This chapter situates the ‘woman question’ as an expansive and flourishing set of debates within political, literary and social thought in the nineteenth century. These debates represented an interrogation of the basic components of liberal and republican political argument – citizenship, property, access to the public sphere and political virtue. To talk of the ‘woman question’ is perhaps misleading, because there were many such ‘questions’. To name but a few, there were questions of single (or ‘surplus’) women, of the status of married women, of authority and the ‘struggle for the breeches’ in plebeian culture, of political rights, of professional status, of rationality, and of education. This chapter gives a schematic overview of the century, and cannot possibly do justice to the complex debates unfolding in each national context. I aim therefore to show the main currents of argument in Europe and the United States, pointing to national distinctiveness and divergence as well as shared transnational arguments and emphases. As a result, the treatment is only loosely chronological; arguments are grouped together thematically and different dimensions of the ‘woman question’ are discussed in turn. I outline some historiographical trends in examining ‘woman question’ debates, and point to the literature available to those seeking more concrete information. Specific campaigns that were highly influential for the women's movement (concerning property, child custody, higher education, prostitution or suffrage) can only be mentioned briefly, for the ‘woman question’ was a broader discourse than the summed activism of the ‘women's movement’. It represented a space for political argument in which the nature, implications and origins of sexual difference might be debated, and was regarded as intensely significant for both its symbolic and its practical import. In John Ruskin's words, ‘There never was a time when wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination permitted, respecting this question – quite vital to all social happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly nature, their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem never to have been yet measured with entire consent’ (Ruskin n.d. [1865], p. 49).

An overview from 1900

Commentators writing in various countries between 1900 and the eve of the First World War disagreed profoundly about what had been the core themes and trends in the evolution of political thought over the course of the past century. In Edwardian Britain there were those who interpreted the predominant political ethos of the previous hundred years as marked by ever-increasing voluntarism, privacy, personal liberty and the progressive limiting and ‘discrediting’ of the powers of the state. And there were others who saw the history of the period in exactly the opposite terms, as signifying the eclipse of ‘individualism’, the decline of ancient self-governing communities and corporations, and the inexorable rise of the ‘collectivist state in the making’ (Barker 1914, pp. 102–21, 1915b, pp. 236–8, 248–51; Davies 1914, passim; Figgis 1914, pp. 54–98; Dicey 1914, pp. 259–88). In the Wilhelmine Reich there were likewise some who emphasised the deepening tensions between authoritarianism and mass democracy, whilst others pointed to the growth of a much more progressive liberal and reformist ‘Rechtsstaat’ (Eley 1991a, pp. 316–46; Guillard 1915, pp. 254–353; John 1989, pp. 105–31; Kepp 2000, pp. 215–66; Mitzman 1987, pp. 15–36; Naumann 1905, pp. 197–220; Tönnies 1914, pp. 65–70). Similarly in turn-of-the-century France, there were enthusiasts who identified the Third Republic with the advance of ‘solidarism’ and ‘public spirit’; critics to whom it seemed an abyss of cultural corruption and ‘utilitarian mediocrity’; whilst an embattled minority viewed the inner structures of French state power as largely unchanged since before the Revolution of 1789 (Agathon 1911, pp. 21–118; Hayward 1961, pp. 19–48, 2007, pp. 253–7, 285–97, 299–304; Sorel 1916, pp. 107–16; Sternhell 1996, pp. 32–89). Throughout Western Europe the growing provision of public social services from the later decades of the nineteenth century appeared to some contemporaries as the distinctive hallmark of a new democratic age; whereas to others it signalled a dangerous relapse into an earlier epoch of stagnation, patriarchalism and serfdom (Belloc 1912, pp. 29, 143–6, 148–53, 179–94; Spencer 1982, pp. 487–518; Webb 1910, pp. 730–65; Weber 1994b, pp. 68–9). And in all Western countries there were political commentators who assumed that female emancipation had already advanced to its furthest limits, whilst others emphasised the continuing legal, constitutional and practical exclusion of women from all aspects of the public sphere.

As this volume demonstrates, Western political and social thought in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a vibrant area of study. Yet scholarship has for the most part remained confined to political and philosophical developments in the European and American heartlands. This is strange because one of the most important dimensions of European thought during this period was the manner in which it achieved an international reach, and in some areas, a near hegemony over the minds of extra-European intellectuals. To an extent even greater than in the case of earlier expanding ‘world religions’, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, European stage-theory ideology, liberalism, and later, integral nationalism, ‘scientific’ racism and communism, became the currency of political debate for elites across the world. These ideas also influenced a wider range of popular movements, so that, by 1900, the leaders of anti-government protests in places as far distant as Santiago, Cape Town and Canton invoked the notion of their ‘rights’ as individuals and as representatives of nations.

Introduction: ‘political’ and ‘anti-political’ socialism

The various strands of thought which would be termed ‘socialism’ by the early 1830s emerged from three main sources: the failure of the French Revolution to have solved the problem of poverty, particularly by securing an adequate food supply; its political degeneration into dictatorship; and the onset of industrialisation. After 1848 these problems would be widely recognised as having a characteristic ‘socialist’ solution that was broadly democratic, collectivist and anti-capitalist, and tended towards community of property and the rejection of ‘free markets’ as such. But the diversity of these responses also needs to be stressed at the outset: socialism possessed authoritarian and paternalist strands, and later in the century was sometimes combined with various forms of individualism and anarchism (in William Morris, for instance), and occasionally it proposed retaining elements of capitalism (for example in Fourierism, where rewards for investment, separate from labour, were encouraged). Moreover, the degree of centralisation appropriate to socialist ends, and whether the ideal society should be essentially communitarian, were also much disputed. For Saint-Simon and his followers, as for Marx, the nation state, if not indeed a confederation of affiliated states, was the appropriate locus, at least ad interim; for Owen and Fourier, the small community or phalanstère was to be preferred. Some writers thus decouple Saint-Simonism in particular from Owenism and Fourierism (e.g. Iggers 1972, p. xli). Hence, too, it is misleading to oppose ‘individualism’, or laissez-faire, to ‘socialism’, or intervention led by the ‘state’ as such (e.g. Ely 1883, p. 29). The degree to which a more just and egalitarian society could or should encourage luxury was also a divisive issue. So too was the means, revolutionary or evolutionary, by which such a society was to be achieved.

Introductory comments

Nationality can be constructed as fact and value. Its construction as value presupposes its construction as fact. First, there are nations; second, nations are bearers of values. However, nations can be constructed as facts without regarding them also as bearers of values on which to base cultural or political programmes.

I define the principle of nationality as consisting of three claims: humanity is divided into nations; nations are worthy of recognition and respect; recognition and respect require autonomy, usually meaning political independence within the national territory. Thus the principle of nationality contains an empirical claim, a value assertion and a political goal, each building on the previous proposition. These are logical relationships; they do not necessarily occur in that chronological order. This principle was constructed in nineteenth–century Europe. The empirical, normative and programmatic constructions took on increasingly complex, differentiated and conflicting forms as the principle of nationality loomed an ever larger role in political culture and practice.

Introduction

The nineteenth century was from the outset an ‘economical age’ or an age of ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators’ (Bishop 1796, ii, p. 296; Burke 1790, p. 113). The ‘administration of things has been perfected at the expense of the administration of men’, the French conservative Louis de Bonald wrote in 1802, of the governments of the new century, and Adam Smith's work was ‘the bible of this material and materialist doctrine’ (Bonald 1802, ii, pp. 89–90). By the end of the century, in the description of the Indian jurist Mahadev Govind Ranade, the great questions of the times were ‘more Economical than Political’; a ‘conflict of practice with theory, not in one, but in all points, not in one place or country, but all over the world’ (Ranade 1906, pp. 5–6).

ACTON, LORD JOHN

1834–1902. Born in Sicily, Acton was educated in England and Germany. He first gained public recognition writing for liberal Catholic journals. He was a Liberal MP from 1858–65 and was made a peer by Gladstone, his friend, in 1869. In 1895 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and in the years up to his death he planned the Cambridge Modern History. Acton never wrote a book, but was influential through his lectures and articles in periodicals. These are collected in Essays on Church and State (1952) and Essays on Freedom and Power (1948).

• Chadwick 1998.

Problems of interpretation

Seen from a broad historical perspective, Hegel's political philosophy, as expounded in his 1821 Philosophie des Rechts, was a grand synthesis of all the conflicting traditions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its theory of the state wedded liberalism with communitarianism; its doctrine of right fused historicism, rationalism and voluntarism; its vision of ideal government united aristocracy, monarchy and democracy; and its politics strove for the middle ground between left and right, progress and reaction. Such an account of Hegel's achievement is not an ex post facto rationalisation; it is a simple restatement of his intentions. For Hegel saw himself as the chief synthesiser, as the last mediator, of his age. All the conflicts between opposing standpoints would finally be resolved – their truths preserved and their errors cancelled – in a single coherent system. The power of Hegel's political philosophy lay here, in its syncretic designs, in its capacity to accommodate all standpoints; any critique of the system, it seemed, came from a standpoint whose claims had already been settled within it.

Introduction

Modernity has been quintessentially defined by the revolutionary impulse, and our judgement, whether laudatory or critical, of the French Revolution of 1789. In the nineteenth century it would be associated with virtually all radical, republican and revolutionary movements, and, by the end of the First World War, the overthrow of many of the leading crowns of Europe. Yet the course of events which produced the overthrow of Louis XVI was not at its outset inevitably anti-monarchical, and would indeed culminate in imperial dictatorship. In association with American independence, however, the idea of revolution came to be identified with the principle of popular sovereignty as such. It was also linked to the explosion of nationalist aspirations which became definitive of the period, as well as to the causes of reaction and the creation of modern conservatism in the works of Burke, Bonald and others. If the British model of limited, constitutional monarchy resting on the principle of the rule of law was central to eighteenth-century reformers elsewhere, thus, it was increasingly supplanted during the nineteenth century by the ideals which emerged from the revolutions of 1776, 1789 and 1848. ‘Revolution’ itself, which had once meant a restoration or rotational return to previous conditions, came to mean the violent overthrow of established regimes in the name of popular sovereignty, ethnic and national self-assertion, or both; and the conscious framing according to the principles of reason of an edifice hitherto regarded largely as a natural, organically derived and divinely inspired order. To its opponents it was also often linked to an obsessive demand for individual autonomy, the growth of commercial and societal individualism, and the wish to break from traditional forms of authority, particularly paternalism and religion.

The epoch of Alexander I

The first years of the nineteenth century in Russia were a time of great hopes. The new emperor, Alexander I, hated the arbitrary despotism of his assassinated father, Paul I, and vowed to make Russia a law-abiding state, a legitimate representative of universal civilisation, playing an important part in European affairs and realising thereby a universally significant imperial mission. The educated strata of the Russian society shared this mood. They felt that a great historic change was imminent and wanted to participate in it. Expectation of a new beginning united the old-fashioned rationalists of the Enlightenment with the members of the mystical freemasonry, known as Illuminati, or Martinists.

‘The return to order’, wrote Joseph de Maistre in 1797, in his plea for Restoration, the Considérations sur la France, ‘will not be painful, because it will be natural and because it will be favoured by a secret force whose action is wholly creative…the restoration of monarchy, what they call the counter-revolution, will not be a counter-revolution, but the contrary of revolution’ (Maistre 1994, p. 105). Maistre was fond of paradoxes, but this was not one of them. After all the ‘perpetual and desperate oscillations’ of French politics since 1789, Maistre argued for the need for stability, not commotion, peace, not violence, tranquillity not anarchy. Achieving this, he argued, necessitated a total separation from the political and intellectual methods of those who had favoured the Revolution. In place of de-Christianisation, was needed belief; in place of insurrection, obedience; in place of insubordination, sovereignty; in place of republic, the monarchy. In other words, what was needed in place of revolution was the contrary of revolution. This meant ‘no shocks, no violence, no punishment even, except those which the true nation will approve’ (Maistre 1994, p. 105). Maistre has been called a ‘fanatical’, ‘monstruous’ and ‘disturbing’ writer (Faguet 1891, p. 1; Cioran 1987; Berlin 1990, p. 57). Stendhal dubbed him the ‘hangman's friend’ because of his famous assertion, in the Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg that the executioner was the secret ‘tie’ holding human society together (quoted in Berlin 1990, p. 57). Various nineteenth-century critics accused him of terrorism, while in the twentieth century he was tainted by a supposed association with fascism. Rather than accusing his political thought of violence, however, it would be more accurate to call him a theorist who refused to imagine any political order that did not have to grapple with and contain violence and terror. ‘[W]e are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything’, he wrote in the Considérations (quoted in Spektorowski 2002, p. 287).

Introduction

One of the peculiarities of nineteenth-century American political thought is that it exists on a relatively low level of abstraction. There is no American equivalent to Rousseau or Hegel or even John Stuart Mill. Of course all important political theory has historically been related to the great events of the time when it was produced. But though thinkers like Plato and Thomas Hobbes were responding to contemporary politics, they still often relied extensively on ontological, metaphysical or epistemological arguments in trying to deal with them. But in nineteenth-century America the debates over political ideas were as a rule conducted on a level much closer to day-to-day political action, due perhaps to the fact that the polity was closer to democracy than any other at the time. In any case, until after the Civil War much of the most important work was produced by major political actors. Even then, the thought of academics like William Graham Sumner remained fairly close to the ground. For much of the century, if one wants to explore the nature of American political thought one turns to the same thinkers who created the politics they theorised. Therefore, methodologically one must pay unusually close attention to ongoing political events if one is going to understand the ideas surrounding them.