Reviewed by: A Political Biography of John Toland by Michael Brown Al Coppola Michael Brown. A Political Biography of John Toland. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Pp. viii + 196. £60; $99. Say what you will about John Toland, you have to love a sonofabitch who, racked with pain and retching on his deathbed at 52, could find the strength to write Physic without Physicians “by fits and starts in [his] intervals of up-sitting.” A scalding indictment of the medical establishment’s unwarranted authority, it attacks the obfuscations, pretensions and malfeasance that prop up a profession whose art, he says, is “founded in darkness and improved by murder.” This is just the kind of anecdote we love to get in a biography: a little local color, a glimpse into the mind of a literary figure who might otherwise be all too easily collapsed into the sum of a few influential ideas in a few influential works. The petty resentments that sustain a deathbed curmudgeon, the preoccupations of a great writer’s obscure ephemera—these are the details that put flesh on the bone of biography. But to Mr. Brown’s credit, this anecdote (which leads off his fine, provocative biography) serves as so much more. The dying Toland’s grousing about doctors is in fact a key to the corpus of this famous, and famously mercurial and ambiguous, freethinker. Physic without Physicians (1722), as much as his notorious Christianity not Mysterious (1696), betrays a fundamental and thoroughgoing distrust of clerisy, whether religious, political, or professional, and the means by which insiders consolidate their power by obscuring and perverting plain truths. Indeed, Mr. Brown is at pains in this political biography to integrate the variety and profusion of Toland’s oeuvre and life under the shelter of a few simple and largely persuasive ideas. As he writes in the polemical introduction (that is itself worth the book’s price), “Toland conceptualized the world in terms of parties and networks, not social groups and economic transformation. These parties often hid their agendas and operations from public view; knowledge elites emerged consisting of those in the know, whose interests lay in the perpetuating of an infrastructure of power and keeping the public in the dark about the actual causes of the events that shaped their lives. Extending this interpretation across society from the church to the state, Toland became a conspiracy theorist.” This is something like a Tin-Foil-Hat Enlightenment: after all, “conspiracy theorist” is an anachronistic label that one associates with angry bloggers in basement bunkers. As a matter of fact, Brown embraces the anachronism of his approach, drawing his chief theoretical framework from Richard Hofstadter’s study of Mc-Carthyism, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). This anachronism proves strikingly useful for making sense of the whole of Toland’s oeuvre, and not [End Page 74] just the chief philosophical and theological works, the caustic wit and slippery rhetoric of which have saved them from obscurity. Toland’s life was “shaped by a commitment to overthrow the conspiracy he identified at play within the church, and thus to complete the political revolution he associated with the Williamite War by extending it to spiritual affairs. . . . Toland did much to promulgate the idea that politics is structured by power, self-interest and deceit. His body of work constitutes a conspiracy theory concerning the corruption of liberty by the malevolent forces of arbitrary government and spiritual orthodoxy.” Mr. Brown persuasively argues that To-land has been wrongly embraced as a “post-modern figure” by recent critics like Justin Champion and Stephen Daniel, whom he tasks for recasting Toland as a proto-post-structuralist, a “1960’s French intellectual, playful, ironic, erudite, and elusive.” Mr. Brown’s biography pays just as much attention to Toland’s extensive pamphleteering and his remarkably energetic application to the life of the courtier, the diplomat, and perhaps even the spy, a career that, at every turn, Mr. Brown shows to be animated by a signature suspicion of cabals and behind-the-scenes manipulation. This is, after all, a political biography. No one who committed himself so fully to eighteenth-century politics, and no one who took...
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May 18, 2024
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