A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850, by Paul Keen

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850 by Paul Keen Kimberly J. Stern (bio) A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850, by Paul Keen; pp. xi + 171. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $99.99 paper, $79.00 ebook. We know the arguments all too well. Faced with budget cuts, diminishing enrollments, and a socio-political climate that demands real action, humanists are on the defense. Some claim that the humanities are valuable because they yield concrete learning outcomes and transferable skills. Others suggest that while the humanities may garner such results, their real value lies in providing access to specialized knowledge that is, as John Henry Newman observes, "an end in itself" (The Idea of a University [Yale UP, 1996], 85). As I have said, we know the arguments all too well. But this is precisely Paul Keen's point in his new book, A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850. By interrogating the history of this debate, Keen proposes that we can become more informed participants in it. Although Keen's book immerses the reader in debates that transpired roughly two hundred years ago, this "factual revision of our received cultural history," to borrow the words of Raymond Williams, makes it possible to approach our contemporary predicament with fresh eyes (Culture and Society [Columbia UP, 1983], viii). How can we do the vital work of interrogating the history and practice of humanistic study while also defending it? How can we advocate for the relevance of the humanities while admitting its failings? "To put this more constructively," Keen writes, "how might we begin to theorize a new 'new humanism' . . . that takes an honest engagement with these tensions as its starting point without abandoning the political impulse that helped to fuel critiques of humanism in recent decades?" (15). For Keen, the humanities are distinguished less by a stable archive of knowledge than by a willingness to probe the limits of what is known. In this spirit, this volume examines early nineteenth-century debates about the utility of the [End Page 461] humanities—in the public sphere and in education—in order to unsettle the claims that have defined this debate in our own time. As Keen illustrates in chapter 1, these claims do not always align with the political or rhetorical positions we might expect. It was Robert Southey, a "hardened Tory," who promoted in his Colloquies on Society (1829) a "model version of the public role of the humanities as a discursive space in which larger questions about human freedom and social justice could be negotiated" (37). Thomas Macaulay, an outspoken Whig, refused such a model on the grounds that the Poet Laureate had ventured into questions of economic policy that could not be treated in strictly aesthetic terms. More strikingly, Macaulay's critique of Southey is underwritten by some of the very claims that continue to inform contemporary defenses of the humanities; the poet's vision was, he proposed, incoherent and thus "provided those who were already inclined to dismiss the arts with all of the ammunition they needed" (30). Nineteenth-century thinkers did not always treat the arts and the humanities in binary terms—as a choice between applied and pure knowledge, conservatism and reform. Indeed, in chapter 2, Keen tracks the efforts of nineteenth-century thinkers to promote an "anti-sectarian" approach to the humanities, citing William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and John Stuart Mill as noteworthy advocates for "embracing literary and instrumentalist approaches as mutually enriching elements of any struggle to mobilize knowledge in the cause of reform" (80). Keen touches on many familiar thinkers and texts here. He notes, for instance, that famous passage in Mill's Autobiography (1873) where Mill locates his shifting views on utility in his reading of William Wordsworth. Yet Keen's account enables us to see Mill's mental crisis with new eyes, as less a repudiation of utility than an awakening to the political possibilities of poetry. It is a notion Mill pursues more explicitly in his 1832 essay "On Genius," which...