Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill

Notes

NOTES prologue 1. See Benedetto Croce’s History as the Story of Liberty (1941) and Collingwood ’s translation of Guido de Ruggiero’s History of European Liberalism (1927). Davidson, 13–18, explores the tension between Keynes’s liberal politics and his attack, in the name of governmental agency, upon traditional liberal laissez-faire policies and the invisible hand. This study looks to the politics of Keynes—and his efforts to make liberal economics act directly. Overall, my use of liberal refers to the cultural ideology that advocates national self-determination, rejects wars of conquests, favors constitutional systems based upon an expanding definition of citizenship, and defends the principal of granting individual rights and autonomy as generously as possible. 2. The epilogue will return to this basic dilemma. 3. Green’s larger argument with the academic establishment and its neglect of the “adventure tale” overlaps with mine here. Green blames snobbish sophistication for the disregard of violent adventure narratives. My study’s texts have not been thus treated individually: many of them still rank very high in the canon. Rather, their enormous length is a strong constraint upon how often they can be taught and has thwarted the ability of scholars to see them as a self-conscious tradition. introduction 1. Leo Braudy’s From Chivalry to Terrorism (2003) is the most detailed recent study to restate the conventional view of a modern trend away from a heroic culture of war. Robert Adams’s Better Part of Valor (1962) is an older but valuable study of the same. Edmund Wilson’s classic Patriotic Gore (1962) is close to my own in its perspective and its combination of history and poetry. Nonetheless, Wilson appeals to the standard hypocrisy thesis in critiquing liberalism’s attachment to heroic warfare, while I argue for a more fundamental connection between the two. Freud remains the most famous advocate for the view that human nature is naturally drawn to aggressiveness in a way that liberal humanism cannot hope to overcome. 2. See Pocock 2:72–162 for Locke’s influence upon Voltaire. 3. For Michelet and Vico and the transformation they together effected upon the writing of history, see Fisch 72–80 and Monod 1:30–43. 294 NOTES TO PAGES 21–31 4. Mack provides the fullest background history of Pope’s unprecedented earnings from his Iliad. Mack also represents an authoritative restatement of the traditional neoclassical Pope. For a different view, see Helen Deutsch’s Resemblance and Disgrace (1996), which looks past the usual Pope of elegance, order, and sanitization to a set of categories summed up in the word “deformity.” 5. See Guillory 124–33 for an alternative account of poetic diction, its relation to prose, and its roots in pastoral. Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction (1952) and Geoffrey Tillotson’s “Eighteenth-Century Poetic Diction (II)” (Essays 63–85) are influential accounts that similarly emphasize pastoral as the major genre for this phenomenon. Tillotson, 68–69, observes that Coleridge’s special object of critique in Pope’s Homer has distinctly pastoral features, but this insight slights the unpastoral siege elements: one implication of my argument is that Pope tends to emphasize the pastoral elements of the epic, but that effort remains part of the larger dilemma surrounding heroic violence. 6. See Michael Walzer’s Obligations (1970) and Yael Tamir’s “Nationalism, Liberalism, and the State,” 231–32, in McKim and McMahan 227–44 for examples of the well-discussed problem of contractarian liberalism and self-sacrifice. This crisis centers on the question of why an individual who has become part of a liberal society so as to secure life and livelihood could be expected to willingly sacrifice his or her life in war for that society. Hobbes’s theory goes so far as to assert the individual cannot be expected to make that sacrifice. 7. See Annabel Patterson’s Nobody’s Perfect (2002) for Milton’s importance to early liberal thinking, particularly in America. 8. John Grenier’s First Way of War (2005) challenges the view that American culture was one of the first to embrace the law of war and an antiwar position generally. 9. See Bordwell 8 for Grotius’s flight from the Thirty Years’ War to Homer’s more humane violence. 10. The Nazi-era German political scientist Carl Schmitt critiques this liberal penchant for euphemism and self-justification: “A new and essentially pacifist vocabulary has been...