Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association, 1857-1886 (review)

Historians now find the mid-Victorians more interesting and agreeable company than they did a generation ago, or, for that matter, two and three generations ago. From the turn of the century through the 1970s they were generally thought a remarkably dreary lot: their sexuality stifled, their clothing oppressively dark and heavy, their politics unspeakably dull until Benjamin Disraeli spiced things up by leaping in the dark and crowning Victoria Empress of India. Now we notice that the mid-Victorians did indeed have sex (some of them lots of it, and not necessarily for procreative purposes), that those endlessly pontificating statesmen did have a few interesting things to say after all, and that they often said them while wearing boldly checked or plaid trousers, no less. Mid- Victorian politics itself is now thought to be worth studying for its own sake, and not simply for the bits of it that seemed to anticipate what came later (a stable two-party system, the welfare state), and in broad rather than arbitrarily narrow and falsely- dichotomizing terms ("high" versus "low" politics, laissez-faireversus intervention). Lawrence Goldman's intelligent study of the Social Science Association (SSA) is a valuable contribution to this effort to develop a more vivid and synoptic view of how politics worked in the high-Victorian decades.

Until Goldman started looking into it, the SSA was generally dismissed as a mere talking shop: an annual week-long congress (organized by a standing central organization in London) where over a thousand delegates would sit through endless speeches on just about every subject conceivably related to the doings of its five standing "departments": legal reform, penal policy, education, public health, and "social economy." But Goldman makes it plain that the SSA was far more than a glorified debating society. His five main arguments are, first, that it was an important policy-making forum whose more influential members (a potent combination of mostly Liberal politicians, administrators, intellectuals, and professionals) did much to initiate and to shape the penal, sanitary, educational, and marriage reforms of the era; second, that it provided an important connecting link between parliamentary and popular politics, metropolis and province; third, that its strenuous faith in human improvement and its efficacy as an instrument for policy-making both testify to the distinctiveness of the Age of Equipoise, during which Britain was remarkably and peculiarly at peace with itself, and social issues did not yet mark out the battle-ground of party politics; fourth, that the mechanics of social reform were far more complicated than either the traditional "Benthamite" or "Tory" interpretations (that is, reform as, respectively, the work of a hard core of activist insiders or of a generalized "spirit of improvement") are able to account for; and fifth, that rather than rue the relatively late development of social science within the universities as a sign of Victorian Britain's sterile empiricism (à la Philip Abrams and Perry Anderson), we should read its early development within robust secondary institutions such as the SSA as a healthy sign of its close connection to political practice in the British public sphere, the stability of which was the envy of liberals and even a good many conservatives throughout Europe and the United States.

As this rather breathless summary suggests, Goldman's is a book of ambitious scope. He largely makes good on his ambitions, showing that the SSA provides a surprisingly big window on a political world that indeed seems to have been as richly variegated as he makes it out to be. Particularly valuable is his broad-minded treatment of the internal tensions between Victorian Liberalism's commitment to the protection of individual rights on the one hand and to the promotion of the "public good" on the other, tensions most noticeable in the preventive measures enshrined in the now...