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.

To be GOVERNED is to be kept in view, inspected, spied upon, directed, legislated,regulated, prosecuted, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued,censured, commanded by those who do not have the right, the wisdom, northe virtue to do so . . . To be GOVERNED is to be at each operation, at eachtransaction, at each movement, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured,numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, annotated, admonished, forbidden,reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in thename of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed,exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightestresistance, at the first word of complaint, to be reprimanded, fined, run down, harassed,tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged,condemned, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed: and, to top it all off, mocked,ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government: that is its justice: that is itsmorality! (Proudhon 1923b, p. 344)

According to Hegel, the central discovery of the Enlightenment is that everything exists for the subject (Hegel 1971, pp. 332–3). This theoretical shift, from ideas of a fixed natural or social order towards subjective utility and freedom, occurs in conjunction with political challenges to the old regime in Europe, and the emergence of modern civil society. While the underlying social changes can be treated only allusively here, the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment is that values and institutions must be critically authenticated as corresponding to subjects’ own insights (C. Taylor 1991, pp. 81–91), and that traditional forms of life must cede to relations sanctioned by reason, whereby subjects attain a growing ascendancy over natural and social processes which inhibit their autonomous self-determination.

Introduction

Empire is one of the most contested terms in the modern political lexicon. Over the centuries it has carried a multiplicity of meanings; today it still lacks a clear and consistent definition. Like so much of our political vocabulary, its etymological roots lie in the ancient world. It originates with the Latin term imperium, which designated initially the right of command (held by magistrates) within the Roman state, and which was subsequently extended to denote, in the age of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the physical space occupied by the territorial acquisitions of Rome, the Imperium Romanum (Richardson 1991). Subsequent European empires never fully escaped the obsession with ritual, virtue and glory, the sanction of religion, or the claims about spreading civilisation, which had been central to the Roman vision. Until the eighteenth century, when it began to be applied to foreign conquests and modes of rule, the term was employed almost exclusively in European political thought to encompass either the Holy Roman Empire or to designate the sovereign territories of individual states. However, the conceptual field of empire has mutated over time, as have the practices associated with it, assuming different forms across diverse national and regional contexts.

Origins of socialist political thought

It might have been expected that the political thinking of German social democracy would build upon a variety of European socialists who wrote before 1848. However, that was seldom the case. To be sure, German intellectuals knew something of the ideas of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Proudhon, Simonde de Sismondi, Owen, Blanqui and Blanc, but it is difficult to show that those ideas guided the later organisations of the German labour movement. People familiar with the polemical literature in German, notably that produced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, often gained their knowledge of early socialist thought second hand. The intention of Marx and Engels, of course, was not to disseminate the ideas of those they labelled ‘utopian’, but to discredit them. To be sure, in 1888, August Bebel published a very sympathetic account of Fourier's ideas, but he also stressed the weaknesses of the ‘utopian's’ thinking.

Introduction

This chapter is devoted to British liberalism in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These years have commonly been viewed as an era of transition. Mid-Victorian liberalism has been widely seen as individualistic, and suspicious of state intervention. The close of the century, however, saw the emergence of a new liberalism, which departed from the earlier individualism, and advocated an enhanced role for state action.

The historiography of new liberalism has been much informed by contemporary political and theoretical concerns. It has been suggested that the presumed dichotomy between liberalism and communitarianism in recent political theory can be transcended through the examination of the new liberal reconciliation of the two (Simhony and Weinstein 2001). Similar claims have been made for new liberalism as a fruitful marriage of liberal and social democratic priorities (Clarke 1978). Later nineteenth–century liberalism, including the later Mill, has been depicted as a powerful fusion of liberal and republican perspectives (Biagini 2003).

‘Mindless violence’ or metaphor?

‘Everybody knows that Ted Hughes’s subject is violence.’ By the time the opening words of this ‘reappraisal’ of Hughes were written in 1965 the association of Hughes’s poetry with violence was so firmly established that such a remark could seem a statement of the obvious. What was far from obvious and settled, though, was what the nature and meaning of this violence was: the essay in which the above remark appears is one of a series of critical articles and exchanges at this time concerning this question. The early debates about Hughes’s poetry register something of the shock of Hughes’s first two books, The Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960). In particular, the contentious nature of these debates about representations of ‘natural’ violence in Hughes, the sense of something radically new being grappled with, suggests that it is not simply ‘nature’ that is at stake here: ‘nature’ in these books, it will turn out, has a social and even political meaning.

In an early review of The Hawk in the Rain Edwin Muir used the phrase ‘admirable violence’ in relation to the imagery of this ‘remarkable’ new poet, a poet ‘quite outside the currents of his time’. The adjective ‘admirable’ anticipates, if not provokes, the debates that soon follow regarding the moral — or amoral — qualities of Hughesian violence (many critics would be quick to find the violence less than admirable).

When some of us who have contributed to this book were asked in 2009 to support the campaign to have a memorial to Ted Hughes (1930–1998) installed in Westminster Abbey, the question we were asked to answer by the Dean was whether Hughes would be a poet whose work would still be read by generations to come. In one sense, this is impossible to guess. In another sense we were being asked whether the work of Hughes was of the stature of the towering figures of twentieth-century poetry who were themselves the major influences upon his own work as a young poet – figures such as W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century it is probably true to say that Hughes’s reputation as a poet has never been higher, both in the school and university curriculum and in British culture at large. There are also signs that, after largely ignoring his work during Hughes’s lifetime, American critics and teachers are starting to catch up. Hughes is often the only post-war English poet considered in books like Harvard professor Lawrence Buell’s Writing for an Endangered World (2001) and Stanford professor John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth? (2009). Any course in British Modern Poetry would be incomplete without the inclusion of work by Ted Hughes. In the four years prior to May 2010 six books on the work of Hughes were published – five monographs and a collection of essays – plus two memoirs. In the last months of his life the publication of Birthday Letters (1998), following a lifetime of apparent silence about the tragic death of his first wife Sylvia Plath, brought a new audience to his work. At the same time, his translation of Tales from Ovid (1998) won literary awards and was turned into a highly successful play by Tim Supple and Simon Reade (1999). Hughes’s late flowering as a playwright translating classics of European theatre also added to the swell of praise that brought him a higher profile in his final years than individual volumes of poetry had done earlier in his life.

It has become commonplace to attribute the twentieth-century recovery of the doctrine of the Trinity to the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968). Barth, though not alone, was indeed a major figure in the modern trinitarian renaissance. In his massive Kirchliche Dogmatik (Church Dogmatics), published in fourteen volumes from 1932 to 1967, Barth developed and expounded the thesis that the doctrine of the Trinity was foundational for Christian theological discourse. In the inaugural volume, he argued, “The doctrine of the Trinity is what basically distinguishes the Christian doctrine of God as Christian, and therefore what already distinguishes the Christian concept of revelation as Christian, in contrast to all other possible doctrines of God and concepts of revelation” (Church Dogmatics, i/1, 301). These words are emblematic of Barth's effort to place the doctrine of the Trinity back in the center of Christian theology. Indeed, following his own advice, Barth placed the doctrine of the Trinity at the very beginning of the Church Dogmatics, arguing that it constituted the internal dynamic of God's speech to humanity and as such functioned as the basic grammar of Christian discourse.

The role of the Trinity in both liturgical prayer and mystical prayer, as different as these prayer forms might seem, must be understood within the economy of salvation, that is, in God's action to reconcile the world to himself. This involves a trinitarian dynamic, which one might call the “grammar of Christian life.” Christians are reconciled to the Father through Christ in the power of the Spirit. The relationship of Christ to the Father and to the Spirit is strikingly evident in his baptism and in his death, where his orientation to the Father and the reception and gift of the Spirit occur in what can only be called a trinitarian tableau at the beginning and end of his life. This chapter examines how the larger pattern of all liturgical action incorporates this trinitarian pattern, as do the individual sacramental rites and a number of examples of mystical prayer. That mysticism should reflect this dynamic is not surprising since the spirituality of the mystics is formed by their immersion in scripture and the liturgical life of the church.

The Trinity is the foundation and framework for everything else that Christianity teaches regarding belief and practice. It is not in the first instance an abstract argument or philosophical puzzle, but an expression of who God is and how God lives. For the majority of Christians through the ages, God has been understood to be a living communion of Three-in-One. Christian identity is grounded in this divine reality. The vast majority of Christians worldwide have literally been baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as they entered the Christian community, the church. In worship the vast majority of Christians pray to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of the Trinity emerged as theologians of the ancient church sought to reflect upon the experience and expression of the divine Three-in-One in life and worship.Worship in particular has been important through the ages for articulating Christian identity, for it is the primary work that the Christian community as a whole undertakes to perform, the service that it offers to God. Christian worship not only gives expression to the trinitarian mystery. To a degree it reflects this mystery in its performance, and in the manner that it models many being together as one. At the heart of worship is a joyous celebration of the experience of communion. Through the centuries trinitarian theology has continuously been nourished, replenished, and articulated afresh through the ongoing experiences and expressions of this communion with God in ever new contexts. Communion is but another way to name the Trinity.