Nineteenth-century Liberalism Research Articles

The geology of railway embankments: Celticity, Liberalism, the Oxford Welsh reforms, and the word order(s) of Welsh

Language reform movements of nineteenth century Wales derived from philological traditions that combined apparently contradictory professional commitments to language reform which were, at the same time, grounded in a model of language that held that language change was fundamentally asocial and natural. The Oxford Welsh movement used linguistic facts about ‘Celtic’ (VSO) and ‘Non-Celtic’ (SVO) word orders to construct genealogies of authentic Celticity in both political and linguistic fields to naturalize their linguistic reforms and broader political projects and authorize them against the equally naturalizing laissez-faire principles of nineteenth century Liberalism and print culture.

Sir Keith Joseph and the undoing of British conservatism

With the British Conservative Party in crisis, the survival of conservative ideology has come into question. Recent publications by John Gray and Robert Eccleshall have inadvertently added to the confusion which seems inseparable from this most contestable of ideological terms, by failing consistently to distinguish the party from the ideology . The debate will always lack clarity unless some distinction is made. The authors analyse the political ideas of Sir Keith Joseph, in the belief that the terms of debate between Gray and Eccleshall have been too abstract. Although no individual can prove a general thesis, Joseph was both a senior politician and a respected thinker, making him a more representative figure than those usually cited in this context. Joseph's ideas can only be satisfactorily explained by reference to the tradition of nineteenth-century British liberalism. His career provides persuasive evidence in support of Gray's thesis that contemporary British conservatism is 'hollowed out'.

Making liberalism durable: Vision and civility in the late Victorian city

Recent scholarship on nineteenth-century liberalism has utilized Foucault's idea of 'govern-mentality' to examine how liberal ideas of the free subject, society and economy, through which the state generated its wealth and well-being, were used as modes of rule. Here, two possibly neglected aspects of this project are analysed: first, the material rebuilding necessary to make cities key sites for liberal rule, and second, how the subjects' visual capacities were particularly implicated in this spatial reordering. Liberal society was often conceptualized visually--civil conduct had to be open to free, mutual inspection, which could not occur in cramped, tangled spaces. This article explores three material technologies introduced to embed and make durable these civil, visual conditions. Smoke-abatement systems aimed to make urban air transparent and salubrious; plate-glass foregrounded the visual at the expense of the auditory and olfactory; and new paving technology aimed at securing the salience of the visual by muffling sound. However, their success was circumscribed by several factors, which lead to a series of conclusions. Matter's brute resistance suggests that historians perhaps need to address the material agency of infrastructure and the role of maintenance in securing the form of the liberal city while, as analysis of smoke-abatement shows, there was some ambivalence towards visuality within bourgeois sensibility itself.

Conquered Non-Knowledge: Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush

This analysis of Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrushemploys philosophical categories borrowed from the works of Herbert Spencer and Karl Jaspers. Thomas Hardy, although he did not attempt to base his poetry on a systematic philosophy, was well-versed in eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism, positivism, liberalism and evolutionism. He was familiar with Herbert Spencer's philosophy of the Unknowable. Herbert in the 1860scriticised religious theories for the assumption that ultimate reality can be known. He conceived the Unknowable as a constituent part of the universe. Spencer's category was echoed in Hardy's frequent use of the privative prefix, as in the titles Unknowing, The Self-Unseeing, Self-Unconscious., Similarly, The Darkling Thrush concludes with the word “unaware”. The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, though from an antagonistic stance, used a similar category when in the 1930s he claimed that “In not-knowing, absolute consciousness becomes a kind of certainty.” The poem was written and published on the very last days of the 19th century, and thus not only records but also represents what Jaspers called a “boundary situation”. Hardy deals with transcendental hope contradicting human reason. The analysis points out that the metrical form of the poem is responsible for certain religious inference. Hardy used the so-called hymnal stanza, the form of popular church hymns by Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Cowper, and John Keeble, all known to Hardy. The effect is further enhanced by the religious connotations of the word “evensong”in stanza four. However, the contrapuntal structure of the poem carefully counterbalances any easy pathos. In the last verse-sentence the subordinate clause in which the word “Hope” occurs is modified by a non-restrictive adverbial clause. The word “unaware”, left nakedly in the final position, challenges the positive note of “Hope” So, although the vigour of the frail bird defies the emptiness of godless existence, the poem ends on a vacuum-effect. Hardy refuses to deify Nature's defiance, but does not deny the chance of Hope. This “conquered nonknowledge”is his reply to unreasoned hope.

The Politics of the Dance Floor: Culture and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

The nineteenth-century Hungarian dance floor provides an invaluable tool for mapping the contours of both an emerging civil society and the political practices of Hungarian nationalism. During the 1840s, consciously “national” costumes, music, dances, and language became de rigueur in all areas of social life, and especially on die dance floor. Because associations and newspapers linked such cultural practices to opposition politics, these balls allowed a large number of men and women usually excluded from public life to display their patriotism and political allegiances. In this way, the diffuse set of ideas, feelings, and allegiances connected witii nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism spread more widely in Hungary. These developments did not occur without conflict, and an examination of debates surrounding the dance floor reveals widely divergent views on participation in civil society and the boundaries of the nation.

The Alchemy of Modernity. Alonso Barba's Copper Cauldrons and the Independence of Bolivian Metallurgy (1790–1890)

Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical … most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance … It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.Goethe, Elective affinities (1809)A linear mode of historical understanding relegated alchemy to a ‘pre-scientific’ era, with the enlightenment's New Chemistry creating a break between ‘empirical’ and ‘scientific’ metallurgies. Similarly, Bolivia's early Republican silver-production has been regarded as ‘stagnant’ and ‘colonial’ from the ‘modern’ perspective of late nineteenth century liberalism. This article questions both periodisations by documenting an ‘alchemical renaissance’ in Bolivian silver-refining methods during the first part of the 19th century. The relaunch of Alonso Barba's ‘hot method’ of amalgamation in copper cauldrons (1609), and its associated technical discourses, expressed a creole desire for an independent ‘modernity’. This rediscovery of a seventeenth century technology, carried out shortly before the Independence War in the Potosí provinces (Chichas), and slightly later in Oruro and Carangas, is distinguished from the version reinvented in Central Europe by Ignaz von Born (1786), as well as from two pre-Bornian experiments in Potosí and New Spain. Its nineteenth century consolidation was, in part, a little-known reaction to Nordenflicht's failure to introduce the new European method of rotating barrels to the Andes during the 1790s. The article shows that this ‘alchemy of modernity’ held its ground for several decades, suggesting a fresh approach to America's postcolonial ambiguities from the perspective of a comparative history of technology.

Millian Liberalism and Colonial Oppression

In nineteenth-century Europe …. [w]ith rare exceptions liberals approved of colonialism and provided it with a legitimizing ideology …. Liberalism became missionary, ethnocentric, and narrow, dismissing non-liberal ways of life and thought as primitive and in need of the liberal civilizing mission.This is the judgement passed by Professor Bhikhu Parekh in his 1994 essay “Decolonizing Liberalism.” His deference to John Stuart Mill is shown in his making Mill not one of the exceptions, but rather the central object of attack. It would seem indeed that if the charges can be made good against Mill they will hold against nineteenth-century liberalism in general, and perhaps in some degree against twenty-first-century liberalism.Simple piety moves me to offer some defence of Mill's own good judgement, particularly in relation to India. But, in dealing with a phenomenon like liberalism, we need always to maintain a distinction which tends to blur. Doctrines and assertions are one thing. Historical movements and trends in a society are another.

Who Deserves Political Influence? How Liberal Ideals Helped Justify Mid Nineteenth-Century Exclusionary Policies

Theory: Too much credit has been given to liberalism as the ideology of inclusion. Moreover, it is an oversimplification to suggest that America's exclusionary policies arose either because liberal ideals were misapplied or because illiberal values such as republicanism or ethnocentrism prevailed. Hypothesis: Neither the theory of misapplied liberalism nor of widespread illiberalism fully explains the ideological origins of America's long-term practice of selective political inclusion. Instead, exclusions and liberalism lived side by side in large part because liberal ideology was a tradition of sufficient ambiguity. Methods: The author looks at a sample of state constitutional conventions held during the first half of the nineteenth century. The author focuses on speeches therein that deal with questions of who should participate in leader selection (and why) and analyzes how answers to that question differ according to the race of whose power is at stake. Results: Debates over how far to empower freemen of African descent verify recent studies which argue that ethnocentric language rationalized political exclusions. In debates over white empowerment, however, those arguing to restrict citizen privileges unequivocally used the language of liberalism to make their case. This suggests that nineteenthcentury liberalism was not just the language of greater empowerment and inclusion; it was dynamic enough to serve as the language of exclusion as well.

Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914

ANY HISTORIAN IN THE FIELD OF modern European or American history sooner or later must confront one of the fundamental paradoxes of the last century: the acquisition and rule by force of colonies by the most advanced democracies, the United States, France, and Great Britain. Whatever the official claims, Western colonization during this period was in large part an act of state-sanctioned violence. On the crudest level, liberal regimes forcibly pacified native peoples who resisted colonization. On a more subtle level, their rule rested on a set of coercive practices that violated their own democratic values. Colonized persons were designated as subjects, not citizens. They had duties but few rights. In neither case, however, did the conquerors in question seem aware of any contradiction between their democratic institutions and the violent acquisition of overseas colonies. As even those among us who are only tangentially interested in the study of imperialism can attest, the faith of yesterday's empire builders in the moral legitimacy of their enterprise was all but absolute. In this essay, I would like to revisit the issue of Western belief in the moral legitimacy of overseas expansion, through an examination of how one modern democracy-France under the early Third Republic (1870-1914)-rationalized imperialism, both rhetorically and in practice, at the high-water mark of late nineteenth-century liberalism. In particular, this article provides an overview of the actions and ideas of a specific group of colonial administrators-the governors general of the French West African Federation, headquartered in Dakar, Senegalfrom the founding of the federation in 1895 to the advent of World War J.1 It is, of

A Multicultural Continuum: A Critique of Will Kymlicka’s Ethnic‐Nation Dichotomy

In Multicultural Citizenship, Will Kymlicka deepens the line of argument he developed in Liberalism, Community and Culture that recognition of special rights for cultural minorities is compatible with liberalism. The idea that group based rights conflict with liberalism is of recent origin, Kymlicka claims. Many prominent nineteenth century liberals appealed to liberal values of autonomy and equality to defend special rights for cultural minorities, and Kymlicka wishes to appeal to the same values. Contemporary liberals have often been occupied by a perceived conflict between the individual and the collective that they believe group rights create. Such a conflict occurs, however, according to Kymlicka, only if group rights are defined as the right of a collective to regulate the activity of its members in any way it wishes. Claims for such internal rights are much less often voiced in contemporary politics of difference, however, than claims to what Kymlicka calls “external rights,” the rights of a cultural minority to preserve its culture and way of life as against the encroachment or domination of a majority culture. Groupbased external rights do not conflict with the pursuit of individual autonomy. On the contrary, Kymlicka’s central claim is that individual autonomy requires membership in and maintenance of a culture of one’s own, because the choices autonomy entails require a meaningful context that only a culture provides. While it is possible for individuals to leave one culture and acquire another, and some people choose to do so, the process is usually difficult and painful, so no one should be forced to do so because his or her culture has been suppressed or allowed to atrophy. Contrary to the view held by many liberals, moreover, the liberal state cannot be neutral among cultures. A state must conduct business in some language or languages, and it is almost always aligned in many other ways with the majority culture in its jurisdiction. Thus justice requires that public policy actively compensate for the lack of recognition or the disadvantage that some members of the polity suffer because of their cultural membership by according cultural minorities special rights such as language rights, religious-based exemptions, representation rights and rights of self-government. In Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka takes an important new step in a liberal theory of group-based rights. We should distinguish types of cultural minorities,

‘Thinking in Communities’: Late Nineteenth‐Century Liberals, Idealists and the Retrieval of Community

‘Thinking in Communities’: Late Nineteenth‐Century Liberals, Idealists and the Retrieval of Community

Grotius, Vattel, and Locke: An Older View of Liberalism and Nationality

Liberalism is now thought to be particularly inclined toward internationalism, so that international guarantees of human rights are regarded as a quintessentially liberal project. Classical liberal thought had a different view. So Vattel's mid-eighteenth-century Law of Nations, which is much more insistent on individual rights, is also much more sympathetic to national claims than the pre-liberal doctrines of Grotius. Even John Locke's classical liberalism is quite attentive to the claims of nationality. The national element in classical liberal thought remains evident in the thought of the American Founders and in nineteenth-century liberalism.

The intellectual basis of right‐wing anti‐partyism

AbstractThis paper shows the long and prestigious intellectual tradition of anti‐party arguments. Even before political parties emerged as unitary political actors, there were already well‐developed arguments with which to express hostility towards them. The emphasis on unity and harmony in Western civilization moulded political thought. While this cultural framework was broken in the brief but extraordinarily powerful experience of the Medieval Italian Republican Cities, the acceptance of organized dissent failed to emerge. Instead, this experience left the vivid memory of the danger of factionalism. In eighteenth century France, both revolutionaries and counter‐revolutionaries viewed parties as political maladies, and nineteenth century liberalism produced only a diffident defence of parties. At the end of the nineteenth century, hostility towards parties was nurtured in both Germany and France by elevating the ideals of the State and of the Nation. Italian and German fascists drew on and developed these philosophical anti‐party traditions in the 1920s and 1930s. Since 1945, however, few anti‐party parties have developed their own detailed or comprehensive philosophical critiques of parties; the Italian MSI is a notable exception.

Was T. H. Green a Utilitarian?

Was Green a utilitarian? At least two studies suggest that he was, at least in some sense. One claim is inspired by Macpherson's association of nineteenth-century liberalism with utilitarianism. Drawing on this argument, Greengarten and Hansen claim that Green's departure from utilitarianism is only partial. His commitment to capitalism indicates a subscription to utilitarianism since the latter is the justificatory force of capitalist institutions.

The rise and fall of liberal government in Victorian Britain

After a review of the origins of Liberalism before 1830, Parry examines in turn the strategies of successive Liberal leaders from Grey to Gladstone and Hartington. Parry argues that nineteenth-century Liberalism tried to maintain the rule of a propertied but socially diverse, rational, and civilized elite, in the belief that this was the best means to administer the state economically and equitably and to promote an industrious and virtuous citizenship. Because of the widespread popularity of the economic, foreign, and religious policies followed to, this end, and because of the flexible, sometimes cynical, presentational skills of Liberal leaders, the Liberal party became the most popular party for much of the century. After 1867, however, Gladstone's idealist religious temper diverged from the Liberal mainstream and led in 1886 to the destruction of the party as the natural ruling body in England. Liberalism was the dominant political force of Victorian Britain. Between 1830 and 1886 a coalition of anti-Conservatives known at various times as Whigs, Reformers, and Liberals was in office for over forty years and lost only two out of fourteen general elections. This book presents the first modern overview of Liberal government during its nineteenth-century heyday. Arguing that Liberalism was a much more coherent force than has generally been recognized, Jonathan Parry gives an account of its rise and fall, in the process reinterpreting the pattern of political development during this period.

Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism

This paper outlines Foucault's concept of governmentality and argues for its contemporary significance. It focuses upon the role that liberal modes of government accord to the exercise of authority over individual and collective conduct by expertise. The paper argues that nineteenth-century liberalism as a mode of rule produced a series of problems about the governability of individuals, families and markets and populations. Expertise provided a formula for resolving these problems instantiated in a range of complex and heterogenous ‘machines’ for the government of individual and collective conduct. Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one sees the rise of a new formula for the exercise of rule, which one can call ‘the welfare state’ - within which expertise becomes linked to the formal political apparatus in new ways. the strategies of rule generated under this formula of ‘the welfare state’ have changed fundamentally over the last fifty years. A new formula of rule is taking shape, one...

Aristocratic liberalism: the social and political thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville

Although the term 'liberalism' is widely used to describe a variety of social and political ideas, it has been an especially difficult concept for historians to define. Alan Kahan's work makes significant progress toward such a definition by linking three great nineteenth-century thinkers in a single intellectual and ideological tradition he calls 'Aristocratic Liberalism'. An important component of Kahan's contribution is his ability to cross national boundaries to find similarities in the thought of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. None of these thinkers came from aristocratic backgrounds, but they shared a distaste for the masses and middle classes, a fear and contempt of mediocrity, a suspicion of the centralized state, opposition to the commercial spirit, and a deep pessimism about the possibility of implementing their goals in the near future. Kahan concludes by correcting prevalent misconceptions about nineteenth-century liberalism (for example, that it was the representative political movement of the ascendant middle class) and by providing a typology of liberalism that will undoubtedly spark scholarly debate.

The Possible Influence of Montaigne's "Essais" on Descartes' "Treatise of the Passions" (review)

49 ~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 99:3 JULY ~991 Michael G. Paulson. The PossibleInfluence of Montaigne's "Essais" on Descartes'"Treatise of the Passions." Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. Pp. xiii + x23. Cloth, $92.50. Paper, $1o.25 . Descartes surely read Montaigne's Essais, and they doubtless had some influence on his writings. Paulson recapitulates "the resemblances between the Essais and the Discoursde la M~thode: the doubt or scepticism therein, the 'morale provisoire', the general conservatism in their outlook on life, the 'livre du monde', and the general ideas on travel" (13). Through a survey of the secondary literature and by juxtaposing texts from Descartes and Montaigne, Paulson shows that there is "a strong possibility that Montaigne 's Essais served as a source for the Trait~ des Passions" (116). Paulson remarks that Descartes examines the passions "from a theoretical or abstract viewpoint," while Montaigne "prefers to present his reader with concrete examples taken from history" (93)" There are various instances of Descartes using examples and subjects that appear in Montaigne, but there is no instance of Descartes using Montaigne's exact words. So Paulson's thesis is as well supported as the method of putting texts treating similar material side by side allows. Paulson speaks throughout of the Trait~ desPassions when the book was published as Les Passions de l'Ame. Also, Paulson erroneously believes that the Passions was composed for Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, whose biography he gives on p. 23, when in fact Descartes wrote for and was friends with her daughter. This rather undercuts Paulson's claim that Descartes bowdlerized the Essais "in order to make them presentable to Elizabeth Stuart" (loo). Paulson also mistakenly says that the Passions is dedicated to Elizabeth (6), when in fact it is dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University Hiram Caton. The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, i6oo-z835. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 627. Cloth, $49.oo. During the heyday of nineteenth-century liberalism, it was possible to believe in universal history as a science which exhibited a moral progress in human affairs. In this study Caton is proposing nothing less than "a resumption of the universal history project" based on recent work in prehistory, evolutionary biology, and related fields. Unlike Spencer's evolutionary biology, which treated behavior as a dependent variable of social institutions, Caton assumes "the conservation of behaviors on the historical time scale, that is, their resistance to extinction or creation by institutional change" (5). What are these constant behaviors? The social structure of animals is a function of reproductive strategies evolved under the constraint of scarce resources. The social structure of the human species is the family and kinship system, which is about 1.5 million years old. Political structure evolves out of social structure with the appearance of institutions. Institutions enable prodigious effects of group action without modify- ...

Working-Class Interests and the Politics of Social Democratic Reform in Britain, 1900–1940

When nineteenth-century liberals searched for reasons not to enfranchise the lower orders, they most often hit upon the argument that, once given the vote, workers would use it to elect governments pledged to redistribution and welfare at the expense of property. A cursory look at the political history of the twentieth century suggests they were not entirely deluded. Indeed, the most salient facts about political development since 1900 surely are related: The democratization of the political system allowed for the emergence of the working class as a distinct claimant to political power, and its presence within the polity somehow or another stimulated the enormous extension of the social and economic role of the state.

Oscar Lieber: Southern Scientist, Southern Patriot

Oscar Lieber: Southern Scientist, Southern Patriot James O. Breeden Early in my career, I became acquainted with War's Aftermath, written by David Starr Jordan and his son, Henry Ernest Jordan. This pioneer study of the eugenics of the Civil War in America vividly depicts not only the enormity of the conflict's carnage but, even more important, the tragic meaning of the human toll. "In spite of its thousands of examples of heroism and self-sacrifice," the Jordans concluded, "it was plainly a strife between brothers, and a strife in which no one gained through his brother's loss."1 This little-voiced perspective on America's most celebrated conflict was recalled to mind several years ago when, researching the history of southern science, I happened upon, in the University of South Carolina's South Caroliniana Library, the Civil War era correspondence of Oscar Montgomery Lieber and his parents. The contents—the story of a loving family torn apart by the sectional hostilities and the tragic loss of a budding intellectual—poignantly personalize the Jordans's message. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Oscar Lieber was one of the Old South's most promising young scientists. Lieber's intellectual bent in a region where cotton and slaves took precedence over matters of the mind is largely attributable to the influence of his father, Francis Lieber, one of the nineteenth century's best known educators and political philosophers. The elder Lieber was born into a successful Berlin business family in 1798.2 His boyhood was spent in a Europe ravaged by 1 David Starr Jordan and Henry Ernest Jordan, War's Aftermath: A Preliminary Study of the Eugenics of War as Illustrated by the Civil War in the United States and the Late Wars in the Balkans (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 79. 2 The standard biographies of Francis Lieber are Thomas Sergeant Perry, ed., The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1882) and Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1947); see also "Letters written by Francis Lieber to his little son Oscar while the latter was at school in Germany and also a few letters from the little schoolboy to his father," 1-4, Francis Lieber Papers, University of South Carolina Library (hereafter cited as FLSC ); Francis Lieber to Oscar Lieber, June 20, 1843, June 22, 1844, "Letters from South Carolina, from Washington, New York and Boston to his little son Oscar at School in Germany from 1839 to 1844 by Francis Lieber," ibid. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, e 1990 by the Kent State University Press oscar lieber227 Napoleon's wars of conquest. At fifteen, he fought with the Prussian Army during the Waterloo campaign, and received near-fatal wounds at the battle of Namur. After the defeat of Napoleon, the youth returned to his studies. But as a follower of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a leading exponent of Prussian nationalism, he was, in 1819, briefly imprisoned by the repressive monarchy before completing his education at the University of Jena. This eye-opening experience spawned an intense and lifelong hatred of tyranny. It is not surprising, then, that when the Greeks revolted against Turkish occupation and repression in 1821, Lieber rushed to the war zone. The appalling reception of the foreign volunteers and the cowardice and ineptness of the Greek revolutionaries, however, quickly transformed his fervor into disillusionment. Lieber left Greece after only three months and made his way to Italy, arriving penniless and in rags. He was befriended by the Prussian minister and prominent historian of Rome, Barthold Georg Niebuhr. Touched by the youth's misfortunes and impressed with his intelligence, Niebuhr made him tutor to his son. Lieber returned to Berlin in 1823, only to encounter renewed political oppression for his liberal leanings. Even the well-placed Niebuhr could do little to protect him. In 1826, frustrated and disillusioned, Lieber secretly made his way to England. A year later, he sailed for Boston. Life in America was a struggle until Lieber devised a plan for an encyclopedia patterned on Friedrich A. Brockhaus's well-known Conversations -Lexikon, the German...