Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville

Citation preview

ARISTOCRATIC LIBERALISM

This page intentionally left blank

ARISTOCRATIC LIBERALISM The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville Alan S. Kahan

New York

Oxford

OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS 1992

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1992 by Alan S. Kahan Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kahan, Alan S. Aristocratic liberalism : the social and political thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueviile / Alan S. Kahan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index ISBN 0-19-507019-4 1. Liberalism- History. 2. Burckhardt. Jacob, 1816 1897 — Contributions in political science. 3. Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873 Contributions in political science. 4. Toequcville, Alexis de, 1805-1859— Contributions in political science. I. Title. JC571.K32 1992 320.5'12~-dc20 91-26379

135798642 Printed in the United Slates of America on acid-free paper

Acknowledgments This book began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. Without the resources of that institution, and the encouragement of my dissertation committee, Keith Baker, John Boyer, Francois Furet, and Karl Weintraub, it would never have been completed. And without the continued encouragement of Keith Baker and Francois Furet, it would probably never have made it over the hurdles that separate books from dissertations. I benefitted greatly from the time in France made possible by a Lurcy Fellowship, and from the access to the Jacob Burckhardt Papers generously given me by the Basel Staatsarchiv and the Jacob Burckhardt Stiftung. Aristocratic Liberalism has also been helped immeasurably by the comments of numerous friends, colleagues, and readers over the years. Above all, however, it has been made possible by the love, support, and critical reading provided by my wife, Sarah Bentley. Houston January 1992

A. S. K.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Introduction, 3 1. Past and Present: The Eighteenth Century and the Origins of Modernity, 11 The Revolutionary Present, 11 The Enlightenment: The Origins of the Revolution and of Modernity, 15 The French Revolution, 20 The Eighteenth Century, the French Revolution, and Modernity, 31 2. The Spirit of the Majority, 34 Contradiction or Coherence? The Aristocratic Liberal Style of Explanation, 34 The Hegemony of the Middle Class and the Commercial Spirit, 41 Hegemony as Stagnation, 46 Hegemony as Mediocrity, 49 The Rise of the Lower Classes, 54 3. Despotisms: The State and Its Masters, 58 The State, 58 Our Masters: Public Opinion, 65 The Problem of Suffrage, 68 The Hare Plan and the Prussian Constitution, 71 Socialism and the Fear of Socialism, 74 4. Modern Humanism: The Values of Aristocratic Liberalism, 81 Humanism, 81 Modern Humanism and Aristocratic Liberalism, 92 Modern Humanism and the Aristocratic Liberals: The Values of Aristocratic Liberalism, 98 5. "Working against Time": The Aristocratic Liberal Response to the Challenge of Modernity, 111 The Political Ideal of Aristocratic Liberalism, 1 1 1 Social and Economic Attitudes, 115

viii

Contents

Optimism and Pessimism, 119 Education, 125 6. Conclusion: Toward a History of European Liberalism, 1830-1870, 135 Aristocratic Liberalism and the Study of Liberalism, 135 The Boundaries of European Liberalism, 1830-1870, 139 Three Misconceptions about Liberalism, 145 Aristocratic Liberalism in Context, 155 Notes, 167 Selected Bibliography, 207 Index, 215

ARISTOCRATIC LIBERALISM

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction The study of nineteenth-century liberalism is problematic for historians. From the first, the history of the liberal movement has been filled with contradictions, both within the movement itself and among its historians. Satisfactory definitions of liberalism do not exist, and there is no agreement among historians about its boundaries, meanings, or impact. The contours of the liberal movement in the nineteenth century are still too hazy for a definitive study of liberal thought to be undertaken with substantial hope of success. This is particularly true when liberalism is considered from a European rather than a national perspective. International studies that do more than provide a smorgasbord of supposedly representative figures taken from random stages in the development of liberalism are rare, and still more rarely successful. Serious investigation of the different kinds of liberalism, on both the national and international levels, has been sadly lacking, despite Hans Rosenberg's call for such typological work over fifty years ago.1 My study is intended as a contribution to the task of defining the different types of liberalism by making concrete one of the nebulous shapes of European liberal thought in the nineteenth century, one I here call aristocratic liberalism. The necessity of constructing a typology rather than a simple definition was recognized by Rosenberg, and his outline of the problems remains unsurpassed.2 Fully recognizing liberalism's varied character, numerous historical transformations, and sometimes conflicting elements, Rosenberg justified the continued use of the term liberalism to describe many varied groups on the grounds that there were important links among liberals that were sufficient to distinguish them from other groups.3 In his view, however, there was only one way in which an understanding of the common elements of liberalism could be reached: "Only through its history and in its differentiation can the 'essence' of liberalism be perceived."4 Rosenberg called for a typology based on inductive historical research. Such types would necessarily lack the sharp clarity of theoretical artifacts, but in defense of such "fuz.ziness" Rosenberg cited Burckhardt's view that history is the most unscientific of sciences.5 Aristocratic Liberalism is conceived as a contribution to Rosenberg's program, as an effort to define

3

4

Aristocratic Liberalism

inductively one type of liberal thought and language, one type of liberal discourse, and then to use that definition toward an understanding of liberalism in general. Many different types of liberal thought could have been chosen as the subject of this book, for many if not most of the differentiations within liberalism have yet to be clearly described, whether on a national or a European basis. But an examination of aristocratic liberalism, a type that in some respects is on the fringes of the liberal movement, sheds particular light on the question of what the boundaries of liberalism are and where liberalism ends and other movements begin. In addition, the investigation of aristocratic liberalism has the advantage of clarifying some central issues in the thought of three major European thinkers, Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who are the aristocratic liberals discussed in this study. Despite the mass of secondary literature devoted to them (or at least to Mill and Tocqueville), their own central concerns have all too often been ignored, misunderstood, or misjudged. Certainly there are other aristocratic liberals not included here, for example, Lord Acton and Walter Bagehot. Furthermore, many other thinkers and writers as diverse as Flaubert and George Eliot could be found to share some significant characteristics with the aristocratic liberals, not least because of the widespread affinity for humanist rhetoric in the mid-nineteenth century. A book of this kind, however, cannot and should not be an exhaustive catalogue. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville all offer strategic advantages for the discussion of aristocratic liberalism. All three are generally conceded to be important thinkers, part of the traditional canon of the intellectual history of the West, and thus any re-interpretation of their meaning and significance is important. Although not the only aristocratic liberals, they were the most eminent. They were, roughly speaking, contemporaries, and they had a certain amount of intellectual contact with one another. Furthermore, considering them together emphasizes the European nature of liberal thought. Although representatives of three national intellectual traditions—German, English, and French—and exposed to very different intellectual influences, they nevertheless shared fundamental ideas as well as the same basic understanding of the European situation. Despite their widely varying intellectual backgrounds, they also shared a common political language, the language of modern humanism. It is difficult to give an adequate preliminary description of aristocratic liberalism as embodied in the social and political writings of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville and to justify in a few words why they should be described as aristocratic liberals. Certainly they were not all aristocrats by birth, and none of them wished to revive the Old Regime or to base liberty on a traditional aristocracy. 6 Indeed, they were sharp opponents of those who attempted to restore or continue the Old Regime, whether Bourbon loyalists or Tory aristo-

Introduction

5

crats. It is the Greek and humanist etymology of aristocracy from the word aristos (the best, the elite) that applies here. Their common distaste for the masses and the middle classes, their fear and contempt of mediocrity, the primacy of individuality and diversity among their values persuaded me that this was the proper label. But aristocratic liberalism is not simply a shared set of elitist values. It is also a historical perspective and an analysis of contemporary society and politics. It is a particular dialect of political discourse. A type of nineteenthcentury liberal thought or language can be constituted only by our finding in it a distinctive and relatively coherent view of the past, present, and future. Aristocratic liberalism is, simultaneously, a particular reading of the historical past and its significance for the present, a particular understanding of the characteristics of contemporary society and culture, and a particular set of values by which past, present, and future developments are judged. The aristocratic liberals saw the eighteenth century and the French Revolution as the origins of modernity. For them, the Enlightenment and the Revolution sketched the outlines of the typical social, political, and ideological struggles of the nineteenth century. From these beginnings flowered the commercial spirit and middle-class domination of the nineteenth century, as well as the ominous first stirrings of the great future struggle between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes. The centralized state continued the growth that had begun in the eighteenth century and threatened aristocratic liberal values both because it provided a means for imposing the domination of one class or idea and because it was a threat in itself to the chief values of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville—liberty, individuality, and diversity. The problem for the aristocratic liberals was how to perpetuate their values in a world that they saw as hostile in the present and likely to grow still more hostile in the future. Although their degree of pessimism and their methods of preserving their ideals varied, they shared a common faith in education, in different forms, as the means by which their task could be carried out. The aristocratic liberals' values are derived from their modern humanist political discourse. Their brand of humanism has two sources. One is the tradition of civic humanism, transmitted directly by the classics, as well as through its later incarnations which developed from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. The second influence on their humanism, that which makes it modern, lies in ideas developed by the Enlightenment and even the French Revolution, ideas that tempered the Aristotelian teleology of the humanist tradition and helped to create a new language that replaced virtue with education and cyclical views of history with historicism. It is the blend of the frequently opposing traditions of civic humanism and the Enlightenment and Revolution that provides the basis, and the language, for the aristocratic liberals' critique

6

Aristocratic Liberalism

of modern life. It is their combination of the negative liberty hitherto largely absent from humanist values with the positive liberties stressed by humanism that makes their thought relevant to so many perspectives. The account of aristocratic liberal thought in this study is necessarily also an interpretation of the individual ideas of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. The question of their mutual influences is thus of some importance. It has been raised in two different contexts, one involving the influence of Tocqueville on Burckhardt, the other the influence of Tocqueville on Mill. Neither Mill nor Tocqueville gives any indication of being aware of Burckhardt's thinking. It is certain that Burckhardt read Tocqueville's Old Regime very carefully. His lecture notes on the eighteenth century and the French Revolution contain numerous references to Tocqueville. This has led some to conclude that Burckhardt's interpretation of the Revolution, in particular his emphasis on the continuity of the Revolution with the dominant trends of the Old Regime, is derived from Tocqueville. As chapter 1 demonstrates, however, the essence of Burckhardt's interpretation, including the continuity thesis, is contained in his 1852 lectures, "The Era of Frederick the Great." These were delivered before the publication of Tocqueville's book later that year. But Burckhardt was not the first to introduce the continuity thesis into German historiography. That honor probably belongs to Droysen. Burckhardt may have heard Droysen lecture or talk on the subject when he was a student in Berlin, or more likely read Droysen's Vorlesungen uber die Freiheitskriege, published in 1846, which contain that interpretation. 7 The question of the influence of Tocqueville on Mill is more complicated, and has been the subject of much debate. It is well known that Mill reviewed both volumes of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, met Tocqueville on his trips to England, and engaged in a desultory correspondence until a few months before Tocqueville's death. Numerous scholars, including Iris Wessel Mueller, J. P. Mayer, and Max Lerner, have argued that Tocqueville's influence on Mill, as exercised by Democracy in America, was decisive in the latter's intellectual development. Other scholars, such as H. O. Pappe, Jack Lively, and Mill himself in his Autobiography, have written that Tocqueville's influence was more limited. Joseph Hamburger, in an imaginative essay, has argued that the contradictions between Mill and Tocqueville are so strong that no real influence, except in minor areas, is conceivable.8 This last position, that Tocqueville and Mill are antithetical thinkers, is obviously rejected here. The degree of Tocqueville's influence on Mill remains difficult to assess. I do not think that Tocqueville drastically altered Mill's ideas. Instead, his work acted to accelerate the pace of Mill's own independent intellectual development.9 Thus, although it is not my primary concern, I have taken positions both implicit and occasionally explicit in regard to various points of controversy

Introduction

7

among commentators on each thinker. In the case of Burckhardt, my interpretations are largely in agreement with those of Werner Kaegi's magisterial eight-volume biography of Burckhardt, to which every student of Burckhardt owes a debt no acknowledgment can repay.10 Therefore I do not accept those views of Burckhardt as a pre-fascist, or as an apolitical and asocial aesthetician, or that attribute to him a psychological fascination with power.11 Nor do I follow the recent revisionist interpretations that give a quasi-Hegelian and decidedly deterministic interpretation of his thought. 12 More important, some may be surprised that Burckhardt, a patriotic native of Basel who spent most of his life there as a professor at the university, should be considered a representative of a German liberal tradition. But it ought not be forgotten that he received most of his professional training, in both history and art, at the University of Berlin, where he was a student in Ranke's seminar, attended the lectures of Droysen, Boeckh, and Kugler, and became a habitue of Bettina von Arnim's salon. He r-eturned from his sojourns in Berlin and Bonn determined to teach Switzerland that it was part of Germany. If his adolescent German nationalism swiftly waned, he nevertheless remained part of the German cultural world, which summoned him to be Ranke's successor at Berlin (a position he refused). Thus Friedrich Meinecke, in his post-World War II lecture on Ranke and Burckhardt, had no hesitation in asserting that they were the two greatest historians of the German cultural world. 13 Of course, to say that Burckhardt was a part of the German intellectual tradition is not to say that he was a part of the German political world in quite the sense that, for example, Treitschke or Sybel was. But then, it must also be remembered that before 1870 there was no Germany. Burckhardt was not a Prussian nor a member of the Prussian school of historiography, but neither were many other Germans.14 What does distinguish Burckhardt sharply from other German-speaking liberals, even before 1870, is the fact that German political unification was not one of his chief preoccupations. He never had to face the dilemma of choosing between freedom and unity that is the hallmark of so much of German liberalism between 1848 and 1870. It is precisely because of this that the study of Burckhardt's liberalism is so rewarding. Many of the compromises with nationalism habitually attributed to German liberalism appear in Burckhardt as authentic outgrowths of a non-kleindeutsch German liberalism free from an overriding concern with the achievement and maintenance of national political unity. With regard to Tocqueville, Seymour Drescher is certainly correct when he says that Tocqueville's self-contradictions cannot simply be explained away. 15 Partly because of this, there are so many debates within Tocqueville scholarship that it would be impossible to address them all. In general, although my emphases and conclusions are sometimes different, my readings of Tocqueville

8

Aristocratic Liberalism

have followed the same general lines as those of Drescher, Francois Furet, Pierre Manent, Jean-Claude Lamberti, and Roger Boesche.16 Yet I reject the arguments of Drescher (and Jack Lively) that Tocqueville considers America a classless society, and that in general class structure plays a minor, ephemeral role in Tocqueville's thought. 1 7 1 also disagree with the "salutary myth" theory, which argues that Tocqueville never really accepted democracy as inevitable or potentially good, but only pretended to do so because he thought it would be better if other people did. 18 My understanding of Mill is different in emphasis from some other perspectives. I regard as incorrect notions that Mill was a democrat, that he considered political participation a right, that he favored the middle classes, that he saw ideas as clearly more important than social forces, and that he unintentionally turned utilitarianism into a much more conservative philosophy than it had hitherto been.19 As the succeeding chapters will show, I think that with regard to all these points precisely the contrary is the case. While many commentators, notably J. H. Burns and Edward Alexander, have rejected some or all of the foregoing propositions, none of them has rejected them in such a way as to wipe out altogether the popular image of Mill as a kind of twentiethcentury social democrat or libertarian somehow marooned in the reign of Queen Victoria. 20 This study relies heavily on quotation, as is perhaps all too natural in a discussion of political discourse. I regard this as a necessary evil. As Walter Houghton notes apropos of his own frequent use of citations in The Victorian Frame of Mind: "Attitudes are elusive. Try to define them and you lose their essence, their special color and tone. They have to be apprehended in their concrete and living formulation." 21 Quotation is especially appropriate in the case of Mill and Tocqueville, where so many interpretive issues are surrounded by controversy, and in the case of Burckhardt, whose attitudes toward the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be unfamiliar to many readers. The picture I have drawn of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville is meant to bring their agreement on essentials into relief. In each case my interpretation of their thought is far from exhaustive, and it is in some measure a composite one, biased toward the later work of each man. 22 I have made no effort at biography, no attempt to track the twists and turns of each man's intellectual development over the course of his life, no attempt to consider the roles of different influences as such or of education. This study is horizontal rather than vertical. To have written it as a series of intellectual biographies or analyses of particular works would have seriously impaired the achievement of its purpose. I am not primarily concerned with particular individuals, even with Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville.

Introduction

9

This work is an attempt to describe a type of liberal thought and language, a coherent style of discourse, an episteme in the Foucauldian sense, not to write about individual subjects and their necessarily disparate intentions, backgrounds, and so on, although I think that our understanding of the thought of these individuals is illuminated by the understanding of their common discourse presented here. My concern is with describing aristocratic liberalism and situating it (and thus also Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville) within the overlapping planes of the different types of nineteenth-century liberal thought. Where I have dipped deeper into the well of the past, beyond the mid-nineteenth century, as in the discussion of humanism in chapter 4, it has not been with the intention of showing biographical influences but rather with the intent of pointing out the discontinuities between the modern humanism of aristocratic liberal discourse and previous kinds of humanist language in order to better our understanding of the particular nature of aristocratic liberalism. Of course, in describing the relationship between modern humanism and past humanisms, I have violated the discontinuous purity of the Foucauldian notion of what constitutes a discrete discourse. But if so, I have only fallen into what must be the inherent problem of history from a Foucauldian perspective: the simultaneous perception of both continuity and change. This is not a problem unique to historians of discourse; it is common to every kind of grammarian, from the dictionary maker to the literary critic. As a good pragmatist, I have chosen to regard a dilemma so widely overcome in practice as illusory. The order of discussion followed in the first five chapters is topical rather than biographical, for the reasons I have just described. In a sense it is chronological, in that the aristocratic liberals' attitudes toward their past, present, and future are successively examined. Thus chapter 1 defines the meaning for nineteenth-century Europe of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as perceived by Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with contemporary Europe seen through aristocratic liberal eyes, the former presenting the aristocratic liberal analysis of Europe's social structure and dominant ideas, and the latter examining the attitudes of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville toward the state and politics. Chapter 4 examines the aristocratic liberals' characteristic rhetoric, as portrayed in the preceding chapters, and analyzes the values both explicit and implicit in its use. Chapter 5 looks at the rather different solutions Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville proposed for their common problematic while bringing out their shared emphasis on education. But this study is not concerned solely with describing one type of liberal political and social thought. A large part of its intention is to shed some light on the wider problem of understanding European liberalism in general during

10

Aristocratic Liberalism

the period 1830-1870. Thus chapter 6 seeks to relate aristocratic liberalism to European liberalism as a whole, and makes suggestions about the types, meanings, and boundary lines of European liberalism in this era. In this manner the description of one strategically chosen type of liberal thought, aristocratic liberalism, contributes to the history of liberal discourse as a whole.

1 Past and Present: The Eighteenth Century and the Origins of Modernity The Revolutionary Present As Karl Mannheim wrote,"Any study in styles of thought characteristic of the first half of the nineteenth century must start with the fact that the French Revolution acted as a catalyzing agent both in relation to different types of political action and to different styles of thought."1 References to the "lessons" of the French Revolution were a staple of mid-nineteenth-century European political thought. The Enlightenment and the Revolution acted as lightning rods for the expression of all the varied and conflicting ideas and ideals of the period. The fact that Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill shared a common interest in the political, social, and intellectual developments that led up to the French Revolution and in the meaning of the Revolution itself, is not significant. What is important is their common understanding of the meaning of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, an understanding that both reflects and forms the basis for their common perspective on the nineteenth century. This perspective on the Revolution has particular significance in the case of the aristocratic liberals because for them France, not England, was the paradigmatic case for modern history. To most nineteenth-century European liberals, England and English history were the pattern for modern development. But to the aristocratic liberals, the pattern was France, and their understanding of the French Revolution must be seen in this light. England was the Other placed opposite the common Continental destiny, continually out of phase with the rest of Europe, sometimes running ahead and sometimes lagging behind. Thus for Mill, "French civilization more closely approaches the normal type of human civilization than any other, while English history diverges ... very far from the usual path." 2 Mill therefore thought "English one of the least interesting of all histories—(French perhaps the most and certainly the most instructive in so far as history is ever so)."3 The history of England was 11

12

Aristocratic Liberalism

uninteresting, or at least atypical, because it did not exemplify modern trends as well as that of France or America.4 In the future, Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville thought, England would more often follow rather than create the path toward modern society broken by others. The heritage of 1688 obscured the crystal ball when they peered into the future, because the aristocratic society engendered by the Glorious Revolution hid the traits of the coming democratic triumph. For this reason the aristocratic liberals gave relatively little thought to England's unique historical development, save as contrast to the common pattern. Instead they concerned themselves for the most part with the eighteenth century (chiefly in its French manifestations) and the French Revolution, not the seventeenth century and the Glorious Revolution. This was the past that Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill thought to be crucial to an understanding of their present. Today only Tocqueville's work on the period, The Old Regime and the Revolution, is well known, and even there knowledge is often restricted to its first volume. None of Burckhardt's work on the eighteenth century was published during his lifetime. Only in 1974 did his Vorlesung tiber die Geschichte des Revolutiomzeitalters appear, derived from the stenographic notes taken by some of his students in 1869.5 Of equal importance, his "Vorlesungen iiber die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," given in Basel in 1852-53 and preserved in the Basel provincial archives, remains unpublished. Mill's writings on the French Revolution, all masquerading as book reviews, date from the period 1826-1837. In 1826 he was still a confirmed Benthamite. By 1837 he had surmounted his mental crisis and had entered the mature stage of his intellectual development. In 1829, when his ideas were in a period of transition, he wrote a sixty-page critique of Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon for the Westminster Review: "It was a labour of love, being a defence of the early French Revolutionists against... Tory misrepresentations.... I had at that time a half formed intention of writing a History of the French Revolution."6 By 1833, in response to Carlyle's urging that he write "something more elaborate" on the French Revolution, he responded unenthusiastically, "It is highly probable I shall do it sometime if you do not."7 Mill felt obligated to turn his long study of the Revolution into some tangible product: "I suppose it is wrong when one has taken the trouble to accumulate knowledge on a subject not to work it up if one can into some useful shape for others."8 It was this sense of obligation that led him to review Alison's History of the French Revolution for the Monthly Repository earlier in the same year, but only "because I would rather write something than nothing." 9 Thus by 1833 Mill had lost his enthusiasm for the project. His only further writing on the subject was his long review of Carlyle's French Revolution, for which Mill had made available to Carlyle his library of source materials. 10

Past and Present

13

According to John Coleman, the key reason Mill did not write his own history of the French Revolution was his new-found belief, in the early 1830s, that only a poet could explain the truth of the French Revolution. The facts, interpreted by the historian without the poet's insight, were only an aspect of the truth. ... Mill was concerned that the "whole truth" should be told, thus he gladly relinquished the project and his collection of books and materials to Carlyle.11

The account that follows does not necessarily displace Coleman's arguments, but it seems to me to provide a stronger and more easily demonstrable reason why Mill gave up his history of the French Revolution. As Coleman himself notes, for the Mill of the early 1830s "neither the Benthamite radicalism of his youth nor the French model of popular democracy could ... provide conditions conducive to the moral improvement of mankind." 12 If, as Mill remarked in his review of Carlyle in 1837, the French Revolution was an event that "can be looked at calmly, now that we have nothing to hope or fear from it," why should Mill waste his time writing about it? At the height of his interest in the Revolution, in 1828, Mill's concern had been a presentist one. Then he had written of the need for the "party of movement" to make clear the real history of the French Revolution in order to stop its being used as a bogeyman by all those who wanted to preserve the status quo. By 1833, or at latest 1837, the history of the French Revolution had lost a large part of its positive utility to the present, in Mill's eyes, for he no longer saw its implications in an entirely favorable light. But it had not lost all of its utility. French history, as we have seen, remained the most instructive past in Mill's eyes. From the mid-1830s, however, he saw it as instructive in a negative rather than a positive way. When Mill cited it in his later writings, it was in this sense. For example: "The National Assembly of France has been much blamed for talking ... about the rights of man, and neglecting to say anything about the duties. The same error is now in the course of being repeated with respect to the rights of poverty."13 Mill usually thought of history as being useful for "the correction of narrowness," its value "not so much positive as negative."14 He could not over-stress its importance without abandoning the progressive, Benthamite component of his thought, nor ignore it without prejudice to his "Germano-Coleridgtan" side.15 Thus the Enlightenment and the French Revolution retained their significance as archetypes of modern development, but too often of developments whose progressive nature was questionable. Yet Mill did not want to write a history of the Revolution that would serve merely as a warning sign against changing the status quo. Instead he gave the job to Carlyle and used his review

14

Aristocratic Liberalism

to balance Carlyle's overly harsh condemnation of the abstract principles of the eighteenth century and its offspring, the Revolution. 16 The kind of narrowness for which England needed the correction of history was not over-reliance on abstract theories. Since the French Revolution was no longer the object of admiration it had formerly been (at least for its earlier stages, through the Gironde), Mill no longer wanted to write its history. 17 If a history of the French Revolution was no longer the best possible means of furthering present social and political developments, Mill was no longer interested in writing it. For an English audience, other methods of instruction would be more effective. Although no defender of the status quo, Mill after 1837 saw the Revolution as a warning as much as a promise. For just that reason his views came to accord with those of Burckhardt and Tocqueville. Tocqueville and Burckhardt also approached the Revolution and the Enlightenment from a presentist perspective. In 1850 Tocqueville decided that he wanted to write "an ensemble of thoughts and insights about the present day, a broad estimation of our modern societies and a forecast of their probable future." 18 But he did not want to write an abstract essay on political philosophy; he felt he needed some solid factual base for his ideas: "fTJhere is nothing except the long drama of the French Revolution which could provide the period ... whose description would give me the occasion to portray the men and things of our century. .. ,"19 Tocqueville stated explicitly, in the preface to The Old Regime and the Revolution, that in writing about the Old Regime, "I have never lost from view the new. ... My purpose has been to make a picture which was strictly accurate, and at the same time could be instructive." 20 Burckhardt was equally open about the relationship between his own times and his interest in the Revolution. Beginning a lecture in January 1868, he said: "In the two months since our course began, militarism has so increased, the economic struggle entered into such a terrible crisis, that we have the right once again to look back at where the shaking began. We may thus once again examine the course of the French Revolution." 21 But Burckhardt's presentism was different from that of Tocqueville or Mill because, although he too saw the origins of modernity in the Enlightenment and the Revolution, his aim in speaking of them was less activist, less aimed at directing current events than was theirs. He was not, however, less of an educator, nor was he less interested than Mill and Tocqueville in forming the attitudes of his listeners toward the present, as we shall see in detail in chapter 5. Presentism encouraged a de-personalization of the aristocratic liberal view of the Revolution. Because Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville saw the tendencies of the present so strongly foreshadowed in the history of the eighteenth century, they did not feel that any single individual exerted much influence on them. Even Napoleon was seen as a mere confirmation of pre-existing trends. 22

Past and Present

15

Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau were the representatives and not the creators of their era.23 Of course, Tocqueville and Burckhardt did discuss individuals at length in their writings. But the deeds of particular individuals were not central to their understanding of the period. The Enlightenment: The Origins of the Revolution and of Modernity From the aristrocratic liberals' point of view, the Enlightenment and the Revolution played a double role in the history of European culture. As the transition to modernity, they represented both a rupture with the past and its culminating development, both continuity between the nineteenth century and Europe's past development and the change that separated modern Europe from what had gone before. Thus Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville constantly compel their readers to switch perspectives when regarding the eighteenth century. One theme of particular concern remained constant, however. Centralization, their bete noire, was the hallmark of the Enlightenment and the Revolution and strongly foreshadowed contemporary trends. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's explorations of the world of the Enlightenment were thus largely an exercise in historical pathology, although they were far from seeing the Enlightenment or the Revolution as purely pathological phenomena. The continuity of the eighteenth century was not only with the present but also with the more distant past. Time and again Burckhardt and Tocqueville stressed the continuity of the eighteenth century with the past, as part of a historical continuum: Even the modern state with its centralization and its taxes finds very early precursors here [in France], for example Philip the Fair. In any case it was more fully developed in the Italian principalities; however with Louis XIV the primacy leaves Italy. 24 In the Revolution, when this all-powerful state no longer calls itself Louis, but the Republic, and when everything else is different, one thing does not change: this inherited idea of the state. 25

Indeed, for Burckhardt even his history of the Italian Renaissance was, "unquestionably, a history of the origin of the modern spirit."26 For Tocqueville, too, the rise of the absolute monarchy in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was linked to the transition to modernity. The general cause of the development of absolutism was the passage from one social state to another, from feudal inequality to democratic equality. 27 Despite these deep historical roots, the eighteenth century, and particularly the three decades after 1750, played a pivotal role in the development of modern

16

Aristocratic Liberalism

society as the aristocratic liberals understood it: "[T]hese three decades were a necessary stage of transition between the earlier era and the present"; "only in the eighteenth century begins... the great crisis...: modern culture."28 Thus the years after 1750 were something new, something fundamentally different from the developments of preceding centuries. This perception of the novelty of modernity is fundamental to the aristocratic liberals' perspective, to their modern humanism, as I will show in chapter 4. The crisis, the eruption of modernity, was general in its various political, social, and intellectual forms to all Europe. For the aristocratic liberals, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment were not the products of a uniquely French situation; otherwise they would not have considered France typical: We need not fear to declare utterly unqualified for estimating the French Revolution, any one who looks upon it as arising from causes peculiarly French, or otherwise than as one turbulent passage in a progressive transformation embracing the whole human race. . . . It must be the shallowest view of the French Revolution, which can now consider it as anything but a mere incident in a great change in man himself. .. , 29

But if France was typical of Europe, it was also the nation most advanced along the common path, the civilization that was closer than any other to the normal type of human development.30 This was why the Revolution broke out in France rather than elsewhere. In the aristocratic liberals' perspective, centralization was one of the most prominent characteristics of modernity foreshadowed by the eighteenth century. The steady encroachment of the state on the domains of all other social powers and on the freedom of the individual was one of the chief threats to the values of Burckhardt, Mill and Tocqueville. France, fulfilling its function as pattern, took the lead. Already in the France of Louis XIV "the absolutist state makes its raw power shockingly effective in relation to its own people and to Europe. .. ."31 Tocqueville noted after a discussion of the administrative means of French centralization under the Old Regime: "The majority of the institutions which I have just described have since been imitated in a hundred different places; but they were then peculiar to France, and we are going to see soon what a great influence thay have had on the French Revolution and its results."32 What were the manifestations, at once cause and effect, of the drive toward centralization? According to the aristocratic liberals, the social and cultural leveling carried out by the Old Regime gradually weakened and even destroyed all the bonds that had formerly connected individuals in a society of orders.33 The result was its destruction and the encouragement of a passion for unity and uniformity, for the elimination of special privileges and of independent groupings within society.34 Thus Joseph II "wants the welfare of his subjects,

Past and Present

17

but in uniformity ... only one means of civilization and improvement."35 One can apply to Burckhardt's characterization of Joseph II the words of Tocqueville on democracy: "Variety disappears ... from the human species; the same ways of acting, of thinking, and of feeling are found everywhere in the world. ... All peoples who take for the object of their studies ... not such and such a man, but man himself, will end by meeting in the same mores."36 Joseph wished to speed up the process. Unfortunately for him "he was if not the only, at least one of the few revolutionaries in his state."37 Nevertheless, this process was characteristic of the eighteenth century, in the aristocratic liberal view. As people became more aware of how alike they were, they also became more aware of the good of humanity in general, but often less inclined to join with their particular neighbors for some common good because they were not joined to one another by any effective links. Centralization and the democratic social state both favored this isolation, which Tocqueville called individualism, and denned as a sentiment ... which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and to retire in separation with his family and his friends; in such a way that, after having thus created for himself a little society for his own use, he freely abandons the larger society to itself. ... Individualism is by origin democratic, and it threatens to develop to the extent that conditions are equalized.38

Tocqueville's Old Regime and the Revolution was really an "archeology of individualism."39 Thus, as with centralization, another of the most unfortunate traits of modernity took its origin from the eighteenth century. Individualism, in this negative sense, was intimately connected with political centralization. The destruction of political liberty—that is, of a political system based on local self-government—was the worst fault of the Old Regime in Tocqueville's eyes.40 Local self-government would have led the noblesse and the Third Estate to recognize their common interests. Lack of self-government deprived both nobility and Third Estate of political experience.41 Instead of encouraging participation as a sort of political school, the Old Regime encouraged a kind of corporate individualism, wherein "each one of the thousand little groups of which French society was composed thought of nothing but itself."42 Thus the government facilitated the process of despotism: "[DJespotism ... sees in men's isolation the most secure guarantee of its own duration, and it usually puts forth all its strength to isolate them."43 This habitual isolation of individual from individual and class from class would have grave consequences for France and all of Europe in the nineteenth century. It simultaneously encouraged both class struggle and political apathy as long as particular material interests were unaffected.

18

Aristocratic Liberalism

The destruction of aristocratic society was effectively completed in the last half of the eighteenth century, and particularly in the three decades before 1789.44 It is clear that from the aristocratic liberal point of view the transformation of aristocratic into democratic modern society was irreversible. Without sharing Guizot's faith in the middle class, the aristocratic liberals shared his conviction that the old world was forever lost. Society was midpassage on a voyage toward modernity from which it could not turn back. Centralization, with its concomitant encouragement of individualism and political inexperience, was not the only, nor necessarily the most important, aspect of that passage. Mill, Burckhardt, and Tocqueville were all convinced of the importance of eighteenth-century ideas to later events, from the Revolution to their present. All three considered the age of enlightened despotism, of Frederick the Great and Joseph II, of Pombal and Aranda, to be a demonstration of the influence of ideas on history. 45 Thus, "[o]ne must not exaggerate the influence which the vices of the administrative mechanism exercised over the destiny of nations. The principal sources of good and evil are always in the spirit which impels it."46 Burckhardt noted that in the eighteenth century the state was above all dominated by ideas. There was thus a "double origin of the modern state from the complete centralization of power and the Enlightenment."47 During the ten or fifteen years preceding the French Revolution, "the human mind gave itself over to disorderly, incoherent and bizarre movements all over Europe . . . symptoms of a new and extraordinary sickness." Everywhere the quantity of intellectual activity was astonishing.48 Why, all over Europe, this passion for ideas? Tocqueville, like Burckhardt, saw the "closest complicity" of society and ideas: "Do not look for separate reasons for all the facts which I have just told you about; all were but the varied symptoms of the same social disease. Everywhere the old institutions and the old powers were no longer adapted to the new situation and the new needs of mankind." 49 As centralization had already been largely accomplished before 1789, so too with the evolution of ideas: "[T]he revolution is intellectually present."50 The revolution in ideas had already occurred even though externally things seemed unchanged. 51 Nor was this change reversible. By the mid-nineteenth century everyone, of no matter what political or religious beliefs, had assimilated a few of the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau. 52 The new ideas, the new language of political and philosophical discourse form as well as signal the transition between aristocracy and democracy, the Old Regime and modernity. Thus the democratic age was not merely an administrative or even a political phenomenon; it was intellectual as well. The eighteenth century shaped and foreshadowed the ideas in addition to the political and social forms of the nineteenth, in the aristocratic liberal perspective. The substitution of the simple

Past and Present

19

laws of reason for complex and irrational customs defined European thought. 53 There arose "in state, church, education, a sudden attack against everything inherited from the Middle Ages; hatred for the historical, trust in an ideal of absolute progress."54 For the aristocratic liberals, the excessive optimism and the anti-historical tendencies that they thought characterized the eighteenth century were to be unfortunate motifs of the nineteenth. But it was in the eighteenth century that these tendencies arose and flourished. Then, according to Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville, all of Europe was seized with a hatred of itself, of its own time, of its own history: "[TJheory taught that tradition was worthless, and that the oldest things were useless rubbish." 55 Tocqueville wondered whether this sentiment was shared by German Philosophy. He was sure that German Philosophers of the eighteenth century must have hated their present but was unsure if on the same grounds as French philosophes. Burckhardt would have reassured him that the hatred of the historical was general: "The character of the age of Frederick the Great: Struggle and rebellion against the historical."56 Tocqueville himself later noted of a German work of the time that it "exaggerates with all the heaviness and clumsiness of the German scene all the defects of the contemporary French mind." 57 The intelligentsia were more or less unanimous in following this antihistorical tendency. The source of their unanimity was twofold: first, they held in contempt historically founded privileges; and second, the social and political position of the intelligentsia, entirely divorced from any practical political experience, encouraged them to underestimate the difficulties and dangers of change. In this they were bolstered by new ideas about human nature: "Never was humanity more proud of itself than at that time. . . . [W]ith that haughty notion of humanity in general was mingled an unnatural contempt for the particular time in which one lived and for the society of which one was a part."58 The eighteenth century's anti-historical tendency was based on reason, and its belief in reason rested on beliefs about the goodness of human nature. Thus the anti-historical and the rise of optimism about humanity were related. Both ideas grew up in the new democratic social state and at the same time fostered it. Whereas aristocratic nations, with their inherently restricted social mobility, tended to have overly limited ideas of human perfectibility, democratic ones tended to have overly generous beliefs about human nature. 59 If Voltaire was the chief representative of the anti-historical tendency, Rousseau was the master of optimism. His belief that it was necessary only to remove outside constraints to let the goodness of man bloom forth encouraged the desire for change. Voltaire was a pessimist, but it was Rousseau's optimism that prevailed and went on to be a leading influence in the Revolution. 60 During the ten or fifteen

20

Aristocratic Liberalism

years before the Revolution, people were "insanely proud of humanity." This was another sign, if one were needed, of growing democracy.61 It was also a harbinger of the faith in progress that was to characterize the nineteenth century in the aristocratic liberal view. The aristocratic liberals would never have been able to attribute so much importance to the role of ideas had they not attributed so much importance to the role of public opinion in the eighteenth century, once again in anticipation of nineteenth-century trends. In this, too, the eighteenth century provided them with the beginnings of an understanding of their own time, in which they regarded public opinion as a dominant force—with both good and evil results.62 Burckhardt characterized public opinion as one of the two "chief causes," along with the growth of state power, of the events of the latter half of the eighteenth century. 63 The increase of centralization and the growing importance of public opinion were linked: the forces of centralization "are making us more than ever (what is the first condition of a powerful public opinion) a homogeneous people."64 The force of public opinion was a necessary result of the triumph of the democratic spirit, and it was an essentially republican force. It was "the shadow of the sovereignty of the people." "The king continued to speak as though he were master, but in reality he himself obeyed a public opinion which inspired him or carried him along. ..." 65 In an aristocratic society, no single public opinion could have existed because there were many publics, not just one. As society became more homogeneous, a single public opinion began to form. In pre-Revolutionary France, public opinion represented the abstract, antihistorical ideas and theories of the Enlightenment, according to the aristocratic liberals. The great lesson of 1789 was how strong this public opinion had grown.66

The French Revolution The Enlightenment evidenced many of the traits characteristic of both the French Revolution and nineteenth-century Europe as the aristocratic liberals saw them. Political centralization and political inexperience, individualism, the anti-historical tendency, and the power of public opinion all remained prominent in their vision of Europe long after 1789. Yet if in their view the French Revolution was in one sense merely the climax of a long series of gradually accelerating historical developments, in another sense it was a break with the past, the start of something completely new—hence its pivotal nature. Burckhardt felt this element of rupture particularly keenly: "The nineteenth century began with a tabula rasa of all relationships. I do not glorify it, I do

Past and Present

21

not criticize it, it is simply the reality. .. ,"67 In Burckhardt's judgment the Revolution created a new historical context that separated it from the past.68 Tocqueville had a more difficult time separating the Revolution from its past. Indeed, one explanation of Tocqueville's difficulties in completing The Old Regime and the Revolution is that they derived from contradictions within his thought about the relationship of the Revolution to both the Old Regime and the Revolutionary future. Thus Francois Furet notes that if the administrative process of centralization had been completed by the Revolution, as Tocqueville thought, there would have been no need for the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to come along to complete the process. Centralization, the chief revolutionary impulse of 1789, could not have been the cause of these later revolutions.69 Eventually, however, Tocqueville came to the conclusion that the Revolution had created a new social state, and that the new situation resulting from the Revolution of 1789-1799 was the dominant factor in the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848.70 Thus, despite all the continuities, for the aristocratic liberals 1789 inaugurated a new, distinctive era in European history, an era with its own characteristic promises and dangers. As for most mid-nineteenth-century thinkers, the Revolution that began in 1789 did not end in 1815, 1830, or even 1848. The study of the French Revolution was important not simply because France was typical of Europe but because the French Revolution was the beginning of the present, of contemporary European society, of "the still unfinished drama of the French Revolution."71 Yet the rupture embodied by the Revolution was not self-explanatory. Why was a revolution necessary? The aristocratic liberals described the three decades before 1789 as a necessary period of transition. Why was the transition so unsuccessful as to culminate in a bloody revolution? Why were not the explosive events of the Revolution, as developments of Enlightenment trends, moderated by their slow historical development? If the decades of Enlightenment after 1750 were a transition, what disturbed its hitherto relatively smooth progress? In a world united by a common belief in the ideas of the Enlightenment, how could the Terror be explained? One answer to these questions is that the Revolution represented change at least as much as continuity, that there were two Revolutions involved in the transition to modernity, one looking to the past for its description, another looking to the future. But we should "perhaps pose this question first: could the old regime have fallen without a revolution?"72 The question was important to the aristocratic liberals because of what it implied about the possibilities of fundamental political change in their own era. For Mill, "an over-centralized government is amenable to no check short of a Revolution; and is lured to its ruin by an appearance of unlimited power, up to the very moment when it is abandoned by all mankind." 73 Thus the

22

Aristocratic Liberalism

Revolution was made inevitable by centralization itself. If true, this statement held disastrous implications for the nature of political change in the centralized states of nineteenth-century Europe. It is not surprising that Burckhardt and Tocqueville hesitated before joining Mill in his conclusion that revolution was the only way that change could be imposed on an over-centralized government. Even Burckhardt wavered before what he considered the "insoluble riddle" of whether the Revolution could have been avoided: The French Revolution had to come because the intellectual direction and the external political and ecclesiastical system were in too strong contradiction. However, it could have happened twenty or thirty years later and then in a very different fashion, if it had not been precipitated by the French financial question. 74

The reasoning in this statement is typical of German liberals in the 1850s. A situation cannot endure because "the power of things and ideas," as Rudolf Haym put it, was in contradiction with political reality. 75 Tocqueville's conclusion about the Revolution was similar: "If it had not taken place, the old social structure would nonetheless have collapsed everywhere, here sooner, there later." Given the social history of the eighteenth century, however, "it was impossible that the Revolution of 1789 should not burst out," which social history presumably includes the "financial question," with all its social implications. The Revolution was inevitable because the Old Regime was untenable, and because, given the nature of Old Regime culture, no other form of political change was possible. 76 The political culture of the nineteenth century, in which the effects of eighteenth-century ideas and sociopolitical changes had been aggravated by the very significant effects of the French Revolution itself (for example, class struggle), would not make it any easier to avoid violent confrontations, but it would be still more vital for liberals to prevent their occurrence. The inevitability of a revolution does not explain the course of the Revolution. The extent to which the aristocratic liberal historians saw the continuity of the Enlightenment with the Revolution acted as a bar to their understanding of many events after 1789. What did the Revolution have that the eighteenth century lacked? To ask that question is to ask what separates the eighteenth century from modernity, to ask how Burckhardt could write that the nineteenth century began with a tabula rasa of all previous relationships. 77 First, however, it is necessary to re-state what linked the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in aristocratic liberal eyes. That can be summed up as centralization and enlightenment, or in other words as the growth of the all-powerful state and of new ideas about the world, both these phenomena at the same time cause and effect of the transition from aristocracy to democracy,

Past and Present

23

from the Middle Ages to modernity. The Enlightenment and centralization were one revolution, and created the presuppositions for the Revolution of 1789-1799, as both a revolution of liberty and a revolution of equality. The aristocratic liberals understood the transition to modernity through a history that embraced two revolutions, one in continuity with the eighteenth century and one fundamentally Other. One could understand the second revolution as a counter-revolution: "We agree with Burke that the Revolution, so far as it was necessary or justifiable, was terminated when the Assembly met. From that time the struggle was not for a revolution, but against a counter-revolution." 78 But Mill produced no work on the "counter-revolution" to explain its meaning, although he shared Burckhardt and Tocqueville's view of the world produced by the French Revolution. And unfortunately his statements about the Revolution itself were sparser and less revealing of his thought than his comments about the Enlightenment. Burckhardt tended to limit his analysis to a relatively few general statements. Only Tocqueville provided the beginnings of a detailed analysis of the second revolution, the analysis of the projected second volume of The Old Regime."19 As I noted earlier, Tocqueville has been thought trapped by his history of Old Regime centralization in a limited understanding of the Revolution. Having demonstrated how much of the Old Regime did not merely persist but came to fulfillment in the Revolution, Tocqueville was faced with the difficult task of defining the fundamentally new elements of the Revolution. Although we possess only the fragments of Tocqueville's definition (in the second volume of The Old Regime), and Burckhardt's scattered statements, they justify an attempt at reconstruction, if only because of the insight they allow into the aristocratic liberals' understanding of what the really new factors in nineteenth-century Europe were, and of how they grew out of the Revolution itself. The first revolution in France had culminated in victory before the meeting of the Estates General in 1789. The clearest element of continuity between the post-1789 revolution and its predecessor was political centralization, but Tocqueville stressed their continuity on several levels. The struggle between Parlement and Crown in 1787 had already revealed that "if the Parlement utilized new arguments in order to re-establish its old rights, the government employed them no less in the defense of its ancient prerogatives."80 The government and the Parlements spoke in terms of the first principles of government and of the constitution, in the language of the Enlightenment, not in that of a society of orders. Even the nobles used this language, for "in that first epoch of the Revolution, when war had not yet been declared between classes, the language of the nobility is in everything comparable to that of the other classes."81 Thus one had to conclude that: "the old society was dead. . . . The union of all the Parlements was not only the means of the Revolution, it

24

Aristocratic Liberalism

was the sign of it. It supposed that the nation, in the middle of the multitude of institutions that still seemed to divide it ... was already one."82 What does this, the final proof of the death of aristocratic society and the rise of democracy, mean? "This does not prove that a great revolution was near, but that a great revolution had already been made."93 In fact, according to Tocqueville, he was no more than doing justice to a contemporary perception: One often finds, among the authors who write before the end of 1788 these words: Thus things happened before the Revolution. That astonishes us, we are not used to hearing talk of a revolution before 1789. ... This was the effect of a very great revolution but one which should soon lose itself in the immensity of that which was to follow, and thus disappear from historical observation.84

This is the revolution whose origins Tocqueville traced in volume one of The Old Regime, the revolution of centralization and public opinion. It was a revolution of interests and of ideas, of society and of language. It exercised an immense influence on the French Revolution proper (that is, post-1789): "This first revolution exercised a prodigious influence over the second, and made of it an event different from all those of the same kind that had ever before taken place in the world, or those which have taken place since."85 Nevertheless, it did not in and of itself contain that second revolution, as Tocqueville, Burckhardt, and Mill recognized. The second revolution, which began sometime in the five months between the call for the Estates General to meet and their election, was something new, something for which Tocqueville could not conjure up the slow maturation of centuries depicted in The Old Regime, or in Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. "The Revolution created an entirely new context, which separated it from the past."86 Although Tocqueville spoke in his first volume about the "new social order" to which the Revolution gave birth, this recognition appears much more forcefully in his later thought as embodied in the second volume. 87 This second revolution required a new analysis, and even such new terms of analysis as the discussion of national temperament and class war. The second revolution was itself divided into two stages in Tocqueville's analysis. The first, which I call the revolution of liberty, lasted until no later than \htjournee of 6 October 1789, when the king and the National Assembly were brought from Versailles to Paris by the women of the Faubourg St. Antoine. The second stage, the revolution of equality, lasted from then until 18 Brumaire. These two stages correspond to the two different passions Tocqueville had noted in eighteenth-century France, hatred for inequality and love of liberty. The hatred for inequality had ancient roots, but the thirst for liberty was recent and relatively weak. 88 The latter was a good thing in aristocratic liberal eyes, the former a more mixed blessing.

Past and Present

25

The idea of a division between a stage of liberty and a stage of equality appears in embryo in the foreword to the first volume of The Old Regime: "I shall begin with that first era of '89, when the love of equality and the love of liberty equally divided the heart of the French nation."89 Later this would change, but in the anti-government agitation of 1787-1789 equality was not the dominant passion of the two: It was not the hatred of social inequalities but the hatred of despotism which showed itself at first. And that makes itself evident among the members of the upper classes and in the heart of the most elevated bodies. For these classes had more than others the means to resist the king and the hope of dividing his power.90

Furthermore, the moment before the meeting of the National Assembly was characterized by class unity: "Nobles, priests, bourgeois, all saw clearly then that it was not a matter of modifying . . . but of ... regenerating France."91 In fact, the Revolution, insofar as it was a revolution against despotism, a revolution of liberty, could occur only on the basis of unity among all classes, a unity whose presuppositions, ironically had been created by the first, centralizing revolution chronicled in The Old Regime and culminating in 1787-88: The king could not have created his uncontrolled power except by dividing the classes, isolating each class with all the prejudices, jealousies, and hatreds particular to itself. . . . It sufficed for the French who formed these different classes, lowering for a moment the barriers that had been erected between them . . . to reunite in order to resist together . . . for the absolute monarchy to be in their power. 92

The nation was conscious of its need for unity in the great regeneration that it confidently expected to see emerge from the Estates General.93 Tocqueville could not stress enough the absence of class division at this point: The obvious and sincere rapprochement was but the principal symptom . . . a symptom of that admirable effort of minds to prepare themselves for the task which they were going to have to fulfill in their devotion to the great cause. . . . The contempt for material interests,... for life, was the supreme sign of it. ... 94 A common joy filled all the so-divided hearts and united them, one moment before they separated for ever. 95

One must recognize the pain as well as the significance with which Tocqueville wrote those concluding words, "pour jamais." This unity was not to be rediscovered in the nineteenth century, to the aristocratic liberals' profound

26

Aristocratic Liberalism

regret. They recognized class struggle as a key component of nineteenth-century society and deplored it as a danger to liberty and to their other humanistic values. But France in the first stage of its second revolution, the revolution of liberty which broke out in 1789, was filled with a boundless confidence in itself: "There was then not one Frenchman who was not convinced that he was not only going to change the government of France, but introduce into the world new principles of government applicable to all peoples and destined to entirely change the face of human affairs." 96 This tremendous confidence, born of the Enlightenment and the elan created by the new-found unity of all Frenchmen, was to suffer at the hands of experience: Then the enlightened classes had none of that fearful and servile nature that revolutions have since given them. For a long time they had ceased to fear the royal power and they had not yet learned to tremble before the people. . . . The desire for material welfare which would finish by mastering all other desires was then but a subaltern and powerless passion.97

Class struggle and materialism would blight that too-hopeful beginning; but until the time when the enlightened classes learned to fear the people, and the spirit of self-interest returned, the spectacle was magnificent. Tocqueville allowed himself to grow almost as lyrical on this point as Michelet did about the Fete des Federations. In fact, Tocqueville wrote that "the Fete des Federations was for the union of the bourgeoisie and the people what the elections of '89 had been for the nobility and the bourgeoisie."98 Tocqueville described his supreme moment thus: "I do not think that any moment in history has seen, anywhere on earth, a comparable number of men so sincerely impassioned for the public good. . . . The spectacle was short, but it was of incomparable beauty. It will never disappear from the memory of man."99 Tocqueville would defend 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the last: "That declaration . . . had as object liberty much more than equality; which shows how the character of 1789 is liberal, whatever certain publicists of today may say." 100 Not only Tocqueville but the other aristocratic liberals too were cognizant of the benefits that the first stage of the second revolution, the stage of liberty, conferred. Those who consider Burckhardt a reactionary would be surprised at the harshness of his condemnation of Old Regime Germany. He was full of contempt for the bulk of the ecclesiastical states and for petty princes such as Landgrave Friedrich of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects to the English to fight in their wars. 101 Yet, compared to these, "how incomparably worse the tiny secular states (for example the baronies and imperial cities) with their sorry ostentation and courts, their barbaric patrimonial justice, etc." 102 These

Past and Present

27

tiny states deserved their destruction, carried out by the revolution of equality, which in this fulfilled the demands of the revolution of liberty and of the Enlightenment. Burckhardt went so far as to say, "The small state only has life and meaning when it is a republic, that is a real republic," and not a disguised oligarchy. In actuality, however, nearly all the Kleinstaaten and even the Mittelstaaten (excepting Wiirttemberg, as did Burke) were worthless. 103 Burckhardt had only praise for the "high postulate of the Rechtstaat" for the kind of constitutionalism that Archduke Leopold of Tuscany, for example, wanted to introduce into his domains before the armed revolution of equality swept him away.104 When he read the demands of the Cahiers for judicial equality, provincial assemblies, an end to feudal rights over the land, Burckhardt spoke of "the greatness of this moment, which is not to be denied."105 The revolution of liberty extended the political victory of democracy over aristocracy. It eliminated legal and fiscal distinctions in personal status, freed the land and industry from entails and hereditary monopolies, and established religious freedom: "These things and their continued defense are progress," and "the sentiment of democracy is an essential part of our sense of justice." 106 All nineteenth-century liberals lauded 1789. Mill called the taking of the Bastille the French equivalent of the Reform Bill of 1832—certainly high approval. But the approval is qualified because for him the fall of the Bastille and the Reform Bill were omens of how two great revolutions would run their course: the French Revolution in bloodshed, the later English Revolution in peace.107 Mill reserved his highest praise for Lafayette, who after leading the enfranchisement of his own countrymen, ... strenuously, and at all personal hazard . . . [opposed] himself to every excess; and three years later deliberately staking life, liberty, fortune, and the love of his countrymen . . . to arrest the precipitate course of the revolution. 108

To understand the aristocratic liberals' judgments about the revolution of liberty, however, is to understand only one part of the meaning the French Revolution held for them. Unfortunately, from their point of view, it was the second stage of the post-1789 revolution, the revolution of equality, that exercised the most influence on modernity. Mill noted that the French Revolution that culminated with the meeting of the National Assembly was justified as the work of the people as a whole, not of any one class or individual interest.109 But even at the moment of unity, the seed of disunity was sprouting. Soon "the true mother passion of the revolution, the passion of class . . . took pre-eminence."110 This passion would triumph in the end, and its triumph lead from the revolution of liberty to the revolution of equality. Liberty had been "a common passion" that "had kept all classes together for a moment." "The moment when that tie was released, they separated; and

28

Aristocratic Liberalism

the real face of the Revolution . . . suddenly revealed itself" as the class struggle that derived from the demands for equality and material well-being. 111 Once the Estates General had met, the nation would be faced sooner or later with "the class struggle which was inevitable." 112 Given the prevailing ideological spirit, the resulting struggle would be frightful. 113 The class struggle, through which the revolution of equality manifested itself, marks a crucial watershed between the eighteenth century and modernity. 114 It would be easy to assume from this that class and class struggle, however undefined, were for Tocqueville at least the prime or even the sole causes of the revolution of equality. But this would be to imprison Tocqueville once more within a unicausal theory of the sort he hated. Furthermore, it is easy to disprove this idea: "What strikes me, is less the class passions which animated the whole polemic ... the struggle of contrary interests which occurs there, than the basis of opinions (and it is always to that that one returns and which makes the final result of revolutions)." 115 It was the ideas that were essential. As Tocqueville had spoken of the "mother passion" of the Revolution, he also spoke of the "mother ideas which form the basis of the whole new system in matters of society and government." 116 It was not the lack of ideas that turned the nation from the path of liberty to the path of equality in 1789 but "the absence of accepted ideas that were just or realizable without revolution"—ideas, in other words, free of the anti-historical, abstract character inherent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought as the aristocratic liberals understood it. 1 1 7 This did not stop Tocqueville from regarding the Constituent Assembly as a highly dangerous body, not because its members were filled with the ideas of the Enlightenment, but rather, echoing Burke, because [o]ne created a body apart from all the great proprietors . . . the Third Estate found itself reduced to choosing only outside the ranks of the proprietors . . . thus . . . it resulted that the power to make laws fell almost uniquely into the hands of those who lacked the conservative spirit that landed property gives. . . . It [the Constituent Assembly] had been elected to represent a class [the bourgeoisie] and not the nation. 118

Tocqueville saw all the factors that led to the stage of equality in embryo in the stage of liberty. Precisely when the stage of liberty ended was a matter about which he gave contradictory indications. While it was no later than 6 October 1789, he sometimes implied that it was much earlier, that the first stage of liberty and unity lasted no longer than the five months between the call for the Estates General and their first meeting. Part of the reason for Tocqueville's difficulty lay in the multi-causal redundant scheme that he created to explain the change. Here the characteristic

Past and Present

29

aristocratic liberal style of explanation (see chapter 2) got in his way, because Tocqueville could not decide which connections were the most important ones to point out to the reader at any given moment. 119 It proved impossible to make the levels of class and ideology march in time to the beat of the same tocsin. This is to say nothing of the secondary causes he also discussed, for example, the general political inexperience that played a part in the second, post-1789 revolution as it had done in the first, pre-1789 revolution (indeed, French political inexperience is a fault that Tocqueville had not ceased to complain of in 1848). It also played a role in changing the character of the second revolution from that of a struggle for liberty into a struggle for equality: "[I]t is further because of that that the movement which had until then been liberal suddenly took on its real character, and the struggle against despotism became the class struggle." Thus "one precipitates oneself toward the idea of pure democracy" from inexperience. 120 In the realm of ideas this was accompanied by the switch from Montesquieu to Rousseau, who "became and is going to remain the unique preceptor of the Revolution," with an "echo in many speeches in the Convention." 121 This sounds as if for Tocqueville and Burckhardt the Revolution had already changed its character forever in the first speeches of the Estates General. But Tocqueville later implied otherwise. Speaking of Paris after the fall of the Bastille, he said: "The spirit of the body seemed very moderate. One scented there rather the bourgeoisie who had prepared the Revolution than the works of the masses who accomplished it. One spoke with respect of the upper classes there. ... It is the bourgeoisie of the Old Regime who govern." 122 But after the fall of the Bastille: "One sees . . . that the people rise against the bourgeoisie, and make themselves feared. One sees, in that first phase of the Revolution, the bourgeoisie make a great simultaneous effort against both those above and those below." 123 The precious unity of those early months was already lost forever, but Tocqueville could not quite decide whether the bourgeoisie by itself could have served as the bearer of liberty. This ambiguity is all the more meaningful in the context of the aristocratic liberal analysis of the nineteenth century as an era of bourgeois hegemony. At times Tocqueville seems more favorable toward the bourgeoisie. Contrasting the actions of the cities with those of the villages during the rural unrest between 14 July and 6 October 1789, he notes: "[T]he bourgeoisie want political rights, the people material gain." 124 The attitude of the bourgeoisie was a sign of the difference between this revolution and the nineteenth century. One of the main distinctions between the past and the nineteenth century was that "the men of the eighteenth century hardly knew that sort of passion for material well-being which is the mother of servitude." 125 It was this "passion

30

Aristocratic Liberalism

for material well-being," the willingness to trade everything else away in order to make money in peace, that Mill, Burckhardt, and Tocqueville would condemn so often in their analysis of nineteenth-century society and the middle class in particular. This was the bitter political fruit of the commercial spirit—bitter at least to all who preferred their freedom to their profits. In any case, the journee of 6 October for a time made the people of Paris master of the Assembly and of the nation. The Assembly and the middle classes were simultaneously saved and enslaved by the people. They had been rescued from the domination of the king and the nobility only to be mastered in turn by the people of Paris, or those who spoke in their name and commanded the streets. According to Tocqueville: "I do not know if in all the Revolution there was an event more fatal than that of the sixth October; it was, it is true, easy to foresee. . . . It happened contrary to the wishes of the majority of the Assembly and that of the country, perhaps the first example of that which was going to happen so frequently." 126 Thus 6 October, at the very latest, marked the end of the first stage—the stage of liberty—of the French Revolution proper. What characterized the second stage of the Revolution, the stage of equality? "Equality had become the soul of the movement, more than freedom." "There is the final word of the Revolution: We will try to be free while becoming equals, but better to cease being free than to remain or to become unequals." 127 The story to be told about the dialogue of liberty and equality at the beginning of the Revolution moved and interested Tocqueville profoundly. The later period of the Revolution held much less attraction for him and for the other aristocratic liberals. Faced with the difficult task of carrying his complex analytical framework into this epoch of the Revolution, Tocqueville faltered. The two complete chapters he did write about the end of the Directory (early writings that are the remnants of his original conception of writing about Napoleon I as the bringer of equality and the murderer of liberty) simply provide liberty with a decent burial after its long exposure to the vultures: "The French, who had loved, or rather had believed themselves to love liberty passionately in 1789, no longer loved it in '99, without having attached their heart to anything else." France was morally exhausted. Tocqueville adds in a note: "The end of great passions is always sad." 128 Tocqueville is much clearer on why the nation passed from the pursuit of liberty to the pursuit of equality than he is on why the nation ever pursued liberty in the first place.129 This is characteristic of the aristocratic liberals' attitude toward liberty throughout their work. Even the most philosophically rigorous of them, Mill, never provides convincing logical criteria by which to distinguish higher pleasures from lower, thus explaining why liberty is a higher good than mere equality. Liberty is a value the aristocratic liberals do not feel

Past and Present

31

the need to justify. Nor is it something that they believe needs definition. Anyone with the proper faculties will know what it is and value it accordingly because it is an essential part of being a fully developed human being in their view (see chapter 4). Thus Tocqueville, Burckhardt, and Mill exert themselves to understand why people forsake liberty rather than why they pursue it. The merits of the true faith are obvious; what is puzzling is why so many go whoring after the false god of equality. That is what requires explanation, an explanation that unfortunately makes the attractions of equality in the modern era all too clear. This is not to say that equality and liberty are necessarily opposed in the aristocratic liberal view, but rather that the danger is great that the passion for equality, which at first may foster the taste for liberty, will become so strong as to exclude it. The French Revolution is an ominous example of the victory of equality over liberty: "Thus the Revolution's final word: We will attempt to be free while becoming equals, but it is a hundred times better to cease to be free than to remain or to become unequal!"130 The eighteenth century (which was in itself the first revolution and the presupposition of the second revolution) seemed to have found the path toward liberty for a few months and then, "reaching the middle of the stairway, thrown itself out the window in order to get to the bottom quicker."131 The question that the aristocratic liberals had to answer was what this fall meant for their present. The Revolution that began in 1789 had not ended in 1815, or even in 1830 or 1848; it still continued. The struggle between liberty and equality, the struggle to form a democracy without a despotism from either above or below, also continued. Thus Tocqueville wrote: Please note that what I blame, is not that we have destroyed the Old Regime, it is the manner ki which we have demolished it. I am not the adversary of democratic societies. . . . What saddens me ... is that the inherited vices of our ancestors and our own vices are of such a nature, that it seems to me very difficult to introduce and animate an ordered liberty among us. But, I confess, I know nothing more miserable than a democratic society without liberty. 132

The Eighteenth Century, the French Revolution, and Modernity The chief threats to liberty in the nineteenth century, as the aristocratic liberals saw them, emerged from the French Revolution. That is why understanding it was so important to them. Some of these threats, for example the centralized state, had eighteenth-century roots that were broadened and deepened by the course of the Revolution. Others, such as the class struggle in its modern form, were basically new, if not ex nihilo creations of the Revolution's stage of equality.

32

Aristocratic Liberalism

Of course, the Revolution did not stand for only the negative aspects of modernity. Together with the eighteenth century, it was the beginning of modern society as a whole, good and bad alike. Tocqueville noted of the Revolution: "I do not know if one could cite in history a single event of this kind which has contributed more to the well-being of the generations which followed it and more demoralized the generation which produced it." 133 Mill thought Tocqueville had over-stressed the negative aspects of Enlightenment thought in The Old Regime, yet Tocqueville himself rejected the suggestion that he was completely hostile to the ideas of the eighteenth century: "I did not w a n t . . . to put the ideas of the eighteenth century on trial, or at least the just, reasonable, and practical portion of those ideas, which are, after all, my own." In the final analysis, the aristocratic liberals were partisans of modernity: they were themselves moderns. The results of the Revolution were both good and bad. The final judgment on those results, however, could not be made until future developments revealed the fate of the modern world to which the Revolution had given birth. 134 But when they analyzed the Revolution, the aristocratic liberals concentrated not on its benefits but on its threatening implications for modern society's liberal development. The principal threat to emerge was class struggle. The social objects of the Revolution were the objects of future social struggles as well. "The French Revolution was social from its very beginning in 1789. . . . The period after 1815 then took up that development and carried it on," and "the classes of men ... that participate in things now become substantially different from what they were previously." 135 The division of the Third Estate into peuple and bourgeoisie was maintained and accentuated by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of a "fourth estate" of proletarians. 136 Above all, the unfettered taste for material well-being, promoting servility and class conflict alike, continually increased in the modern era, co-operating with the class struggle to debase politics and the individual. If the prerequisite for liberty was class unity, where was it to be found in a world dominated by class struggle? In Tocqueville's history of the latter part of the Revolution, whichever class is united wins out over its internally divided enemies (for example, united Estates versus unsure monarchy, united Third Estate versus divided First and Second, and so on), but for all of society to win—that is, to gain liberty—all of society must be united. Where was that unity to be found? Chapter 5 will explore the extent to which the aristocratic liberals still hoped to find or create that unity, each in his own fashion. The absence of unity led to a terrible logic of despotism. Despotism had established its mastery by destroying the links that bound the orders together. By separating the classes it had made itself indispensable. In the same way, the new social divisions created a new demand for a master. The state was now called on to play an ever bigger role, on the one hand to protect the property

Past and Present

33

of the upper classes and on the other to fulfill the demands of the lower classes. In fact, the encroachment of the state, of politics, on what had hitherto been the concerns of civil society began well before the Revolution. Burckhardt and Tocqueville both noted the resemblance of the law code of Frederick the Great to a kind of state socialism.137 It was the Revolution, however, that gave impetus to the expansion of the state's responsibilities, and the transfer of civil society's tasks to the state.138 From above and below in the nineteenth century there was a call for a despot to use the power of the centralized state for internal purposes, to further the material well-being of one class or another. 139 "It is a question of a new concept of state power, which comes from the Revolution and is in the sharpest contradiction with freedom. ... The French Revolution founded an all-powerful despotism and completed centralization. All the other peoples then centralized likewise."140 The ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution were also central elements in modern culture. They contained important contributions to liberty, such as the ideals of the Rechtstaat and constitutionalism and contributed crucial elements of the aristocratic liberals' own modern humanism in their recognition of change and discontinuity. They also had less fortunate contents, both politically and culturally. Tocqueville summed up the ideas of the stage of equality as contempt for the past, love of uniformity (both nationally and internationally), the exaltation of human reason over past history, unlimited power vested in a one-chamber assembly, unlimited press freedom, and the unlimited sovereignty of the people and their elected assembly over all other rights and powers whatsoever.141 Some of these ideas were inherited from the eighteenth century; some were new; many posed a grave threat, in the aristocratic liberals' eyes, to the freedom and diversity that they prized. Too many of the ideas of the Revolution and the Enlightenment could easily lead to despotism, whether by a party or by a military dictatorship, for the aristocratic liberals to be comfortable. Above all, the taste for material well-being, the raging rush to make money at any (non-monetary) price, had a dire impact both politically, as an encouragement to despotism, and culturally, as an incitement to indifference and contempt for any activity not connected with making money. The commercial spirit also served to reinforce the Enlightenment's taste for uniformity. All these were threats that the aristocratic liberals thought had been given their definitive impulse by the Revolution. The kind of politics, the kind of individual, and the kind of cultural institutions the aristocratic liberals valued were endangered by these developments. How they were threatened can best be seen if we look at how the aristocratic liberals understood their own century. Yet on all the levels of their concern—the political, the social, the intellectual—the Revolution marked the beginning of modernity and its unique problematic.

2 The Spirit of the Majority Contradiction or Coherence? The Aristocratic Liberal Style of Explanation The aristocratic liberals used many levels of explanation in analyzing the French Revolution and the Enlightenment: social struggles, battles of ideas, long- and short-term transformations of political life and of society all played large roles in their account. In essence, they described two sorts of change in Europe, social and ideological, whose chameleon-like synthesis was the world of politics. But was there really a synthesis or merely a juxtaposition, or was there in fact a series of contradictions between the different types of explanations they used? When this question is carried over into the aristocratic liberals' analysis of the nineteenth century, the answer becomes still more important, as they tended to boil down the leading social, intellectual, and political phenomena of the nineteenth century to three: the hegemony of the middle class, the dominance of the commercial spirit, and the power of the centralized state. What was the relationship among these three? Each of them at times appears all-powerful in the aristocratic liberals' explanations and accounts. In order to make clear how they perceived the social, intellectual, and political structures of the nineteenth century (as well as to cast some light backward on their understanding of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution), one must consider their characteristic style of explanation. This style, whether applied to their past or their present, is often puzzling. Social forces and ideas are never thesis and antithesis, never independent opposites. One is always conditioning, even determining, the other. Unfortunately for the tidy historian of ideas, which one determines or conditions the other also changes, to say nothing of the reciprocal effects of politics on society and ideas. The aristocratic liberals refuse to provide a simple answer to the question whether ideas determine social forces or the other way around. Pierre Mancnt notes that Tocqueville "strives to keep a single object in view in successively designating first the social state, then the sovereignty of the 34

The Spirit of the Majority

35

people, and finally public opinion as the generating principle of laws and mores. .. ."1 This single object is essentially an anthropological one, that is, humanity— humanity seen in its unchanging essence, in its permanent interests, as a progressive species and at the same time as the product of a unique set of historical circumstances.2 Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville themselves realized the seamless nature of the material they worked with. Thus Mill, for example, wrote that "the economic nature of ... all society, depends therefore essentially on its moral and intellectual, and that again on its social, condition." 3 But depending on what point they were trying to emphasize at a given moment, Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill would treat one aspect or another as though it were the sole determining factor. The aristocratic liberals maintained their resolutely multi-sided perception of things even when it worked against their own interests. For example, although they could not rely on any particular social class as the source of salvation, they nevertheless emphasized the importance of a social base to the success of their ideas. The question of where to find a social base for liberty and for the full development of the individual dogged their thought, and its solution ultimately eluded them. Perhaps their inability to clarify the relationship between the social and the ideological was related to this difficulty. But regardless of how it complicated the achievement of their own ideals, Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville persisted in ascribing to social factors a strong and at times seemingly exclusive influence over ideas and politics. This can be made clear in a discussion of only a few examples from their works in which the determining role of social factors, and in particular of class, is stressed, sometimes to the exclusion of all other influences. The aristocratic liberals never defined class, their chief term of social analysis. Perhaps they felt excused from the need to give definitions, since the ideas of class analysis were certainly commonplace in their time. The nineteenth century was the apogee of class analysis, and class analyses of one kind or another were particularly in fashion in French and German historiography in the period 1815-1848. Yet Mill at least did not think the sociological viewpoint commonplace. In 1842, he wrote to Comte that a sociological history of England would find no English readers because the English had not yet learned to think in terms of social generalizations.4 If, for whatever reason, the aristocratic liberals left their social forces more or less undefined, those social forces were nevertheless crucial to them. Mill called himself "a philosophe sociologiste" and his self-description applies just as well to Tocqueville and Burckhardt. 5 In this aspect of aristocratic liberal thinking, ideas and politics were subordinated to the social. Mill argued that "government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever

36

Aristocratic Liberalism

is the strongest power in society, and that what that power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it."6 Similarly with politics: "Constitutional power cannot long continue very different from that real power, without a convulsion."7 Class, however ambiguous, was the crucial element, the essence of the "social Power": "[T]he state corresponds not simply to the whole people, but to one leading component, a particular area, a particular clan, or a particular social stratum." 8 In the nineteenth century, when neither clans nor peculiarly privileged localities still existed, and when the steamroller of modern homogenization had passed over all of Europe, only social class was available as a basis for the state: "[T]he opinion-forming classes substitute themselves for the authority of Cabinets. The dynasties become, insofar as they still exist, essentially administrators on their behalf." 9 What kind of leading classes? With the eighteenth century "begins the Age of Commerce and Manufacture, and these interests hold themselves more and more to be the determining ones."10 Appeals to sweet reason were fruitless against such interests: We are the last persons to undervalue the power of moral convictions. But the convictions of the mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or with their class feeling. . . . Men's intellects and hearts have a large share in determining what sort of Conservatives or Liberals they will be; but it is their position . . . which makes them Conservatives or Liberals. 1 '

In Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's view of a society dominated by class and class interests, it was clear that the class struggles inaugurated in the French Revolution, in their view, would remain important in nineteenth-century Europe. In fact, Tocqueville traced all succeeding French history through 1848 to these struggles. 12 This was one reason why the aristocratic liberals thought that the French Revolution was continuing in the nineteenth century—because the class struggles that it had commenced, first between aristocracy and middle class, then between bourgeoisie and people, continued to characterize their contemporary politics. Thus relevant contemporary political action had to be founded on the support of classes and class interests, based on contemporary social divisions. Political opinion could be effectively influenced only by "the growth in numbers, intelligence, and wealth, of the classes who are already, and from circumstances of their position, Radicals or Conservatives."13 As in the French Revolution, the problem was to find a social base for liberty. And as in the Revolution, unity and coalition were essential. When Mill considered the chances for a successful Reform party in England, he piled one likely social group on another until they made a sufficient majority. 14 Unity between the middle classes and the lower classes was essential for Mill if liberty was to be achieved. He was

The Spirit of the Majority

37

thus appealing for the unity of the Third Estate which had been divided within itself by the demand for equality during the French Revolution. But in the aristocratic liberal view it was difficult to avoid despotism in a democratic society, difficult to avoid the hegemony of a single class over all other classes and individuals. The worst of all worlds, of course, would be a society dominated by the lower class, the "mass of brutish ignorance," the "barbarians whom Universal Suffrage would let in."15 Domination by the lower classes would be a self-evident disaster from the viewpoint of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. We shall see later on what they thought of the domination of society by the middle class. Class determined not only politics but also ideas in this aspect of aristocratic liberal thought. For example, how a society ranked virtues and vices would vary according to social circumstance. Thus, "wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority."16 Whether an opinion was accepted or not depended on its social acceptability.17 In America, where money-making was the chief occupation of a middle-class society, "[a]ll the peaceful virtues which tend to give an ordered allure to the social world and to favor commerce should therefore be especially honored. ... All the virtues which often foster brilliance, but still more often create trouble in society, occupy . . . a subalternate rank." 18 Some virtues prized by Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville, however, grew best in pre-modern stages of society. This was "one of the chief stumbling-blocks both in the theory and in the practice of morals and education," as well as politics, for the aristocratic liberals.19 By contrast to the desired relationship between a virtuous society and virtuous ideas, and partly as a direct result of the terrible conditions in the great industrial cities, contemporary Europe was witnessing "the development of socialist and communist theories . . . an unavoidable correspondence and reaction to unfettered commerce and industry." 20 But whatever the cost in increased pessimism about the future of Europe, the only avenue of action open was "turning things into the best channel which the conditions of the state of society admit of."21 Nevertheless, the aristocratic liberals had a strong stake in the independent importance of ideas because their values were tied to the propagation of certain ideas rather than to the success of any particular social class. Unlike Marx or Guizot, the aristocratic liberals had a perspective on society and social classes that was not derived from a millenarian viewpoint. They did not look forward with pleasure to either a classless society or to a society dominated by one heroic class, whether the proletariat Oi the bourgeoisie. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville did not oppose the continued existence of different social classes;

38

Aristocratic Liberalism

to do that would have been to support the kind of uniformity and homogeneity they abhorred. 22 More optimistically, from their point of view, the aristocratic liberals could be as forceful in proclaiming the all-importance of ideas as they were in announcing the all-importance of social forces. Thus, Tocqueville observed: "The more I study .. .the cause of the changes in this world, the more I remain convinced that everything in politics is nothing but consequence and symptom, except for the ideas and sentiments reigning among a people, which are the true causes of everything else." 23 Here everything is completely subordinated to the movement of ideas. On this basis the aristocratic liberals could well claim that all history is the history of the mind, and that "intellectual changes are the most conspicuous changes in history, not from their superior force, considered in themselves, but because practically they work with the united power belonging to all three." The "three" referred to are three possible agents of change—economic, moral, and intellectual. Economic and moral forces are "in a great degree the consequences of the intellectual condition, and are, in all cases, limited by it." 24 Thus there is "nothing more clearly established . . . than the necessary relationship which unites great intellectual and great political movements"; this link is even "divine legislation." "The consequences of reflection are thus postulates which can bring great masses of men into motion." 25 If rulers needed further confirmation of this, the June Days of 1848 were a case in point. They were, according to Tocqueville, a revolutionary attempt based entirely on a new set of ideas about how society should be constituted. 26 Political institutions were of limited value either for good or for evil compared to ideas and beliefs. Tocqueville was shocked when one of his friends managed to draw the opposite conclusion about his thoughts: "Are you not familiar enough with my ideas to know that I accord only a secondary influence over the destiny of mankind to institutions? . . . Political societies are not made by their laws . . . but ... by the beliefs, ideas, habits of heart and mind of the men who compose them." 27 Even centralization, apparently, was secondary. The powerlessness of political institutions was a two-edged sword, however, from the aristocratic liberal perspective. If it meant that no political institutions, no matter how terrible, could ultimately corrupt, it also meant that no political institutions, no matter how good, could breathe life into liberty in a country where its flame had burned out. Thus Mill had to recognize "the powerlessness, recognized today, of all the theoretical and practical attempts that have been made for the past one hundred years to renovate the state of humanity by institutions alone."28 Institutions were powerless when not nourished by ideas and mores, and only the "proletarians" still had any illusions about the efficacy of democratic political institutional reforms, according to Mill. 29

The Spirit of the Majority

39

Thus, in this context of aristocratic liberal thought, it was not a particular social or institutional situation that gave power to ideas and to the makers of ideas. An administrative or electoral structure, centralized or decentralized, was not in itself a sufficient cause for change or the presupposition for the influence of certain ideas. The climate of opinion and ideas was itself the crucial factor. Ideas could dominate or even constitute society and social struggles; and "these ideas ... are to the social body what the vital principle itself is to the human body."30 At the very least, ideas beyond a certain point were independent of economic forces; and at the most, they determined social and economic developments themselves: "[I]t is not necessary to find a material basis for the birth of every idea. . . . Once the mind becomes conscious of itself, it creates its own world from there on."31 Ideas explain history and contemporary society, including the development of social forces. And social forces, particularly class struggles, explain history and contemporary society, including the development of ideas. Politics and institutions are also autonomous explanatory spheres, in their turn, for the aristocratic liberals. If one separates all the explanatory factors they used, there seems to be no escaping the contradictions among them. There appears to be a whole series of radical incoherences built into their work. But the aristocratic liberals were not deconstructionists ahead of their time. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville were all aware that they emphasized different types of explanation at different times. For example, Burckhardt's Force and Freedom (Uber das Studium der Geschichte), his lectures on the study of history, presented three different perspectives through which one can view history, describing three significant factors in human affairs and their relations with one another: the state, religion, and culture.32 It has been argued that the choice of these three particular elements indicated a grand "ideal-typical theory of the ... great historical forces ... which can rightly be called a philosophy of history," according to which it was only through the proper balance of these particular three powers that high culture could flourish. The evils of modernity could be seen as the result of imbalance among these forces. Burckhardt's division of the historical into state, religion, and culture, however, was self-avowedly arbitrary. It was simply a device to introduce his students to the contemplation (Anschauung) of history and make possible some coherent division and understanding of historical configurations: "It is as if one took a few figures out of a picture while leaving the rest behind."33 Burckhardt then looked at various historical situations in the six different hierarchical permutations that this division permitted: the state in dependence (Bedingtheit) on religion, the state in dependence on culture, religion in dependence on the state, and so on. He saw no contradiction in having each factor now dependent, now dominant, because he separated the permutations

40

Aristocratic Liberalism

temporally; that is, one place and time was dominated by religion, and so forth. In effect, he used these permutations, as Jorn Riisen has noted, as Weberian ideal types, in a manner arguably similar to the ways in which Tocqueville and Mill used America, in their own series of explanatory permutations, as the ideal type for modern democratic society taken as a whole.34 Riisen astutely notes that by seeing history through the device of ideal types, Burckhardt, and by extension all the aristocratic liberals, could see history as both continuity and change, each historical configuration being both unique and universal in some respect, in typical modern humanist fashion. Thus they took into account both a historicist vision of change and a teleological vision of human continuity. 35 For Burckhardt, this multi-level perception of historical situations was the essence of "cultural history," which sought to study "a sequence of configurations" rather than the sequence of events described by ordinary history. 36 Indeed for Burckhardt historical understanding, and more particularly this kind of historical understanding, had a unique importance. The ability to recognize historical connections was the essence of the educated man, and the contemplation of culture had a leading role in Burckhardt's educational program and in his personal dialect of modern humanism that it did not have for Mill and Tocqueville, as we shall see in chapters 4 and 5. Tocqueville seems to follow Burckhardt in separating types temporally when he says that in 1789 people had causes, while in 1858 they only had interests, and thus that 1789 was dominated by ideas, 1858 by economic and social forces.37 The aristocratic liberals, however, did not always make such neat separations in practice, as we have seen. In Democracy in America, for example, the different types of democratic ideas, sociology, and so on are chronologically simultaneous. The aristocratic liberals' de-emphasis on chronological description (a point that, outside of the pedagogically intended Uber das Studium der Geschichte, is as true of Burckhardt as of Tocqueville and Mill) in their historical practice in favor of ideal-typical description, in which one set of circumstances is sometimes related to several ideal wholes, often makes their explanatory scheme difficult to sort out. But if the aristocratic liberals' style of explanation is amply over-determined, it is not incoherent. Rather than confusion, it represents an attempt to force the reader to acknowledge, as they do, the multiple connections between different orders of things. Perhaps at some points the aristocratic liberals regressed into a more mechanistic understanding of explanation, but in general they kept to a style of explanation that embraced alternative mechanisms. The gears of the aristocratic liberals' different wheels all mesh; they all end up driving the machine in the same direction. In the final analysis, this is what makes their style of explanation effective. Whether one reads Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's historical analyses or their writings on the contemporary

The Spirit of the Majority

41

scene, one sees that the exposition of every particular was informed by an understanding of the whole. Ideas, social forces, and politics all bore one stamp in the aristocratic liberals' view, and if they chose to stress one factor here or there, even to the exclusion of the others, it was the better to present some special facet.

The Hegemony of the Middle Class and the Commercial Spirit The aristocratic liberals saw contemporary nineteenth-century Europe as a mesh of dominant ideas, social forces, and political structures. The dominating class in nineteenth-century Europe was the middle class, the dominating set of ideas the commercial spirit. The commercial spirit and the middle class were an ensemble with a complementary, sometimes identical meaning, and their sphere of domination was coterminous. Together, they ruled nineteenthcentury culture, in the eyes of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. The hegemony of the commercial spirit and the middle class preserved leading features of eighteenth-century Europe while also presenting new aspects to view, symbolized in part by the aristocratic liberals' focus on England alongside France as the representative of modern industrial society. All together, it was a hegemony that, in the aristocratic liberal view, threatened Europe with stagnation, mediocrity, and civil and foreign war. What was the nature of this hegemony, and of the middle class and the commercial spirit themselves? Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville defined the commercial spirit as the spirit of business, that is to say, the set of ideas and values deriving from an unlimited pursuit of material well-being as the highest good. Mediocrity was seen as one of the strongest elements in this pursuit of well-being, and in the aristocratic liberals' presentation of the commercial spirit mediocrity was often as prominent as money-grubbing. The commercial spirit had a symbiotic relationship with individualism, in Tocqueville's sense of the word. 38 Individualism and the commercial spirit sprang from the common ground of modern democratic society, whose destruction of the society of orders was their shared presupposition. Individualism favored the commercial spirit by restricting the individual's perspective to his own and his family's needs, and by cutting off his attachments to the rest of society. Freedom from the need to consider others encouraged the concentration on material well-being characteristic of the commercial spirit. Although individualism is not identical with the commercial spirit, it is a necessary component. As part of its own development, the commercial spirit's emphasis on material well-being further encouraged the self-absorption characteristic of individualism. Individualism also increased the possibility of one class's exercising a despotism

42

Aristocratic Liberalism

over society because it cut the links that bound different classes together despite their contrary material interests. The aristocratic liberals' definition of the other dominant factor in their society, the middle class, is more difficult to pin down than their definition of the commercial spirit. Just as they did not define their idea of class, neither did they define precisely whom they meant by the middle class or classes. In this connection Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville all used both the singular and plural of class as well as the term bourgeoisie without explanation. Whether and how Burckhardt differentiated between the bourgeoisie and the Mittelstand is particularly murky. Burckhardt, like Marx, saw a decline in the Mittelstand, understood as independent small producers, together with a rise in the power of big money and, unlike Marx, an increase in the number of presumably middleclass public and private bureaucrats. 39 This change was unfortunate for the future of liberty, since the aristocratic liberals thought that economic independence was necessary for liberty and for individual development.40 The nineteenth century was dominated by a homogeneous mass of money-grubbing bourgeois, not by a diverse and independent artisanry. The rich presented a further problem to defining the middle class. Were they part of it? Sometimes Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville saw the very rich as a different class from the middle class, sometimes as one end of a middle-class continuum. Large quantities of wealth were usually insufficient in themselves to distinguish one from the middle class in the aristocratic liberals' view, but mere wealth did serve to distinguish members of the middle class from the proletariat. Tocqueville did sometimes treat the rich as part of the aristocracy, but usually for him even landed wealth by itself was not a sufficient criterion of differentiation from the middle class; otherwise he would not have considered the July Monarchy the archetype of middle-class government. Membership in the aristocracy, or the "leisured class," as Mill called it, implied something other than the incessant search for material gain that the aristocratic liberals saw among even the richest bourgeois.41 Since in any case they thought that the plutocracy shared the middle class's commercial spirit, its feverish pursuit of ever more wealth, the distinction was not important to them.42 The aristocratic liberals recognized that the middle classes were a group of varied composition and with very nebulous boundaries. For Tocqueville it was just that lack of homogeneity and precise limits that rendered government by the bourgeoisie itself difficult. 43 In the end, the aristocratic liberals' "middle classes" represented all those with a certain (poorly defined) minimum of property and/or education, who yet lacked enough cultivation to rank among the intellectual elite and the lineage and attitudes that would make them part of the aristocracy. The hegemony of the commercial spirit and the middle class was not simply

The Spirit of the Majority

43

the continuation of eighteenth-century or even Revolutionary trends. It was also a break with the past, if one can call the rapid acceleration of a pre-existing trend a break. The aristocratic liberals shared the Romantic realization that modernity was fundamentally different from the past, and that this was at least partly unfortunate. Thus Burckhardt contrasted modernity and the past: "our life is a business, that hitherto was an existence."44 The transformation of life into a business was a nineteenth-century event. The eighteenth century began "the age of business and commerce," according to Burckhardt, but their domination only took hold after 1815.45 The real efflorescence of the commercial spirit, if not its origins, was post-Revolutionary. Mediocrity, too, was not a striking characteristic of eighteenth-century life and thought. It began to predominate only after 1815. France, although the archetype of eighteenth-century specialization, was not the archetype of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution; England was. After 1815 the example of England began to be influential, attracting imitators as the centralization of Louis XIV and the Revolution had attracted them.46 Burckhardt observed that as the example of modern industrialism, "England with its world commerce and its industry became the general model" of the new economy and the new free market economics.47 But England was not a model to be envied; at times Burckhardt found London " a true symbol of everything repugnant about the operation of modern life," with coal dust everywhere.48 What Tocqueville said was true of the aristocratic liberals in general: "I have insurmountable prejudices against industrial projects, even the greatest. ... [Industrial preoccupations have exercised an influence which is not good over the ideas and feelings of those who occupy themselves with them."49 Nevertheless, England set the example for the "increasing industrialization of the world," which ensured that "money will be and is the measure of all things."50 On his English voyage of 1835, Tocqueville noted that money was the real power in England, not birth or talent; it was, "one could almost say, the only element of power."51 England was the richest country in Europe, but for that very reason the nation with the most poor and dissatisfied because the higher general wealth raised the threshold of material needs and aspirations. 52 The commercial spirit, the desire for material well-being, reigned in all segments of the English population, with disastrous results: The virtues of a middle class are those which conduce to getting rich. . . . And the qualities of a more questionable description . . . a general indifference to those kinds of knowledge and mental culture which cannot be immediately converted to pounds, shillings and pence; very little perception or enjoyment of the beautiful . . . the predominant passion that of money—the passion of those who have no other. . . . 5 3

44

Aristocratic Liberalism

In this England provided the archetype for Continental developments. To prove the inevitability of middle-class domination, the aristocratic liberals compared England to America. According to Tocqueville, America of course was the middle-class country par excellence.54 Mill, in his review of Democracy in America, endorsed Tocqueville's view and applied it to England: "England is progressively changing . . . from an aristocracy with a popular infusion, to the regime of the middle class. . . . America is all middle class; the whole people being in a condition, both as to education and pecuniary means, corresponding to the middle class here." 55 America was what English society would be if it were all middle class, and what English society was going to be in the not-so-distant future, according to Mill. Democracy in the sense of rule by the middle class and a society based on equality was inevitable in England. 56 English society, if it still was aristocratic in the 1830s and 1840s, could not remain so for long in the view of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. Mill doubted that England was an aristocracy even in the 1840s, when "the daily actions of every peer and peeress are falling more and more under the yoke of bourgeois opinion." 57 The most aristocratic society left in nineteenth-century Europe was really dominated, or about to be dominated, by the middle class. The July Monarchy of France provided additional evidence for assessing both the facts and the effects of the domination of the middle class, as well as the fundamental resemblance of England to the Continent. For Tocqueville, the French National Assembly under Louis-Philippe represented only the middle classes. Under the July Monarchy the middle class "presently holds in its hands the direction of all things," "absolute power."58 But, contrary to Henry Bulwer, Tocqueville thought the similarities between the English and French middle classes more important than the differences. If, unlike the French middle class, the English still retained some aristocratic passions, the situation was temporary. 59 After all, the bureaucrat was the new aristocrat of democratic society, and the bureaucrat was a bourgeois.60 For the aristocratic liberals, it was evident that the commercial spirit was dominant on the Continent as well as in England. The chief component of the commercial spirit was the taste for material well-being that was so dangerous to liberty in aristocratic liberal eyes. Mill thought that the profit motive was less developed on the Continent than in England or America, but Burckhardt and Tocqueville were not comforted by the relative comparison, if they accepted it. 61 Even if it were true, it was a vanishing difference. Throughout Europe, society was becoming democratic in obedience to long-established tendencies, and in democratic societies no one ever thought he had enough money. In democratic societies "the majority of [people's] passions either end in the love of riches or derive from it," and thus "the taste for material well-being forms the salient and indelible trait of democratic ages."62 Equality favored the

The Spirit of the Majority

45

passion for cash above all other passions. Eventually equality even drove out all other passions in favor of the taste for material well-being "because for us the standard of material well-being hovers continually before our eyes."63 The exclusive pursuit of wealth by the individual, absorbing all his or her energy, meant the destruction of all real individuality from the aristocratic liberal perspective.64 To Mill, the majority of the English and Americans had arrived at a state where they had no life but in their work, and no real pleasures. Or if they had pleasures, they were purely of a low, material sort. Given over totally to the desire to grow richer, the majority had allowed all other facets of their humanity to wither. 65 All they knew was "the frenzy of getting rich quick . . . the passion for the million, because this is the real standard of existence. ... One requires at least the appearance of wealth."66 If the ideal person of the aristocratic liberal imagination possessed enough property to make him (or her, in Mill's view) financially independent, one did not spend the majority of one's time plotting to increase one's fortune. Money was useful, but it was not to be everything. As Mill wrote: "There would be as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on."67 But "getting on" was the preoccupation of the middle class, the soul of the commercial spirit, and hence one of the nineteenth century's most salient traits. The leading motifs of the nineteenth century—domination by the middle class and the commercial spirit—were in one sense a break with past European history, but in another sense they were generally in continuity with the eighteenth century's leading ideas, that is, optimism and the anti-historical tendency. Optimism was reflected in the limitless ambition of the middle classes for wealth and their faith that it was attainable. The middle-class faith in technical innovation as a means to wealth reflected the anti-historical tendency.68 But the limitless ambition applied only to the appetite for wealth. In all other respects the desires of the middle class were mediocre, unlike those held in the still partially aristocratic eighteenth century, which saw a last efflorescence of aristocratic excellence in literature and the arts. In a further example of continuity and transformation, the homogenization of the eighteenth century was displayed anew in the nineteenth century in the overall mediocrity of virtues and intelligence and in the universal penetration of this taste for material well-being. The nineteenth century represented an acceleration of eighteenth-century tendencies in this direction. Diversity was not merely ignored; it was suppressed because of the barriers it erected to the untrammeled pursuit of commerce: "Modern-day people have gradually, among broad social strata, already unconsciously renounced their nationality and actually hate any diversity. They will sacrifice, whenever necessary, all their particular literatures and cultures in return for trains that do not wait at

46

Aristocratic Liberalism

borders."69 Homogenization was taking place everywhere, in keeping with the rise of the middle class and the commercial spirit of the new democratic society.70 Europe's ideas were approaching more and more closely those of America, that is to say, the ideas of the middle class.71 Speaking of the effects of the desire for wealth, Tocqueville noted that "the return of this same passion is monotonous; the particular procedures which that passion employs to satisfy itself are equally so."72 The increasing homogenization of Europe demonstrated the extent of the hegemony of the commercial spirit.

Hegemony as Stagnation The domination of the nineteenth century exercised by the middle class and the commercial spirit was not comforting to the aristocratic liberals. It posed an abiding menace to both the present realization and the future preservation of their values. It was a threat for two reasons: because they were opposed to the hegemony of any one spirit or class, and because they feared many of the specific traits of the hegemony of the middle class and the commercial spirit. The influences exercised by these two factors were inextricably interwined from the aristocratic liberals' perspective, and so henceforth I will refer to the middle class and the commercial spirit interchangeably, for the aristocratic liberals saw nineteenth-century culture proceeding inexorably from both. Tocqueville once said that the French Revolution had guaranteed France against the worst of all tyrannies, that of a class, by destroying the aristocracy and making all men equal before the law. But he and the other aristocratic liberals also recognized that democratic society had a capacity for despotism even greater than that of the Old Regime, in part because of its equality and uniformity. For the aristocratic liberals, diversity was of decisive importance on both the individual and European levels. Diversity was what had always marked Europe off from other regions and cultural systems: "This is European: the expression of all powers, in sculpture, art and word, institutions and parties, up to the individual—the development of the intellect on all sides and in all directions—the striving of the mind to express everything within it, not, like the Orient, to silently surrender to world monarchies and theocracies."73 But in the mid-nineteenth century, Europe "already begins to possess this benefit in a considerably less degree. It is decidedly advancing towards the Chinese ideal of making all people alike."74 Variety was disappearing. Many of the reasons derived from the specific traits of the hegemony of the middle class and the commercial spirit, from their hatred of diversity and their taste for mediocrity. But the fact that it was one class, one set of ideas that ruled, the fact that nineteenth-century Europe was

The Spirit of the Majority

47

homogenized, was disastrous in itself because of what it meant for the diversity that aristocratic liberalism prized as Europe's raison d'etre. Bourgeois opinion was now dominant in Europe; but any one group's control of the press and public opinion would have been bad because such domination encouraged uniformity, which was bad in itself. The general leveling, with its concomitant hegemony of one class and spirit, was also bad, regardless of which class or spirit it was. Thus Mill noted in regard to America that "the evil is not in the preponderance of a democratic class, but of any class."75 The consequence of a lack of diversity, of the domination of one class, was the danger of stagnation—"a Chinese stationariness," as Mill liked to call it. The uniform climate of thought would "finally restrict the activity of the human spirit within narrow limits which would not lend themselves to the greatness and happiness of the species."76 Tocqueville noted that most contemporary thinkers feared a wave of incessant change sweeping over Europe. He was afraid of the opposite tendency in modern societies: "I fear that they will end up by being too invariably fixed within the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same mores; to such an extent that the human race will halt itself and limit itself."77 Modern institutions were provisional, but the spirit that changed these externals remained remarkably constant in itself. The continual little changes of democratic society hid its fundamental stability, as Tocqueville discovered in Democracy in America. Mill wrote to Tocqueville of his happiness at finding another thinker who believed that "the real danger in democracy ... is not anarchy or love of change, but Chinese stagnation and immobility."78 Burckhardt and Tocqueville also compared the threat of Western stagnation to Oriental conditions, by which they meant a situation in which an absolute government was combined with an intellectual orthodoxy that did not permit the existence of innovation or diversity. Furthermore, domination by one class meant immediate political stagnation. A political life dominated by a single class was no political life at all. Thus for Tocqueville the period 1789-1830 had a real political life because there was true diversity in political society, and thus real issues were present. After 1830, when the bourgeoisie ruled alone, there was no politics. The Revolution of 1848 in France restored politics because it introduced the struggle of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat into political life. 79 In the final analysis, even class struggle was more favorable to liberty than the suffocating victory of either side in the struggle, followed by the silencing of the losers. That is one reason why the Second Republic, for all its faults, was so much more attractive to Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville than was Louis Napoleon. In addition to destroying politics, the domination of a single class corrupted that class itself once it had achieved "the paramount power." No matter how virtuous or well educated that class had been to begin with, its virtues would

48

Aristocratic Liberalism

never be sufficient to make its members "proof against any plausible fallacy tending to make that which was good for their class interest appear the dictate of justice and of the general good."80 Mill thought that no one "class, even though the most numerous, should be able to return a decided majority of the whole Legislature."81 Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville could have applied to classes Lord Acton's later dictum about the effect of power on individuals, that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. The effects of power on the middle classes were seen under the July Monarchy when they "gradually assumed towards the rest of the nation the position of a little aristocracy, and without its higher feelings: one feels ashamed of being led by such a vulgar and corrupt aristocracy."82 Two things seem odd about the aristocratic liberals' condemnation of the hegemony of one class. First, Tocqueville was on balance pleased with the rule of the middle class in the United States. Although the United States faced the threat and in part the reality of a tyranny of the majority, on the whole it was the freest country Tocqueville knew. America was not a Utopia in Tocqueville's eyes; but even if the rule of the bourgeoisie and the commercial spirit had not produced the best types of human being there, they were far from producing the worst. But what America did produce was not altogether good. It was in some crucial respects mediocrity, a mediocrity directly attributable, in aristocratic liberal eyes, to the hegemony of the middle classes and the commercial spirit, as we shall see. The second apparent contradiction in the aristocratic liberals' condemnation of one-class rule is their admiration for many aspects of the Middle Ages, for the society of orders. How can admiration for a society dominated by the aristocracy be reconciled with hatred for one-class rule? The aristocratic liberals, however, did not consider a real society of orders to be dominated by a single class.83 Such a society was not homogeneous. Rather it was, ideally, a harmonious blend of different traits and views, united by a common feeling and religion. That is why Tocqueville sees freedom where Guizot sees servitude in the society of orders, why Burckhardt laments the passing of any possibility of an organic society in the present, and why Mill regrets the transformation of the medieval clerisy into what Carlyle called a "great Imposture."84 Nevertheless, faced with the domination of nineteenth-century society by the middle class and the commercial spirit, the aristocratic liberals did not give up the struggle for liberty and the self-development of the individual, for individual Bildung.95 They believed that the evil tendencies of both one-class rule in general and the rule of the middle class in particular could be counterbalanced. But to discuss aristocratic liberalism's solutions is to leave its problematic behind. First we must explore the specific character of the threat to Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's values posed by the hegemony of the

The Spirit of the Majority

49

bourgeoisie and the commercial spirit in particular. That is, beyond the basic fact of dominance by one class, with its attendant threat of stagnation, what were the chief traits of nineteenth-century society in Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's eyes? Hegemony as Mediocrity "That which strikes me most about our days, is not that we do so many little things, but rather that we do not understand any better the theory of doing great things. The feeling for greatness is missing, and one would say that the imagination of greatness is extinct."86 Tocqueville summed up the middle class and the commercial spirit as "moderate in all things, except in the taste for material well-being, and mediocre."87 For aristocratic liberalism, mediocrity was characteristic of the middle class, of democratic society, and thus of the nineteenth century. Under the dominion of middle-class public opinion, "the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind." 88 Indeed, the natural effect of democracy was to "give everyone the desire of changing places without suggesting to anyone the idea of going much farther; to make personal ambition a universal feeling and to diminish the number of great ambitions," a tendency that was encouraged by the increasing specialization of modern life. 89 Modernity was characterized by "the general guarantee of mediocrity . . . the strictly enforced impossibility of everything of great spontaneity . . . the insurance of about average talents... the dissolution of a greater individuality." 90 Thus Tocqueville noted in 1857 that "a universal mediocrity seems to be spreading little by little over everything. All those who had a reputation or merited one seem to be disappearing; and where is the new man who gives a well-founded hope, in science, the arts, in literature, in politics?"91 The strongest impulse toward modern mediocrity according to the aristocratic liberals was, of course, the urge to make money. Thus, in France, [FJrom the most literary nation of Europe, that which stirred itself and the world with the aid of ideas taken from thick books, there has sprung a generation which is interested in absolutely nothing that may be written, and which attaches importance to nothing but facts, and only to a very small number of facts; those which have a direct, visible, and immediate relation to material well-being.92

In modern society, speedy and cheap production to satisfy mass taste and purchasing power was essential. 93 In a society with no use for the great and the exceptional, the arts and literature were exploited as just another means of

50

Aristocratic Liberalism

commercial speculation, and those with mediocre talents were declared first-rate. Mediocrity, not quality, was the natural by-product of the drive for lucre. It was accepted by a commercial spirit that felt no need for anything better: "[T]he present wants to concern itself only with its businesses."94 Formerly there was no literary industry, and the public, still relatively elite and exclusive, had thus given the author the time and attention necessary for the production and reading of good work. Cities such as Athens and Florence had produced works of genius, whereas modern cities, centers of literary industry, produced only increasing numbers of mediocrities. Since the pre-modern elite had shared the same tastes, the author could write for everybody and not just for one fraction of the elite or for one political tendency: "[Tjhis is literature from Shakespeare through Voltaire, who still wrote fully for the upper and highest estates and who were only understood and valued by the bourgeoisie for their malice."95 Tocqueville noted that the literary environment in France had been completely transformed between 1650 and 1850. As he wrote in 1856: "There is no place today where any lively and durable attention is given to any work whatsoever of the mind. ... The class which in reality governs hardly reads and does not even know the names of the authors."96 The "enlightened classes" had been dethroned by "the classes which . . . read nothing but newspapers."97 The upper and middle classes now cared only about material interests, and even if they could again be attracted to ideas (unlikely, according to Tocqueville), they would have difficulty understanding the people below. The old reading public had disappeared.98 Furthermore, the social environment directed people away from the abstract and the excellent toward the materially profitable.99 People no longer wrote because it was their vocation; they did so in the hope of honor or promotion. The most famous authors were really novel manufacturers, and scholars took up the writing of popularizations.100 The intellectual progress that so struck other observers of the nineteenth century was not evident to the aristocratic liberals.101 Mill wrote: "I do believe that intelligence and knowledge are less valued just now, except for purposes of money-making, than at any other period since the Norman Conquest, or possibly since the invasion of the Romans."102 Tocqueville could only say, when confronted by the general mediocrity: "I cast my regard over that innumerable crowd, composed of identical creatures, where nothing sticks up and nothing falls below. The spectacle of that universal uniformity saddens me and makes me shudder, and I am tempted to regret the society which no longer exists."103 This was a general symptom of "the sickness of the age," which rendered the human spirit indifferent "to all products whatsoever of literature and to everything which is neither stock exchange nor fashion." 104 Even the intellectuals could find nothing intellectual to talk about anymore. After the deaths of Goethe and Bentham, Mill wrote: "I sometimes

The Spirit of the Majority

51

think that instead of mountains and valleys, the domain of the intellect is about to become a dead flat, nothing greatly above the general level, nothing very far below it."105 Burckhardt said flatly, "[T]he great majority of mankind is trivial."106 The combination of intellectual mediocrity and an all-consuming thirst for material well-being was so widespread, in the aristocratic liberal view, that it threatened the very survival of the arts and sciences: "[T]he level of common cultural presuppositions needs to sink by only a handsbreadth, for everything that rests on it to dry up." 107 Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville asked whether if in modern times the pursuit of knowledge might not be abandoned as a hindrance to production, whether anything extraordinary might not be hated and rejected.108 Echoing Adam Smith, aristocratic liberalism traced some of the roots of modern intellectual mediocrity to the effects of the increasing division of labor, itself a manifestation of the commercial spirit. By concentrating on one particular field, one lost the ability to see beyond the head of a pin, and at the same time lost the common culture that had existed through Voltaire's time. Modernity separated into the educated and the uneducated what had once been a unified elite culture. 109 The modern division of labor and specialization made inevitable the partition of life and knowledge into little compartments, and made a general education a goal increasingly difficult to attain. Pushed by the commercial spirit, given scope only for the pursuit of wealth by modern democratic middle-class society, people no longer had the leisure to think, according to the aristocratic liberals. As the medieval noble had hired others to do his praying for him, the modern bourgeois hired others to be cultured for him. Cash was divorced from culture, which was itself broken down into specialized sub-divisions.110 The specialization, or rather the over-specialization, of nineteenth-century life in general was paralleled by over-specialization within academia and among the intelligentsia. Burckhardt complained that there was far too much minuscule monographic specialization among historians.111 But the problem was not unique to any one discipline: "In the other disciplines it is beginning to be the same; in these times there are almost only specialists. The morass of that which is worth knowing, and that which it is necessary to know, grows ever broader. What is funny is that everyone plays the game of being broad-sided, Renaissance men at the same time."112 The aristocratic liberals feared the effects of specialization even where it might have seemed harmless, in jobs such as postman or clerk, for specialization fostered the creation of narrow human beings.113Tocqueville opposed the institution of civil service examinations on the grounds that they encouraged mediocrity by turning government from an art into a "trade," that they fostered

52

Aristocratic Liberalism

uniformity in education, and that "the result of all these accumulated exams seems to me to be rather to create an average functionary of mediocre capacity, than to give birth to exceptional administrators." 114 Although Mill campaigned hard for civil service exams in England, it was with the proviso that they not be strictly professionally oriented, and that they give weight to general knowledge. 115 The aristocratic liberals felt specialized education to be a terrible menace. In the course of his early legal studies, Tocqueville remarked that he would rather burn his books than become a narrow specialist like his fellow students. Later in life he condemned the Ecole Polytechnique for promoting "continued application to a small number of subjects, and those always the same."116 Mill, in his St. Andrews Address on university education, stated flatly that universities were not places for professional education; other, lesser institutions could do that. 117 If the aristocratic liberals were comfortable with the idea of rule by the "enlightened classes," they were not friendly to the idea of rule by "scholars or savants without real originality . . . as in China, that is to say a pedantocratie."118 Nor did they favor an educational system formed by the middle class, who "set no value on any instruction not strictly professional."119 For the aristocratic liberals the modern demand for wider educational opportunities for the masses was really a "veiled desire for a better material life," that is, strictly a demand for vocational training. 120 They had little patience for the idea of education as a direct means of social mobility. 121 The extension of education was itself a cause of mediocrity: "When knowledge becomes a general attribute, great intellectual talents become rarer." "[T]he people becomes enlightened, knowledge extends, a mediocre capacity becomes common." 122 Education, by bringing the mass of individuals under common influences, was increasing uniformity and discouraging individuality. 123 Thus, the increased availability of at least a mediocre education was not necessarily a good thing for Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. They thought that widespread primary education was no sign of a people's culture, and that the diffusion of education was secondary in importance to the quality of the education diffused. 124 Of widespread bad education Burckhardt noted: "This is a long subject, the extension of education and the decline of individuality, aspiration and ability; through which this world is rotting and choking once again in the risen mist of its philistinism." 125 The aristocratic liberals had no praise for the "usual half-educated people" or for the kind of education that produced them. 126 Political mediocrity was also, logically enough, a rising tide in modern civilization in the aristocratic liberals' view. Specialization, in the sense of professionalization, was a bad thing in politics, too. Paid representatives were

The Spirit of the Majority

53

anathema to them, partly because they believed that the pay attracted mediocre people.127 But on more general grounds Mill thought that "the natural tendency of representative government . . . is towards collective mediocrity." This tendency was reinforced by every extension of suffrage to include less and less educated classes.128 Universal suffrage tended to encourage political mediocrity still more. The tyranny of the majority, exercised though the ballot box, worked to eliminate talented people from the running. This was true everywhere in Europe, even where there were still barriers to suffrage. Most elections saw the defeat of the better-educated, more intelligent candidates by mediocrities.129 For the aristocratic liberals, the passion for material well-being also encouraged the tendency toward political mediocrity. The more the commercial spirit had penetrated a society, the more its political life was apt to be mediocre, since all talent was devoted to private enterprise. That is why America was in some respects the worst country for the democratic experiment, according to Mill, because it was the country most penetrated by "the passion of moneygetting."130 European mediocrity was not at a much higher level than American. Tocqueville was forced to admire Thiers, whose policies he detested, simply because he was better than mediocre, and Burckhardt had the same reaction to Jules Ferry later on. But usually, according to Tocqueville and Burckhardt, the more intelligent Frenchmen were out-shouted by the majority. Whereas Burckhardt thought that the situation had been different under Louis-Philippe, Tocqueville would have corrected him. 131 In English politics, Mill complained of the "small intellectual and moral stature of the men of the present day"; only the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell was exempted from his blanket indictment of contemporary politicians. Burckhardt condemned German and Swiss politicians equally. 132 Nor was the political mediocrity of nineteenth-century Europe confined to representative governments. Its roots, the domination of the middle class and the commercial spirit, went far too deep for the mediocrity to be limited to one political form. Thus the aristocratic liberals condemned modern despots as mediocrities too. The most notable of them (and the most notably mediocre) was Napoleon III, the archetype of despotism from above in the interests of property. Indeed, given the circumstances, no virtues could have served Napoleon III as well as his mediocrity did. 133 Democratic societies whose essence was mediocrity were inclined to use only mediocre men as their tools. Even when they looked for the exceptional, they did not know how to go about finding it: witness the example of Boulanger in France. 134 Government run by second- or third-rate men was inevitable. The commercial spirit with its passion for material well-being imposed its characteristic mediocrity on all things.

54

Aristocratic Liberalism

The Rise of the Lower Classes Speaking of the French Revolution in the period of the Directory, Burckhardt observed that "the concept of property has outlived all other principles and values."135 The inequality of property was the one inequality that emerged unchallenged, or at least intact, from the French Revolution, in Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's perspective. The middle class and the commercial spirit could seemingly expect a triumphant and unchallenged reign in the nineteenth century. Equality and cash, however, were not passions restricted to the middle class. If inequality in property had survived the French Revolution, it was not necessarily sure to survive the revolutions of the nineteenth century. One factor disturbed the hegemony of the middle class and their obsession with their bank balances: the rise of the proletariat. The aristocratic liberals too saw a specter haunting Europe. The lower classes provided a ghostly counterpoint to all their fears regarding the hegemony of the middle class and the commercial spirit. In some respects, however, the danger posed by the lower classes was precisely that posed by the middle class. The working class (or classes) has an equivocal definition in Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's thought. Sometimes the working classes are treated simply as poor bourgeois, with the same drive for material well-being and thirst for equality natural to the middle classes. They too are imbued with the commercial spirit and also the optimism characteristic of modernity, which accustoms them to believe that everything can change for the better and that there are no natural barriers to the progress of humanity or of their class. In this perspective, therefore, the proletariat is the logical extension of the bourgeoisie, and its demand for the abolition of the last remaining inequality, the inequality of property, is simply the logical extension of the struggle against other inequalities. Sometimes, however, the aristocratic liberals see the lower classes as something essentially Other, a brutish mass as Mill calls them, that stands totally outside the boundaries of civilized society, a new barbarism. If the aristocratic liberals were equivocal about their definition of the working class, they were clear about its growing role in the nineteenth century. For Mill, most modern communities were divided into two interests, "laborers on the one hand, employers of labour on the other." 136 As early as 1842, it was clear to Mill that the working class and its relation to society was the "great social question," a question rapidly becoming imminent. 137 By 1871 he thought that the whole structure of society had been put into doubt for the next few generations, and that "the relation between labour and capital are the points on which the whole of politics will shortly turn." 1 3 8 Tocqueville had come to the same realization in 1847: "Soon, the political struggle will establish itself between those who possess and those who do not; property will be the

The Spirit of the Majority

55

great battlefield, and the principal question will turn on the more or less deep modifications to be made in the rights of property owners."139 Burckhardt, too, considered the inequality of property to be the next great struggle, a source of inevitable conflict between the masses and those who maintained their right to "call upon the exploitation of the strength of others in all ways."140 Incited by the commercial spirit and the general optimism, the working classes became more ambitious, conceiving new political and economic aspirations and needs.141 The Rights of Man of the French Revolution were re-interpreted to mean a right to work and to subsistence, without sufficient regard, in the aristocratic liberal view, to what was actually possible: "[N]eeds increase all over and the theories adapted to them [as well]."142 Increasing lower-class desires were accompanied by increasing lower-class means to fulfill those desires, according to Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. The spread of a mediocre primary education had raised the proletariat's abilities closer to the common level; the working classes were more and more conscious of their common situation; and "the capacity of cooperation for a common purpose, heretofore a monopolized instrument of power in the hands of the higher classes, is now a most formidable one in those of the lowest."143 The lower classes were now capable of organizing for action without the hitherto necessary leadership of disaffected elements of the upper classes. For Tocqueville, the February Revolution of 1848 was the first great manifestation of this metamorphosis, the first revolution made against, not with, the middle classes.144 Tocqueville was so shocked by the events of 1848 that under their direct impact he was tempted to make the drive of the lower class for material well-being the motivating force for all the French revolutions since 1789.145 It is probable that his experience in 1848-49 made him more inclined to think in terms of class struggle when he wrote the second volume of The Old Regime, although such elements are present in his thought much earlier than 1848. In any case, 1848 and particularly the June Days were different from past events because for the first time they put into question not merely the political but also the social order.146 The social order was threatened everywhere, not just in France, as the European scope of the revolts of 1848 seemed to show, although the failure of those revolts also showed the strength of the resistance.147 Even England was threatened, in the aristocratic liberals' view, despite its seeming exemption from European troubles. All Europe was going to face a continuing series of social changes and upheavals.148 For the aristocratic liberals, the growth of socialism and communism was an inevitable result of unfettered business and commerce and the necessary fruit of the proletariat's struggle to reverse the last remaining source of inequality, property. The social upheaval of nineteenth-century Europe was thus inevitable. Its

56

Aristocratic Liberalism

results could be horrendous, from Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's perspective: "One day the appalling Capitalism from above and the covetous activity from below will smash against each other like two express trains going in opposite directions on the same track. What will become of our quiet, peaceful conversations then?"149 For the aristocratic liberals, class conflict was deadly to liberty and culture. The nature of the contemporary combatants, the middle class and the proletariat, did not reassure them. Faced with the threat from below, what was the dominant middle class likely to do? Its preoccupation with money had left it with just one remaining political passion, "the love of public tranquillity," in which it could make money in peace without having to fear a sudden assault on the very existence of property. 150 The only liberty for which the commercial spirit really cared was the liberty to get rich. Under the despotism of Napoleon III, Tocqueville was only bitterly amused by the bourgeoisie's occasional whimpers of protest: "It is a quite amusing spectacle to observe these men who find despotism good for everything except for regulating their material interests: they regard the confiscation of all liberties with pleasure; but when one comes to touch the liberty of enriching oneself, they give vent to loud cries."151 Allegiance to money had replaced allegiance to political ideals, to liberty. 152 And even if the hegemony of the middle class was being challenged by the proletariat in nineteenth-ccentury Europe, the hegemony of the commercial spirit was not. The proletariat was equally imbued with it. The aristocratic liberal identification of the bourgeoisie with the commercial spirit was broadened after the middle class had achieved hegemony and commenced a new struggle. In achieving hegemony, the middle class had succeeded in generalizing the commercial spirit to all strata of society. The rise of the working classes, and the threat they posed to property, thus represented a dynamic element in nineteenth-century society, opposed to the one-class hegemony of the middle class, with its implied stagnation. Yet at the same time as the working classes are the opposite of the middle class in the aristocratic liberal perspective, they are also the same, equally driven by the commercial spirit. Their triumph would logically create only more stagnation, homogenization, and mediocrity. For the aristocratic liberals, the hegemony of the middle class, the domination of the commercial spirit, and the incipient rise of the working class to challenge bourgeois hegemony were the leading characteristics of nineteenthcentury Europe. They made up the spirit of the majority among whom the aristocratic liberals lived. The nineteenth century combined class conflicts and class roles first presented on the European stage by the French Revolution, but only definitively cast in the lead by the domination of the bourgeoisie and the appearance of industrialism and its by-products, socialism and the rise of the proletariat. The new spirit took not one country but all Europe as its province.

The Spirit of the Majority

57

This left Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville profoundly uneasy for the future of the values they held dearest.153 Neither the commercial spirit nor the hegemony of a class, whether bourgeoisie or proletariat, promised well for the individual caught in their midst. The political situation was no better. As we shall see in the next chapter, the political situation, like the social and intellectual situation, seemed to the aristocratic liberals to present only a choice among despotisms.

3 Despotisms: The State and Its Masters

The State For the aristocratic liberals, the threefold threat of despotism faced by nineteenth-century Europe was embodied first by the domination of one set of ideas—the commercial spirit—and second by the hegemony of one class or another—either the middle class or the proletariat. In politics, the third leg of the aristocratic liberals' characteristic explanatory tripod, the chief dangers were the centralized state, aided and abetted by the various parties struggling to control it, and the power of public opinion. The aristocratic liberals feared the ever-increasing centralization of the state, and they feared the uses to which the massive power of the centralized state might be put. Indeed, they thought that the very existence of such a concentrated mass of power was a threat to the individuality, diversity, and liberty that they prized. The threats to their ideals posed by politics generally, and the state in particular, were compounded by what the aristocratic liberals saw as the volatile and transitional nature of their era.1 The French Revolution had ended the old world but ultimately failed to define the new. The Revolution was not over. As Tocqueville put it: "It is clear to me that for the past sixty years we have been wrong in thinking that we had seen the end of the Revolution. We thought it was over in 1814. I myself thought, in 1830, that it was very likely finished. ... Mistake!"2 Rather, Tocqueville concluded, the youngest child then living would in all probability not see the Revolution's finish: "[T]o arrive at what end? In truth, I do not know."3 It was characteristic of this continuing cultural and political revolution, Mill thought, that societies were forced to regulate by law—that is, by political action enforced by the state—what should have been left to the independent action of social mores.4 The one institution that seemed to have roots strong enough to withstand the rapid changes of the post-Revolutionary world, indeed, to possess the strength to reap profit from the whirlwind was the state. As Burckhardt noted, "In the whole French Revolution one thing remained 58

Despotisms

59

constant and did not waver: the old inherited concept of the state: indeed its omnipotence was theoretically strengthened, and putatively justified. .. ."5 The aristocratic liberals thus saw the nineteenth-century state evolving into an ever more centralized, ever more comprehensive power. The demands placed on the state required increased power and a larger sphere for the central authority. The forms and constitutions of the nineteenth-century state might be ever more mutable, but its essential strength was growing ever greater.6 The increased power and scope of the state, which the aristocratic liberals had chronicled from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, continued to grow in the nineteenth century, when, Burckhardt wrote, "No one can make the state as such powerful enough," for everyone wanted to use its power to further his own ends.7 Mill described nineteenth-century France as a place "where the contests of political parties are but struggles to decide whether the power of meddling in everything shall belong to one class or another."8 Everywhere the preference for equality over liberty served to strengthen the power of the state.9 Everywhere the creation of an all-powerful state threatened despotism. A great danger was that the state would be asked to assume an instrumental role in the struggle for hegemony between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the socialist proletariat. The attack or defense of property could become a sufficient justification and an efficient cause for despotism. But the danger lay not so much in the struggle itself as in its uncompromising character, and in the titanic power of the state machine that was used as a weapon. Centralization was potentially the perfect instrument of socialism. Tocqueville said of socialism that "it is to centralization what the wild plant is to the grafted and cultivated tree."10 By concentrating more and more power in the hands of the state, partly in order to repress the socialists, the other classes of society were better fitting it to be an instrument of the socialist program. Socialism and the fear of socialism worked hand in hand as far as political centralization was concerned. From the aristocratic liberal perspective the only question was from which side despotism would come. In such a situation the state might well end up imposing its own despotism, if not that of a party. Europe faced two alternative solutions to its social and intellectual tensions, neither pleasant: "It has long been clear to me that the world is hovering between the alternatives of complete democracy and absolute lawless despotism. . .."n One despotism threatened from above, another threatened from below. Both fulfilled the modern demand for equality; neither recognized individual liberties. For Tocqueville these "alternatives" were incarnated in the portraits he found facing each other in a wealthy peasant's home—Ledru-Rollin and Napoleon III: "Demagogy in its republican form and demagogy in its absolute form face to face. . . . Is that not the whole spirit of France?"12 Both kinds of despotism were made possible by the increased

60

Aristocratic Liberalism

power of the state, and each potential despot contributed to that power. Compared to despotism from above, "complete democracy," "demagogy in its republican form," the tyranny of the majority had little positive to offer the aristocratic liberals. Mill noted that "it is not certain that the despotism of twenty millions is necessarily better than that of a few, or of one."13 On all sides Europe was beset by "terribtes simplificateurs" eager to use the raw power of the unfettered state, whether to destroy private property or to preserve it. 14 Given these views, it is not surprising that unlike many other liberals, the aristocratic liberals did not confidently expect the future state to be the more or less constitutional government of the propertied and educated. Modern society was always threatened by despotism, in the aristocratic liberal perspective.15 Tyranny was at least as likely a future as representative government. Of course, to portray despotism from above or despotism from below as the only two alternatives facing Europe is to present the aristocratic liberals at their most pessimistic. They did not always see the picture through quite such gloomy glasses. Indeed, perhaps the most important difference separating Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville from one another is the degree of their relative optimism or pessimism.16 Nevertheless, despotism was always their "default future" for Europe—the future that would happen by default unless some action was taken to prevent it—the permanent danger facing all modern societies. The power of the state was dangerous not merely as an instrument of the hegemony of a particular social class but in itself as well. The state in the abstract—power in the abstract—did not play a very positive role in aristocratic liberal thought. Burckhardt dismissed the notion that the state was a mere nightwatchman, or the result of humanity's demand for justice.17 Instead it was a manifestation of power, and of power the aristocratic liberals had little good to say: [T]he love of power is the most evil passion of human nature . . . power over others, power of coercion and compulsion, any power other than that of moral and intellectual influence, even in the cases where it is indispensable, is a snare, and in all others a curse, both to the possessor and to those over whom it is possessed; a burthen which no rightly constituted moral nature consents to take upon itself, but by one of the greatest sacrifices which inclination ever makes to duty.' s

Or, as Burckhardt put it more simply: "Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it."19 The increasing power of the state thus acted as a snare to all those who controlled it, even if they were of good will, which was too often not the case. Centralization provided numerous means of corruption, and the state acquired an institutional drive to increase its power at the expense of all other forces. 20

Despotisms

61

This is not to say that the aristocratic liberals held libertarian ideals. Mill explicitly rejected a definition of state authority limited to protection against force and fraud, rejecting the libertarians' definition as one "to which neither they nor anyone else can deliberately adhere, since it excludes ... some of the most indispensable and unanimously recognized of the duties of government."21 Nevertheless, the expansion of the state throughout the nineteenth century was far beyond what the aristocratic liberals considered justifiable. For the aristocratic liberals, the growing force of the state, and hence the central focus of nineteenth-century politics, was derived from centralization, a process that had a double meaning in their eyes. It meant both the concentration of state power in a central authority and the extension of state authority into new areas, which Tocqueville characterized as political centralization and administrative centralization respectively. In effect, centralization meant a further diminution of the individual's rights and powers before the authority of society, a further homogenization and leveling, in keeping with the dictates of the commercial spirit and the democratic social state. Their egalitarian tendencies encouraged democratic societies to centralize, and centralization itself encouraged equality. 22 As early as 1838 Tocqueville remarked on "the long chain which already surrounds individual existence on all sides."23 Administrative centralization destroyed individual initiative and replaced it with a passive dependence on the state that called for still more state intervention. 24 If the private individual had gained greater security and material well-being from the increasing activity of the state, he had lost ground as an independent individual and as a member of a community; "as a private individual he gains, as a citizen he loses."25 The growth of the state promised to become the chief threat to the individual in modern times.26 The dangers posed by the power of the state were magnified from the aristocratic liberals' perspective by the state's recent invasion, in the nineteenth century, of areas that they viewed as especially important to the propagation of their values—education and the employment of the educated classes. State control over education would be "a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another," and, even more important, would be used by whoever controlled the government to establish "a despotism over the mind." 27 Indeed, centralized state control over education struck at the very heart of the aristocratic liberals' values, at everything they believed worthwhile. It meant a leveling of the intellect, and to homogenize the intellect would be to destroy Europe, for Europe meant "the penetration of the intellect to all sides and in all directions."28 Even as an employer of the educated, seemingly a benevolent manifestation of centralization from an aristocratic liberal perspective, the state represented danger. The vast state apparatus replaced politics with patronage and

62

Aristocratic Liberalism

bureaucracy and replaced independent voters with place hunters, with disastrous consequences for liberty.29 According to Burckhardt, place hunting even threatened the independent manifestations of the commercial spirit by attracting all the bright young men away from the risks of business (and even from the glamour of the military) to the security of civil service jobs.30 The new aristocrat was the bourgeois bureaucrat, not the kind of aristocrat the aristocratic liberals had in mind.31 In only one area did they see centralization as an advantage in and of itself. That area was foreign affairs, and even here there was a certain ambiguity. Tocqueville thought it both good and absolutely necessary that a nineteenthcentury government should be able to act decisively toward its neighbors, and that in this sphere at least it was proper for all authority to be concentrated in a central government.32 Burckhardt thought centralization necessary if a state wished to survive in modern Europe, and cited the destruction of Poland as an example to those who thought otherwise.33 Mill, too, expressed no objections to state authority in this area. The three were all in their own ways nationalists, and they devoted considerable thought to their countries' place in the European balance of power.34 If national power, or even national prestige, required a strong central authority, at least in this sphere the aristocratic liberals were prepared to support it. 35 Even with regard to an area still largely independent from the state—the economy—the aristocratic liberals drew little comfort from what they saw as a temporary situation with its own drawbacks. From their point of view, industrialization, even if not directed from the political center, served to increase the power of the central authority by encouraging the growth of cities, by creating or concentrating a proletariat that required control (at least in middle-class eyes), and by rapidly increasing forms of wealth lacking the traditional protections of land and thus more subject to state encroachments. The growth of industry created demands for infrastructure for which only the state had the resources, and which at the same time increased the state's need for new resources.36 And the needs of industry grew endlessly, in line with the impetus of the commercial spirit, which demanded a state universal in scope and even in extent to provide it with optimum conditions for its limitless expansion.37 At the same time, the growth of industry made it a tempting target for a state take-over.38 The threat to liberty posed by centralization was always increasing, in the aristocratic liberal view, because centralization was continually increasing. The state was constantly encroaching on spheres hitherto left to the independent action of society, encouraged to do so by the demands of all parties and factions. As Tocqueville noted: "The to-and-fro of our revolutions creates an illusion, if one does not regard them closely. At the beginning there is invariably a push

Despotisms

63

toward decentralization: 1787, 1828, 1848. At the end an extension of centralization."39 Europe was not merely centralizing; it was already too centralized, particularly on the Continent.40 After all, centralization was the natural tendency of democratic society, and all nineteenth-century Europe was essentially a democratic society in aristocratic liberal eyes, partly, indeed, as a result of the state's own actions—that is, as a result of centralization. The state continued to play the role of democrat in this sense: "[T]he state itself postulates equality."41 But what about England, frequently alleged, even by contemporaries, to be an exception to Continental centralization? England was a particularly noteworthy case: "I am not an Englishman, but I am a man; and that gives me a kind of right to concern myself with England, whose destiny exercises so much influence on that of the human race."42 Thus Tocqueville, much concerned, wrote to George Cornewall Lewis arguing against England's adoption of centralized French methods of public administration. According to Mill, England was still different—not yet conquered by the Continental passion for bureaucracy, place hunting, and centralized government. But even English government was too centralized in some respects for Mill, extending its power into spheres best left to private action, and central power was steadily increasing.43 England was clearly less centralized than the Continent; but was England already too centralized, or on the way to becoming so? As late as 1861, in On Representative Government, on the whole Mill did not think so. Thus he wrote that "in all the great civilized countries of the world, except England and the United States, the governmental and central element is the one in excess, and that in a prodigious degree."44 But in England the central government had too little power in Mill's view.45 Tocqueville's generalization that equality leads to centralization in countries without experience of freedom did not apply to England and America because they had had experience of freedom before they reached a democratic social state.46 Mill even felt free to applaud certain advances of centralization in England, precisely because centralization was so contrary to the English spirit that it posed no real threat.47 Yet Tocqueville disagreed with Mill's 1835 judgment in this respect, believing rather that the centralizing tendency common in greater or lesser degree to all democratic societies would finally push the English toward centralization, and indeed toward too much centralization.48 Burckhardt, too, was sure that even in England the overweening state was enlarging itself at the expense of society.49 There is evidence that Mill also came around to this view. In On Representative Government he also referred to the fact that Parliament had been extending its influence into too many spheres better left independent. 50 By 1870 he noted that it was the English lower middle class, not the working classes, that had

64

Aristocratic Liberalism

prejudices against centralization. 51 Nevertheless, Mill made his remark about anti-centralizing prejudices in the context of support for a more centralized leadership for the trade-union movement. On the whole, it would seem that while Burckhardt and Tocqueville thought that England would also fall victim to centralization, albeit a bit later than the rest of Europe, Mill was more doubtful. If he lost his youthful confidence in England's immunity to the common disease, he did not become certain that she was yet a victim. He saw centralization more as a threat in England rather than the reality it was on the Continent. But the threat of centralization was bad enough, when combined with other characteristics of nineteenth-century European society that England shared, to make Mill fear centralized despotism even in England. To the aristocratic liberals it seemed as if all forces in nineteenth-century Europe were prepared to aid the concentration of state power. Certainly neither the middle class nor the proletariat wished to stop the advance. All wanted centralized power as their own guarantee, to use the all-powerful state for their own purposes, and thus sought to strengthen the state against the day when they would control it. 52 Political changes and even political liberalization served only to increase centralization and extend the sphere of state activity, because all factions wanted absolute power. 53 Tocqueville referred to the difficulties this situation presented when he said that trying to combine an elected assembly and a highly centralized executive was "the greatest problem of modern times."54 The combination of a "democratic constitution" and a strong centralized government "not only is not political freedom," noted Mill, "but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination."55 As Burckhardt noted: "Above all, nations and governments demand, despite all the speeches about freedom, unlimited state power in internal questions."56 The threat to political diversity inherent in this situation threatened the continued existence of politics itself,57 because politics dominated by one group, in the aristocratic liberals' view, was no politics.58 Tocqueville called for a great book to solve the problem of combining freedom, the centralized state, and an elected government. Unfortunately, when it came time to write such a book, he produced The Old Regime and the Revolution, which did much to explain the historical origins of the problem but little to solve it. Perhaps at that point in his career the problem seemed insoluble. Even earlier he had written that "we want to make co-exist . . . three things which have never been combined anywhere: administrative centralization, representative government, and equality."59 By the time he wrote The Old Regime, Tocqueville thought that the contradictory desire to introduce liberty into a centralized state and a society ridden by class struggles could never produce a free and stable government. 50

Despotisms

65

Our Masters: Public Opinion The centralized state posed a problem for liberty, both in its own right and as an instrument for despotism; but the aristocratic liberals feared another kind of despotism that served as the agent of classes and ideas seeking hegemony. The tyranny of the majority was one of their variations on the theme of political despotism set by the centralized state. It threatened to impose itself on both state and society by way of the power of public opinion, expressed through both the press and the ballot box. The aristocratic liberals shared the common belief of most nineteenthcentury liberals that public opinion was a decisive force in political and social life. As with concepts such as the middle class that were common currency in the political thought of the era, the aristocratic liberals did not feel any need to define rigorously what they meant by public opinion. Unlike many liberals, however, they were alive to the dangers posed by an all-powerful public opinion. Through the press and through peer pressure, public opinion controlled individual behavior and exercised a sometimes decisive influence on the state. It also participated in the state directly, in the form of voting. Yet opinion was in turn subject to manipulation by the state, through both government influence on the press and control of suffrage. Thus, from the aristocratic liberals' prospective, the state appeared in relation to the majority at one moment as a tool, at the next as a master. Nevertheless, in their view public opinion, both in civil society and as political representation, was generally an independent variable, although the pre-conditions for its power were affected by the leveling action of democratic society.61 In some respects the question of the tyranny of majority opinion was largely identical with the question of centralization. In an all-powerful state, those who controlled the government were also all-powerful. Thus control over public opinion, over the press, and over who got the vote were crucial questions for the aristocratic liberals, as for most other nineteenth-century politicians. In a Europe dominated by public opinion, the question of suffrage was vital to the aristocratic liberals in determining how the state's power would be used. The question of universal suffrage and majority rule in politics, and the development of mass public opinion in civil society, also brought a new dimension to the problem. Does not the majority have a right to do what it pleases, both in politics through the vote and in civil society by the dictates of public opinion? The aristocratic liberals answered this question with a firm negative. Limitations on the power of the majority were necessary if the majority was not to become an oppressor, for "where public opinion is sovereign, an individual who is oppressed by the sovereign does not, as in most other states of things, find a rival power to which he can appeal for relief. .. ,"62 Other

66

Aristocratic Liberalism

interests besides those of the greatest number had to be respected; to think otherwise was revolutionary tyranny. 63 It was to find a means of avoiding this tyranny that the aristocratic liberals devoted attention to the ways in which suffrage might be limited (ways I will consider later in this chapter). But equally important was the direction of public opinion outside representation, outside the bounds of the state, both for its independent effects and for the influence it exerted on government. According to the aristocratic liberals, the political power of public opinion had been increasing for centuries.64 The rise of democratic society encouraged it, and by the eighteenth century public opinion had become an independent force for governments to reckon with. 65 The political strength of public opinion continued to increase in the nineteenth century, and at the same time increasingly rapid communication furthered its homogeneity and gave it a pan-European dimension. More and more, public opinion became the supreme power, strengthened by the general diffusion of knowledge, the growth of the press, and the increasingly public nature of government actions and decision-making processes.66 All kinds of behavior were regulated by "the all-powerful force of public opinion," which could even determine the inclination of generals to lead military coups.67 As Burckhardt noted, "[OJpinion creates and transforms the world."68 In Europe as in America, public opinion was the guiding power.69 The press was one of the chief organs for its expression. The aristocratic liberals had an ambiguous attitude toward the press and the freedom of the press, and toward the role the press played in the relationship between public opinion and the state. Mill wrote that the newspapers govern the country, both as spokesmen and as creators of public opinion. 70 If the press united, it could put a government in peril, and thus Tocqueville feared a press oligarchy.71 In principle the aristocratic liberals all favored a free press, but in practice they grew dubious about its effects—Tocqueville and Burckhardt more so than Mill. The expression of diverse ideas had obvious attractions from an aristocratic liberal viewpoint, and Tocqueville considered the press vital to combat individualism by showing people that they belonged to a larger community. 72 Nevertheless, a free press was not good in itself. It was good because of the evils it prevented rather than because of what it did, and because censoring the press was the first step on the slippery slope to despotism.73 Without an independent press, liberty did not exist in the modern age.74 Yet the press also had flaws from the aristocratic liberal point of view. In 1843 Burckhardt complained that the radicalism of the Paris press terrified him almost enough to make him give up his belief in a free press.75 Mill deplored that "the outward signs of public opinion are at the absolute command of professional excitement-makers, to which category most of the journalists . . .

Despotisms

67

belong.76 This could be particularly dangerous in tense international situations, when the yapping of the press threatened to inflame situations to the point of war. 77 Yet at the same time Burckhardt considered the excitement of the press useful when it discredited itself and other excitement makers such as Victor Hugo.78 The press shouted so loud that often no one listened, and the general cacophony had the effect of reducing all ideas to the same level. The press was the champion of mediocrity, most often echoing the vulgar strata of the upper and middle classes, or else being the willing servant of whoever offered a bribe.79 It encouraged people to adopt opinions without thinking about them, and then to refuse to reconsider them. The merits and effects of a free press varied depending on the political education and experience of the nation concerned, but Tocqueville did not think a free press was a good idea for people without much political education: "Unhappy are the first generations who suddenly accept the freedom of the press!"80 Perhaps this was what led him to propose banning penny newspapers in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1848.81 Through the press and its other social organs, public opinion threatened individuality. More than the others, Mill detailed the relationship between individuality and the power of public opinion. Although he wrote Comte in 1843 that the lack of common opinions in an age of social transition deprived public opinion of its normal repressive force, much more often he treated modern public opinion as a steamroller flattening out all individual differences.82 Thus when listing the threats to individuality, Mill considered public opinion the most powerful because of "the complete establishment, in this and other countries, of the ascendancy of public opinion in the State.83 By leveling all differences and distinctions, public opinion threatened individual diversity. Whatever crushed individuality was despotism.84 Nineteenth-century Europe was thus threatened with a Chinese-style stagnation through the despotism of public opinion, and specifically by the despotism of middle-class or lower-class opinion directed in accordance with the commercial spirit and class interest.85 In nineteenth-century Europe public opinion meant the opinion of a mass, if not of the opinions of the numerical majority, then those of the middle class.86 This threat was particularly strong in England, where, according to Mill, the despotism of public opinion fulfilled many of the functions assigned to more centralized governments elsewhere.87 As time went on, social support for non-conformity vanished with the progress of equality, and the danger of tyranny posed by public opinion within and without the enforcement mechanisms of the state grew ever greater.88 "Liberal" public opinion posed just as much danger as any other kind: "[Ojpinion

68

Aristocratic Liberalism

tends to encroach more and more on liberty, and almost all the projects of social reformers in these days are really liberticide."69 Both the type and the threat of the tyranny of the majority were exemplified by America. Tocqueville's Democracy in America was a continual warning to Europe against the dangers posed by the "omnipotence of the majority."90 Mill, writing well after Tocqueville's death, thought that America had succumbed to the threat, that it had become a "collective despotism."91 At first Mill had thought that the danger of majority tyranny was less in Europe than in America, and that Tocqueville's warnings were overstated.92 Later he changed his mind: "It is an uphill race, and a race against time, for if the American form of democracy overtakes us first, the majority will no more relax their despotism than a single despot would."93 Nevertheless, in the aristocratic liberal view, governments should ideally be run in fundamental accord with public opinion.94 But this ideal depended on circumstances for its realization. It was not desirable that a mass opinion of uneducated manual laborers, or shopkeepers scared to death by socialism, should control the centralized state; that was a sure way to despotism. Nor was it desirable that society should be utterly dominated by the commercial spirit of the middle class, as in America. The political power of public opinion could be a serious problem if majority opinion seemed likely to demand cultural mediocrity or the abolition of private property. Equally disconcerting was the ability of a mass opinion, stirred up by demagogues playing on the passions of the moment, to plunge governments into turmoil or to threaten Europe with war, while governments also manipulated the press for their own ends.95 Whether manipulated or independent, opinion was a powerful and dangerous force, with a dangerous inclination to tyranny and disregard for the minority. Thus the increasing power of majority opinion meant yet another increase in the danger of despotism.

The Problem of Suffrage The tyranny of the majority could function in several directions, from the aristocratic liberal perspective—either through the independent action of opinion on society, through the indirect influence of opinion on the government, or through the direct participation of opinion in the state, that is, through political representation. The problem of representation brought the aristocratic liberals face to face with that stickiest of nineteenth-century political questions, suffrage. The question of broadening suffrage involved determining the content of public opinion—that is, public opinion as representation- in the most

Despotisms

69

direct way. Although all the aristocratic liberals commented on this issue, it was Mill who examined it most systematically. The logical end result of nineteenth-century political tendencies, as the aristocratic liberals perceived them, was universal male suffrage. (Very few people in the nineteenth century really considered female suffrage a probable outcome, Mill being a notable exception. Despite the omission of the majority, I will refer to universal male suffrage as "universal suffrage" hereafter, as the aristocratic liberals and their contemporaries almost always did.) Universal suffrage had a number of positive aspects for the aristocratic liberals. In an essay of 1837 Mill looked forward to it, although he seemed to think that the working classes were not sufficiently qualified to receive the ballot immediately. In a letter that may have been written while Mill was actually working on that essay, Tocqueville, too, hoped for the extension of suffrage as people became qualified to use it. Burckhardt praised the small state where "the greatest possible number of inhabitants are citizens in the full sense," considering the Greek polls, despite slavery, far superior to modern republics for this reason.96 In the ideal state of society, all liberals, even aristocratic liberals, believed in universal suffrage. 97 Even in the not-so-ideal society of nineteenth-century Europe, the aristocratic liberals had a certain amount of praise for universal suffrage. Suffrage in itself was an important means of political education in their view.98 Furthermore, it had practical political uses. Universal suffrage possessed a unique prestige, and it was an indispensable way to legitimize the government, thereby diminishing the possibility of upheaval." And since political power was the only security against oppression, everybody, even women and presumably the poor, needed some of that security.100 Perhaps most important, universal suffrage made it difficult for a group to claim to represent the un-enfranchised majority when it really represented only a small extreme fringe, so that universal suffrage diminished the danger of revolution and tyranny. 101 Thus Tocqueville wrote, after forcefully reminding his readers that he did not think it would be a good idea for the world to reproduce American institutions en bloc: But I think that if we do not succeed in introducing, little by little, and eventually in establishing democratic institutions among us, and that if we give up on inculcating in all citizens the ideas and feelings that will first prepare them for liberty, and then enable them to exercise it, there will be no independence for anyone . . . but an equal tyranny for all; and I foresee that if we do not succeed in founding among us the peaceful empire of the greatest number, we will end up sooner or later in the unlimited power of a single individual. 102

Nevertheless, this did not mean that the aristocratic liberals were committed supporters of universal suffrage in the present or even in the not-so-immediate

70

Aristocratic Liberalism

future. Tocqueville wrote that first one had to instill in all citizens the ideas and feelings that prepared them for liberty, and only then permit them to use their freedom. Universal suffrage was an ideal, but not one that was necessarily ripe for realization.103 Broadening suffrage posed two problems from the aristocratic liberal perspective. Either it increased the influence of the middle-class masses, with their money-grubbing mediocrity; or, if suffrage was made universal, it let in the completely uneducated proletariat. Thus it should not be surprising that, when faced with concrete proposals for suffrage reform, the aristocratic liberals usually reacted with doubt whether "lowering the franchise will not do more harm than good."104 As Tocqueville put it in 1842, speaking of the very restricted suffrage of the July Monarchy, "I believe that as for the present, with respect to the electoral law, we have given not too much but enough to democracy."105 In the aristocratic liberal view, then, there was no right of political participation.106 Mill, who is usually treated as the most sympathetic of the aristocratic liberals toward universal suffrage, went so far as to call the idea that everyone had a right to vote "trash." Rather, the vote was a trust of which not everyone was worthy. 107 Some sort of educational qualification was necessary, according to Mill, and it was essential to ensure that the "intelligent" could resist the "democracy of mere numbers."108 At its best, the democracy of mere numbers meant mediocrity: No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few. 109

Without some form of plural voting for the educated, Mill went so far as to say, it was better that universal suffrage should not exist. 110 Simple universal suffrage could even teach false opinions, particularly the American "false creed" that "any one man (with a white skin) is as good as any other."111 Unfortunately, according to the aristocratic liberals, all too many of the educated favored universal suffrage themselves. 112 Ballots placed in the wrong hands could have substantially dangerous results, for universal suffrage in contemporary circumstances would encourage demagoguery and class struggle. Demagogues would claim that the majority were infallible, that precautions were not necessary to limit their mistakes, and that power should be concentrated in the hands of the masses. 113 Tocqueville spoke for all the aristocratic liberals when he wrote, "I hate

Despotisms

71

demagoguery, the disorderly action of the masses, their violent and ignorant intervention in affairs, the envious passions of the lower classes. .. ."114 Even a broad suffrage (as in England after 1832, in Burckhardt's judgment) meant that foreign policy would be conducted according to the dictates of the domestic situation and according to what would appeal to the majority of voters.115 Too often that would mean war, if only to avoid revolution at home. Tocqueville favored some sort of system of indirect election as a partial remedy for this and other flaws in universal suffrage, although Mill on the whole opposed it. 116 At best, from the aristocratic liberal perspective, universal suffrage meant mediocre government run by elected mediocrities, and every lowering of qualifications for the franchise meant more mediocrity.'' 7 Thus, once again, one facet of the aristocratic liberal style of explanation reinforced the message of another, as in this case the mediocrity of universal suffrage was seen to reinforce the mediocrity of the commercial spirit. But the great problem posed by any nineteenth-century suffrage was to prevent voters from being swayed by class interests, that is, from using the vote and representation as weapons with which to impose tyranny. The uneducated masses were a particular threat in this respect.' 18 The aristocratic liberals did not want a government dominated by any one class, and certainly not by the proletariat. And Mill did not want uneducated manual laborers, the "operatives," to command a majority in Parliament. He feared the strength universal suffrage would give French "Communists" in the National Assembly in 1848, and the split it would encourage between the bourgeoisie and the workers.119 Yet a suffrage too narrowly confined to the bourgeoisie was also undesirable; after all, the aristocratic liberals were no friends of the middle class. Mill did not want even the educated to exercise a despotism over the uneducated poor. 120 If, then, the aristocratic liberals condemned universal suffrage, at least for the foreseeable future, yet did not support the status quo, what did they want? How did they propose to embody public opinion in government? The Hare Plan and the Prussian Constitution The kind of suffrage the aristocratic liberals wanted in theory and the kind that they were willing to support in practice frequently seem contradictory, and the theory itself was often vague. Burckhardt did not present any general guidelines on how to delimit the "limited suffrage" he supported. 121 Tocqueville and Mill wished to "extend little by little the circle of political rights, in such a manner as to go beyond the limits of the middle class, in order to render public life more varied, more fruitful." 122 Yet Mill and Tocqueville were highly

72

Aristocratic Liberalism

concerned about the effect that lowering qualifications for the franchise might have on the right of property, and they did not want any extension that might jeopardize that right. 123 What, then, was the aristocratic liberals' attitude on suffrage questions in practice? They had plenty of opportunities to express their opinions, given the never-ending proposals for suffrage reform in all western European countries. They agreed that suffrage in France under the July Monarchy was too narrow, too confined to the bourgeoisie.124 Yet Tocqueville opposed every concrete proposal made to reform suffrage during the July Monarchy. His own ideas were limited to the abolition of a few corrupt "rotten boroughs" and increasing the suffrage by a few local notables who already possessed certain political rights (the so-called second jury list). 125 This despite the fact that he predicted revolution in January 1848 because the regime was too narrowly based on one class, the bourgeoisie. 126 The paradox is unresolvable. Mill, of course, supported the Hare Plan, an elaborate system of proportional representation designed to ensure a hearing for minority views, whatever the composition of the suffrage. In theory he opposed property qualifications in favor of educational ones (although he thought property qualifications were better than nothing), although he also demanded that those who voted for taxes be those who would pay them, thus excluding the very poor. 127 He supported a system of plural voting for the educated to balance the influence of the masses and to prevent lower-class despotism. Mill, however, also wished to limit the number of multiple votes so that it would not create a despotism of the educated. 128 His emphasis is more democratic than that of either Tocqueville or Burckhardt, but it should be remembered that On Representative Government shifts much power from the elected representatives to the expert committees charged with drafting laws. The actual constitution that came closest to the aristocratic liberal ideal in matters of suffrage (at least before the English Reform Bill of 1867) was one that will surprise many who are accustomed to think of Mill as a democrat and Tocqueville as a liberal in the American sense of the word. This misplaced surprise, however, is symptomatic of misunderstandings of nineteenth-century liberalisms that fail to recognize that liberals were not democrats, nor yet democrats in embryo. 129 In fact, Tocqueville and to some extent Mill were admirers of the Prussian Constitution of 1850. Under the three-class system of indirect suffrage found in Prussia, almost everyone could vote, but not all votes counted equally. The population was divided into three classes depending on the amount of tax each paid. Each class represented one-third of the total taxes paid by a given district, and each third then elected one-third of the electors who would choose that district's

Despotisms

73

representative in the Prussian House of Deputies. Thus the ten or twenty rich individuals (sometimes even one) who paid one-third of the taxes for their district might choose a third of the electors themselves; but at the same time, manual laborers also had a vote, although a much less meaningful one. Even in 1839, when Prussia did not really have a constitution at all, Mill wrote, "I suspect Prussia is the only country pleasant to live in for one who loves mankind," because only in Prussia was real individual character still common.130 But Mill's and Tocqueville's admiration for Prussia was also founded on more specific evaluation. Tocqueville had had some personal experience there. During his visit to the Prussian Rhineland in 1854, he met a number of prominent politicians and political figures: the liberal theorist and political activist Dahlmann, Bethmann-Hollweg, the leader of the so-called Wochenblattspartei, and Kruse, the editor of the important Kolnische Zeitung. He also benefited from his nephew's reports when the latter was attached to the French embassy in Berlin in 1858. Tocqueville judged that the contemporary Prussian constitution was ideally adapted to Prussia's state of political development, that it was a good tool for political education, and that Prussia was lucky to have acquired it almost without a revolution. He worried only that the Prussian liberals would seek to expand their newly acquired liberties too quickly. 131 Similarly, Mill wrote in 1863 to a future Liberal M.P. with plans for suffrage reform: "I have no doubt that the plan of election which you propose, and which is not very different from that established by the present Prussian Constitution, would be a considerable improvement on our present electoral system; at least if the one-third of the House, which you reserve for the democracy, were elected by universal suffrage." 132 He said this despite his dislike on principle for property qualifications as an equivalent for educational ones.133 Mill's preference for the Prussian Constitution of 1850 over the English Reform Act of 1832 raises the question of the aristocratic liberal attitude toward English suffrage. Mill's own attitude was more complicated than the quotation just cited might suggest. Despite early fears, he soon decided that the 1832 suffrage did not "give democracy even its due influence." He preferred the Prussian Constitution largely for giving the lower classes some influence on government, and thus satisfying the requirements of both justice and education. Mill's support of the English Reform Bill of 1867 was based on similar grounds. But the role he wished the lower classes to play in contemporary English suffrage was limited. He did not want them to have a chance of electing a majority of the Commons, that is, to have all power available to them. 134 It was not good to lower the franchise too soon, before the necessary educational progress had been made. 135 It is noteworthy that Mill regretted that the proposals made for

74

Aristocratic Liberalism

the reform of suffrage in 1854 (which were less broad than those actually enacted in 1867) seemed "likely enough to be conceded, and that, too, more rapidly than is desirable."136 Every step made to lower the franchise without providing the necessary safeguards against the tyranny of the uneducated majority was a step toward despotism. Unfortunately, universal suffrage, without any safeguards, seemed inevitable to the aristocratic liberals.137 Given the role played by mass public opinion, this meant a state and a society controlled by the majority, with no assurances about what it might do.' 3 8 This was a tyranny that could be exercised by the majority themselves, or more often by those who usurped the majority's unlimited authority and the unlimited power of the centralized state to impose their own despotism in the name of the people. 139 Yet it is too vague to speak only of a tyranny of the majority, or of a minority ruling in their name, exercising despotic powers over nineteenthcentury Europe. The same groups whose very contention served to reinforce the centralization of the state were involved in trying to impose the tyranny of their opinions over Europe and the individual through the ballot box. The proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and their common commercial spirit continued to play the role of co-conspirators in aristocratic liberal thought when it came to the electoral tyranny of the majority: unequal roles, perhaps, when we consider the aristocratic liberal preference for a predominantly bourgeois suffrage. Yet for Mill the middle class was peculiarly intolerant, and an elective tyranny by a middle-class majority, transformed into the political majority by a restricted suffrage, was "not the less irksome because most of the tyrants may not be manual laborers."140 For the aristocratic liberals, there were many despotisms to guard against. Socialism and the Fear of Socialism Given the situation of European civilization, there were two proximate causes of despotism that were particularly threatening from the aristocratic liberal viewpoint. These were socialism and, perhaps even more important, the fear of socialism. As we have seen, the aristocratic liberals thought that the struggle over property, the last remaining inequality, was destined to be the chief issue of nineteenth-century politics.141 The cleavage between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was a basic component of later nineteenth-century society. Given their analysis of nineteenth-century society and ideology, the aristocratic liberals took the threat of socialist revolution more or less for granted, as did most of their contemporaries. 142 Unlike most, however, they feared even more the danger of reaction.

Despotisms

75

How did the aristocratic liberals understand socialism? Of course, it would be difficult even now to define socialism clearly in the period roughly 18401871. Burckhardt and Tocqueville seem to have shared a relatively vague, uncomplicated definition, whereas Mill's was differentiated enough to allow him to call himself a socialist while repudiating state control of the economy.143 Mill really had two definitions of socialism—one for the kind of socialism he favored, that of the "more thoughtful and philosophic socialists," and one for the kind he opposed, more prevalent on the Continent than in England: "revolutionary socialism."144 Mill's favored socialism was a sort of modified Fourierism, based on the joint ownership of individual enterprises by those who work in them or on a combination of ownership by capital and labor. He favored the increase of private property, albeit more evenly distributed, not its abolition, and he saw individual independence as the desired consequence of the replacement of employer-employee relationships by joint proprietorship. 145 This kind of socialism would be an experiment in education, to be undertaken only on a small-scale basis, whose hoped-for effects I will examine in the next chapters. It is appropriate to note here, however, that in Mill's eyes the presupposition for any socialist experiment was that all the people involved in it be educated. Mill excluded the uneducated, which for a long time to come might mean that the average manual laborer was as ineligible for socialism as he was for suffrage.146 The same, chiefly moral, reasons for supporting co-operation led Mill to prefer small peasant proprietorships instead of large farms run by hired labor (most notably in Ireland), unlike most of his English contemporaries but like Tocqueville and Burckhardt. 147 Thus Mill's socialism differed from forms of socialism based on state ownership of the means of production. His criterion for choosing between capitalism and communism, between private and public ownership of property, was always which option allowed the individual the most freedom and spontaneity.148 Any socialism that exchanged liberty for equality, that gave all power to the state, was a terrible mistake in his eyes. Mill therefore condemned even a small-scale communist association in which "private life would be brought in a most unexampled degree within the dominion of public authority." 149 He "repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve." 150 He dismissed from favorable consideration, even on a trial basis, all "revolutionary socialists" who wished to expropriate private property and administer the economy on a centralized basis, and he condemned the First International. Furthermore, Mill warned against socialist ideas that were filling the minds of the poor with the notion that society was responsible for them, rather than individuals' being primarily responsible for themselves. 151 Thus

76

Aristocratic Liberalism

Mill was no more favorable to the kind of socialism that Tocqueville and Burckhardt dealt with than they were. What, then, of Tocqueville and Burckhardt? With all the talk of socialism and socialist ideas in Tocqueville's Souvenirs, one would expect him to offer a definition, but one finds none. Doubtless Tocqueville did not think one was necassary for his readers. Burckhardt, too, never felt it necessary to make his definition of socialism explicit. But in his famous speech against the right to work, Tocqueville did provide a general definition of socialism for the National Assembly, a definition that Burckhardt, though he never gave one of his own, seems to have shared implicitly. According to Tocqueville, socialism was motivated by the demand for material well-being, that is, by the commercial spirit. But although it had a common starting point with middle-class capitalism in the commercial spirit, socialism went on to demand the abolition of private property (the last remaining inequality) and the subjection of the individual to the state. Socialism meant state ownership of all property, especially industry, and/or absolute state control of the organization of labor. In Tocqueville's eyes, all the evil consequences of socialism were centered on the domination of the state over the individual. 152 Burckhardt, too, spoke of the internal contradiction within socialism, which attempted to combine external power with internal freedom, the total power of the state with liberty.! 53 Socialism was the ultimate exaltation of equality over liberty, of the state over the individual. 154 As such it was despotism of the worst kind. Freedom was not to be obtained by providing the individual with material guarantees of happiness. 155 The despotic threat of state socialism imposed by the ignorant masses was viewed by the aristocratic liberals as a very present danger. It may be alleged, however, that Mill was an exception to this generalization. But if during most of his career Mill spoke about his fear of "revolutionary socialism" less than the other aristocratic liberals, one can account for the seeming under-emphasis in several ways. First, Mill did not want socialism's reputation to be further blackened when he was busy campaigning for his own variety of it. Thus he denied that the confiscation of private property for the benefit of the lower classes had anything to do with the meaning of socialism.156 Second, "revolutionary socialism" was in his eyes more of a threat on the Continent than in England, where he believed Owenite co-operative socialism to be the dominant form. Nevertheless, at the end of his life, in his "Chapters on Socialism," Mill treated the danger of revolutionary socialism in the Continental style as the most serious long-term political danger facing England. 157 Whether by a violent revolution or by means of the broader suffrage after 1867, the lower classes were going to exercise an increasing influence on the state. Unfortunately, the lower classes, particularly in Continental Europe, were socialists

Despotisms

77

of a very unsophisticated sort, whose main idea was to take all property out of the hands of the bourgeoisie now and think about what to do with it later.158 Mill's run-of-the-mill revolutionary socialists were very much Burckhardt's "terribles simplificateurs."159 Mill's purpose in writing the "Chapters" was to teach both the upper and lower classes the merits of co-operative socialism for fear that otherwise a horrific class struggle would result. 160 Thus Mill wrote: "The future of mankind will be gravely imperilled, if great questions are left to be fought over between ignorant change and ignorant opposition to change."161 Yet for all the dangers that socialism presented to European civilization, the fear that socialism provoked was a danger of at least equal scope in the aristrocratic liberals' view. Their stress on the threat of despotism from above, imposed out of fear of socialism, was far less commonplace among other liberals than the fear of socialism itself. Unlike many other liberals, the aristocratic liberals recognized that the fear of socialism strengthened the state and could turn it into a terrible instrument of oppression. The middle class was inclined to increase the central power as the best defense against anarchy. The more troubled the times, and the more the threat of socialist revolution was perceived to increase, the greater this tendency grew. In a democratic society, the passion for material well-being led the middle class to fear disorder above all else, to the point that "the love of public order is often the only political passion."162 As political crises began to bring social crises and demands in their wake, the idealistic originators of these crises were frightened and appalled.163 This was the case everywhere in Europe in 1848. The middle-class multitude was terrified, and "their insane fear of socialism throws them headlong into the arms of despotism. As in Prussia, as in Hungary, as in Austria, as in Italy, so in France, the democrats have served the cause of the absolutists." The despotism of Napoleon III was the direct result of the fear of socialism.164 Indeed, for Tocqueville, Napoleon III was in some ways a mixture of socialism and reactionary despotism, combining populist measures such as rent controls and public works programs with repression. Tocqueville might have made the same comment a few years later about the social legislation of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. As early as 1852, after the coup d'etat of Napoleon III, Tocqueville wondered if "this long French Revolution will not end up in a compromise between equality and despotism."165 All were equal under the tyrant, all secure in the possession of their property, or in the expropriation of others' property, and in the right to increase their material well-being at the expense of freedom and individuality. Later developments served only to justify aristrocratic liberal fears. If the fear of socialism could lead to despotism in 1848, the tendency was even stronger in 1871, when, Mill noted just after the bloody suppression of the Paris

78

Aristocratic Liberalism

Commune: "[T]he political unanimity of the upper classes ... would seem to promise only a violent effort to keep the working class in subjection by all the usual means of monarchical tyranny." 166 Mill was more frightened by the violence of upper-class repression than he had been by the crude revolutionary ideas of the socialists.167 Even the aristrocratic liberals shared this visceral fear of socialism to some extent. For example, Burckhardt wrote, also under the impact of the Paris Commune: "Not that I hold an absolute government to be a special evil as compared to the consequences of universal suffrage; I have become extremely lukewarm in such matters." 168 One despotism was as good as another. The concrete manifestations of socialism in the mid-nineteenth century were few. The aristocratic liberals did not discuss the means by which the threat of despotism would become reality in the socialist case. For one thing, there was no example of a successful socialist revolution in their lifetime, and for another, they probably thought that all their readers could imagine revolutions on the 1848 pattern for themselves. The effects of the fear of socialism, however, were both more subtle and more real. The aristocratic liberals discussed in some detail the mechanisms by which the fear of socialism could be transformed into despotism: militarism and war. The need to divert internal problems was not the only reason for the increasing European militarism in the period 1848-1914, but it was a very powerful contributing factor. Burckhardt wrote about the militarization of European society—and noted the wars waged by Germany for internal reasons—in order to diminish the clamor of lower-class demands.169 This discussion was most developed by Burckhardt, the longest-lived of the three aristocratic liberals under discussion, but it can also be seen in Tocqueville and to a lesser extent in Mill. Militarism had to struggle against the naturally peaceful instincts of democratic, middle-class societies.170 But the fear of socialism drove such societies to choose military regimes as the ultimate alternative to "complete democracy," that is, to socialism. 171 If the military was necessary to stop the socialists, democratic societies would use men like Napoleon III to stop the revolution. The army of the Second Empire was to Napoleon as the old aristocracy had been to the Restoration, the middle class to Louis-Phillipe, and the workers to the provisional government in 1848. The army set the tone for society.172 This greatly increased the threat of war, in several ways. Democratic armies, if not democratic populations, like to fight, and military regimes such as that of Napoleon III were likely to give them their head. 173 Furthermore, once reaction felt itself securely in power all over Europe, the ties that united nations against the possibility of revolution anywhere would be relaxed, and contrary interests would come to the fore. Thus in 1855 Tocqueville predicted

Despotisms

79

that a consequence of the repression of liberty and revolution would be frequent war. 174 It is an interesting confirmation of aristocratic liberal views to note that for Bismarck, it was only a conservative-monarchist French regime that could threaten the peace after 1870.175 But beyond the warlike inclinations of the modern army and the bellicosity of secure reactionary despotisms, the continuing role the army played as an internal bulwark for insecure regimes also encouraged war. Burckhardt saw war resulting more and more from considerations of Innenpolitik, wars waged for internal social and political reasons and not for the sake of traditional dynastic quarrels or for reasons of national interest. Thus, in 1871, comparing modern warfare to eighteenth-century warfare, he wrote: "[O]f the wars of that time one has the feeling, right or wrong, that the rulers could have chosen to wage them or not; we suspect that present conflicts are undertaken in order to cut off or to channel revolutions." 176 Prime examples of war waged for internal reasons are offered by Prussia and France. Of course the aristocratic liberals and many other observers had always accused France of making war for internal reasons. Napoleon III had been particularly suspect in this regard. Before 1870 Prussia had had the great diplomatic advantage that people thought only Napoleon III made war for internal reasons. 177 Indeed, one of the basically internal reasons that Burckhardt alleged for the Franco-Prussian war was the desire to weaken the revolutionary nation par excellence.178 Even in 1886, in the midst of the Boulanger crisis, Burckhardt thought that the French upper classes would dearly like to provoke a war in order to get rid of universal suffrage. 17q According to Burckhardt, Prussia had waged the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870 for internal reasons. There had been other reasons as well, but the internal motivation could not be ignored.180 When his friend von Preen tried to object to his reasoning, Burckhardt replied: "I am indeed, as you know, in certain things unteachable and unconvertible, and I attribute all three of the last wars to the wish to deal with internal matters."181 These wars succeeded in their purpose: power could now be organized "from above" for a long time. Or at least so Burckhardt thought on the morrow of the Prussian victory. By 1873 he was already speaking of a revival of pressures from below.182 For Burckhardt, 1870 inaugurated an era of wars. The same internal pressures that had encouraged militarism and war before 1870 continued to grow thereafter. War also meant an increase in the power and the centralization of the state, to the point that the state would take over industry and militarize it. 183 But Burckhardt went further: out of the era of chaos that he foresaw, in his view largely provoked by impossible-to-meet lower-class demands, Burckhardt predicted that military officers might well emerge to rule the

80

Aristocratic Liberalism

world. 184 Tocqueville presciently declared that "even if I were allowed to lift the veil that hides us from the future, I would not dare to do so. I would be afraid to see all society in the hands of soldiers." 185 What was to be done? Nineteenth-century Europe was pregnant with threats and dangers. The centralized state was a terrible threat to freedom, whoever was in control. The powerful force of public opinion threatened to impose a stifling tyranny of the majority. Below the surface, the ideological domination of the commercial spirit and the socio-political hegemony of the bourgeoisie, together with the challenge posed by the lower classes, helped compress the already explosive pressures on European society. Everything seemed to present only a choice of evils: the dictatorship of the state over the majority or the tyranny of the majority itself, the money-grubbing and mediocrity of the commercial spirit in its bourgeois form or in its proletarian incarnation, socialist despotism in the name of the lower classes or despotic repression in the name of property. The aristocratic liberals' responses to these threats (outlined in chapter 5) were based on a shared, deeply felt set of common values and beliefs, which had themselves shaped their understanding of modern Europe—a set of values and beliefs that I will call, for reasons outlined in the next chapter, modern humanism.

4 Modern Humanism: The Values of Aristocratic Liberalism Humanism The aristocratic liberals stress three things in their response to nineteenthcentury culture: liberty, individuality, and diversity. Of course these are large and vague ideals, cherished in whole or in part by many kinds of liberal and non-liberal thinkers. What they mean to the aristocratic liberals can be explained only by an examination of how they are applied in practice, as has been done in the preceding chapters. But the aristocratic liberals' values, and their use of those values, are rooted in the humanist tradition, and an exploration of certain strategically chosen roots is important for an understanding of aristocratic liberalism, not so much for genealogical purposes as for situating these theorists among the currents of thought and language of the mid-nineteenth-century. It is also important for an understanding of liberalism in general, because it shows that liberalism and humanism are not necessarily contradictory languages, that modern humanism could reconcile the ideals of positive and negative liberty, and that positive liberty is not a notion entirely foreign to nineteenth-century liberalism. In what did the aristocratic liberals' humanism consist, and how was it especially modern? Humanism is a term that requires considerable description to be meaningful. This is complicated by the fact that the civic humanism of the Renaissance and thereafter was not necessarily the same as that of antiquity, and that the nineteenth century was exposed to the influence of all preceding periods simultaneously. Nonetheless, by briefly and selectively examining the development of relevant aspects of the humanist tradition from antiquity through the nineteenth century, we can expose its influence on the modern humanism of the aristocratic liberals. They derive their values, their modern humanism, from two sources. One is the older tradition of humanism, transmitted directly by the classics, as well as through its later incarnations in the new civic humanism that developed 81

82

Aristocratic Liberalism

from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. This is a broader version of the civic humanist tradition that J. G. A. Pocock brilliantly describes in The Machiavellian Moment.1 In some respects the aristocratic liberals indeed represent a prolongation of the Machiavellian moment, as Roger Boesche has noted of Tocqueville.2 But the aristocratic liberals also bring something new to the older traditions of humanist political discourse, and this lies in certain ideas (of negative liberty, commercial society, historicism, and so on) developed by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The incorporation of these aspects of modern thought is what makes modern humanism "modern." It is the blend of these two frequently opposing traditions that provides the basis for the aristocratic liberal (and not only the aristocratic liberal) critique of modern life.3 The older traditions of humanism as carried on into the nineteenth century had their origin in the Greco-Roman world. Throughout western Europe, knowledge of the classics and of the classical languages (at least Latin if not Greek) was the hallmark of the educated person. Knowledge of antiquity, as the great English historian of Greece, George Grote, remarked, served to unite Europeans across frontiers, to give them a common language, common metaphors, and political and philosophical suppositions that were arguably commensurable. All the elite educational systems of nineteenth-century Europe, whether the English public school, the French lycee, or the German Gymnasium, emphasized classical languages and literature. When knowledge of the ancient languages eventually began to fail, translations of the classics of Greece and Rome transmitted the legacy of the past to a more numerous elite, an effort of cultural diffusion that was markedly successful until the First World War.4 One result of this familiarity with the ancients was to create a sense of contemporaneity with them. Greece and Rome were seen as fundamentally similar to modern Europe; the English particularly delighted in drawing lessons for their own society based on ancient examples. Time and again men such as Matthew Arnold, J. A. Froude, and John Addington Symonds would cite Homer to support their position in some contemporary controversy, without any sense of incongruity or incommensurability. Thus elements of classical thought were incorporated wholesale into nineteenth-century thinking, usually with conservative implications.5 Indeed, one of the things that distinguished the aristocratic liberals and made them modern humanists was their rejection of the commensurability of the present and the classical past. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville were all sufficiently historicist to recognize the vast gap that separated the modern world from the past. For example, Tocqueville explicitly condemned those who wished to judge America by classical example—a new social state, he said, needed to be understood by new ideas, for modern democracy was not at all the same

Modern Humanism

83

thing as ancient—and refused the suggestion that the experience of Florentine democracy had any relevance for nineteenth-century Europe.6 Nevertheless, the aristocratic liberals did share in the common classical heritage and made it their own in a fashion not altogether unique. They wanted to continue the classical emphasis of European higher education, and they found it particularly valuable precisely because the classical world was so different from the present. The aristocratic liberals valued ancient literature and philosophy because it embodied crucial elements of their own ideals. Its humanism was an important source of their own humanism.7 In what did this elusive humanism consist? For the aristocratic liberals chiefly in a more or less unacknowledged kind of Aristotelianism, that is to say, in an understanding of human nature which bears sufficient relation to Aristotle's to give it his name. It is no accident that in 1864 Burckhardt could be found preparing to go through all of Aristotle's Politics pen in hand; that Mill, when criticizing the Oxbridge curriculum, made sure to except Aristotle's Politics, Ethics, and Rhetoric; or that Tocqueville's Democracy in America has struck some readers as fundamentally Aristotelian because of its understanding of human nature.8 This Aristotelian conception of human nature, in the sense in which it was influential in the nineteenth century, was basicallly teleological. Aristocratic liberal thought was teleological because its values of liberty, individuality, and diversity were based on an idea of human nature in which these values were fundamental human needs. Embodied in this concept of human nature was the idea that certain kinds of needs had to be fulfilled for a human being to reach his or her highest and fullest expression, and that such fulfillment was a factual criterion for defining the good and the virtuous. Since among these needs was participation in society, political participation was thus a good in itself. This attitude toward the virtue of political participation helps explain why the aristocratic liberals were never able to reject the ideal of eventual universal political participation, universal suffrage, when certain conditions were fulfilled. It was part of the modern, democratic, and universalist foundation of their ideal of liberty. Its emphasis on self-direction, moreover, fit well with the elements of their concepts of individuality that derived from later currents, such as the Romantics, Rousseau, and Kant. This underlying democratic potential remains even though some people may be properly excluded from political participation. The Aristotelian scheme embodies differentiations of political functions and virtues for different kinds of polity and people (monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies; the one, the few, and the many). Pocock notes that the Polybian-Aristotelian tradition of mixed government can be given either a democratic or an aristocratic bias. It

84

Aristocratic Liberalism

is in keeping with most classical tradition (and later developments) that the aristocratic liberals gave it a restrictive, elitist turn, at least in practice.9 Nevertheless, their progressive assumption that under the right conditions all human beings (even, for Mill, women) had it in their nature to participate politically at the highest level, and that such conditions might be attained, implied a fundamental separation from Aristotelian-humanist presupposit ions. But although they proceeded from the egalitarian foundations of modern democratic society, the aristocratic liberals' constructions were mostly concerned with protecting liberty from the winds and storms of contemporary politics, society, and ideas. Indeed, only liberty, and not equality, made sense within Aristotle's concept of human nature, for liberty—political and otherwise— was a real need of human nature, whereas equality was in contradiction to it. Equality was in many respects simply a factual error, as are so many other disagreements over values from the Aristotelian perspective. Nor were those influenced by classical humanism comfortable with the sole remaining distinction among persons acknowledged by modern commercial society: money. The commercialism of modern society and its appetite for the purely material were strongly condemned by the Aristotelian and classical humanist tradition as corruptions of the human ideal. Corruption, of course, is the nemesis of classical and civic humanism. It means the destruction of virtue in the individual and reciprocally in society and politics. Both the individual and society must maintain their original virtue and nature for either to remain virtuous; yet both have a nearly irresistible tendency to decay, for any change from the originally virtuous state must be for the worse. Since virtue is denned according to human needs and nature, all change in a structure that once satisfied those needs must serve to thwart them, for classical humanism presumes a constant human nature. The inevitability of change in human affairs is thus the dreaded enemy of virtuous politics. Long-term pessimism is the logical result. Their dissent from this attitude toward change, as I shall show later, is one of the characteristically modern aspects of the aristocratic liberals' modern humanism. Considered on its own, the classical influence was seemingly only a hindrance in the nineteenth century, a drag on the development of a social thought that would take into positive account the new aspects of modern society.10 This view, however, fails to account for two aspects of the influence of classical humanism and the humanist tradition more generally. First, the classical tradition continued to play an actively dialectical role in Western thought. If it served to bolster a conservative rejection of many aspects of modern life, it also helped to buttress aspects of the radical critique. Marx's concept of alienation draws much of its force from its resonance with the classical (and of course Christian) tradition of human needs and nature, however historicist

Modern Humanism

85

its own conception of human nature may be. Furthermore, the classical humanist tradition did not fall into the hands of nineteenth-century thinkers stripped of the contributions of the Renaissance and later thinkers. Certainly the civic humanist tradition represented a revival of the classical in many respects. True, even the new elements in Renaissance thought were often based on Aristotelian categories. But later humanists, particularly the humanists of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, developed different aspects of the humanist tradition than had its classical representatives. Renaissance civic humanism began to reveal the tensions between classical and later civic humanist thought. In the Dialogue of the Renaissance political theorist Guicciardini, as portrayed by Pocock, they were already apparent. Soderini, the representative of a classically oriented civic humanism, argued that the purpose of politics was to "encourage the virtues, excellence of character and honorable deeds." The worst kind of government was that which discouraged in any way the attainment of individual excellence. Such an evil government would sin by preventing the individual from fulfilling his Aristotelian nature and needs. In this account it is assumed that individual excellence and virtue are attainable only by a small elite, not by all. Machiavelli's assumption, in the Discourses, that all could attain excellence directly challenged this classical assumption.11 This challenge, however, could be represented as a revival of the classical democratic tradition against the aristocratic biases of Aristotle. More radical, and more directly foreshadowing attitudes adopted later by modern humanism, was the counter-argument put foreward by Bernardo in the Dialogue: liberty was obedience to laws, not men, as opposed to personal participation and personal excellence. In contrast to Soderini's classical emphasis on positive liberty, Bernardo defined a negative ideal of liberty as freedom from the domination of others. Though stemming from a common humanist (and perfectly Aristotelian) stress on individual autonomy, this negative emphasis had sharply different effects, at least potentially, from the positive emphasis on personal participation.J 2 It was a long step toward modernity. The continued use of both negative and positive definitions of liberty, two strands of the humanist tradition that would separate widely over time, created an unstable yet fertile tension at the heart of modern humanism and aristocratic liberalism. * 3 Characteristic of the Florentine civic humanist analysis of liberty, whether negative or positive, "was an impressive sociology of liberty, transmitted to the European Enlightenment and the English and American revolutions."14 Largely absent from the classical humanist tradition, the sociology of liberty remained a constant in modern humanist and aristocratic liberal analysis. The problem of finding a social basis for freedom as an integral part of creating a society that combined freedom and order (stability) was at the heart of aristocratic

86

Aristocratic Liberalism

liberal thought. The confusion between sociological, ideological, and ethical judgments which Pocock cites as characteristic of the Florentines was equally characteristic of the aristocratic liberals, who were very much the inheritors of this aspect of civic humanism and later republican theory. * 5 The need to discover or create a social base for contemporary liberty became a characteristic of modern humanist rhetoric. Renaissance humanism was not purely civic in character, however. It also stressed an educational program for the individual, based on literary studies, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, that could be integrated with, added to, or separated from the civic perspective. Indeed, it was this educational tradition that gave rise to the word humanism and gives resonance to eighteenth-century and modern humanist notions of individual self-fulfillment. 16 The aristocratic liberals attempted to synthesize the civic and educational perspectives of Renaissance humanism, perspectives that were not necessarily logically connected in themselves. This synthesis contributed to the occasional ambivalence between the contemplative educational-intellectual aspects of aristocratic liberal thought, most strongly present in Burckhardt, and the active and political civic element. This was an ambivalence the aristocratic liberals strove to overcome in both theory and practice, with mixed results. Yet civic humanism imparted its distinctive flavor to the blend of old and new ideas present in modern humanism. The civic humanists of the Renaissance passed on to modern humanism not merely the tensions that grew out of their differences with the classical world (for example, the sociology of liberty) but also some of the tensions that they inherited from it. They could never satisfactorily deal with change, no more than Polybius. They re-emphasized the classical inability to develop an ideal of positive change, of progress, and they left to their successors a profound uneasiness with the idea of progress and progressive rationality put forward by the Enlightenment: "For all the tough-mindedness of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the fact remains that the weakness of the Aristotelian and humanist tradition was the insufficiency of its means for discussing the positive, as opposed to the preservative, exercise of power."17 The use of Sparta in humanist language is a good example of traditional humanisms' inability to deal with change. In the Spartan version of the humanist ideal, enforced egalitarianism was a means to the end of avoiding corrupting individual dependence. Sparta was so arranged as to maintain virtue and suppress those who would make attempts to corrupt it, but the Spartan system was a closed one, inherently incapable of expansion so as to include, for example, helots. Its virtue could be only preservative, never progressive. From the problem of stability, the civic humanist tradition could not progress to that of

Modern Humanism

87

going beyond a static virtue to one that changed and increased, from a state power that preserved to one that was a positive force for good.18 A key to this difficulty lies in the inability of theories of politics obsessed with the autonomous individual to incorporate state action and legislation into their scheme in positive ways, a problem inherited by much of liberalism, whether humanist in inspiration or not. The autonomy and independence of the individual are too much an absolute value to admit the state to a positive role. In part, this is because virtue is directly dependent on the autonomy of the individual. An individual must be independent or else his actions cease to reflect his own virtue or vice; no longer capable of virtue, he is less than fully human. Any kind of dependence eliminates the possibility of the dependent individual's virtue. It also diminishes the virtue and the prospects of freedom of everyone else, for freedom and virtue are dependent on one's living in a political community of equally free individuals.19 This, of course, is the one dependence recognized as legitimate by humanism, the inevitable mutual dependence of all members of a political community, which arises from the fact that while all rule, all are ruled. Indeed it is not merely a legitimate dependence but a necessary one, for without a community to participate in, individuals cannot fulfill their humanity. But any more than a preservative role for the state smacks of an inadmissible outside dependence, and it is hard to imagine how the state can be a force for anything but corruption or preservation in the humanist vocabulary. The Enlightenment would resolve some of the tension between change and virtue for modern humanism, but it could not free it from a deep distrust of state action born of the clash between virtuous autonomy and the progressive sovereign community. Given the tensions between humanist ideals on the one hand and change, state power, equality, and so forth on the other, it is not surprising that civic humanism should frequently take on the colors of an anti-modernist revolt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The humanist tradition also had to struggle with ideals that challenged its understanding of human nature as erroneous or irrelevant, that, for example, accepted or even praised speculation and entrepreneurship as public virtues rather than corrupting vices.20 It is in this period that the commercial spirit, the nemesis of the aristocratic liberals, begins to become the specter haunting humanist thought. The clash between civic man's virtue and economic man's interest becomes acute. England is where the problems of relating a commercial society to humanist values first comes to the fore. Paul Fussell has provided the best analysis to date of the humanist tradition in Augustan England, which will here stand for the humanist tradition in the eighteenth century generally. 21 Augustan humanism began the long contention

88

Aristocratic Liberalism

between humanist orthodoxy and modernist heterodoxy. The modern perspective described by Fussell was basically optimistic, egalitarian, non-classical, imbued with the idea of progress, and lacking any fundamental quarrels with industrialism. 22 It was Tocqueville's democratic society. Against this Fussell presented Augustan humanism as basically reactionary, a discourse with strong classical and Renaissance roots that was "thoroughly old-fashioned" and distinctly in the minority. Its aristocratic, anti-progressive ethic, its denial of the possibility of moral progress and inability to come to terms with positive change, its hierarchical thinking, and even its stress on human autonomy and diversity in an era of specialization all served to put Augustan humanism on the defensive against an ever more dominant modernity. 23 Humanism's distaste for the world around it was symbolized by its distaste for the money-grubbing commercial spirit. Humanists, of course, were not necessarily averse to money. A certain amount of wealth was a prerequisite for independence for humanists from Aristotle to Guicciardini, and property ownership often served to replace the classical polis's military service as proof of full participation in society. But the modern world replaced the old landed wealth with new forms based on credit and exchange. This had already bothered the Florentines. Some had argued that the man of commerce, by his wide experience of the world, was more fitted to citizenship, but in the end most Renaissance and later humanists rejected this claim. Much more common, with varying emphasis, was Montesquieu's position (albeit often ambiguous) that commerce led to luxury, which led to corruption, a progression that could be mitigated (perhaps even stabilized) but not denied: "In the intermediate perspective, commerce and the arts could be seen as contributing to sociability and even to liberty and virtue . . . but the ultimate incompatibility remained."24 Despite all the mitigating factors imaginable, the threat of the destruction of politics and virtue by self-interest and commerce became an abiding fear of eighteenth-century humanism and pointed humanist thought in directions rather different than those taken during the Renaissance. The French humanists of the later eighteenth century, for example Mably, continued to wrestle with this dilemma. Aspects of the new language of modern humanism began to become prominent in the late eighteenth century, as theorists started to replace individual and collective virtue with public opinion, which could be trusted to alter constitutions to fit changing circumstances. Contending opinions would defeat corruption in such a manner as to make the exercise of virtue superfluous. The "corruption" of faction, of self-interest, of flawed human nature would be rendered harmless by competition, in the Madisonian framework. Self-interest set free was all that was necessary to secure freedom. Because public opinion governed throughout the state, politics—the public sphere— was no longer vulnerable to corruption and tyranny. A diversity

Modern Humanism

89

of definitions of virtue was no longer either a factual mistake or a threat to the survival of the republic. Whereas humanism had always stressed the variety of human nature and its need for varied expression, it had demanded uniformity in the definition of those varied needs across time and unanimity on their definition within the polls. Madisonian discourse began to liberate political and social thought from these stern requirements and to make possible the affirmation of genuine diversity in these areas. Constant, for all his occasional old-fashioned humanist language, completed the task of making the state, and politics, neutral toward the definition of the good life. In this the aristocratic liberals largely agreed, although they did not look upon the actual definitions of the good life chosen by society with quite the indifference that Constant did. 25 Thus the old humanist language of virtue was no longer applicable to politics. There arose a new problematic that represented the end of classical politics and civic humanism as a political theory. Liberty no longer needed a sociology. The play of clashing interests and opinions was omnipresent, and liberty no longer depended on autonomous individuals freely choosing virtue. The equilibrium of personal virtues, social hierarchies, and political constitutions sought by humanism had become irrelevant. Salvation lay not in balance and stability but in dynamic change and contention within society—the contention of rival interests and opinions, not of virtue and corruption. In Madisonian America, at least, the republicanism of the civic humanist tradition had given way to a modern ideology that Gordon Wood identifies with liberalism.26 Or so Wood argues. Pocock only partially accepts his thesis. The rhetoric of humanism, according to Pocock, was still relevant to the American situation. It was in this sense that Tocqueville analyzed American society. Tocqueville, of course, tended to regard American society for all its contention as basically unitary, united by a quasi-universal middle class and commercial spirit. Nevertheless, both the commercial spirit and the middle class could be discussed in terms of modern humanism. It was here, as Pocock said of the Scottish Enlightenment, "where the classical concept of corruption merges into the modern concept of alienation, and the humanist roots of early Marxism become visible."27 In the aristocratic liberal view with which we are chiefly concerned, the rhetoric of humanism was displaced from the public and political to the private and individual. It was the private sphere, the private individual, who was threatened by the tyranny of the majority, a problem that returned the dialogue to the public sphere, but with new terms and a new focus. The rhetorical world of modern humanism began to acquire a new concern with the individual apart from society, a concern utterly foreign to the classical and Renaissance perspectives. At the same time, modern humanism began to lay out its own

90

Aristocratic Liberalism

defense of the negative freedoms, distinct from that of the laissez-faire school, as an inherent part of its critique of modern life. It is frequently argued that the nineteenth century witnessed the disappearance (pace Hegel) of the kind of teleological, holistic thinking that characterized classical and civic humanism and still characterized eighteenthcentury social and political thought. 28 Yet almost as soon as one asserts a mid-nineteenth-century decline in humanist language, historians report a revival in Aristotelian and teleological modes of discourse. Thus Frank Turner, discussing T. H. Green, speaks of a resurgence of interest in Aristotle and in teleological thinking from the 1880s.29 Humanism as a distinct tradition and language of political discourse did indeed carry on into the nineteenth century. It is difficult, however, to distinguish among the varied sources of nineteenthcentury humanism. The nineteenth century had direct access to the classical humanist, Renaissance humanist, and Augustan humanist variations and made use of all of them. The ambiguity of perspective in humanist language increased with its increasing richness, and the ever more diverse body of thought making use of aspects of humanist rhetoric made the function of humanist language more difficult to discern. Humanism in general, however, took on more and more of an ethical and critical perspective. It had always stressed the moral element, choice, the criticism of corruption, but in the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as George Eliot and Karl Marx incorporated elements of humanist thought to stress these rather than the more synthetic aspects of humanism. If the creation of a stable state based on the eternal verities of human needs and nature hovered in the background, it was a Utopia that became steadily more removed from the present, and increasingly less discussed. If one accepts the notion of a gap, or more plausibly a decline in the humanist tradition in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the aristocratic liberals and their modern humanism begin to fit a larger pattern. Under the impact of the triumph of liberalism, commercial civilization, and, dare one mention, the bourgeoisie, humanism retreated. If humanist rhetoric, for whatever reasons, suffered a period of eclipse in 1830-1870, it becomes more understandable that thinkers such as Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville on the one hand and Marx on the other were largely ignored at mid-century, only to experience great popularity in the fin de siecle. Indeed, if one wishes to wax Hegelian, their historical task becomes the renovation and transformation of humanist language to make it relevant to the modern era. This scenario does not describe the reception of, for example, Mill's Political Economy, which quickly became academic orthodoxy. But this is a work in which Mill found it therapeutic to emphasize his attachment to the negative liberties, most often in terms not traditional to humanism. His Logic also became a standard reference. But within these works, and in On Liberty, it is notable that Mill's

Modern Humanism

91

humanist rhetoric about the "stationary state" and the "permanent interests of man as a progressive being," his bitter criticism of the commercial spirit and the decline of individuality, were largely ignored, if not ridiculed, in his lifetime.30 This pattern fails in at least one important respect, however. It makes the mistake of too closely identifying liberalism with anti-humanist rhetoric and values, with commercial society and the bourgeoisie. The aristocratic liberals were part of the humanist tradition in important ways, and they were liberals. That the modern humanist critique of nineteenth-century life can be at once liberal and humanist, humanist and pro-modern, may appear paradoxical. Pocock himself sometimes sees the history of "republican humanism" existing "alongside" the history of liberalism, acting as a critique of liberalism rather than a complement to it.31 Certainly this is one of the functions of the humanist tradition, and it is a role often played by humanist language within the modern humanism of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. Yet Pocock also argues that humanist language is not necessarily opposed to modernity, and perhaps not even to all forms of liberalism.32 It is the latter emphasis that seems more correct. Even in the nineteenth century, David Hume was already demonstrating some aspects of a possible reconciliation.33 From a nineteenthcentury point of view, Stephen Holmes has noted that different liberalisms have very different ideas of the nature of the individual, ideas by no means limited to "economic man." He also observes that it is characteristic of Romanticism to replace the unitary, symmetrical virtue of classical humanism with a new diversity of virtues, as the aristocratic liberals did.34 The various possible metamorphoses of liberalism and humanism create a space where they can fuse, and in that space are to be found Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. Yet it is criticism of modern society, in humanist terms, that superficially appears to be most prominent in the three. Their description of modern life presented in chapters 2 and 3 of this study, and to some extent also in chapter 1, seems to make their identification as modern humanists—their affirmation of modernity and their ability to reconcile modernity and the negative freedoms with humanism—doubtful. But if the aristocratic liberals tended to stress the negative in their account of contemporary culture, it was always within the context of a fundamental acceptance of the present. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville never condemned 1789. They never condemned equality. They were always grateful for precisely those negative freedoms of expression and perception created, in their view, by the nineteenth century. Their analysis of nineteenth-century culture emphasized the critical because they felt that it needed their criticism, a criticism that came not from outside democratic modernity, like that of a de Maistre, but from within. Unfortunately for the overworked historian of political thought, rhetorics do not always demonstrate a one-to-one correspondence with political or even

92

Aristocratic Liberalism

ideological categories, and such categories frequently embrace more than one language or dialect without necessarily being disrupted thereby. By identifying liberalism too closely with purely negative definitions of liberty, one illegitimately impoverishes a rich tradition.35 In the broad context of the history of liberalism, aristocratic liberalism was to some extent a transitional discourse, a formative influence on the process of investing liberal language with the positive concerns of humanism. What made it capable of acting as a bridge between humanism and modern society were the modern aspects of its rhetoric, the elements the aristocratic liberals took over from the French Revolution and the Enlightenment as they understood them.

Modern Humanism and Aristocratic Liberalism The resonance of traditional humanist concerns and language with the aristocratic liberals' understanding of nineteenth-century Europe, as described in previous chapters, is loud and clear. In a number of respects, however, their viewpoint differed from those past. They incorporated into their perspective, as did many others influenced by the humanist tradition in the nineteenth century, several ideas and attitudes foreign to previous humanist dialects. I call this new variation 'modern humanism'. It is not by any means restricted to the aristocratic liberals, but in this context it is their adoption of this viewpoint that is significant. Understanding modern humanism and how it differs from previous humanisms is essential to understanding the aristocratic liberals' critique of modernity and the values that informed and created it. Starting from the Archimedean point of human nature, modern humanism articulated itself through chosen aspects of humanist language—the sociology of liberty, the value of participation, the evils of the commercial spirit and philistine bourgeois society. At the same time it differentiated itself from older humanisms by adopting a number of modern attitudes and ideas, derived largely from the Enlightenment. 36 Three new emphases stand out in modern humanist discourse: a thoroughgoing historicism, a new relationship to the idea of progress, and the use of education as a more or less democratic substitute for both virtue and the material foundations of independence (property). A fourth difference that was stressed by most of the liberals among the modern humanists was a stress on the ideal of negative liberty as well as positive liberty, a point I will discuss later on in relation to the aristocratic liberal conception of liberty. Historicism stands out as a hallmark of modernity in the context of the humanist tradition. What historicism means here is the belief that things really do change, that there are real and important discontinuities over time. 37 Be it

Modern Humanism

93

Marx or Mill, those who adopted the modern humanist viewpoint stressed the fundamental incommensurability of past and present, however varied their grounds might be. Whether the decisive difference was a change in the organization of production, a new land, or a new set of ideas, it was clear to modern humanists that the contemporary world could not be judged by the standards of classical antiquity or indeed of any age much before the eighteenth century or the French Revolution. Fundamentally new circumstances required a new analysis, which, though it might adopt some of the traditional rhetorical devices of the older humanist dialects, as for example in the sociological analysis of the foundations of liberty, would come to strikingly different conclusions in a different world. The historicist emphasis on the incommensurability of past and present appeared now and then in Augustan humanism's attempts to come to terms with commercial society, but it only fully and unambiguously came to the fore in the nineteenth century.38 Historicism liberated modern humanist social and political thought to recast the socio-political paradigms of the one, the few, and the many into a new analysis of middle-class society and of competing interests. The incommensurability of past and present was in no way diminished for modern humanists even when, like the aristocratic liberals, they shared the widespread mid-nineteenth-century conviction that they were living through an age of transition. If the new world was not yet defined, the old world was dead and gone, never to be resurrected. In aristocratic liberal terms, the outlines of democratic society might be nebulous, but the society of orders was definitively over. Along with the affirmation of fundamental change came a corollary aspect of modern humanist historicism, the belief in the possibility, but not necessarily the certainty or even probability, of progress. Pre-modern humanism, of course, had been compelled to reject the idea of progress in all essentials. While not denying the reality of material and technological progress, it refused to admit the possibility of moral progress; human nature was fixed, and the limits of virtue were fixed with it. They could be reached but not exceeded, for to exceed them would be to surpass the limits of human existence. But for modern humanism, human nature was not necessarily fixed but could change according to circumstances. For many of the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, moral progress was not impossible but rather almost inevitable with the spread of lumieres, and moral progress would go hand in hand with material progress. This view was encouraged by the Enlightenment's stress on education and its effects. With the spread of knowledge, I'infame could be ecrase, and the sum total of human happiness could be increased to an extent never before equaled or possible.39 With the increase of infinitely expandable knowledge, new human needs, new human freedoms, new virtues,

94

Aristocratic Liberalism

to use humanist terms, could be created. For example, older definitions of virtue as disinterestedness sponsored by civic humanism could be replaced by "enlightened self-interest," as was the case in America, in Tocqueville's vision. The idea of progress in its relationship to modern humanism can be considered in three ways: the inevitability of progress, the probability of progress, and the possibility of progress. The receptivity of modern humanism to these different aspects of the idea of progress varies. It is hard to reconcile humanism and the inevitability of progress. It is the variation in the reaction that determines just how modern a given dialect of modern humanism is: the more probable it considers progress to be, the more modern it is. A complete rejection of progress implies a rejection of modernity in favor of a more traditional humanist ideal. The aristocratic liberals, as is so often the case, appear to be a fringe group, situated toward the conservative boundary of the modern humanist spectrum. On the whole, the aristocratic liberals were more absorbed in fighting the complacent faith in progress of their contemporaries than in making clear their thoughts on those aspects of modernity that were superior to the past. But it is also in this regard that some of the differences among Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville come to light in ways that foreshadow their different expectations and solutions for the problems of nineteenth-century culture. Mill (who at times held progress probable) was clearly the most modern, that is to say, the most progressive among them in this respect, and Burckhardt (who at times held progress impossible) the least. The first option, the inevitability of progress, was categorically rejected by all the aristocratic liberals. Their observation of European history and society, as well as their understanding of human nature, made this assumption no more than a dangerous error in their eyes. Indeed, no kind of humanist could easily accept this notion. Even Marx envisaged a state of pauperized stagnation for modern society as the alternative to a not inevitable socialist victory. The possibility of human failure, of tragedy, of corruption is an essential part of humanism. The aristocratic liberals rejected the probability of progress as well as its inevitability. Even Mill, on the whole, saw the outlook as evenly balanced.40 The reluctance of the aristocratic liberals to act as if progress were really likely (with the partial exception of Mill) had a chilling effect on their assessment of their contemporary situation, as we shall see shortly. But there remains the question of the possibility of progress. At first glance there would appear to be a divergence among Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill in this regard. Burckhardt did not believe in progress, Mill and Tocqueville did. If this is a central question, then Burckhardt was not a modern humanist. Mill and Tocqueville, although they admitted that some of the values they admired were best exemplified in other eras, nevertheless regarded their present as on the

Modern Humanism

95

whole better than, or at least potentially superior to, the past. Progress had occurred, and it could and ought to occur again in the future (whether or not this was likely is a separate question). Mill spoke disparagingly of Aristotle's and classical humanism's attitude toward progress: The Politics . . . is a philosophic consecration of existing facts, choosing by preference among those facts such as tend towards stability, rather than towards improvement. It should be remembered that . . . none of the ancient politicians or philosophers believed in progress; their highest hopes were limited to guarding society against its natural tendency to degeneration.41

Yet even Mill's affirmation of progress was not quite so simple as it sometimes appears: It seems to me that there is no progress, and no reason to expect progress, in talents or strength of mind; of which there is as much, often more, in an ignorant than in a cultivated age. But there is great progress, and great reason to expect progress, in feelings and opinions. If it is asked whether there is progress in intellect, the answer will be found in the two preceding statements taken together.42

Burckhardt is well known for rejecting the idea of progress. He admitted the reality of new needs, new freedoms, new human capabilities in certain regards. The present was truly different from the past. But he resolutely refused to make comparative judgments about whole periods. Nevertheless, he could and did point to examples of progress in particular respects, progress that was in no sense a recurrence or return to a previous virtue.43 Although he was the least modern of the aristocratic liberals, his historicism compelled him to admit that in certain respects (and not only in material things, but in its capacity for historical observation, a faculty he rated highly) the present was superior to the past, and the future might be superior to the present in some respects.44 Burckhardt knew that happiness could not exist in stagnation or the persistence of old virtues; there had to be change. There could be no positive definition of happiness, according to Burckhardt. At most one could say that it was the absence of pain, and a "delicate sense of growth."45 His was the most lukewarm possible affirmation of progress ("growth" or "development," in Burckhardt's terminology), yet it is sufficient to differentiate him from the old humanist rhetoric, which did not allow for growth, and to make him a modern humanist, albeit the least modern among the aristocratic liberals.46 It was also sufficient, when combined with his particular pessimism about nineteenth-century Europe, to differentiate Burckhardt's solutions to the common problematic more sharply from those of Mill and Tocqueville. Burckhardt's special feeling for growth was in some degree general among the aristocratic liberals. If as a group they stressed progress less than most in

96

Aristocratic Liberalism

their dialect of modern humanism, they stressed the value of change in itself more. For the aristocratic liberals, historicism in itself, change itself, became a kind of value, an essential attribute of a healthy human society. Both the capacity for and the reality of fundamental change were for them important aspects of European culture. The traditional humanist virtues and the traditional humanist search for stability became dynamic in the value system of aristocratic liberalism, and change became a positive value in itself. Innovation (not simply a return to past virtue) was positively incorporated into the old civic humanist effort to combine liberty with order and stability. Of course, fear of a changeless despotism was an essential part of the humanist tradition of corruption, the classic example of which was the Roman Empire. Humanism always distinguished between stable corruption and stable virtue. But there was an essential difference between the traditional humanist fear of corruption and the modern humanist fear of stagnation, of the absence of change and hence of life and of progress.41 The aristocratic liberals go so far as to say, with Burckhardt, that "the perception of happiness is false in itself, when it requires the persistence of a particular condition to exist. Persistence leads to rigidity and death; only in movement, however painful it may be, is life."48 Along with historicism and receptivity to ideas of change and progress, education received a new emphasis in modern humanist discourse. Education had always played an important role in the thought of classical humanism; one need not rehearse the history of the liberal arts yet again. P. O. Kristeller went so far as to identify Renaissance humanism with a particular educational program.49 But the modern humanist emphasis on education added a real or potential democratic universality lacking in Cicero. The Enlightenment had produced, for the first time, a widespread recognition of the necessity for universal education: not necessarily the same education for all, but universal education nevertheless. In addition, many enlightened thinkers acted from the conviction that society as a whole would willingly follow its more educated members, particularly once a minimum of general education existed in the population at large. In one form or another, modern humanism took over the Enlightenment's transformation of virtue into education.50 At times it even considered the extent to which education could replace the missing sociological foundations for liberty. In place of a Guicciardinian conception of the masses, with their lesser virtues providing a necessary judge and audience for the virtues of the aristocracy, modern humanism substituted education for virtue: the lesseducated masses could provide a willing assent, and even an acceptable judge, for their more educated betters.51 In ensuring the stability of republics, the citizens' education became more important than their virtue. 52 All the aristocratic liberals attempted to use education in this way, albeit in different

Modern Humanism

97

contexts, as will be seen in chapter 5. Burckhardt, for whom the educated were the last hope for the preservation of his ideal of European culture in the future, perhaps went farthest in this regard. This rhetorical switch had the additional virtue of putting mere property and the commercial spirit in their place as inferior or irrelevant tests of education, although property sometimes served as a guarantee of education. Thus humanism's strong sense of human hierarchy returned through the back door. Indeed, there was clearly an equivalent hierarchy at work in the kinds of education espoused by the aristocratic liberals. Some kinds of education were better than others (especially classical and non-vocational education), and not everybody should get the same kind. 53 Yet at the furthest extreme of radical modern humanist criticism of society, one finds Marx arguing that the modern organization of production has already given everyone, or nearly everyone among the proletariat, sufficient education to perceive and act toward a more rational organization of society. Whether or not a particular modern humanist viewpoint realized the democratic potential of its stress on education, the potential was always there. But whereas Marx can be seen as Machiavelli's successor in developing the democratic aspects of humanism, the aristocratic liberals (and most modern humanists before 1870) continued to stress differentiation, elitism, and hierarchy. Side by side with modern humanism's emphasis on change, the continuities of modern humanist discourse with past humanism must not be forgotten. Frequently modern humanism's contribution to the account of human needs and virtue tended to be additive. Discovering different ways of organizing society, or establishing different human capacities or needs, supplemented rather than replaced the Aristotelian and civic humanist emphases on individual autonomy and participation in society. Even where a new concept of individuality itself, or at least one incorporating elements foreign to the older humanist traditions, emerged, as with the aristocratic liberals, the new ideas about individuality fulfilled familiar functions. Human nature or mores might change, but the "permanent interests of man as a progressive being" remained constant, as Mill put it. The new, Romantic role models and the "experiments in living," in Mill's words, had to be made consistent with traditional humanist concerns. Historical change did not alter the fact that modern man needed liberty, individuality, and diversity as much as or more than his predecessors. For the aristocratic liberals historicism was, as Pocock puts it for historicism generally, "both an attempt to engage the [constant] personality and its integrity in the movement of history, and an attempt to depict history as generating new norms and values."54 Pocock's definition seems to be an Anglo-Saxon version of Burckhardt's statement that history is change but not transience. 55 Nevertheless, the modern humanist attempt to combine historicism and

98

Aristocratic Liberalism

teleology was not without contradiction: changing human nature and "permanent" human interests (Mill); history that was about man "as he is, was and always will be," about the "constant and typical," and about eternal change and the essential particularity of a given culture (Burckhardt). 56 Thus for Burckhardt every event could be seen under at least two aspects, as testimony of both uniqueness and continuity. 57 There was a fertile tension, at least within the aristocratic liberal variant of modern humanism, between teleology and historicism, between, in other words, continuity and change, the words that appear in so many subtitles of history books. Of course, this tension also tended to produce self-contradictory statements, such as those cited in previous chapters, which have led many commentators to emphasize one aspect to the exclusion of the other, with apparently perfect textual support. Nevertheless, the tension between historicism and teleology within modern humanism was ideal ground for the historical perspective, as the masterpieces of Burckhardt and Tocqueville indicate.

Modern Humanism and the Aristocratic Liberals: The Values of Aristocratic Liberalism Modern humanism was the basis of the aristocratic liberals' perspective. It shaped their language, their categories of analysis, their understanding of modern Europe. It was crucial to their outlook on European culture. Above all, it was the fundament of their values. The imprint of the language of humanism is to be seen nowhere more strongly in aristocratic liberal thought than in the key elements of their value system: liberty, individuality, and diversity. Hitherto, however, their language has been presented chiefly in negative terms, in criticism of particular aspects of modern European history and culture. What the aristocratic liberals prized is implicit in what they criticized. Their attachment to political liberty is mirrored in their condemnation of Napoleon III, their concept of the individual in his or her diversity revealed in their condemnation of the commercial spirit and its demand for homogeneity and mediocrity, their distaste for a life devoted to the accumulation of possessions trumpeted by their contempt for "I"amour du million^ But the values of aristocratic liberalism were not solely to be found in negation, in the attack on the spirit of the majority and the despotisms of the state and its masters. The aristocratic liberals, to a greater or lesser extent, also stated their ideals and desires positively, though often these positive statements have to be constructed from across their works rather than simply pointed at, owing to the largely therapeutic character of many of their writings. In their relatively rare positive statements, the modern humanist resonance of their

Modern Humanism

99

language is particularly strong, as indeed even the listing of their ideals as liberty, individuality, and diversity implies. Traditionally humanism, both modern and pre-modern, approached these ideals through the medium of the development of the individual in accordance with the human telos, that is to say, through education. In this respect the aristocratic liberals' modern humanism shone forth with extra clarity, and their continuity with older humanisms was particularly strong. The common teleology of classical, civic, and modern humanism frequently led to a common philosophy of education among humanists, and humanisms, and a common tendency to see all human problems as problems of education. The aristocratic liberals' statements of their values of liberty, individuality, and diversity were intimately bound up with this educational approach to human nature and to the individual. Their approach to past, present, and future was founded on their anthropology.58 Mill, in criticizing Comte, wrote that his work was a warning of "what happens when once men lose sight in their speculations of the value of Liberty and Individuality."59 Liberty and individuality play a not altogether transparent role in aristocratic liberal values. What did the aristocratic liberals mean by liberty? It was not simply a set of institutions, of legal or constitutional rules, although the aristocratic liberals certainly thought it important that institutions and constitutions embody liberty. Liberty was an essential "taste," a necessary spirit whose origins cannot be accounted for.60 It was a part of human nature, according to Mill (as one would expect from a humanist), but one that required careful development. It was here that the role of education was crucial, for not all kinds of education led to liberty. Yet liberty was a necessary condition for the achievement of all other aristocratic liberal ideals. Without it nothing else was possible. The desirability of liberty was "grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being."61 Liberty in the aristocratic liberal perspective was both a positive and a negative idea. Liberty from political repression and from the tyranny of the majority exercised by public opinion was necessary. All kinds of despotism, of whatever inspiration or mechanism, negated liberty and negated the aristocratic liberal vision of the free individual. For Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville, negative liberty, the basic freedom from all kinds of coercion—economic, social, political—was fundamental to their modern humanism. It was a constituent part of modern liberty for them just as it was for Constant, as can be seen from their understanding of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and their positive evaluations of those aspects of modern society that tended to encourage negative liberty.62 This was a perspective foreign to most previous humanist language. Implicit in it was a justification of modern commercial society and an idea of rational

100

Aristocratic Liberalism

progress. The aristocratic liberals (and liberal modern humanists in general) were sufficiently won over by the new point of view to integrate within humanism the relatively new conception of negative liberty, that is, a new human need, discussed by Guicciardini but largely subordinate in previous humanist language. At the same time, however, they retained their grasp on the positive aspects of liberty and human nature traditionally stressed by the humanist tradition. It was the fusion of the two, of positive and negative, new and old ideas of human needs and nature that was characteristic of the aristocratic liberals and other modern humanists. 63 Their stress on negative liberty is perhaps the most radical aspect of aristocratic liberal thought from a classical humanist perspective. If, as Pocock argues, the eighteenth-century proponents of the market economy were the greatest of intellectual heretics from a traditional humanist point of view, how are we to rate the audacity of a J. S. Mill, who attempted to unite heresy and humanist orthodoxy, to combine crucial aspects of the civic humanist and modern "liberal" (Pocock's use of the term) paradigms?64 At the same time, in accord with the traditional humanist perspective, liberty played an essential positive role in fighting the tendencies in nineteenth-century society that the aristocratic liberals opposed. Liberty as political and social participation and scope for action was itself the sovereign anodyne against all the prospective tyrannies of the century. It alone could fight the taste for material well-being; it alone could fight the tendency of democratic society to egalitarian tyranny; liberty alone could make possible the aristocratic liberal ideal of individual development.65 The aristocratic liberals' discussion of suffrage emphasized the great value of political participation in itself, for all in the ideal, and for as many as possible in the present. Political participation and association, ideally in local, decentralized units, were essential as weapons against both dangerous forms of individualism and centralization.66 But political participation was more than a defensive weapon. For the aristocratic liberals it was a good in itself. Public morality, the fulfillment of one's duties toward the nation and society, was as important as private morality. 67 Attachment to the community and involvement in its issues was part of the proper education and development of the individual, as we shall see later in this discussion.68 Liberty in the aristocratic liberal sense thus implied the value of community, because the isolated individual, or individualism in the Tocquevillean sense, could not fulfill this aspect of human nature. The discussion of liberty from the aristocratic liberals' perspective is complicated by the differences of language among them. Mill used "liberty" and "freedom" more or less interchangeably, although with a growing preference for the former. Tocqueville talked of "liberte" in a sense that parallels Mill's, indeed is sometimes identical to it, but that often stressed the strictly

Modern Humanism

101

political aspect more than Mill did.69 This is very understandable given the political regimes under which Tocqueville lived, and indeed his paeans to political liberty greatly increase in frequency and volume after Napoleon III took power. There is no substantial difference between Tocqueville's broad definition of "the end" as "the complete freedom to perform actions which are not evil in themselves" and Mill's definition of liberty in On Liberty as freedom in all "self-regarding" actions, if we assume that Mill and Tocqueville could agree on the definition of acts "evil in themselves," which I think probable. Thus they agreed about both negative liberty and the positive liberties contained in their conception of politics and of individuality. Burckhardt tended to use the word Freiheit more for strictly individual concerns, and more in the sense of being free of restraints and prejudices, that is, as negative liberty.70 Thus, "But after all from the Freiheit of this nineteenth century we profit gladly, and we owe to it our objective observation of all things."71 This was one of the great contributions made by negative liberty. But this Freiheit, even in the relatively limited sense of negative liberty, was not an automatic gift of the nineteenth century to all. Burckhardt lamented the "inner Unfreiheit" the positive subjection that characterized the mass, a result of the general uniformity encouraged by the commercial spirit, mediocrity, and the dominance of class interests. When Burckhardt talked about political freedom, he talked about Recht and the Rechtstaat. In this presentation of aristocratic liberal thought, Rechtstaat and Freiheit have tended to be subsumed under liberty and individuality without distinction. What united the aristocratic liberal conception of liberty, despite differences of language and emphasis, was its stress on individuality and individual participation, and its opposition to coercion, to the Machtstaat, and to the imposition of ideological conformity by the majority and the masses. Because it embodied such opposition, as well as a positive emphasis on the individual, Tocqueville and Mill often used the word liberty (or liberte) to represent all the other aristocratic liberal values as well. Thus Tocqueville, for example, could say: "I have but one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity."72 Liberty became a representation of all the virtues, positive and negative; it was the essence of humanity, the one element of "human dignity" that needed to be specified. The aristocratic liberal ideal of liberty was not something wholly abstract, a bodiless, directionless passion. It was anchored in what may be called in some ways the primary aristocratic liberal value: the individual. In a good Aristotelian sense the inextricable presupposition for the free development of the individual was his liberty, more particularly his political freedom (or hers, in Mill's case). Following from this basic humanist presupposition, liberty and the individual were the twin, virtually co-extensive yardsticks of the aristocratic liberals'

102

Aristocratic Liberalism

judgment on all the varied phenomena they observed. It was through their concept of the individual that they united their positive and negative definitions of liberty. What does it mean to say that "the individual" was the highest value for Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill? On the one hand, it means that anything that emphasized the value of the individual versus that of society or the mass was good. This emphasis was different from that of Aristotle and perhaps that of civic humanism as well, and it embodied a new understanding of the value of diversity and diverse self-expression. These differences arose in part from the circumstances of nineteenth-century society as the aristocratic liberals understood it. In a society of orders Tocqueville would never have claimed that "all that enchances the idea of the individual... is healthy." 73 But in the present Tocqueville praised the American Unitarian William Ellery Channing because he "places the real grandeur of man only in the individual. It was the individual that above all he wished to see great, independent, noble and free."74 Of course, in no way were Tocqueville or the other aristocratic liberals espousing individualism in the Tocquevillean sense of that word. That would have been repugnant to their idea of human dignity and freedom. Liberty and individuality were never ideals to be pursued in isolation. The aristocratic liberal version of Bildung did not include a concentration on the self to the exclusion of society. That would be individualism, the isolation of each in his own and his family's concerns to the exclusion of concern for and participation in the lives of his fellow citizens. A social and political dimension was essential to the expression of liberty and individuality, because, as in the Aristotelian telos, social life was part of being human. Community and political involvement and political liberty were essential to the fulfillment of the aristocratic liberal ideal. Only when this is understood is it meaningful to call "the individual" the highest aristocratic liberal value, and comprehensible to say that for the aristocratic liberals the "good of the species" could best be served "by each taking for his exclusive aim the development of what is best in himself." Individual development, Bildung, was the highest good. 75 As Burckhardt put it, "[T]he individual [Personlichkeit] is after all the highest which exists." Thus Tocqueville wished that government would cease attempting to do great things with men and instead exercise a bit more concern for making great men, that it would "attach less importance to the work and more to the worker."76 The aristocratic liberals' ideal of individuality was intimately related to their concept of education, of Bildung in the sense of personal development in accordance with the nature of the human species and of the unique individual. Indeed, although their concept of education was an outgrowth of their ideal of individuality, in some perspectives it would be fair to consider liberty and individuality as themselves subordinated to educational purposes, insofar as

Modern Humanism

103

they could ever be disentangled from one another. Mill sometimes described political participation as an educational exercise in character formation, and in so doing he invested political activity with a value in itself, as did Tocqueville and Burckhardt. 77 Liberty, by acting as an antidote to all the distortions of human nature brought about by the commercial spirit and the taste for material well-being, was serving an educational function for the individual. It was precisely because universal political participation, for example in the form of universal suffrage, was an essential part of fully developing one's moral character and individuality that it could not be ruled out of the aristocratic liberal ethos. Thus, the opportunities provided for individual development were the criteria for choosing between forms of government. 78 Preserving what remained of the independence, strength, and originality of the individual in the face of society was for Tocqueville the first duty of the legislator in a democratic age.79 Indeed, Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America because "I wanted to expose to the light of day the great perils to which equality exposes human independence.''8 ° Thus education was at the heart of the aristocratic liberals' concerns (as will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5) because it was central to their understanding of individuality. Formal as well as informal education of high quality and broad scope was at the base of their ideal. They firmly believed that the nature that all humans are born with must be developed and cultivated, for otherwise it would fester and corrupt. What higher praise of education could an aristocratic liberal give than Mill's statement that education, "of all many-sided subjects ... is the one which has the greatest number of sides"?81 Education was the prerequisite for diversity, for the "art of living." It gave the individual a "deeper and more varied interest... in life: which will give it tenfold its value, and a value which will last to the end."82 It was the kind of education received that was crucial. At times Mill implied that an increase in education would necessarily develop the taste for liberty. But this was not the point of view he took in On Liberty, where he found that simply increasing education, at least of the prevalent type, could have no positive effect.83 Nor was Mill simply concerned with curriculum reform. Not merely formal education but the kind of daily and universal education received by all classes in mores, habits, social life in the broadest sense were important, for all these contributed mightily to the formation of the individual, and all these could be judged in terms of the human telos. All of these had to be improved in order to improve the "art of living." For all their contempt for money-grubbing, money was also a necessity for the development of the individual from the aristrocratic liberals' perspective. If a passionate pursuit of riches ruled out the kind of individual development that they cherished, poverty created an equal barrier. This was not merely because

104

Aristocratic Liberalism

money was necessary to obtain an education but because it was necessary for the independence that the aristocratic liberals considered essential to individual development. Tocqueville argued that the only real strength an individual had was his or her character, and that the only sure way of preserving one's character was never to be in need of money. But this did not mean that one had to be a millionaire: "Ergo, I conclude that when one cannot augment one's income, one must know how to limit one's expenses." Money was to be despised and kept because it was impossible to deal with better things without it. 84 Mill gave as his economic desideratum the attainment of "a modest competence," that is, a small independent income sufficient to live on. Wealth was also a prerequisite for having the time and independence necessary to participate properly in politics.85 Independence was a traditional humanist prerequisite for individual development as the aristocratic liberals conceived it, and independence was not to be had for nothing, in any sense. One of the most important aspects of the development of the individual, and in practice the source of some of the aristocratic liberals' most often repeated attacks on contemporary society and ideas, was diversity. While diversity can be considered an aspect of individuality, it was one the aristocratic liberals stressed with particular emphasis. For all of them, but especially for Burckhardt, diversity played a role as a particularly European characteristic, as something that served to distinguish European from Asian and Middle Eastern civilizations: This is European: the expression of all powers, in sculpture, art and word, institutions and parties, up to the individual—the development of the intellect on all sides and in all directions—the striving of the mind to express everything within it, not, like the Orient, to silently surrender to world monarchies and theocracies.86

On the grand scale, diversity within a culture played a parallel role to the diverse character of human nature and particular individuals. A specialized society which allowed expression to only one aspect of humanity was repugnant for the same reason a purely one-sided specialized individual was: it was not fully human. The aristocratic liberals valued diversity in two ways. In one sense, it meant that the individual should develop his talents in more than one direction, avoiding over-specialization as much as dilettantism. 87 The aristocratic liberals shared, in Pocock's terms, "the civic ideal of the virtuous personality, uncorrupted by specialization and committed to the social whole in all its diversity."88 But diversity also took on a role in the aristocratic liberals' conception of the personality which distanced them from the classical and civic humanist

Modern Humanism

105

traditions. They were partisans of individual diversity in the sense that each individual should naturally develop differently, according to his own unique nature. In common with the Romantics they "shatter the uniformity of the ancient concept of virtue, suggesting that self-development can lead in an infinite variety of uncoordinated directions."89 The humanist ideal of diversity is related to the classical notion of balance, but in modern humanism it has been transformed into a dynamic notion, in much the same way that modern humanism transformed civic humanist stability into progress.90 The aristocratic liberals' understanding of diversity can be related to their historicism. Rather than viewing society as a static struggle, they saw it as properly a dynamic process of historical change and development in new and different directions. Just as modern society had different interests and virtues than past societies, so the individual personality in its diversity was charged not to maintain a symmetrical balance but to develop in its own unique ways. Mill criticized what he considered Goethe's worship of symmetry in personal development because it was inappropriate for modernity: "[N]ot symmetry, but bold free expansion in all directions is demanded by the needs of modern life and the instincts of the modern mind."91 The crucial importance of diversity reached its greatest emphasis in On Liberty, where Mill cites Wilhelm von Humboldt in the motto: "The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity."92 Mill's praise of "many-sidedness," Burckhardt's praise of Anschauung, must be read in this light. Burckhardt's Renaissance man was no example of calm balance and symmetry, in classical fashion, but of powerful, even demonic diversity of talent. As such, the Renaissance was in this way too the beginning of modernity for Burckhardt. From this understanding of the meaning and importance of diversity sprang many of the aristocratic liberal criticisms of the tendencies of nineteenth-century culture. Individual diversity was the mainspring of all progress, moral and mental, indeed almost its only spring in aristocratic liberal eyes. It was the key to cultural diversity and general progress as well.93 Thus diversity was of central importance to the aristocratic liberals beyond the level of the individual. Their liking for diversity appeared in all their analyses, in their attacks on centralization and the domination of society by a single class, and so on. It was particularly striking in the political sphere, where indeed politics did not exist if it was simply an exercise within a single class, as for example during the July Monarchy in France. Politically, the aristocratic liberal stress on diversity amounted to a legitimation (and not simply toleration) of at least limited conflict within society. This produced a fertile tension within the aristocratic liberals' thought between their acceptance of conflict and disagreement

106

Aristocratic Liberalism

on a limited scale and their antipathy to class struggle, in which more than a trace of older humanisms lingered. This tension in their thought with regard to social pluralism and diversity was matched by other tensions with regard to intellectual and individual diversity. The aristocratic liberals were not the wholehearted pluralists that their commitment to liberty, individuality, and diversity might superficially seem to imply. They did not think that over-specialized, money-grubbing individuals had made a choice that they had to affirm on the grounds of respect for individual diversity. Because of the teleological basis of their thought, their support for diversity was based on a particular conception of what human beings ought to be. They accepted a set of variations on a theme set by their understanding of the human telos. They did not acknowledge the equal validity of other conceptions of human nature. The aristocratic liberals faced a difficult situation in attempting to propagate their values. These were incomprehensible or meaningless without a common understanding of the "permanent interests of man as a progressive being."94 Aristocratic liberalism would not have existed as a coherent whole without such agreement; it is the precondition of a functioning humanism. But at the same time the aristocratic liberals strongly disagreed about whether such agreement could ever become widespread, and this disagreement was a prime source of their varying degrees of optimism and pessimism and their divergent views of the task of education. Mill's general assumption was that everyone could be persuaded to agree about what constituted these permanent interests, and an explanation of Burckhardt's and Tocqueville's pessimism is their conviction that this was not the case, that liberty and individuality, although central to man's permanent interests, would never become central in the minds of their contemporaries. 95 Their modernized humanism thus left them confronting the same possibility of political tragedy which civic humanism had faced. The goals of aristocratic liberalism were of universal application, but the aristocratic liberals did not see much chance of applying them universally. Ultimately aristocratic liberalism failed to discover a social foundation on which liberty could be built. This was a symptom of the difficulty it had in assimilating the lower classes and even the middle-class majority into its ideal of things in any positive way. For all the aristocratic liberals' acceptance of change, their potentially egalitarian and progressive emphasis on education, their greater or lesser reconciliation to the idea of progress, their acceptance (as just and inevitable) of democracy as the dominant motif of the nineteenth century, they did not expect progress, not anything that they would define as progress in any case, and refused to plan for it. Their rejection of the faith in progress was not merely a counterweight to dominant tendencies in their era that required opposition but something more fundamental.

Modern Humanism

107

In continuity with pre-modern humanism, aristocratic liberal thought takes place on one level in a fundamentally static world. The aristocratic liberals had limited expectations for the immediate practical results of education, and in particular about the extent to which a good education could hope to reach.96 Their historicism had its limits. They could free themselves from the past to live in the present, but they could not sufficiently free themselves from the present to see the future, at least not in a positive light. Their attitude toward history excluded a cyclical fall from virtue to corruption, but not the creation of a brand-new despotism. These attitudes toward the masses and toward progress are what separate aristocratic liberalism from Fabian socialism, to which in certain other respects it would, seem to bear a close resemblance, particularly in the emphasis it placed on the evil effects of the commercial spirit and the profit motive.97 And it is in this respect that its position near the boundary line of a division between modern and pre-modern humanism is most evident. This discussion of aristocratic liberal values has included no word about utility or religion. Some may find the omission of utility surprising in a discussion of Mill, or even of Tocqueville, who often made judgments based on "the greatest good of the greatest number." Tocqueville justified the modern notion of equality against medieval inequality on this basis.98 But the omission of utility from this discussion will be less surprising when we consider how Mill defined his utilitarianism: "I am still, and am likely to remain, a utilitarian; though not one of'the people called utilitarians'; indeed, having scarcely one of my secondary premisses in common with them; nor a utilitarian at all, unless in quite another sense from what perhaps any one except myself understands by the word."99 What Mill understood by the word utilitarian was someone who saw that the ultimate good of the species could be served only by the development of every individual, grounded "on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being." This was how Mill understood "utility in the largest sense."100 Thus by defining liberty and individuality we have been defining the highest utility for Mill, what the greatest happiness of the greatest number consisted of. This kind of utilitarianism was certainly far from that which is unable to tell the difference between pushpin and poetry, but then so was Mill. It is a humanist version of the doctrine of utility. What chiefly separated Mill from Bentham on utility is this: both accepted what one might call the science of utility. For them it was a statement of fact that all coherent justifications of morality, politics, and the like were based on the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But Mill attacked Bentham for leaving out of consideration the "art of life," that is, for failing to recognize some essential elements of human nature and to understand how their development was of supreme importance to achieving happiness. Mill's science of utility was based on a teleology whereas Bentham's was not—a humanist

108

Aristocratic Liberalism

teleology based on the art of life. In practical terms, the discussion of the art of life was at the heart of Mill's system of values, while in Bentham it was absent or based on incorrect (from Mill's point of view) ideas about human nature and history. Mill's views about human nature, about why the well-educated man was better off than the specialized money-grubber, rested on a priori assumptions about human nature. Liberty, individuality, and diversity were to Mill "parts of happiness rather than means to happiness."101 The self-development of the individual was an essential constituent of his or her greatest happiness, and Mill would doubtless have justified it as such.102 This is why dissatisfied Socrates is "happier" than the satisfied drunk. Mill's conception of human nature served to make utility a factual question in something not far from the manner of Bentham's "felicific calculus," but operated with a different set of facts. Mill's values were part of his definition of happiness, and consciously so in that they derived from his understanding of human nature. This definition of human nature and of happiness strongly distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, and in the final analysis Mill was just as unwilling as Burckhardt to decide what happiness was by majority vote. 103 After all, the majority might decide that happiness was a million dollars. Religion is also absent from this discussion of the aristocratic liberals' values. In part this is due to the diversity of their beliefs. None of them was a Christian, although all admired the New Testament. Mill was an agnostic who thought the only defensible form of theistic belief was a kind of Manichaeanism. Tocqueville believed in God and an afterlife in which good was rewarded and evil punished, but he rejected Christianity. 104 Burckhardt abandoned the theological studies for which his family had destined him when he lost his faith, although he later acknowledged belief in some sort of divine providence. All of them, however, believed that religion had a potentially positive role to play in society, which for one reason or another it was not playing in nineteenth-century Europe. But religion was not central to the aristocratic liberal understanding of nineteenth-century culture, and religious beliefs were not central to their values of liberty and individuality. 105 In this the aristocratic liberals adopted a position with strong roots in humanist tradition. As for Machiavelli, religion was important for the aristocratic liberals as an instrument with which to encourage virtue rather than as a virtue in itself.106 It was a means to an end. As with everything else, it was made subordinate to the development of the individual personality. Insofar as it had a role to play, it was as a form of education that was frequently of secondary importance, particularly for the upper classes. Despite (or perhaps, in some cases, because of) the elitist biases of the aristocratic liberals' humanist language, their stress on liberty, individuality,

Modern Humanism

109

and diversity is very largely familiar in contemporary terms. These humanist concerns, in one emphasis or another, are shared by strata of contemporary society, although, like the aristocratic liberals, contemporary cultural critics rarely define their terms. The natural half-familiarity of the aristocratic liberals' key concepts is part of what has made it so difficult for analysts to grasp that their values, their responses, were intimately linked to a particular understanding of their own era and their own history, to a particular problematic, and thus to recognize fully the intricate relationship of their historicism to their humanist conception of human needs and capacities. It has also been difficult for late twentieth-century democratic humanists to recognize that hitherto even most modern humanists had an attitude toward the majority of humanity that would make them very uncomfortable, at least in public, and that such is the case for the aristocratic liberals. So, for example, On Liberty or Democracy in America are read without reference to the effects of the domination of society by the middle class and the commercial spirit. It is essential to understand that the intellectual context in which the aristocratic liberals put forth their values was one in which the majority had no immediate part or any assurance of a part in the future. The aristocratic liberals succeeded in combining the theoretically egalitarian and pluralistic biases of their liberalism with an elitism that had no difficulty in rejecting, for example, proletarian taste and culture as outside the pale of valuable diversities. Late twentieth-century political thought usually pretends to be more democratic, even in its most humanist guise, than aristocratic liberalism. Too contextual a reading of aristocratic liberal values, however, puts its own difficulties in the way of a correct interpretation. The aristocratic liberal problematic as presented in the preceding chapters is essential to an understanding of the nature of the aristocratic liberals' agreement about issues of the highest mutual importance. It is crucial because it established which aspects of the permanent interests of man as a progressive being they thought needed to be pointed out to their contemporaries. But it must be stressed that although historical circumstances may determine the stresses of aristocratic liberal thought, there is no indication that liberty and individuality were to them anything but permanent a priori human interests. Nevertheless, the historical context of the aristocratic liberal value system must not be overlooked. All the aristocratic liberals participate in a rejection of rationalist, ahistorical values. They deliberately set out to root themselves in their own particular historical circumstances when criticizing modern society, and their activity was consciously designed for its impact on their particular social, political, and ideological environment. It is in this way that their historicism played a mediating role between the elements of continuity and change in their outlook. If the values they defended were meant to be in eternal

110

Aristocratic Liberalism

accord with man's permanent interests, nevertheless their emphases were directed at the particular situation of nineteenth-century Europe, and at propagating those aspects of the "truth" that modern Europe was most likely to overlook under the domination of the commercial spirit, the middle class, and the centralized state.

5 "Working Against Time": The Aristocratic Liberal Response to the Challenge of Modernity The Political Ideal of Aristocratic Liberalism According to Mill, only by giving scope to individuality could Conservatives and Radicals be reconciled.1 How, then, was government to be arranged so that it would both provide the individual with the means of development and protect the individual from all the threats posed by modernity? How could politics be organized so as to promote "the most important form of excellence which any government can possess ... to promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves"?2 For the aristocratic liberals the kind of government that would be most appropriate would vary according to the situation, educational and otherwise, of the people to be governed. Barbarians were not fit for liberty, for example, and according to Mill even slavery could be a benefit in the short term for savages. A nation without experience of free government required different political institutions than did one with a long experience of political liberty.3 But in all states of society the most important part of a government's operations was its action as "an agency of national education," that is, the role it could play in raising the people to a higher level of civilization.4 Tocqueville and Mill frequently spoke of different kinds of government, especially local government, as a form of education, and when Tocqueville was asked to join the cabinet in 1849, he wished to be named minister of education rather than of foreign affairs. 5 What kind of government, what kind of political education, was appropriate to nineteenth-century Europe? What kind of government would be best equipped to uphold liberty and individuality, insofar as that was within the sphere of government to do? In general terms it may be said that the aristocratic liberals supported a constitutional regime with a limited suffrage, 111

112

Aristocratic Liberalism

alongside which there would be a high degree of decentralization and local self-government.6 Although accurate on the whole, this kind of generalization about three such complex thinkers working in such diverse national circumstances is somewhat misleading. There were contradictions among Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill on these subjects. For example, constitutional monarchy was irrelevant to Basel politics, and while Mill thought a constitutional monarchy was admirably suited to English conditions, he thought it a bad idea for the Continent, where compromise was less popular. Thus, for him, constitutional monarchy for most nations was just "a brief halt on the road from a despotism to a republic."7 But if we substitute a constitutional republic for a monarchy, as Mill did in On Representative Government, and treat Burckhardt as a federalist in Swiss politics and a constitutional monarchist in regard to Europe, the generalization holds.8 It is not easy to find an aristocratic liberal political credo in which their ideal of government is laid out at an appropriate level of generalization. Brief praises of political liberty in general are of no use, and On Representative Government is too detailed a treatment to serve. But in a series of letters written in late 1836, Tocqueville gave a general description of his political goals which, if we lessen the emphasis on foreign affairs owing to France's particular national situation, will serve to characterize aristocratic liberalism as a whole.8 In these letters Tocqueville proclaimed himself, in an oft-quoted phrase, "a liberal of a new kind," because his beliefs combined in equal proportions a love for liberty with an attachment to law, order, and morality. When nevertheless accused by a friend of having revolutionary tendencies, he strongly denied any such thing, and for the only time in his life gave a detailed and explicit statement of his political program. In his credo Tocqueville sharply distinguished his relatively "democratic" ends from his highly conservative means. His end was a hereditary monarchy, preferably legitimate, above all because a legitimate monarchy would be stronger in foreign affairs, and France's situation demanded a government strong in external relations. He wanted a powerful central government, again in part because of France's external position, but also because a democratic society, without the natural centers of strength of an aristocracy, needed such a government to gather its dispersed forces. Thus when the aristocratic liberals spoke of their desire for constitutional monarchy, this did not necessarily translate into a weak executive. Even Mill, who might be expected to be the most concerned on this point, said clearly that he wanted final responsibility in the executive branch to reside in a single individual rather than be weakened and divided, and he expected that that individual would wield considerable power. Mill was particularly concerned that responsibility for military affairs be concentrated. 10

"Working Against Time"

113

But if the aristocratic liberals wanted government to be strong, they also wanted a government whose sphere of action was strictly limited, which did not meddle in matters outside its own proper concerns. Tocqueville wanted this government "always subordinate, in its tendency, to public opinion and to the legislative power which represents it."11 He thought that this strong central authority could co-exist with very developed provincial liberties, that is, with a large degree of local, decentralized authority.' 2 Most important, he wrote: I think that a government of this kind can exist, and that at the same time the majority of the nation can involve itself in its own affairs; that political life can be spread almost everywhere; the direct and indirect exercise of political rights be very extended. I want the general principles of the government to be liberal, that the greatest possible part be left to the action of individuals, to personal initiative. I believe that all these things are compatible; even more, I am deeply convinced that there will never be order and tranquillity except when we will have succeeded in combining them.13

Of course, the means that Tocqueville authorized for reaching these goals were extremely cautious. He wanted to proceed slowly, carefully, legally. At the time he wrote the letter, he thought that the July Monarchy would provide a sufficient vehicle for reaching his goals. He believed that such a government as he desired needed, in order to establish itself, mores, habits, and laws that did not yet exist and could be only slowly and cautiously introduced.14 We have already seen that in practice Tocqueville rejected every reform of the suffrage proposed under the July Monarchy, even after he had come to detest that regime, despite the fact that he wished to introduce citizens into political life "in the measure that one believes them capable of being useful there, rather than seeking to keep them out at all costs."15 The aristocratic liberals' reluctance to broaden suffrage is characteristic of the kind of government (and citizens) they wanted—one in which the educated, whom we could perhaps define as Thomas Jefferson's "natural Aristocrats," with the addition of a good classical education and a modest assured income, would not be dominated by the uneducated mass but "the educated" would gradually come to mean a larger and larger portion of the population. 16 Nevertheless, this letter does tell us about the kind of government that Tocqueville ideally wished to see established in France (even if he thought France was not quite ripe for its immediate establishment), and it may serve as a description of aristocratic liberal ideals as well. The speed of evolution toward their ideals that the aristocratic liberals thought possible or desirable varied from country to country and from situation to situation. They were never revolutionaries. Everything depended on the situation, and even early on the aristocratic liberals viewed the situation with

114

Aristocratic Liberalism

caution. Burckhardt wrote as early as 1845, for example: "The time will also come in Germany, when reasonable progress (whose goal is a constitution) will sunder itself from blind and intriguing agitation. Until then you are in fact political children. ..." Burckhardt feared communist agitation (in 1845!) because "the political nation, to which confident people boastfully appeal, does not yet exist, at least in Germany and Switzerland; instead of which there is on hand a mass," ready to the hand of any demagogue. 17 Of course, Burckhardt was the most pessimistic of the aristocratic liberals, and the least inclined to support political change in practice. Even Mill, however, was no friend of "revolutionary Socialism" and preferred to advocate the slow process of persuasion by experiment and example for the kind of co-operative socialism he supported. Crucial to the aristocratic liberals' political ideal was their stress on decentralization and local self-government, on individual participation in society. It was the obverse side of their attack on centralization and uniformity and the political corollary of their stress on the individual. Politically this focus was not intended to multiply the number of professional politicians, for whom the aristocratic liberals had no love, but rather to provide opportunity for political education and participation as well as to limit the sphere of central authority. In addition, the experience of working together on local matters of mutual interest would serve to break down class and caste differences and encourage the unity indispensable to liberty. Thus Tocqueville thought that even the smallest dose of "self-government" (he used the English words) would have virtually destroyed the caste spirit of the ancien regime.18 Local government thus performed several functions in the aristocratic liberal view. It combatted the authority of the centralized state, educated and united the citizenry in their common obligations, thus diminishing individualism and the separation of the classes, and promoted a diversity of approaches to government suitable to varied local conditions. All the aristocratic liberals were bitter opponents of centralization, of course. But Buckhardt, although he fought every extension of central authority over Basel and the other cantons, did not express himself at length about the special virtues of local government as such, and so discussion of aristocratic liberal views on local government must come largely from Tocqueville and Mill. Mill devoted a chapter of On Representative Government to "local representative bodies." Interestingly, they were the only institution for which he considered a property qualification for suffrage to be correct, based on local tax paid.19 Mill went into some detail about what local governments should and should not do. But above all he regarded them as educational tools: "I have dwelt in strong language . . . on the importance of that portion of the operation of free institutions, which may be called the public education of the

"Working Against Time"

115

citizens. Now, of this operation the local administrative institutions are the chief instrument."20 Every local institution was one more tool with which to involve people in interests beyond their own material concerns. Tocqueville wrote that "local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science."21 He blamed the lack of political education in France, a result of the absence of local self-government, as one of the causes of the fall of both the First and Second French Republics.22 Local government was a necessary educational tool to fit people for national affairs.23 One of Tocqueville's bitterest reproaches against Napoleon III was for destroying what little local self-government France had had under Louis-Phillipe.24 France's lack of a strong tradition of local self-government was one of the things that, for Tocqueville, made her prone to tyranny—both tyranny by the state itself and tyranny by a majority in control of the state apparatus, to which there was no local counterweight.25 Local institutions were such a counterweight, for each association formed a sort of collective aristocrat, with an aristocrat's powers of resistance to the central authority. 26 The desirability of strong local representative institutions with broad powers meant, in the context of nineteenth-century Europe, that the aristocratic liberals had not merely to oppose centralization but also to support decentralization. They did so very strongly, if not always hopefully. Mill protested constantly against the over-centralization of the Continent and warned of an encroaching central authority at home. 27 Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, stressed the importance of political decentralization time and time again. He linked France's inability to establish liberty to its inability to decentralize. Tocqueville's final pessimism about the possibility of liberty in France went along with a judgment about the impossibility of decentralization. No one wanted liberty, and no one wanted to decentralize.28 Burckhardt shared Tocqueville's pessimism. He too spoke of "the hopelessness of any decentralization, of any voluntary limitation of power in favor of the local and cultural life."29 In effect, there was no demand for the kind of political education the aristocratic liberals had to offer. By extension, there was neither sufficient demand nor sufficient supply of the kind of human being living the kind of human life that the aristocratic liberals thought worthwhile. Social and Economic Attitudes Aristocratic liberal political desiderata included constitutional monarchy, a limited suffrage, and strong local counterweights to the authority of the center, all derived from a theory of education of humankind's noblest capacities as the aristocratic liberals saw them. On the socio-economic front, the aristocratic

116

Aristocratic Liberalism

liberals embodied their ideals in allegiance to the right of private property and a general acceptance of the principles of laissez-faire in economics, although not without some reservations. They usually opposed systematic welfare measures by the state on behalf of the poor, although here their position was more nuanced. But they did not look with favor on the concentration of landed and industrial wealth in a few hands, and one of their strongest positions was taken on behalf of small peasant proprietors. All these positions were meant to express the importance of the individual and his liberty, in the aristocratic liberal perspective. In working out their implications, the aristocratic liberals continued to show special concern for their effects on individual character formation. Tocqueville saw the right of private property "as the basis of civilization," and this attitude is after all no surprise in a "liberal" of any kind. It never occurred to Burckhardt to question it, and Mill went to great lengths to defend it in his Political Economy.30 For all the aristocratic liberals, but for Mill in particular, the economic freedom of the individual was a necessary part of those modern "negative liberties" that they cherished. Thus they extended their idea of private property to include a generally laissez-faire attitude toward economics. Tocqueville's investigations of economic questions as such were infrequent, as one might expect from a French political thinker of his period, but he condemned socialist ideas on political economy—especially the notion that government intervention in the economy could help the laborer—as having helped cause the Revolution of 1848.31 Burckhardt was equally severe in his condemnations of price-fixing and deficit budgeting and so on, although one wonders if he would have shared Tocqueville's and Mill's general endorsement of free trade. 32 The merits of laissez-faire economics were more an unexamined assumption for Tocqueville and Burckhardt than a scientific theory of economics. Mill, one of the foremost economists of the day, was much more specific. He believed that "the laisser-faire doctrine, stated without large qualifications, is both unpractical and unscientific; but it does not follow that those who assert it are not, nineteen times out of twenty, practically nearer the truth than those who deny it."33 Mill strongly supported the benefits of competition over monopoly and the virtues of the free market, which, if not ideal, were at least better than any proposed substitutes.34 His ideas may be summed up in the sentence "Laisser-faire, in short, should be the general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil."35 Mill was quite sure that there were occasions when such departures were in fact justified. They were generally not, however, departures from laissez-faire in economic matters strictly speaking. Rather they were departures from the general aristocratic liberal principle restricting the state to as small a sphere as possible. In areas

"Working Against Time"

117

such as education Mill thought the state could do great service as an example.36 Indeed in some states of society, such as in undeveloped colonies, Mill accepted government intervention in all spheres when the government was trying to promote some good the people were not yet advanced enough to perceive for themselves (another example of the aristocratic liberals' limited regard for cultural diversity).37 Nevertheless, Mill's departures from the principle of laissez-faire did extend to such things as support for government limitation of the working hours of children and theoretical approval for limitations for adults.38 One notable exception to the respect of the aristocratic liberals for the principles of market economics was their bias in favor of the small peasant proprietor. Burckhardt lamented the decline of the Mittelstand and "above all the palpable decline of the real substance of the nation, namely the agricultural population . . . the decline of the peasantry. ,.." 3 9 Regardless of relative agricultural efficiencies, Mill praised the virtue of the small landowner who worked his farm himself, and argued that dividing the great estates of Ireland (with due compensation to their owners) was the only salvation for that unhappy island.40 Tocqueville argued with Nassau W. Senior over this very point, claiming that the moral, social, and political virtues promoted by peasant landownership more than outweighed any strictly economic benefits obtainable from a tenant labor system. The aristocratic liberals liked the idea of small landowners because they thought that ownership encouraged intelligence, education, prudence, morality, and political responsibility.41 In a characteristic humanist evaluation the encouragement of these virtues in the individual more than outweighed any marginal gains in productivity in the aristocratic liberals' eyes. Their attitude toward the landowning peasantry was a special case, but it was also a reflection of their wider bias against dependent relationships and their humanist emphasis on personal autonomy. The aristocratic liberals' prejudice in favor of small landholdings further indicates their distaste for vast extremes of wealth and poverty, with their potentially disastrous social and political consequences.42 Indeed, to the aristocratic liberals, eliminating the class struggle was crucial to liberty, as it was for Marx in an opposite sense. Class struggle had destroyed liberty in the French Revolution and was encouraging the despotism of the state and threatening universal stagnation with the total victory of either side. The project of creating a classless society was adopted by a wide range of nineteenth-century thinkers—humanist and non-humanist—and we should not let our twentieth-century preoccupation with its Marxist incarnation make the aristocratic liberal adoption of the project seem surprising. 43 But the aristocratic liberals held out no hope for ending the class struggle,

118

Aristocratic Liberalism

no concrete means by which the masses could be raised out of their misery. On the whole, they were opposed to violations of laissez-faire in welfare questions and viewed them largely from the standpoint of classical economics. Burckhardt saw government-subsidized medical insurance as an intolerable dictatorship. Tocqueville was a noted opponent of the right to work, seeing state control of the economy as its necessary pre-condition. Mill condemned the error "of making all take care of each, instead of stimulating and helping each to take care of himself." He opposed any aid to the lower classes that would lessen their independence or encourage improvidence.44 But the aristocratic liberal attitude toward poor relief was not derived entirely from economics, and insofar as it was not, it was full of doubts and contradictions. Tocqueville could not rid himself of the idea that the poor had some kind of right to assistance or to subsistence.45 Mill, for all his concern that the liberty of the poor not be infringed by assistance, was willing to take away the right to marry or have children from persons on relief of any kind; liberty was not compatible with dependence on charitable support (Mill strongly advocated birth control for the poor as a means of raising their wages by restricting the supply of labor).46 In the end, Tocqueville and Mill were in disagreement regarding the notion of a right to government aid for at least subsistence. The early Tocqueville thought that a guarantee of government assistance promoted laziness among the poor, and he had a low opinion of the desire of the masses to better themselves; they needed the spur of starvation evidently. The later Tocqueville could never quite overcome these objections, although he was more sympathetic to the other side of the argument. At the same time, Tocqueville always thought that private charity should be increased, largely because it established social links between rich and poor. 47 Mill, by contrast, eventually concluded that a right to assistance, if the conditions were made disagreeable enough, would not demoralize the poor, and that without such a right, hatred by the poor of the rich and the right of property was almost inevitable.48 The one aristocratic liberal who nevertheless did hold out some hope to the lower classes outside the poorhouse, who did think he had a means with which to end the class struggle, was Mill, who alone among the aristocratic liberals thought that the social question could be successfully resolved with the aid of birth control and co-operative socialism. All the aristocratic liberals thought the class struggle evil in itself and in its consequences. Mill alone thought that he had devised a social method not merely to mitigate its defects but to eliminate it entirely. The co-operative organization of industry would have material benefits too, he argued, but those would be: as nothing lo the moral revolution in society that would accompany it: the healing of the standing feud between capital and labour; the transformation

"Working Against Time"

119

of human life, from a conflict of classes struggling for opposite interests, to a friendly rivalry in the pursuit of a good common to all; the elevation of the dignity of labour; a new sense of security and independence in the labouring classes; and the conversion of each human being's daily occupation into a school of the social sympathies and the practical intelligence.49

Indeed, Mill hoped to accomplish nearly everything that aristocratic liberalsim desired via co-operative ownership of industry and the means of production. Co-operation was in itself a complete education.

Optimism and Pessimism Against the aristocratic liberals' vision of how society should be and how nineteenth-century culture really was, it is hard to see any alternative to despair from their perspective. The traditional long-term pessimism of classical and civic humanism seems fully justified in the circumstances. It is here that the progressive aspects of the modern humanist variant make themselves felt, to varying effect, in Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville. The situation may have appeared grim to them, but the aristocratic liberals were not fatalists. 50 Of course, they also firmly rejected the popular nineteenth-century doctrine of the inevitability of progress; they did not limit their rejection of determinism to the pessimistic variety. Tocqueville summed up their attitude best when he said that "for my part, I hate . . . these absolute systems, which make all the events of history depend on great first causes, linked by a chain of fatality."' 51 Thus if Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill all became more pessimistic over time, none of them was willing simply to accept destiny. They did not believe that the future of Europe was fixed, that there was nothing worthwhile for them to do before the deluge, if deluge there was to be. In order to understand their responses to their problem, it is necessary to understand to what extent they were or were not pessimists, and what they thought about the optimism that often surrounded them. Their differences of emphasis will also become clearer, for the relative strengths of their pessimism was one reason why the aristocratic liberals formulated different responses to their common problems. Indeed it is perhaps the single most important factor in the differences among them. At the same time, their relative pessimism as compared to the rest of the liberal movement in the period 1830-1870 helps separate them from other strands of liberalism. One charge from which the aristocratic liberals must be exonerated is that of worshiping the past, condemning modern Europe by comparison to a golden age. This is an aspect of classical humanism they dispensed with; there was no past golden age in their eyes.52 True, all the aristocratic liberals thought that

120

Aristocratic Liberalism

some of the virtues they prized were more apt to flourish in a different environment. There were virtues proper to an aristocratic age that a democratic era would find difficult to attain. 53 But that did not mean that aristocratic ages were better than democratic ones. Burckhardt rejected all comparisons of the relative happiness of different eras, both favorable and invidious.54 Nevertheless, he was not always consistent in his refusal to judge, as for example when he vaunted the superiority of medieval "authority" over modern majority rule, or claimed that the period 1830-1848 was the best in the history of the world. 55 As has been discussed in relation to the idea of progress, Mill and Tocqueville would have claimed that modern democracy had at least the potential to be better than an aristocratic era, that the virtues proper to democratic ages were more just than those proper to aristocracy 56 —this despite their occasional nostalgia for the advantages presented by a functioning clerisy and a real society of orders, a longing more pronounced in Tocqueville than in Mill. But the absence of some vanished golden age from aristocratic liberal comparisons does not in itself make these thinkers either optimists or pessimists. In their youth they were all optimists. Even Burckhardt, writing in 1842 when he was twenty-four, was touched by a very romantic optimism: "We must become ever more open, ever more sincere, and on the ruins of the old states love will perhaps found a new empire."57 Burckhardt pledged his devotion to the progress of the German spirit, and even if frightful revolutions were in store first, he looked forward to Germany's entering a golden age. In the first volume of Democracy in America, written when he was in his late twenties, Tocqueville was certain that God was preparing a calmer and less troubled future for Europe, whatever the doubts and tumults of the present. He believed at least as late as 1836 that the slow reforms of the July Monarchy would gradually increase the sphere of liberty in France to the desired dimensions. Mill, even in his first few years of intellectual independence after he had revolted against Benthamism, was still strongly marked by the Benthamite faith in progress. Thus, in reviewing the first volume of Democracy in America, he claimed that Tocqueville had painted democracy too darkly, and that although the threats were real, they were not as great as Tocqueville supposed.58 This general optimism about the future of Europe did not last very long. Burckhardt lost it in the period 1843-1846, Tocqueville in 1837-1840, and Mill by 1840, although Mill and Tocqueville had reversions up until around 1848.59 It was replaced by political and cultural pessimism, and by a strong denial of the idea that progress was probable. This pessimism was characteristic of Tocqueville and Burckhardt. Mill, however, remained more optimistic. Although he was not willing to predict success in the struggle for aristocratic liberal values, neither was he willing to predict defeat. Burckhardt often spoke of optimism as not merely wrong but reprehensible.

"Working Against Time"

121

In his later years he specifically criticized the faith in progress that he thought was characteristic of 1830-1848. He condemned Hegel and Rousseau for their optimism about human nature and about the course of history. Such optimism, successor of the anti-historical tendencies of the Enlightenment, only served to encourage money-grubbing, socialism, and universal suffrage. Optimism encouraged hubris and the overwhelming material desires of the commercial spirit, desires that led to unending conflicts as they spread from one class and one nation to another. 60 Mill and Tocqueville did not go quite so far in their attitude toward optimism about man and the future. Nevertheless, even in Democracy in America Tocqueville thought that democratic nations extended the concept of the perfectibility of man too far, and he did not share the eighteenth century's "exaggerated confidence" in mankind. 61 Mill was particularly critical of the widespread notion that modern Europe's economic development made man happier, nobler, and wiser. Progress, real progress in Mill's judgment, was not the inevitable accompaniment of material progress, and in fact any era in which the stress on material increase preponderated would be "an era either of stationariness or of decline."62 If Mill rejected the ancient notion that all politics was cyclical, he cautioned the modern majority, which believed in incessant progress, that there were strong forces that made for decline, and that without constant effort humanity would not merely remain staionary but rapidly regress.63 Such pessimism was not limited to an attack on the idea of inevitable progress. The aristocratic liberals had more concrete fears. Mill and Tocqueville did not, in the end, see contemporary democracy fulfilling the progressive potential they had once discovered in it. Despite occasional revivals of their political hopes, in the long run it seemed that everywhere the revolution of equality would repeat its original triumph over the revolution of liberty. As Tocqueville put it for his own nation, the French of the 1850s had more in common with the egalitarian physiocrats of 1750 than with the men of'89. 64 Tocqueville's political forecasts followed an increasingly pessimistic course. From the very beginning of his work, even when he was most optimistic about democracy, his purpose in writing was to point out threats to be avoided and evils to be mitigated.65 As time went on, as each successive hope was disappointed, his estimation of the threats to liberty grew. In the first volume of Democracy in America he had been very hopeful about the prospects for liberty in democracy. In the second volume the odds between anarchy or servitude on the one hand and liberty on the other seem almost even.66 In January 1835 Tocqueville condemned Louis-Philippe personally as a would-be despot, and although in 1836 he was still full of praise for the July Monarchy, by late 1837 he had only contempt for it. In 1843 he thought that the lower

122

Aristocratic Liberalism

classes in France would never make another revolution, but by 1847 he was predicting one. 67 In December 1851 he did not think that Louis Napoleon would last very long; a few years later he thought that the regime of Napoleon III would last his lifetime, as indeed it did. 68 In the last few years of his life, in the final stage of his thought which produced The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville revised not only his predictions for the future of France but also to a certain extent his opinions of the past. Indeed, in his Recollections he coupled denunciation of Louis-Philippe with the statement that the revolution of February 1848 meant that the cause of liberty was dead. 69 He saw no contradiction in condemning Louis-Philippe but praising the July Monarchy as the last hope of French liberty, nor did he think that liberty had been killed by the particular character of the revolution. 70 It had been distroyed by the fundamental political instability of France itself: "If one great revolution may found liberty in a country, several revolutions one after another will make all ordered liberty impossible there.71 The social situation of France was incapable of supporting a stable government. 72 Thus Tocqueville, by arguing that liberty was impossible rather than that liberty's powers were limited, gave vent to the traditional response of the defeated humanist. Even before the June Days and the advent of Louis Napoleon, he had known that nothing good could come out of the Revolution of 1848.73 The implications for countries other than France were clear. If all Europe was fundamentally politically unstable as a result of the dominance of the commercial spirit and the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, could any European nation expect liberty? Other countries had not experienced as many revolutions as France, but all Europe was exposed to the same ideas and social forces. Tocqueville explored the origins of this problem in The Old Regime without finding any solution that could substitute for unity between the classes. But where was class unity to be found? The Old Regime seems to say that the search is hopeless, at least in France, and Tocqueville feared that the second volume of the book would lead to despair, even in himself. Even America became increasingly disappointing to Tocqueville.74 It was only by rejecting socio-historical analogies and cyclical theories of history, by placing his hopes in some unknown future and thus taking refuge in historicism, that he could avoid the final collapse of his dreams. 75 So Tocqueville became a pessimist. As in the French Revolution after the early days of 1789, so in the modern world: the passion for liberty had been extinguished by other passions. France itself, incapable of stable government, was condemned to a feverish oscillation between liberty and despotism.76 Never, wrote Tocqueville in May 1852, had he been more convinced of the value of free institutions, and "never have I been more convinced that the deficiencies,

"Working Against Time"

123

whether of our education or of our nature, and our woes and our faults make us incapable and unworthy of enjoying them."77 In a later letter he avowed that he had always thought that the attempt to make France a free nation was a bold and difficult task, but now he was convinced that "[i]n our days, we shall not see a free society in France. ... Nothing will be able to make us free for a long time to come, and for the best of reasons, which is that we do not seriously wish to be free."78 Liberty was "hopelessly lost."79 Tocqueville's political pessimism, on the increase since 1835, became permanently dominant around 1850-51. Burckhardt's political gloom started earlier, as early as his unsuccessful involvement in Basel and Swiss politics in 18441846.80 Furthermore, while Tocqueville's pessimistic predictions were concentrated on France (although he never tired of warning his friends in England about the dangers liberty ran there), Burckhardt's were European in scope, though he was equally pessimistic about Basel, Swiss, and German politics.81 Burckhardt, of course, is famous for the remark he made about terribles simplificateurs descending on Europe.82 His letters to his friend Friedrich von Preen, written between 1864 and 1893, are full of political pessimism. Thus, for example, he wrote in 1876 that now only destructive and leveling forces have real power.83 Burckhardt saw no alternative for the world between "complete democracy" or absolute despotism and an era of frightful wars. He foresaw a world ruled by "absolute brutality" as the final result of the "present competition for the participation of the masses in all party disputes."84 Nevertheless, even for Burckhardt and Tocqueville there was a certain flicker of hope at their grimmest moments. Thus Burckhardt wrote to von Preen of the possibility of a new art, poetry, and religion arising to save the German spirit from domination by the double imperatives of power and money. He particularly noted that one property of higher cultures was their capacity for renaissances. There always remained the undimmed creativity of nature working through humanity. 85 Tocqueville too could dream of a liberal renaissance. Denying all the times when he had judged liberty dead in France, he wrote in 1858 that since "the bulk of the people are a nation neither corrupt nor fearful, nor a servile nation like the Roman mob," France might one day hope to see freedom again.86 But Tocqueville made no prediction about whether that freedom would last. Rather, he noted in another context, "Everyone needs to feed himself with some illusion. I need that one in order not to be too unhappy in the midst of the ruin of our most noble hopes."87 Burckhardt and Tocqueville can be described as pessimists, though not fatalists. Mill was neither the one nor the other. Europe could go either way for Mill, to liberty or to despotism. The issue was still doubtful. In evaluating Mill's standpoint, one has to make allowances for his tendency to make "tactical statements," as Edward Alexander calls them. 88 Often Mill would stress one

124

Aristocratic Liberalism

particular side of an argument because that was the side of the truth that, in Mill's opinion, a particular audience at this particular time needed to have stressed.The presentism Mill brought to bear on his choice of historical subjects was equally influential in his correspondence and polemical work. 89 In this case it means that we must take into account the fact that Mill would sometimes make optimistic predictions in which he did not believe for the sake of encouraging others to keep struggling for the good. We can determine which of Mill's positions are tactical either by pointing to his own later admissions, as for example in the Autobiography, or by finding contemporary contradictions and trying to explain them in this way. Mill's attitude toward America is a good example of tactical optimism on his part. Writing in 1865 to Edwin Godkin, an English emigrant to America who became an important figure as the first editor of The Nation and then as editor of the New York Evening Post, Mill claimed that Tocqueville would now have to admit that many of his unfavorable predictions about American democracy were wrong. After expressing his own happiness at the elimination of slavery, Mill went on to say that now he had "no misgiving" as to the future of America.90 Yet when Mill was writing to non-Americans, people he did not need to encourage to work for the good in America, his attitude toward the United States was very different. In Considerations on Representative Government, first published in 1861 but substantially revised by Mill in 1865, the same year as his letter to Godkin, Mill referred to the United States as a "collective despotism."91 In the early 1860s, both before and after the outbreak of the Civil War, Mill was extremely critical of America to his non-American correspondents. Thus he claimed that evils described in their infancy by Tocqueville had made "fearful advances since," and warned England against adopting "the American form of democracy."92 It is still, of course, open to question which one of Mill's attitudes to America was merely tactical, but on balance the unfavorable, pessimistic attitude seems to predominate. If Mill was pessimistic about America, what was his attitude toward the rest of the world? Occasionally he seems to have given up hope everywhere. Thus he wrote, "We have come, I think, to a period, when progress, even of a political kind, is coming to a halt, by reason of the low intellectual and moral state of all classes... ,"93 Indeed, Mill had to combat the accusation of pessimism from contemporaries: For the other misapprehension I am probably myself accountable. . . . I do not, as you seem to think, take a gloomy view of human prospects. Few persons look forward to the future career of humanity with more brilliant hopes than I do. I see, however, many perils ahead, which unless successfully avoided could blast these prospects. . . . The dangers are real, and unless constantly kept in view, will tend to increase. 94

"Working Against Time"

125

Mill's persistent warnings were warnings only. He put real hope, for example, in the Hare Plan for proportional suffrage and in plural voting for the educated. They were ways of balancing the evils of mass democracy and maintaining diversity and a desirable degree of conflict in society.95 To the end of his life Mill remained both politically active and politically hopeful, not confident in victory but not expecting defeat either. These differences in attitude among Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville were crucial in determining their responses to their common perception of their situation. The immediate goals that each pursued in his intellectual and political activity differed according to their differing estimations of what could still be achieved. Although their closely united perception of European society influenced their educational goals, their varying degree of optimism and pessimism divided their means and expctations. Even the kind of education they wished to give was affected by the kind of education they thought their audience was fit to receive and the different kinds of audience they thought it was still possible to reach. Education What responses did the aristocratic liberals make to their predicament? Although they shared common ideas about the nature of individuality and liberty, about the correct political forms for Europe, and more vaguely about desirable socio-economic arrangements, they did not necessarily share one another's ideas about how to achieve these things. Nor did they partake of the same degree of optimism or pessimism about whether these could be achieved at all, regardless of the means. Thus, for example, neither of the others shared Mill's vision of co-operative socialism as a cure for the ills that afflicted European society. There was, however, one sphere of action, one response to their situation, in which all the aristocratic liberals could join, albeit with different purposes and hopes: education. Education was the primary means by which they hoped to affect their era. This is true, first, in the sense that the aristocratic liberals set out to spread their gospel primarily by exercising an intellectual influence rather than by taking a direct political role; the political roles Mill and Tocqueville did play were, after an early period, subordinate to this end. It is true also in the sense that what hopes they had of avoiding the dangers facing Europe lay in education, both in the broad sense of political participation and intellectual development and in the narrow sense of what could be done in the schools. This emphasis on education is in line with the general emphasis on individual development characteristic of modern humanist thinking, and with those strands of

126

Aristocratic Liberalism

aristocratic liberal thought that subordinated political and social developments to the movement of ideas. As the aristocratic liberals' analysis of the European social situation grew gloomier, as their estimates of the threats posed by the middle class, the commercial spirit, and the class struggle increased, so did their emphasis on education. Education thus served to overcome a defective sociology of liberty. Their focus on education never ignored society and politics, but it was in the realm of ideas, in the final analysis, that they thought they could be most effective. That the aristocratic liberals were primarily intellectuals and educators rather than politicians or social reformers is a natural conclusion in regard to Burckhardt, a historian and professor at both university and Gymnasium, though it may appear more open to question in the case of Mill and especially Tocqueville. But despite their early ideas, Mill and Tocqueville soon decided that their individual vocation was primarily intellectual rather than political. All the aristocratic liberals, even Burckhardt, had some political ambitions in their youth. Burckhardt joined a guild, at the time a purely political action, when he returned to Basel from his studies in Germany; and he edited a conservative newspaper, the Baseler Zeitung. There his patron and employer was a politician 6f some importance in both Basel and Swiss affairs. 96 But if he really did cherish hopes of a political career to run alongside his academic one (certainly he never intended to leave academia, and in the era of notable politics it was not clear that he needed to do so), Burckhardt quickly abandoned them, although he remained an active citizen of Basel whose views on all subjects were well known. 97 By 1846 he wrote to a politically inclined friend: "Liberty and state have not lost much in me. With men like myself, one does not build a state. ... I now have enough training and experience in order to manage in case of necessity even high politics, only I no longer wish to participate. .. ,"98 Even in his optimistic youth, Burckhardt did not see his role as one of pushing for change, of participating directly in the revolutionary tumult of the 1840s.99 Rather, he proclaimed his allegiance to "the culture of old Europe" and to his mission to help rebuild when the current crisis was over.100 At that time Burckhardt thought the crisis would be of short duration, but in effect it lasted all his life, as neither the class struggle nor the commercial spirit found a resting place for long. The twentieth century is accustomed to regard the nineteenth as a particularly stable period, but the aristocratic liberals were far from unique in regarding their own era as one of a new instability, inaugurated by 1789 and never terminated, despite all the attempts at restoration. But without an end to the crisis, Burckhardt could not help rebuild; his purpose had to change. Thus in 1867 he wrote: "If, however, there should still be some happiness in the midst of misfortune, it can only be an intellectual one, facing backwards towards the salvation of the culture of an earlier era,

"Working Against Time"

127

turning forwards as the bright and untarnished representation of the mind in a period which otherwise could be entirely reduced to the material."101 The purpose of Burckhardt's writing and teaching thus became one of preservation. Above all, he felt that it was necessary to preserve the aristocratic liberal and humanist ideal of individual development in a time and place that was otherwise hostile to it, doing so in the dual hope that some later period would recognize its value, and that individuals in the present could make it their own and derive some consolation in the Anschauung (contemplation) of other eras and their products. In renouncing active participation in politics, Burckhardt dedicated himself to helping others.102 He proclaimed that the duty of the author or teacher was "to make numerous and varied kinds of people love intellectual things," each in their own individual way, in an era which posed the gravest danger to culture. 103 Thus the purpose of Burckhardt's life as writer and educator was a struggle against the odds to preserve values in danger of disappearing from the world. In doing so, Burckhardt made a choice that was well within the bounds of humanist tradition. Humanism had always contained a certain ambivalence between the values of active participation and contemplation.104 Burckhardt chose the virtues of Anschauung in an era when those of participation were no longer practicable. His was a task of salvage rather than of renovation or construction; for that the time had not yet arrived. Mill and Tocqueville continued their direct and indirect political activities until the end of their lives. But the purpose behind their political careers changed over time. Mill, even after he had ceased to be a Benthamite, had high hopes for the Radical party in Parliament, and at one point seriously planned to put a prime minister in sympathy with Radical views, Lord Durham, in 10 Downing Street. He wrote essays explaining which social strata could be brought to support the Radicals and how they could form a parliamentary majority. 105 By September 1839, however, Mill was writing that "it is no part of my vocation to be a party leader," and by 1840 he had given up on the idea of forming an independent Radical party on the grounds that "if I can hope to do any good it can only be by merging in one of the existing great bodies of opinion; by attempting to gain the ear of the liberal party generally, instead of addressing a mere section of it."106 The conclusion Mill drew from his attempt to animate a Radical party was that "we are entering upon times in which the progress of liberal opinions will again, as formerly, depend upon what is said and written, and no longer upon what is done."101 One could attempt to explain Mill's youthful political activities as an attempt to make the government into a "national agency of education" rather than to put through certain political measures (and the two are not mutually exclusive). Regardless of Mill's early intentions, however, his later political activity is

128

Aristocratic Liberalism

explicitly educational. Thus to Comte, who had objected to Mill's campaign for Parliament on the grounds that activity as an M.P. would take time away from more important activities, he wrote that Parliament was "the best chair of public education for a sociological philosophe" ("un philosophic sociologiste"). Mill counted on Parliament to give him a broad reputation and put him in a position to influence far wider circles than he had hitherto. 108 The rest of Mill's career was devoted to "educating the public" in all senses. Nothing else was equally important: "In how many respects it is a changed world within the last half-dozen years.... Still, there is no real change in education, therefore all the other changes are superficial merely. It is still the same world. A slight change in education would make the world totally different."109 Mill's life was an attempt to effect such a "slight change in education." Tocqueville's case is more difficult to understand. As a young man he was desperately determined to get elected to the National Assembly, and he rejected advice from Royer-Collard that he would be more useful as a writer and intellectual. His own personal preference was for direct action: "Do not believe . . . that I have a blind enthusiasm, or indeed any kind of enthusiasm, for the intellectual life ...", he wrote to a friend in 1837.110 Tocqueville's refusal to join either the government or the main opposition bloc, despite warm offers from both on his first election, was as much a result of ambition as of principle. But for many reasons, not least a voice that quickly grew hoarse and incapable of sustaining debate, Tocqueville was unable to fill the political role that he had imagined for himself. Even in 1837 he had written, "I cannot understand how when the route of action is closed, one does not throw oneself with all one's strength towards thought."111 From his trip to America Tocqueville took away the lesson that education was more important than virtue in maintaining a republic. 112 Once convinced, he spent the rest of his life trying to educate the French in liberty. By 1850, confirming the earlier opinion of Royer-Collard, Tocqueville realized that "my real value is above all in these works of the mind, that I am better at thought than at action. .. ,"113 It would be tempting to date the transition in Tocqueville's conception of his vocation, the switch from politics to ideas, to the time of his disillusionment with the July Monarchy. But that came no later than mid-1839, when Tocqueville was still avidly attempting to gain his first election to the Chamber. He made no claim that his seat in the Chamber was a teaching chair, and certainly his ambitions on entering politics were great, as befitted the celebrated author of Democracy in America. It is hard to reconcile Tocqueville's actions with his thoughts about the July Monarchy. Certainly, for all the bitterness of his attacks on the July regime, Tocqueville regarded the Revolution of 1848 as a defeat for liberty rather than a victory. 114

"Working Against Time"

129

One possible way to understand Tocqueville's actions is that he hoped to be an intellectual influence on his colleagues, but this must remain conjecture, made still more dubious by his low opinion of men such as Guizot and Thiers when considered as politicians rather than as writers. Of course, one could try to argue that Tocqueville's real disillusion with politics did not arrive until 1848, and that revolution rather than reflection changed his idea of his vocation. But he certainly realized his essential political impotence under the July Monarchy long before 1848. It seems likely that he was impelled to enter active politics by family traditon (Malesherbes and Chateaubriand formed part of his family tree), humanist precepts, and a combination of passion and duty to engage in as active a political participation as possible. Once involved, he found many distractions. Nevertheless, he re-emphasized his primary vocation as an educator well before his political career was over. What, then, were the educational tasks that Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill sooner or later set themselves? What possible influence did they ascribe to their educational program? Their concepts of education and the evolution of their ideas are personal enough that an individual rather than a topical approach to their views is required. In its response to modernity the unity of aristocratic liberalism fragments. The unity of language, perception, and values described earlier was insufficient to eliminate this diversity. Burckhardt hesitated about the means by which his task of preserving the aristocratic liberal ideal might best be carried out. He had some ambition and success as a poet, but in the end he found "the highest poetry in history," because history better portrayed "the development of the individual and the development of the whole."115 This thought is from a letter of 1840, but there is ample evidence that Burckhardt continued to assign a special role to history as both a vehicle for individual Anschauung and as a preserver of Bildung in an unfriendly age. Thus in his lectures on the study of history Burckhardt stated that "historical studies are the worthiest employment of the cultured," the highest praise from him. History was for Burckhardt what psychotherapy was for Freud. If Freud took as the motto of psychotherapeutic practice "Where id was, there ego shall be," Burckhardt wrote that "the Geist must transform its memories of its experience of different eras into its possession. Where once was sorrow and joy, there must be knowledge, as indeed is also the case in the life of individual."116 Those without such knowledge were "barbarians". Indeed, Burckhardt thought so highly of history and the beneficial effects of historical study that he praised historical dilettantism—not on the part of historians, of course, but on the part of those who followed other callings.117 His own works were not intended primarily to be read by other specialists. In 1848 he conceived the plan of editing a "library of cultural history" designed to popularize the discipline. 118 The ambition of "popularizing" anything

130

Aristocratic Liberalism

appears rather odd in Burckhardt, particularly given his opinions about the undesirability of universal, mediocre education. But evidently Burckhardt worked at this project over a long period. Both The Age of Constantine the Great and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy were meant to form part of it, the book on the Renaissance being intended as the concluding volume. The studies on medieval .subjects meant to fill the gap between Constantine and Cesare Borgia remained unwritten, according to Burckhardt, only because the circumstances of his tenure at Basel compelled him to devote his time to art history. 119 After the experience of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, Burckhardt swore that henceforth he would ignore events as much as possible in his history teaching and concentrate on Kulturgeschichte. What this means is that after 1870, when Burckhardt felt his values particularly threatened, he resolved to concentrate even more on teaching history as a means of Bildung rather than as a professional pursuit, on teaching and writing in a desperate race against time so that he could make as many people as possible love the things of the spirit. 120 His method of doing so was through the study of history, or rather of the "historical," as he preferred to say; for what he had to teach was not the academic discipline of history but ways of perceiving change, differences, continuities, ways of contemplating the configurations of past cultures and the fundamental telos of human nature, not the ordinary sequence of events. 121 Given his early adoption of a pessimistic viewpoint, Burckhardt could not have hoped, regardless of the success of his "popularizations," to win a majority for aristocratic liberal values, or even for a historical perspective on things, and there is no evidence that he expected to do so. His was simply an attempt to cast the seed as widely as possible in the hope that some would lie undisturbed in the dust as the marching boots tramped over Europe, to spring up again in a more fruitful climate. The task of preserving cultural values even among a minority seemed an uphill struggle to Burckhardt. He was not optimistic that the future would take much notice of the past; indeed it might take only "mocking notice of all the past." 122 From his youth Burckhardt had made resignation the center of his psychological life—resignation and doing what good he could for others. A line from one of his letters could be taken as the motto of his teaching: "In the meantime we do our daily duty as well as we can; thus we can pro tempore endure." 123 The kind of educating Burckhardt did was limited both by his personal characteristics and by the goal of preservation. Political education, in the sense of educating people by and for participation in politics, was foreign to Burckhardt's pedagogical practice because political influence was foreign to his ambitions, owing to his pessimistic view of the political possibilities. To a certain

"Working Against Time"

131

extent, history was for him a substitute for politics, for it was through historical contemplation that he aimed to cultivate individual independence and autonomy while combating individualism (in the Tocquevillean sense), whereas Tocqueville and Mill still looked to political participation. For them, education potentially had a much stronger role to play in the present than as a mere force for the preservation and transmission of aristocratic liberal values in a hostile environment. Tocqueville, far more than either Burckhardt or Mill stressed political education, that is, education directed at the individual's relationship with society more than at self-cultivation, insofar as these are distinguishable in the aristocratic liberals' modern humanism. Even at an age when he was most devoted to action, Tocqueville held himself equally bound to serve his country in the realm of ideas.124 He was convinced that political science formed the climate of opinion and that writers had formed the French national character, and he set out to make his own mark. 125 Both volumes of Democracy in America were intended as lessons for a European, especially a French, audience. They were meant to demonstrate the inevitability of democracy, to describe its character, to show how it could be combined with liberty and which elements in it endangered liberty. Tocqueville's task was, in effect, to produce among the French the kind of enlightened self-interest he had discovered in America, to bring the French up out of their individualism and absorption in the commercial spirit. In so doing Tocqueville hoped to diminish the over-enthusiasm of democracy's partisans while assuaging the fears of its enemies, thus making possible a peaceful transition to a fully democratic state that would preserve liberty.126 More important, Democracy in America was meant to show European democrats that Europe, or at least France, did not yet possess the necessary education and mores for democracy and that "one must work to obtain them before drawing their political consequences."127 America had taught Tocqueville the crucial role of education, broadly denned, in sustaining liberty, and the equally crucial necessity for education in Europe. Why had the American republic been able to endure where so many other modern republics in Europe and the New World had quickly degenerated into one sort of despotism or another? There is one great explanation which dominates all the others and which, after one has weighed them all, carries all the others in the balance: the American nation, taken as a whole, is not only the most educated in the world, but what I consider much more important than that advantage, they are the people whose practical political education is the most advanced. It is this truth, in which I firmly believe, which gives birth in me to the only hope I have for the future happiness of Europe. 128

132

Aristocratic Liberalism

The "insoluble question" that Tocqueville added, however, was whether education would be sufficient to sustain liberty without the special material and other advantages that the United States enjoyed.129 This was a question he never returned to address theoretically (and his writings never dispensed with the sociology of liberty), but his activity was predicated on the assumption that education must be sufficient. Be that as it may, Tocqueville's career was dedicated to education for liberty. The concerns his writings address were always presentist, in The Old Regime no less than in Democracy in America. The issues in which he was most involved under the July Monarchy—the penal system, the abolition of slavery, the colonization of Algeria—were all issues on which he could and did stress the necessity of educating for liberty.130 The content of his teaching was what might be expected of an aristocratic liberal: the importance of the individual, of decentralization, of the fight against individualism, of the dangers to liberty. Tocqueville had started his career as educator with high hopes for his pupils. As his pessimism increased with his darkening view of the trends in nineteenth-century European society, his thoughts about the influence of ideas became less hopeful. In 1851 he wrote that the general tendency in France was away from liberty and toward the concentration of power, and the fact that the majority of France's most eminent politicians and generals opposed the trend did not give him hope, for "we live in an era and in a democratic society where individuals, even the greatest, are of little account."131 Later, despite the success of The Old Regime, he was not reassured that his acclaim meant anything encouraging for liberty. Books were no longer important now—at least in the short run, for Tocqueville did not give up hope entirely: "It is still useful to throw these ideas into circulation in the hope that, if they are correct, they will end up little by little transforming themselves into passions and into facts. I ask God to let me see that transformation in my days, although, to tell the truth, I hardly hope to."132 Tocqueville's efforts at education were directed chiefly at the middle class and the aristocracy. When it no longer seemed to him that these would be the dominant actors in European history, his hopes receded.133 For all their distaste for the middle class, the aristocratic liberals needed the middle class very much for the achievement of their goals. This need and the force and frequency with which the aristocratic liberals stated their distaste are not unrelated. They could have taken the flaws of the middle class lightly had these not been an essential social component to the realization of their values. They would not have devoted their lives to educating the middle class to the flaws of the commercial spirit had the task not been essential in their eyes. Significantly, the importance of a modicum of property and a good education for independence and liberty made it very difficult for the aristocratic liberals to assimilate the lower classes

"Working Against Time"

133

into their system of values in any positive way. 1'heir version of humanism remained a fundamentally elitist, minoritarian one. As such it was typically liberal. In their attitude toward the education of the lower classes the aristocratic liberals faced the same dilemma, and produced different solutions despite common fears. Burckhardt thought that free and compulsory education for the masses would be of a very mediocre quality and would result in only destructive dissatisfactions.134 Tocqueville, despite the example of America, was dubious of the merits of universal education in Europe, although he seems eventually to have been won over to the idea, provided the education was of sufficiently high quality.135 Mill was the only aristocratic liberal who came out strongly in favor of free and compulsory education for all—compulsory at least through the primary level and free thereafter for those who could not afford to pay, although he had some doubts about the effects of an education that ended at the primary level, and more broadly about the results of mediocre education.136 Even Mill, the apostle of co-operative socialism, who had more hope of assimilating the proletariat into aristocratic liberal values than either of the others, was not overly optimistic about the effects of the kind of education the masses were likely to receive. The problem of educating the proletariat increased aristocratic liberal pessimism. It was hard enough trying to educate the middle class. In this respect, however, Mill did not face quite the same dilemma as the others. He had maintained a strong belief in the power of the united opinion of "the instructed" to influence other classes, of the "almost boundless" power of education.137 Unanimity among experts led naturally to the ascendancy of their opinions, in Mill's view, whether the subject was astronomy or political economy. In part because of these ideas, Mill had many fewer reservations about educating the lower classes than Tocqueville or Burckhardt did, although he was not wholly without them. Of course, Mill was concerned to see that the lower classes received the right sort of education, since if he thought that the desire for liberty grew naturally with the development of intelligence and morality, he also believed that the wrong sort of education, for example one that encouraged people "to renounce liberty for the sake of equality," could indeed "deprive them of one of the most elevated characteristics of human nature," that is, the desire for liberty. 138 Mill defined education very broadly, as might be expected. In a famous chapter in his Logic, Mill defined ethology, which more or less corresponded to social science, as "the science which corresponds to the art of education; in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of national or collective character as well as individual." 130 It should be noted, however, that Mill did not restrict his definition of education to books. Like Tocqueville, he stressed

134

Aristocratic Liberalism

the practical education of political participation, of participation in selfgovernment, especially on the local level.140 Unlike the other aristocratic liberals, he emphasized the need to develop co-operative socialism as the primary means for the education and uplift of the masses. In this respect Mill's educational agenda addressed a different audience—the aristocracy of the labor movement, as Mill saw it—from the middle classes. Through co-operative socialism, the material and moral lot of the lower classes could be improved simultaneously. At the same time as they learned the individualistic virtues of the Protestant ethic, they would learn higher co-operative political virtues inculcated by participation in a common endeavor for the good of their community. They would realize the value of talented individuals in their midst and understand the need to subordinate one's own material desires to a superior end. The most optimistic of the aristocratic liberals, about the possibilities for education as for everything else, Mill nevertheless felt that the attempt to educate society in aristocratic liberal values, in the merits of liberty, diversity, and individuality, was an uphill fight. In Mill's eyes, England presented special problems in this regard because of the particular strength of public opinion. It was thus even harder to encourage original thought and ideas, harder to educate in England than elsewhere: "Are there six persons in the House of Commons who think it any business of theirs to liberate and stimulate individual thought and action, or who would desire to do so even if they knew what it meant? How many are there even outside the House...?" 141 Outside the House, it seemed, the English middle class was not interested in any education not strictly professional. Even his writings sometimes seemed of dubious effect to Mill, given the number of American slaveholders who "approved of and admired" his work. 142 Whatever his doubts and difficulties, however, Mill never gave up hope that education could resolve the problems he foresaw between the lower classes and the rest of society: "Our best chance of avoiding this will be the progress of education in all classes; and unfortunately it is easier to improve education in quantity than in quality. . . . [We are] in a certain degree, working against time."143 In their efforts to educate, all the aristocratic liberals felt that they were working against time. Time, fortuna, decline, and corruption—the typical foes of the humanist. The aristocratic liberals continued the ancient battle in a new world and with new means. Despite their differences in purpose and outlook, in this they were unanimous.

6 Conclusion: Toward a History of European Liberalism, 1830-1870 Aristocratic Liberalism and the Study of Liberalism The aristocratic liberal perspective described in the preceding chapters is formed by a coherent understanding of European history, society, and culture, backed by common values and a common language partaking in the modern humanist tradition. It is a particular understanding of the historical past and its significance for the present and of the characteristics of contemporary society and culture, and a particular set of values by which past, present, and future developments are judged. Aristocratic liberalism is thus a distinct discourse within the European liberal movement in the period 1830-1870. In concrete terms, the aristocratic liberals saw in the eighteenth century and the French Revolution the primary origins of modernity. The French Revolution sketched the outlines of the typical social, political, and ideological struggles of the nineteenth century. That century witnessed the flowering of the commercial spirit and middle-class domination, as well as the first stirrings of the future struggle between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes. The centralized state continued the growth it had begun in the eighteenth century and before, and threatened aristocratic liberal values both as an instrument for imposing the domination of one class or idea and as a threat in itself to liberty, individuality, and diversity. The aristocratic liberals' problem was how to perpetuate their values in a world they saw as hostile in the present, and likely to grow still more hostile in the future. Although their more or less pessimistic hopes and methods varied, they shared a common emphasis on education as the means by which their task might be carried out. From the very different vantage points of London, Paris, and Basel, the aristocratic liberals discerned a similar, fundamentally European landscape, to which no European nation presented an alpine exception. But despite the fact that the thinkers discussed in this book came from three different nations and participated in three different national traditions of thought, they 135

136

Aristocratic Liberalism

nevertheless spoke a common language of political discourse, and their ideas represented one variant of the European tradition of political thought loosely referred to as liberalism. What, then, was the relation of the aristocratic liberal variant to European liberalism? Of what importance is the fact that aristocratic liberalism was expressed in modern humanist language? What is the role of this work in the task of writing the history of European liberalism as a whole? Unfortunately, liberalism has proven a particularly difficult subject for historians to define. The difficulty of their task is one of the few things about which those constrained to attempt a definition can agree.1 For the historian concerned with nineteenth-century liberalism, particularly in the period before 1870, there is at least the consolation that these problems are mirrored in the difficulties nineteenth-century liberals themselves had in drawing the boundaries of their own movement.2 To this extent the lack of precision in modern historiography is understandable. Indeed, the difficulty and lack of precision are not confined to nineteenth-century liberalism; many trends in European political thought before 1870 have proven difficult to categorize for both historians and contemporaries.3 Today, without numerous preliminary studies of the individual types of liberalism, a clear delineation of the outlines of the liberal movement is impossible. There are still many gaps in the research, particularly in respect to international studies of European liberalism. In 1965 Vincent Starzinger, echoing Louis Hartz, lamented the "almost complete dearth of such comparative analysis," regarding this lack as "the really disappointing thing about most studies of nineteenth-century European political thought."4 With a few exceptions, most notably the recent controversy over the German Sonderweg which has produced some interesting comparative work, the situation has not changed much since 1965.5 Some might still challenge the legitimacy of comparative work, of histories of liberalism such as this one, which give priority to the European rather than the national characteristics of liberal thought. Whether a European or a national approach proves most appropriate in the end, however, one result of comparative studies will be to clear up some of the contradictions one finds among historians when they venture conclusions about the individual nations they study based on comparisons with imaginary international standards. At present, all too often one judges the success or failure of a particular movement by the results one imagines it to have had elsewhere, not realizing that the presumed model is based on incorrect and outdated assumptions.6 But the merits of a European approach to the history of European political thought are not merely therapeutic; nor does a European approach simply serve to correct past misconceptions. Acting as if the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Europe had been conducted on a series of islands surrounded

Conclusion

137

by impenetrable reefs would be foolish. And in fact no one does this. All historians acknowledge the importance of outside influences and the existence of similarities among national traditions of European political thought. After all, without such recognition the concept of liberalism would not exist. Given this recognition, it should be clear that studying the continental similarities will help us understand what is truly different about individual nations. More concretely, comparative study will show us that, at least in this era, Europe is not merely a geographical expression, that there is a genuine European cultural community. Indeed, in returning to comparative study we are returning only to the practice of the period, for 1830-1870 was the time of the greatest flowering of comparative historical study. This is not to deny the reality of national differences—different emphases in thought and different courses of economic, social, and political development. Nations and national liberalisms have their own uniformities of language and practice to distinguish them from the common European typology, which of course is nowhere reproduced in toto. But as Geoff Eley puts it, "[W]e should speak not of German peculiarity, but of British, French and German particularities"1 Different types of European liberalism will be of different significance in different countries. The comparative study of European political thought in general and European liberalism in particular is no substitute for national histories. The current absence of comparative work, however, demands efforts that emphasize the European rather than the national dimensions of European liberalism. Thus at present the questions I raise about the relation of aristocratic liberalism to European liberalism and the relative importance of aristocratic liberal or even more broadly of modern humanist discourse in the constellation of liberal discourses cannot be fully answered. To attempt to answer them is to discover that although this study has defined aristocratic liberalism, there is no commonly accepted definition of what liberalism is. Even if one restricts the applicablity of the term to the period after 1750, there is at present no definition that is at once both useful and correct. Neither liberal political language nor liberal political practice has been sufficiently characterized. It is not acceptable to say that Bagehot "was a liberal because he was a gentleman in Victorian England," a definition doubly confusing when one page later Crane Brinton describes Bagehot as "a far better Conservative than Carlyle."8 If, following Anthony Arblaster in The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (and many others), we consider liberalism "the dominant ideology of the West," we had better have a firm grasp of what this "dominant ideology" is, for lack of clarity has too often given rise not only to confusion but to self-contradiction.9 Recent works (for example, by Arblaster and by James Sheehan) have attempted to get around the problem of definition by arguing that there is no

138

Aristocratic Liberalism

one thing to define. In this view liberalism is a set of related ideas and movements, changing over time, rather than any given laundry list of characteristics. Liberalism is a family resemblance, as Sheehan notes, borrowing from Wittgenstein.10 In Foucauldian terms, liberalism is a multivocal system of discourses and practices in which it is difficult to discern a hegemonic voice that dictates the language or dialect spoken. This is certainly true, but it does not relieve historians of the obligation to try to see what the different members of the family looked like, differentiating parents from children and brothers from sisters, one dialect of the broader liberal discourse(s) from another. It is not enough simply to note the variety of positions taken by people conventionally called liberals on crucial issues such as suffrage without trying to see if those positions fall into recognizable types, or to evaluate the relative importance of those types. 11 The task of differentiation, of drawing boundary lines within the constellation of liberal discourses and between the liberal episteme and others outside it, is not easy, but it is necessary.12 However premature, some attempt to provide working hypotheses and a positive alternative to outmoded views about the boundaries of liberalism is worthwhile. There is a need for descriptions that can both act as an exclusion principle and, ideally, do something toward a typology of discourses within European liberalism. At the same time, certain misconceptions that attribute to liberal discourse a univocality that it never possessed must be put aside. With regard to aristocratic liberalism itself, there must be some attempt to indicate the general liberal background against which aristocratic liberalism is to be situated. The necessity of constructing an inductive typology rather than a simple definition of liberalism has been discussed in the introduction to this volume. The problem, as Hans Rosenberg recognized in 1930, is that without sufficient historical investigation of the kinds of liberal political thought and practice, it is difficult to avoid vague or dogmatic conceptions of liberalism. The account of aristocratic liberalism given in the preceding chapters is meant to provide one such investigation, and to contribute to a more general history of European liberalism in several ways: by defining one particular type of liberalism with reference to its understanding of the past, present, and future; by providing a model for the definition of other types of liberalism; and by offering additional counter-evidence against several misconceptions about the boundaries of the liberal movement as a whole. For unless one is prepared to say that Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville are not liberals, that aristocratic liberalism is not a liberal language, it should be clear from the preceding chapters that some common definitions of liberalism based on its univocality will have to be scrapped. What follows are some suggestions as to the ways in which a future definition ought and ought not to be constructed.

Conclusion

139

The Boundaries of European Liberalism, 1830-1870 What kind of definition of the boundaries of liberalism will be meaningful? The crucial element in constructing a general typology of liberalism, in Rosenberg's view, is the "exclusion principle," the grounds on which ideas and individuals can be ruled out of the liberal movement. 13 Without one a typology is impossible, and with an incorrect one the typology is a failure.14 Rosenberg, however, did not proceed to provide future investigators with an exclusion principle or with a comprehensive typology. He could only throw out suggestions as to what he thought were the most interesting variations and contradictions within liberalism.15 What follows is a very tentative effort to find an exclusion-principle and arrive at some conclusions about European liberalism. These judgments, necessarily preliminary, are nevertheless stated in positive and even dogmatic formulas, the better to act as lightning rods for further reflection. The evidence presented is suggestive rather than demonstrative, given both the lacunae in historical knowledge and the context of this study. More than the most schematic overview would be out of place in a book devoted primarily to aristocratic liberalism. I hope to present more of the basis for the conclusions that follow in a future work. The elements of a definition of liberalism presented herein are mostly political in nature. Liberalism, a movement that united a wide diversity of values and social analyses and encompassed numerous rhetorics and discourses, is best grasped as a coherent and identifiable entity in the domain of politics. Nevertheless, the boundary lines and common characteristics of liberalism are of a very varied character. In any attempt to understand the nature of liberalism, political, social, formal, and philosophical concerns tend to mix. 16 The grand epistemic system of discourses that was liberalism in the nineteenth century was wide ranging. Thus the generalizations that follow criss-cross the boundaries between political thought and political practice, between strategies and tactics, without regard for distinctions that are often useful in other, narrower contexts. There are two senses in which the limits of European liberalism need definition. On the one hand, liberalism needs to be marked off from movements that, however many liberal features they may occasionally incorporate, are not themselves liberal. On the other hand, we need to distinguish the different types of liberalism from one another. Within the political arena three different points can be identified which help to form an exclusion principle at the same time as they contribute toward a positive understanding of the broad contours of European liberalism in the period 1830-1870. First, there is a common liberal minimum program that

140

Aristocratic Liberalism

can be identified, in both negative and positive terms. Second, there is a typical liberal attitude toward the strategic relation of ends and means in politics. Finally, liberal thought characteristically concerns itself with the dangers of two potential despotisms, from above and below, and thus must wage a war on two fronts, sometimes simultaneously. All of these common characteristics allow for considerable.variations of political language and practical political emphasis between different types of liberalism. Thus, for example, some liberals will emphasize the threat from above while acknowledging the threat of despotism from below, and vice versa. Even within one type of liberalism emphases may change in altered circumstances. One negative, exclusionary aspect of the minimum political program of liberalism can be stated very simply: liberals are not democrats, and they oppose democracy in the form of universal or manhood suffrage. Liberals are sufficiently anti-democratic in the period 1830-1870 that one element of any exclusion principle for deciding who is a liberal must be that whoever wants universal suffrage to be instituted immediately is not a liberal. 17 This does not mean that liberals may not acquiesce in the implementation of universal suffrage if there is no other choice—under revolutionary pressure, for example, as did Tocqueville during the French Second Republic—but no liberal ever accepts it in the immediate present for its own sake. It should be stressed that no liberal can support the immediate establishment of universal suffrage, but all foresee some time in the distant future when it would be a good thing.' 8 A consequence of this is that whoever regards universal suffrage as permanently undesirable is also not a liberal. All liberals reject universal suffrage and democracy in the here and now. All theoretically support it under certain conditions to be met at some point in the (generally distant) future. The benefits of clearly grasping what may seem to some a truism can be easily demonstrated, for example, with reference to Germany. Acceptance of this exclusion principle would mean that people such as Gervinus and Schulze-Delitzsch and even the later Welcker cannot be considered liberals, at least until 1870. This is true even though the reason they supported universal suffrage, at least in the case of Welcker and Schulze, was that they were certain the lower classes would elect liberal men of property to represent them. 19 This distinction is hardly new to German historiography, but clear grounds for it with general application have been lacking. One element of an exclusion principle is contained, as I have noted, in the statement that liberals are not democrats, and that anyone who believes in immediate universal suffrage is not a liberal. There is also a positive aspect to the liberal minimum program that contributes to an exclusion principle, separating liberals from conservatives in the same way that the slogan "liberals

Conclusion

141

are not democrats" severs liberalism from the left. Liberalism had its own independent program. Liberals wanted to end the French Revolution; they did not want to unmake it.20 They related to the Revolution and its discourses in very different ways than did true conservatives. Liberalism was never simply reactionary. A good deal of the liberal minimum program in the period 1830-1870 is not, strictly speaking, political. Indeed, for some types of liberal discourse political participation is very much a secondary aspiration compared to such legal and economic goals as equality before the law and the free use of private property.21 These things could be and were achieved, for example, under the French Second Empire or in Bismarck's Prussia without creating a government dominated by public opinion.22 But the priority many liberals put on preserving private property did not make them conservatives or reactionaries, at least not by choice, although when sufficiently frightened by the specter of socialism they tended to run for the shelter of authoritarian government, as Tocqueville lamented. The positive minimum program that all liberals share may be summed up as follows: the right freely to dispose of and exploit all forms of private property (including land), abolition of internal tariffs, equality before the law, careers open to talent rather than birth, the rule of law rather than arbitrary caprice (with the political implication that a constitution is necessary), freedom of the press and of assembly (within certain limits), a general preference for the rights of individuals to do as they please, and a representative government responsible to public opinion and based on a restricted suffrage.23 It is apparent that by 1871 this program had been largely achieved in England, France, and Germany.24 Again, this conclusion may appear less than startling to some, but it serves to explain the often surprising admiration that, for example, many English liberals had for Prussia and Germany in this period.25 Such admiration would be incomprehensible if Germany had truly been an illiberal state from all liberal perspectives. Of course, Germany was liberal only from the perspective of the more minimal (but not necessarily least influential) versions of the liberal program. Germany had a Reichstag and Prussia a House of Delegates, but whether their powers were sufficient to make their governments "representative," whether they were really responsible to public opinion, and what kind of "public" should count, were matters over which liberals could and did disagree. And indeed there is ample room for disagreement among liberals both within and without the topics covered by this definition—over how free the press should be, the exact requirements for the suffrage, and the powers it was desirable that the state should exercise, to name only a few. The minimum program offered here is incomplete, but it

142

Aristocratic Liberalism

serves its main purpose: to provide a means of separating liberals from democrats and conservatives. Bismarck is not a liberal because he did not want government to be responsible to public opinion by any definition. 26 Another characteristic that liberal discourses share is a problematic strategy aimed at creating a society very different from the one in which they find themselves but without accepting revolutionary means. Even the most conservative liberals, such as Guizot, have political and social goals that are far removed from reality. Certainly this strategic dualism between ends (the complete transformation of society) and means (more or less slow reform) is present in aristocratic liberalism. Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill had visions of a very different kind of culture from what they saw around them, but none of them would have made a revolution to realize their visions. Of course this is so in part because it is difficult to imagine what kind of revolution could have embodied their desires, but the paradox remains. 27 Thus liberals were often in the weak position of calling for reforms so that revolution could be avoided without being able to threaten their opponents that they themselves would make a revolution were their demands for reform ignored.28 Revolution as such could be made only against liberalism, never for liberalism. When revolutions did occur, liberals were forever trying to end them. Thus any thinker who calls for a revolution—that is to say, who calls for the employment of revolutionary means, as opposed to having revolutionary ends—is not a liberal.29 There is, however, a theoretical if not a practical exception to this rule. Revolution is a theoretical weapon of last resort for all liberals, which they are never entirely willing to give up, at least in theory.30 But liberals hedge the right to rebel with many restrictions and great practical reluctance. In reality liberals are prepared to join in revolutions in order to end them, as in the French Revolution of 1830, or in effect in Bismarck's unification of Germany, but not to initiate revolutions themselves.31 One reason that liberals are so wary of the risks of revolution is that they are fighting a war on two fronts, against two kinds of despotisms, from above and from below. This is a general trait of liberalism in the period 1830-1870. Liberals define themselves in opposition to both the aristocracy and the lower classes.32 Thus Ebenezer Elliot, the Corn Law Rhymer, assails "the tyranny of the aristocracy" and the "foolish insolence of the Chartists," while in a more classical vein Shelley warns of "the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism."33 French and German liberals are no less conscious of the double struggle than English liberals. Rotteck, Sybel, and de Broglie, to name a few random examples, are all opposed to both feudalism and socialism, all afraid of a despotism exercised either from above or from below, by a minority or by a majority. 34 Thus any political thinker who is concerned about preventing

Conclusion

143

a socialist revolution, or about destroying aristocratic hegemony, but not about both at the same time is not a liberal. But although all kinds of liberals perceive their movement to be threatened from both sides, the threat they most emphasize varies greatly. One of the best means of understanding the differences of emphasis among liberals, about whether the threat from below or that from above is more pressing, is to look at liberal histories of the French Revolution, as Neumiiller did for German liberal historians, and as this volume has done for the aristocratic liberals.35 The French Revolution demonstrates both threats, and thus trying to understand it is a characteristic occupation and a crucial task for liberal discourse, albeit one on which different types of liberalism could never reach a consensus.36 It is the strong differences of emphasis on the threats from above and below that make liberal ideas, methods, and language such a productive source for those of other persuasions. Liberals of different kinds provide potent ammunition to their own enemies, who take one part of liberalism's struggle to be the whole of their own and typically annex the liberals themselves to their enemies, willy-nilly. Thus, for example, radicals often see little difference between liberals and reactionaries and, in a reversal of liberalism's own typical practice, picture liberals as part of an unholy coalition of oppressors. Coalition is in fact a highly typical situation for nineteenth-century European liberalism. Liberalism's characteristic double conflict puts liberals in a strategically weak position, and it is one of the reasons liberal parties and movements find coalitions so necessary to their success. This is true of liberalism both as a kind of political discourse and as a political practice carried out by particular groups and interests. Indeed, there is generally a double process of coalition involved in liberal political formations. Liberals need to form coalitions among themselves, for example, between those more concerned about the threat from above and those more concerned about the dangers from below, and at the same time they need to make common cause with non-liberal groups. Gladstone, of course, is the great example of liberal success at both kinds of coalition. German liberalism after 1870 is perhaps the best example of liberal failure, on both fronts, although both before and after 1870 the German liberals in coalition with Bismarck did accomplish many of their goals. I would go so far as to suggest that it is the German case that is more typical of the liberal discursive universe, which tends to emphasize threat rather than opportunity, massive exclusion versus only limited inclusion, whose self-consciousness tends to make it stand apart from others rather than join with them, even after 1870, when the independent possibilities for liberal hegemony seem less and less likely. 37 The liberals' need to form coalitions with

144

Aristocratic Liberalism

one of their opponents to fight off the other, whatever their short-term success, is in the long term a crippling weakness that eventually serves to relegate mid-nineteenth-century forms of liberalism to the dustbin of history. Part of the explanation for liberalism's failure to maintain its autonomy, both as a political movement and as a political discourse, lies in the fundamental lack of sociological imagination shown by most liberals.38 All liberals could imagine and indeed support individual social mobility. But class and group mobility were unthinkable. They could not imagine a situation in which groups and classes could and should change places. Thus they could not integrate the working class, the great reservoir of political strength under universal suffrage, into their coalition on a long-term basis, and still less could they transform the poor and ignorant as such into liberals. This is not to say that all or most liberals envisage a unitary middle class as the only possible governing class. But however liberals form their elite, on the basis of whatever kind of education or property, it is a fundamentally static and permanent basis, insulated for all practical purposes from any kind of positive change from a broader social perspective. Certainly most types of liberalism are unable to work for such change, and this limitation is a general characteristic of liberal discourse. As can be seen from the varied characteristics I have ascribed to liberalism, there is no one scale on which a liberal discourse can be weighed and classified. Rather, there is a whole series of issues, questions about different strands of liberalism's understanding of the present and understanding of what the present implied for the future, which identify a discourse as liberal and against which different liberalisms must be mapped. Together these responses will form a continuum on which the different varieties of liberal thought can be situated. There is, alas, no single liberal language, even for 1830-1870, and it may well be that there is not even a family resemblance among liberal languages. I do not mean to deny the existence of a universe of characteristically liberal discourses as argued in the preceding pages. What I mean is that there are at least two liberal languages that have relatively little in common: those descended from some form of humanist notion of the human telos, like aristocratic liberalism, and those derived from more individualistic notions of human nature. Thus fundamentally different languages, different worlds, are brought together in the larger universe of liberalism. Such a combination is unstable, and in a crisis one or another language group must give way or turn illiberal. Such was the case in the French Revolution when the previously coordinated political languages of enlightened reform turned on one another. 39 Widely different philosophical and ethical traditions are to be found within the liberal camp, finding it more or less apt to call themselves by the same name, sharing conclusions derived from different perspectives. As the aristocratic liberals show, the influence of humanist language on liberalism is evidence that

Conclusion

145

the discourse of contract and Hobbesian individualism is not the only possible liberal tongue, if such evidence is needed. A full history of liberalism would have to take all these different languages into account. Within the temporal and categorical boundaries of 1830-1870, this book's description of aristocratic liberal discourse through its understanding of the past, present, and future can be usefully applied to the definition of other kinds of liberalism as well. Any attempted typology of European liberalism will have to make distinctions on the basis of the different attitudes liberals had toward the past. Attitudes toward the Enlightenment and especially the French Revolution and their implications for modernity may prove to be a general litmus test in this regard. Michael Neumiiller has attempted to use the attitudes of German liberal historians toward the French Revolution (and the Reformation) as a barometer of the evolution of German liberalism.40 Attitudes about the French Revolution may prove equally useful for distinguishing types within liberal thought. Thus investigating the copious liberal historiography of the French Revolution can aid in the eventual creation of a typology of liberalism in general, as it has helped distinguish aristocratic liberal from other viewpoints. What, then, of different liberalisms' understanding of the present and the future? Here there is no single issue of equal magnitude with the French Revolution in liberalism's understanding of the past. Thus chapters 2-4 of this study, presenting the aristocratic liberals' view of present and future, have not been as tightly focussed on a single topic as was chapter 1, dealing with their understanding of the past. There are a number of important relationships through which liberals can be situated on a spectrum: for example, different liberalisms' relationship to industrial society and the commercial spirit, to parliamentary (as opposed to merely representative) government, to reform from above or emancipation from below, and so on. Furthermore, liberalism cannot always be described in terms of opposition to a given idea or development. If one is to distinguish adequately the different kinds of liberalism, one must pose open-ended questions: how liberals of different kinds think the class struggle could be avoided or ended, how the problem of war on two fronts could be solved, what attitudes they take to a particular segment of the middle class. A whole series of investigations of liberal political language is necessary. Three Misconceptions about Liberalism In order to undertake these investigations successfully, there are three misconceptions about liberalism that stand in particular need of modification

146

Aristocratic Liberalism

because they imply a unanimity in liberal discourse that did not exist: first, that liberalism is based on the untroubled alliance of property and education, of Bildung und Besitz, as the Germans like to put it; second, that liberalism is the representative political movement of the ascendant middle class; and third, that liberalism is the "party of movement," fundamentally opposed, whether in government or out of it, to the status quo. There are elements of truth in all these propositions, but taken at face value they are often misleading and at worst simply false. These ideas are misconceived partly because they ignore certain general characteristics of liberalism, such as liberalism's habit of fighting a war on two or more fronts at the same time. But they are more largely caused by over-simple identifications of liberalism with ideas, policies, and political and social orientations that are characteristic of only a few kinds of liberal discourse, all too readily assumed to be the dominant or unique forms. As the account given of aristocratic liberalism in the preceding chapters has shown, there were liberals and at least one type of liberalism to which none of these three common generalizations apply. In this the aristocratic liberals were not alone. At first glance the proposition that liberalism stands for the untroubled alliance of property and education seems incontrovertible.41 But too often historians act as if liberals were indiscriminately favorable toward all kinds of property and all kinds of education, or that differences about the kind of property that ought to be important politically or the kinds of education that qualified one for political activity were practically insignificant. The question of suffrage seems to provide evidence in favor of this point of view. Many liberal theoreticians and politicians argued that the representatives of the people must be well-educated men of intelligence and cultivation, and that the practical way to achieve this was by restricting both suffrage and eligibility for election to those with property. Alongside this argument for a restricted suffrage, however, ran another that made no reference to education. This was that political representation had to be based on the material interest of the represented in good government, and that only the possession of property, in a more or less considerable amount, guaranteed that interest. Thus two arguments, one deriving the right to participate in political life from education, the other deriving it solely from the interest in government created by the possession of property, co-existed. One derived much of its force from quasi-humanist arguments, while the other was based on more contractarian language. Present-day historians too often resolve any tensions between these two arguments, any conflict between the stress on property and the stress on education, by pointing to the similarity in their practical effects (since the educated and the moneyed were largely overlapping groups) and to the fact

Conclusion

147

that men of letters, the representatives more or less of education, accepted middle-class values, middle-class ideas of progress, and so on.42 This interpretation rests, however, on a number of faulty assumptions. First, even if anti-industrial liberals supported property qualifications for the suffrage, they did not do so out of equal regard for all kinds of property; such liberals often looked on industrial property unfavorably as compared with farms and estates. Too often the proposition of the alliance between property and education is put forth as though there was a homogeneous idea of property, according to which all property was considered equal, and a homogeneous idea of education, according to which all the educated held similar views. The purpose of this discussion is not to deny that there were many liberals for whom some particular alliance of property and education, or of some particular kind of property and some particular kind of education, was a natural assumption. Forms of liberalism that privileged landownership could condemn industrialism and the commercial spirit, while others that privileged industry condemned Junkers and peasants. There was thus considerable tension within the property side of the "property and education" combination. There was also often considerable stress across the property-education divide, for example, men of letters who condemned the commercial spirit of the middle classes in the name of a higher ideal of human education, as well as self-avowed representatives of big business or the entrepreneurial strata whose liberalism had little to do with educational goals.43 Many liberals who wished to found politics on reason and education felt considerable antipathy toward some of the dominant forms of property. The idea of a simple alliance of property and education generally identifies property with the middle classes and assumes that the intelligentsia was generally united in its support of middle-class values. My discussion of aristocratic liberalism should throw doubt on the idea that all the representatives of education were in firm support of the aspirations of the middle class, however that troublesome term is defined.44 The aristocratic liberals may be an extreme case, but T. W. Heyck notes even of England (where we might expect middle-class influence to be most powerful) that "perhaps the strongest theme in nineteenthcentury English literature was criticism of industrial society and the utilitarian and laissez-faire philosophies that went with it."45 Heyck maintains that Victorian men of letters were not alienated from their society, that they still regarded themselves as an essential and indeed a leading segment of it. Even so, they were its critics at least as much as they were its supporters. Whether or not one accepts Wiener's contention that anti-industrialism (the attack on what the aristocratic liberals called the commercial spirit) was the dominant intellectual attitude in England after 1850, there is ample evidence that a considerable number of the intellectuals—the representative class of English

148

Aristocratic Liberalism

culture—were disaffected from the middle classes and their presumed values in the period 1830-1870.46 This is not to say that most English men of letters were not liberals at the time but rather that many English liberals found the commercial spirit problematic. This situation was hardly confined to England.47 In regard to Germany, Lothar Gall underlines the gap between liberal bureaucrats and the liberal Stadtburgertum. The liberal merchants often enough found themselves fighting the attempts at enlightened regulation by the university-educated liberal bureaucrats, while the bureaucrats and other members of the liberal university intelligentsia frequently regarded themselves as on a higher plane than those engaged in economic pursuits, if not as a separate and more than equal class (for example, Max Weber). Gall goes so far as to speak of a secret mutual contempt between the educated bureaucracy and the grand bourgeoisie. Although he stresses that both groups were united by a common belief (and, one might add, a common humanist language) in autonomy and independence as the necessary qualification for citizenship, an ideal that seemed to unite them across the real chasms between their life-styles, the tensions between their views remain evident.48 The "natural" alliance between property and education is part of the definition of a certain type of liberalism, but not of all types.49 Neither liberalism nor any other political movement could depend on unity of thought and purpose among the representatives of property and education. The family of European liberalisms includes members, among them the aristocratic liberals, for whom the relationship of property and education is complicated and full of difficulties. The tensions between property and education already present in some types of liberalism in 1830-1870 help explain some later nineteenthcentury liberals' growing alienation from their "natural" grand bourgeois supporters. 50 One must thus be wary of simple equations of ideology, that is, liberalism and class interests. This discussion of the varied relationship of liberal ideologies and forms of property brings us to the question of the relationship of liberalism to the middle classes and to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. All too often, as Eley notes, liberalism is regarded "as the natural property of a 'rising' bourgeoisie," the inescapable accompaniment of middle-class ascendancy.5 * Historical discussions of nineteenth-century liberalism are filled with more or less qualified statements that liberalism is a middle-class movement or is representative of the middle class, encompassing intellectuals as well as grand and petty bourgeoisie.52 It is true that most types of liberalism did have an affinity with elements of the middle classes and drew their main support from some sections of that most heterogeneous group. Furthermore, I would argue that all European liberalisms of 1830-1870 presumed the present or future hegemony of the middle class in

Conclusion

149

some form. But not all liberalisms regarded middle-class hegemony as an unmixed blessing, and many distrusted one or another element within the middle classes. Aristocratic liberalism provides a case in point, although its distaste for the middle classes is probably extreme within the liberal movement. At their worst, interpreters of liberalism who assume an easy identification between a simply denned liberalism and a simply denned middle class make claims that John Stuart Mill, for example, was an ardent defender of middle-class hegemony. 53 While no serious investigator of the nineteenth-century middle classes in any European nation would claim that the middle classes were a homogeneous group, many historians nevertheless try to treat liberalism as if it were the expression of a single middle-class point of view.54 In actuality, liberalism was sufficiently detached from any given element of the middle classes that there were liberals without sympathy for the traditional petty bourgeoisie and also liberals, like the aristocratic liberals, who could condemn the decline of independent artisans and peasants and the rise of modern industrialism. There were many different liberalisms reflecting the many different and sometimes opposing groupings within the middle classes.55 This relatively free-floating trait of liberal thought and politics was a source of both vitality and weakness in the liberal movement, reminiscent of the opportunities and difficulties created for liberals by their need and ability to form coalitions. On the one hand, liberals could point to their relative independence from any particular social group as a sign that they were the true representatives of the general will, beyond the influence of special interests, since they were not attached to any one interest. They were the only truly rational political choice. On the other hand, liberalism could be, and frequently was, fragmented into a series of splinter parties representing particular special interests within a badly divided middle class. Liberal language could break down into mutually unintelligible or contradictory dialects, or it could gain depth and richness from the variety of social and political situations that it formed and expressed. In the long run, successful versions of liberal integration become more rare. Liberal political parties were characteristically coalitions of broad groups, largely but not exclusively drawn from the middle class. As the different constituencies of these parties became more antagonistic toward one another after 1870, these coalitions became harder and harder to hold together in the face of pressures from left and right, and their base of support became narrower. Thus, even the English Liberal party, which under Gladstone had been the most successful of all European Liberal parties at coalition building, experienced a slow hemorrhage of upper-working-class support to Labor and of Manchester manufacturers to the Tories/ 6 Partly as a result, after 1870

150

Aristocratic Liberalism

European liberal political theory gradually tended toward some kind of limited social democracy on the one hand (Solidarism in France, the New Liberalism in England, Naumann in Germany), or something hardly distinguishable from conservatism on the other, losing much of the fluid quality it had had in the period 1830-1870. As liberal groups lost out to their former coalition partners outside the liberal camp, so, in a directly related process, did they find their own supporters deserting them. What remained tended to be a rump organization dominated by special interests, without the rich diversity and broad appeal of the earlier formation. Liberalism as an organized political entity in Europe headed toward its twentieth-century irrelevance. Its previous rich and multivocal discourses dissipated, narrowed, or defected. The complicated relationship between mid-nineteenth-century liberalism and the middle classes is often complicated still further by the idea of middle-class hegemony in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet in the period 1830-1870 there was no country in which the middle classes were politically dominant most of the time. Furthermore, rather than appealing to the lower classes for support, as is the usual picture of the triumphant middle class in France and England, the middle classes in all countries were generally much more comfortable in an arrangement with the aristocracy and/or the absolutist state. The "feudalization" of the middle classes was not a phenomenon restricted to Germany. 57 The tendency to compromise was encouraged by the preference of the middle classes in England, France, and Germany to ally themselves with the aristocracy or with the executive power of the state, which were the strongest available partners. Once again, England may be urged as an exception to this generalization, given the examples of the Reform Act of 1832 and the Corn Law repeal of 1845. But even in England the middle classes preferred to ally themselves with the upper classes rather than the lower.58 The process of middle-class coalition with the aristocracy was facilitated by the English aristocracy's unique willingness to enter into such coalitions.59 In addition, fear of the lower classes arose very early in England and elsewhere, a fear far out of proportion to any real threat the mid-nineteenth-century proletariat really posed, at least when viewed in hindsight. This tended to limit the willingness of the middle classes to form coalitions downward, even in England.60 Given that most liberal political coalitions were with the upper rather than the lower segments of society, it is not surprising that most liberal political theorists tended to align their theories the same way. The aristocratic liberals were an extreme example. Nonetheless, willingness on the part of the English middle classes to ally with the lower classes when occasion offered was important to the relative success of English liberalism in politics. Liberalism was a multivalent political

Conclusion

151

movement, capable of attracting support from, and uniting with, many different social groups under the right conditions. All political liberalism was based on broad social coalitions, and the broader the potential for coalition (and the fewer cleavages within the middle class), the greater and more permanent the success of political liberalism. English liberalism, the most successful of European liberalisms, was certainly the most successful at forming such broad coalitions.61 Interestingly enough, England was also the country in which aristocratic liberalism, with its concern for constructing a broad social base for liberty, was strongest. What one would expect of middle-class groups, at least outside England, is what one in fact finds in many liberalisms—a political theory that often has more affinity with aristocratic values or a strong executive branch of government and less inclination to broadening suffrage and other attitudes likely to attract lower-class support. This situation varied, however, according to circumstances and the nature of the prospective coalition partner. When liberals as a group felt strongest, and least under pressure from their own internal divergences, middle-class liberals could claim to represent the "general class" which would eventually subsume all others. This is one reason why liberalisms were particularly hostile to theories of class war, even though some of them possessed a very clear class consciousness, which served to alienate potential coalition partners from the liberals.62 The argument that the middle classes and middle-class liberalism were a relatively weak force has aroused the strongest debate in English history. England represents the traditional archetype of the middle-class state. Taking note of the vitriolic debate between Perry Anderson and E. P. Thompson over whether the middle classes were really generally weak, T. W. Heyck's excellent work on Victorian England nevertheless refers to the 1850s and 1860s as the period of "the moral and material hegemony of the middle class."63 If there was a middle-class moral hegemony, there is also considerable evidence that it was strongly challenged. And politically there was no such thing. True, the English suffrage between 1832 and 1884-85 was such that the majority of electors were middle class. But the electoral districts were drawn in such a way as to diminish greatly the effects of this suffrage, and political life was so structured that, as John Vincent's standard history of the British Liberal party declares, "there was in no sense in the mid-nineteenth century, a real middleclass alternative to aristocratic government, as is occasionally supposed.64 At the same time, the nineteenth century also saw a continuing process of gentrification of part of the middle classes in England, France, and Germany. This, as well as the previous discussion, argues against the third common misconception about liberalism, that liberalism was the "party of movement," fundamentally opposed to the status quo. The process of gentrification went

152

Aristocratic Liberalism

on concurrently with the spread of such middle-class values as efficiency, hard work, and success. Yet Samuel Smiles, author of the gospel of self-help and apostle of the entrepreneurial inventor, could co-exist with a bourgeoisie whose members were enamored of purchasing country estates and participating in the local hunt. Elements of movement and satisfaction with the status quo co-exist within liberal parties (which is no surprise) and the liberal tradition without either being an unauthentic representative of liberalism; the example of the co-existence of democratic and elitist tendencies within humanist language provides an analogous example. Further distancing liberalism from any claim that it is the party of movement is the liberal attitude toward state efforts to improve the lot of the lower classes. On this subject, liberals in the period 1830-1870 are often far more "conservative" than the conservatives: "It is evident here as well how wrong the in many ways still popular system is, which absolutely and once and for all characterizes liberalism as the party of movement, of modernization, and of progress."65 All too often, however, liberalism is equated with the party of movement, and when it fails to act as one, or to go far enough in its actions, the movement as a whole or individual liberals are characterized as betraying their principles.66 This attitude has been noticeable particularly among historians of nineteenth-century Germany, who frequently accuse one group or another of liberals of selling out, without taking into adequate account that the price paid may have largely satisfied the demands of a given kind of liberal. But this kind of misconception is not restricted to Germany. Many commentators have shared this tendency to impose anachronistic twentiethcentury democratic standards on nineteenth-century liberals.67 All this is not to relegate liberalism, even as a representative of the middle class, to an eternal second-place finish, [n no country did the middle classes maintain a political position that matched their economic importance.68 Economic hegemony and even a questionable moral hegemony did not lead, at least not immediately, to political hegemony. Lacking political hegemony on its own, and with its moral and intellectual dominance challenged by anti-industrial elements within and without its own ranks, the liberal middle classes had to make compromises in achieving their goals. But the middle classes, or at least sections of them, did not necessarily have to give up too much, politically speaking, in these arrangements. This is not to argue that politically the middle classes and the liberal movement gained more than is usually assumed from the Reform Act of 1867, the Second Empire, or the Prussian Constitution of 1850. I mean rather that liberal goals were often attained much sooner in the course of European political development than is frequently asserted, and that therefore increasing numbers of liberals could be increasingly satisfied with the status quo. Many types of liberalism had very

Conclusion

153

limited political demands, at least when judged from a democratic perspective. In this the aristocratic liberals are, I think, less on the margins of the liberal movement than may at first appear. Nevertheless, if the foregoing analysis is correct, one arrives at a situation in which liberal political language, liberal politics, is dominant, without the liberals themselves necessarily being the leading, and more rarely still the unique, party in power. But liberal victory in coalition with others did not always require a defeat for the liberals' partners. Politics, language, discourse are not always zero-sum games, in which one side's victory means the other side's defeat. Some arguments have clear winners and losers, while in other discussions, all sides gain, even if not equally. We perceive the mid-nineteenth century as the liberal era not because there were none but liberals in power, none but liberal languages of politics spoken, but rather because some kinds of liberalism (and some part of the middle class) were almost always part of the ruling coalition. And often enough, in those areas of most concern to the liberal minimum program and in relation to the problems of the two despotisms and the war on two fronts, liberalism was fully satisfied in its aims. For most liberals, within the meaning of that term given here, the period 1830-1870 was unquestionably one of great success. This conclusion largely depends on the appropriateness of identifying 1830-1870 as a distinct period. All the statements made here about liberalism in general, and aristocratic liberalism in particular, are meant to apply only to this time period. The boundary is somewhat arbitrary, and a comprehensive defence of 1830-1870 as a distinctive period in European history is a task beyond the scope of this work. Nevertheless, some justification is both necessary and possible. It is not difficult to see why the aristocratic liberals discussed as examples themselves are best understood within this period. Mill abandoned Benthamism around 1829 and died in 1873. The first volume of Democracy in America was published in 1835, and although Tocqueville died in 1859, his commentary on the Second Empire and the society that gave it birth is perceptive enough to justify situating him among thinkers who lived until 1870. Burckhardt is a little more problematic. But by 1870 he had ceased publication, and if he had always felt himself to be in the minority, he was increasingly so, in relation both to Basel and to Europe in general, as time went on. But it is certainly also appropriate to designate this period as a distinct era in thought, discourse, and politics for both Europe and European liberalism. It corresponds to the era Walter Houghton labels Victorian in his study of the intellectual climate of England, and, like his division, my choice of what constitutes an era militates against the traditional importance of 1848 for the Continent or 1850 for England as a turning point. 69 I agree with Houghton

154

Aristocratic Liberalism

and Rosenberg in arguing (against Raymond Williams and others) that 1830 is a watershed, and that it is an error to regard 1790-1870 as one era in the development of liberalism.70 Before 1830, European thought is still enveloped in the direct aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution, and liberalism has not gone very far in differentiating itself, however hazily, into its component types. Before 1830 even the French Doctrinaires have not made clear what their doctrine would amount to. Above all, before 1830 it is not clear that the French Revolution is not over, either in France or anywhere else. After 1830 there is a qualitative change in European politics, society, and language. Liberalism, with its characteristic problems and practices, assumes center stage for the first time. By contrast, the events of 1848 act as an accelerator and confirmation of previously existing possibilities and trends, but they do not in themselves constitute a radical transformation. 71 The period 1870-71 is much better suited for the role of watershed date in European thought and politics. By 1871 the German Empire had been created and universal suffrage given its first trial there, the Paris Commune had marked the emergence to prominence of a new kind of revolutionary ideology, the English Reform Act of 1867 had opened the door to the creation of mass political parties, and a new era of economic development (and shortly depression) and competition had begun. This is not to say that every particular characteristic of European thought in the period 1830-1870 comes to an abrupt end after that period; many do not. But they survive in altered importance and drastically altered context. As Houghton puts it, a "new frame of mind" emerges.72 After 1870 everything is only too clear, and the fluidity of the previous period, in which liberalisms flourished, is largely lost: organized labor confronts concentrated capital; mass politics has begun to make the traditional liberal politics of notables obsolete; economic development has shattered that precarious alliance known as the middle class into mutually antagonistic interest groups; the state has become much more centralized and influential. Its role in this regard usurped by socialism, liberalism has forever lost whatever pretensions it may once have had (this too is problematic) as the leading party of movement and as the logical alternative to the status quo. After 1870 relativism and doubt become much more prominent, and cultural unity is considered a much less plausible and sometimes even less desirable state than previously. Intellectual specialization becomes a necessity, and men of letters become intellectuals, in Heyck's description.73 Liberalism continues to exist, but in an altered form and with different orientations necessitated by the transformation in European conditions. After 1870 the "New Liberalism," as described in England by Freeden, in France by Logue, and by the many studies of Naumann, Brentano, and Max Weber in Germany, comes into being. 74 New

Conclusion

155

kinds of political language that better relate to new situations flourish alongside old rhetorics and often supplant them. The old episteme of liberalism is shattered as entirely new vocabularies and practices emerge in the new situation of Europe. Where the old liberalism seems to survive most strongly, as in imperial Germany, its relation to other kinds of political discourse is altered in ways beyond the scope of the present discussion to explore. By the 1880s liberalism has profondly changed to meet a fundamentally different European situation. Indeed, some might prefer to use 1880 as a terminal date for one era of liberalism and for one kind of liberal hegemony, for 1880 would see us safely past the period of liberalism's greatest strength in imperial Germany and well into its terminal decline in the French Third Republic. I would not wish to argue the case very strongly either way, and indeed both periods could be combined to describe the decade of the 1870s as one of transition, as it so clearly was in French and German history.

Aristocratic Liberalism in Context Liberalism in the period 1830-1870, then, is separated from democracy and socialism on the one hand and conservatism on the other by its rejection of (immediate) universal suffrage and by its insistence on a minimum program that includes a government responsible to public opinion, among other things. 75 It is characterized by a desire to alter radically the existing state of things but to attain its revolutionary ends only by reformist means. It finds itself in a constant struggle on several fronts, against the threats to its program it perceives from above and below. Rather than being the constant ally of an ascendant and unitary middle class, the emblem of a natural alliance of property and education, liberal discourses are fluid in their intellectual and social appeal, and as fragmented as the middle class, segments of which it often did represent. As such, liberalism was more often the junior than the senior partner in political coalitions. Nevertheless, since most form of liberalism in most circumstances could not by nature constitute an unadulterated party of movement, they satisfied more of their minimum program in coalition with the state and with conservatism than is often realized. Aristocratic liberalism as described in this work certainly fits the positive criteria established here for the boundaries of liberalism. But the question remains as to how aristocratic liberalism relates to the liberal movement as a whole. Aristocratic liberalism was never central enough to be an important part of any practical political coalition, never the dominant language within a governing or even an opposition liberalism. Although it may be heretical to

156

Aristocratic Liberalism

perceive such canonical figures as Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville as essentially marginal, that is how they appear both in relation to the more common liberal dialects of their time and in their own self-perceptions. All the aristocratic liberals discussed in this work produced books that were widely read.76 But the success the aristocratic liberals enjoyed was a succes d'estime more than anything else; their books received excellent reviews, and sometimes even sold well, but their practical effects in their own time were close to nil. Mill gave up his hopes of forming an alternative political party, Tocqueville was always an outsider in French politics, and Burckhardt withdrew from his nascent political career almost before he began it. Even in the world of ideas, which acclaimed Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Mill's Political Economy, Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, to name only a few aristocratic liberal masterpieces, the majority admired the author, took into general circulation the ideas and conclusions that disturbed it least, and ignored the rest. It might be suggested, however, that aristocratic liberalism was both widespread and centrally important within English liberalism. Politicians as diverse as George Cornewall Lewis (a frequent correspondent of Tocqueville's), Robert Lowe, and even Gladstone might be claimed as aristocratic liberals, or close enough. Mill, after all, was a great admirer of Gladstone. Outside the patently liberal camp it was Sir Robert Peel who first popularized Democracy in America among the English political elite.77 More obvious aristocratic liberals such as Walter Bagehot or Lord Acton were also prominent figures on the English scene. Aristocratic liberalism commanded an audience throughout Europe; in England it had a political impact. And yet, even if the situation of aristocratic liberalism in England was more favorable than elsewhere, that did not prevent Mill from feeling isolated, nor did it save his fellow aristocratic liberal Bagehot from being the only reviewer of On Liberty not to ignore or disparage Mill's insistence that diversity was disappearing. But if one can easily make a case that aristocratic liberalism was more influential in England than elsewhere, it would be much harder to claim that it was a dominant force within English liberalism; it was much too far from Nonconformism for that (although perhaps not so distant from Evangelical Anglicanism). In any event, aristocratic liberalism was chosen as the subject of this study not because of any putative political centrality but rather because its marginality serves to shed light on how far from certain established ideas of liberalism many equally well established liberal figures could be. It demonstrates the multivocality and richness contained within the broad assemblage of liberal discourse. At the same time aristocratic liberalism displays certain features highly typical of liberal thought, particularly liberal elitism, in an unusually forceful and striking manner.

Conclusion

157

The most satisfactory way of describing the relationship of aristocratic liberalism, marginal or otherwise, to other forms of liberalism would be to point at a list of other liberals and other liberal languages and to note the differences and similarities. Without a previously established typology, however, it is impossible to slide aristocratic liberalism in neatly among pre-established types to left and right. Without a clear understanding of the different discourses of liberalism and the relations among them, it is impossiale to estimate the place of aristocratic liberalism within the modern humanist dialect of liberalism and the role of that language within liberal thought as a whole. But whatever issues may be chosen as the basis for differentiating various types of liberalism, the aristocratic liberals will usually be found toward the conservative edge, although their antagonism toward the state reminds one of the affinities between certain strands of humanist-liberal and anarchist-libertarian thought. They are among the liberals least friendly to the state, most pessimistic about ending the class struggle and avoiding despotism, most inclined to emphasize diversity (within a liberal movement that was not usually friendly to pluralism and difference), most opposed to the commercial spirit, and least attracted to the middle class. Their distaste for the middle classes and the masses and their humanist values make them distinctively aristocratic. Nevertheless, certain characteristics of aristocratic liberalism beyond those necessary to meet the basic criteria for liberals are fairly typical of most liberalisms. The aristocratic liberals' elitism was a trait widely shared by liberals, no matter how differently they might construct their elites. Whatever the precise nature of the mid-nineteenth-century middle class, it was always a relatively small minority of the population, and very conscious of the fact. It was an elite that the many could not attain. Liberal discourse, while preserving its democratic potential, tended to adhere to this elitist reality. In the case of the aristocratic liberals, this is expressed in the lesser stress placed, in practice but also in theory, on the more democratic potentials inherent in their modern humanist language. Humanist language itself was fairly widespread within liberalism, not to mention outside of it. Rarely in as pure a form as with the aristocratic liberals, humanist notions of autonomy are often to be found alongside more Hobbesian versions. Indeed, it is in the blending of positive and negative ideals of freedom that modern humanism is at its most creative and most liberating. Although the precise blend found in aristocratic liberal thought is not very common, the mixture itself is typical. Some form of it can be found in thinkers as diverse as George Eliot, Benjamin Constant, and Gustav von Mevissen. In most things, however, Burckhardt, Tocqueville, and Mill do tend toward the extreme—yet another way in which they are on the margin. This says nothing, however, about the relative importance of aristocratic liberalism. It

158

Aristocratic Liberalism

is possible that the extreme position within a group can also be the dominant one, but the aristocratic liberals always felt themselves—correctly—to be a minority, both within the liberal movement and within society at large. Aristocratic liberalism was not the dominant force in European liberalism, or within English, French, or German liberalism. What influence it had within liberalism declined over the period 1830-1870, and tended both then and thereafter to be exercised as much outside the liberal camp as within it. This was a side effect, in part, of the broad appeal of humanist language in nineteenth-century European thought, especially among intellectuals, and perhaps especially in England, where aristocratic liberalism was relatively strongest. Unlike most other liberal groups, the aristocratic liberals could never feel that the spirit of the age was on their side. They felt themselves isolated not merely politically but intellectually (as their comments about the disappearance of the "public" indicate), despite the fact that, at least in Mill's case, their contemporaries considered their influence important.78 Aristocratic liberalism was condemned to the sidelines because it refused to link its particular elitism to any of the elite or aspiring elite groups that might have given it power, refused to make any the bearer of its values. In its own terms, it could never find the necessary social basis for liberty. Aristocratic liberalism could not easily make the transition from the era of notable politics in the period 1830-1870 to the mass politics thereafter. Many kinds of liberal discourse were unable to integrate the new vocabulary of politics into their old grammar; for aristocratic liberalism it was particularly difficult. Despite the modernity of its humanism, it was never able to reconcile humanism fully with modernity. Such a reconciliation was ultimately possible only with the abandonment of elitism (as, for example, in Marx). But aristocratic liberalism never came to terms with the masses, never found a way satisfactory to itself of integrating the lower classes into its value system. For all its emphasis on education, aristocratic liberalism did not really see education as a broadly effective means of mobility, a way to transform the European masses into complete individuals in the aristocratic liberal sense.79 Mill is a partial exception, yet even he regarded co-operative socialism as, at best, a hopeful experiment, and not an experiment that was immediately applicable to the whole or even the majority of the lower classes. Yet if aristocratic liberalism seems clearly to represent an elitist viewpoint, what elite did it represent? Historians have long given up the "vulgar Marxist" game of attempting to establish one-to-one correspondences between ideas and particular social classes whose economic interests they serve. Nevertheless, no one (least of all Burckhardt, Mill, or Tocqueville) would deny that ideas are born, exist, and die in specific historical circumstances, nor that there sometimes exist affinities between particular ways of thinking, particular discourses, and

Conclusion

159

particular social groups. If political language itself constitutes and defines those social groups, it does not do so in a vacuum; no language of which we can have historical knowledge was ever invented in the absence of all other languages. Thus it makes sense, for example, to recall previous humanisms in any discussion of the modern humanism of the aristocratic liberals. It is equally necessary to bear in mind, as the aristocratic liberals did, the particular conditions of the world in which they lived. No new language of politics was ever invented in the absence of a previously existing politics. Only God can create ex nihilo. For all the enormously creative powers of political discourse, they must be spoken by particular and limited speakers in a particular and limited space. And yet from many points of view, aristocratic liberalism seems to exist in a social vacuum. It can hardly be seen as the representative of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, for which it expressed so much distaste. And while some might be tempted to see in it a longing for the past, for the old aristocracy, its values were not those of the Old Regime, whose return or revival was never one of its goals. Every political choice made by Mill and Tocqueville was in direct opposition to the contemporary representatives of the Old Regime, nor did Burckhardt ever express any allegiance to the corporatist Romantic conservatism that flourished in the Germany of his youth. Without going into detail about their social milieus, we can recognize that Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville came from very different social and economic backgrounds. Burckhardt was the son of a Protestant pastor, without considerable family wealth. He had to work for a living, which of course he did as a professor. Mill's father, James Mill, was also from a Protestant clerical background of modest means, but he spent his professional career in the East India Company. He prospered, and although John Stuart Mill also spent time as a bureaucrat in the service of the East India Company, he possessed a modest independent income. Tocqueville, by contrast, came from one of the oldest noble families in Normandy, was raised a Catholic, and never seriously had to contemplate earning his own living. Can three such different figures from three very different countries (not to mention all the other aristocratic liberals not covered by this work) be given a common social and cultural context to any significant extent? How, indeed, can a context be made to fit a discourse that in so many ways is out of sympathy with its surroundings? How could the aristocratic liberals' books sell so well, find such resonance often at points on the political spectrum far removed from their own, at the same time that the authors themselves felt so intellectually isolated and misunderstood? These are broad questions. What follows are a few tentative suggestions as to how, in this case, the complicated relationship between ideas and social contexts might be approached. The applications Pierre Bourdieu has made of the concept of bohemia are

160

Aristocratic Liberalism

highly suggestive in this regard, as are some of Karl Mannheim's ideas about the "socially unattached intelligentsia."80 Both ideas, despite some significant differences between them, can be combined to provide an interesting context in which to understand aristocratic liberalism and its appeal or lack thereof. Bourdieu's analysis of bohemia and Mannheim's of the socially unattached intelligentsia are both centered on the mid-nineteenth century. Then unattached intellectuals making a precarious living with pen or brush began to form a new element in the European social and cultural context, new in its size, its independence and its ambivalent marginality.81 Marginal because the bohemians lived outside the established centers of power, and ambivalent because, as Balzac noted, it was from bohemia that many "diplomats... writers, administrators, soldiers, journalists, artists! In fact all kinds of ability, of talent," came to be integrated into society.82 This bohemia was both deliberately distant from middle-class society and attracted to it, "simultaneously within ordinary society and outside it."83 Recruited from both the upper and the lower reaches of the social-political-cultural hierarchy, it displayed all the contradictions one might expect from such a mixture. 84 If sometimes poor in wealth (Bourdieu and Mannheim recognize the heterogeneous social origins of their subjects), bohemia was always rich in the intellectual and cultural capital heretofore generally found only in close association with wealth and power. In many ways bohemia's attitudes were closer to those of the aristocracy or upper middle class than those of the people or petite bourgeoisie. In Bourdieu's terms bohemia represented the "dominated fraction of the dominant social group. This contradictory position destined them to a sort of objective, and therefore subjective indeterminacy. .. ,"85 In practice, bohemians tended to fire broadsides on all quarters as they appealed for approval to a society that seemingly had rejected them and that they too rejected: "The relationships that these writers and artists maintained with the market no doubt contributed to their ambivalent representation of the 'general public,' at once fascinating and despised, in which they mixed up the 'bourgeois' enslaved to the vulgar cares of commerce and the 'people' stultified by labor."86 Status within bohemia was established by one's claim to independence from the estabilished powers, and at the same time, according to Bourdieu, bohemians tended more or less to pay court subtly to the rising political tendency, whatever it was. 87 For Mannheim this was indeed a general characteristic of the socially unattached intelligentsia, whose precarious position, especially in Germany, encouraged it to seek shelter in the service of power.88 Bourdieu, however, better captures the ambivalence always present in the relationship of the bohemian intellectual to the establishment. In many respects the aristocratic liberals seem to belong to this bohemia or socially unattached intelligentsia. They, too, were a dominated fraction within

Conclusion

161

the larger and dominant discursive world of liberalism. They, too, forcefully rejected both middle classes and proletariat, not without some ambivalence, albeit more toward the middle classes than the people, with the exception of Mill.89 They explicitly valued independence and individuality both in their own careers and in their more general understanding of the human telos. Mill's On Liberty, especially, seems to embody the rejection of enforced social conventions and emphasis on independence characteristic of the bohemian.90 Mannheim's argument that unattached intellectuals were "born philosophers of history" determined to understand the "specific marks of their age" seems as if written with Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville in mind, and would apply equally to the concern for "modernity" shown by many members of the avant-garde.91 Possessing vast reserves of cultural capital, the aristocratic liberals were unable to find a social or political establishment in which to bank it, and were thus condemned to marginality willy-nilly. If they were unattached, it was not entirely by their own choice. In many ways they would have liked to be what Mannheim sometimes thought they were: the allies of a class who nevertheless preserved their ability to see more than just the material interests of one class. In their continued independence, however, the aristocratic liberals seem a kind of super-bohemian, free of more ordinary bohemians' tendency to go along with the intellectual and political fashions of the moment. Like a certain section of Bourdieu's bohemians—those who had both economic and cultural capital and thus hovered between careers in art and business, like Frederic in Flaubert's Sentimental Education—Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville hovered for a time between conventional politics on the one hand and education, sometimes carried out by political means, on the other. The aristocratic liberals in this respect are closer to Bourdieu's bohemians than to Mannheim's intellectuals. An important difference, for our purposes, between Bourdieu and Mannheim is that for Mannheim the intelligentsia possesses special political virtues absent from Bourdieu's vision of bohemia. Sometimes Mannheim ascribes to the intelligentsia a mediating function in society. The intelligentsia is incapable of producing its own vision of ultimate ends outside of those of other classes.92 But individual intellectuals, although forced to attach themselves to the worldview of a particular class, nevertheless perform a vital function of political mediation because of their broad common education and ability to see other points of view.93 They can transform "the conflict of interests into a conflict of ideas."94 Without the intelligentsia, "it might easily happen that all spiritual content would disappear from our increasingly capitalistic society and leave nothing but naked interests" (here the mandarin Mannheim sounds rather like Burckhardt himself).95 If aristocratic liberalism is a representative of a socially unattached intelligentsia, its self-understanding would seem to be partly in contradiction with this aspect of Mannheim's view. The aristocratic

162

Aristocratic Liberalism

liberals seem perfectly capable of independence from any particular social class. But the later Mannheim of Ideology and Utopia saw the intelligentsia as the "advocates of the intellectual interests of the whole" of society, and thus came closer to something the aristocratic liberals might have said of themselves.96 But they sharply differentiate themselves from Bourdieu's bohemians in other respects. If they shared Flaubert's distaste for "the bourgeois in overalls and the bourgeois in the frock coat," they did not, could not, share his political neutrality. They could never participate in creating "art for art's sake"; the presentism, the political involvement implicit in all their writings rejected this characteristically bohemian option. It is difficult to reconcile their political commitment with the purely aesthetic viewpoint often adopted by Bourdieu's bohemia, though not necessarily by Mannheim's socially unattached intellectuals. Yet there is surely an element of aesthetic repulsion in aristocratic liberalism's distaste for what the commercial spirit and class struggle did to the human beings involved in them, as in humanist teleology generally. The aristocratic liberals also did not share bohemia's desire for independence from any social base. Their concern to find a social basis for liberty worked in the opposite direction, however unsuccessfully. Flaubert and Baudelaire may have been more accurate than the aristocratic liberals in their appreciation of the hopelessness of the task, but it was a characteristic aristocratic liberal project nonetheless. If Flaubert might glory in his incomprehensibility to the dull commercial bourgeoisie, the aristocratic liberals could only lament theirs.97 The difference is summed up by that between Madame Bovary and On Liberty: Flaubert wished to write well about mediocrity, Mill to teach a nation of mediocrities the meaning of individuality. In their desire to find a social class or classes to which they could attach their hopes, the aristocratic liberals were far closer to the traditional role of Mannheim's unattached intellectual, a moral guide to the society of which he was a part, than was bohemia in its ambivalent alienation. The aristocratic liberals were in this sense very much a part of what Bourdieu calls "bourgeois art," in the long tradition of humanist rhetoric and middle-class moralism and self-criticism. This may help explain why so many of bohemia's productions, for example Madame Bovary, fell under the disapprobation of the contemporary establishment, whereas the aristocratic liberals, for all their harsh words, received rave reviews. Still, they do not really fit either Bourdieu's notion of "bourgeois art"—critical but fundamentally affirmative—or his bohemia, for they are simultaneously too critical and too much a part of what was, after all, the leading language of politics in nineteenth-century Europe: liberalism. The bohemians—Flaubert and Baudelaire, to use Bourdieu's favorite examples—are not aristocratic liberals. They do not share crucial aspects of

Conclusion

163

aristocratic liberalism's moral-teleological vision. But the aristocratic liberals do share much with bohemia, as described by Bourdieu. They are unattached intellectuals, more detached, more conscious of their detachment, more pessimistic about their possible role in modern society than Mannheim would have had them. As always, they are on the margin, even with regard to the homeland of the marginal—bohemia. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's ambivalence about modern society pushed them toward the bohemian position, at the same time that their intimate involvement with the bourgeois world connected them to the fate of that world more closely than any true bohemian could ever accept. This is the cultural context in which their uniquely central marginality existed. The parallel between aristocratic liberalism and the bohemia of the midnineteenth-century is doubly interesting because of the analogies that can be drawn between aristocratic liberalism and some of the ideas floating around among the unattached intellectuals of the fin-de-siecle. Late-blooming aristocratic liberals, and others influenced by modern or pre-modern humanism, by Aristotelian views of the individual, tended to become increasingly alienated from modern society after 1870.98 The results of this alienation varied from the withdrawal and abandonment of society portrayed in HofTmansthal's Lord Chandos' Letter to the attempt to recreate humanist values by force— Nietzsche's Superman. A third option may be found on Max Weber, for whom the rational society of Aristotle has been replaced by the stifling rationality of bureaucracy, which thus require a Nietzschean charisma to be restored to full humanity. Regardless of what remedy, if any, the fin-de-siecle intellectuals proposed, they attacked the debasement of taste, of art, of politics on the grounds of their incomplete, inhuman, corrupted vision of humanity. Isolated, usually unable or unwilling to engage themselves politically, artistic and philosophical rebels against convention, fin-de-siecle intellectuals often rejected conventional language and art forms as well. The difficulty the aristocratic liberals increasingly complained of as time went on, the disappearance of the public, became an impossibility, an absolute barrier to communication for many fin-de-siecle thinkers who made their alienation their distinctive stamp." Many writers and artists of the Romantic period foreshadowed this development, but in the realm of social and political thought, the aristocratic liberals are some of its most prominent representatives. If 1830-1870 is the summertime of liberalism and the Indian summer of humanism, aristocratic liberalism foreshadows the common fall. The course of history in the later nineteenth century was not what the aristocratic liberals would have wished. But if all aristocratic liberal discourse achieved was a

164

Aristocratic Liberalism

succes d'estime, in a sense that was all it was aiming for, all that its methods and inhibitions permitted it to seek. Today the aristocratic liberals continue to enjoy a succes d'estime, a phenomenon that makes one wonder whether they have not succeeded in at least some of their educational goals after all, or at least whether virtue and the commercial spirit cannot co-exist at different levels of society for a much longer period than they thought possible. The present's continued interest in the aristocratic liberals discussed here in the kind of political language they spoke is a sign that their values have proved more durable than they would have thought possible in a world largely dominated by the commercial spirit. The post-World War I and even more the post-World War II period has seen a tremendous increase in interest, both academic and non-academic, in the ideas of aristocratic liberalism. Burckhardt. Mill, and Tocqueville are never out-of-print. This is partly due to their apparent foresight; their more or less pessimistic prophecies are acclaimed by those who think they have been fulfilled by the horrors of Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany, or that they will be fulfilled by the America of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. It also stems from the pre-capitalist roots of much of modern humanist discourse, which have enabled it to survive and even benefit from, the various assaults sustained by laissez-faire capitalism.100 But, in relation to the present as well as to the past, the interpreters of the aristocratic liberals are all too often ready to ignore the issues and circumstances that Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville thought were crucial. Instead of asking the three what their questions were, we ask them our own questions, and as a result get an answer that is distorted or misunderstood.101 One of the purposes of this study has been to reconstruct these thinkers' own chief concerns, to present their own understanding of the society in which they lived and thus to reproduce their discourse's characteristic grammer rather than imposing our grammer on their vocabulary. Their understanding of the nature of their contemporary society and its history was vital to their perspective, and it is something too often left aside in modern appropriations of their ideas. What modern philosophical study of On Liberty, concerned with drawing from it lessons valid for the twentieth century, begins with a historical and social analysis of the nature of present-day society? Yet Mill considered his work to be intimately bound up with particular real-world conditions—conditions of a kind that are almost always left out of account in modern commentaries that seek to apply his ideas to the present. Both today, insofar as it may still exist, and in the nineteenth century, aristocratic liberalism is a marginal movement. Yet precisely because the aristocratic liberals were a small, brillant, and perhaps ineffective minority on the edge of the liberal movement, examining them illuminates the boundary lines of liberalism with special clarity, helps us to determine some of liberalism's

Conclusion

165

general characteristics, and sheds light on the key issues confronting liberal thought in their era. At the same time, understanding Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's sometimes problematic ideas in the context of aristocratic liberalism helps to shed light on those ideas, and understanding their participation in the tradition of humanist discourse helps us to understand something more of the history of European political thought.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes Introduction 1. Hans Rosenberg, "Theologischer Rationalismus und vormarzlicher Vulgarliberalismus," in Politische Denkstromungen in deutschen Vormarz, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft no. 3 (Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Rupprecht, 1972), pp. 18-50, a reprint from Historische Zeitschrift 141 (1930): 497-541. Some exceptions to this neglect are the works of James J. Sheehan, Vincent E. Starzinger, and John Vincent. For more detailed evaluation of recent historical work on liberalism, see chapter 6. 2. Rosenberg, "Theologischer Rationalismus," pp. 18-50. 3. Ibid., p. 27. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., pp. 27-29. 6. To those familiar with the historiography of French liberalism, it should be stressed that the term aristocratic liberalism, as used here, has nothing to do with Louis Althusser's description of Montesquieu. Nor does it conform to the occasional usage of "le liberalisme aristocratique" to describe vaguely a succession of liberal thinkers including Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville. See William Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870-1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 5. Although interesting comparisons of Tocqueville and Montesquieu have been made, the differences between them are at least as important as the similarities. See Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux democraties (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1983), pp. 310, 312; Raymond Aron, Les etapes de la pensee sociologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp.227, 631, 634. 7. Michael Neumuller, Liberalismus und Revolution: Das Problem der Revolution in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Diisseldorf: Padagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1973), p. 92. Since the lectures by Droysen that Burckhardt heard were on ancient history, it is more likely that he read about the continuity thesis. 8. The arguments of those who stress Tocqueville's influence are summarized in H. O. Pappe, "Mill and Tocqueville," Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964): 217-18, 230-34; See also Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 12-14; Joseph Hamburger, "Mill and Tocqueville on Liberty," in John M. Robson and Michael Laine, eds., James and John Stuart Mill: Papers of the Centenary Conference (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 119-24. 9. This will become apparent in the discussion of Mill in chapters 2 and 3. 10. Werner Kaegi, Burckhardt: Eine Biographic, 8 vols. (Basel: Benno Schwabc and Co., 1947-1985). For a briefer introduction to Burckhardt's thought, see Karl 167

168

Notes to Pages 7-8

Weintraub, Visions of Culture: Voltaire, Guizot, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 11. Johannes Wenzel, Jacob Burckhardt in der Krise seiner Zeit (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1967); Valentin Gitermann, Jacob Burckhardt als politischer Denker, Institut fur europaische Geschichte Mainz no. 19 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1957); Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). 12. See Wolfgang Mommsen's essay on Burckhardt in Rediscoveries: Some Neglected Modern European Political Thinkers, cd. John A. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), and Jorn Riisen's essay in Historische Prozesse, ed. Karl-Georg Faber and Christian Meier (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978). 13. Friedrich Meinecke, Ranke und Burckhardt, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Lectures and Essays, vol. 27 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1948), p. 5. 14. Neumiiller, Liberalismus und Revolution, points this out in relation to Bavarian historiography. 15. Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), pp. 84-85. 16. Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy, Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux democraties; La notion d'individualisme chez Tocqueville (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970); Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la democratic (Paris: Julliard, 1982); Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 17. Lively, Social and Political Thought of Tocqueville, pp. 139, 217; Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy, pp.202, 212, 243-44, 269. 18. Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 18-21, 147. 19. For an example of each of these claims, see John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 224; Peter M. Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 160; Graeme Duncan, Marx and Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 221-23, 212; J. B. Schneewind, "Concerning Some Criticisms of Mill's Utilitarianism" in Robson and Laine, James and John Stuart Mill, p. 53. 20. J. H. Burns, "J. S. Mill and Democracy, 1829-61," in Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. J. B. Schneewind (New York: Anchor Books, 1968), pp. 280-328; Edward Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom, also rejects many of these errors, as do other revisionist Mill scholars such as John Gray and C. L. Ten, all of whom, however, underestimate the importance of social structure in Mill's thought. 21. Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press for Wellesley College, 1957), p. xv. 22. I reject those interpretations, presented most forcefully by Gertrude Himmelfarb, which argue that Mill's thinking was subject to drastic changes at the instigation of Harriet Taylor. 1 also disagree with those who argue that after the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqucville's perspective underwent a radical change. This is

Notes to Pages 11-14

169

not to say that aristocratic liberal thought, the thought of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville, stood still, but only that its development held to a relatively steady course without sharp changes of direction. Chapter 1 1. Karl Mannheim, "On Conservative Thought," in From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 135. 2. Mill to Auguste Comte, 6 May 1842, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963-91), 13:518; hereafter cited as CW. 3. Mill to Harriet Taylor, 27 January 1849, CW, 14:6. See also Mill to Tocqueville, 15 December 1856, CM7, 15:518; Jacob Burckhardt, "Vorlesungen fiber die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," (1852) Basel Staatsarchiv, PA 207, 171,7, quarto 17-1. 4. Yet France was still a better example than America of European civilization for a number of reasons. For instance, Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville thought that America was all middle class, whereas Europe suffered from class conflict. Thus Burckhardt believed that America really was different from Europe, but Switzerland was not. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte (1868-1873), ed. Peter Ganz (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1982), p. 136. 5. Jacob Burckhardts Vorlesung ilber die Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters in den Nachschriften seiner Zuhorer, ed. Ernst Ziegler (Basel: Schwabe and Co. Verlag, 1974). Burckhardt left hundreds of pages of lecture notes on the Revolution, but his own opinions are so enmeshed in unattributed quotations and parahrases that determining from the notes what thoughts are his has proved impossible. 6. Mill, Autobiography (1873), CW, 1:135. 7. Mill to Thomas Carlyle, 5 October 1833, CW, 12:181. 8. Mill to Carlyle, 11-12 April 1833, CW, 12:152. 9. Mill to William Johnson Fox, 18 May 1833, CW, 12:157. 10. Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:135. 11. John Coleman, "John Stuart Mill on the French Revolution," History of Political Thought 4 (February 1983): 108. 12. Ibid., p.107. 13. Mill, "The Claims of Labour" (1845), CW, 4:376. 14. Mill, "State of Society in America" (1836), CW, 18:93. 15. The changing nuances of Mill's view of history are demonstrated by the changes he made in his essay "Civilization." The original 1836 version, while recommending the study of history, argued against "the puerile notion that political wisdom can be founded on it." When the essay was republished in 1859 as part of Dissertations and Discussions, he excised this phrase. See Alexander Brady, introduction to CW, 18:lxxvii. 16. Mill, "Carlyle's French Revolution" (1837), CW, 20:162. 17. For Mill's Girondin sentiments, see his Autobiography, CW, 1:67. 18. Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay, 15 December 1850, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, ed. J. P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951-), 13, pt. 2:231; hereafter cited as OC. 19. Ibid., pp. 337-38. On Tocqueville's presentism, see also Furct, Interpreting the French Revolution, pp. 173-74, 195.

170

Notes to Pages 14-18

20. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime et la Revolution (1856), OC, 2, pt. 1:73. 21. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 235. 22. Only Mirabeau, had he lived, might have been able to change the course of the Revolution, and even in his case it is doubtful. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, passim; Mill, "Scott's Life of Napoleon" (1828), CW, 20:57-58; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 392. 23. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 21-1. 24. Ibid., 17-1. 25. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 322. And see ibid., pp. 300-301; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique (1835), OC, 1, pt. 1:2-3, 447. 26. Kaegi, Eine Biographic, 3:674. 27. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, passim. See also Mill, "Carlyle's French Revolution," CW, 20:158-59. 28. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 2-3, 2-4, 19-1; Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 322. See also Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:249. 29. Mill, "Alison's History of the French Revolution" (1833), CW, 20:118. See also Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:90; pt. 2 (1859), p. 245. 30. Mill to Comte, 6 May 1842, CW, 13:518; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 19-1; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:5-8. 31. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 39. 32. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:127. See also Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 9-2, 17-1, 17-2; Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, pt. 2:368. 33. For a few of many references, see Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler, 1957), p. 239; "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 2-3, 2-4. See also Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II] (1840), CW, 18:167; Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:47, 53; De la democractie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:2-3. 34. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:143, pt. 2:87; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 2-1. 35. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 31-2. 36. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique (1840), OC, 1, pt. 2:237. 37. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 32-2. 38. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:105. 39. Lamberti, La notion d'individualisme chez Tocqueville, p. 47. 40. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:159, 93. 41. Ibid., pt. 1:198. 42. Ibid., pt. 1:158. 43. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:109. 44. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 2-3, 2-4. 45. See particularly Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government" (1861), CW, 19:382. 46. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 1, pt. 2:317. 47. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 322, n. 22, n. 24; Historische Fragmente, p. 285. 48. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 45. 49. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:45. 50. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 13-1; Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:33, 37. 51. Burckhardl, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, pp. 150-51.

Notes to Pages 18-22

171

52. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 19-2; Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:201. 53. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:194. 54. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 1-2. 55. Tocqueville to Adolphe de Circourt, 14 June 1852, OC, 18:76; L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:34, 36. 56. Tocqueville to Circourt, 14 June 1852, OC, 18:76; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 2-1, 13-1. 57. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt.2:35. 58. Ibid., pt. 2:33-34. 59. Tocqueville, De la Democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:39-40. 60. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 20-4, 19-front; "Zu Montesquieu," 20-2; Tocqueville to George Cornewall Lewis, 6 October 1856, in Oeuvres completes, ed. G. de Beaumont, 9 vols. (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1866-67), 7:407-9, subsequently cited as OC, Beaumont ed.; L'ancien regime, OC, pt. 1:34, pt. 2:167. 61. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:34; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," E. 62. See chapter 2 on the role of public opinion in the aristocratic liberals' understanding of the nineteenth century. 63. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 1-2. 64. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:165; Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, pp. 285-86. 65. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:126; L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:64, 222. 66. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 468; Historische Fragmente, pp. 266-67. Mill, in "Reorganization of the Reform Party" (1839), CW, 6:482, argues that the disasters of the French Revolution were caused by attempts to go beyond what opinion was prepared for. Burckhardt notes, in "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 27-1, that the ideas of the Enlightenment, joined with constitutionalism, are the origin of modernity. Is it going too far to add that 1789-99 provides the juncture? 67. Burckhardt to Gottfried Kinkel, 13 June 1842, in Briefe, ed. Max Burckhardt, 8 vols. (Basel: Schwabe and Co., 1949-), 1:201. 68. Burckhardt to Hermann Schauenberg, 14 September 1849, Brief e, 3:112; Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 13. 69. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, pp. 162-63. He also argues, in complementary fashion, that centralization thus could not have been complete before 1789 for Tocqueville. 70. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:72, 107; see also my discussion later in this section. 71. Tocqueville to Gustave de Beaumont, 26 December 1850, OC, 8, pt. 2:343; L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:343. The theme of the period roughly 1815-1870 as an age of transition was widespread in contemporary European social and political thought. 72. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:174. 73. Mill, "Centralization" (1862), CW, 19:608. 74. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 29-1. 75. Rudolf Haym,"Ein Wort mil der Neuen Preussischen Zeitung," Preussische Jahrbucher 1 (1858):699. 76. Tocqueville, The Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with

172

Notes to Pages 22-27

Nassau William Senior, ed. M. C. M. Simpson (London, 1872), 2:51; L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:198. 77. Burckhardt to Kinkel, 13 June 1842, Briefs, 1:201. 78. Mill, "Scott's Life of Napoleon," CW, 20:86. 79. Thus it is Tocqueville's analysis that provides the backbone of what is presented herein as the aristocratic liberal understanding of the Revolution itself. This analysis is frequently confirmed by Burckhardt, and occasionally by Mill, but it is in essence Tocqueville's. Beyond the support provided by Burckhardt and Mill, what makes this an aristocratic liberal rather than simply a Tocquevillean analysis is its overriding concern with the portrayal of characteristic aristocratic liberal preoccupations, as this and later chapters will make clear. 80. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:60. 81. Ibid., pt.2:69. 82. Ibid., pt. 2:59-60. 83. Ibid., pt. 2:67. 84. Ibid., pt. 2:76. 85. Ibid., pt. 1:242. 86. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 13. 87. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 1, pt. 1:72. 88. Ibid., pt. 1:247. 89. Ibid., pt. 1:72. 90. Ibid., pt.2:48. 91. Ibid., pt. 2:130-31. 92. Ibid., pt. 2:77. 93. Ibid., pt. 2:133. 94. Ibid., pt. 2:131. 95. Ibid., pt. 2.133. 96. Ibid., pt.2:132. 97. Ibid., pt. 2:132. See also Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 205. 98. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:205. 99. Ibid., pt. 2:133-34. 100. Ibid., pt. 2:216. Tocqueville's discussion of the stage of liberty within the French Revolution militates against Richard Herr's interpretation, which argues that volume 1 of The Old Regime was intended to demonstrate why the ideas of the Enlightenment (in Herr's view still more important to Tocqueville than the process of centralization itself) made liberty impossible thereafter in France. This is true in part, but as I demonstrate later on, it is class struggle, a post-1789 development in Tocqueville's view, that ultimately strangles liberty. See Richard Herr, Tocqueville and the Old Regime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 36, 62-63. My discussion is equally opposed to Herr's notion that it really was the Old Regime itself, and not the Revolution, that was the center of Tocqueville's interest. See Herr, Tocqueville and the Old Regime, pp. 34-35. 101. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 14-1, 14-2. 102. Ibid., 14-3, 14-4. 103. Cited in Kaegi, Eine Biographic, 4:191, 104. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich dcr Grosse," 20-1, 23 3, 24-1. 105. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 172.

Notes to Pages 27-31

173

106. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 22-1; Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, pp. 13, 205. This statement is one of the rare open avowals of progress by Burckhardt; see chapter 4 for further discussion. 107. Mill, "State of Politics in 1836" (1836), CW, 6:321. 108. Mill, "Notes on the Newspapers" (1834), CW, 6:236. Mill was also an admirer of the Girondins. 109. Mill, "Scott's Life of Napoleon," CW, 20:58-59. 110. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:100. 111. Ibid., pt. 2:104, 106; pt. 1:167. This, and the argument that follows, is opposed to the contention that Tocqueville pays less attention to class as an explanatory factor in The Old Regime than he had in previous works. This is true, perhaps, only in regard to volume 1 considered on its own. Compare Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 148. 112. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:106. 113. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 468. 114. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 199. 115. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:117. 116. Ibid., pt. 2:197. 117. Ibid., pt. 2:198. 118. Ibid., pt. 2:175. 119. For a discussion of the aristocratic liberals' style of explanation, see chapter 2. 120. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:105", 107. 121. Ibid., pt. 2:107; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 20-2. 122. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:202. 123. Ibid., pt. 2:208. 124. Ibid., pt. 2:214. See Burckhardt, Vber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 360, on the later willingness of the bourgeoisie to acquiesce to despotism, provided their possession of the confiscated church lands was left intact. 125. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:175. 126. Ibid., pt. 2:220-22. 127. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 468; Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:169. 128. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 1, pt. 2:276, 336. Burckhardt, as cited by Kaegi, compared the Directory to the era of Marius and Sulla in the Roman Republic, or, as he called it, the Roman Scheinfepublik. See Kaegi, Eine Biographie, 3:308. Although all speculation as to why Tocqueville never finished his book is only that, I find this explanation more convincing than that of Herr, who argues that Tocqueville did not continue his work because a history of the Revolution would have demanded that he deal with individual personalities, and that Tocqueville was neither interested in describing individuals nor any good at it. Thus Herr considers it fortunate for Tocqueville's reputation that he did not live to finish his second volume. This seems overly bold to me. See Herr, Tocqueville and the Old Regime, pp. 102-3. 129. One exception to this is the passage in Democracy in America where Tocqueville argues that equality gives men a taste for liberty. But the thrust of that and Tocqueville's other works is that equality, while it can be combined with liberty, also threatens liberty, and it is the threat that Tocqueville usually emphasizes. See De la democratic en Amerique, OC, l , p t . 2:295-96. 130. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:169. See also Souvenirs (1850), OC,

174

Notes to Pages 31-37

12:182; L'ancien regime, pt. 2:161; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Groose," 24-2. 131. Tocqueville to Pierre Freslon, 23 September 1853, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:233-34; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," E. 132. Tocqueville to Freslon, 11 September 1857, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:407-8. 133. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:275. 134. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 24 April 1856, OC, 8, pt. 3:395; Mill, "Alison's History of the French Revolution," CIV, 20:118; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse." 135. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, pp. 281, 199. 136. Ibid., p. 306. 137. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:271; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse." 138. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:166. 139. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 324; Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 42. 140. Burckhardt, Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, p. 15. 141. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:165-66. Chapter 2 1. Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la democratic (Paris: Julliard, 1982), p. 21. 2. The dialectic between historicism on the one hand and teleology and anthropology on the other in aristocratic liberal historical thought suggested here is more fully discussed in chapter 4. 3. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), CW, 3:758n. 4. Mill to Comte, 6 May 1842, CW, 13:518. Perhaps, however, this remark was intended to apply strictly to Comtean social science. 5. Mill to Comte, 25 February 1842, CW, 13:503. 6. Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:169. 7. Mill "Civilization" (1836), CW, 18:127. And see Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:361. 8. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 256; See also Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:169. 9. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 82. 10. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 323. 11. Mill, "Reorganization of the Reform Party" (1839), CW, 6:469. 12. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:30. 13. Mill, "Reorganization of the Reform Party," CW, 6:469. 14. Ibid., 6:475-81. 15. Ibid., 6:488. See also Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:89, 93. Burckhardt's expressions of fear and contempt for the masses are legion. 16. Mill, "On Liberty" (1859), CW, 18:221; Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:761n.; Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:107; De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:163. 17. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:234.

Notes to Pages 37-39

175

18. Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:243. 19. Mill, Principles of Political Economy , CW, 3:761n. 20. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 369. 21. Mill to Henry Samuel Chapman, 12 January 1862, CW, 15:766. 22. It is true that Tocqueville once permits himself to say: "I do not like to use the word 'class' I do not like to speak of the middle class or the upper class or the lower class. I prefer to speak of the general interest of France." But these words are in the context of a parliamentary speech in which Tocqueville argues that merit is to be found in all ranks of society, even among civil servants, and that therefore not even "the class of functionaries" (his use of the word class, ten seconds after the preceding disclaimer, brought laughter from his parliamentary audience) should be excluded by reason of their profession from holding seats in the National Assembly. Thus, if anything, this speech shows how deeply thinking in terms of social groups was embedded in Tocqueville's mind. See Le moniteur universal, 1 February 1840, p. 263. 23. Tocqueville to Louis Bouchitte, 23 September 1853, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:299-300. 24. Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Deductive (1843), CW, 8:935. See also Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:45. 25. Tocqueville, "Institut Royal de France—Academic Francaise: Discours de M. de Tocqueville prononce dans la seance publique du 21 Avril 1842," OC, 16:255; Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 92. 26. Tocqueville to Eugene Stoffels, 21 July 1848, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:458-59. 27. Tocqueville to Francisque de Corcelle, 17 September 1853, OC, 15, pt. 2:81. 28. Mill to Comte, 23 October 1842, CW, 13:553. 29. Ibid., See also Mill to Robert Barclay Fox, 19 December 1842, CW, 13:563; Tocqueville to Beaumont, 27 February 1858, OC, 8, pt. 3:543. 30. Tocqueville, "Discours du 21 Avril 1842," OC, 16:256. 31. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp.278, 278 n. 8. For further references in this vein, see Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:382, and his reviews of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, CW, 18. See also Tocqueville to Corcelle, 16 October 1855, OC, 15, pt. 2:151; Souvenirs, OC, 12:95; "Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835," OC, 5. pt. 2:91; De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:146; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 302, 323-24. 32. In the context of this book, these could be more or less accurately glossed as politics, ideas, and social forces. 33. Wolfgang Mommsen, "Jacob Burckhardt," in Hall, Rediscoveries, p. 55; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 254. In a similar vein to Mommsen, see Jorn Riisen, "Die Uhr, der die Stunde schlagt: Geschichte als Prozess der Kultur bei Jacob Burckhardt," in Historische Prozesse, ed. Faber and Meier, pp. 197-203. Riisen argues that state, religion, and culture act as Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in Burckhardt. He sees his argument confirmed by Burckhardt's well-known statement that perhaps only a new religion could save Europe. This accords with Riisen's semi-Hegelian version of Burckhardt, in which religion is the antithesis of the state. But is it not more natural to see Burckhardt, afraid of both the commercial spirit and state despotism, simply calling for some clearly non-materialistic force such as religion to prevent the complete hegemony of materialism and the state over the nineteenth century?

176

Notes to Pages 40-43

This puts Burckhardt's comment on religion into its intended historical perspective without fixing it permanently in a role of natural opposition to the state, which is entirely too deterministic for Burckhardt. 34. See Riisen, "Die Uhr," pp. 196-97, 203ff. See chapter 4 for further discussion. Riisen prefers the term anthropology to teleology, choosing to reserve the latter for Hegelian visions of progress. 35. Even if Riisen and Mommsen are correct about Burckhardt's theory of history, this would place him squarely in the modern humanist tradition. His theory would attempt to preserve culture not in any particular ancient form but in some new way. It would reject fatalism because human nature is in some sense constant, not subject to lasting corruption, and because "nature is as creative now as ever." Burckhardt, cited in Riisen, "Die Uhr," pp. 214-15. 36. Cited in Mommsen, "Jacob Burckhardt," p. 52. Not just any configurations, of course, but the "typical" ones, those that resonate with us both in our particular present circumstances (for example, the history of modernity of which Cultural History of Greece and Civilization of the Renaissance form a part) and as members of the human species in continuity with all past representatives of our kind. 37. Tocqueville to Freslon, 8 July 1858, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:442. 38. See chapter 1 for Tocqueville's definition of individualism. 39. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, pp. 208, 281-82. 40. Ibid.; Drescher, Tocqueville and England, pp. 148-49, which includes a discussion of Mill. 41. It is a further question whether the middle classes are identical with "the masses" in Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's view. In general they are identical with or part of the masses not least because of the all-around mediocrity the aristocratic liberals attribute to the middle class and the commercial spirit. But I will return to this question later in my discussion of the aristocratic liberal attitude toward the rise of the working classes. 42. Provided we leave out of account the occasion on which Mill suggested that every person in England with an income of over five hundred pounds a year be shot. Mill to John Sterling, 20 October 1831, CW, 12:84. 43. And, by extension, inclined the bourgeoisie to a Bonapartist solution for its difficulties. 44. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 133. 45. Ibid., p. 323. 46. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 208. 47. Ibid., pp. 281-82; see also Drescher, Tocqueville and England, p. 127. 48. Burckhardt to Friedrich von Preen, 8 January 1870, in Jacob Burckhardts Briefe an seinen Freund Friedrich von Preen, 1864-1893 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), p. 8. 49. Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 22 September 1853, OC, 13, pt. 2:264. 50. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 268; Mill to Gustave d'Eichthal, 15 May 1829, CW, 12:31-32; Tocqueville, "Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835," OC, 5, pt. 2:63. 51. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835," OC, 5, pt. 2:63, 89-90. 52. Tocqueville, "Memoire sur le pauperisme" (1835), OC, 16:117-18.

Notes to Pages 43-48

177

53. Mill, "State of Society in America," CW, 18:101. 54. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Amerique," Cahier E (1831), OC, 5, pt. 1:293. 55. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:167; see also "On Liberty," CW, 18:268. 56. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:164-65. In fact, Mill thought that Democracy in America was not really about democracy as a political form but about the middle class. See ibid., 18:193, 196. 57. Ibid., CW, 18:195. 58. Tocqueville to Henry Reeve, 7 November 1840, OC, 6:62; Tocqueville, "Notes sur le livre La France sociale, politique et litteraire, par Henry Bulwer" (1836), OC, 6:320-21; Souvenirs, OC, 12:31. See also Tocqueville to W. R. Gregg, 27 July 1853, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:214. 59. Tocqueville, "Notes sur Henry Bulwer," OC, 6:320-21; "Voyage en Angleterre de 1833," OC, 5, pt. 2:40; Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:163. 60. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:132. Burckhardt says much the same thing. 61. Mill, Logic, 8:906. 62. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:163; De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:33. 63. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, 2:139; Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, pp. 79, 268. 64. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 282. 65. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:104n. 66. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 268. 67. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:756. 68. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 376. 69. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 20 July 1870, p. 24. See also Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 302; Historische Fragmente, p. 82. 70. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:237. 71. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 368, 375; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:203; Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:167, 194-95, 200. 72. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:237. 73. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 192. 74. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:274. See also Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:237. 75. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:196. 76. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 2, pt. 2:19; pt. 1:267. See also Mill to the New York Liberal Club, 20 January 1871, CW, 17:1802. 77. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:269. 78. Mill to Tocqueville, 11 May 1840, CW, 13:434; and see Mill to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 August 1867, CW, 16:1307. Tocqueville also liked to use Chinese imagery to describe European stagnation. See De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 2, pt. 2:48-49. 79. Tocqueville, De la classe moyenne et du peuple (1847), OC, 3, pt. 2:738-40. 80. Mill to David Urquhart, 26 October 1866, CW, 16:1208-9; "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:445-46.

178

Notes to Pages 48-51

81. Mill to Thomas Bayley Potter, 16 March 1865, CIV, 16:1014. See also Mill to William Lovett, 27 July 1842, CW, 13:533; Autobiography, CW, 1:179. 82. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:32. 83. It is only the breakdown of the society of orders that leads to the possibility of domination by a single class. For Tocqueville's remarks on this, see Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 139. Mill is quite clear about the evils of aristocratic domination (as opposed to a truly organic society) in England in the 1830s. See "Fonblanque's England under Seven Administrations" (1837), CW, 6:353. 84. See chapter 1. 85. Perhaps the best short definition of what is meant by the untranslatable German word Bildung is that given by James J. Sheehan: "a concept which combined the meaning carried by the English word 'education' with notions of character formation and moral cultivation." As Sheehan notes, Bildung was frequently identified with politics and political education by liberals and even socialists. See Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 14, 14n. 86. Tocqueville to P.-P. Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, OC, 11:61. 87. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:31. 88. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:268. See also Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 364. 89. Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 2 February 1838, OC, 13, pt.2:12. See also De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:250; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 365,-221. 90. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 219. See also Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:189; "On Representative Government," CW, 19:457. 91. Tocqueville to Freslon, 5 November 1857, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:415-16. See also Mill to Carlyle, 17 July 1832, CW, 12:111-12; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 281. 92. Tocqueville to Freslon, 3 November 1853, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:239. See also his letter to Corcelle, 23 December 1855, OC, 15, pt.2:157. 93. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:55. 94. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 404. 95. Ibid., p. 281; Historische Fragmente, pp. 211-12. 96. Tocqueville to Arthur de Gobineau, 30 July 1856, OC, 9:266. 97. Tocqueville to Freslon, 12 January 1858, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:479-80. See also Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:195; "Civilization," CW, 134-45; Burckhardt to Johanna Kinkel, 25 August 1843, Briefe, 2:43. 98. Ibid. 99. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:50. 100. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 268. 101. This is one of the most puzzling things about the aristocratic liberals' observations of the nineteenth century. For an explanation, see chapter 4. 102. Mill to Carlyle, 17 July 1832, CW, 12:112; see also "Sedgwick's Discourse" (1835), CW, 10:34. 103. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:337. 104. Tocqueville to J.-J. Ampere, 14 March 1857, OC, 11:371. 105. Mill to Carlyle, 17 July 1832, CW, 12:111 12. 106. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 60. See also Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:890.

Notes to Pages 51-53

179

107. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 19 December 1884, p. 196. 108. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 84. 109. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, \, pt. 2:164; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 266. It is strange to see these apostles of diversity deploring the lack of a unified elite culture. But the aristocratic liberals' emphasis on diversity was modified by their insistence on a teleological view of human nature, so that the diversity they espoused was less a true pluralism than a set of variations on a theme. For further discussion of aristocratic liberal values, see chapter 4. 110. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 284; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:23. 111. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 248. 112. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 31 December 1877, p. 115. 113. Mill, "Reform of the Civil Service" (1854), CW, 18:211. 114. Tocqueville to George Cornewall Lewis, 18 November 1855, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:379. See also Correspondence with Senior, 2:86. 115. Mill, "Reform of the Civil Service," CW, 18:211. 116. Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 23 July 1827, OC, 13, pt. 1:108; Correspondence with Senior, 2:86. 117. Mill. "Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews" (1867), CW, 21:218. 118. Mill to Comte, 25 February 1842, CW, 13:502. 119. Mill to John Elliot Cairnes, 16 November 1869, CW, 17:1663. 120. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 284. 121. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 278; Mill to Comte, 25 February 1842, CW, 13:502-3. 122. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Amerique," OC, 5, pt. 1:188, 121. 123. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:274; Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:594 repeats this point and notes the benefits of commerce in bringing dissimilar people into communication with one another, one of the rare aristocratic liberal avowals of the intellectual benefits of commerce; Tocqueville, "Voyage en Amerique," OC, 5, pt. 1:190-91, also discusses the leveling effects of mass education. 124. Tocqueville, "L'Inde" (1843), OC, 3, pt. 1:507. 125. Burckhardt to Schauenberg, 22 March 1847, Briefe, 3:60. 126. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p.-250. 127. This was Mill's later position, as stated in his letter to d'Eichthal, 18 April 1869, CW, 17:1592, although earlier he had supported the payment of M.P.'S in his letter to John Pringle Nichol, 10 July 1833, CW, 12:167. 128. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:457. 129. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:268-69; Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:174; Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 13 April 1882, p. 184. 130. Mill, "State of Society in America," CW, 18:107. 131. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, [?] February 1838, OC, 11:58; Souvenirs, OC, 12:103; Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 23 December 1871, pp. 41-42. 132. Mill, "Postscript: The Close of the Session" (1835), CW, 6:315. Later he might have made another exception for Gladstone. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 17 March 1888, pp. 221-22; 23 December 1871, p. 43. 133. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:229. 134. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 17 March 1888, pp. 221-22.

180

Notes to Pages 54-59

135. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 273. 136. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:447. 137. Mill to d'Eichthal, 10 January 1842, CW, 13:497. 138. Mill to Charles Loring Brace, 23 September 1871, CW, 17:1837-38. 139. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:37. 140. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 137. 141. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:197. 142. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 325. See also Tocqueville, "Memoire sur le pauperisme," OC, 16:122-23. 143. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [I], CW, 18:51. 144. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:92. 145. Ibid., 12:96. 146. Ibid., 12:151. Of course, this statement that the June Days were the first time this had happened contradicts both Tocqueville's 1847 (and earlier) statements about an inevitable class struggle and his later arguments in The Old Regime tracing the class struggle in France back to the Revolution (see my discussion in chapter 1). Perhaps, under the strong impact of the events of 1848, Tocqueville allowed the fact that such upheavals were new to his personal experience to overpower his recognition that, in terms of history, they were neither new nor accidental. 147. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 369. 148. Drescher, Tocqueville and England, p. 60; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 245. 149. Burckhardt, Briefs an von Preen, 27 December 1890, p. 271. 150. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:300-301. 151. Tocqueville to Corcelle, 17 December 1852, OC, 15, pt.2:66. See also his letter to Corcelle of 3 December 1853, ibid., pt. 2:85. 152. Ibid., 3 December 1853, pt. 2:71; Tocqueville to Beaumont, 22 April 1838, OC, 8, pt. 1:292. 153. For the definition of aristocratic liberal values, see chapter 4. Chapter 3 1. The feeling of living in an age of transition was widespread in the mid-nineteenth century. It was especially strong in England, but common on the Continent as well. The Victorians did not think themselves nearly so comfortable as later observers have complained. See A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 2. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 28 April 1850, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:460-61. 3. Ibid. See also Burckhardt, Briefs an von Preen, 27 December 1890, p. 271. 4. Mill to Comte, 13 July 1843, CW, 13:589. 5. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 135. 6. Ibid., pp. 323-24. 7. Ibid., p. 135. 8. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:420. 9. Ibid., CW, 19:420-21. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:92-94. 10. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:332. It is interesting that Tocqueville sees socialism as natural and centralization as artificial.

Notes to Pages 59-63

181

11. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 13 April 1882, p. 178. 12. Tocqueville to Corcelle, 1 November 1856, OC, 15, pt. 2:182. 13. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:568. But Tocqueville would have preferred the despotism of the many or the few to that of the one—insofar as any despotism could be a matter of preference to him. See De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:325. 14. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 24 July 1889, p. 248. 15. Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:322-27. See also Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:153-204. 16. For a full discussion of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's differences with respect to their relative optimism or pessimism and an exploration of its implications for their thought, see chapter 5. 17. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 257. 18. Mill, "Centralisation," CW, 19:610. 19. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 302. See also p. 260. 20. Tocqueville to Nassau Senior, 25 August 1847, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:232; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 262. 21. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:936. 22. Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:97. See also chapter 1. 23. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, OC, 11:60. 24. Mill, "Centralisation," CW, 19:605. 25. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 78. 26. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 185; Tocqueville to Beaumont, 8 July 1838, OC, 8, pt. 1:311. 27. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:302. See also Mill to Chapman, 28 May 1849, CW, 14:33; to William Johnson Fox, end 1849, CW, 14:40; to Rev. Leopold Charles Bernays, 8 January 1868, CW, 16:1347; "Auguste Comte and Positivism" (1865), CW, 10:314. All these contradict Mill's early position in favor of state control over education in the "arts of citizenship." Furthermore, one must be careful to distinguish state control over education from a state requirement that everyone receive an education; see "On Liberty," CW, 18:302. 28. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 192. 29. Mill, "Centralisation," CW, 19:607-9; Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:54; De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:256-57. 30. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 13 April 1882, p. 179. See Mill, "Centralisation," CW, 19:608-9, for his unhopeful disagreement. 31. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:132. 32. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 24 July 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:432-34. 33. Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 31-4. 34. Burckhardt did not put much trust in Switzerland's chances of maintaining neutrality. 35. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 24 July 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:432-34. 36. Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:315-17. 37. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 193. 38. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:36; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 326. 39. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:343. 40. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 350; Mill, "Considerations on

182

Notes to Pages 63-66

Representative Government," CW, 19:582, and Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:799; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:310-12. See also Drescher, Tocqueville and England, p. 128. 41. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 367. See also p. 375. 42. Tocqueville to Lewis, 18 November 1855, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:380. 43. Ibid.; Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:534. 44. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:582; emphasis added. 45. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:799. 46. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:304. 47. Mill to Charles Dupont-White, 6 April 1860, CW, 15:691; Tocqueville, "Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835," OC, 5, pt. 2:53. 48. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835," OC, 5, pt. 2:53,69. 49. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 208. 50. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:534. 51. Mill to Edwin Chadwick, 24 May 1870, CW, 17:1724. 52. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 170. 53. Ibid., p. 324. See chapter 4 for aristocratic liberal views on the possibility of decentralization. 54. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:33. 55. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:944. 56. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 264. 57. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:33. See also Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 28 September 1834, OC, 13, pt. 1:361-62. 58. See chapter 2. 59. Tocqueville, Le commerce, 24 November 1845. 60. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 21 July 1848, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:459. 61. It is possible, of course, that the independence the aristocratic liberals attributed to 'public opinion' was due to the fact that they equated it with the middle class. Asa Briggs has established that this was the case in mid-century English usage, and I suspect that it was the same in France and Germany. See Briggs, "The Language of Class in Early Nineteenth Century England," in Essays in Labour History, ed. Asa Briggs and John Saville (London: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 43-74. 62. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:940. 63. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt.2:162. 64. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:162. 65. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:18-19. 66. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 266; Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 193; Mill, "State of Society in America," CW, 18:99; "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:162. 67. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:275. 68. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 266. 69. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:126; Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:275. 70. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [I], CW, 18:165. 71. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 3 September 1848, OC, 8, pt. 2:39; De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:189. 72. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt.2:118. See pt. 1:186 for some other uses of the press.

Notes to Pages 66-70

183

73. Ibid., pt. 1:185-86; Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 28 August 1835, OC, 11:11. 74. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:196. 75. Burckhardt to Johanna Kinkel, 25 August 1843, Briefe, 2:43. 76. Mill to Cairnes, 5 March 1865, CW, 16:1003. While the reference is to American journalists, this condition is characterized as a general weakness of democracy. 77. Ibid., Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, All Souls Day 1889, p. 256; 1 April 1893, pp. 291-92. 78. Briefe an von Preen, 6 November 1869, p. 6. 79. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 267; Briefe an von Preen, 31 December 1874, p. 81; Mill, "Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848" (1849), CW, 20:319. Mill, "Civilization," CW, 18:134, is also relevant, though directed toward the effect of mass-market books. 80. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:188-93. 81. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 3 September 1848, OC, 8, pt. 2:39. Here I think Mill would have parted company with Tocqueville. 82. Mill to Comte, 13 July 1843, CW, 13:589. 83. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:275, 264. 84. Ibid., 18:275, 266. 85. Ibid., 18:274. See also chapter 2 and the discussion of suffrage later in this chapter. 86. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:18-19; Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:271-72. In America, where the majority was middle class, public opinion, in the aristocratic liberal perspective, really was the opinion of the majority. 87. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:935; letter to Dupont-White, 10 June 1860, CW, 15:700. 88. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:275. 89. Mill to Harriet Mill, 15 June 1855, CW, 14:294. 90. See chap. 7 of Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1. 91. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:460. See Mill to Chapman, 12 January 1862, CW, 15:764-65. 92. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [I], CW, 18:84-86. 93. Mill to Henry Fawcett, 5 February 1860, CW, 19:672. 94. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 5 October 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:433-35. 95. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:286-87; Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 25 December 1885, p. 200; Briefe an von Preen, All Souls Day 1889, p. 256; Historische Fragmente, p. 266. 96. Mill, "Parties and the Ministry" (1834), CW, 6:397; Tocqueville to Stoffels, 5 October 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:435-36; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 259. 97. See Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:404. 98. Ibid., 19:467-68, 322; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, l,pt. 1:247. 99. Tocqueville to Corcelle, 1 August 1850, OC, 15, pt.2:30; Tocqueville to Stoffels, 9 March 1849, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:239. 100. Mill to Florence Nightingale, 31 December 1867, CW, 16:1345. But he failed to convince his correspondent. 101. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:200. 102. Ibid., pt. 1:330. 103. Ibid., pt. 1:329-30; Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:406. Note that in general aristocratic liberal statements in favor of universal

184

Notes to Pages 70-72

suffrage in the dim future or in the abstract are closely linked with statements deploring the possibility of immediate universal suffrage. This contradicts the general nineteenthcentury liberal progression over time, according to Lothar Gall, from positions favorable to immediate broad extension of the suffrage to positions contra. See Gall, "Liberalismus und 'biirgerliche Gesellschaft': Zu Charakter und Entwicklung der liberalen Bewegung in Deutschland," Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 324-56. At the time, Mill was even dubious about the Reform Act of 1832! See Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:180. 104. Mill to Harriet Mill, 15 February 1854, CW, 14:160-61. 105. Tocqueville, parliamentary speech of 19 January 1842, Le moniteur universe!, pp. 107-8. 106. Tocqueville, quoted in Drescher, Tocqueville and England, pp. 136-37. 107. Mill to Harriet Mill, 30 June 1854, CW, 14:221; to George Cornewall Lewis, 20 March 1859, CW, 15:608. 108. Mill to Chadwick, 10 January 1859, CW, 15:588. See also "Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform" (1859), CW, 19:323; Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:141. 109. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:269. 110. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:477. 111. Ibid., 19:478. 112. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 22 July 1881, p. 161. 113. Ibid., Mill to Max Kyllmann, 15 February 1865, CW, 16:997; Mill to John Boyd Kinnear, 25 September 1865, CW, 16:1103. 114. Tocqueville, as cited in Comme disait M. de Tocqueville, ed. A. Redier (Paris: Perrin, 1925), p. 48. 115. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 369. 116. Tocqueville to Corcelle, [?] October 1835, OC, 15, pt. 1:57; Mill to DupontWhite, 6 December 1871, CW, 17:1864-65; "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:486-87. 117. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Amerique," OC, 5, pt. 1:196-97, 258; Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, [?] February 1838, OC, 11:58; Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:457; Burckhardt, Brief e an von Preen, 17 March 1888, pp. 221-22. 118. Mill to Herbert Spencer, 27 March 1859, CW, 15:608; Mill to Chapman, 12 January 1862, CW, 15:764-65; Mill to Potter, 16 March 1865, CW, 16:1014; Mill to Kinnear, 25 September 1865, CW, 16:1103; Tocqueville to Gregg, 27 July 1853, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:214. 119. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:512; "Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform," CW, 19:327; Mill to Chapman, 29 February 1848, CW, 13:732. 120. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:476. 121. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 25 December 1885, p. 200. 122. Tocqueville, "De la classe moyenne et du peuple," OC, 3, pt. 2:739; Mill to Chadwick, 10 January 1859, CW, 15:588; Mill, "Parties and the Ministry," CW, 6:396-97. 123. Mill, "Rationale of Representation" (1835), CW, 18:32; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:218. 124. Tocqueville to Gregg, 27 July 1853, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:2.13-15; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 368; Mill, "Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848," CW, 20:329.

Notes to Pages 72-75

185

125. Tocqueville to Corcelle, 4 September 1839, OC, 15, pt. 1:135; Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 8 August 1839, OC, 11:80. 126. Tocqueville, as cited in Drescher, Tocqueville and England, pp. 189-90. 127. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:464-7!, 476. 128. Ibid., 19:476-77. 129. See chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of the nature of liberalism in the period 1830-1870, and for my own ideas about what separates liberals in this period from democrats on the one hand and conservatives on the other. 130. Mill to Carlyle, 5 September 1833, CW, 12:175. See his letter to Sarah Austin, 22 May 1842, CW, 13:522, for further pro-German effusions. Tocqueville, however, condemned Prussia in 1844 as being ruled by a despotic royal power in Le commerce, 24 November 1844. 131. Tocqueville to Hubert de Tocqueville, 4 April 1858, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:496-97; Tocqueville to Christian von Bunsen, 27 December 1858, OC, 7:366, and the introduction to OC by Francoise Melonio and Lise Queffelec, 7:272-73. But compare Tocqueville to Beaumont, 16 July 1854, OC, 8, pt. 3:224, and 6 August 1854, pt. 3:228, on the problems of German political development in Tocqueville's eyes. Usually his more optimistic views of Prussia date from 1858, after the start of the so-called New Era, the period of moderate liberal administration in Prussia that lasted from 1858 to 1862. 132. Mill to William Rathbone, Jr., 29 November 1863, CW, 15:905. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid.; Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:478. 135. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:764. 136. Mill, Diary, 20 March 1854, CW, 27:662. 137. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 9 March 1849, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:239; Mill to Fawcett, 5 February 1860, CW, 15:672; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 137; Historische Fragmente, pp.62, 82. 138. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, pp. 268-69. 139. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:413. 140. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:240-41; "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:200. 141. Inequalities of gender remain outside the aristocratic liberal purview, except for Mill, and even in his case they most often stayed in the background. 142. See chapter 2. It might be argued that some of Mill's expressed fears of socialism were merely tactical statements of the kind he was often given to, designed to make the upper classes afraid. Mill wrote that one of the greatest uses of socialism was as a spur to action. But Mill's comments on the "great question of our times, the question of property" are too numerous, too consistent, and expressed over too long a period of time to be judged as of merely tactical significance, over-stressing one useful aspect of the truth. 143. Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:239. 144. Mill, "Chapters on Socialism" (1873), CW, 5:737. 145. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:766-96; and see his remarks on Fourierism in 2:212-13. 146. Ibid., 2:205. 147. Ibid., 2:252-53; Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:98; Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, \ January 1889, pp. 236-37.

186

Notes to Pages 75-79

148. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:208. 149. Ibid., 2:209; Mill to Georg Brandes, 4 March 1872, CW, 17:1874; "Chapters on Socialism," CW, 5:745-46. 150. Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:239. 151. Mill, "Chapters on Socialism," CW, 5:708-9, 737, 748; Mill to Brandes, 4 March 1872, CW, 17:1874; "The Claims of Labour," CW, 4:375-76. 152. Tocqueville, "Speech on the Right to Work" (1848), in Drescher, Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform (New York: Harper Torch books, 1968), pp. 180-83, 192. 153. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 135n. 154. Tocqueville, "Speech on the Right to Work," p. 187. 155. Tocqueville, "Voyages en Angleterre," OC, 5, pt. 2:69. 156. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:775. 157. Mill, "Chapters on Socialism," CW, 5:708-9, 737. And see Burckhardt, Briefs an von Preen, 2 July 1871, p. 35. 158. Mill, "Chapters on Socialism," CW, 5:707-9. 159. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 24 July 1889, p. 248. 160. Mill, "Chapters of Socialism," CW, 5:707-8; Mill to Kinnear, 25 September 1865, CW, 16:1103. 161. Mill, "Chapters on Socialism," CW, 5:708. 162. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 19 March 1855, OC, 8, pt. 3:283; De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:300-302, 310-12. 163. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 355 n. 53. 164. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 2:7; Tocqueville to Reeve, 7 November 1840, OC, 6:62; Tocqueville to Corcelle, 21 February 1851, OC, 15, pt. 2:41. See also Tocqueville to Corcelle, 17 December 1852, pt. 2:66, and Mill to Brandes, 4 March 1872, CW, 17:1874-75. 165. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 1 February 1852, OC, 8, pt.3:20. 166. Mill to Dupont-White, 6 December 1871, CW, 17:1865. 167. Ibid. 168. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 31 December 1872, p. 61. 169. Ibid., 26 April 1872, pp. 50-52. 170. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:270; Tocqueville to Beaumont, 23 March 1853, OC, 8, pt. 3:94; 8 April 1853, pt. 3:101. 171. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 13 April 1882, p. 178; Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 361. 172. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:270f.; Tocqueville to Corcelle, 13 May 1852, OC, 15, pt.2:54. 173. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:270. 174. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 11 January 1855, OC, 8, pt. 3:261. And see Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 245. 175. See Allan Mitchell, The German Influence in France after 1870: The Formation of the French Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 176. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 199. 177. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 12 October 1871, p. 39. Mill was one of those who still thought so about Napoleon III; see Mill to Henry Fawcett, 26 July 1870, CW, 17:1754. 178. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 359.

Notes to Pages 79-83

187

179. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 26 September 1890, p. 267; 25 December 1886, p. 207. 180. Ibid., 12 October 1871, p. 39. 181. Ibid., 17 March 1872, p. 46. See also Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 373-74. 182. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 374-75. Hans-Ulrich Wehler cites Burckhardt prominently in the historiography of the "primacy of internal politics" school; Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 35-36. 183. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 31 December 1870, p. 30; Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 325-26. 184. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 10 September 1891, p. 277. 185. Tocqueville, Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.a., paquet no. 8, p. 50, cited in Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 232. Chapter 4 1. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Tocqueville has been connected to the humanist tradition, if not always satisfactorily, in Bruce James Smith, Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke, and Tocqueville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). The same service has been better performed for Mill, especially with reference to the reconciliation of positive and negative liberty, by Bernard Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), is stimulating on this point as well. 2. Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 213 n. 8. 3. I do not, in the pages that follow, mean to attribute to humanist ideas the whole force of the nineteenth-century critique of negative liberty. Much of that force is derived elsewhere, for example, from organic conceptions of traditional society which have little to do with Aristotle. The concentration on humanism here is meant to highlight points for the present discussion rather than to provide an exhaustive genealogy of nineteenthcentury thought. 4. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 4-5. 5. Ibid., pp.8, 10-11, 171. The importance of Greco-Roman precedents for Continental thinkers was no less marked, as noted in Eliza Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), and many other works. 6. Turner, The Greek Heritage, p. 25; Tocqueville, cited in M. Reinhold, "American Political Thought," in Classical Influences on Western Thought, 1650-1870, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 243; Tocqueville, "Machiavel," (1836), OC, 16:548-49. In contradiction, Boesche cites Tocqueville's notes for Democracy in America: "Montesquieu was therefore right... and what he said of Greeks and Romans is still applicable to America." The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de

188

Notes to Pages 83-88

Tocqueville, p. 195. Here Tocqueville is comparing ancient and modern virtue. But elsewhere he implicitly disavows Montesquieu: "Another point demonstrated by America, is that virtue is not, as has long been maintained, the only thing that can preserve republics, but rather that education facilitates that social state [that of a republic] more than anything else. The Americans are hardly more virtuous than others; but they are infinitely more enlightened. ..." "Voyage en Amerique," OC, 5, pt. 1:278. 7. For references to the value of classical education, see Mill to Spencer, 9 February 1867, CW, 16:1237, 1237 n.2; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:92. Burckhardt taught in a classical Gymnasium. 8. Burckhardt to Otto Ribbeck, 10 July 1864, Briefe, 4:155; Mill, "Civilization," CIV, 18:143n.; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 538. Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, occasionally refers to Aristotle in connection with Tocqueville. I have been unable to find any direct references to Aristotle by Tocqueville, however, and it may well be that much of his Aristotelianism was derived via Montesquieu (one of his favorite authors) or even Rousseau. 9. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 273. Harvey Chisick, The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes toward the Education of the Lower Classes in EighteenthCentury France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp.72-75, discusses the classical influence on anti-democratic tendencies in the French Enlightenment. 10. R. R. Bolgar, "Classical Elements in the Social, Political, and Educational Thought of Thomas and Matthew Arnold," in Bolgar, Classical Influences on Western Thought, p. 338. 11. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 230-31. It should be noted that the democratic implications of Machiavellian thought were generally overlooked by readers. 12. Ibid., pp. 231-33, 226-27. 13. I do not wish to imply that the notion of negative liberty is to be derived solely or even mostly from the humanist tradition but only that it is not entirely foreign to that tradition. 14. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 85; emphasis added. 15. Ibid., pp. 90-91. 16. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), pp. 9-11. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, p. 80. 17. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 329. 18. Even for Marx, in the end, the state and sovereignty are supposed to wither away. 19. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 75. Of course, this ignores the problem of slavery, helotry, serfdom, and the like. But that is in keeping with the curiously limited sociology of liberty practiced in almost all the pre-modern and most of the modern humanist tradition. 20. Ibid., pp. 330,460-61,466. Still more difficult for the humanist tradition to accept was the division of private vice and public virtue into separate and not necessarily congruent spheres. 21. Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). I prefer Fussell to Pocock here because Fussell presents a broader picture than Pocock does, as is understandable, given Pocock's rather different purposes. Furthermore Fussell's definitions are Pocock's starting point. 22. Ibid., p. 22. 23. Ibid., pp. 4-9, 20-21.

Notes to Pages 88-95

189

24. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 463-64, 493, 495. 25. On Constant, see Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 9, 42-43, 60. 26. Gorden Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), pp. 606-15. Of course, the implicit identification of liberalism with the rhetoric of competing interests is one that I challenge. 27. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 502, 513, 521-23. One should add that the classical republican tradition persists side by side with the Madisonian from Mably through the Jacobins. 28. Sheldon Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 196; Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp.163, 190-226. 29. Turner, The Greek Heritage, p. 364-65. 30. This assertion is based on a limited survey of the English response to Mill found in reviews of On Liberty and his work as a whole. The only English commentator who accepts Mill's claim that intellectual diversity is disappearing in the modern world is another aristocratic liberal, Walter Bagehot. See, for example, Bagehot, "Parliamentary Reform" (1859), in the Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas (London: The Economist, 1974), 6:188. Unfortunately, work is lacking on both the English and European reaction to Mill which would allow a more confident faith in this assertion. 31. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 45; "Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers," in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 249. 32. Pocock, "Cambridge Paradigms," p. 250; Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 308-9. 33. See John Robertson, "The Scottish Enlightenment and the Civic Tradition," in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue, esp. pp. 174-78. 34. Holmes, Benjamin Constant, pp. 175, 178. 35. I thus dispute the connection between liberalism and purely negative liberty. For a recent example, see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 44-45. 36. In what follows I do not mean to reduce the Enlightenment to these ideas. It is clear, for example, that faith in progress was by no means universal among Enlightenment thinkers. I merely point to the Enlightenment as the era when the ideas I discuss later either originated or became widespread. 37. What historicism most emphatically does not mean in this context is a belief in the inevitability of historical progress, or a belief in historical determinism. 38. Though it seems to be imported more from basically non-humanist thinkers, such as Constant, rather than from eighteenth-century precursors. 39. This picture is, of course, a caricature of Enlightenment thought. But it is accurate as a representation of what the aristocratic liberals and much nineteenth-century opinion thought the Enlightenment meant. The same is true of the view of mid-nineteenthcentury thought presented here. 40. For a more detailed consideration of the relative optimism or pessimism of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville, see chapter 5. 41. Mill, "Grote's Aristotle" (1873), CW, 11:505.

190

Notes to Pages 95-98

42. Mill, Diary, 15 January 1854, CW, 27:643. 43. See his comment about the progressive results of the French Revolution in chapter 1 and his comments on the nineteenth century in general in Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 284, for example. 44. For Burckhardt's views on the advantages to historians of living in the present, see Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 166; to Albert Brenner, 17 October 1855, Briefs, 3:227. 45. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 238. 46. Compare Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranks and Burckhardt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 66-73, 78-79. 47. On the difference between corruption and stagnation, see Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, p. 107. 48. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 238; Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, pp. 118, 153, 187, and to a lesser extent Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, pp. 92, 104-5, argue against seeing Mill in a historicist light. While I agree with the revisionist view that Mill harbored considerable pessimism, as will be discussed in chapter 5,1 would nevertheless claim that an author who so often stressed the "Age of Transition" was much more of a historicist than Semmel, at least, would seem to think. Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture?, pp. 80, 91-92, argues that by the time Burckhardt wrote his Griechische Kulturgeschichte in the 1870s, his main emphasis was on historical continuity. It seems to me, however, that when Burckhardt stresses continuity it is for didactic purposes, and that his perception of the fundamental rupture between modernity and the past never wavered. 49. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, pp. 10-11. 50. This is not to say that "virtue" entirely disappears from the rhetoric of modern humanism (modern humanists are still humanists), although only Tocqueville among the aristocratic liberals makes frequent use of the word. There is a change of context and emphasis even where there is not a complete change in vocabulary. 51. Chisick, The Limits of Reform, pp. 70, 238-43 passim. Of course, the modern humanists' acceptance of tabula rasa psychology, which Chisick sees as central to the Enlightenment's optimism about education, is modified by their ideas of human nature. But, as Chisick shows, even the Enlightenment tempered its egalitarian educational and psychological premises with social and political considerations. 52. See, for example, Tocqueville, "Voyage en Amerique," OC, 5, pt. 1:278. 53. This is not to say that the aristocratic liberals ever really solved the problem of the relationship between property and education. Mill's agonizing and self-contradictions over this issue in relation to suffrage are characteristic of the aristocratic liberals' difficulties. They are a replay of humanism's typical problems with the relationship between wealth and virtue in modern terms. 54. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 551. 55. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 228. 56. For these citations from Burckhardt, see Ober das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 227-28. See also Riisen, Historische Prozesse, p. 211. 57. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 249. See also p. 248, where he makes the point that the object of observing the past is to understand the change that modernity represents. For Burckhardt, however, one of the essential characteristics of European as opposed to other cultures is thai European culture possesses a continuity

Notes to Pages 99-102

191

of development of all its aspects, that there are transitions rather than disappearances of given aspects of human nature. See Riisen, Historische Prozesse, p. 216; Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture?, pp. 91 -92. After these transitions, however, Europe presents a basically new appearance, as, for example, after the French Revolution. 58. Anthropology and teleology have basically synonymous meanings here. This is in contrast to some uses of teleology in which the word is confined to Hegelian-style readings of the past as prologue to the glorious present. For the latter usage, in which anthropology and teleology are made opposing terms, see, e.g., Riisen, Historische Prozesse, p. 196 and passim. The approach to Burckhardt taken here is thus not so different from Riisen's as a quick glance at the terminology might suggest. See also the discussion of Riisen in chapter 2. 59. Cited by John Morley in "Mr. Mill's Autobiography," in John Morley: Nineteenth-century Essays, ed. Peter Stansky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 152, from Mill's "Auguste Comte and Positivism," CW, 10:264-327. 60. See Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la democratic, pp. 162-63, for a good discussion of how Tocqueville was unable to account for it. 61. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:224. 62. See chapters 1-3. For a striking example of Burckhardt's allegiance to negative liberty, see Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 124-25. I disagree with Bernard Semmel's implication that Mill's political economy is in merely accidental and unsystematic relation to his humanism. For me the linkage of the two is fundamental to his characteristic style of thought. See Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, p. 182. Semmel indeed seems to come around to the same point at p. 197. I also reject Doris Goldstein's overly classical humanist reading of Tocqueville which at times denies any distinction between ancient and modern liberty in his thought. See "Alexis de Tocqueville's Concept of Citizenship," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108 (February 1964):52. 63. In the aristocratic liberal version the old humanist elements are frequently the more prominent, of course, from therapeutic motives. 64. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 104. 65. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:75, 208; Mill, "On Liberty," CW, vol. 18. 66. Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:329-30 passim. 67. Tocqueville to Mme. Swetchine, 10 September 1856, OC, 15, pt. 2:292; to Stoffels, 24 July 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:432-34. 68. There are those who have charged Burckhardt with being essentially apolitical, at least in his personal life. For an adequate rebuttal, see Kaegi, Eine Biographie, 7:127ff. 69. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835," OC, 5, pt. 2:92. 70. Though not always, as for example in his letter to Hermann Schauenberg, 28 February 1846, Briefe, 2:209. 71. Burckhardt to Albert Brenner, 17 October 1855, Briefe, 3:227; emphasis in original. See also Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 166. 72. Tocqueville to Reeve, 22 March 1837, OC, 6:37. 73. Tocqueville to Reeve, 3 February 1840, OC, 6:52. See also Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 125; Mill, "On Liberty." 74. Tocqueville to Mme. Hollond (sic), 9 August 1857, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:400-401.

192

Notes to Pages 102-106

75. Mill to Carlyle, 12 January 1834, CW, 12:207-8; see also A System of Logic, CIV, 8:951-52; "Bentham" (1838), CW, 10:98. For Burckhardt's concurrence, see Kaegi, Eine Biographie, 3:639-49 and 5:156. 76. Burckhardt to Brenner, 24 May 1856, Briefe, 3:250; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:334. 77. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:404, 406-7, 410-12. For Mill this educational value is so great that it is a considerable incentive toward universal suffrage, since all people need this kind of education. Education is not, of course, the only value Mill sees in suffrage. The educational aspect of political participation should be clear for Tocqueville from the preceding discussion. It must be nuanced for Burckhardt, as I show at length in chapter 5. 78. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:208, by analogy with his views on forms of economics; see Tocqueville on socialism in chapter 3. 79. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:332-34. See also Lamberti's discussion in La notion d'individualisme chez Tocqueville (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970). 80. It might be considered that aristocratic liberalism's opposition to determinism is a corollary of the aristocratic liberal ideal of the individual, to the importance and efficacy it ascribes to individual actions. Burckhardt's highly nuanced discussion of the role of the "Great Man" in history is applicable here. There are, however, other plausible explanations of aristocratic liberalism's opposition to determinism. 81. Mill," St. Andrews Address," CW, 21:217. 82. Ibid., p. 257. Burckhardt's commitment to education can hardly be questioned, and Democracy in America and the Voyages en Sidle et aux Etats Unis give ample demonstration of the value Tocqueville placed on education. 83. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:208; "On Liberty," CW, 18:274-75. 84. Tocqueville to Gobineau, 6 August 1851, OC, 9:190; 8 January 1856, 9:246. 85. Mill to d'Eichthal, 18 April 1869, CW, 17:1592. Thus I dissent from Burrow's claim that Mill completed the divorce between property and intellect as criteria for independence and political participation. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, pp. 111-12. 86. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 192. 87. See chapter 2 on over-specialization; Mill, "Bentham," CW, 10:98. 88. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 551. 89. Holmes, Benjamin Constant, p. 178. 90. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, p. 113. At the same time this dynamic, asymmetrical diversity remains distinct from specialization. 91. Mill, Diary, 6 February 1854, CW, 27:651; Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, p. 94; Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue, p. 245. See also Mill to Harriet Mill, 24 February 1855, CW, 14:345-46. 92. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:215. See also "Coleridge" (1840), CW, 10:140. 93. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:209; "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:197. See also Mill, "Centralisation," CW, 19:613 and "On Liberty," CW, 18:261-62. Burckhardt and Mill both invoked the prestige of Greece to witness the importance of diversity in individual development and traced its origin there. See Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 115; Kaegi, Eine Biographie, 3:437; Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:266. 94. Mill, "On Liberty," CW, 18:224. 95. Mill is in direct contrast to the picture of riineteenth-century ethics painted in

Notes to Pages 107-108

193

Maclntyre's After Virtue. Perhaps this explains Maclntyre's persistent misinterpretations and avoidances of Mill throughout that work. 96. Mill, of course, always admits the possibility of real progress. He is the least pessimistic of the aristocratic liberals. Yet even Mill is too concerned with the threats to consider success probable. 97. It can be argued, that Mill, in distinction to Tocqueville and Burckhardt, really was a Fabian socialist in this sense. The Fabians themselves claimed him. But he is distinguished from the Fabians by his reluctance to give political power to the lower classes and perhaps by his attitude toward the state. These are enough to show the limits of his optimism, his faith in progress, and his confidence in the masses. 98. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:337-38; "Memoire sur le pauperisme," OC, 16:117-57. 99. Mill to Carlyle, 12 January 1834, CW, 12:207. 100. Ibid. The ultimate good of the species, however, might not necessarily be synonymous with the good of the individual in a given instance. Thus, giving up one's life to save others might be a good act, even an act required by duty, for Mill, although it involves real sacrifice of happiness and pleasure. But a society in which individuals were self-sacrificing in this way would be for the good of all the individuals in it. See Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 109-10. 101. Ibid., p. 133. This discussion is indebted to ibid., pp. 101-33, generally. See also Semmel, John Stuart Mill, p. 178. 102. Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom, p. 48. 103. Burckhardt, Vber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 238. And see, for example, Mill, "Utilitarianism" (1861), CW, 10:212 (the famous Socrates-and-the-pig comparison). This has led some commentators, for example Rawls, to deny that Mill is a utilitarian in any meaningful sense. I prefer Mill's self-description, ably defended in Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom. 104. There has been considerable discussion whether Tocqueville was a Catholic, in particular whether he underwent a deathbed conversion. See John Lukacs, "The Last Days of Alexis de Tocqueville," Catholic Historical Review, 50 (July 1964), for the pro-Catholic arguments. My own view, based primarily on Tocqueville's discussion of religious subjects in his correspondence, is that he died in the same non-Christian faith in which he had lived, and with the same concern for not being seen publicly to violate socially valuable religious norms. His English wife, an ardent convert to Catholicism, did her best to have him remembered as a co-religionist. Doris Goldstein, in Trial of Faith: Religion and Politics in Tocqueville's Thought (New York: Elsevier Scientific Publishing Co., 1975), p. 8n., suggests that Tocqueville's deathbed actions can best be understood in terms of Pascal's recommendation of "des gestes de la foi" as a means of attaining faith. 105. It is true that religion plays an important role in Democracy in America. But references to religion are few in Souvenirs and The Old Regime. The role of religion became increasingly less central in Tocqueville's thought over time, although finding a way to reconcile religion, that is, Catholicism, with liberty was always an important concern for him. It is also true that his religious beliefs influenced his thinking to be more favorable to egalitarian, democratic conceptions of justice and virtue. I differ from Goldstein by regarding religion as a means rather than an end in Tocqueville's thought, and I do not share her view that religion is crucial to Tocqueville's understanding of modern society. Tocqueville is not, after all, Quinet.

194

Notes to Pages 108-115

106. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 192; Chisick, The Limits of Reform, p. 164. Chapter 5 1. Mill, Autobiography, p. 469. 2. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:390. 3. Ibid., 19:375-77, 394-95; "On Liberty," CW, 18:224; Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 29 June 1831, OC, 13, pt. 1:234; Burckhardt, "Die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 23-3, 24-1. 4. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:393-94, 545. 5. Burckhardt, however, never spoke of modern government as a positive force in education, although he did of ancient government in the Griechische Kulturgeschichte. 6. This statement is correct only for the younger Burckhardt, as represented by his letter to Kinkel, 13 June 1842, Briefe, 1:201, where he proclaimed that Europe was grown up and ready for constitutional government. Twenty-five years later, in Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 541 n.27, he said the opposite. But I think it is fair to take as Burckhardt's political ideal what he would have chosen when he thought Europe was mature. 7. Mill, "Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848," CW, 20:331-32. See discussion later in this chapter and Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:209, on Tocqueville's support for monarchy over republic. 8. On Burckhardt as federalist, see Kaegi, Eine Biographie, vol. 7. 9. Though the general aristocratic liberal sympathy for centralization in foreign affairs has been noted in chapter 3. 10. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:520-21. 11. See also ibid., CW, 19:524-25. 12. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 5 October 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:433-36. 13. Ibid., 5:434-35. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Despite all of Mill's disclaimers about suffrage rights based on property, even he could not help equating the capacity for political leadership with wealth, at least to some degree. Thus, for example, he thought Greece needed more material prosperity before it would produce people sufficiently well off to take a disinterested attitude toward public affairs. Mill to d'Eichthal, 18 April 1869, CW, 17:1592. 17. Burckhardt to Kinkel, 19 April 1845, Briefe, 2:158. 18. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:289. See the parallel remarks of Mill in "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:404-12. 19. Ibid., 19:536. 20. Ibid., 19:535, and see "On Liberty," CW, 18:305 and "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:412. 21. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, l,pt. 2:115-16andpt. l,p. 59. 22. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:120. 23. Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [I], CW, 18:60-63, and see "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:404-12, 535-37. 24. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 2:78. 25. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Angleterre de 1833," OC, 5, pt. 2:35.

Notes to Pages 115-119

195

26. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:329-30. 27. See chapter 3. 28. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:90-96; Souvenirs, OC, 12:182. 29. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 302. 30. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 2:161. 31. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:35-36. 32. On price-fixing and state intervention in the economy, see Valentin Gitermann, Jacob Burckhardt als politischer Denker, Institut fur europaische Geschichte vol. 19 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1957), p. 11. For Tocqueville and Mill on free trade, see Tocqueville to Edouard de Tocqueville, 22 October 1842, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:202; Mill, Principles of Political Economy. 33. Mill, "Auguste Comte and Positivism," CW, 10:303. 34. Mill, "Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:794; "Auguste Comte and Positivism," CW, 10:340-41. 35. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:945. 36. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:545; Autobiography, CW, 1:169, 184-185; Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:937. 37. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:970. 38. Ibid., 3:956-57; Mill to Austin, 7 March 1848, CW, 13:734. 39. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 208; Briefe an von Preen, \ January 1889, pp. 236-37; and see Historische Fragmente, p. 29. 40. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:150, 252-53, 280-83, 310. 41. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:51-52. 42. See Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 282, for example. 43. Consider the distaste of "organic" thinkers for the very idea of class, the common "liberal" dream of annexing everyone someday into the burgerliche Gesellschaft, and of course the many projects on the left for making the working class universal. The counter-trend represented by thinkers such as Comte who want to institutionalize class distinctions permanently forms a relative minority among the western European intelligentsia in the period 1830-1870. 44. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 25 March 1890, p. 259; Mill to Alexander Bain, 27 March 1847, CW, 13:711; to Comte, 17 May 1847, CW, 13:716-17; to John Campbell, 4 April 1866, CW, 16:1155. Tocqueville's parliamentary speech against the right to work is contained in Seymour Drescher, ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform. Also see the discussion of socialism in chapter 3. 45. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:204-5. 46. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:347, 351; 3:208; "The Claims of Labour," CW, 4:367-68. 47. Tocqueville, "Memoire sur le pauperisme," OC, 16:117-57. 48. Mill to Antoine Elisee Cherbuliez, 6 November 1863, CW, 15:897. 49. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 3:792. 50. They reacted strongly against socially or racially deterministic theories of society. Tocqueville responded angrily to Gobineau's racist theories of the decline of the West, and Tocqueville and Burckhardt found Islamic fatalism particularly distasteful. For Tocqueville's uninhibited reaction to Gobineau (as opposed to his more polite responses to Gobineau himself), see Tocqueville to Beaumont, 3 November 1853, OC, 8, pt. 3:164; Tocqueville to Beaumont, 13 January 1854, OC, 8, pt. 3:182. See also Tocqueville to

196

Notes to Pages 119-122

Gobineau, 17 November 1853, OC, 9:202. On Islam, see Tocqueville to Gobineau, 22 October 1843, OC, 9:68-69; Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 128, 304. 51. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:84-85. See also Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 175. 52. Though individual preferences for different periods are allowed. See Burckhardt, Historische Fragments, p. 3. 53. See chapter 2. 54. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, pp. 233, 245-46, 283; Historische Fragmente, p. 92. 55. Ibid., p.40; Briefe an von Preen, 23 December 1871, pp. 41-42. 56. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:256. See also the discussion of this subject in chapter 4. 57. Burckhardt to Kinkel, 13 June 1842, Briefe, 1:201. 58. Ibid.; Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 1:11; letter to Kergorlay, [January] 1835, OC, 13, pt. 1:373; to Stofifels, 24 July 1836 and 5 October 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:428-35; Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [I], CIV, 18:54. 59. It should perhaps be noted that Burckhardt was younger than Mill and Tocqueville by twelve and thirteen years, respectively. 60. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, pp.92, 277; Brief e an von Preen, 19 September 1875, p. 84; 2 July 1871, pp. 35-36. See Briefs an von Preen, 30 December 1875, pp. 87-88, on his dislike of optimism. 61. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:40; letter to Gobineau, 20 December 1853, OC, 9:205. 62. Mill, "Civilization," CW, 18:119; "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America," [II] CW, 18:197. 63. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:388. 64. Tocqueville, L'ancien regime, OC, 2, pt. 1:216. 65. For example, Tocqueville to Kergorlay, [January] 1835, OC, 13, pt. 1:373. 66. Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:335. 67. See Tocqueville to Kergorlay, [January] 1835, OC, 13, pt. 1:373, for his condemnation of Louis-Phillipe; to Stoffels, 24 July 1836 and 5 October 1836, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:428-35, for praise of the July Monarchy. Correspondence with Senior, 1:18, is the last example of praise for it, or at least of its capacity for internal reform, that I have been able to find (January 1838). By 1839 he is opposed. On the likelihood of revolution, see his letter to Le siecle of 3 January 1843, and his famous speech of 1847. 68. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 2:8; letter to Beaumont, 27 February 1858, OC, 8, pt. 3:543. 69. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:86-87. 70. Though of course this does contradict his earlier condemnation of the regime. If the July Monarchy was a hopeless case, then a revolution that did not change the hopeless situation was of no great importance. Perhaps absence makes the heart grow fonder both for old lovers and old regimes. 71. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:87. 72. Tocqueville, Correspondence with Senior, 1:89-90, Tocqueville's note. 73. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:87. This statement, however, is partially

Notes to Pages 122-127

197

contradicted by the Correspondence with Senior, 1:89-90, where Tocqueville hopes at least to mitigate, although not cure, the evils facing France. 74. Tocqueville to Francis Lieber, 1 September 1856, OC, 7:179. 75. Tocqueville to Freslon, 11 September 1857, OC, Beaumont ed., 6:406-7. 76. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 21 July 1848, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:457-59. 77. Tocqueville to Corcelle, 13 May 1852, OC, 15, pt. 2:55. See also to Bouchitte, 23 September 1853, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:299-300; to Hubert de Tocqueville, 25 March 1854, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:323. 78. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 27 February 1858, OC, 8, pt. 3:543. 79. Ibid., 13 January 1852, pt. 3:12. 80. Or even earlier. See, for example, Burckhardt to Schauenberg, 14 September 1849, flrfe/e, 3:112. 81. Though we should remember that France remained the archetype of Europe, and Tocqueville's warnings about democracy had always been general. 82. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 24 July 1889, p. 248. 83. Ibid., 17 November 1876, p. 97. 84. Ibid., 13 April 1882, p. 178. The examples could easily be multiplied. See the letters to von Preen for a multitude of evidence of Burckhardt's political pessimism. 85. Ibid., 3 July 1870, p. 18; Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 283; citation in Riisen, Historische Prozesse, pp. 214-15. 86. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 18 February 1852, OC, 8, pt.3:26; to Freslon, 12 January 1858, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:481. Interestingly, Tocqueville reverted here to purely classical language. Whereas earlier he had spoken of education as well as nature in describing the French, as a good modern humanist, he now returned to the old language of corruption pure and simple and abandoned historicism to argue that the French were better than the Romans. 87. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 16 November 1857, OC, 8, pt. 3:512. 88. Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, pp. 65-67. 89. Ibid., and see chapter 1. 90. Mill to Edwin L. Godkin, 24 May 1865, CW, 16:1056. 91. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:460. 92. Mill to Chapman, 12 January 1865, CW, 15:764-65; and see also Mill to Fawcett, 5 February 1860, CW, 14:672. 93. Mill to Edward Herford, 22 January 1850, CW, 14:45. Note the characteristic modern humanist association of education (intelligence) and morality in this statement. 94. Mill to Charles A. Cummings, 23 February 1863, CW, 15:843. 95. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:458-59. 96. Kaegi, Eine Biographie, 2:377-458. 97. Ibid., 7:127-63. 98. Burckhardt to Schauenberg, 28 February 1846, Brief e, 2:209. 99. Burckhardt to Kinkel, 13 June 1842, Brief e, 1:201. 100. Burckhardt to Schauenberg, 28 February 1846, Brief e, 2:209-10. 101. Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, p. 269. 102. Burckhardt to Schauenberg, 28 February 1846, Brief e, 2:209-11; to Johannes Roggenbach, 12 December 1838, Brief e, 1:97. 103. Burckhardt to Brenner, 16 March 1856, Brief e, 3:248; Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 227. On the threat to culture, see chapters 2 and 3.

198

Notes to Pages 127-133

104. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 66. 105. See the various essays Mill wrote in 1838-39, esp. "Reorganization of the Reform Party," CW, 6:465-96. 106. Mill to Sterling, 28 September 1839, CW, 13:406; to Macvey Napier, 22 April 1840, CW, 13:430. 107. Mill to Napier, 30 July 1841, CW, 13:483. 108. Mill to Comte, 25 February 1842, CW, 13:503. 109. Mill, Diary, 13 April 1854, CW, 27:668. 110. Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 4 October 1837, OC, 13, pt. 1:479. 111. Ibid. 112. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Amerique," OC, 5, pt. 1:278. 113. Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 15 December 1850, OC, 13, pt. 2:230. 114. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, OC, 12:89. 115. Burckhardt to Friedrich von Tschudi, 16 March 1840, Briefe, 1:145. 116. Cited in Kaegi, Eine Biographic, 3:371, 5:47. 117. Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, p. 253. 118. Burckhardt to Andreas Heusler-Ryhiner, 19 January 1848, Briefs, 3:94. 119. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 31 May 1874, p. 75. 120. Ibid., 31 December 1870, p. 30. Felix Gilbert is probably correct in seeing Burckhardt's original choice of cultural history rather than political history, after the manner of his teacher Ranke, as motivated by presentist concerns, though Gilbert fails to spell out what those presentist concerns might have been. Perhaps we can see some clues to the young Burckhardt's choice in these late remarks. See Gilbert, "Jacob Burckhardt's Student Years," Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (April 1986): 249-74. The pedagogical strategy Burckhardt employed in Uber das Studium der Geschichte and his university and Gymnasium teaching are outside the scope of this work. 121. See Mommsen, "Jacob Burckhardt," in Rediscoveries, ed. John A. Hall, p. 52; Riisen, Historische Prozesse, pp. 212-13, 217; and chapter 4. 122. Burckhardt, Historische Fragments, p. 213. 123. Burckhardt to Arnold von Salis, 29 November 1871, Briefe, 5:144. 124. Tocqueville to Kergorlay, [January] 1835, OC, 13, pt. 1:373. 125. Tocqueville, "Discours sur la science politique" (1852), OC, 16:233. 126. Tocqueville to Stoffels, 24 July 1846, OC, Beaumont ed., 5:430-31. 127. Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique, OC, 1, pt. 2:300-301. 128. Tocqueville, "Voyage en Amerique," OC, 5, pt. 1:257. 129. Ibid. 130. Although Tocqueville thought that the kind of political education the French received at home fated them to be poor colonizers. See "La vocation coloniale de la France" (n.d.), OC, 16:38-39. 131. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 29 January 1851, OC, 8, pt. 2:369. 132. Tocqueville to Odilon Barrot, 18 July 1856, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:394-95. See also his letter to Stoffels, 9 March 1849, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:239-40. 133. Tocqueville to Beaumont, 27 February 1858, OC, 8, pt. 3:543-44. 134. Burckhardt, Briefe an von Preen, 13 April 1882, p. 179; to Schauenberg, 22 March 1847, Briefe, 3:60. 135. Tocqueville to Bouchitte, 11 October 1834, OC, Beaumont ed., 7:79-80; to Kergorlay, 29 June 1831, OC, pt. 1:226; 26 December 1836, pt. 1:432; "L'lnde," OC, 16:507.

Notes to Pages 133-136

199

136. For Mill's remarks in favor of educating the lower classes, see Mill to William Cox Bennett, December 1869, CW, 17:1666; to d'Eichthal, 21 May 1871,CW, 17:1821; Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:107; "Civilization," CW, 18:127-28. For his doubts, see "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America" [II], CW, 18:196; "On Liberty," CW, 18:274; "Sedgwick's Discourse," CW, 10:33. 137. Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," CW, 19:382; "Nature" (1874), CW, 10:409. It should be noted, however, that Mill expressed himself strongly against a "pedantocratie," feeling that a despotism of the instructed would end in stagnation on the model of Confucian China; see Mill to Comte, 25 February 1842, CW, 13:502; "Auguste Comte and Positivism," CW, 10:302-3. 138. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 2:208-9. 139. Mill, Logic, CW, 8:869. 140. See Mill's remarks on suffrage in the relevant section of chapter 3. 141. Mill to Thomas Hare, 11 January 1866, CW, 16:1138-39. 142. Mill to Cairnes, 16 November 1869, CW, 17:1663; to Philip Henry Rathbone, 26 December 1868, CW, 16:1532. 143. Mill to Fawcett, 24 October 1869, CW, 17:1659. Chapter 6 1. For example, see Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 6, 10; Harold Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (London: Unwin Books, 1962), p. 13; Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 5; Gall, "Liberalismus und 'biirgerliche Gesellschaft,'" Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 324. 2. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 5; Jean Dubois, Le vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 a 1872 (Paris: Labrousse, 1962), p. 69. 3. Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1949; New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 294. 4. Vincent Starzinger, Middlingness: Juste Milieu Political Theory in France and England, 1815-48 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965), p. xi. 5. Dieter Langewiesche and his group at the University of Bielefeld have produced a number of interesting essays on German liberalism in comparative perspective, and Langewiesche himself has arrived at some tentative conclusions that in part parallel those reached here. See Langewiesche, "Deutscher Liberalismus im europaischen Vergleich. Konzeption und Ergebnisse," in Langewiesche, ed., Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europaischen Vergleich (Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1988): 11-22. Significant comparative work has also been undertaken from a different perspective by James T. Kloppenberg, in Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 6. To give just one example, Lothar Gall attacks the Vormdrz German liberals because they had an incorrect understanding of German society, and contrasts them to contemporary French liberals and their correct understanding of French society. Yet Starzinger faults the French liberals for having the wrong picture of French society, lauding the English Whigs by comparison. Lothar Gall, Benjamin Constant: Seine politische Ideenwelt und der deutsche Vormdrz, Veroffentlichungen des Institut fur

200

Notes to Pages 137-141

europaische Geschichte 30 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1963) p. 56; Starzinger, Middlingness, pp.13, 74-79. This example could easily be multiplied: see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 59; Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), passim. 7. Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 154. 8. Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, p. 187. 9. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, pp. 6, 10. 10. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, pp.5, 10-11; James J. Sheehan, "Some Reflections on Liberalism in Comparative Perspective," in Deutschland und der Westen, ed. Henning Kohler, Studien zur europaischen Geschichte 15 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1984), p. 44. 11. Sheehan, whose work on German liberalism is a model in many other respects, is a prime example of this problem. See German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 28-30, 44, 88-91, 108. 12. The problem is well presented in Neumiiller's brilliant and largely unread work Liberalismus und Revolution, pp. 28-30. 13. For Rosenberg's research program, see the introduction to this volume. 14. Rosenberg, "Theologischer Rationalismus," pp. 27-28. 15. Ibid., pp. 29-30. Rosenberg also described one historical type of liberalism, which he called "vulgar liberalism." Vulgar liberalism was derived from the rationalist theology popular in certain German Protestant circles in the early nineteenth century, and reached its broadest expression in the so-called Lichtfreunde movement in Prussia. Rosenberg continued his investigations of liberalism in Rudolf Haym und die Anfange des klassischen Liberalismus, Historische Zeitschrift 31 (Berlin: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1933). 16. Absent from this list is economics. The extent to which particular economic theories, for example, laissez-faire or more broadly the free market, do in fact characterize liberals as opposed to other groups seems to me a doubtful question, which I hope to address at some future date. 17. An interesting corollary of this is that, from a European point of view, there is no such thing as an American liberal after 1820 or so, With the occasional throwback, such as Henry Adams or perhaps some of the pro-slavery theorists such as John Calhoun, I think this is correct. 18. This is related to the general fact that liberal discourses envisage revolutionary ends via purely reformist means. 19. They might, however, be included in liberalism by a weaker version of the exclusion principle that allowed those who thought universal suffrage desirable in itself, but only as a second-best choice, to be considered liberals. 20. Neumuller, Liberalismus und Revolution, pp. 218-19; Roger Henry Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), p. 39. 21. Neumuller, Liberalismus und Revolution, p. 83. 22. Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 90. 23. This minimum program is an amalgam of the definitions of liberalism used by Gareth Stedman Jones and Thomas Nipperdey. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866 (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1983), pp. 290-93; Jones, as cited in Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 76. Much of this program, but not all of it, could be subsumed under the heading of negative liberties, with which liberalism

Notes to Pages 141-142

201

has been too often equated. The relative importance of negative versus positive liberties of one sort or another within the universe of liberal discourses is perhaps a way of distinguishing different liberal dialects from one another. 24. Thus it is unfair for Sheehan to accuse the German liberals of failing at constitutional reform when at least some of them, as he himself notes, did not want further constitutional reform, being satisfied with what they considered the achievement of their program. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 132; cf. Alan Kahan, "The Victory of German Liberalism? Rudolf Haym, Moderate Liberalism, and Bismarck," Central European History 22 (March 1990): 57-88. Of course it may be argued that the great failure of German liberalism is the creation of the universal North German Confederation and later Reichstag suffrage. Rudolf Haym, among notable contemporaries, took this position. While there is much to be said for this point of view, liberal acquiescence to universal suffrage is not ruled out by the definitions I have given. 25. Giinter Hollenberg, Englisches Interesse am Kaiserreich: Die Attraktivitat Preussen-Deutschlandsfur konservative und liberate Kreise in Grossbritannien, 1860-1914, Veroffentlichungen des Instituts fur europaische Geschichte Mainz 70 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974), p. 199. See chapter 3 for Mill's and Tocqueville's admiration for Prussia. 26. Although Michael Gugel is correct that Bismarck came closer to liberal desires than many choose to admit. See Mommsen, "Der deutsche Liberalismus," p. 82. What else can Wehler's "Bonapartism" thesis really mean? 27. This theory of liberal dualism is developed for German liberalism by Neumuller, and I have adapted it to fit all European liberalism. Neumuller himself appropriated the concept from K. D. Bracher, cited in Neumuller, Liberalismus und Revolution, pp. 18, 289. It would be interesting to try to expand it to cover all political thought in the period 1830-1870. Then reactionaries would be those who wished to go backwards to some past; those with reformist means and reformist ends would be conservatives; those with revolutionary means and revolutionary ends democrats or socialists; and so on. 28. For examples, see Mommsen, "Der deutsche Liberalismus," p. 83; Rosenberg, "Theologischer Rationalismus," p. 34. 29. Or at least he is not acting in a liberal way; he has begun to speak a non-liberal language, presumably under the pressure of events, as indeed happened to some left-liberals in crisis situations, a fact that reveals the inherent difficulties of liberal discourse in dealing with revolutionary crises. 30. This is true even of German liberalism, despite the contrary example of Kant. See Theodor Schieder, The State and Society in Our Times: Studies in the History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, trans. C. A. M. Sym (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), p. 7; Neumuller, Liberalismus und Revolution, passim. 31. The passage of the Indemnity Bill for Bismarck is an example of this. I am further willing to argue that the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, insofar as it was a liberal creation, was not a revolution. Rather, it was an example of the classic liberal paradox: the employment of a moderate, reformist means, a parliament, to achieve a revolutionary end, the unification of Germany. The actions of the Rhenish liberals lead by Camphausen and Hansemann in March 1848 tend to confirm this. Of course it could be argued that in Germany in 1848 a national parliament was in fact a revolutionary means. The case is doubtful, and provides grounds for further investigation of the peculiarities of German liberalism.

202

Notes to Pages 142-147

32. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 90; Starzinger, Middlingness, p. 9. 33. Asa Briggs, "The Language of Class in Early Nineteenth-Century England," in Essays in Labour History, ed. Asa Briggs and John Saville (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), p. 61; T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 193. 34. Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 39-40; Neumiiller, Liberalismus und Revolution, p. 188; Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 26. 35. Neumiiller, Liberalismus und Revolution. 36. It is an oversimplification to assume that liberal historiography merely affirms 1789 while condemning 1793. Both affirmation and condemnation are highly nuanced from one liberal writer to another, and liberals are far from treating 1789 itself as a unit. See ibid., pp. 37-38. 37. Obviously aristocratic liberalism and other humanist-descended dialects seem to fit this pattern, as does even the apparently more inclusive rhetoric of a Samuel Smiles or a Guizot. 38. The aristocratic liberals are a notable exception to this generalization, insofar as they do imagine in great detail, and without complete rejection, the consequences of an egalitarian society that most other liberals could hardly take seriously except as a bogeyman. 39. For a description of the political discourses of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, see Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 40. Neumuller, Liberalismus und Revolution. 41. So incontrovertible that even the iconoclastic Eley leaves this idol intact. Eley and Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History, pp. 77-78 n.4. 42. Arblaster, Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, p. 82; Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, pp. 37, 193. In France one can point to Constant and the Doctrinaires. The German version is presented in Schieder, The State and Society in our Times, p. 55, to cite one example among many. 43. In Germany, where one would expect tensions between artisan industry and developing capitalism to arise latest because of the relative backwardness of German industrialization, and where the educated were held in greatest respect, such tensions were manifest quite early. See Rainer Koch, "Staat oder Gemeinde? Zu einem politischen Zielkonflikt in der burgerlichen Bewegung des 19. Jhs.," Historische Zeitschrift 236 (January 1983): 77; Lothar Gall, "'Ich wiinschte ein Burger zu sein': Zum Selbstverstandnis des deutschen Biirgertums im 19. Jahrhundert," Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 609-23. 44. Vincent notes that in England the 1860s saw a shift away from arguments for the right of property to govern in favor of arguments for the right of education to govern, and considers Mill instrumental in effecting the shift. But he regards the beneficiaries as "congruent" in either case, and thus largely misses the importance of Mill's attacks on the commercial spirit, and the significance of his putative influence. I do not think that Mill's contemporaries, as opposed to the fin-de-siecle generation, took much interest in the anti-middle-class aspects of his thought. See Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, pp. 152-53.

Notes to Pages 147-149

203

45. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, pp. 190-91. 46. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, p. ix; Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, pp. 9, 12; Sheehan, "Some Reflections on Liberalism in Comparative Perspective," p. 51. These tensions were not only a phenomenon of the later nineteenth century but were present earlier as well. Thus I disagree with Mommsen's position that tensions between Bildung und Besitz arose only in the 1880s with the spread of capital-intensive factory-based industrialism. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen "Der deutsche Liberalismus zwischen 'klassenloser Biirgergesellschaft' und 'organisiertem Kapitalismus': Zu einigen neueren Liberalismusinterpretationen," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 20 (January 1978): 87. It is probably right to assume that the alienation between sections of the intelligentsia and the middle class became more intense and widespread after 1870, but they originated long before. 47. On France, see Starzinger, Middlingness, p. 13; Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, p. 5. On Germany, see Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 30, 88-89,338; Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, pp. 138-39. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harvest Books, n.d.), p. 156. 48. Gall, "'Ich wiinschte ein Burger zu sein,'" pp. 612-14, 620-21. Gall himself casts doubt on the efficacy of the notion of Selbststandigkeit as binding glue when he remarks that the "educated," presumably in contrast to the commercial middle class, had never believed that all those who were independent in the Kantian sense—that is, potentially everyone—should really be entitled to full citizenship on that basis alone. See ibid., pp. 617-18. 49. Obviously, the forms of property, the relative importance of capital-intensive industry, and so on changed considerably between 1830 and 1870.1 agree with Mommsen that most liberalisms responded to the kinds of property that were actually in existence at the time rather than remaining mired in a pre-industrial outlook, unable to adapt to modernity. See Mommsen, "Der deutsche Liberalismus," p. 77. For an opposing view, see Gall, "Liberalismus und 'biirgerliche Gesellschaft,'" p. 334. 50. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866, p. 298. 51. Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 58. 52. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, pp. 90, 265; Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism, p. 169; Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, pp. 8-9; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866, p. 288. 53. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, p. 265. 54. Mommsen, "Der deutsche Liberalismus," pp. 89-90. 55. Yet even those who argue strongly for the diversity of the middle class frequently treat liberalism as though it were a basically unitary doctrine, and one that had particular difficulty adapting to changing social circumstances at that; thus Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 75. 56. German liberalism, as has been noted elsewhere, was perhaps the liberal movement least successful in building coalitions, a fact that partially accounts for its weakness. After 1870 it experienced difficulty in maintaining what little success at coalition it had had. Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 269; Schieder, The State and Society in Our Times, pp. 55-56; Koch, "Staat oder Gemeinde,"

204

Notes to Pages 150-154

p. 77; Mommsen, "Der deutsche Liberalismus," p. 88; Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit', Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party. In France the liberal elements in Opportunism slowly succumbed. 57. Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 190; Starzinger, Middlingness, p. 13. 58. Peter Marsh, "Conscience and the Conduct of Government in NineteenthCentury Britain: An Introduction," in The Conscience of the Victorian State, ed. Peter Marsh (Syracuse, NY: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 11; Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, p. 175; Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, p. 113; Briggs, "The Language of Class in early Nineteenth-Century England," p. 72; Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, pp. 7, 12-13. 59. Starzinger, Middlingness, p. 48. 60. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, p. xxx. 61. On liberalism's need for a broad social base, see Black bourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 77; Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, pp. 124, 150. If a liberal movement took power on a narrow basis, as the July Monarchy did in France, the resulting regime was weak and unstable. 62. Guizot was quite happy to envisage past class wars, from which reason, as presently embodied in liberalism and the middle class, had emerged the victor. But no present or future struggle could be justified. 63. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, p. 17. See also Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, p. 184; Starzinger, Middlingness, p. 85. 64. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, pp. xl-xli; see also pp. 164-65, 252-53. Vincent explicitly disagrees with Bagehot's contemporary judgment (and for that matter with Mill's) that the middle class was really politically dominant. Ibid., p. 2. 65. Rosenberg, "Theologischer Rationalismus," p. 29. 66. For authors who routinely consider liberalism the party of movement, see, for example, Gall, Benjamin Constant, p. 42; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866, p. 286. 67. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, p. 78; Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, pp. 79-80; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866, p. 287; Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, p. xxxv. More typical of nineteenth-century liberalism is Montalembert's wonder at finding in Ollivier a "real liberal" among the democrats. See Theodore Zeldin, Emile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire of Napoleon HI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 56. 68. It might be argued that the French July Monarchy is an exception to this general statement, which is why I write "maintain" rather than "reach." But even the July Monarchy was chiefly a landowners' cartel, and its fall proved how indifferent or hostile the vast mass of the middle classes was to it. Tocqueville may have regarded it as the creature of the middle class, but surely the widespread disgust at its corruption, which Tocqueville shared, was an expression of middle-class morality. 69. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, p. xv. 70. Ibid., p. 32; Rosenberg, "Theologischer Rationalismus," p. 40; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 296-97.

Notes to Pages 154-160

205

71. This was the case even in Germany. See Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 101. The only perspective from which it is justifiable to speak of 1848 as a watershed is the history of socialism, in which a case can be made that 1848 really is a turning point. 72. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, p. xv. 73. Ibid., pp. 9-23; Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life, pp. 13-22. Heyck's discussion of the differences between men of letters and intellectuals is fascinating but would require too much time to go into here. 74. Michael P. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology. French solidarism, perhaps analogous to the new liberalism in England in some ways, awaits its definitive study. 75. For the liberal minimum program, see my discussion earlier in this chapter. 76. Though most of Burckhardt's commentary on current affairs was contained in his correspondence or in his posthumously published Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, whose influence, if any, falls outside the 1830-1870 period under discussion. 77. See Mill to Tocqueville, 11 May 1840, CW, 13:434. 78. Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, pp. 102, 147. One of the paradoxes of aristocratic liberalism is how other thinkers envied them a position they themselves considered most unenviable. Thus Leslie Stephen regretted that no one of his generation could do what Mill and George Eliot had done for the preceding generation, that is, speak and be heard by a large non-academic public without becoming irrelevant to the masses or appearing ignorant in the eyes of specialists. Yet it is exaggerating only a little to say that the public that in retrospect was heaven to Leslie Stephen had been John Stuart Mill's idea of hell, that the audience that Stephen retrospectively found ideal Mill thought had already disappeared. If it seems as if mid-nineteenth-century England ought to have been the aristocratic liberal paradise, both intellectually and in terms of practical politics, Mill at least does not appear to have noticed it. See Heyck, The Transformation of Victorian Intellectual Life, p. 230. 79. See the discussion of aristocratic liberal views of education in chapter 5. 80. Pierre Bourdieu, "Flaubert's Point of View," in Literature and Social Practice, ed. Philippe Desan, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Wendy Griswold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 218-19. Mannheim's somewhat self-contradictory remarks can be found in "On Conservative Thought," in From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 183-86, and Ideology and Utopia, pp. 153-60. 81. There had long been many of these unemployed or underemployed intellectuals in the "Grub Streets" of Europe, as Robert Darnton's work on the French Enlightenment has shown, but the period from 1815 and especially 1830 onwards witnessed a vast increase in their number. 82. Honore de Balzac, cited in Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 4. Although I have borrowed liberally from Seigel's insights into bohemia where they seem to me to cohere with Bourdieu's vision, it should be noted that Seigel's definition of bohemia, emphasizing youth and marginality, is intended to be considerably more restrictive than Bourdieu's embrace of the whole of the independent intelligentsia within the broad limits of bohemia. For Bourdieu, Flaubert is a typical example of one kind of bohemian,

206

Notes to Pages 160-164

whereas for Seigel he is not a bohemian at all. For Mannheim, Flaubert would be an archetypal example of the independent intellectual. 83. Ibid., pp. 11,401. 84. Ibid., p. 55; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 155-56. 85. Bourdieu, "Flaubert's Point of View," p. 220. For Mannheim this indeterminacy allowed a relative disinterestedness that was for him of crucial political significance. Further discussion of this point would take us far from aristocratic liberalism, however. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., pp. 220-21. 88. Mannheim, "On Conservative Thought," pp. 183-84. 89. This is more in line with Bourdieu's view of bohemia than Mannheim's view of the unattached intelligentsia. 90. See Seigel, Bohemian Paris, p. 55. 91. Mannheim, "On Conservative Thought," p. 184. By contrast, as so often in Mannheim's unfinished and ambiguous work, Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville seem to refute his contention that "the best chance for the achievement of comprehensive views of the whole course of history appears when intellectuals . . . ally themselves with the aims of real existing social forces," as of course the aristocratic liberals were unable to do. See Ibid., p. 184 n. 3. Perhaps it is Mannheim, the member of the German Social Democratic party, who is speaking here. 92. Mannheim, "On Conservative Thought," p. 186. He takes a different position in Ideology and Utopia, p. 160, however. 93. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 155. Here Mannheim's vision of education as the bond uniting the socially unattached intelligentsia performs a role analogous to Bourdieu's notion of the possession of "cultural capital" as a hallmark of bohemia. 94. Ibid., p. 159. 95. Mannheim, "On Conservative Thought," p. 186. 96. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 158, 160. 97. Bourdieu, "Flaubert's Point of View," pp. 224-25. 98. Naturally I do not mean to suggest that all alienated fin-de-siecle types were either aristocratic liberals or influenced by humanism. 99. One thinks of Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos' Letter, in which the protagonist, portrayed as a brilliant philosophical student of Bacon as well as an eminent warrior, has lost all ability to communicate, all use of language, as symptomatic of fin-de-siecle alienation. 100. Stephen Holmes makes a similar point about the pre-capitalist—that is, humanist—roots of Benjamin Constant's thought, although the contribution of humanist language to Constant is much less than to the aristocratic liberals. See Holmes, Benjamin Constant, p. 261. 101. Boesche draws attention to this recurrent problem in The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 17.

Selected Bibliography Primary Sources For Tocqueville and Mill, I have used the modern editions of the collected works wherever possible, falling back upon the second Beaumont edition of Tocqueville (1866-67) where necessary. In the case of Burckhardt, I have consulted the more recent editions of his work in preference to the Gesamtausgabe. My references to Burckhardt's letters come from either the complete letters, edited by Max Burckhardt under the title Briefs, or else, for the sake of convenience, from the Briefe an von Preen. References to Burckhardt's unpublished "Lectures on the Age of Frederick the Great" are made directly to the manuscript in the custody of the Basel Staatsarchiv. In all cases, the first reference in the notes gives the date of writing or publication as appropriate, with the exception of references to Burckhardt's Historische Fragments, which derive from lectures delivered over such a long period (1865-1885), without specification in the text, as to make dating pointless. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. Burckhardt, Jacob. Jacob Burckhardts Briefe an seinen Freund Friedrich von Preen, 1864-1893. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922. . Briefe. Edited by Max Burckhardt. 8 vols. Basel: Schwabe and Co., 1949-. . Historische Fragmente. Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler, 1957. . Uber das Studium der Geschichte. Edited by Peter Ganz. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1982. . "Vorlesungen iiber die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse." Basel Staatsarchiv, PA 207, 171, 7. . Jacob Burckhardts Vorlesung iiber die Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters in den Nachschriften seiner Zuhorer. Edited by Ernst Ziegler. Basel: Schwabe and Co., 1974. Mill, John Stuart. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Edited by John M. Robson. 33 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963-91. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Oeuvres completes. Edited by G. de Beaumont. 9 vols. Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1866-67. . Oeuvres completes. Edited by J. P. Mayer. Paris: Gallimard, 1951-. Secondary Sources Alexander, Edward. Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. 207

208

Selected Bibliography

Anschutz, R. P. The Philosophy of J. S. Mill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Arblaster, Anthony. The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Aron, Raymond. "La definition liberate de la liberte II: Alexis de Tocqueville et Karl Marx." European Journal of Sociology 5 (1964): 159-89. . Les etapes de la pensee sociologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Baker, Keith Michael. Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Bellamy, Richard, ed. Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice. London: Routledge, 1990. Berger, Fred R. Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Birnbaum, Pierre. Sociologie de Tocqueville. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970. Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Boesche, Roger. "The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville." History of Political Thought 2 (1981): 495-524. . "Tocqueville and Le Commerce.'''' Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April 1983): 277-92. . The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Bolger, R. R., ed. Classical Influences on Western Thought, 1650-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bowie, John. Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. Bradley, Ian. The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism. London: Faber and Faber, 1980. Briggs, Asa. Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851-67. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Briggs, Asa, and John Saville, eds. Essays in Labour History. London: Macmillan, 1967. Brinton, Crane. English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Brogan, H. Tocqueville. London: Collins and Fontana, 1973. Butler, Eliza M. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. Burrow, J. W. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. . Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Chisick, Harvey. The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes toward the Education of the Lower Classes in Eighteenth-Century France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Coleman, John. "John Stuart Mill on the French Revolution." History of Political Thought 4 (February 1983): 94-114. Cowling, Maurice. Mill and Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.

Selected Bibliography

209

Culler, A. Dwight. The Victorian Mirror of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Cumming, R. D. "Mill's History of His Ideas." Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (April 1964): 235-56. Desan, Philippe, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Wendy Griswold, eds. Literature and Social Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Drescher, Seymour. "Tocqueville's Two Democracies." Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (April 1964): 201-16. . Tocqueville and England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. . Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968. Drescher, Seymour, ed. Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968. Dubois, Jean. Le vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 a 1872: A trovers les oeuvres des ecrivains, les revues et les journaux. Paris: Larousse, 1962. Duncan, Graeme. Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Eisenstadt, Abraham S., ed. Reconsidering Tocqueville's Democracy in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Erbe, Walter, and Paul Luchtenberg, eds. Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus. Friedrich Naumann-Stiftung zur Politik and Zeitgeschichte. Vol. 10. Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966. Faber, Karl-Georg, and Christian Meier, eds. Historische Prozesse. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978. Freeden, Michael. The New Liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Fussell, Paul. The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Blake. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Gall, Lothar. Benjamin Constant: Seine politische Ideenwelt und der deutschen Vormarz. Veroffentlichungen des Instituts fur europaische Geschichte Mainz. Vol. 30. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1963. . "Liberalismus und 'biirgerliche Gesellschaft': Zu Charakter und Entwicklung der liberalen Bewegung in Deutschland." Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 324-56. Gargan, Edward T. Alexis de Tocqueville: The Critical Years, 1848-51. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955. . "The Formation of Tocqueville's Historical Thought." Review of Politics 24 (1962): 48-61. . "Tocqueville and the Problem of Historical Prognosis." American Historical Review 68 (1963): 332-45. . De Tocqueville. New York: Hillary House, 1965. Gay, Peter. Style in History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Gilbert, Felix. "Jacob Burckhardt's Student Years." Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (April 1986): 249-74. . History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Girard, M. Le liberalisme en France de 1814 a 1848: Doctrine et mouvement. Paris: Centre de Documentation universitaire, 1966. Gitermann, Valentin. Jacob Burckhardt als politischer Denker. Institut fur europaische Geschichte. Vol. 19. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1957.

210

Selected Bibliography

Goldstein, Doris. "The Religious Beliefs of Alexis de Tocqueville." French Historical Studies 1 (December 1960): 279-93. . "Alexis de Tocqueville's Concept of Citizenship." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108 (February 1964): 39-53. . Trial of Faith: Religion and Politics in Tocqueville's Thought. New York: Elsevier Scientific Press, 1975. Gugel, Michael. Industrieller Aufstieg und burgerliche Herrschaft. Cologne: PahlRugenstein, 1975. Gray, John. Mill on Liberty: A Defence. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Hall, John A., ed. Rediscoveries: Some Neglected Modern European Political Thinkers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Halliday, R. J. John Stuart Mill London: Allen and Unwin, 1976. Hamburger, Joseph. Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Hardtwig, Wolfgang. Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Alteuropa undmoderner Welt: Jacob Burckhardt in seiner Zeit. Gottingen, Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1974. Harvie, Christopher. The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy, 1860-86. London: Allen Lane, 1976. Hearnshaw, F. J. C., ed. The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1930. Hereth, Michael. Alexis de Tocqueville: Die Gefahrdung der Freiheit in der Demokratie. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammler, 1979. Herr, Richard. Tocqueville and the Old Regime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Heyck, T. W. The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Victorian Minds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. . On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. Hollenberg, Giinter. Englisches Interesse am Kaiserreich: Die Attraktivitat PreussenDeutschlands fur konservative und liberale Kreise in Grossbritannien, 1860-1914. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974. Holmes, Stephen. Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Hont, Istvan, and Michael IgnatiefF, eds. Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Jardin, Andre. Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859. Paris: Hachtte, 1984. Kaegi, Werner. Jacob Burckhardt: Eine Biographic. 8 vols. Basel: Schwabe and Co., 1947-85. . Europaische Horizonte in Denken Jacob Burckhardts: Drei Studien. Basel: Schwabe, 1962. Kahan, Alan. "Tocqueville's Two Revolutions." Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (October 1985): 585-96. . "The Victory of German Liberalism? Rudolf Haym, Liberalism, and Bismarck." Central European History 22 (March 1990): 57 88.

Selected Bibliography

211

Kern, P. B. "Universal Suffrage without Democracy: Thomas Hare and John Stuart Mill." Review of Politics 34 (July 1972): 306-23. Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York: Harper and Row, 1961. Laine, Michael. Bibliography of Works on John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Laine, Michael, and John M. Robson. James and John Stuart Mill: Papers of the Centenary Conference. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Lamberti, Jean-Claude. La notion d'individualisme chez Tocqueville. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970. . Tocqueville et les deux democraties. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1983. Lamer, Reinhard J. Der englische Parlamentarismus in der deutschen politischen Theorie im Zeitalter Bismarcks (1857-1890): Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte des deutschen Parlamentarismus. Historische Studien 387. Liibeck: Matthiessen Verlag, 1963. Langewiesche, Dieter, ed. Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europaischen Vergleich. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft. vol. 79. Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1988. . Liberalismus in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988. Laski, Harold J. The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation. London: Unwin Books, 1971. Le May, G. H. L. The Victorian Constitution: Conventions, Usages, and Contingencies. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979. Lively, Jack. The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Loewith, Karl. Jacob Burckhardt: Der Mensch inmitten der Geschichte. Lucerne: Vita Nova, 1936. . Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Logue, William. From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870-1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983. Lukacs, John. "The Last Days of Alexis de Tocqueville." Catholic Historical Review 50 (July 1964): 155-70. Maclntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville et la nature de la democratic. Paris: Julliard, 1982. Mannheim, Karl. From Karl Mannheim. Edited by Kurt H. Wolff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. . Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harvest Books, n.d. Marsh, Peter, ed. The Conscience of the Victorian State. Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979. Mayer, Arno J. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. Mayer, J. P. Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Study in Political Science. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. McClelland, Charles E. The German Historians and England: A Study in

212

Selected Bibliography

Nineteenth-Century Views. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1971. McCloskey, H. J. "Mill's Liberalism." Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1963): 143-56. . John Stuart Mill: A Critical Study. London: Macmillan, 1971. Meinecke, Friedrich. Ranks und Burckhardt. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1948. Mommsen, Wilhelm. Grosse und Versagen des deutschen Biirgertums: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Bewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts, insbesondere zur Revolution, 1848-49. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1964. Mommsen, Wolfgang. "Der deutsche Liberalismus zwischen 'klassenloser Biirgergesellschaft' und 'organisiertem Kapitalismus': Zu einigen neueren Liberalismusinterpetationen." Geschichte und Gesellschaft 20 (January 1978): 75-90. Morley, John. Nineteenth-Century Essays. Selected by Peter Stansky. Classics of British Historical Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Mueller, Iris. John Stuart Mill and French Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956. Neumann, Carl. Jacob Burckhardt. Munich: Verlag F. Bruckmann, 1927. Neumuller, Michael. Liberalismus und Revolution: Das Problem der Revolution in der deutschen liberalen Geschichtsschreibung des 19. Jahrhunderts. Diisseldorf: Padagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1973. Nipperdey, Thomas. Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866: Burgerwelt und starker Staat. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983. Orr, Linda. "Tocqueville et 1'histoire incomprehensible: L'ancien regime et la Revolution." Poetique 13 (February 1982): 51-70. Packe, Michael St. John. The Life of John Stuart Mill. New York: Capricorn Books, 1970. Pappe, H. O. "Mill and Tocqueville." Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (April 1964): 217-34. Pierson, G. W. Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. Plamenatz, John. The Revolutionary Movement in France, 1815-1871. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. . Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Quaker, T. H. "John Stuart Mill, Disciple of Tocqueville." Western Political Quarterly 13 (December 1960): 880-89. Redier, A. Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville. Paris: Perrin, 1925. Rees, J. C. Mill and His Early Critics. Leicester: University College Press, 1956. Robson, J. M. The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968. Rosenberg, Hans. Rudolf Haym und die Anfdnge des klassischen Liberalismus. Historische Zeitschrift Beiheft 31. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1933. . Politische Denkstromungen im deutschen Vormdrz. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft. vol. 3. Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Rupprecht, 1972. Rothblatt, Sheldon. Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1976. Ruggiero, Guido de. The History of European Liberalism. Translated by R. G. Collingwood. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1981. Ryan, Alan. /. S. Mill. London: Routledgc and Kegan Paul, 1974.

Selected Bibliography

213

Sainte-Beuve. Causeries du lundi. Vol. 5. Paris: Gamier, n.d. Salomon, Albert. "Tocqueville, 1959." Social Research 26 (1959): 449-70. Schieder, Theodor. The State and Society in Our Times: Studies in the History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Translated by C. A. M. Sym. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962. Schieder, Wolfgang, ed. Liberalismus in der Gesellschaft des deutschen Vormdrz. Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1983. Schleifer, James T. The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Schneewind, J. B., ed. Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968. Seidman, Steven, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Seigel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris, Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930. New York: Viking, 1986. Semmel, Bernard. John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Sheehan, James J. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Smith, Bruce James. Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke, and Tocqueville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Soltau, Roger Henry. French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Russell and Russell, 1959. Srbik, Heinrich Ritter von. Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart. 2 vols. Salzburg: Mueller, 1951. Starzinger, Vincent E. Middlingness: Juste Milieu Political Theory in France and England, 1815-1848. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965. Stephen, Leslie. The English Utilitarians. 3 vols. London: Duckworth, 1900. Stillinger, Jack, ed. The Early Draft of John Stuart M fill's Autobiography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961. Ten, C. L. "Mill and Liberty." Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 47-68. . Mill on Liberty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Thompson, Dennis F. John Stuart Mill and Representative Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Turner, Frank. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Vincent, John. The Formation of the British Liberal Party. New York: Scribner's, 1966. Waszek, Norbert. The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel's Account of Civil Society. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1973. . Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987. Weintraub, Karl J. Visions of Culture: Voltaire, Guizot, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Weitman, Sasha R. "The Sociological Thesis of Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution.' "Social Research 33 (1966): 389-406. Wenzel, Johannes. Jacob Burckhardt in der Krise seiner Zeit. Berlin: VEB deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1967.

214

Selected Bibliography

Wettstein, Gertrud. Frankreich und England im Leben und Werk Jacob Burckhardts. Zurich: W. Weiss, Affoltern am Albis, 1957. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Wiener, Martin J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Willey, Basil. Nineteenth-Century Studies. London: Chatto and Windus, 1949. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Zeitlin, Irving M. Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Zeldin, Theodore. Emile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire of Napoleon III. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Zetterbaum, Marvin. "Tocqueville: Neutrality and the Use of History." American Political Science Review 58 (1964): 611-21. . Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.

Index

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg aristocratic liberal, 4, 48, 156 Adams, Henry, 200n.l7 Alexander, Edward, 8, 123 America. See also Democracy archetype of modernity, 11-12, 40, 46, 103 education, 128, 131-32 false egalitarianism, 70 humanism and, 82-83, 85, 89, 93 ideal type, 40 incommensurable with antiquity, 82-83 lessons, 131-32 middle class dominates, 37, 44, 46, 47, 169n.4 Mill's opinion of, 53, 124 money-grabbing, 37, 53 not classless, 8 not over-centralized, 63, 115 public opinion dominates, 66-68 slaveholders, 134 stability, 47 Tocqueville on, 48, 69, 122 tyranny of the majority, 67-68 Anderson, Perry, 151 Anschauung (contemplation). See also Modern humanism: active vs. contemplative life consolation, 127 diversity and, 105 historical study and, 39, 129 Arblaster, Anthony, 137 Aristocracy. See also Class admiration for, 48 aristocratic liberalism and, 4-5, 159 army as, 78

bohemia and, 160 class straggle and, 36 definition, 48 England, 12, 44 finished, 16, 18, 23-24, 41, 93 individuality and, 102 inferior to democracy, 120 isolation of, 36 labor, 134 liberalism and, 142, 150, 151 middle class and, 36, 48 natural strength of, 112 public opinion and, 20 transition to democracy, 18, 22-23 wealth and, 42 Aristocratic liberalism choice of examples, 4, 6-8 definition of, 4—6 English, 156 European scope of, 4, 135-36 marginal, 155-56, 157-58 social context of, 158-63 strategic type of liberalism, 4, 9-10 today, 164 typical of liberalism in some respects, 156, 157 Aristotle. See also Civic humanism; Classical humanism; Humanism; Modern humanism aristocratic liberals and, 83 categories, 85 elitism, 83, 85 humanism, 5 Ethics, 83 Mill on, 95 mixed government, 83 215

216

Index

Aristotle (continued) nineteenth century, 90 Politics, 83, 95 Rhetoric, 83 stability and virtue, 86 teleology, 5, 83, 84, 85, 101-2 Tocqueville and, 188n.8 Weber, Max, and, 163 Arnim, Bettina von, 6 Arnold, Matthew, 82 Bagehot, Walter as aristocratic liberal, 4, 156, 189n.30 as conservative, 137 Baudelaire, Charles, 162 Bentham, Jeremy influence on Mill, 12-13, 120, 127, 153 and utilitarianism, 107-8 Bildung. See Education; Individuality Bismarck, Otto von Innenpolitik of, 79 liberalism and, 142-43 social legislation, 77 Boeckh, August, 7 Boesche, Roger, 8, 82, 187n.6 Bohemia aristocratic liberalism and, 160-63 definition, 160 fin-de-siecle, 163 interpretations, 161-62 Boulanger crisis, 79 Bourdieu, Pierre, 159-63 Bourgeoisie. See Middle class(es) Brentano, Lujo, 154 Brinton, Crane, 137 Broglie, A.-C.-L.-V. de, 142 Burckhardt, Jacob correspondence: to Gottfried Kinkel, 21-22, 112, 114, 120, 126; to Johanna Kinkel, 50, 66; to Hermann Schauenberg, 21, 52, 101, 123, 12627, 133; others, 83, 95, 101-2, 127, 129-30 German intellectual tradition of, 7 interpretations of, 7 works cited: Briefe (see Correspondence); Briefe an von Preen, 43, 46,

51, 53, 56, 58--60, 62, 67-68, 7071, 75-80, 117-18, 120-21, 123, 130, 133; Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters, 14, 16, 18, 20-21, 24, 26-28, 30, 33; Griechische Kulturgeschichte, 190n.48, 194n.5; Historische Fragmente, 16, 18, 20, 28, 32, 36, 38, 42, 43, 45-46, 50-51, 54, 61, 64, 66-68, 74, 79, 104, 117, 119, 120-21, 127, 130; liber das Studium der Geschichte, 12, 14-16, 18, 29, 33, 36-37, 39, 43, 45-46, 49-52, 55, 59, 60-64, 66, 69, 7172, 74, 76-79, 95-99, 101-2, 105, 108, 112, 115, 119-20, 123, 127, 129; "Vorlesungen iiber die Zeit Friedrich der Grosse," 11, 16-20, 22, 26-27, 29, 31-33, 62, 111 Burns, J. H., 8 Burke, Edmund, 23, 27, 28 Carlyle, Thomas. See also Mill, John Stuart: correspondence clerisy, 48 conservative, 137 on French Revolution, 12-14 Civic humanism. See also Classical humanism; Humanism; Individuality; Liberty; Modern humanism active vs. contemplative life, 86 anti-commercial, 87, 88 anti-modern, 87, 88 classical humanism, continuity and change from, 85, 86 educational ideals, 86 history, 5 negative liberty and, 85, 187n.3 sociology of liberty, 85-86, 188n.l9 virtue and corruption, 84, 119 Class. See also Aristocracy; Class struggle; Democracy; Education; French Revolution; French Revolution of 1848; Intellectuals; July Monarchy; Lower class; Middle class; Socialism bohemia and, 160-62 classless society, 8, 37-38, 117-19 definition, 35 domination, 5, 37, 46-48, 105

Index explanation, 28, 29, 34-36, 37 in Mill and Tocqueville, 8 isolation, 17, 32 liberalism and, 144, 145-46, 148, 149 modern humanism and, 93, 96 subordinate to ideas, 38-39 unity as basis for liberty, 25, 26, 35, 36-37, 106, 114, 117, 122 Class struggle. See also Democracy; Lower class; Middle class; Socialism acceptance, 47, 105-6, 117 effects on upper classes, 26 leitmotive of nineteenth century, 5, 26, 31-32, 33, 36, 56, 74, 126, 135 subordinate to ideas, 39 suffrage and, 70-71 threat to culture, 56, 74 threat to liberty, 32, 56, 64, 65, 68, 74, 77, 122 Classical humanism. See also Aristotle; Civic humanism; Humanism; Individuality; Liberty; Modern humanism Aristotelian teleology, 84 dialectical role, 84-85 modern education and, 82, 83 historicism, 82 nineteenth century, 82 progressive influence, 84 Tocqueville reverts to, 197n.86 virtue and corruption, 84, 119 Coleman, John, 13 Commercial spirit. See also Civic humanism; Humanism; Lower class; Middle class; Modern humanism; Socialism America, 89, 109 bohemia and, 162 class struggle and, 56 definition, 41 destroys individuality, 45, 67, 98, 103 dominant, 5, 34, 56-57, 80, 126 encourages centralization, 62 encourages individualism, 41-42, 61, 131-32 encourages mediocrity, 41, 47, 48, 4951, 53

217

encourages uniformity, 33, 45, 46-47, 61 encourages stagnation, 46-47 England as model, 43-44 humanism and, 87-88, 89, 91, 92, 97, 164 identified with middle class, 41, 45 liberalism and, 145, 147^8 lower class and, 54-56, 74 modern, 42-43 natural in democratic societies, 44-45 optimism, 121 political stability, 122 threat to liberty, 29-30, 33 universal suffrage and, 71 Communism. See Socialism Comte, Auguste cited by Mill, 99 as Mill's correspondent, 35, 67, 128 "Considerations on Representative Government." See Mill, works cited Constant, Benjamin humanism and, 89, 99, 157, 189n.38, 206n.lOO liberalism and, 202n.42 Democracy. See also Class; Class struggle; Commercial spirit; Despotism; Diversity; Equality; Individuality; Liberty; Public opinion; Suffrage aristocratic liberals and, 8, 13, 27, 106, 109, 120, 131 Enlightenment defines, 18 individualism encouraged by, 17 liberalism and, 140, 150, 155 liberty and, 31 modem and ancient, 82-83 Mill on American, 124 new language, 23-24 optimism, 19, 120-21 social equality defines, 15, 16-17, 18, 44 tyranny of the majority, 48, 53, 59-60, 65-68, 74, 89 uniformity encouraged by, 16-17 Democracy in America. See Tocqueville: works cited

218

Index

Despotism. See also Class struggle; Commercial spirit; Democracy; Equality; Lower class; Middle class; Socialism; State America as, 124 America avoids, 131 class struggle encourages, 32-33, 56, 117 enlightened, 18 Enlightenment ideas encourage, 33 hatred of despotism during French Revolution, 25, 29 humanism and, 96 individualism encouraged by, 17, 41 modern humanism and, 107 of educated, 71 of lower class, 37, 54, 56, 72, 74, 7677 of European middle class, 150, 151, 152 of middle class and commercial spirit, 29, 33, 34, 41, 42, 46, 48, 49, 53, 56, 74 of middle class and liberalism, 148-49, 155 of one class, 37, 46-47, 48 of public opinion, 65-68, 74 of state, 34, 58-61, 66 oscillation between liberty and despotism, 122 threat to aristocratic liberal values, 99 two despotisms and liberalism, 140, 142-43 two despotisms, from above or below, 31, 57, 59-60, 122-23 Diversity. See also Commercial spirit; Individuality; Liberty; Modern humanism aristocratic liberal value, 5, 81, 83, 98, 134, 157 aristocratic liberal definition, 104—6 aristocratic liberals' limited acceptance, 106, 117, 179n.l09 Bagehot on, 156 classical education and, 83 contemporary uses, 108-9 education and, 103 European, 46, 47, 104

humanism and, 83, 88-89, 97, 104-5 individuality and, 102, 104, 105, 108 local self-government promotes, 114 political, 47, 64 Romantic, 91 suffrage and, 125 threatened by centralized state, 16-17, 58, 64, 135 threatened by commercial spirit, 45, 46 threatened by domination of one class or ideology, 46-47 threatened by Enlightenment, 16-17, 33 threatened by public opinion, 67 virtue and, 88-89 Drescher, Seymour, 7-8 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 6 Education. See also Civic humanism; Classical humanism; Humanism; Individuality; Modern humanism; Suffrage anti-historical tendency in eighteenth century, 19 aristocratic liberals' method, 5, 9, 12526, 134, 135 aristocratic liberals' preferred kind, 97, 103, 113, 125 Burckhardt as educator, 129-31 classical, 83, 97, 113 cooperative socialism as, 75, 119 criterion of class, 42, 44, 51, 144, 161 free press and, 67 French lack, 122-23 humanism and, 92, 96, 99 individuality and, 102-3 landownership as, 117 liberty and, 69, 99, 102-3 limited expectations, 106-7, 113, 158 lower class, 55, 132-33 mediocrity, 52 Mill as educator, 127-28, 133-34 modern disadvantages, 37 over-specialized, 51-52 political, 67, 69-70, 73, 100, 103, 111, 114-15 public, 61, 116-17 religion as, 108 substitute for virtue, 92, 93-94, 96-97

Index suffrage and, 69-70, 73, 97, 146-47 Tocqueville as educator, 128-29, 13133 1848. See also French Revolution of 1848 German liberalism and, 7 middle-class reaction, 77-78 not watershed, 153-54 Eley, Geoff German Sonderweg, 137 liberalism and middle class, 148, 203n.55 Eliot, George aristocratic liberalism and, 4, 90, 205n.78 humanism, 4, 90, 157 Elliot, Ebenezer, 142 England and the English American comparison, 44 Anglicanism, 156 atypical, 11-12 centralization, 63-64 civil service exams, 52 class analysis in, 35 commercial spirit dominant, 41, 43-44, 45 constitutional monarchy, 112 Corn Law repeal, 150 education, 134 1850 not watershed, 153-54 French middle class similar to, 44 French Revolution's lessons and, 13-14 Glorious Revolution, 12 humanism, 82, 85, 87-88 influence of aristocratic liberalism, 156, 158 intellectuals critical of commercial society, 147-48 liberalism, 137, 141, 142, 147-48, 149-50, 151, 152, 154 middle class relations with lower class, 150-51 middle-class state, 44, 151-52 Nonconformism, 156 political mediocrity, 53 political prospects, 36, 123 Reform of 1832, 27, 71, 150 Reform of 1867, 72, 152, 154

219

suffrage system compared unfavorably to Prussian, 73 threat of despotism by public opinion, 67, 134 threat of socialism, 55, 75, 76-77, 150 Enlightenment. See also Modernity anti-historical tendency, 18-20, 33, 45 centralization and, 15, 16, 17, 20, 33 commercial spirit and, 29-30, 36, 41, 43 continuity and change, 15-16, 20-21, 22-23, 43, 45 destruction of aristocracy, 18 education and, 96 French, 16, 19 homogenizing tendency, 16-17, 20, 33 intellectuals, 19 language, 23 liberalism and, 145 modern humanism and, 5-6, 82, 85-89, 92-93, 96, 99 optimism, 19-20, 26, 45, 121 origin of modernity, 5, 11, 15, 31-33, 135, 171n.66 positive and negative aspects, 31-32, 33 power of ideas, 18-19, 20, 28, 33 public opinion, 20, 66 Scottish, 89 warfare, 79 Equality. See also Class; Class struggle; Commercial spirit; Enlightenment; French Revolution; Socialism anti-diversity, 67-68 aristocratic liberals and, 91, 107 centralization and, 61, 63, 64 civil, 141 commercial spirit encouraged by, 44-45 democratic social state, 15, 44-45, 46 enemy of liberty, 30, 31, 59, 77, 103, 121, 133 humanism and, 84, 87 socialism and, 75, 76, 77 source of class struggle, 36-37, 54 Ferry, Jules, 53 Flaubert, Gustave, 4, 160n.82, 161, 162

220

Index

France. See also Boulanger crisis; Enlightenment; French Revolution; French Revolution of 1830; French Revolution of 1848; July Monarchy archetype of modernity, 11-13, 16, 41, 43 centralization, 15-18, 21, 22-24, 43, 59, 63, 64, 114, 115 decline of literature, 49-50 liberalism, 154, 167n.6, 199n.6, 202n.42 middle class similar to English, 44 political inexperience, 17, 29, 67, 115 political prospects, 59, 77-78, 112-13, 120-23, 132 Third Republic, 155 Frederick the Great enlightened despot, 18 socialism, 33 Free press, 66-67 Freedom. See Liberty French Revolution anti-historical tendency, 19, 28 aristocracy and, 27, 46 Bastille, 27, 29 Burckhardt's writings on, 6, 12 centralization, 15, 31, 33 class struggle and class unity, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27-29, 31, 32, 36, 55, 56, 117 continuity and change, 5, 18, 20-28, 31-2, 33, 121, 135 Directory, 173n.l28 individual influences, 12-14 influence on modern humanism, 82, 92-93, 99 inevitable, 21-22 lower class and, 29, 30, 32, 55 middle class and, 29-30, 32 J. S. Mill on, 12-14 ongoing, 31, 58, 126 optimism, 19-20, 26, 28, 55 public opinion, 20 revolution of equality, 23-25, 27-31, 33 revolution of liberty, 24-27, 30-31, 121 1789 and liberalism, 26, 27, 30, 91, 141, 202n.36

1789 as transition, 21, 25, 29, 40, 122 Tocqueville on, 21, 23 two revolutions, 21, 23-24 French Revolution of 1830, 142 French Revolution of 1848 centralization and, 21, 63 class struggle and, 55, 71 February Revolution, 55 June Days, 38, 55 liberal defeat, 128 new ideas, 38, 116 provisional government, 78 restored politics, 47 Second Republic, 140 Tocqueville's prediction, 72 Froude, J. A., 82 Furet, Francois, 8, 21 Fussell, Paul, 87-88 Gall, Lothar, 148, 199n.6 Germany anti-historical tendency, 19 Burckhardt and, 7, 22, 120 Burckhardt's condemnation of old regime, 26—27 constitutionalism, 114 1848, fear of socialism in, aided Prussian absolutism, 77 freedom and unity, 7 humanism, 82 intellectuals, 160 liberalism, 7, 22, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 152, 154, 155, 158 mediocre politicians, 53 middle-class gentrification, 151 and Mill's admiration for Prussia, 73 pessimism about, 123 politically immature, 114, 185n.l31 popularity of class analysis, 35 Prussian constitution, 72 Prussian school of historiography, 7 Prussian suffrage, 72-73 Sonderweg, 6, 136, 137 Tocqueville on Prussia, 73 unification, 7, 154 wages war for internal reasons, 78, 79 Gervinus, G. G., 140

Index Gilbert, Felix, 198n.l20 Gladstone, W. E. as aristocratic liberal, 156 and coalition, 143, 149 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 50-51, 105

Green, T. H., 90 Grote, George, 82 Guizot, Francois anti-aristocracy, 48 faith in middle class, 18 liberalism, 142, 204n.62 as millenarian, 37 as politician, 129

221

money and, 88 nineteenth-century, 4, 90 religion and, 108 stability and change, 86-87, 89, 107, 119, 134 teleology and, 83, 99 types of, 5-6, 81-82 Hume, David, 91

Individualism centralization and, 17-18 commercial spirit and, 41 definition, 17, 102 Enlightenment and, 20 free press combats, 66 Hamburger, Joseph, 6 historical study combats, 131 Hobbesian, 145 Hartz, Louis, 136 political participation combats, 100, Haym, Rudolf, 22 114, 131-32 Hegel, G. W. F. Individuality. See also Aristotle; Comaristocratic liberalism and, 90 mercial spirit; Diversity; Humanism; Burckhardt and, 7, 121, 175n.33 Liberty; Modern humanism; ModernHegemony. See Despotism Herr, Richard, 172n.lOO, 173n.l28 ity active versus contemplative, 86 Heyck, T. W., 147, 151, 154 aristocratic liberal value, 5, 48, 81, 98Historicism. See Aristotle; Classical humanism; Modern humanism 100, 101, 102-5, 109 autonomy and, 87 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 163 Holmes, Stephen, 91 Bildung, 48, 102-3 Houghton, Walter, 8, 153-54 bohemia and, 160-61, 163 centralized state threatens, 16, 58, 61, Humanism. See also Aristotle; Civic humanism; Classical humanism; Com76, 135 mercial spirit; Individuality; Liberty; commercial spirit debases, 32, 45, 5657, 77 Modern humanism aestheticism, 162 diversity's importance, 46, 104 suffrage, 83-84, 100, 146 education's effect, 52, 86, 103, 115, anti-commercialism, 84, 88 126-27, 131-34 Aristotelianism, 5, 83 elitism and, 83-84, 85, 106, 109 Augustan, 87 humanism and, 83-87, 106, 163 independence as prerequisite, 104 autonomy and, 85, 87, 104, 117, 148 bohemia and, 162-63 mediocrity threatens, 49 definition, 81 modern humanism and, 89, 91, 97-98, democratic implications, 83-84, 152 106 education and, 86, 99 political ideal, 111-12, 115 public opinion threatens, 67, 74 elitist implications, 83-84, 152 equality and, 84 religion not central to, 108 and fin-de-siecle, 163 Romantic concept, 83, 91, 97 Indian Summer of, 163 socialism and, 75, 76 liberalism and, 81, 91, 144-45, 157 socio-economic ideal, 103-4, 116, 117

222

Individuality (continued) utility and, 107-8 Intellectuals aristocratic liberals as "socially unattached," 160-62 anti-historical tendency among, 19 aristocratic liberals as, 126 bohemian, 160-63 fin-de-siecle, 163 humanism and, 158, 163, 164 liberal intellectuals and middle class, 147^*9 modern mediocrity, 50-51 "socially unattached," 160—63 specialization among modern, 51, 154 Joseph II enlightened despot, 16, 18 July Monarchy. See also Louis-Philippe doctrinaires, 154, 202n.42 lower class and, 121-22 middle class in, 42, 44, 48, 105 suffrage, 70, 72 Tocqueville on, 113, 120-22, 128 Kaegi, Werner, 7 Kant, Immanuel, 83 Kugler, Franz, 7 Langewiesche, Dieter, 199n.5 Laissez-faire economics, 115-17 humanism and, 164 liberalism and, 147, 199n.5 negative freedom, 89-90 Lamberti, Jean-Claude, 8 Lerner, Max, 6 Lewis, George Cornewall, 63. See also Mill, John Stuart: correspondence; Tocqueville: correspondence Liberalism(s). See also Aristocratic liberalism; England; France; Germany; Humanism; Laissez-faire; Lower class; Middle class; Modern humanism; Suffrage aristocratic liberalism and, 4, 135-36, 155-58

Index Burckhardt and German liberalism, 7, 22 coalition, 143-44, 149-51, 152-53 comparative study, 3, 4, 136-37, 141 decline, 149-51, 163 definition, 3-5, 136, 137-41, 155 discourse, 9, 138, 139, 144, 150, 159 dominance, 150-51, 152, 153 elitism, 72-73, 140, 144, 149, 152, 157, 158 exclusion principle, 139, 140-41 free-floating, 149 intellectuals and, 147^*8 minimum program, 139—41 party of movement, 151-52 periodization, 153-55 revolution and, 142 suffrage and, 73, 140, 146, 147 two despotisms and, 140, 142-43 two languages of, 144-45 Liberty. See also America; Aristotle; Class struggle; Commercial spirit; Democracy; Diversity; Education; Equality; Free press; French Revolution; Humanism; Individuality; Lower class; Middle class; Optimism and pessimism; Public opinion; Socialism; Suffrage aristocratic liberal definition, 31, 99102, 103 aristocratic liberal political ideal, 11112, 114-15 aristocratic liberal value, 5, 58, 81, 9899 bohemia and, 161, 162 desire for liberty inexplicable, 30-31, 99 diversity and, 105-6 economic independence and, 42, 118 elitism and, 106-7, 109 idea, 38 individuality and, 101-2 middle class and, 132-33 religion and, 108 socialism and, 75, 77 utility and, 107-8 war encouraged by repression, 78-79 Lively, Jack, 6, 8

Index Louis XIV, 15, 16, 43 Louis-Philippe, 53, 122 Lowe, Robert, 156 Lower class(es). See also Class struggle; French Revolution; Modernity; Socialism; Suffrage aristocratic liberalism and, 37, 158, 160-61 basis for liberty, 106 commercial spirit and, 54—56, 74 definition, 42, 54 demands on state, 32-33, 59, 64, 7980 domination of public opinion, 67 education, 55, 97, 133-34 illusions, 38, 79 importance, 55 liberalism and, 142, 154 rise, 54-55, 56, 62 socialism and, 76-77 suffrage and, 70-71, 72, 74, 75, 140 threat to society, 55-56 Mably, Abbe de, 88, 189n.27 Machiavelli, Niccol6 humanist, 85, 86, 97 on religion, 108 Maistre, Joseph Marie de, 91 Mannheim, Karl on French Revolution, 42 on intelligentsia, 160-63 Marx, Karl classless society, 117 definition of petite bourgeoisie, 42 humanism, 84-85, 90, 92-94, 97, 158 millenarian, 37 Mass(es). See also Democracy; Lower class; Middle class aristocratic liberal attitude, 107, 158 education, 52 humanism and, 96 influenced by ideas, 38 lack of inner freedom, 101 middle class as, 42 public opinion, 65, 67-68 taste, 49 threat to individuality, 67-68, 101, 102 uneducated, 113-14

223

Mayer, J. P., 6 Mediocrity. See Commercial spirit; Middle class Meinecke, Friedrich, 7 Mevissen, Gustav von, 157 Michelet, Jules, 26 Middle class(es). See also Class; Class struggle; Commercial spirit; French Revolution; July Monarchy; Mass; Public opinion; Suffrage America and, 44, 89 anti-historical tendency, 45 basis for liberty, 18, 29-30 challenged by lower class, 54—55 commercial spirit and, 41-42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 89 corruption, 48 definition, 42, 49 dominant class, 5, 34, 36-37, 41, 4243, 44, 54, 150, 151 domination of public opinion, 47, 67 education, 52, 134 elite, 157 fear of lower class, 56, 150 fear of socialism, 56, 77-78 humanism and, 90-91 importance for aristocratic liberalism, 132-33, 142 intellectuals and, 147-48, 160-63 intolerance, 74 liberalism and, 146, 147-52, 155 mediocrity and, 45, 48, 49 optimism, 45 political situation, 150-52 suffrage, 70, 71, 72, 74, 151 uninterested in literature, 50 Mill, James, 159 Mill, John Stuart correspondence: to Thomas Carlyle, 12, 49-51, 73, 102, 107; to Edwin Chadwick, 64, 70-71; to Henry Samuel Chapman, 37, 61, 68, 71, 124; to Auguste Comte, 11, 16, 35, 38, 52, 58, 67, 118, 128, 133; to Gustave d'Eichthal, 43, 53-54, 104, 113, 133; to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 47; to George Cornewall Lewis, 70; to William Lovett, 48; to Harriet Taylor

224

Index

Mill, John Stuart (continued) Mill, 11, 68, 70, 105; to Florence Nightingale, 69; to Thomas Bay ley Potter, 48, 71; to Herbert Spencer, 71, 83; to Alexis de Tocqueville, 11, 47, 156; others, 12, 38, 42, 47-48, 52-54, 61, 63, 67-68, 70-71, 73-75, 77-79, 117-18, 124, 127, 133 interpretations of, 8 works cited: "Alison's History of the French Revolution," 16, 32; "Auguste Comte and Positivism," 61, 99, 116, 133; Autobiography, 12, 14, 36, 48, 70, 75, 111, 117; "Bentham," 102, 104; "Carlyle's French Revolution," 14-15; "Centralization," 21, 60-62, 105; "Chapters on Socialism," 75-77; "Civilization," 13, 36, 50, 67, 83, 121, 133; "The Claims of Labour," 13, 75, 113; "Coleridge," 105; "Considerations on Representative Government," 18, 39, 48^9, 53-54, 59-60, 63, 68-73, 103, 111-15, 117, 121, 124-25, 133; "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America, [I]" 39, 55, 66, 68, 115, 120; "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America, [II]" 16, 20, 39, 44, 47, 49, 50, 53, 60, 66, 74, 105, 121, 133; "Diary," 74, 95, 105, 128; Dissertations and Discussions, 13; "Grote's Aristotle," 95; "Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews," 52, 103; "Nature," 133; "Notes on the Newspapers," 27; "On Liberty," 37, 44, 46, 49, 52, 61, 66-68, 70, 74, 99100, 102-3, 105-6, 111, 115, 133; "Parties and the Ministry," 69, 71; "Postscript: The Close of the Session," 53; Principles of Political Economy, 35, 37, 45, 51, 61, 63-65, 67, 73, 75-76, 103, 105, 116-19, 133; "Rationale of Representation," 72; "Reform of the Civil Service," 51-52; "Scott's Life of Napoleon," 14, 23, 27; "Sedgwick's Discourse," 50, 133; "State of Politics in 1836," 27; "State of Society in America,"

13, 43, 53, 66; System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Deductive, A, 38, 44, 105, 128; "Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform," 70-71; "Utilitarianism," 108; "Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848," 67, 72, 112 Mirabeau, Gabriel Honore de Riquetti, 170n.22 Modern humanism. See also Aristotle; Civic humanism; Classical humanism; Humanism; Progress active vs. contemplative life, 127, 13031 affirmation of modernity, 91, 158 America and, 88-89 Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville and, 4, 9 definition, 5-6, 80, 82, 92 diversity and, 88-89, 104-5 education and, 92, 97-98, 99, 125, 127, 170n.22 elitism, 106, 109 Enlightenment and French Revolution, 5, 33 historicism, 5, 16, 40, 82-83, 92, 93, 97-98, 105, 107 independence and, 104 individuality and, 97, 101-2, 131 liberalism and, 91-92, 133, 157 negative and positive liberty, 85, 8990, 92, 99-102 previous humanisms and, 90, 97, 164 progress and, 92, 93-96, 97, 106-7, 119 public opinion and, 88 renovation, 90-91 sociology of liberty, 89 stability, 88, 89, 96, 119 teleology, 99, 106, 107-8 tyranny of the majority, 89 utility and, 107-8 values of aristocratic liberalism, 98-99 virtue and corruption, 88-89, 96, 134 Modernity. See also Commercial spirit; Democracy; Education; French Revolution; Humanism; Modern humanism; Optimism and pessimism

Index age of transition, 58 anti-historical, 18-19 aristocratic liberals and, 129 bohemia and, 161, 163 centralization, 16, 17, 32-33 class struggle, 28, 32 commercial spirit and, 43, 84 continuity and change, 22-23 democracy, 18 diversity, 105 education, 111 Enlightenment and, 22-23, 33 equality, 27 French Revolution and, 21, 31-32, 145 humanism and, 88, 91, 158 imbalance, 39 individualism, 17 language and ideas, 18 lower class and, 32, 54-55 mediocrity, 49-51, 52-53 optimism, 54 origins, 5, 11, 14-16, 18, 135 specialization, 51-52, 88 two despotisms, 59-60 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 176n.35, 203nn.46, 49 Montesquieu, Charles de commercial society, 88, 187n.6 decline of influence, 29 representative of Enlightenment, 15 Tocqueville and, 188n.8 Mueller, Iris Wessel, 6 Napoleon I, 30 Napoleon III centralization, 115 demagogue, 59 mediocrity, 53 socialism, 77 Naumann, Friedrich, 150, 154 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 163 Old Regime and the Revolution, The, See Tocqueville: works cited "On Liberty." See Mill, John Stuart: works cited

225

Optimism and pessimism. See also Aristotle; Classical humanism; Civic humanism; Enlightenment; Humanism; Middle class; Modern humanism aristocratic liberals divided by degree of pessimism, 5, 60, 106, 119-20, 125, 134 Burckhardt and Tocqueville more pessimistic than Mill, 106, 123, 134 Burckhardt's pessimism, 95, 115, 12021, 123 class struggle source of pessimism, 37 humanist pessimism, 84 Mill's pessimism, 121, 123-25, 133-34 optimism of lower class, 54-55 optimism of middle class and commercial spirit, 45 over-optimism characteristic of modernity, 19 Tocqueville's pessimism, 115, 121-23, 132 universal suffrage and, 121 Organic society. See Aristocracy Pappe, H. O., 6 Pedantocracy, 52, 199n.l37 Peel, Sir Robert, 156 Pessimism. See Optimism and pessimism Pocock, J. G. A. on civic humanism, 82, 85, 86, 104 classical humanism and, 83 eighteenth-century humanism, 89, 100 historicism defined, 97 humanism and liberalism, 91 Presentism aristocratic liberal accounts of the French Revolution, 13-15 Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville's, 162 Mill's, 124, 169n.l5 Tocqueville's, 132 Progress. See also Commercial spirit; Enlightenment; Humanism; Lower class; Middle class; Modernity; Optimism and pessimism aristocratic liberals and, 94-96, 99-100, 106, 119, 120-21

226

Index

Progress (continued) Burckhardt and, 27, 94, 95-96 education and, 134 Enlightenment faith in, 19 humanism and, 86-88 liberalism and, 152 Mill and, 94, 95, 193n.96 modern faith in, 19-20, 54, 88 modem humanism and, 92, 93-96, 99100, 105 modern intellectual life not progress, 50 Proletariat. See Lower class Prussia. See Germany Public opinion. See also Aristocracy; Democracy; Despotism; England; France; French Revolution; Lower class; Middle class; Suffrage centralization and, 20 "chief cause" in eighteenth century, 20, 66 control over, 65 democracy and, 20 dominant in nineteenth century, 20, 65, 66 encourages stagnation, 67 explanatory factor, 20, 34—35 humanism and, 88-89 liberalism and, 141, 155 middle class, 49, 67, 182n.61 negative liberty and, 99 Old Regime, The, and, 24 press organ of, 65 as source of despotism, 58, 65-68, 74, 80 state and, 65, 68, 71, 113 strength in England, 134 uniformity and, 20, 47 Ranke, Leopold von, 7, 198n.l20 Religion, 108 Romantics, 83, 91, 105 Rosenberg, Hans exclusion principle, 139 history of liberalism, 3, 138, 139 periodization of European history, 15354 Rotteck, Karl von, 142

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques influence on French Revolution, 29 influence on nineteenth century, 18 as optimist, 19, 121 representative of Enlightenment, 15 Riisen, Jorn, 40, 175n.33, 176n.35, 191n.58 Schulze-Delitzsch, Hermann, 140 Seigel, Jerrold, 160 Senior, Nassau William, 117. See also Tocqueville: works cited Sheehan, James J., 137-38, 178n.85, 201n.24 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 142 Smiles, Samuel, 152 Socialism. See also Bismarck; Class; Class struggle; Equality; Individuality; Lower class; Middle class; Napoleon III; State anti-historical tendency, 121, 125 Burckhardt's fear, 114 centralization and, 59 co-operative, 75-77, 114, 118, 133-35, 158 commercial spirit and, 55, 76 definition, 75, 76 Fabian, 107 fear of, 77-78, 185n.l42 First International, 75 Frederick the Great and, 33 individual and, 76 liberalism and, 141, 142, 154, 155 Mill on varieties, 75-76 and optimism, 121 as product of industrialization, 37, 5556

terribles simplificateurs, 77 threat to liberty, 74, 76 Society of Orders. See Aristocracy Specialization, 51-52 Stagnation. See also Commercial spirit; Equality; Humanism; Modern humanism China as metaphor for, 47, 67 encouraged by class struggle, 117 humanism and, 94, 96 incompatible with happiness, 95-96

Index intellectual, 47 lower class and, 56 political, 47 public opinion and, 67 threat to modern Europe, 41, 47, 49 Starzinger, Vincent, 136 State. See also Class; Class struggle; Classical humanism; Democracy; Despotism; Enlightenment; Equality; French Revolution; Socialism aristocratic liberals' ideal, 111-15 centralization, as product of Enlightenment and French Revolution, 15, 16, 22, 32-33, 135 centralization encouraged by industrialization, 62 centralization encouraged by warfare, 79 centralization increasing in nineteenth century, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 154 changes after 1870, 154 desirable centralization of, 112, 116-17 destroys aristocracy, 16 education and, 111-12, 114-15, 116-17 France, model of modern, 16 humanism and, 87-89 as instrument of class struggle, 59, 64 liberalism and, 141, 150-51, 152, 155, 157 modern, derives from centralization and ideas, 18-19 public opinion and, 65-66, 68, 88 Renaissance origins of centralization, 15 role in Burckhardt's theory of history, 39-40 small, 27, 69 socialism and, 75-77 as source of despotism, 5, 58-64, 7577, 80, 118 subordinate to class, 35-36 subordinate to ideas, 38-39 Stephen, Leslie, 205n.78 Suffrage. See also Aristotle; Class; Class struggle; Democracy; Humanism; Modern humanism; Public opinion educational qualifications, 70, 72, 7374, 75, 113, 146-47 extension opposed, 70, 71-72, 73-74 extension supported, 69, 72, 83, 100

227

form of education, 73, 100, 103, 11415 Hare Plan, 71-72, 125 indirect, 71 liberalism and, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146-47, 151, 155 middle class, 74 Mill on, 72 property qualifications, 113, 114, 14647 Prussian, 72-73 public opinion and, 65-66, 68-69 right to vote, 70 Tocqueville on, 72 universal, as cause of war, 71, 79 universal, as ideal, 69-70, 83 universal, as tool of class struggle, 70, 71, 74, 76 universal, encourages mediocrity, 53, 70, 71 universal, opposed, 37, 74, 78 universal, positive aspects of, 69 Switzerland and Germany, in Burckhardt's thought, 7 Burckhardt as federalist in, 112 Burckhardt's political activity, 123, 126 European, 169n.4 political immaturity, 113 politicians of, condemned by Burckhardt, 53 Sybel, Heinrich von, 7, 142 Symonds, John Addington, 82 Thiers, Adolphe, 53, 129 Thompson, E. P., 151 Tocqueville, Alexis de correspondence: to Odilon Barrot, 132; to Gustave de Beaumont, 21, 32, 38, 56, 61, 66-67, 73, 77-79, 119, 12223, 132; to Francisque de Corcelle, 38-39, 49, 56, 59, 69, 71-72, 7778, 123; to Pierre Freslon, 31, 40, 49-50; to Arthur de Gobineau, 50, 104, 119, 121; to Louis de Kergorlay, 14, 43, 49, 52, 64, 111, 12022, 128, 131, 133; to George Cornewall Lewis, 19, 52, 63; to Henry Reeve, 44, 77, 101-2; to P.-P.

228

Index

Tocqueville, Alexis de (continued) Royer-Collard, 49, 53, 61, 66, 7172; to Nassau Senior, 60; to Eugene Stoffels, 38, 58, 62, 64, 68-69, 74, 100, 113, 120, 122, 131-32; others, 19, 38, 44, 50, 71-73, 100, 102, 116, 122-23, 133 influence on Burckhardt, 6 influence on Mill, 6 interpretations of, 7-8 works cited: "Academic Franchise: Discours," 38; Ancien regime et la Revolution, L', pt. 1, 14-21, 24-26, 28, 33, 37, 44, 62, 100, 114, 117, 121, 193n.l05; Ancien regime et la Revolution, V, pt. 2, 14-16, 1821, 23-33, 36, 44, 55, 59, 63, 66, 116; Commerce, Le, 64, 73; Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior, The, 22, 48, 52, 59, 62, 64, 75, 77, 115-16, 118, 122; "De la classe moyenne et du peuple," 47, 71; De la democratic en Amerique, pt. 1, 15-16, 20, 47, 53, 61, 66-70, 72, 74, 103, 115, 120, 193n.l05; De la democratie en Amerique, pt. 2, 17, 19, 30, 37-39, 44-47, 49-51, 55-56, 60, 62-63, 66-67, 70, 77-78, 83, 100, 102-3, 107, 115, 121, 131, 193n.l05; "Discours du 21 avril 1842," 39; "Discours sur la science

politique," 131; "Inde, L'," 52, 133; "Machiavel," 83; "Memoire sur le pauperisme," 43, 55, 107, 118; "Notes sur Henry Bulwer," 44; Parliamentary speeches, 70; Souvenirs, 31, 36-37, 39, 44, 53, 55, 62, 112, 115, 119, 122, 128, 193n.l05; "Vocation coloniale de la France, La," 132; "Voyage en Amerique," 44, 52, 71, 83, 96, 128, 131-32; "Voyage en Angleterre de 1833," 44, 76, 115; "Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande," 39, 43, 63, 101; Voyage en Sidle et awe Etats Unis, 103 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 7 Turner, Frank, 90 "Tyranny of the majority." See Democracy Utilitarianism, 107-8 Vincent, John, 136, 151, 202n.44 Voltaire anti-historical tendency of, 19 elitism of, 50, 51 influence, 18 representative of Enlightenment, 15 Weber, Max as intellectual, 148 liberalism of, 163, 164 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 187n.l82 Welcker, Karl Theodor, 140 Wood, Gordon, 89