Natural Right and the Intellectual Context of Early Chartist Thought

Chartism is one of the most written-about subjects in modern British history, yet the ideas of the movement have been understudied. The disregard of ideas was a hallmark of postwar British social history, in which the ‘masses’ were understood as ‘passive beneficiaries of structural divisions in society’.¹ To understand why this is still the case, despite the decline of traditional social history, it is necessary to revisit the debate launched thirty years ago by Gareth Stedman Jones’s ‘Rethinking Chartism’.² This essay was not just an event in Chartist historiography, but in Anglophone historiography and society more generally. Although ‘Rethinking Chartism’ received a positive response from many quarters, in Chartist studies, and British social history more generally, it caused a bad-tempered debate that produced ‘over a decade of disagreement’.³ Much of the heat was generated by Stedman Jones’s treatment of class, which he argued was not a foundational reality but an ‘artefact of discourse’.⁴ Applied to Chartism, this approach challenged the firmly embedded notion that Chartism was the world’s first ‘working-class’ political movement.

The field has now largely moved on from these controversies. Although many prominent Chartist historians continue to make use of the concept of class, they no longer invest class with the analytical power historians once did.⁵ The tendency to confine the debate around ‘Rethinking Chartism’ simply to class, however, has allowed fundamental issues that Stedman Jones raised to remain unaddressed. Aside from dethroning class, ‘Rethinking Chartism’ realigned the relationship between ‘the social’ and ‘the political’ by restoring the central position of political history. In so doing, Stedman Jones was suggesting a way to close the long-established interpretative gulf between intellectual and social history. As he wrote elsewhere: ‘In contrast to the traditional approach to “social movements”, there is no reason why the “intellective” elements of popular politics should not be analysed as rigorously and scrupulously as is customary among intellectual historians tracing the filiation of ideas.’⁶

Although this agenda was extended to areas beyond Chartism, the linguistic approach to history has not been as influential as it is usually perceived to have been.⁷ In Chartist historiography, the leading responses to the ‘linguistic turn’ argued that Stedman Jones had overlooked the so-called ‘non-textual’ or symbolic language. Paul Pickering, for example, in an article that has recently been described as the most authoritative response to Stedman Jones,⁸ argued that class language was articulated ‘without words’ when Feargus O’Connor, Chartism’s greatest leader, adopted the fustian jacket, ‘the uniform of the working man’.⁹ James Epstein has advanced a similar argument in relation to the cap of liberty, the Phrygian cap of the French Revolution.¹⁰ This widening of the notion of language has greatly enriched our understanding of popular politics. ‘Non-discursive’ language does not, however, escape from the bounds that contain the spoken word. Language, whether expressed in text, speech, or symbol, cannot simply reflect social reality. As Stedman Jones has highlighted, the problem with locating class consciousness in symbolic language is that it simply ends up mirroring the relationship between economic and political change for which social history was being criticized in the first place.¹¹

The ‘cultural turn’ in Chartist historiography emerged in response to the ‘linguistic turn’. Unlike in other areas of history, culture was used as a tool to reassert many aspects of what came before. Attention to culture was integral to a peculiarly British form of Marxian analysis associated with Raymond Williams and above all Edward Thompson.¹² From this Anglo-Marxist conception of culture, Chartist studies has continued the practice of overlooking what the Chartists said and wrote, the foundational point of ‘Rethinking Chartism’. John Belchem, for example, has insisted that we should analyse the radicals’ ‘conduct, not their texts’, and ‘context, not content’, because ‘What had given Chartism its distinctive radical identity was not its language (which of course it shared with other reformers before and after) but its culture and conduct’.¹³ It thus mattered more what the masses – as masses – did and how they looked rather...