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  • Selvages of Living Liberalism:liberal / Liberal \ politique
  • Kirstie M. McClure (bio)

The thesis of Elaine Hadley's Living Liberalism is at once literary, historiographical, and, as it were, political-theoretical—this last in the loose sense appropriate to critical efforts to refashion commonplaces about the political past. Developed as a synchronic account (as the subtitle suggests) of "practical citizenship in mid-Victorian Britain," that thesis is simple: the long-belabored abstract liberal subject was not so disembodied after all. Abstract at the level of theory, it was nonetheless re-embodied in material practices and worldly disciplines, particularly mental disciplines, which gave flesh to many of the familiar ethical and political attributes of political liberalism.

What distinguishes this account is not so much the thesis of embodiment itself, but two precise ways in which Hadley understands the manifestation of embodiment. First, it takes the form of "liberal cognition," a "cognitive individualism" encompassing the mental operations through which the liberal subject abstracts itself from "'mere' personality, self-interest, and bodily desire" to contribute to matters of public concern (13–14). Far from leaving the body behind, these operations reconfigure the mind-body relation to generate the "passionately embraced" objectivity, "sincerely articulated" disinterestedness, and "altruistic sentiment" familiar across many genres of writing in the period. These together, Hadley argues, comprise an "affect of rationality" (14) capable of coordinating practical relations between the subject's "universalist yearnings and individualist tendencies" and its "interests and disinterests" (13). Second, this "abstract embodiment" materializes liberal subjects in specific sites where its attributes find practical effect, among them "the opinionated individual, the signed opinion piece, the elector in the ballot box, and the liberal politician" (14). Hence [End Page 294] the book's literary and historiographical dimensions, which press the argument through the various substantive discussions noted by other participants in this forum. Throughout, Hadley draws with great finesse and broad learning on an impressively interdisciplinary range of modern scholarship as well as period sources. And each chapter repays careful attention with a wealth of insights into the vicissitudes of living liberalism as a difficult and ambivalent, even impossible, model of practical citizenship for liberal subjects of the time.

I take this last as Hadley's most striking political-theoretical claim, and it is on this that I will focus here. While the claim is elaborated over the course of the book, its conceptual underpinning is developed in the introduction and two initial chapters. There, Hadley both defends the heuristic value of her historiographical focus on mid-Victorian political liberalism and specifies her intention to "contest the conventional wisdom regarding some of the most valued categories and practices that inform liberal politics in the nineteenth century—individualism, opinion, sincerity, discussion" (2). The new twist she adds to those familiar themes is her formulation of the two features of political liberalism just noted—liberal cognition and abstract embodiment—each of which, in her account, distinguishes mid-Victorian liberalism from its utilitarian or Lockean predecessors by giving flesh to cognitive practices of ideation in the embodied form of individual opinion. Liberal writers engaged here include J. S. Mill, Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, and John Morley, all of whom are shown to betray the ambivalence with which political liberalism inhabited formalism and, consequently, to suggest the contradictions that beset liberal enactment of its various modes of "abstract embodiment" and made its "instructions for a good life so difficult to follow" (31).1

Taking Hadley's synchronic intentions at face value, we might imagine the book as weaving a loose fabric of argumentation spanning the period from the 1850s through the 1880s. The warp yarns, running temporally lengthwise, are various concepts commonly thought central to liberalism's theoretical vocabulary: individualism, sincerity, opinion, disinterestedness, and discussion. Holding these threads constant, Hadley aims to dampen "the roar of teleology" that a focus on development and change typically entails (6, n11). The weft, on the other hand, is spun from the specific cases of mid-Victorian liberalism that provide topical foci for chapters on the signature controversy, the secret ballot, Irish land reform, and William Gladstone's political [End Page 295] improvisations. While each of these instance the difficulties of living liberalism, as they thread...

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