Gladstone Studies

Charting recent ‘turns’ in history, towards empathy and ethics, this paper proposes reading Mayhew as a writer. The entry point proposed is Mayhew's What to Teach and How to Teach It: So that the Child may become a Wise and Good Man (1842), a book that charts Mayhew's theories of literacy and language, and of voice and writing.     

Work,Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London

Mayhew's understanding of work in London has not been considered a great success. His accounts of workers were sentimental and erratic and his ambivalence to political economy prevented him from fully understanding the relationship between work and poverty. As the century progressed, it was Marx and Booth who provided systematic and sustained studies of the labour question. However, as this article argues, the circulation of facts, moral judgements and guesswork that filled the pages of London Labour and the London Poor offers a fair representation of a metropolitan manufacturing economy that was characterized by uncertainty, speculation and shifting boundaries of capital and labour. In particular, Mayhew's demonization of small masters, the working poor who set up as independent producers and whom he blamed for over-competition, drew out a contradiction in contemporary understandings of capitalism: large-scale capital and well-organized labour were seen as progressive and modern but small businesses were flexible and adaptable and were for many the only hope of escaping poverty and breaking out of the ranks of labour. As such, it is Mayhew rather than Marx or Booth that best exposes the tensions between the aspirations of the working poor and the paradigms of social investigators that insisted on distinguishing capital from labour.     

Henry Mayhew at 200 – the ‘Other’ Victorian Bicentenary

The New Agenda introduction puts forward the case for a much-needed revision of the scholarship devoted to Henry Mayhew – journalist and wit, playwright, co-founder of Punch, educational writer, novelist for children, travel writer, hack, social explorer and author of London Labour and the London Poor. It argues for a more intertextual and contextual reading of his major and minor works, and presents the articles contained in this new agenda special issue. The complex publishing history of Henry Mayhew's work and of London Labour and the London Poor in particular are explored in part one. The second part surveys the scholarship so far devoted to Mayhew and sketches out a new agenda for research based on a wider intratextual and intertextual approach to Mayhew's corpus. It is time, the introduction urges, for Victorianists to revisit Henry Mayhew.     

Utopia Fading: Taxonomies,Freedom and Dissent in Open Access Publishing

This essay focuses on some of Mayhew's interviews in London Labour and the London Poor, and especially his interview with one coster-girl. Do these sources express the lived experience of a speaking subject; or do they merely rehearse contemporary cultural and linguistic codes? There is no subject without language; language precedes and determines the subject, but nor is there language without subjects. Language exists only insofar as individuals and groups utilize it, reproduce it and transform it – and always within specific social relations and networks of power and in a relentlessly material world. Mayhew's writings provide a wonderful resource to explore some of these complex struggles over meaning – in a precise time and place.     

A Review of “Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency,the Supreme Court,and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History”

In 1974 David Mayhew proposed that incumbency was increasingly important in deciding elections to the House of Representatives. One cause of this increase, he speculated, might be more effective use of the resources of office by incumbents bent on improving their electoral position. These suggestions heavily influenced subsequent research on congressional elections, and helped shape the design of the 1978 national election survey by Michigan's Center for Political Studies. This essay surveys that line of research, except for the recent articles making use of the 1978 data or dealing specifically with campaigning, which will be treated in a sequel. Full length books, articles before Mayhew's, and unpublished papers are excluded, except for certain works of particular relevance.     

‘What say you to free trade in literature?’ The Thief and the Politics of Piracy in the 1830s

Between 1832 and 1834, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett produced a weekly twopenny paper called The Thief. As its title suggested, this publication consisted of articles, stories and illustrations extracted, condensed and brazenly stolen from other periodicals, magazines, newspapers and books. Modelled on the format of Le Voleur, an early paper of Émile de Girardin, the great innovator of French popular journalism, scholars of Mayhew have generally treated The Thief as inconsequential hack work, if they even mention it at all. This essay, the first analysis of the paper itself, argues that The Thief is less ‘throwaway’ than it first appears. In satirical fashion, the paper used the methods of the radical press to critique the ‘liberal values’ of useful knowledge and free trade. Mayhew's involvement with The Thief connected him with a vibrant radical underground print culture. Moreover, in its suspicion of middle-class liberalism and of the rhetoric of free trade, The Thief set the thematic tone for much of Mayhew's later work.     

RACE AND ANIMAL‐BREEDING: A HYBRIDIZED HISTORIOGRAPHY

Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.     

Enacting a Local Reform in the Age of Reform: A Salary for the Chairman of Middlesex Sessions

This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made from 1833 to 1842 by Middlesex's justices of the peace to obtain a local statute allowing them to pay a salary to their chairman. Instead of securing such an act, they had to settle for a statute enacted by the government, a statute authorising the government to appoint their chairman for judicial proceedings. The article uses the story of Middlesex's attempt to obtain a salary for the chairman to examine: justices' attempts to reform the office of chairman of county Sessions; the limited powers of justices in their county Sessions; and the centralising aspirations of central government. The statute that the government produced in 1844 originated as a public bill. In contrast, the statute that Middlesex had attempted to obtain originated as private bills. The statute enacted by the government contained defects that probably would not have marred a statute enacted under the rules governing private bills. So, this article uses the legislative misadventures of the government's bill to compare the procedures for enactment of public and private bills. The article therefore provides a case study of mid‐19th‐century legislative procedures governing enactment of local legislation, while arguing that, as of the mid 19th century, parliament had not developed procedures appropriate to both representative government and a centralising central government using public bills for local matters.     

The history of econometric ideas. Historical perspectives in modern economics

This article presents a comparative analysis of the concepts of totalitarian democracy and positive liberty in the work of Jacob Leib Talmon and Isaiah Berlin. Its main purpose is to show that a combined analysis of Talmon and Berlin's biographical relationship and their individual texts demonstrates that Talmon's idea of totalitarian democracy may have had a greater influence on Berlin's notion of positive liberty than Berlin seems to have ever acknowledged. The article first summarises the intellectual and biographical relationships that tied these two authors together in a personal friendship and an intellectual fellowship that lasted for more than three decades. In the second part, the insights drawn from the investigation of the authors' intellectual and biographical relationships are linked to an analysis of their texts, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Two Concepts of Liberty. Finally, in the third part of the article, three crucial aspects of Talmon's definition of totalitarian democracy are considered: the interpretation of the Enlightenment and Rousseau's thought, the view of the French revolution, and the possible impact each of these has on subsequent Marxist and socialist reflection, to see how they are addressed in Berlin's idea of positive liberty.     

Erdoğan’s pragmatism and the ascension of AKP in Turkey: Islam and neo‐Ottomanism

This article aimed to analyze the ascension of Justice and Development Party—Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (AKP)—in Turkey and its political measures regarding both Islam and the country's Ottoman past, in order to comprehend the party's role in a potential shift of Turkish national identity and in Turkey's relationship with the Middle East. The article does this through a content analysis of decrees, laws, and other measures taken by the AKP that emphasizes its cultural and religious policies, as well as revisiting literature produced about the subject. Analyzing Recep Tayyip Erdo?an's government during his time as Prime Minister (2003–2014), two noteworthy features come to light: its Islamic influence and its so‐called neo‐Ottomanist outlook. However, this article argues that besides an identity‐ and ideology‐based motivation, the AKP had pragmatic intentions in adopting such approaches, aiming to gather support both domestically and regionally.     

Widows’ Men: The Admiralty Board,Precedent, and Pensions for the Widows of the Lost Franklin Expedition

When the British Admiralty announced in January, 1854 that it intended to strike the names of the officers of Sir John Franklin's missing polar expedition off the active Navy List, it had years of legal precedent to support its right to do so. The Board used such precedent to its advantage in ending a search its members had considered fruitless since 1849, the year the expedition's food would have run out. However, in their treatment of the widows made from that decision, Board members consistently pushed against established practice in order to do what they felt was right: to give the widows as generous a pension as the Treasury would approve, and to do so in defiance of the strict rules of eligibility. In 1844, only months before Franklin and 128 men set forth to discover the Northwest Passage, new eligibility guidelines were set that both limited women's access to pensions, and hampered the Board's ability to grant them. Archival evidence that forms the core of this article shows, however, that compassionate treatment of the expedition's widows was central to all discussions of how the Admiralty might move forward on the Franklin disaster, between promoting officers in absentia in order to augment pensions, to waiving the need for proving the date of death in order for families to collect the explorers’ back pay. As this article argues, the 1854 Admiralty Board had powerfully split loyalties: on the one hand, as the press acknowledged, the Board had a duty to perform on behalf of the public, to avoid wasting the nation's money on frivolous or useless searches for men assumed to be long dead; on the other hand, it felt equally strongly the obligation to support those widows who were the product of such imperial adventuring, even in defiance of its own rules. Through an analysis of legal precedent, Naval Instructions, and private Admiralty Board documents, in the case of the Franklin expedition's widows one can perceive a few naval administrators who tried to keep some of the nation's most vulnerable citizens in view even as they managed the bottom line.     

The Pepys Apocalypse (Cambridge,Magdalene College,MS Pepys 1803) and the readership of religious women

In 1405 Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, rebelled against Henry IV and was executed. He has been seen by historians as being easily led into rebelling against the king by other rebels and also as rather a fool. Although it survives in no contemporary copy, a Manifesto containing 10 charges against Henry's government was attributed to the archbishop by contemporaries. Contemporary chroniclers and historians alike have disparaged this document as having little to do with political reality and as such reflects the simple-mindedness of its author; Archbishop Scrope. This article discusses six of the charges (grouped in pairs) contained in various versions of the Manifesto that centre on Henry IV's alleged abuses of government, specifically: 1 and 2) that the king had oppressively taxed both his lay and clerical subjects; 3 and 4) that the king had replaced experienced government officials with new men who had lined their pockets and that the king had subverted the appointment to the office of sheriff; finally 5 and 6) that he subverted the selection process for knights of the shire and subverted their rights to ‘act freely’ in parliament. The article demonstrates that the archbishop's charges were not ‘naïve nonsense’ but reflected political reality and resonated with those who read them.     

Sovereignty,mercy, and natural law: King James VI/I and Jean Bodin

ABSTRACT

The affinities between Jean Bodin's and King James VI/I's political theories have been recognized, and the fact that James had owned Bodin's Six livres de la république has been recorded, but Bodin's specific influence on James has remained nebulous. This article examines the evidence for James's direct engagement with Bodin, by studying James's copy of the Six livres alongside James's political treatises. It provides substantial new archival evidence for Bodin's influence on James's political thought and, thereby, on Scottish and English theories of sovereignty.     

Roland Barthes's Soirées de Paris : An alternative view of Parisian night life

This article concerns Roland Barthes's posthumously published Soirées de Paris , a text comprising a series of diary entries dating from the period shortly before the author's death. The article discusses the critical reception of this work in terms of two extreme positions; the first is that the publication of this text is an immoral act of voyeurism, whilst the second is that this text reveals the 'true' homosexual Barthes who was for so long repressed. The article does not concur with either of these views, but argues instead that Barthes's Soirées de Paris does not break radically with his previously published works, but rather develops and continues many of the main themes of his earlier writings, in particular the autobiographical preoccupations to which he had recently turned.     

Malaysia — democracy and the end of ethnic politics?

In this article I discuss Malaysia's turning point moments – the March 8^th General Election and the August 26th by-election which respectively saw the opposition's ascendancy and Anwar Ibrahim's political comeback. The opposition's ability to gain an ‘optimum multiethnic consensus’ had denied the incumbent of its unbroken two-thirds majority win. Its coalition arrangement was presented as a credible alternative to the 51 year-old winning but increasingly fractured coalition of the incumbent. In the final analysis a combination of a dwindling economy, the Abdullah-versus-Anwar leadership factor and the new media was what provided the major push for the swing. The article ends by posing various questions about the future of Malaysia's characteristic ethnic vote, the possibility of an emerging two-party system and of a probable Malaysia under Anwar Ibrahim.

     

4. NEOLIBERALISM THROUGH FOUCAULT'S EYES

Michael Foucault's 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on the birth of biopolitics are increasingly read as the most lucid introduction to neoliberal policies. This article invites us to be cautious about such claims by exploring one rather obvious point: these lectures also—and perhaps most important—reflect Foucault's very distinctive and contemporary preoccupations. In 1978, Foucault wrote and thought about three topics that were, in his view, crucial: the idea of “critique” and the influence of Kant; Foucault's project for an “analytical philosophy of politics”; and the crisis of disciplinary society, notably as it related to sexuality. This paper shows that these preoccupations had a profound impact on Foucault's interest in neoliberalism. As a result, the interpretation of the neoliberal revolution proposed in these brilliant lectures is, if not idiosyncratic, at the very least highly partial.     

Australia's diplomatic asylum initiative at the United Nations: comparing international law rhetoric with foreign policy practice

In 1974, Australia took the initiative to have an item on diplomatic asylum inscribed on the UN General Assembly's agenda for that year. Its original ambition was to procure an international treaty on the subject. This article traces the history of that initiative from its inception to the acknowledgement seven years later that it had come to nothing. It also investigates the impact that Australia's initiative at the UN had on its foreign policy practice in relation to diplomatic asylum through two administrations: the Whitlam government (5 December 1972–11 November 1975) and the Fraser government (11 November 1975–11 March 1983). It demonstrates that, while the initiative generated a great deal of bureaucratic work, it wrought no real change in Australia's practice on the ground.