Malthus wrote so convincingly that the elites of the world panicked into believing him. His view, according to William Hazlitt, was ‘a ground on which to fix the levers that may move the world’.4 Among the disastrous consequences were wars and imperial ventures, provoked by people’s fear of running out of space: the drive for German Lebensraum, and the ‘colonizing’ as ‘the only means to salvation’ that the demographer Patrick Colquhoun urged on Britain in 1814. The results were again disastrous when a new wave of Malthusian apprehension hit the world in the mid-twentieth century as world population surged forward. The so-called ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s onward spattered the world with pesticides and chemical fertilizers in an attempt to grow more food. ‘Factory farming’ made grocers’ shelves groan with cruelly raised, poorly fed, over-medicated carcasses. Some countries introduced compulsory family-limitation policies, effectively encouraging infanticide, and including sterilization programmes and cheap or free abortions; contraceptive research attracted enormous investments, which produced dubious moral and medical side effects.
Malthusian anxieties have proved false: demographic statistics fluctuate. Trends are never sustained for long. Overpopulation is extremely rare; experience suggests that as an ever higher proportion of the world’s population attains prosperity, people breed less.5 But in the nineteenth century, Malthus’s doom-fraught oracles seemed reasonable, his facts incontrovertible, his predictions plausible. Every thinker read Malthus and almost all took something from him. Some adopted his apocalyptic anxieties; others appropriated his materialist assumptions, his statistical methods, his environmental determinism, or his model of the struggle of life as competitive or conflictive. At the broadest level, he challenged confidence in the inevitability of progress. The political thought of the West, and therefore of the world, in the nineteenth century was a series of responses to the problem of how to sustain progress: how to avert or survive disaster, or perhaps to welcome it as a purgative or as a chance to make a new start.
Right and left were equally inventive. At the extremes, they came to seem hardly distinguishable, for politics are horseshoe-shaped and the extremities almost touch. At the outer edges, convinced ideologues may have contrasting views but they tend to adopt the same methods of forcing them on others. So we start with conservatism and liberalism before tackling socialism, but tack between left and right as we review the doctrines of confiders in the state and the anarchists and Christian political thinkers who opposed them, before turning to the emergence of nationalisms that trumped, in appeal and effects, all other political ideas of the period.
Conservatisms and Liberalism
Even conservatism, which proved paradoxically fertile in new thinking, was part of an insecurely forward-looking world. Conservatism is best understood stratigraphically – detectable in three layers of depth. It usually issues from a pessimistic outlook: unwillingness to tamper radically with things as they are, in case they get worse. At a deep level, where humans seem irremediably bad and in need of restraint, pessimism inspired another kind of conservatism – authoritarianism that values order above liberty and the power of the state above the freedom of the subject. There is also, overlappingly, a conservative tradition that values the state, or some other community (such as ‘race’ or ‘nation’), above the individual, generally on the grounds that one’s own identity is imperfect except as part of a collective identity.
These constructions, however, were not what the Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, envisaged in 1790. Like mainstream conservatism ever since, his concerns were to safeguard progress and to reform in order to survive. Burke had radical sympathies with victims and underdogs but recoiled from the excesses of the French Revolution. Time is ‘the grand instructor’, he said, and custom or tradition the source of stability.6 Order is essential, but not for its own sake: rather, to equalize all subjects’ opportunities to exercise liberty. A state must be willing to reform itself when necessary; otherwise revolution, with all its evils, will ensue. When Robert Peel founded the British Conservative Party in 1834, he enshrined this balance. The programme of the party was to reform what needed reforming and to conserve what did not – a formula with flexibility to endure change. ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ is how the French apostle of conservatism, Alphonse Karr, put it in 1849, after a series of frustrated revolutions alarmed the European elite. Most successful governments in modern times adopted broadly conservative strategies, although they did not always admit as much. Those that opted for revolution or reaction rarely lasted long.
Conservatism started as a way of managing nature, especially human nature, for the common good: not very far, therefore, from agendas we now think of as social-democratic, which deploy modest amounts of regulation to protect otherwise free markets from distortion by corruption, profiteering, exploitation, gross inequalities of income or privilege, and other abuses of freedom. Distrust of ideology is another feature Burke transmitted to modern conservatism. He declared peace better than truth. ‘Metaphysical distinctions’ he deplored as ‘a Serbonian bog’, and theorizing as a ‘sure symptom of an ill-conducted state’.7
Conservatism has never pretended to be scientific – based, that is on verifiable data and delivering predictable effects. Malthus’s statistical approach, however, made a science of society imaginable: policies based on infallible facts could yield guaranteed outcomes. The search could be literally maddening: Auguste Comte, the pioneer of what he called ‘sociology’ or ‘social science’ was, for a while, interned in a madhouse. In lectures he began to publish in 1830, when he was struggling with self-diagnosed insanity and a stagnating academic career, he predicted a new synthesis of scientific and humanistic thinking, though he was unsure about how to frame or forge it. As it developed during the rest of the century, sociology was favoured on the right as was an attempt to make social change controllable. Only in the long run did sociologists become synonymous in popular mythology with the hairy, baggy, elbow-patched stereotypes of the intellectual left.
In the meantime, however, an English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, thought of a way of achieving in policy-making a synthesis similar to that for which Comte yearned. Bentham is now treated as a kind of secular saint, as befits the founder of a college without a chapel – ‘an angel without wings’.8 His body is exhibited there, in University College London, as encouragement to students. His ‘utilitarianism’ was a creed for the irreligious. He devised a sort of calculus of happiness. He defined good as a surplus of happiness over unhappiness. The object he set for the state was ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. This was not liberalism as most people understood the word at the time, because Bentham rated social ‘utility’ above individual liberty; but his philosophy was radical, because it proposed a new way of evaluating social institutions without reference or deference to their antiquity or authority or past record of success. The doctrine was purposely godless and materialist: Bentham’s standard of happiness was pleasure; his index of evil was pain.
Benthamism was instantly influential. His British admirers reorganized the state, purging the penal code of pointless pain, while inflicting new kinds of pain on the supposedly undeserving in what came to be called ‘the public interest’. Poor laws sought to cut the numbers of vagrants and outcasts by making their misfortunes unbearable. Britain’s bureaucracy was re-staffed with good examinees. Even under nominally right-wing governments libertarian prejudices could never quite excise public interest from legislators’ priorities. Until well into the twentieth century, the radical tradition in Britain was preponderantly Benthamite, even when it called itself socialist.9
Bentham was the most eloquent member of a British ruling class engaged in a retreat from romanticism. He and his friends tried to think austerely, rationally, and scientifically about how to run society. The greatest happiness of the greatest number, however, always means sacrifices for some. It is strictly incompatible with human rights, because the interest of the g
reatest number leaves some individuals bereft. Nor were Benthamites alone in willingness to sacrifice liberty to supposedly greater good. As we shall see, German worshippers of will and supermen shared the same disposition. Thomas Carlyle, Britain’s most influential moralist until his death in 1881, who fed German thinking to English believers in the essential unity of an ‘Anglo-Saxon race’, thought it made good sense to ‘coerce human swine’.10
Nonetheless, the right in Britain remained ‘civilized’ – unwilling, on the whole, to cudgel liberty or cripple individualism. Bentham’s most effective and devoted disciple, John Stuart Mill, helped keep freedom in conservatives’ focus. Mill never ceased to recommend aspects of utilitarian philosophy, perhaps because he could not forget a lesson from his father, who had long served virtually as Bentham’s amanuensis: ‘The most effectual mode of doing good’, Mill senior explained, ‘is … to attach honour to actions solely in proportion to their tendency to increase the sum of happiness, lessen the sum of misery.’11 His formula describes the way philanthropy still works in the United States, rewarding millionaires with veneration in exchange for private investment in public benefits.
Yet young John Stuart Mill could not quite escape romantic yearnings. At the age of twenty he began to lose faith in his father’s guru, when he experienced a vision of a perfect world, in which all Bentham’s prescriptions had been adopted. He recoiled in horror from the prospect. Modifying, then rejecting utilitarianism, Mill ended by putting freedom at the top of his scale of values. For Bentham’s greatest number, he substituted a universal category: the individual. ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’ An individual’s liberty, Mill decided, must be absolute, unless it impinges on the liberty of others. ‘The liberty of the individual’, he averred, ‘must thus far be limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people … 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’ – not ‘to make him happier’ or ‘because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right’.12 If we now think of nineteenth-century Britain as a great liberal society – liberal in the original, European sense of a word that started in Spain and properly means ‘focused on the freedom of the individual’ – it was largely Mill’s influence that made it so. For Lord Asquith (the wartime prime minister whom admirers praised for patience and enemies condemned for procrastination), Mill was ‘the purveyor-general of thought for the early Victorians’.13
Mill’s individualism, however, never undervalued social needs. ‘Society’, he wrote, ‘is not founded on a contract, and … no good purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it.’ But ‘for the protection of society’, the citizen ‘owes a return for the benefit’; he must therefore respect others’ rights and contribute a reasonable share of taxes and services to the state.14 Nor was Mill’s liberalism perfect. At times he veered wildly between extremes of rejection and praise for socialism. In consequence of his influence, the British political elite adopted what might be called a modified liberal tradition, which responded undogmatically to change and helped to make the country surprisingly impervious to the violent revolutions that convulsed most other European states.15
‘Women and Children First’: New Categories of Social Thought
The clash of Bentham against Mill illustrates contradictions in industrializing societies. On the one hand, inventors of machines need to be free, as do devisers of economic and commercial strategies, or organizers of business for maximum efficiency. Workers, too, need liberation for leisure, in order to compensate for drudgery and routine. On the other hand, capitalism must be disciplined for the common good or, at least, for the good of ‘the greatest number’. Industry is, paradoxically, both the fruit of capitalism and an emblem of the priority of community over individuals: factories slot individuals in a larger whole; markets work by pooling investment. Machines do not function without cogs. By analogy with industry, society can follow dirigible courses, like assembly lines or business algorithms. Mechanical processes become models for human relationships. As we shall see, much new nineteenth-century thought and language submerged individuals in ‘masses’ and ‘classes’ and, on a wider scale, in talk of ‘races’.
Before we explore those sweeping and delusive categories it is worth pausing for two real groups of people whom the systematizing minds of the era tended to overlook: women and children. Under the impact of industrialization, both demanded re-evaluation. The exploitation of children’s and women’s labour was one of the scandals of the early phases; gradually, however, mechanization took these marginally efficient groups out of the labour market. Men transferred womanhood to a pedestal. Adults treated children no longer as little adults but as a distinct rank of society, almost a subspecies of humankind. Women and children, deified by artists and advertisers, were confined to shrines in the home: ‘women and children’ became, in a famous line from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, ‘the phrase that exempts the male from sanity’. European idealizations, enviable in artists’ images of delicately nurtured femininity or cherubic childhood, were barely intelligible in cultures where women and children were still men’s partners in production.
There were disadvantages in being idealized. Societies that freed children from the workplace tried to confine them inside schools. Sweeps did not naturally change into the water-babies that Charles Kingsley mawkishly imagined; the romantic ideal of childhood was more often coerced than coaxed into being. In 1879 Henrik Ibsen captured the plight of women in his most famous play, A Doll’s House, casting them in a role that resembled that of children. For women the fall from the pedestal could be bruising, as for the adulteress pictured by Augustus Egg in three terrible stages of decline and destitution, or for sexually louche operatic heroines, such as Manon and Violetta. The fallen woman, la traviata, became a favourite topos of the age. Doll’s House and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden proved, in practice, to be oppressive pens from which the women and children of twentieth-century Europe struggled to escape.16
New thinking, however, about women and children was little remarked. They were indistinguishably immersed, like male individuals, in the categories of class and mass on which most intellectuals focused. The clash of political visions in nineteenth-century Europe was the echo of a mightier clash of rival philosophies of humankind. Was ‘man’ ape or angel?17 Was he the image of God or the heir of Adam? Would the goodness inside him emerge in freedom or was it corroded with evil that had to be controlled? Politics of fear and hope collided. In the rest of this section, we shall be in the great arena of their collisions: that of socialism and kindred thinking.
Socialism was an extreme form of optimism. In Milan in 1899, Giuseppe Pellizza, a convert from a guilt-ridden bourgeois background, began his vast symbolic painting on the subject. In Il quarto stato he depicted a vast crowd of workers, advancing, the artist said, ‘like a torrent, overthrowing every obstacle in its path, thirsty for justice’.18 Their pace is relentless, their focus unwavering, their solidarity intimidating. But, except for a madonna-like woman in the foreground, who seems bent on a personal project as she appeals to one of the rugged leaders at the head of the march, they are individually characterless. They move like parts of a giant automaton, with a mechanical rhythm, slow and pounding.
No work of art could better express the grandeur and grind at the heart of socialism: noble humanity, mobilized by dreary determinism. In the history of socialism, the nobility and humanity came first. Radicals apostrophized them as ‘equality and fraternity’; early socialist communities tried to embody the same qualities in practices of sharing and co-operating (see here). In Icaria, envy, crime, anger, rivalry, and lust would – so the founder hoped – disappear with the abolition of property. The sexual orgies Charles Fourier planned would be organized on egalitarian principles.19
Such experiments failed, but the id
ea of reforming society as a whole on socialist lines appealed to people who felt under-rewarded or outraged by the unequal distribution of wealth. Icarus came down to earth, with the ‘accountants’ socialism’ of Thomas Hodgskin. He endorsed the view of David Ricardo, whom we shall come to in a moment, that workers’ labour added the greater part of most commodities’ value; so they should get the lion’s share of the profits. This was a capitalist’s kind of socialism, in which ideals carried a price tag. Once socialist economics had become conventional, Louis Blanc made its politics conventional, too. Blanc, who in 1839 coined the phrase ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, convinced most socialists that the state could be trusted to impose their ideals on society. John Ruskin, the self-tortured art critic and arbiter of Victorian taste, echoed these arguments in England. For him, ‘the first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated’.20 Increased state power could surely only help the needy. Meanwhile, Karl Marx predicted socialism’s inevitable triumph through a cycle of class conflicts; as economic power passed from capital to labour, so workers, degraded and inflamed by exploitative employers, would seize power. Early socialist experiments had been peaceful, with no land to conquer except in the open spaces of the wilderness, no human adversaries except selfishness and greed. Now, transformed by language of conflict and coercion, socialism became an ideology of violence, to be resisted uncompromisingly by those who valued property above fraternity and liberty above equality.21
Out of Our Minds Page 36
