John Owen and John Locke: confessionalism,doctrinal minimalism,and toleration

ABSTRACT

The present article compares John Locke’s and John Owen’s approaches to toleration. Owen, a towering figure of the Puritan revolution and a Protestant scholastic whose work is still the object of significant appreciation in Reformed circles, was Locke’s dean during his time as a student in Oxford. There is a number of treatises on toleration by Owen, especially during the mid-1640s, and later again after the Restoration, in his role as a nonconforming divine. There has also been some speculation regarding the involvement of both Owen and Locke in the circle around Shaftesbury. Together with their writings against Parker and Stillingfleet, this would seem to draw Owen and Locke quite close to each other. Both authors are, however, divided in their approach to Christian doctrine: Owen represents classical confessionalism and Locke modern doctrinal minimalism. The article explores the ways in which these oppositional approaches to doctrine relate to their views of toleration.     

‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

Liberal Evolutionism and the Satirical Ape

This article considers intersections between the doctrines of mid-Victorian liberalism and biological evolution using 1860s caricatures and satires from Punch. In the years following the 1859 publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, caricatures featuring satirical apes illustrated mutually supportive cultural attitudes about politics and science. Ideas of character united the discourses of mid-Victorian evolutionism with liberalism, and the confluence of these ideas, or what I term liberal evolutionism, dramatized this overlap for Victorian culture. My project shows that the apes depicted in Punch were often intended as not only whimsical responses to the theories put forward by Darwin and Mill, they also point to the formation of the British subject.     

The long road to religious toleration: Emeric Crucé predecessor of the enlightenment

ABSTRACT

Le Nouveau Cynée has been neglected and little cited by Anglo-American historians of political thought, and its author, Emeric Crucé, considered a secondary figure and nearly forgotten. Why is he largely ignored if his book offers the broadest notion of toleration of its time, along with new and original proposals to make peace and organize the world without distinction as to religion and race? Indeed, his peace plan compared with Sully’s, Saint-Pierre’s or Leibniz’s was the only one not addressed exclusively to Christians, but which incorporated all kinds of people, no matter what their religion was. And he did so at a time when the Turks were considered by Christian kings to be their natural enemies, since their threat to Christianity was constant. Besides, his concept of toleration goes beyond that of the so-called champions of toleration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Locke, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Rousseau or Kant. Thus, he can be regarded, along with Spinoza, as one of the most tolerant authors prior to Enlightenment.     

‘Discipline and Interference’: Ruskin's Political Economy,Natural Law,and the Moral Disorder of Victorian England

When Ruskin turned from art and architectural studies towards political economy in the late 1850s works such as Unto This Last, Munera Pulveris and Time and Tide met with negative critical reactions. In these works he attempted to restore to the language of Victorian political economy the moral content which, he argued, had been lost since the time of Adam Smith, under a cloak of misleading scientific terminology associated with utilitarian ‘orthodox political economy’. In doing so, he resorted to pre-Enlightenment sources of political and economic practice. His study of classical, Biblical, medieval and selected renaissance texts led him to gradually embrace older natural law arguments which contrasted sharply with the assumptions of post-Enlightenment positivist forms of natural law and science. These older and more organic natural law based understandings informed the principles by which he established his ideas on economics as well as his late social experiment, the Guild of St George. The charter and oath of the Guild illustrates how Ruskin's early upbringing in the Protestant Evangelical tradition was replaced by a more comprehensive natural law tradition of ethics.     

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small. Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career. On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.     

Editorial

For John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, and their later Victorian respondents, the Stoic writer and second-century CE Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius represented a test-case for the sufficiency of the ostensibly masculine practices of askesis and detachment as ethical ideals, specifically in the context of Christianity. A brief passage in Mill's On Liberty (1859) comparing Stoic ethics with Christian ethical practice provoked an extended response from Arnold in an 1863 review essay. Mill and Arnold both used comparisons with Christianity to trace the contours and to explore the limits of Marcus Aurelius's ‘lovable’ nature; in doing so, Arnold in particular enacted a peculiar kind of historical sympathy for both the Marcus Aurelius that was and for a missed rapprochement between classical and Christian ethics. For a series of later writers, including freethinkers, religious conservatives and liberal Christians, Marcus Aurelius either promised or threatened to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity. Assessing the emperor in the light of Christianity became a means both for producing or denying a link to the classical past and for describing the condition of Christianity in England. A key point of contention for these writers and a landmark in the broader debate over Victorian secularization was the question of Marcus Aurelius' role in the torture and killing of 48 Christians at Lugdunum (Lyons) in 177 CE.     

Milton’s Euripides and the superior rationality of the heathen

ABSTRACT

If arguments have always been made either that Milton maintains the primacy of the Bible over classical literature, or that he often presents classical sentiments as congruent with the biblical, one claim that has rarely been made is that Milton is willing to assert the truth of classical literature over that of the Bible. This article argues that there are moments in the canon that show him capable of doing precisely this, with particular reference to the invocation of his favourite Greek dramatist, Euripides. The article considers Milton’s reading and interpretation of Euripides in his early poetry and prose, before examining more closely the citation of Euripides in two of the prose works which bear heavily on the question of how politically and religiously radical Milton was: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and De Doctrina Christiana. The turn to Euripidean authority over the biblical reveals Milton’s willingness to subject Scripture to the test of pagan wisdom, if he judges that wisdom to have superior claims to rationality. This willingness derives from the development of his ethical thought in the 1630s and early 1640s, and from his understanding of classical, patristic and contemporary authorities, including John Selden.     

John Banville’s “monstrous child”: freedom and inheritance in Shroud

ABSTRACT

John Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) – a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death – as his “monstrous child” that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida’s thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity – that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past – into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a “monstrous child”.     

Reappraising Walter Bagehot's Liberalism: Discussion,Public Opinion,and the Meaning of Parliamentary Government

Summary

This article offers a novel and comprehensive account of Walter Bagehot's political thought. It ties together an interpretation of Bagehot's liberal commitment to norms of discussion and deliberation, with an analysis of Bagehot's extensive arguments about the institutions of representative government. We show how Bagehot's opposition to American-style presidentialism, to parliamentary democracy, and to proportional representation were profoundly shaped by his conceptions of government by discussion, and the rule of public opinion. Bagehot's criticisms of English parliamentarianism, both of its pre-1832 and post-1832 varieties were also motivated by those principles, as was his own proposal for parliamentary reform. By examining the whole range of Bagehot's writings on representative government (not merely his preference for parliamentarianism over presidentialism) and by connecting his institutional recommendations to his liberal principles, we are also able to better clarify Bagehot's position in Victorian political thought. The article concludes with a discussion of the debate leading up to the Second Reform Act, in which we elucidate Bagehot's disagreements with other prominent exponents of liberalism including John Stuart Mill, the “university liberals,” and Robert Lowe.     

Alexis de Tocqueville,John Stuart Mill,and the Modern Debate on the Enlightenment

This article discusses Tocqueville’s and Mill’s views of the cultural progress of indigenous colonial societies in the context of the current debate about the Enlightenment. The analysis of their philosophical outlooks tends to support Jonathan Israel’s interpretation of the Enlightenment, yet with one important difference: while Israel emphasizes the Radical Enlightenment as the chief instigator of the movement towards modern democracy, Tocqueville’s and Mill’s views emphasize the preponderance of the Moderate Enlightenment, which, while sharing the radical advocacy for rationalism, broad education, religious toleration, the critique of despotism, and other enlightened ideals, nonetheless shunned support of full democracy or universal suffrage. Tocqueville’s and Mill’s Eurocentric views regarding the possible ameliorative influence of colonialism emphasize how the ideals of the Moderate Enlightenment had an overriding effect on the emergence of nineteenth-century liberalism. While this conclusion broadly accepts Israel’s outline of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, it gives greater weight than he does to the Moderate Enlightenment.     

Spiritedness,Reason, and the Founding of Law and Order: John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Abstract

John Ford's 1962 classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, analyzes the difficulties inherent in founding a new political order based on the rule of law. Some critics have concluded that the film mordantly portrays the closing of the frontier, the tragic loss of the rugged individualism it promoted (represented by Tom Doniphon), and the ascendance in its place of a fraudulent political class (represented by Ransom Stoddard), while exposing that even free societies are founded on crime. Yet, as others have argued, Doniphon also represents the spirited part of the Platonic tripartite soul, revealing spiritedness's ambiguous relation to justice: he refuses to fight unless personally threatened; perpetuates servitude, if not slavery; and shows no interest in promoting equality of women. Doniphon stands in opposition to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, pointedly recited at the film's chronological center, and his eclipse by Stoddard is not a tragic mistake. In addition, John Locke's state of nature teaching unlocks why Valance's death is not a crime that sullies the foundations of the society. Finally, the legend told as fact at the film's conclusion combines both men into a single entity, “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” thereby propagating a salutary lesson for future citizens: reason must combine with and rule over spiritedness if law and order are to prevail.     

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot,Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

This article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature (1800), but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention.     

Tradition and Reform: Aristotle’s Response to Modern Alternatives

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to articulate an Aristotelian alternative to two prominent contemporary ways of understanding human freedom and dependence on the past, and to the implications these understandings have for political life. While a liberal tendency, following Machiavelli’s emphasis on new modes and orders, understands political life to begin with breaking from the past, the more conservative camp in modern thought, following Burke in his emphasis on tradition, understands political life to begin with laws and customs inherited from the past. Aristotle’s teaching in his Nicomachean Ethics on the freedom and responsibility that make human beginnings possible points us, I propose, to a better understanding of political founding than either modern alternative. In the Politics, he connects the city to natural beginnings in the family but also calls the first who founded a city one “responsible for the greatest of goods” (Pol. 1253a31-32). And in the Ethics, he offers his own founding of a way of inquiring about politics, which engages with his predecessors, as a model for politics itself. In this way, Aristotle offers us a deeper understanding of political founding and change, even presenting his own philosophic inquiry in the Ethics as its ground and model.     

‘The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life’: Lewis Carroll and Victorian Psychiatric Practice

An analysis of the numerous connections of Lewis Carroll to the Victorian psychiatric profession reveals their influence on the portrayal of insanity in Carroll’s fiction. Through examining his relationship with his uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, a Commissioner in Lunacy, and collating Carroll’s personal recollections from diaries and letters with correspondences of the Lunacy Commission, this article offers a comprehensive picture of Carroll’s intellectual engagement with Victorian psychiatry. Combining these insights with his literary writings illuminates the psychiatric origins of the ‘Mad Tea-Party’ and characters such as the Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the organization and methods of mid-Victorian pauper lunatic asylums and their treatment of impoverished workers. Likewise, the illustrations of Carroll’s works stood in dialogue with popular imagery of insanity as well as ideas of physiognomy and their diagnostic application in asylum photography by Hugh Welch Diamond. This piece will argue that the framework of Victorian psychiatry provided Carroll with imagery he utilizes to satirize aspects of Victorian moral values. It thus aims to highlight the benefits of re-framing the works of Lewis Carroll beyond the genre children’s literature, and considering them as part of the wider Victorian discourse of the sciences of the mind.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

Robert,earl of Gloucester,and the daughter of Zelophehad

Robert, earl of Gloucester, the leader of Mathilda's party in England during Stephen's reign, has a good press because the main source for his activities is his admirer, William of Malmesbury. This article re-assesses Robert's role and character by concentrating on chroniclers other than Malmesbury and on charter evidence. It finds, by these methods, that Earl Robert may have been in some ways an attractive man, but that he was also a practised curialist, a ruthless factionalist, a plunderer of church lands, and a man who made acquisition of his neighbours' lands one of his main objects. New evidence is presented to account for his behaviour in the crucial months at the end of 1135 and beginning of 1136 when Stephen made himself king. Robert is found to have had little choice but to cross to England because his lands in the southern Marches were under threat from a Welsh rising. His alienation from Stephen in the next few years is traced to a failure at court against his rivals, the Beaumont group. His subsequent private war against the Beaumonts in Dorset and Worcestershire is further evidence against Malmesbury 's portrayal of him as a man of pure principle. conduct of the war against Stephen after 1139 can be shown to have had serious flaws. The result was a rebellion against him by his own sons and the repudiation of his methods (if not his acquisitions) by his successor Earl William. Evidence is presented that Earl William sparked off the movement amongst the magnates to draw up private treaties to contain the Anarchy. In view of all this, it is not surprising to find indications that Earl Robert lacked any real commitment to the claims of his half-sister, the empress.     

Nudges and the limits of appropriate interference: reading backwards from J.S. Mill’s harm principle to Jeremy Bentham’s indirect legislation

ABSTRACT

The starting point of the present paper is the nudge phenomenon. The most disturbing element of nudge is its potential for individual manipulation, that is, for relying on initiatives that go beyond the acceptable limits of interference in individual choice. This feature is not ignored by nudge advocates, who discuss it extensively to justify the overriding benefits of such initiatives. In this discussion, they acknowledge the seminal importance of J.S. Mill’s harm principle, which is introduced in On Liberty. Academics without hidden agendas must look into Mill’s theories from an intellectual history perspective and study to what extent Mill’s harm principle lends support to the interference of government and society in private lives. This paper first unveils some contradictions in the interpretation of Mill’s harm principle in order to show that it is an unlikely source of philosophical justification for nudge proponents. The paper argues further that Mill was familiar with Jeremy Bentham’s writings on indirect legislation, presented in the Traités de legislation civile et pénale. It pinpoints elements of indirect legislation that are discussed by Mill in On Liberty, without ever naming them as such. The paper contends that Mill’s presentation of the harm principle can be read as a discussion with Bentham in relation to the appropriate limits of government intervention in people’s lives. This double reading of Mill and Bentham through the lens of indirect legislation makes it possible to pinpoint the main differences between the authors as regards the appropriate degree of government interference. Bentham’s theories appear to be a more appropriate source of philosophical justification for the use of nudges than Mill’s harm principle.     

Recovering Republican Eloquence: John Cheke versus Stephen Gardiner on the Pronunciation of Greek

Abstract

The controversy over Greek pronunciation at Cambridge University in 1542, principally between university chancellor Stephen Gardiner and regius professor of Greek John Cheke, marked the emergence of not only the linguistic but also the political agenda of the mid-Tudor Cambridge humanists. This important group included future statesmen and political thinkers such as William Cecil, later Elizabeth's famous minister, Thomas Smith, author of De republica anglorum, and John Ponet, leading exponent of ‘resistance theory’. In the 1542 Greek controversy Cheke and his allies advocated the restoration of an ancient pronunciation they saw as having been the medium of eloquence in the Athenian republic. Their concepts of language provide a template for their political concepts: both language and political structures are generated by the community, reflective of the community's particular character, susceptible to change and capable of improvement. Throughout their subsequent careers and especially in the reign of Edward VI, when their influence was at its height, these humanists fostered a ‘monarchical republican’ politics; it involved rhetorical persuasion as the main mode of political action, programmes of religious and economic reform, and popular consent as an important factor in the good governance of the commonwealth.     

From practice to theory to practice: William Penn from prison to the founding of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for toleration in Restoration England. The broader political theory that Penn articulated in England and attempted to realize in Pennsylvania contained economic, political, social, legal, and religious components, worked out in drafts of founding documents over the course of many months. But the foundation of that theory – its unshakeable commitment to liberty of conscience, its faith in juries as a potential restraint on the arbitrary exercise of power by civil governors, its unsteady mix of principled and pragmatic underpinnings – was laid in Penn’s early years as a Quaker, intertwined with his experiences of imprisonment in England and Ireland. In a very real sense, then, the road to Pennsylvania, for Penn, began in the Cork prison 15 years before he set foot in America.