Looking back on John Stuart Mill, we see him as the most important English philosopher of his century. For us, he fits naturally into what we think of as a British empiricist tradition between Hume in the previous century and Russell in the next. Yet this is not how Mill himself would have thought of his work. ‘Empiricism’ was something he criticised and wished to avoid. Nor did he look back to Hume. Instead, he looked back to his father, James Mill. His father, he thought, provided the most advanced analysis of the human mind, which for Mill was the central key to all philosophy. And, again following his father, he looked back before him to the account of the mind in David Hartley, building on Locke.

The history of thinking about the structures of human association in Western Europe during the nineteenth century was marked by a remarkable resurgence of interest in questions pertaining to the conflicting and mediating relations between the spiritual and temporal, the transcendent and immanent, the sacred and secular dimensions of human experience, as well as to the institutional, ‘objective’ articulation of such ‘subjectively’ defined relations in the renegotiations, transformations, reforms and reconstructions of the relations between state and church. Between the defeat of Napoleon and the massive social and political transformations of the last quarter of the century, it was virtually impossible to formulate questions concerning the associative life of human beings outside the framework of the field of tension and reciprocity produced by religious and political agendas for transforming emancipated strangers into members of a community of consciousness, will and sentiment. It is difficult to find a significant political or social thinker before 1870 whose discourse was not framed in large parts by this polarity.

The aim of the nineteenth-century volume of the Cambridge History of Political Thought is to provide a systematic and up-to-date scholarly account of the development of the central themes of political and social thinking in the century following the French Revolution. Its purpose is not to reinforce a canon but rather to trace the emergence of particular preoccupations and to delineate the development of distinctive forms and languages of political thinking. As in the preceding volumes, the aim will be to analyse the provenance and character of leading political ideas, to relate them to the specific historical contexts within which they arose and to examine the circumstances in which their influence made itself felt. This thematic approach has many advantages. But we do not consider it appropriate in every case. In a few instances – those of Hegel, Marx, Bentham and Mill – we have largely devoted chapters to a single author. For in assessing such major thinkers, whose influence and reputations have reached down to the present, we have considered it important that readers be enabled to evaluate their work as a whole.

Introduction

When Madame de Staël wrote her Considérations sur la Révolution Française one of the central questions she raised was the following: ‘Did France possess a Constitution before the Revolution?’ (de Staël 2008, pp. 96–111). Her answer was that France had been ‘governed by custom, by caprice but never by laws’ and that of all modern monarchies France had undoubtedly been the one ‘whose political institutions had been the most arbitrary’. This is a portrayal that France's monarchs might have challenged – they certainly felt themselves to be constrained in their actions by a set of fundamental laws that they might not transgress – but the fact remained that by 1789 there existed a widespread demand for a written constitution that would set out clear limits to the actions of government and that would define the rights of all citizens. It was in this context that the meaning attributed to the idea of a constitution changed irrevocably, and with radical implications. Henceforth it was to be understood as the set of arrangements that were to determine the manner in which institutions of the state and of public authority operated. Moreover, given the descent of the monarchy into what was widely perceived to be despotism, the demand was increasingly made that these arrangements should correspond to the deliberate choice of the nation.

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.