Abstract

This article argues that Victorian ideas about "character" crystallize a tension between singularity and universality crucial to the smooth functioning of modern democracy. Formally equivalent to one another and able to engage in contractual social relations, liberal subjects emerge through an operation J. S. Mill's System of Logic describes as induction, and that Karl Marx explains via the general equivalency of the money form. In dialogue with theories of reform, commerce, and abstraction, Wilkie Collins's Armadale endorses and ironizes the move from particularity to exchangeability underwriting "modern" social organization. In the context of a wider network of exchange, the empire, Collins traces links between the domestic modernity Mill called liberty and the most basic form of human interchangeability: slavery.

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