The Place of Liberalism

Where was liberalism? From the liberal point of view, this is almost certainly the wrong question to ask. As Uday Singh Mehta notes in his provocative study, Liberalism and Empire (1999), the universalist principles of nineteenth-century liberalism promoted a denial of place in liberal political theory, a purposeful neglect of the significance of territory (120). Liberal thinkers embraced the concept of evolution in time, emphasizing that individuals and societies unfolded in historical stages. But if the significance of time in liberal theory was assured, the role of place was suspect. Indeed, the liberal espousal of historical development was matched by an equally powerful insistence on transcending categories of place—region, territory, or nation—as part of the peculiar pointillism or decentralization of power in liberal society.

In the nineteenth century, the repudiation of place was politically meaningful because it aided the articulation of a specifically liberal brand of imperialism. The rejection of place allowed Victorian liberals to refuse the territorial claims that typically bolstered anticolonial nationalist movements. Thus, the doctrine of "placelessness" had great utility for the governance of empire. But it has been a remarkably robust doctrine, a sturdy legacy of liberal thought. It continues to function as a crucial element in the neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms of today (Harvey), although it is often cloaked in the more attractive language of cosmopolitanism. How might scholars begin to redress these lacunae of liberalism regarding place and placelessness? What methodologies might be useful in doing so?

The disavowal of place, in another of liberalism's seemingly infinite contradictions, went hand in hand with a profound concern for the impact of the material environment on individual and collective character. In theory, the liberal individual was not fixed in any particular material setting (Hadley). In practice, liberal governors spent a great deal of energy on the creation of highly particularized spaces to promote the qualities of discernment essential to liberal character. The belief that people were molded through their environments prompted an unprecedented moralization of possessions, a worldview in which material objects were seen to have moral sway over those who owned and saw them. I would like to suggest some of the ways in which the insights of material culture studies can unpack the complexities of the liberal relationship to place and placelessness, which has proved so politically significant for empires past and present.¹ At the same time, I'll argue that the study of liberalism can enrich the interdisciplinary field of material culture scholarship by illustrating the ways in which artifacts reveal political histories, as well as social and cultural ones.

Every age, it has been said, has its own thing about things (Brown; see also Appadurai): the portrait miniatures of the Renaissance, the automata of the Enlightenment, the glittering wares of the Crystal Palace. The Victorian appetite for things was distinguished less by its enthusiasms than by its ongoing anxieties about reconciling material abundance with moral good. As Deborah Cohen has shown, Victorians responded to the apparent conflict between God and Mammon by investing their household objects with moral qualities and thus placing morality and materialism hand in hand. The idea that possessions could be evaluated on moral grounds—a notion endorsed by design reform and underwritten by incarnationalist theology—found wide reception among Victorians both agnostic and religious. In the eighteenth century, good taste in objects was associated primarily with luxury and refinement, the province of the few. By the Victorian era, good taste was a universal ideal, albeit one requiring major reforms of mass education and design (Cohen; Koven).

Within this broader Victorian culture of things (Briggs; Levine; A. Miller; Richards), what was the status of the object in liberal thought? Was there such a thing as a liberal thing? Henry Cole, the driving force behind the Department of Science and Art, claimed that his efforts to democratize art education and thus good taste in objects were predicated on the liberal extension of suffrage (Alexander 144); if French museums were all...