A Sweeter Word?

In 1889 the philosopher Herbert Spencer, in an effort to prove how little influenced he had been by the work of Auguste Comte, paid a researcher one guinea to go to the British Library and trawl through Spencer's articles from the 1840s checking whether or not he had used the word 'sociology' (p. 204). Today, with digitalized resources and electronic searching to hand, time-pressed scholars need no longer resort to cash payment to track a word which interests them. Thomas Dixon's most recent work shows just what important and insightful history can result. The Invention of Altruism tells a series of richly populated stories charting the semantic naturalization that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century following George Henry Lewes's 1852 translation of Comte's term altruisme. Notwithstanding the discomfort caused by the 'barbarous' mixing of a Latin root, alter, with the Greek suffix, -ism (perhaps by Comte, or by his teacher, François Andrieux), the coinage championed by Lewes and others found acceptance in Britain. The latest complaint Dixon can find about altruism as a new and 'silly word' is in a newspaper article being perused by the Reverend Lashmar in George Gissing's 1901 novel, Our Friend the Charlatan. Paired with egoism, altruism had become an established way to denote other-regarding, as opposed to self-regarding, impulses. In the process, Comte's original coinage was contested, eventually unmoored from its positivist origins, and associated with divergent intellectual and political positions, accruing to itself in the process a substantial freight of new meanings and helping to redefine and shape Victorian moral debate.

For Dixon's book, as its subtitle indicates, is about the 'processes of moral meaning-making' (p. 23). It is also importantly a history which explores moral feeling. In part, that accounts for why Dixon seeks his evidence in such a variety of places, in popular fiction, for instance, as much as the work of influential philosophers. In addition, readers of Dixon's From Passions to Emotions: the Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge University Press, 2003) will recognize some similarities. The earlier book also focuses on a keyword to examine how a diverse range of terms denoting forms of feeling - passions, affections, sentiments - were corralled by the end of the nineteenth century into a single over-arching category of 'emotions'. In the earlier book, there is a clear sense of a rich and diverse language of feeling, one which is (broadly) theologically underpinned, and which is substantially lost to the secularized and scientific domain of psychology as the latter becomes increasingly dominant during the second half of the nineteenth century. The distinctly elegiac note of this earlier work is not so audible in the more exuberant narrative of The Invention of Altruism, although it is clear that Dixon has strong reservations about the term he so meticulously tracks and its originator, the 'egotistical and humourless Auguste Comte' (p. 54).

A reader might even speculate that, in comparison to an imagined social organization based on altruism, in which 'there were to be no rights for anyone other than the right to do their duty' (p. 50), Dixon finds preferable the world championed by the 'post-Victorians'. These iconoclastic men and women, who dominate the book's final chapter, formed their ideas in an 'antagonistic but intimate relationship with the Victorian moralism that went before' (p. 322). Instead of attempting to discern and follow the dictates of nature they sought instead 'to follow their own hearts', and, in Walter Pater's phrase, to 'witness the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions' (pp. 322, 358). Oscar Wilde's aesthetic individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche's injunction "'Kein Altruismus!" - "No altruism!"' (p. 343), and G. E. Moore's celebration of an intersubjectivity which moves beyond the static opposition between 'ego' and 'alter', mark the end of a distinctively Victorian moral language in which altruism plays a central role. In the interview with Thomas Dixon which follows this review, Dixon reflects...