Victorian Political Thought (review)

H. S. Jones organizes this instructive and valuable survey of nineteenth-century thought around a central theme: the search for a new authoritative intellectual foundation for the political order. He examines three principal groups which sought a new intellectual synthesis for their age: political economists, the modern clerisy of the nation-state (constitutional historians and Liberal Anglicans), and the social evolutionists. The book emphasizes the "political" but "political" is interpreted broadly to incorporate overlapping inquiries: sociological, economic, scientific, and philosophical. While Jones elects to examine key texts of political theory instead of the "shapeless mass of Victorian political discourse" (ix), he traces connections and continuities between individual thinkers and social and political reformers and actors, and thereby builds an analysis of the dominant political discourses. Nonetheless, the book belongs more to the genre of traditional intellectual history than to cultural history or the "new political history."

Although the book is intended as an introduction to nineteenth-century political thought, it is not a workmanlike survey which eschews original arguments. In the long chapter entitled "Economic Men," for example, Jones briskly encapsulates the principal arguments of the usual dramatis personae: Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, James and J. S. Mill, T. B. Macaulay, Thomas Chalmers, and William Huskisson, but he also includes figures who opposed economic orthodoxies—S. T. Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Jones then persuasively argues that the reputation of early Victorian liberals and utilitarians as the standard bearers of an atomistic view of society is too simplistic. He analyzes Samuel Smiles's popular writings and Mill's On Liberty (1859) in an attempt to capture the ambiguities in mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, arguing that Stefan Collini's appreciation of the Victorian cult of character might be employed to explain these nuances. Jones argues that Mill did not espouse a negative understanding of liberty which the British idealists then converted into a positive meaning of liberty, and so laid the foundations for a more interventionist state. Rather, Mill's concern for the development of character led him to emphasize that government, institutions, and civil society must seek to foster "a common good" in which individuals would develop their moral character. This perspective was anything but hedonistic and atomistic. While this perspective is familiar to specialists in nineteenth-century political thought, it is too often absent from general texts which tend to present a more reductive and simplistic account of the transformation of the negative liberty of the early century to the positive liberty of the late century.

Jones's attention to nationalism and nation building is also valuable. The middle section of the book treats national identity by looking at two distinct groups: theologians, specifically Liberal Anglicans, and Whig constitutional historians. Both groups sought to define a national identity in the mid-century which would serve as a rubric for the solution of political dilemmas. While the pairing of these two groups is unorthodox, partly because the Liberal Anglicans do not frequently appear in surveys of Victorian political thought, Jones draws useful links between their preoccupations. Particularly striking is his emphasis on ethical citizenship and a moral state as the bedrock of the nation shared by such thinkers as Thomas Arnold, F. D. Maurice, and J. R. Seeley. Jones deals only very briefly with how Empire rebounded on late-nineteenth-century political theory, though this would have enabled him to explore the nuances of national identity and political thought.

In the third and last major section of the book, Jones advances several compelling arguments about late-nineteenth-century political thought. Asserting that organic and evolutionary arguments were ubiquitous, he follows John Burrow in arguing that they cannot be traced directly back to Charles Darwin (who was much less influential than Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), but that organic evolutionary arguments were drawn from many different sources, notably Edmund Burke, Coleridge, and William Gladstone. Also valuable is his discussion of how some late-Victorian thinkers used...