Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (review)

These are auspicious times for any scholar interested, as is Daniel S. Malachuk, in the "serious reconsideration" of Victorian liberalism (2). Yet Malachuk's contribution stands apart from other recent studies in its more pointed engagement with the present day. As he turns back to John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, Malachuk's purpose is less to historicize or critique than to resurrect a forsaken ethico-political project. His point is not merely to join critics such as Terry Eagleton in contesting the skeptical excesses of postmodernism. Rather, in his view, comparable doubts about reason and objectivity have bred anti-Enlightenment assaults on liberalism since the early twentieth century and, in more recent times, have become the stock of mainstream liberal theory. From Bloomsbury to British Marxism, from John Rawls to Michael Sandel, from neoconservatism to poststructuralism, Malachuk perceives a ubiquitous adherence to the "fiction of reason" and the "fact of pluralism" coincident with a retreat from the perfectionist aspirations of Victorian liberals (3). Though he welcomes the recent Victorianist work of Amanda Anderson, Suzy Anger, George Levine, and Bruce Robbins, Malachuk craves more full-bodied affirmation of the "core conviction" of Victorian liberalism as he interprets it: the idea "that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection" (2).

Of course, Mill's chariness toward the state has often led to his being cast as a libertarian, just as Arnold has been portrayed as an authoritarian statist. Malachuk rightly questions such simplifications. His surprising counterclaim is that both Mill and Arnold embraced a robust statism that is lacking even in the pro-welfare liberals of today. Although Malachuk attempts to make this case in policy terms, by demonstrating the Victorian enthusiasm for civic participation, the statism he describes is ultimately a disposition rather than a set of policy recommendations. As against the modern habit of skepticism, Malachuk wants to tap the Victorian belief that collective institutions of various kinds might be mobilized to bring about a more perfect moral and political condition. Yet, by presenting the Victorian zeal for citizenship as statism, his account obscures crucial tensions. That Mill was a "perfectionist"—that he believed that human beings had the capacity to create a just and vibrant society—is hardly at issue. The trick in Mill is that the socially embedded individuality that he saw as the root of such ethico-political progress required diversity and even the tolerance of error for its culture. It is possible to describe Mill as a species of statist. But in doing so one needs to acknowledge that though Mill's ultimate goals were universalistic, in the here-and-now he urged the plurality of human flourishing (at least within western contexts) not because there was no ascertainable difference between better and worse, but because any rigid institutionalization or hegemonic endorsement of the presumptively better would undercut the very individuality on which future betterment depended. Thus, when Malachuk invokes Mill on behalf of a statist project of "moral objectivism," he calls for an Enlightenment universalism from which Mill purposely diverged when he turned to Romanticism and civic republicanism in order to craft a hybrid liberal thought (37).

Even if one does not accept all of his assumptions, Malachuk's book is chock-full of thought-provoking arguments and insights. His first chapter, which confidently analyzes various incarnations of liberalism as articulated by Martha Nussbaum, Rawls, Joseph Raz, Richard Rorty, and many others, is stimulating reading for any Victorianist interested in political theory (and it is lucid enough to serve as a useful introduction for the curious). A richly eclectic second chapter aims to capture "three major misreadings of the Victorian state" (48). Malachuk begins with a discussion of the Thatcher/Reagan-era debates over "Victorian values," moves on to examine earlier twentieth-century intellectuals such as Isaiah Berlin, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Raymond Williams, and concludes with a discussion of recent theory, including a perceptive...