British Idealism: A History by W. J. Mander (review)

Near the outset of British Idealism, W. J. Mander declares that his study is unique “from anything previously attempted in respect of its scope.” It examines the British Idealists’ philosophy “as a whole, permitting the full range and unity of their philosophical vision to emerge” (4). British Idealism is therefore ambitious, running 556 pages of text conjoined with a comprehensive bibliography. Nothing comparable indeed has been written before.

By the time we arrive at the end of Mander’s study having learned just how complex and wide-ranging British Idealists were in their philosophic commitments, we cannot help but concur that early English-speaking analytical philosophers reconstructed Idealism simplistically in order to overdramatize their own originality. British Idealists were not so muddled and worthless as Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, and their successors caricatured them in overexaggerating the novelty of their break from them. Rather, analytic “philosophy did not just magically replace the earlier Idealism, but rather developed alongside and in conscious opposition to it, and in this process Idealism shaped its successor; as truly as any parent shapes the child who rebels against it” (2).

Mander believes that we can best appreciate Russell and Moore’s prejudiced reconstruction of the Idealists by letting them “speak again for themselves” by systematically attending to their primary texts, including those by lesser figures among them (1). But Mander is not merely interested in correcting the hermeneutical patricide wrought by early twentieth-century analytical philosophy. His motivations extend beyond repairing the compressed, self-serving historical narrative that we have inherited from Russell and Moore. Mander also believes that the history of philosophy properly practiced “allows the present to talk with the past.” While the history of philosophy should always work hard to understand past philosophers as they understood themselves, it nevertheless refuses to lose itself in fetishizing parochialism, never forgetting that philosophy, including its history, “is nothing if not an engagement with real living ideas.” To protest that the history of philosophy “is neither properly philosophical nor properly historical is like complaining of a bridge that it is on neither one bank nor the other” (11).

In allowing the Idealists to speak for themselves, Mander devotes considerable space and energy to Idealist logic and metaphysics, since both were so elemental to their thinking. And no one among the Idealists wrote more about both than Francis Herbert Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. We learn, for instance, why Bosanquet regarded logic and metaphysics as identical whereas Bradley deemed them ultimately separate. For Bradley, thinking was not the same thing as reality, invariably distorting it by never getting a hold of it completely. Nevertheless, following Mander’s account through the complex conceptual labyrinth of metaphysical claims of the many major and lesser Idealists that he examines with great care is not always easy. Mander is correct when he claims that seeing their thinking through their eyes requires taking up in considerable detail their logic and metaphysics, as well as their aesthetics and philosophy of religion, but the reader must work hard not to let this detail swamp the all-encompassing intellectual narrative Mander so diligently tells. Perhaps providing so much detail is the price that any historian of philosophy who takes contextualism to heart invariably pays, especially when recounting such an intricately systematic philosophical movement as British Idealism. The British Idealists had so much to say, and often with such lack of the analytical precision that we now so much value, on so many topics: epistemological, metaphysical, normative, and otherwise.

Mander’s study does less well situating the Idealists in the contexts they were responding to. Mander notes that Idealism was, in part, an attempt to fill the void that the Victorian crisis of faith opened up. It provided “a weakened substitute of reduced content easier to swallow than the hard edges of traditional belief systems” (433). And he mentions that, like classical utilitarianism, it also arose in reaction to the moral...