Liberalism and the Time of Instinct

This essay, which reads Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics alongside the economic theories of its day—most notably, William Stanley Jevons's Theory of Political Economy—suggests how the term "instinct" affords Bagehot a means of distinguishing "civilized," self-determining subjects from their "savage" others by providing an account of agency outside of a liberal framework committed to rational willfulness and individual character development. In Bagehot's usage, savage actors governed by "instinct," supposedly insensible to any knowledge of the relation between means and ends, are deprived of any association they might be thought to have with either lengthier horizons of aspiration or the anxious deferral of pleasure, ideas valued as cornerstones of the liberal subject.