gladstone’s objection to 117; Victorian liberal commitment to as perfectionist 118–119; Stephen’s objection to 173–174n, 174–175n; see also experience, policy essentialism, summary of argument concerning 7–8; Nussbaum’s defense of 39–40, 156–158; Foucault’s objection to 79–80; democracy in Victorian liberal versions of 89; objectivity in Victorian liberal versions of 156, 158–161; see also metaphysics, philosophical anthropology experience, Mill’s empirical commitment to 92–95; Mill’s shaping of through institutions including political economy 95–97; liberty of discussion 97–99; the franchise 99–100; municipalism 100–103;Arnold’s shaping of through institutions including municipalism 105–109; best selves 109–110; discursive culture 110; minorities 113–115; equality 115–117;Thoreau’s shaping of through programs including minorities 111–113; nature 137; Emerson’s shaping of through programs including individualism 129–130; civic life 130–132; method of nature 132 Fuller’s shaping of through programs including municipalism 133–134 experiential pedagogy, defined 5–6, 91; see also experience expression, free, see discussion fact of pluralism, see pluralism fascism, collectivist threat of to modern liberalism 19, 30, 41, 58–59, 62–66,

199

71, 72–73;T.S. Eliot’s Christian state versus 61; see also collectivism feudalism,Victorian liberals versus 93, 103–106, 141, 173 fiction of reason, see reason Florence 103–104, see also municipalism,Trollope Forster, E. M. 30, 152 Forster,William 149 Foucault, Michel, power and 9, 75–80; antistatism and 4–5, 75–80, 171n, 176n; communitarians versus 77; right-liberalism and 77–80; contemporary Victorian studies and 83–85, 171n; see also emotivism, Nietzsche, postmodernism frameworks, summary of argument concerning 3, 6; minimal versions of in contemporary theory versus in perfectionism 12–23, 27–28, 35–37, 42, 49. 78–79, 167n, 170n; minimal versions of and antistatism 47, 49; see also emotivism, methodological individualism, welfarism France 76, 87, 106, 117, 134, 140, 145, 147, 150, 173n, 176n, 177n, 178n; see also ideas of 1789 franchise, the,Victorian liberal debate about 93–94; Mill on 99–100, 174–175n, 176n;Trollope on 104; Arnold on 107, 109–110;Thoreau on 111–112; see also experience, minorities fraternity 93, 174–175n; see also ideas of 1789; Stephen freedom, Berlin on 11, 32, 64; Rawls on 17, 20; virtue liberals on 22, 179n; Sandel on 35; Bell on 61; Foucault on 78–79;Arnold on 90, 110; Mill on 97, 107, 124–125, 146;Trollope on 104; Emerson on 127; Fuller on 133;Thoreau on 136; Nietzsche on 167n; see also discussion, experience, ideas of 1789, thought free speech, see discussion

200

Index

Fuller, Margaret, summary of argument concerning 6; state preservation and 122–126; instrumental statism and 126; shift of from didactic to experiential pedagogy 132–135; Thoreau and 135 fundamentalism, see religious fundamentalism Galston,William, virtue liberalism of 23–26, 31, 37, 163n, 167n Germany 61, 65, 78, 145, 146, 147, 176n Gingrich, Newt,Victorian values debate and 51–55; antistatism and 57 Gladstone,William 117, 126 God,Arnold’s state described as 59–60, 62, 67; postmodernism and death of 76;Victorian liberals on 109, 112, 124, 126, 133, 143; role of in liberalism per Mill 154–157, 175n, 180n, 183n; see also metaphysics Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, significance to Victorian liberals 122–123, 133, 160 Goodlad, Lauren, on Foucault and Victorian studies 78–79, 171n; on Mill 171n, 173n; see also Victorian studies goods (moral), summary of argument concerning 1, 3, 4, 7–8; virtue liberals and instrumental versions of 22–24; immutability and non-revisability of 23; modern liberalism’s unrecognized 27–32, 40–42; neglected objective status of in perfectionist liberalism 33–42; irrational status of in communitarianism 35, 165n; privatized status of in political liberalism 36; objection to pussyfooting about 41–42;Victorian objectivity about 43; Mill and 100; Arnold and 116; see also bracketing, epistemology, moral program, neutrality

government, neutrality of for left-liberals 13, 36, 38, 73; devolution of for rightliberals 51, 53; Mill’s two criteria for evaluation of 90–91; see also governmentality, municipalism, state governmentality, in Foucault’s theory 5, 77–85 Gray, John, modus vivendi liberalism of 20–25, 28–29, 163n Great Britain, see Britain Greece, ancient, see ancients Green,T. H. 183n Grote, George 107–108 Halt (“steadiness”),Arnold on 122–125, 142 Hare,Thomas 111 Harrington, James 129 Hebrew and Hellene,Arnold on 121, 123, 147, 156, 159; see also Calvinism Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 83–84 Herder, Johann Gottfried, perfectionism of 145–46 Himmelfarb, Gertrude,Victorian values debate and 52–55 historicism 27–28, 164n; see also postmodernism, reason Hofstadter, Richard 76 humanism, Foucault and 76, 168n; Mill’s religion of 175n; see also religion of humanity humanization, civilization’s role in for Arnold 117, 131 human nature, Nussbaum on 39–40, 179n; democracy and 89; Mill on 96–98;Arnold on 109, 116–117; Coleridge on 145;Victorian liberals and 158; Stephen on 175; see also essentialism, objectivism, perfectionism, philosophical anthropology human imperfection, Robbins on 84–85; Mill on 99, 110, 126; see also Calvinism, immutability, skepticism

Index human perfection,Woolf against 68; Victorian liberals for 85, 125–126, 128; Mill for 96–100;Arnold for 115–117, 123, 141, 146–147; Rawls for 120;Thoreau for 127–128, 136–137; Emerson for 129, 137; objectivity of 152; Marx for 180n;Thomas Arnold for 181n; see also perfectionism, liberal perfectionism human rights, summary of argument concerning 7; modus vivendi liberalism and 22; Nussbaum and 40; perfectionism and 153–155, 183n Humboldt,Wilhelm von, perfectionism of 145–146, 148 ideas of 1789; role of in Victorian liberalism 90, 93, 173n, 174n, 181n immutability, summary of argument concerning 3; pluralism and 15; communitarianism and 15–16; political liberalism and 16–19; modus vivendi liberalism and 19–22; virtue liberalism and 22–23, 36–37, 164–165n; modern liberalism and 42, 47–49; Foucault and 78–80; see also pluralism, reason individualism, see emotivism, individualist-collectivist axis, methodological individualism, Victorian values individualist-collectivist axis, politics of redistribution and 49–50;Victorian values debate and 50–55; libertarianauthoritarian axis and 56–58; summary of argument concerning 71–72; methodological individualism and 72–74 institutions, see culture, didactic pedagogy, experience, frameworks interdisciplinarity 8–10; see also academe interpretive turn 3, 29; see also postmodernism, reason

201

intervention, see frameworks, neutrality, perfectionist liberalism, recognition, republicanism, state, virtue liberalism irony, modern liberalism and 28, 31–32, 42, 153; see also autonomy, Rorty, skepticism Italy,Arnold on 89–90, 105, 181n; Trollope on 103–104; Fuller on 134 Jones, Gareth Stedman,Victorian values debate and 53 jury duty, Mill on 98, 176n; see also experience, policy justice, neutral liberalism and 13, 120, 168n; political liberalism and 15, 17; modus vivendi liberalism and 22; perfectionism and 29; modern liberalism and 31, 41–42, 47; virtue liberalism and 36; Emerson and 130; see also frameworks, goods Kant, Immanuel 14, 15, 64 Kymlicka,Will, on communitarianism versus perfectionism 35; on liberals and immutability 163n; on Marxism as perfectionist 166n; on intrinsic or instrumental goods 166n; on liberal theory and practice 168n; on Marxism and libertarianism 171n Labor Party, the 50; see also right-liberals Leavis, F.R., elite minorities and 61–62, 68, 69, 74 left-liberals, summary of argument concerning 4–5;Arnold as authoritarian and antistatist according to 48–49, 56–58, 63–74, 82, 84; see also methodological individualism, welfarism Levine, George, on Cold War Victorian studies 44; on Victorian objectivity 44–46

202

Index

liberalism, see communitarianism, comprehensive liberalism, left-liberals, modern liberalism, modus vivendi liberalism, perfectionist liberalism, political liberalism, republicanism, right-liberals, virtue liberalism, Victorian liberalism liberalism, history of 7, 29–32, 32–34, 52–55, 62–63, 83–84, 151–154; see also modern liberalism,Victorian liberalism libertarian-authoritarian axis, summary of argument concerning 6; complex relationship of with individualistcollectivist axis 56–58; summary of 71–72; role in modern Victorian studies of 86; see also libertarianism libertarianism, summary of argument concerning 6; politics of distribution and 49, 50; authoritarianism and 56–58; continuity of in modern liberalism 63–73, 172n; Marxism and 70–71, 74–75, 171n; postmodernism and 75–80, 171n; role in modern Victorian studies of 86;Victorian liberals and 108, 141, 146, 169n; see also libertarian-authoritarian axis, right-liberals liberty, see discussion, human rights, ideas of 1789, thought Lipman, Samuel, represents right-liberal struggle with libertarian-authoritarian and individualist-collectivist axes 56–57, 70; see also Arnold, Said local government, see municipalism Lowe, Robert 93, 148 machinery,Victorian liberal wariness of 6, 59, 86, 108, 109, 110, 116, 132, 133, 159;Thoreau’s objection to 135–138; Arnold’s defense of 149–150 MacIntyre,Alasdair, theory of emotivism of 2, 5, 48, 80–83, 171n; communitarianism of 15–16; antistatism and balkanization of 16,

21–22; immutability and divorce of moral and political programs of shared with liberal theorists 16, 23–25, 162n, 163n, 164n, 165n; Foucault shares defeatism with 77 market, the, politics of redistribution and 50, 73–74; right-liberals and 171n Martineau, Harriet,Arnold’s correspondence with 139–140, 181n metaphysics, summary of argument concerning 7; Rorty against 26–27; Berlin against 31–32; Nussbaum publicly against but privately for 39–42; perfectionism can involve but does not require 152, 154–161; see also essentialism, God, philosophical anthropology methodological individualism, summary of argument concerning 5, 72–74; explanatory limitations of 80; see also emotivism Marx, Karl, Mill and 10, 44, 166n, 175n, 180n; see also Marxism Marxism, as non-liberal 5, 49; as antistatist and libertarian 69–71, 171n, 74; as emotivist 82; as perfectionist 166n; see also Eagleton, Marx Mill, James 174n, 176n Mill, John Stuart, summary of argument concerning 6–8, 42; pluralism and 42; as libertarian in modern commentary 55, 64, 66–68, 86, 169n; and Foucault 78–79, 171n, 172n, 174n; exemplifies Victorian liberalism in commitment to democracy and perfectionism 88–91, 173n; relationship of to utilitarianism 91–95, 174–176n; commitment of to experiential pedagogy in: all institutions 95–97; liberty of discussion 98–99; the franchise 99–100, 176n; municipalism 100–103, 176–177n; in comparison to Arnold 105–117

Index passim; perfectionist not virtue liberalism of 118–119; state preservation and 124–125, 141, 145; instrumental statism and 125–126, 178n; shift from didactic to experiential pedagogy by 129; Fuller and 132–134;Thoreau and 136; Humboldt and 146; clarity of policy of versus Arnold 147; religion’s utility for 154–155; essentialist perfectionism of 155–156, 158–159, 179n, 184n; history of modern commentary on and perfectionism of 172–173n; interventionist state of 174n; the Enlightenment and Romanticism and 181n; republicanism and 185n Mill, John Stuart, major writings of:“De Tocqueville on Democracy in America” (1835, 1840) 88, 101–103, 124;“Coleridge” (1840) 124, 126, 140, 141, 179n; System of Logic (1843), empiricism in 92, 94, 174n, 179n; Principles of Political Economy (1848), empiricism in 94; happiness in 95; intervention in 174n, 175n; intrinsic worth of liberty in 176n; municipalism in 176n; On Liberty (1859), modern liberals on 66, 68, 86, 172n; intrinsic and instrumental worth of liberty in 98–99, 110, 176n; instrumental statism and 126; experiential pedagogy in 129, 134, 136; Considerations on Representative Government (1861), criteria for government evaluation in 90–91; experiential pedagogy in 97–100, 103, 108–111, 115, 129, 134, Utilitarianism (1861), empiricism in 94; institutional reform in 96; Autobiography (1873) happiness in 94–95, 178n; pliability of humans in 97, 174n; professional experience in 100; institutions in 126; socialism in

203

175n; musical combinations in 176n; against intuitions in 183n millet system 21; see also Gray, modus vivendi liberalism Milton, John 129 minorities, summary of argument concerning 6; modus vivendi liberalism and 21–22; Leavis and 62; Mill and 111;Thoreau and 111–113, 137; Arnold and 113–115; Rousseau and 118; Fuller and 122–123, 124–125, 132–133; perfectionism in modern movements to liberate 153–154; see also franchise, policy modern liberalism, summary of argument concerning 3–8; unrecognized goods of 29–32, 40; anti-perfectionism of 33–34; continuous struggle with collectivism of 62–63; methodological individualism and antistatism of 72–74; emotivism and antistatism of 80–83, 165n;Victorian liberalism versus 85, 86–87, 152–153; human rights and 155; Rorty and 166n; see also Victorian liberalism modus vivendi liberalism, summary of argument concerning 3, 15; political liberalism and 20–22, 163n; minimal frameworks of 35; politics of recognition and 48–49; Berlin and 64, 162n Moot, the, see Eliot,T.S. moral perfectionism, see perfectionism moral program, summary of argument concerning 3–4, 23,47; modern theorists reject union of political programs and 12–13; Rawls’s in Theory 14; liberal theorists adopt communitarian’s 15; liberal theorists surrender own 16–23, 164n; comprehensive liberalism combines political programs with 24; communitarianism involves only 24; skeptical liberal theory

204

Index

moral program—continued abandons 26–27; liberal theorists fantasizes about 28–30, 166n; continuity of fantasy about 30–32, 163n, 164n;Victorian liberalism unites political and 42, 45, 97, 172n, 175n; postmodernism abandons 79; theory cannot abandon 86–87; theory can avoid metaphysics with 155–156, 183n;Victorians share with Marx 166n; see also autonomy, immutability moral relativism, contemporary theory and 34, 163n, 183n; see also postmodernism, reason Morley, John, on Mill’s empiricism 92, 174n, 176n; on Mill’s transcendentalism 93, 155, 175n; on Mill’s perfectionism 98, 99; on democracy’s inevitability 173n, 174n Morris,William 10 municipalism, role of in experiential pedagogy 6, 95, 98, 100–109, 134, 138, 176n, 177n; see also Arnold, experience, Fuller, policy, Mill, republicanism,Trollope,Victorian liberalism nationalism, collectivist threat of to modern liberalism 30, 58, 63, 71; see also collectivism Nazism, see fascism Neal, Patrick, defends political liberalism 12, 29, 162n; rejects perfectionist liberalism 37–38, 166n; defends thin frameworks, 163n neo-authoritarianism, see authoritarianism,Woolf neoconservatives, see right-liberals neo-feudalism, of Victorian sages 71, 101, 173n, 179n; see also feudalism, Victorian sages neoliberals, see right-liberals New England 101, 136; see also municipalism

New Liberals, the 10, 183n Newman, Francis William 102–103 Newman, John Henry 172n, 175n neutrality, in liberal theory 3–4, 13–15, 57, 63, 73, 82–83, 120–21, 162n; in virtue liberal theory 23; perfectionism versus 33–34, 86–87; communitarianism versus 36–37; see also bracketing, immutability, political power Nietzsche, Friedrich, as Rorty’s private reading 29; as Victorian morality’s foe 43–44; as Foucault’s predecessor 79–80; as MacIntyre’s exemplary emotivist 80–82, 165n, 167n; as postmodernism’s antistatist godfather 83 non-liberals, see Marxism, postmodernism non-revisability, see goods, immutability normative theory, need for 11; Rawls’s modern initiative of 12; contemporary theory’s abandonment of 25–26, 34–35, 45, 164n; see also modern liberalism,Victorian liberalism, skepticism Nozick, Robert 50, 73, 78; see also libertarianism, right-liberals Nussbaum, Martha, on Rawls’s significance 12; as perfectionist then political liberal 38–42, 167n, 183n; as similar to Rorty 167n; distinction between essentialism and metaphysics made by 39, 156–58, 179n; criticism of welfarism by 73–74, 170n; criticism of MacIntyre’s relativism by 164n objectivism, in perfectionism 1–2, 170n; summary of argument concerning 6, 11–12, 85, 151–152; neglect or disparagement of in political theory 33–42; dismissed or disparaged in Victorian studies 4, 42–43; new interest in Victorian aspiration

Index toward 43–46; role of metaphysics or empiricism and intuitions in 152–161; absent in Cavell’s “perfectionism” 165n; absent in Sandel’s communitarianism 166n objectivity, see objectivism On Liberty, see Mill, John Stuart, major writings of participatory democracy, Rousseau on 118; see also civic virtue, democracy, municipalism, republicanism paternalism, in Victorian state theories 104–05, 108; see also authoritarianism, Stephen patriotism, collectivist threat of to modern liberalism 58; Mill on 103; see collectivism, municipalism pedagogy, see didactic pedagogy, experience perfection, see human perfection perfectionism, summary of argument concerning 1–8, 47; modern liberal definition of 33–34; neglect of moral objectivism of 34–42;Victorian liberal pursuit of democracy and 86–91, 172n;Arnold and 115–117, 142–143; virtue liberals versus 117–119, 151–152; Emerson and 132; Fuller and 133;Arnold’s sources of 143–147, 182n; objectivism of 152–161, 183n; Cavell and 165–166n; Marxism and 166n; republicanism and 166n; commentary on Mill and 172–173n; the Enlightenment and 175–176n; Thoreau and 180n; see also perfectionist liberalism perfectionist liberalism, political theories versus 32–42; politics of recognition and 48–49;Victorian liberals and 85; commentary on Mill and 172–173n; see also human perfection, perfectionism, objectivism,Victorian liberalism

205

Pericles 108, 122–123, 124, 140 philosophy, see normative theory, political power philosophical anthropology 7–8, 156–161, 173n; see also essentialism Plato, defense of coincidence of political power and philosophy by 58; association of with Arnold in modern commentary 58–69, 74–75, 82; contrasting role of in modern and Victorian liberalism 85, 86–87; Arnold’s endorsement of the critique of democracy by 113–114;Arnold’s rejection of the philosopher kings of 148–49; see also political power pluralism, summary of argument concerning 3, 49; liberal response to 11–12; account of the fact of 14–32, 34–35, 37, 38, 40–41, 161n, 163n, 163–164n, 164n; aesthetic of 41–42; Berlin and 64–65; see also frameworks, immutability, reason policy, summary of argument concerning 5–6;Victorian liberalism and 91; Arnold’s limitations with 109–110, 114, 118; state preservation and 121–125; the Tarpeian Rock passage not a serious example of 141–142; see also best self, didactic pedagogy, equality, experience, franchise, jury duty, minorities, municipalism, open ballot political liberalism, summary of argument concerning 15; comprehensive liberalism and 3, 73; frameworks in 16; response to pluralism of 16–19, modus vivendi liberalism and 19–22, 163n; virtue liberalism and 22–23, 163n; account of fiction of reason in 24–25; republicanism and 36, 166n; Nussbaum and 39–40, 156–157; Berlin and 64; communitarianism and 163n; see also comprehensive liberalism

206

Index

Political Liberalism, see Rawls, John, major writings of political power, modern liberal objection to coincidence of philosophy with 58–71, 82–83, 85;Victorian liberal pursuit of coincidence of philosophy with 86–91 political program, summary of argument concerning 3–4, 23, 29–30; political theory’s divorce of moral programs and 12–13; neutral liberalism and 14; political liberalism and 14–15; account of the fact of pluralism and 15–16, 24; account of the fiction of reason and 27–28; republicanism and 36; perfectionist liberalism and 37; Foucault and 79;Victorian liberalism’s union of moral program and 161; see also moral program political theory, summary of argument concerning 2–4, 9, 11–12; normative ambition lost by 12–13, 14–15; political and moral programs divorced by 24; pluralism overwhelming to 26, 27; antistatism in 47, 50; see also skepticism Poor Laws 53, 101 popular government 98, 101–102; see also democracy, experience, municipalism, policy postmodernism 9; as non-liberal 5, 49; as emotivist 3, 5, 74–80; as subjectivist in Victorian studies 44–46; as antistatist 83–85, 171n; as right-liberal 171n; see also Foucault, skepticism power, see anti-perfectionism, political power preservation of state, see state private, the, modern liberalism’s public or 3, 15, 16–17, 23, 29, 41–42, 51–52, 82–83, 163n;Victorian liberalism’s public and 100, 107–08, 127, 132 privatize, see bracketing

progress, Mill on 91, 95–96, 107, 155; Trollope on 104;Arnold on 105–106, 116–117, 122–123, 160; Thoreau on 112–113 progressives, Robbins on 83–84,Victorian liberals and 93–94; objective moral perfectionism and 153–161 Progressives,The 10 public, the, see private radicalism,Victorian authoritarianism versus 71; Mill and 92, 94, 175n; see also Marxism, postmodernism, utilitarianism Rawls, John, summary of argument concerning 7; neutral and political liberalism of 12–13, 162–163n; good in theory of 14; fact of pluralism and 16–20, modus vivendi liberalism and 20–22, 163n; account of fiction of reason and 24–26, 27, 164n; modern liberalism and 29–33, 165n; perfectionism defined by 33–34; civic virtue and 36–37, 166n; Nussbaum influenced by 39–40, 183n; Nozick and 50; methodological individualism of 73; state-supported culture rejected by 120–121; statism of 168n; see also Rawls, John, major writings of Rawls, John, major writings of, A Theory of Justice (1971) 12–14, 25, 29, 33, 120, 161n, 165n, 168n; Political Liberalism (1993) 7, 12, 16–17, 20, 36, 39, 162n, 163n, 164n, 166n Raz, Joseph, partial defense of objective moral goods by 37–38, 44; defense of reasoning about goods as well as rights by 164–165n; defense of culture as perfectionist by 179n; see also perfectionist liberalism Reagan, Ronald,Victorian values debate and 50–51, 168n; right-liberal antistatism of 84

Index realistic utopia 12; see also normative theory, Rawls reason, summary of argument concerning 3–4, 7, 49, 85, 152–53; account of the fiction of 23–32, 164n; modest role in rivals to perfectionism 35–37, 166n; Raz’s reliance upon 37–38, 164–165n; skepticism about in Nussbaum’s work 34–35, 38–41, 167n, 183n; skepticism about evident in aesthetic pluralism 41–42; skepticism about in academe 42–43, 45–46; skepticism about in Berlin’s work 63–64; skepticism about in Trilling’s work 65–67; skepticism about in Foucault’s work 79; skepticism about in Nietzsche’s work 81–82; Mill’s belief in 97;Arnold’s gratitude to ancients for 105, 107; best selves’ reliance upon 109; the state’s provision of to democracy 142, 148; Coleridge’s belief in 144–45; Humboldt’s belief in 146; essentialism and 156–61; see also postmodernism recognition, politics of, politics of redistribution versus 4, 48–50, 162n, 168n redistribution, politics of 55–57, see also recognition Reform Bill, of 1832 101; of 1867 93, 101, 174n Reformation, the 17, 20, 21 reformism, timorous in postmodernism 75; admirable in Victorians and utilitarianism 83–85, 92; minorities and 6, 114–115, 146; New Liberalism and 183n relativism, see moral relativism religion, fact of pluralism and 15, 17, 20–21, 27, 41; modern liberalism threatened by 30, 36, 120; virtue and 22, 121–122, 131, 133, 178n;Arnold’s culture and 69–70; freedom of 90, 97, 99; machinery of 110;

207

perfectionism of 115, 118, 144–145; see also Christianity, God, ideas of 1789; metaphysics, perfectionism, religion of humanity religion of humanity, Mill’s ideas about 7, 151, 154–55, 175n, 180n, 183n; Stephen’s objection to 174n; see also humanism religious fundamentalism 154–155, 182–183n; see also religion remnant, see minorities Renan, Ernest, perfectionism of 126, 145–148, 182n representation, see minorities Republican Party, the 50, 51–52, 168–169n, see also right-liberals republican tradition, the, see republicanism republicanism 9; liberalism and 34–37, 166n; virtue liberalism and 118–119; Mill and 158–59, 172n, 184n; Emerson and 180n; Coleridge and 182n right, the (as opposed to the good), see justice right-liberals, summary of argument concerning 4–5; role of in Victorian values debate 48–55; authoritarianism and 55–57, 70; anti-collectivism and antistatism of 73, 84; Foucault and 77–80; see also Gingrich, Lipman, Reagan,Thatcher rights, see human rights, ideas of 1789 Robbins, Bruce, defends Victorian state 83–85; see also Victorian studies, welfarism Romanticism 10, 175–176n, 181n Rome 62, 126, 134; see also ancients, Fuller, municipalism Rorty, Richard, fiction of reason and 26–32; Nussbaum and 167n; see also skepticism Rousseau, Jean Jacques, Berlin on 64; virtue liberalism of 118–119, 174–175n

208

Index

Ruskin, John 5, 9, 44, 71, 93, 169n, 172n, 173–174n, 174n; see also Victorian sages Russell, Bertrand, exemplifies modern liberalism 4, 30–32 Ryan,Alan, defends aesthetic pluralism 41–42 sages, see Victorian sages Said, Edward, represents left-liberal struggle with libertarian-authoritarian and individualist-collectivist axes 57, 71; see also Arnold, Lipman Sandel, Michael, on Rawls’s unrecognized goods 14; on immutability 15; as virtue liberal 35–37 saving remnant, see minorities schools,Victorians and 54; Bell and 61; Mill and 102;Arnold and 105–107, 116–117, 140, 149; Emerson and 117;Thoreau and 135–136 secular 10, 30, 155, 183n self-government 35, 58, 100, 101, 103, 106; see also municipalism Shaw, George Bernard, rejects Victorian objectivity 43 Sher, George, questions restricting reason to rights not goods 29, 164–65n; see also perfectionist liberalism shopping, Foucault’s defense of 79–80 skepticism, summary of argument concerning modern culture of 2–7, 47–48, 85, 86–88, 150, 151–153; accounts of pluralism and reason two expressions of 11–13; modern liberalism and 31–33, 163n, 165n; perfectionist liberals against 38–42; academic habit of 42;Victorian studies and 43–46;Trilling and 67; postmodernism and 77;Victorian liberals against 85, 86–88; hope to move beyond 153–155; see also anti-perfectionism and antistatism

slavery 40, 112, 130, 131, 137, 158, 170n, 174n Smith,Toulmin 101 social democrats, see left-liberals socialism, perfectionism of 10; collectivist threat of to modern liberalism 30, 58–59, 69; Mill and 96, 115, 175n; see also communism, fascism sociology, Rorty on 27; Rawls on 36; MacIntyre on 81–82; Mill on 154; Nussbaum on 158; philosophical anthropology and 158–159 Southern Baptists 7, 41–42; see also religious fundamentalism Spencer, Herbert 72 stability, political liberalism’s goal of 15–18; political theory’s goal of 47–49;Victorian liberalism pursuit of more than 118–119, 121–128, 181n; see also frameworks, state state, the, modern prejudice against 1–2; summary of argument concerning modern prejudices against and Victorian pedagogies of 4–6; liberal neutrality and 13–14, 49; liberal and communitarian difference regarding 16; perfectionist liberals and 33–34; summary of representations of outside political theory 47–48; question of intervention of defines politics of redistribution 50, 56–58; right-liberal crusade against 50–55 passim, Plato and 58;Woolf and 58–59;T.S. Eliot, Bell, and Leavis and 59–62; more recent commentary on Arnold and 69–71; perfectionism versus welfarism about 83–85; instrumental version of and Victorian liberalism 125–128; shift of most Victorian liberals away from didactic versions of 129–138; Arnold and 138–150; see also antistatism statism, see the state

Index Stephen, James Fitzjames, defines Victorian liberalism 87–88; resists ideas of 1789 93–94; charges Mill with aesthetic pluralism 99; emphasizes preservation not perfection of state 122, 125; shifts from liberal to neo-feudalist authoritarian 172n, 174n, 179n; believes democracy to be inevitable 173n; charges Mill with fear of coercion 174n; charges Mill with transcendentalism 174–175n; embraces Calvinist transcendentalism 175n; describes professional experience as an education 176n; compared to Matthew Arnold 179n; compared to Thomas Arnold 181n Strachey, Lytton,Victorian objectivity opposed by 43 subjectivism,Victorian perfectionism and 156, 165n; see also emotivism, methodological individualism; objectivism, postmodernism, welfarism suffering, Rorty and 27–28, 31; Mill and 96–97 Sullivan,William 25–26 Thatcher, Margaret,Victorian values debate and 50–55 passim, antistatism of 57 Theory of Justice, A, see Rawls, John, major writings of thought, liberty of,Williams on 68–69; Mill on 97, 108; see also pluralism, policy Tocqueville,Alexis de, Mill and Arnold and 88–91, 173n; Mill’s franchise theory and 99; Mill’s municipalism and 101–103, 173n, 176n; Gingrich and 169n totalitarianism; collectivist threat of to modern liberalism 19, 33, 50, 172n; see also communism, fascism transcendentalism, heresy of to modern liberals and Victorian utilitarians 17,

209

27, 92–95, 174n, 175n, 176n; see also American Transcendentalists Trilling, Lionel, on Arnold 65–67 and 67–71 passim, 86 Trollope,Thomas Adolphus, critical of municipalism 103–105, 108 United Kingdom, see Britain United States of America 1, 8, 10, 27, 49–52, 58, 62, 72, 76, 83, 87–91, 101–103, 109, 122, 132–134, 135, 140, 166n, 171n, 172n, 178n; see also American Transcendentalists utilitarianism, Rawls’s objection to 73; Mill’s revision of 91–97, 174–175n, 179n; emphasis on centralization in 101 variety, see diversity Victorian liberalism, summary of argument concerning 1–8, 47, 151–152; modern liberalism versus 30, 33, 42, 85, 118–119, 121–129; Gingrich misconstrues 51, 168n; defined as committed to democracy and perfection 87–91, 172n, 173n, 175n; experiential over didactic pedagogy in 137–138; objectivism of 152–161; Marx and 166n; Lincoln and 167n; Nietzsche and 167n; Enlightenment and 176n, 181n; France and 178n; Stephen and 179n;Thomas Arnold and 181n; Coleridge and 182n; republicanism and 182n; see also modern liberalism Victorian sages, illiberal authoritarianism of 5, 55, 67, 71, 93, 169n, 173n, 174n; perfectionism of 172n Victorian studies, summary of argument concerning 2, 4, 10–11;Victorian objectivity in 43–46, 167n; see also Anderson,Anger, Buckley, Goodlad, Levine, Robbins

210

Index

Victorian values, summary of argument concerning 5; right-liberals and 48, 50–55, 57, 71–72, 73, 169n; Foucault and 80; see also Collini, Gingrich, Himmelfarb,Thatcher virtues, see civic virtues, moral program virtue liberalism, summary of argument concerning 3, 6; political liberalism and 22–24; communitarianism, republicanism, perfectionism and 34–37, 152, 164–165n; politics of recognition and 48–49; antistatism and 49; Berlin and 64; Foucault and 78–79, 171n;Victorian liberalism’s experiential pedagogy not 117–119; Victorian liberalism’s didactic pedagogy not 120–129; Sandel and 163n; different names for 163n; Mill read as 171n, 172–173n, 179n voluntaryism,Victorian civil society and 78, 168n; neutral liberals and 120;

Emerson’s experiential pedagogy and 129; see also culture, experience, Victorian values vote, see franchise Wahhabi Muslims 7; see also religious fundamentalism Wall, Steven, and objective moral goods 38; see also perfectionist liberalism Weber, Max 81–82 welfare liberals, see left-liberals welfarism, methodological individualism and 73–74, 170n; Robbins and 84–85 Williams, Raymond, on Arnold 67–71 Woolf, Leonard 63–75 passim, modern liberalism of 31–32; antistatism of in response to Arnold 58–63, 87, 165n Yeats,W. B. 31, 41

Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism

Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism

Liberalism without Perfection

Neo-Liberalism, State Power and Global Governance

Perfection

Perfection

Perfection

Perfection

Perfection

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society

The Idea of Perfection

The Idea of Perfection

LIBERALISM

Lancashire and the New Liberalism

British Liberalism and the United States: Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age

THE STRUGGLE FOR PERFECTION

Absolute Perfection

The Idea of Perfection

Liberalism and the Social Problem

The Way of Perfection

The Way of Perfection

The Corruption of Perfection

Lancashire and the New Liberalism

Sweet Perfection

Christmas Perfection

Absolute Perfection

Near Perfection

Christmas Perfection

Absolute Perfection

Sweet Perfection

True Perfection

Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism