“This Offensive and Alarming Set of Pamphlets”: Thomas Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and the Condition of England in 1850

Abstract

Something profoundly wrong with way live today (1). So begins Fares Land, final book published by historian and cultural commentator Tony Judt before his death in August 2010. The book's title, a reference to Oliver Goldsmith's 1770 poem The Deserted Village, signals moral passion that drives examination of way live now. Ill fares land, to hastening ills a prey, Goldsmith laments of an earlier time, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay (lines 51-52). Judt felt strongly enough about condition of America--and Britain, and Europe--to compose book while enduring final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease. It not a happy book indeed, in many places it an angry book--but against all odds it a hopeful book, as Judt examines sorry state of America and Europe in wake of financial crash of 2008, linking widening ripples of economic collapse to political failings that themselves reflect a debased set of values: thirty years have made a virtue out of pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.... We cannot go on living like this (1-2). And yet, Judt charges, seem unable any longer to imagine alternatives to status quo: the rising generation acutely worried about world it to inherit. But accompanying these fears there a general sentiment of frustration: 'we' know something wrong and there are many things don't like. But what can believe in? What should do? (3-4). For Judt, response to new age of anxiety and insecurity--an age of private affluence, public squalor marked by fear and a scandalous gap separating rich and poor--must be a strong and vibrant commitment to a re-imagined social democracy (12, 162). He asserts boldly what now runs against grain in United States as in Britain and Europe more generally: the practical need for strong states and interventionist governments (8). Arguing that questions of public policy must not be reduced to a narrowly economic calculus, Judt insists that we cannot continue to evaluate our world and choices make in a moral vacuum (37). If are to solve intertwined social and economic problems face--if do not wish indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional 'free market' and much-advertised horrors of 'socialism'--we must devise a new language of social purpose that articulates complex human ends, and not just reductive economic means (34). To a reader of works of Thomas Carlyle and, indeed, much of Victorian literature from 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, Judt's analysis sounds eerily familiar. Judt himself more likely to cite eighteenth- or twentieth-century analogues to malaise of present. But tone of his extended essay, as well as questions he ponders, evokes mingled, sometimes conflicting, always engaged voices of Dickens and Disraeli, Mill and Gaskell, Ruskin and Arnold and George Eliot--and above all, of Thomas Carlyle. For it was Carlyle more than any other, more even than Marx and Engels, who defined condition-of-England question in mid-nineteenth century and then compelled his contemporaries to consider it; it was Carlyle who provided language with which to consider it. Though Judt never says so, his powerful book Carlylean to core, never more so than when he inveighs against state's abandonment of moral obligation in favor of a neutral cash nexus between person and person, or when he writes scathingly that politically speaking, ours an age of pygmies (165). The British House of Commons in 2010, says Judt, is a sad sight: a parlor of placemen, yes-men and professional camp-followers--at least as bad as it was in 1832, last time it was forcibly overhauled and its 'representatives' expelled from their sinecure; United States Senate, once a bulwark of republican constitutionalism, has declined to a pretentious, dysfunctional parody of its original self (164). …