Response: Re-Living Liberalism

It is a special if also daunting prospect to respond to these reviews, written by three scholars (a literary critic, a political theorist, and a historian) who ably represent the ideal audience I imagined as I wrote this transdisciplinary book, Living Liberalism. I am of course aware of the deafening silence that ordinarily meets scholarly work and thank the editors of Victorian Studies for this opportunity to elongate the arguments of my book in response to such evidently smart readers.

I. They Don't Call Them Disciplines for Nothing

Living Liberalism's synchronic approach invariably encourages readers to ask questions that are raised by the relative absence of diachronic gestures. As a historian, James Vernon misses an account of historical change in a method that is still by and large attached to discursive analysis. As a literary critic, Helen Small wishes for a fuller rendering of a genealogy of style. And as a political theorist, Kirstie McClure puts pressure on the theoretical salience of the cognitive categories I insist on labeling mid-Victorian liberal. I don't mean to pigeonhole these colleagues whose work I deeply value and often cite. I am simply noting that as an ensemble their distinct suggestions confirm that interdisciplinary work is not disciplinary work; it moves between disciplines and thus is likely to fall short of disciplinary norms and excellences. If I have learned anything as a scholar working in interdisciplinary interstices, it is that we cannot all work in this way, despite the calls years ago for a paradigm shift to interdisciplinarity. Such work produces knowledge that a more singular disciplinary project might not produce because it has the license to liberate itself from certain disciplinary assumptions—in this case, the self-evidence of "opinion" in the history of liberalism, the ahistorical claims of "proceduralism" in political theory, the literary formalist "reading" of an entire novel—but it also simply does not do other things.

As Vernon himself acknowledges, his is a predictable reaction to discursive work but not therefore an invalid one. My often bland recourse to causes such as population growth, rise in literacy rates, and economic development is of course not a sufficiently evidential account of change, but more like token change. Although it may seem evasive, my strongest response is one with which I am, however, comfortable. I am not writing about the root causes of the evolution toward liberal opinion politics, and, moreover, many historians have done that work quite well already, including Vernon himself.

At this juncture, moreover, a different sort of work on Victorian liberalism seemed in order, for I had become frustrated by the ubiquity and vacuity of the term "liberal subject" and its virtual analogue "abstract liberal subject," both operating nearly without content or comment in literary criticism, especially of the novel, and in political theory. In an effort to move beyond these shibboleths and arrive at a denser accounting of political agency, I suspect I have overstated the power of liberal individualism in the actual, lived experiences of British subjects and in some of their political practices, as evidenced by the corporate forms of representation in the university constituencies that Vernon mentions; my object at any rate had not been to disclose liberals' lives, but to expose and develop the practical theory of liberal politics that exists alongside and sometimes through such subjects but is not fully constitutive of them. The irony was not lost on me that my insights thus primarily dwell in what Small experiences as the "realm of theoretical description and interpretive refinement" rather than in the empirical, material, and/or economic realms (288). In locating the legislative and embodied practices of Victorian liberalism's peculiar variety of abstraction (the ballot and land legislation, for instance), I had hoped to inject a certain sort of materiality into my analytical method, but at the same time I wanted to put into relief certain conceptual logics that informed those practices. Such are the compromises and hybridism of interdisciplinary work.

Vernon's related observation that liberal collectivities existed alongside liberal individualism and that liberal individualism operated in a complexly uneven relation to the social...