No title

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 305–330
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000198 Printed in the United Kingdom

beauty or beast, or monstrous regiments? robertson and burke on women and the public scene laszl ´ o´ kontler Department of History, Central European University, Budapest

The Enlightenment can usefully be conceived as a confrontation with eroding Christian and classical republican ethics. It was permeated with assumptions about women and the gendered dichotomy between public and private spheres. While William Robertson and Edmund Burke, along with many of their contemporaries, remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, they were working within a new Enlightenment paradigm. Its political agenda has to be understood by way of its configurations of beauty, taste, and morality as these relate to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. An examination of two themes in the work of Robertson and Burke—the nature of women in “savage” and “civilized” societies, and “beauty in distress”—reveals how long-held convictions about the character of women, especially with regard to their capacity and right to appear in the public domain, were modified and adjusted to the idea of progress, and became central to an enlightened affirmation of modern European civilization. The result had its ironies. On the one hand, a positive public and indeed political role was invented for women that is central to understanding the overall thrust of a political discourse based on politeness, civility, refinement and similar values specifically associated with modern commercial societies. On the other hand, though the complexity of this model of society gave ample scope to informal and spontaneous vehicles of social disciplining, whatever room was left for the more traditional ways of governing polities through the direct exertion of political power remained closed to women: the very features that opened for them the opportunity to play political roles through sociability in the public sphere also circumscribed them.

When the disorders incident to the Gothic system had subsided, the women began to be valued upon account of their useful talents and accomplishments; and their consideration and rank, making allowance for some remains of that romantic spirit which had prevailed in the former period, came to be chiefly determined by the importance of those departments which they occupied, in carrying on the business and maintaining the intercourse of society . . . . Thus we may observe, that in refined and polished nations there is the same free communication between the sexes as in the ages of rudeness and barbarism. In the latter, women enjoy the most unbounded liberty, because it is thought of no consequence what use they shall make of it. In the former, they are entitled to the 305

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same freedom, upon account of those agreeable qualities which they possess, and the rank and dignity which they hold as members of society.1

These sentences are from the concluding sections of the lengthy first chapter in the Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society, and offer a faithful summary of it. The Observations was published in 1771 by the Glasgow lawyer and professor of civil law John Millar (republished in 1773 and further expanded in 1779 as The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks). The work established Millar’s reputation in his native Scotland and in Europe and is generally regarded as a pioneering text on the distribution and exercises of power and influence in society, though it fell into near-oblivion shortly after 1800 and was only rediscovered fairly recently. Its first chapter, comprising more than one-third of the entire book, also contains one of the first systematic discussions of the status of women in different societies. Millar’s indebtedness to authorities such as Samuel Pufendorf, and to his fellow Scottish philosophers Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Hume, and Smith for their views on moral philosophy, psychology, and property relations, has received considerable scholarly attention. The inspiration he drew from the contemporary efforts to reform Scots law has also been pointed out.2 On the issue of women, however, it is equally important to expand the context of Millar’s and others’ views to include other “neighbour disciplines”, such as narrative history, aesthetics, and political ideology. Particularly striking cases in point, lending themselves readily to such an exercise, are texts by two slightly older contemporaries of Millar, the Edinburgh historian William Robertson (1721–1793) and Edmund Burke (1729– 1797). An expanded contextual reading of these texts promises to enhance our understanding of the ways in which otherwise widely diverging preoccupations and opinions were united, through the choice of topic and approach, within the intellectual movement that is still widely recognized as the Enlightenment despite an emerging tendency to use this noun with a lower case letter and in the plural.3 For the argument developed here, several features of Millar’s work provide salient background for a reading of Robertson and Burke. First, Millar retains the idea, dominant in earlier paradigms that addressed gender roles, that there is a specific “female character” based on psychological and somatic properties. Second, this does not, however, lead him to argue that the status of women in

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John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks: or an Inquiry into the Circumstances which Give Rise to Influence and Authority, in the Different Members of Society (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1990), 98–9, 101. Richard Olson, “Sex and Status in Scottish Enlightenment Social Science: John Millar and the Sociology of Gender Roles”, History of the Human Sciences 11 (1998), 73–100. Most notably, John Pocock in the “Introduction” and “Epilogue” of his Barbarism and Religion. Vol. I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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either the private or the public realm, or both, is eternally “given” in human societies. On the contrary, he introduces a dynamic element into the study of the problem by setting it firmly within the framework of humanity’s progress through different stages, defined in terms of the dominant “mode of subsistence” (hunting-gathering, herding, agriculture and commerce). On the other hand, for Millar as for several contemporary authors of “philosophical history”, the status of women was an indicator of the “manners” prevailing in each of these stages, which, in turn, were widely regarded as a kind of scientific measure of the progress of society.4 This aspect of Millar’s thought, perhaps most typically and readily associated with the preoccupation with the idea of progress in the Enlightenment, is also a suitable starting point to expand his “context” to include contemporary narrative history and political ideology. To both of these fields the kind of evolutionary sociology Millar pursued was highly relevant; and in both of them, statements not unlike his about women’s social roles—inevitably concerned with their influence in the public domain through peaceful or violent means, their aptitude for rulership, command, coercion, and domination—often had a quite central importance. These ideas assumed especially interesting and revealing variations in the thought of Robertson, who has emerged in recent historiography as a central figure in a moderate or “conservative” Enlightenment,5 and Burke, who still remains a conservative founding father. Part of a larger project that aims to study both the views of these two authors on the civilization of the European old regime and their continental reception, this essay will focus on the role each of 4

5

See Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), Chap. 6, where several eighteenth-century women’s histories are discussed; and Sylvana Tomaselli, “Woman in Enlightenment Conjectural Histories”, in Hans Erich B¨odeker and Liselotte Steinbr¨ugge, eds., Conceptualising Woman in Enlightenment Thought (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2001), 7–22. See also Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1760–1860 (London: Macmillan, 1985), 24–6, 30, for specific references to the status of women among the Amerindians; and her “Tacitus Engendered: ‘Gothic Feminism’ and British Histories, c. 1750–1800”, in Geoffrey Cubitt, ed., Imagining Nations (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 57–74 for eighteenth-century assessments of relevant passages in Tacitus’s Germania. Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985); for the concept of “conservative Enlightenment”, see several studies by J. G. A. Pocock, especially “Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England”, in Raffaele Ajello, ed., L’Et´a dei Lumi: Studi Storici sul Settecento Europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples: Jovene Editore, 1985), and “Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions: The American and French Cases in British Perspective”, Government and Opposition 24 (1989); for Robertson’s place in it, see Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion. Vol. II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Chap. 4.

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them assigned to women and femininity as cements and solvents of civilization. Two themes, explored by both Robertson and Burke in detail, deserve special attention. One is the treatment of the female character under the circumstances of savage society, and the implications for conditions prevailing under modernity, in Edmund and William Burke’s An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757) and Robertson’s History of America (1777), as well as in scattered remarks in other works. The other theme is “beauty in distress”, to be found in Robertson’s account of Mary, Queen of Scots in The History of Scotland (1758) and in the references to Marie Antoinette’s tribulations on the night of 5–6 October 1789 in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The relevant passages can be usefully studied against the background of the theory of moral aesthetics in Burke’s widely acclaimed Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), and a discourse on the stadial progress of European civilization shared by these authors with many British and continental contemporaries. The essay is intended as a contribution to the debate on the plurality versus the unity of the European Enlightenment. My understanding of this plurality is based on the following considerations. The Enlightenment as an intellectual movement embraced the whole spectrum of efforts to confront the challenges posed by commercial modernity and the erosion of the Christian and republican ethical foundations of Western societies from the late seventeenth century to the era of the French Revolution—or at least the segments of the spectrum that were not confined to a mere repudiation or negation of these challenges. To those engaging the challenges, the questions were the same or very similar. How is it possible to eliminate the religious and political conflict generated by the extremes of “superstition” and “enthusiasm” that had wrought social and political havoc in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Can the moral imperatives of cooperation, sympathy, and public spirit in human collectives be reconciled with commerce, which had become inevitable and indispensable for modern societies, but equally inevitably reinforced the self-regarding impulses inherent in human nature? Is it possible to enshrine the dignity of man in constitutions that also allow for strong government and stability? These, and a great many other questions, defined themes, fields, and pursuits in eighteenth-century intellectual inquiry that were central to what we know as Enlightenment: toleration and the “natural history” of religion, political economy and conjectural history, natural law, and so forth. An influential stream in Enlightenment studies pursues the idea that Enlightenment plurality can be best conceived in national or regional terms.6 6

Roy Porter and Mikul´as Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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Others stress that “enlightenments” were fundamentally distinguished by their ideological commitments.7 If we proceed instead from the position that the questions were the same but the answers were different,8 we see that, from intellectually sophisticated and (in the sense used here) “enlightened” confrontations with the issues outlined above, it was equally possible to arrive at conclusions protective and subversive of the political, social, and intellectual status quo of the European old regime. The essay will show that the discourse on women and femininity, especially as it assigned them social and political identities, played an important role in shaping such conclusions on both sides. Whereas the emancipatory drive best represented by the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft was one possible culmination of the Enlightenment’s engagement with the issue, there was also a more ambivalent thrust, to which Robertson and Burke made a significant contribution.9 ∗ ∗ ∗ Robertson and Burke represent the eighteenth-century restructuring of thinking about female roles in general and about women and the public domain in particular. To understand what was new in this discursive change, we need to look briefly at earlier patterns available for discussing the same set of questions. We can only take quick soundings into the early modern querelle des sexes, a “European gender dispute” that, just in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, comprised thousands of works on the putative differences between women and men.10 A glimpse at one of the characteristic positions taken in the dispute, exemplified by a text by the Scottish Calvinist reformer John Knox, is appropriate for several reasons.11 First, like Robertson and Burke later, Knox did not address the gender issue directly for its own sake, but exploited potentials inherent in it and 7 8 9

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Pocock, “Clergy and Commerce”; and again, his Barbarism and Religion, vol. I, “Introduction” and “Epilogue”. John Robertson, “The Enlightenment Above National Context”, Historical Journal 40 (1997), 667–97. In the same spirit, Tomaselli, “Woman in Enlightenment Conjectural Histories”, surveys a fair range of eighteenth-century texts to show that whereas women were generally regarded as “catalysts” of the civilizing process, and their status as the gauge of the level attained in it, that very process (especially its culmination in commercial society) was viewed with optimism by some but with pessimism by others. This controversy is the central theme of Gisela Bock, Women in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). On the more immediate intellectual context and Knox’s contribution, see Constance Jordan, “Women’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought”, Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987), 421–51; Anne N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. Chap. 2.

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arguments offered by it for purposes more central to his thought. Second, it also has some significance for this essay that Knox, along with one of his chief political opponents, Mary, Queen of Scots, was a protagonist in Robertson’s History of Scotland. Early in 1558, as an exile on the continent, Knox published The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, a classic diatribe against the very principle of female government. Three years later, when Mary Stuart returned to Scotland and Knox preached a series of sermons inveighing against her idolatry, he was summoned to the queen’s presence for hearings, at which one of the charges was that “he had written a book against her just authority”. Knox replied that “that book was written most especially against that wicked Jezebel of England”, Mary Tudor, but the queen certainly had a point in retorting that “ye speak of women in general”.12 Indeed, the First Blast proved to be a source of embarrassment to Knox and his fellow Scottish Protestants when, just a few months after its publication, they looked to Queen Elizabeth for aid; it stated in generic terms that “it is more than a monster in nature that a woman shall reign and have empire over men”; that “this monstriferous empire of women” is “amongst all enormities . . . most detestable and damnable”, “a thing repugnant to nature”, and “the subversion of good order, equity and justice”.13 Even though it was only the English who were explicitly assured that “if God raise up any noble heart to vindicate the liberty of his country” their opponents would be lifting “their hands against God”,14 most of what Knox had to say could be given general application. Knox based his argument primarily on the prejudice, common among his contemporaries, that “a woman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him”.15 This, in turn, was embedded in a framework of beliefs about the female character also widely held at the time, and supported by an array of authorities from the Scripture through Aristotle and the Digests to the Church Fathers. Some of these concerned women’s moral, others their intellectual, “inferiority”. The most common of the former category, quoted by Knox from Tertullian’s De habitu mulieri, was to the effect that woman was “the port and gate of the Devil” and “the first transgressor of God’s law”, a circumstance that only further justified her subordination, originally arising from “the order of His creation”.16 Indeed, 12 13 14 15 16

John Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland, in John Knox, On Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 175, 177. John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in Knox, On Rebellion, 4, 6, 8, 22. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 11, 15.

beauty or beast, or monstrous regiments?

Knox employed the virtually Manichean dualism of the early Christians, which was later only attenuated but not at all abandoned in scholasticism, suggesting that in the active/passive, virtue/vice, good/evil dichotomy woman always represented the latter, because by her very nature she was impatient, inconstant, and variable, and more exposed to the temptations of pride and ambition than man. These moral blemishes in women were accompanied by the inferiority of their natural talents, at least in regard to leadership and initiative. In Knox’s view it was unnatural for the blind to lead the seer, for the weak to nourish the strong, and for the “foolish, mad and frenetic” to govern “the discreet and give counsel to such as be sober of mind”. He claimed that women’s “sight in civil government is but blindness, their strength weakness, their counsel foolishness, and judgement frenzy”.17 To him these female qualities were just as immutable as “the law moral” which proceeded from the order of Creation (of which they were part): “the constant and unchangeable will of God to which the Gentile is no less bound than was the Jew”.18 The plethora of biblical exempla which Knox deployed thus served not merely as so many convenient parallels but as quasi-legal precedents whose binding force was universal and eternal, without regard to time and place. Besides Christian–scholastic thought, another tradition of early modern moral philosophy, also highly relevant to the context in which both Robertson and Burke would work, was republican or civic humanism. The contribution of civic humanists to the querelle des sexes was rather ambivalent. On the one hand, they regarded the human being as an animal civile, one of the implications, as pointed out by the great Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni, being that “the primary union . . . is that between man and woman, and without it there is no perfection”. Similarly, Marsilio Ficino spoke about marriage as “a domestic res publica”. Statements like these represented a challenge to the earlier misogamous and, by implication, misogynistic tradition.19 However, such conclusions were in a peculiar tension with certain tenets equally fundamental to early modern republicanism. For the civic humanists, whose intellectual and political heroes were Cicero, Cato, and other champions of late republican Rome, the condition and indeed the very survival of the res publica (the classical polis as well as the Renaissance city state) depended on the virtue of the citizens: their dedication to the cause of the public and their willingness to put it before their private interest, even at the cost of taking up arms in defence of the patria. Not only because of this ideal of the armsbearing citizen, but also because civic humanists in fact preserved much of the

17 18 19

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 30. Bock, Women in European History, 19.

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conventional view of the sexes as dichotomous opposites (especially in regard to the supposed inconstancy and corruptibility of women), virt`u was for them a quality masculine by definition (further emphasized by its putative etymological association with vir, “man”, through the notion of virility, still influential in the eighteenth century).20 The internal logic of the whole paradigm suggested that private and domestic pursuits, such as the sexual bond, had an effeminating effect; they undermined the commitment of the vir virtutis (man of virtue) and thus tended to disrupt the public domain. Indeed, corruption, a constant nightmare of civic humanists, was often rendered by them in terms of “effeminacy”, and even the chief agent whereby the way to introduce changes in the affairs of the republic through corruption was opened, fortuna, was generally represented as a female figure.21 The early modern classical revival thus tended to invest public action—exercising judgement and powers of persuasion (peaceful or violent), and making decisions—with a decidedly masculinist ethos.22 It also assumed that there was a distinct cleavage and opposition between the domestic and the public domain, that women were by their nature unfit for the latter and therefore ought to be confined to the former. There were, of course, dissenting voices raised against this concert of antifemale polemics. Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth century argued not only that the female soul was equivalent to the male soul, but also that women had a natural sense for government. A century later, Baldassare Castiglione suggested that women wanted to be men not to be “more perfect”, but to have freedom. Later contributors to the querelle simply blamed male tyranny for whatever inferiority women exhibited. However, it was not until the eighteenth century that new perspectives were introduced into the discussion of the status and roles of women and threw new light on it. Two developments, evident despite the persistence of earlier patterns, are worth mention. Owing to the discovery of progress, the earlier tendency to investigate the subject with the exclusive aim of identifying the supposedly immutable female character could be abandoned in favour of an approach that held the unfolding assertion of all human (male and female) qualities to be relative to social environment. At the same time, as the public sphere was posited as a domain wedged between the political and the private, a space for discussion 20

21 22

See Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias, in idem, Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz–Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 196. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 168–9. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 3 and passim.

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and exchange removed from the sway of the state and critical of its acts or foundations,23 it became possible to hypothesize ways in which qualities and types of conduct normally not associated with the political could gain some sort of public significance. Especially in situations where the direct exercise of civic virtue through participation in processes of political decision making was unrealistic even for most men, it was a reassuring idea that various forms of sociability (“commerce”, in the sense of the exchange of goods as well as of ideas and sentiments) still offered powerful cements of the social bond and thus alternative ways of asserting one’s patriotic commitment.24 David Hume, for instance, made a forceful case for his claim that “beside the improvements which [people] receive from knowledge and the liberal arts, it is impossible but they must feel an encrease of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment”; and he added that these features are “peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages”.25 Viewed from this angle, luxury—long assumed to pose a threat to the civic commitment—no longer seemed as pernicious as in the republican tradition. Hume was reluctant to follow Bernard Mandeville down the path of the latter’s unreserved eulogy of commercial society in his Fable of the Bees, in which, for instance, the proverbial addiction of women to fashionable clothes and other tokens of conspicuous consumption sets economic actors into motion in ways that result in social benefit.26 Hume was careful to distinguish between “innocent” and “blameable” types of luxury and maintained that the latter might have harmful effects on political society (although he was much more specific in describing the former kind and was at pains to point out that most instances of

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The terms used in Roger Chartier’s succinct summary of Habermas’s concept of ¨ Offentlichkeit in The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 1991), 20. Cases in point are Scotland after the Union of 1707, where the removal of Parliament as the main venue of political debate caused a reconsideration of the civic humanist paradigm, and France under the ancien r´egime. See John Robertson, “The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition”, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 137–78; Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts”, in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1985), 271. This essay was first published as “Of Luxury” in 1754, the title being changed in 1760. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1988), 1:88.

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“corruption” usually ascribed to luxury occurred for different reasons). As regards women, rather than stressing the stimuli that commerce and industry received from their vanity, he chose to focus on the qualities commonly associated with their domesticity. Hume employs an interesting paradox here. On the one hand, he takes women’s “inferiority” for granted (and presents it as a phenomenon only intelligible through a materialistic world view).27 At the same time, this assumption is developed into an argument for alleviating “that superiority [of mind and body in man] . . . by the generosity of his behaviour, and a studied deference and complaisance for all her inclinations and opinions”—a disposition absent among “barbarous nations” that “display this superiority, by reducing their females to the most abject slavery”, but characteristic of the “male sex, among a polite people”.28 What is more, under civilized conditions the same qualities that had doomed women to being suppressed into the domestic sphere— that is, feebleness of mind and body—are “redescribed” as natural softness, tenderness, and grace capable of making them proper “Sovereigns of the Empire of Conversation”—in other words, such venues of enlightened sociability as the salons of Paris which Hume later came to know so well, where women indeed wielded considerable authority.29 We can now turn to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, one of the most influential eighteenthcentury treatises on aesthetics, and a book introduced (albeit only in its second edition) by an “Essay on Taste” inserted in an attempt to respond to Hume’s

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Female inferiority is explained by the fact that “[t]heir domestic life requires no higher faculties either of mind or body”, a circumstance that “vanishes and becomes absolutely insignificant, on the religious theory”, according to which the two sexes have equal tasks to perform and therefore ought to have been endowed with equal powers of resolution and reason. Hume, “Of the Immortality of the Soul” (1755, unpublished until the posthumous edition of the Essays), in Essays, 593. Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742), in Essays, 133. Hume, “Of Essay-Writing”, in Essays, 535. Published in 1742, this essay does not appear in later editions. It must be added that Hume himself quite clearly knew that it was not exactly their domestic virtues that earned significance for the salonni`eres; and that in a slightly later period it was precisely the combination of traditionally “male” qualities like wit and learning with “female” frivolity, licence, and luxury in influential aristocratic women that led clandestine writers to expose the maladies of political despotism in France in misogynous terms. See Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, Chap. 2. Also, Hume kept the distinction between the “conversible” and the “learned” world, and, whereas he had nothing against women’s dominant role in the former, he was worried by the merger between the two domains under their governance which he experienced in France. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 124–5. Goodman’s entire reconstruction of the role of the salonni`eres is highly relevant to my subject.

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position on the question whether a “standard of taste” can be fixed.30 Burke’s Enquiry is a systematic analysis of the human aesthetic experience, proceeding from an overview of the psychological factors that evoke reactions to sensation in general, to an investigation of the things “that cause in us the affections of the sublime and the beautiful”.31 Burke’s identification of the “leading passions” as those of self-preservation and of society is crucial. About the former, Burke asserts that “they are the most powerful of all the passions” because they do not merely consist in the “positive pleasure” arising from the simple enjoyment of life and health, but in awesome and astonishing delight caused by the removal of pain or danger or its observation from a distance.32 Awe and astonishment, “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”, accompanied by “the inferior effects [of] admiration, reverence and respect”, are the emotions normally caused by the experience of the sublime. And Burke hastens to identify the source of the sublime: “I know nothing sublime which is not some modification of power . . . strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together.”33 The sublime appears as a dynamic, active force; applied to the public domain, its most obvious association is with sovereignty, statesmanship, or even revolt: legitimate or illegitimate uses of power which, in extraordinary circumstances, might still be essential for the preservation of society. The masculine overtones in Burke’s theory of the sublime emerge even more clearly when it is examined in conjunction with its dialectical counterpart, the beautiful. In his refutation of the traditional notion of beauty as “usefulness”, sublimity and beauty are both linked with gender stereotypes: “if beauty in our species were annexed to use, men would be much more lovely than women; and strength and agility would be considered the only beauties. But to call strength by the name of beauty, to have but one denomination for the qualities of a Venus and Hercules, so totally different in almost all respects, is surely a strange confusion of ideas, or abuse of words.”34 Beauty was for Burke “a name I shall apply to all 30

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Hume’s text was published early in 1757 in his Four Dissertations and was included in later editions of the Essays as “Of the Standard of Taste”. Hume, just like Burke, anchored judgements of taste in ordinary social practice, and shared the same criteria of “objectivity”; and both men were indebted to Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s views advanced in R´eflexions critiques sur la po´esie et la peinture (1719–33), translated as Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music (1748). Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 54. Ibid., 38–40. Ibid., 57, 64–5. Ibid., 106. Cf. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility”, in idem, Iconology: Text, Image, Ideology (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 129ff.

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such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion the most nearly resembling these”. Littleness, smoothness, and delicacy are specifically mentioned among these qualities: ones associated with femininity, and inducing a sense of pleasure and affectionate superiority in a male-dominated society. The passions to which Burke refers here are positive pleasures arising from social intercourse, in contrast to the thrilling delight resulting from the removal of pain or danger or its observation from a distance. He explicitly calls beauty “a social quality”. Of the two main sorts of society, one is that of sex, the dominant passion here being love, having the beauty of women as its object. Significantly, a notion of the civilizing process as understood in Enlightenment conjectural histories is discernible in the background. “The passion which belongs to generation, merely as such, is lust only; this is evident in brutes, whose passions are more unmixed . . . The only distinction they observe with regard to their mates, is that of sex . . . Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty.” As men (i.e., male humans) advanced from rudeness towards refinement, they became progressively divested of the character of lustful brutes that sought the gratification of their instinct by forcing any specimen of the other sex to submission, and developed the desire to win the approbation of one particular woman, to whom they, now gallant suitors, were attracted by her individual qualities.35 However, Burke suggested that the social appetite was also asserted within the “great society” or “society in general,” where the characteristic sentiment evoked by the experience of beauty was “likewise love, but it has no mixture of lust”—sympathy, “a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man”.36 The beautiful, extrapolated from the association of sexes, where it is indissolubly linked to femininity, to human society at large, is indispensable for the perpetuation of the entire social bond, and especially its foundations in the peaceful, ordinary intercourse of everyday life. True, “this quality, where it is highest in the female sex, almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection. Women are very sensible of this; for which reason, they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, even sickness.” As beauty in effect becomes a social practice liable to

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Again, these were aspects of larger processes perceived by many eighteenth-century thinkers—civilization as the growth of individualism, as well as the tendency to value the self increasingly in terms of the approval or disapproval of others—which some of them applauded, others accepted with qualifications, and yet others abhorred. Mandeville, Adam Smith and Rousseau would perhaps be suitable representatives of these three positions. Burke, Enquiry, 42–4, 51.

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manipulation, so it easily lends itself to abuse and deception, especially in view of the fact that “beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty”.37 It is also true that the calm diffused by beauty entails a certain passivity, a state in which “the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions . . . Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder” result from this languor, the only antidote being “labour . . . an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles”.38 Passages like these have been used in a highly suggestive recent interpretation to show that Burke’s Enquiry is a piece of bourgeois ideology in which the author reveals his preferences for the sublime force of initiative and vigour, associated with the middle class, as against aristocratic effeminacy and langour, identified with the aesthetic beautiful (while the tensions in the Reflections arise from Burke’s difficulties in consistently applying his aesthetic categories to “a revolution against the bourgeois revolution”).39 I am drawing the outlines of an alternative explanation. Even if it is possible roughly to identify the sublime and the beautiful with collective agents and processes in eighteenth-century society, the perceived relationship between those social groups is one of mutuality rather than antagonism: they are seen to contribute, in different, even opposite and sometimes conflicting, but mutually reinforcing, ways to maintaining a sound social and political order, rather than representing irreconcilable alternatives that ought to prevail at the expense of one another. Consequently, the contradiction between the Enquiry and the Reflections is not as dramatic as it may at first appear to be. Just as, on the testimony of the previous paragraphs, the beautiful appears to produce a soothing effect on the turbulent energy of the sublime by generating sympathy, so its own excesses are corrected by the operation of the active powers of the latter. This mutually counterpoising role of the two qualities resembles the system of checks and balances available in the British constitution, or the equilibrium of the social forces commonly supposed to underlie it—a modern old regime whose preservation crucially depended on the just proportion of aristocratic and middle-class values. If in the Reflections Burke seems to be shifting his allegiances and appealing to “chivalry”, so forcefully married to the principle of the beautiful in the text, this neatly dovetails with his avowed general strategy as “one who . . . would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end, and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be

37 38 39

Ibid., 110. Ibid., 135. The need for brevity may make this an unfairly simplistic presentation of the argument of the most recent monographic treatment of the subject, Tom Furniss’s powerful and challenging Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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endangered by overloading on one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise”.40 In what ways did Burke rely on his own aesthetic theory in his polemic against the French Revolution, more than three decades after the publication of the Enquiry? How did he combine it with his peculiar view of the rise and progress of modern European civilization? One route to the answers to these questions lies through the ideas about female beauty, and about violence exercised by women, in the work of an historian renowned for his original combination of narrative history with a theory of the progress of society borrowed from the classics of conjectural history.41 William Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759) and History of America (1777) (he also wrote and published the History of Charles V in 1769, and An Historical Disquisition of the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India in 1791) are works of a “historiographer royal”, a national historian who has also been described as the quintessential eighteenth-century cosmopolitan historian; both of them are the works of a master of historical narrative using stadial history as his interpretative framework. In most of his output as a historian, Robertson focused on the period he considered crucial for his vision of the history of the Western world as the unfolding of the great plan of Providence, a gradually increasing accessibility of the divine revelation, made possible by the improvement of the means of subsistence and the consequent refinement of manners and enlightenment of the human mind. This was the sixteenth century, which represented a crisis in that process (in the sense in which the term has been used in the modern historiography of the early modern period, i.e. as both a halt and a catalyst).42 In the History of Scotland Robertson sought to show how and why Scotland, although already making its appearance on the horizon of European history by the sixteenth century, did not share in developments that were taking place elsewhere. The curtailing of feudalism, for example, was in effect postponed in Scotland until the constitutional Union of 1707 with England. In this way he

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Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 8, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 293. Perhaps literally so: Adam Smith is said to have accused Robertson of having plagiarized the backbone of his famous long introduction to the History of Charles V, “A View of the Progress of Society in Europe”, from Smith’s unpublished Lectures on Jurisprudence. Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 105–6. This use of “crisis”, perhaps introduced by Jakob Burckhardt in Chap. 4 of the Reflections on History, was applied to the birth pangs giving rise to the Enlightenment in Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience europ´eenne in 1935, a book that in turn was to some extent responsible for the fashionableness of the term in the 1950s and thereafter among historians studying the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century which marked the advent of capitalism.

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attempted to refocus Scottish historiography, to place Scotland on the map of Europe by providing a pattern for the study of national history in the context of the continent-wide development of economies, societies, and polities. True, Robertson did pay tribute to the robust traditions of independence and martial vigour that so heavily imprinted themselves on the history of Scotland. He was also as willing as the republican Andrew Fletcher, a father figure for the Scottish Enlightenment at the time of the Union debates, to explore these themes by using the classical vocabulary of virtue, and in a “mood of carefully contained nostalgia”.43 But at the same time he was certain, and left no doubt, that these aspects of the Scottish past were indissolubly wedded to the “aristocratical genius of the feudal government”,44 which, because of a few peculiar properties of the country and its inhabitants, was only accentuated in the case of Scotland. While the lairds acknowledged no master, foreign or domestic, they also refused to recognize legal constraints, and exercised an oppressive tyranny over their inferiors. For Robertson the economic benefits of the Union and the resulting social progress more than made up for the loss of political viability. Therefore, by broadening the horizon of writing Scottish history to include the progress of manners and social structures as well as political events, he proposed to supersede its shallow ancient constitutionalism and its insularity. To be sure, as part of the moderate Whig establishment in the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk and at the University of Edinburgh, Robertson also had a political axe to grind, namely, to point out the historical irrelevance of the Jacobite and French connection for Scotland. But he chose to do so by attenuating the partisan edge of the debate between the adherents and adversaries of Mary, Queen of Scots, so prominent in the works written in the context of a significant revival of interest in her during the period preceding the publication of his History.45 It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in most of these works the portrayals of Mary, depending on the authors’ political allegiances, formed polar opposites that resembled the early Christian view of woman as either “the gateway of the devil” or “the bride of Christ”. Though virginity would have been difficult to ascribe to Mary, she was often shown to be innocent and victimized. Robertson 43

44 45

The expression of Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108. The argument of this paragraph and the next one owes a great deal to O’Brien’s study, as well as to Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). William Robertson, The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI till His Accession to the Crown of England, 2 vols. (4th edn, London, 1761), 25. See O’ Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 114ff.; Mary Fearnley-Sander, “Philosophical History and the Scottish Reformation: William Robertson and the Knoxian Tradition”, Historical Journal 22 (1990), 323–38.

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chose to follow a different path. True to his moderate Whig convictions, he acted upon his belief that anti-Jacobitism, which he certainly embraced, was more effectively served by marginalizing Mary as a political emblem than by railing against her. His main device to divest Mary of her character as a potent symbol of an independent and Stuart Scotland was to feminize her in ways that can be associated with contemporary aesthetic standards, rather than with the old Christian or the civic humanist paradigms. We can begin to explore this theme by referring to the translator’s preface in one of the German editions of Robertson’s History of Scotland. According to Theodor Christoph Mittelstedt, Robertson “shows [Mary] for what she truly was, lovable in youth, rash and despicable in mature years, but worthy of admiration and sympathy in her death”, which was meted out to her by the rage of God for falling prey to characteristically female frailties.46 It has recently been suggested that Robertson relied on the aesthetic of the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson in intimating that Mary’s femininity was a source of her moral weakness, simultaneously inviting empathy from female readers and indulgent yet belittling sentiments of chivalry from men; and that as this morally incompetent femininity demonstrates, stemming as it did from her French and Catholic connections, Scotland’s destiny was with England and Protestantism rather than with anything represented by Mary.47 Yet Hutcheson’s directly relevant text, the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), makes no explicit reference to femininity. Claiming that “the Ideas of Beauty and Harmony . . . are necessarily pleasant to us”, and that “some Objects are immediately the Occasions of this Pleasure of Beauty”, the book is mainly about the “Senses fitted for perceiving it”.48 To the extent that this sense of beauty consists in the ability to estimate and appreciate the proportion and harmony, especially the balance between uniformity and variety, in objects, it is a counterpart of the moral sense (explored in Treatise Two of the Inquiry) whose function is also to make judgements about good measure, thus ensuring tranquillity and stability. The sense of beauty—that is, taste—does indeed serve as an analogue for the other senses, including the moral sense: each of them is a faculty operating in a disinterested manner, i.e., without any prospect of advantage accruing to the subject.49 But this is perhaps 46 47 48

49

Herrn William Robertsons Geschichte von Schottland, trans. Theodor C. Mittelstedt (Braunschweig, 1762), vol. 1, “Vorrede”. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 118–19. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, in Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson, ed. Bernhard Fabian (reprint of the 2nd edn of 1725; Hildesheim/Z¨urich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 10–11. “Nay, do we not often see Conveniency and Use neglected to obtain Beauty, without any other prospect of Advantage in the Beautiful Form, than the suggesting the pleasant Ideas of Beauty?” (ibid., 11). Cf. the definition of the moral goodness as “our idea of some Quality

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even less explicit in Hutcheson than in Shaftesbury, who gives the beauty of the socially human clearer emphasis as a cement of the communal bond by directly subsuming taste and morality into one another.50 From either author it was in fact possible for Robertson to borrow the resulting idea of sympathy, crucial for him in the attempt to effect “a recuperation of national unity”.51 However, even in Shaftesbury women tend to figure more for their physical and moral frailty than for their beauty, let alone for the combination of beauty with possibly positive effects of frailty52 —a combination that certainly appears in Robertson’s presentation of Mary Stuart. Robertson took great pains to point out the positive effects that Mary’s feminine character, combined with the values of refinement with which it was associated (note the contrast with the combination of masculinity and simplicity in civic humanism), wrought, or at least promised, in Scotland after she had returned there from France. “The amusements and gaiety of her court . . . began to soften and polish the rude manners of the nation . . . . The beauty and gracefulness of her person drew universal admiration, the elegance and politeness of her manners commanded general respect.” She displayed a “corteous affability . . . without lessening the dignity of a Prince”.53 The problem was that Scotland was not yet quite ripe for appreciating such refinements and for absorbing their soothing effects. “The inhabitants, strangers to industry, averse from labour, and unacquainted with the arts of peace, subsisted intirely by spoil and pillage”, and “the nature of the Scottish constitution, the impotence of regal authority, the exorbitant power of the nobles, the violence of faction, and the fierce manners of the people, rendered the execution of the laws feeble, irregular, and partial”. Therefore, the attempts of the young queen to exercise a moderating influence, by policy as well as by example and simply by character,

50

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apprehended in Actions, which procures Approbation, and Love toward the Actor, from those who receive no Advantage by the Action” (ibid., 101). Any number of quotations from Shaftesbury might illustrate his point that our sense of judgement operates alternately as moral sense and as sense of beauty, depending on what is observed (actions or objects). “No sooner the eye opens upon figures, the ear to sounds, than straight the beautiful results and grace and harmony are known and acknowledge. No sooner are actions viewed, . . . than straight an inward eye distinguishes, and sees the fair and shapely, the amiable and admirable, apart from the deformed, the foul, the odious, or the despicable.” Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John M. Robertson (reprint of the 1900 edn; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), 2:137. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 119. Cf. the reference to the “weak, womanish, and impotent part of our nature”, or the claim that “what is done in fury or anger can never be placed to the account of courage. Were it otherwise, womankind might claim to be the stoutest sex” (Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 20, 80). Robertson, History of Scotland, 265–6.

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were doomed to failure or could be but temporarily successful.54 Robertson’s portrayal of Mary is not devoid of the idea of physical and moral feebleness, capable of simultaneously evoking disesteem and empathy. And yet by way of the peculiar rhetorical device of redescription, the very same feebleness appears as fragility, and ultimately grace and beauty, capable of exerting a moderating effect on sentiments and interpersonal relations. However, since this potential was inseparable from circumstances only available in a sufficiently improved physical, moral, and intellectual environment, it is no wonder that it was not realized in sixteenth-century Scotland and remained unappreciated until the times of commerce, rule of law, and Enlightenment when Robertson was writing. Robertson’s presentation of the feminine as a principle especially amenable to evoking the feeling of sympathy is an uncharacteristically original contribution by a historian whose originality consists, for the most part, in his superb talent for synthesis. It would certainly be difficult to establish to what extent, if at all, Robertson was familiar with Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (the publication of the two texts is separated by two years, so he just could have been). But the pattern described in the previous paragraphs is akin to Burkean, rather than Hutchesonian (or Shaftesburian), aesthetics. The same can be said of the “beauty in distress” theme, which is quite central to Burke’s exploration of the moral implications of the aesthetic beautiful, and appears in the account of Mary’s final tribulations in the History of Scotland: “A woman, young and beautiful, and in distress, is naturally the object of compassion. The comparison of their present misery with the former splendour, usually softens us in favour of illustrious sufferers”—irrespective of our moral or political judgement of the sufferer’s character.55 There is, finally, the developmental aspect of Robertson’s treatment of femininity. On the one hand, referring to the licentiousness of the French court, which could not but have left its imprint on Mary’s character, Robertson dwells on the paradox that amidst the “military character of the age” (as a rule associated with more primitive stages of progress) a “liberty of appearing in all companies . . . began to be allowed to women, who had not yet acquired that delicacy of sentiment, and those polished manners, which alone can render this liberty innocent”56 —an observation anticipating Millar’s overall treatment of the

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Ibid., 272, 281. Ibid., 431. The question why tragedy pleases was a hotly debated one in Edinburgh at the time of the writing of Robertson’s History of Scotland, with virtually all of the literati contributing something on it. For the broader context, see Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, 65–92. Robertson, History of Scotland, 397.

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subject. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that, as we have seen, in Robertson’s presentation the moderating effects of femininity in social relations and the public domain only operate once a certain level of progress has been attained—a further parallel with Burke, to be discussed in the concluding section. Burke saw the French Revolution not merely as an upheaval of the political system of France, the subversion of the government of Louis XVI and his ministers, but as “a revolution of manners”—the decomposition of the complex web of moral and aesthetic standards of intercourse that cemented the European societies of his time. I shall concentrate on the short but vivid passages of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, which give the gist of Burke’s interpretation of these standards. They are introduced by his recalling the “delightful vision” of Marie Antoinette from the time of his visit to France in 1773. This is followed by an account of the events of the night of 5–6 October 1789, when the march of Parisian women to Versailles forced the royal family to relocate to Paris. Underlying his account are the aesthetic principles which, as Burke expounded in the Philosophical Enquiry, emerge in the social sphere in the course of an historical progress peculiar to European civilization. I have suggested that in the Philosophical Enquiry Burke presented both the sublime and the beautiful as essential categories for the stability of any society. The mutual counterpoising effect of the sublime and the beautiful in the civilization of the old regime finds expression in the paradoxical adjective–noun compounds and more complex phrases in Burke’s summary of the standards of manners guiding this civilization. These standards consisted of “that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom . . . which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity”. It was “[t]his mixed system of opinion and sentiment” that has “distinguished [modern Europe] to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world”. In other paradoxical structures, combining elements which could have sublime and beautiful connotations, Burke writes of a “noble equality, . . . [that] mitigated kings into companions . . . obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance”.57 Finally, although— as explained in A Philosophical Enquiry—beauty “almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection”, which could be pretended and thus deceitful,58 from the point of view of the result this does not really matter: the beautiful component of old regime civilization might consist of mere illusions,

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Burke, Reflections, 127. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 110.

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but they were “pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life”.59 Although he traced back the origins of this system to “antient chivalry”, Burke conceived of the European old regime founded on the system as modern, enlightened and progressive.60 To his mind this constituted a sharp contrast to the barbarous conduct of the revolutionary mob, in which women were assuming masculine roles by wielding power and perpetrating violence (attributes of the sublime). By threatening the very principle of the beautiful (represented by the queen who was forced to flee “almost naked”—a part of the story for which there is no supporting evidence), women dealt a blow to the delicate equilibrium on which the whole of Western civilization was established. The “beauty in distress” motif is clearly central to Burke’s metaphor of an imminent civilizational catastrophe.61 At the same time, both Burke’s vision of the old regime as the latest stage in a long civilizing process, whose meaning was the refinement of manners and the growth of the rule of law under strong monarchy, and his images of the revolutionaries as representing a “ruder” stage in the progress of mankind are indebted to the achievement of eighteenth-century Scottish conjectural history, especially in the works of Robertson, whom Burke greatly admired.62 Apropos the tribulations of the royal couple and their being “led in triumph” to Paris, Burke wrote of the conduct of the revolutionaries: “it was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages, entering Onondaga, after some of their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps, their captives, overpowered with scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation . . . ”.63 In the previous passage the humiliating treatment of a woman (and one of very illustrious status) appeared as an assault on the aesthetic principle of the beautiful and its role in maintaining the balance

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Burke, Reflections, 128. Italics throughout this paragraph are added. Cf. Pocock, “Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions”, 81–106, esp. 92. For a relatively recent, more detailed treatment of the episode from this point of view, see Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1996), Chap. 3. For Burke’s esteem for Robertson, see The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–71), 3:350–1, where the former described the latter’s History of America (1777) as an “incomparable work”, worthy of the author of the History of Scotland and the History of Charles V, and added: “The part which I read with the greatest pleasure, is the discussion of the manners and character of the inhabitants of the New World. . . . You have employed philosophy to judge on the manners, and from the manners you have drawn new resources for philosophy.” See also Burke’s similarly enthusiastic review of the same work in the Annual Register (1777), 214–34. Burke, Reflections, 117.

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of old regime civilization. Now, this kind of conduct, together with the general ferocity shown by Parisian women, places those guilty of it outside the European system of values, on a level with those primitive tribes whom Robertson, according to Burke, described so magisterially. The Scottish historian thought that in this “state of society . . . so extremely rude, that the denomination savage” may be applied to it, “the condition of women was humiliating and miserable . . . To despise and degrade the female sex, is the characteristic of the savage state in every part of the globe.”64 Then he went on to describe the martial habits of native Americans: In carrying out their public wars, savage nations are influenced by the same ideas, and animated with the same spirit, as in prosecuting private vengeance . . . When polished nations have obtained the glory of victory, or have acquired an addition of territory, they may terminate a war with honour. But savages are not satisfied until they extirpate the community which is the object of their hatred. They fight, not to conquer, but to destroy.

And, as regards their treatment of captives: As soon as they approach their own frontier, some of their number are despatched to inform their countrymen with respect to the success of the expedition. Then the prisoners begin to feel the wretchedness of their condition. The women of the village, together with the youth who have not attained to the age of bearing arms, assemble, and forming themselves into two lines, through which the prisoners must pass, beat and bruise them with sticks or stones in a cruel manner.65

It must be added that despite the interesting textual parallels, when writing the Reflections Burke did not need to look up the description of “savage” manners in Robertson. He might recall, or turn back to, a work he and William Burke (usually regarded as his “kinsman”) first published in 1757, the same year as the Philosophical Enquiry appeared. The two authors develop the same themes: Their motives for engaging in a war are rarely those views which excite us to it. They have no other end but the glory of the victory and the benefit of the slaves which it enables them to add to their nation, or sacrifice to their brutal fury . . . The fate of their prisoners is the most severe of all . . . . When they come to their station, they are wounded and bruised in a terrible manner. The conquerors enter the town in triumph . . . . The women, forgetting the human as well as the female nature, and transformed into something worse

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William Robertson, The History of America, in The Works of William Robertson (London, 1835), 811, 822. Ibid., 831, 833. Robertson’s source for this passage is Nouveaux voyages de M. le baron La Hontan dans l’Am´erique septentrionale (1703), an account of the author’s observation of the life of the tribes around Lake Ontario, the Hurons in the area of the Jesuit mission of Onondaga mentioned by Burke being one of them.

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than furies, act their part, and even outdo the men, in this scene of horror [culminating in the death of the captives by torture].66

The point is not whether Burke borrowed from Robertson, or even whether Robertson borrowed from Burke. They shared a discourse (with each other as well as with many British and continental contemporaries) in which the manners of native Americans, with special reference to the status of women among them, were described in disparaging terms by reference to the relatively primitive stage they had attained in the progress of different “modes of subsistence”—rather than merely to race. This is not to say that either Robertson or Burke was unaffected by the vast and diverse eighteenth-century effort to explain the differences between races (and sexes) by reference to biological factors, physical and mental constitution as framed by “nature”, be it God, climate, or geographic features. Robertson especially makes clear his allegiances in the contemporary debate between monogenists and polygenists. With the former he asserts that man is “the only living creature whose frame is at once so hardy and so flexible, that he can spread over the whole earth”—i.e., there is one, unitary human race—while also sharing the view of the “environmentalist”, such as Buffon or Blumenbach, that “the human body is not entirely exempt from the operation of climate”. Hence the fact that “Americans were more remarkable for agility than strength”; that “feebleness of constitution was universal among the inhabitants” of the New World; and that the “beardless countenance and smooth skin of the American seems to indicate a defect of vigour”—even of sexual appetite—in view of which he is “destitute of one sign of manhood and of strength”.67 The image of the native American as made effeminate and on that account inferior through a process of degeneration, championed in the eighteenth century by authors as diverse as the Jesuit Joseph Franc¸ois Lafiteau and his critic Cornelius de Pauw—even echoing 66

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[William Burke and Edmund Burke], An Account of the European Settlements in America, 6th edn (London, 1777), 1:191, 194–5, 198. On this rarely studied book by the Burkes, see Michel Fuchs, Edmund Burke, Ireland and the Fashioning of the Self (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), Chap. 4; F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. 1, 1730–1784 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Chap. 5. Robertson, History of America, 813–14. Robertson’s contemporary Henry Home, Lord Kames, made much of hairlessness as a marker of insufficient masculinity and the consequent sexual frigidity and concomitant inability to enter stadial progress among the native Americans in his Sketches of the History of Man (1774), Book 2, vol. 3, “Origin and Progress of American Nations”. For the relevance of the systems of Linn´e and Buffon to the present subject, I have benefited from Phillip Sloan, “The Gaze of Natural History”, in Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1994), 112–51.

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the taxonomy of Carl von Linn´e in which the beard, that ancient symbol of virility, preserved its status as the chief distinguishing feature between man and woman—is lurking in the background of such claims.68 With this image in mind, it may seem somewhat paradoxical that, as we have seen, in the same book of the History of America Robertson provided a vivid image of the warlike masculinity of the females among native Americans—a race effeminate by definition. Robertson could do so only because his dominant frame of reference was not race but civilization: manners, which essentially define patterns of behaviour in the social domain, are more powerfully shaped by the prevailing mode of subsistence than characteristics that might be peculiar to the race. Similarly, the directly political inferences of Burke could not be made within the framework of racial determinism, but only by relying on a discourse of the progress of human civilization. “Whoever studies the Americans of this day”, we are told in the chapter on the manners of the Americans in the Account of the European Settlements, “not only studies the manners of a remote present nation, but he studies in some measure, the antiquities of all nations; from which no mean lights can be thrown upon many parts of the ancient authors, both sacred and profane.”69 The employment of this commonplace of conjectural history by the future author of the Reflections, when juxtaposed with the passages quoted from that book, throws light on a potential inherent in this line of eighteenthcentury inquiry that has hitherto received less attention than it deserves. This was a discourse that Burke was able to put into the service of his anti-revolutionary polemic, implying that, rather than being the conquerors of hitherto unseen peaks of civilization, the revolutionaries were in fact turning the clock backwards: when they looked in the mirror, the savage stared back at them. Viewed from a slightly different angle, instead of being the instruments of linear progress (a characteristically Enlightenment idea of history) toward a higher stage, the revolutionaries were throwing mankind back into the cyclical motion of history (a characteristically pre-Enlightenment idea). ∗ ∗ ∗

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Robertson relied extensively on Lafiteau’s Moeurs des sauvages am´eriquains (1724) and was aware of de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Am´ericains, ou, M´emoires int´eressantes pour servir a l’histoire de l’espece humaine (1768), although he did not share the latter’s more extreme statements on the inferiority of native Americans. Cf. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), Chaps. 3–5; Londa Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 23/4 (1990), 387–405. I have also benefited from Silvia Sebastiani, “Race, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment” (manuscript). [Burke], Account of the European Settlements, 167.

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As recent scholarship has shown, the view that conservatism as a political ideology and the thought of Edmund Burke as its first champion emerged as a critique of the fundamental assumptions about man and society expressed by the Enlightenment70 is in need of reconsideration. One of the vehicles of this challenge was the drive to question the very unity of “the” Enlightenment and to contemplate a plurality of Enlightenments instead; in particular, the suggestion that “among the phenomena which ‘Enlightenment’ connotes for us there are some whose effect may be termed ‘conservative’ in the sense that it was to strengthen elites—some of them clerical—in their capacity for civil control”.71 It should be added that these phenomena also include eighteenthcentury theories of history which described and approved of the contemporary European ancien r´egime as the outcome of stadial progress and refinement, and, as such, a modern and highly developed order of civilization: a view from which it was possible to conclude that the voluntary correction of this status quo is a vain attempt, with disastrous consequences, and ultimately doomed to failure. This dimension of Enlightenment may also—perhaps more appropriately—be labelled conservative in a stricter or at least more recognizably modern sense. Its commitments linked it to positions deemed politically conservative in the terminology that was introduced in the post-Revolutionary era. I have attempted to show that a discourse on women had an important place in this trend. In my introduction I suggested that the Enlightenment as a whole can be usefully conceived as the confrontation with the erosion of Christian and classical republican ethics, which was to a considerable extent permeated by assumptions about women and the public/private dichotomy. It is evident that Robertson and Burke took this confrontation very seriously. Though both men remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, they were working within a new, Enlightenment paradigm. Understanding its political agenda requires a close reading of its ways of configuring beauty, taste, and morality as these relate to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. Among many other things, long-held convictions about the fundamental character of women, and especially about their capacity to appear in the public domain and the legitimacy of their presence there, were somewhat modified and adjusted to the idea of progress, thus becoming relevant to the enlightened discourse about European civilization. It is particularly noteworthy that this new paradigm was double-edged in a very subtle way. On the one hand, in view of the aesthetic features and the directly 70

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A view perhaps most forcefully advanced in Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960). Pocock, “Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions”, 82.

beauty or beast, or monstrous regiments?

resulting moral qualities attributed to women, a positive public, indeed political, role was invented for them. That role was central to the understanding of the overall thrust of a political discourse based on politeness, civility, refinement, and similar values specifically associated with modern commercial societies. It was the complexity and sophistication of this model of society that opened new possibilities for Robertson and Burke. It gave them unprecedented scope to identify and theorize hitherto unrecognized forms of social interaction and constraint, informal and spontaneous, which were shown to be critical to the preservation of commercial societies. But whatever room there was left—and this was still very considerable—for the more traditional ways of governing polities through the direct, even violent, exercise of political power, that room remained closed for women: the very features that opened for them the opportunity to play political roles through sociability in the public sphere at the same time circumscribed them. Robertson and Burke both clearly worked within a paradigm in which civil society recognized itself to be dependent on the civilizing and moral force attributed to women in view of their readily acknowledged character as sociable beings, but at the same time “rested on notions of sexual difference that could justify banishing them from the political arena”—that is, voting and governance.72 The survival chances of the entire edifice of Europe’s old regime modernity seemed to depend on both acknowledging women’s civilizing roles and confining them to their proper place. This certainly sounds conservative enough in the sense that the term is commonly understood today: a necessary and reasonable adjustment of inveterate notions of patriarchy to the requirements of a changing socio-cultural scene, calculated essentially to preserve a status quo genuinely believed to be more conducive to well-being than any alternative feasible under the given circumstances.73 But there is also a sense in which the positions taken by Robertson and Burke may be identified as expressions of a “conservative Enlightenment”. Analysing the structures of a commercial society in a recognizably “enlightened” way, both authors were able to identify the chemistry that stabilized it and provided it with the continuity Burke so famously and ironically celebrated. Burke was embraced as a predecessor and an icon by political conservatives throughout the nineteenth and (especially) the twentieth centuries, though

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This is generalized as the Enlightenment paradigm on the subject in James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 15 and Chap. 6. In fact, the term “conservative Enlightenment” is used by John Pocock in a similar, soft sense, too: by reference to its general tendency to preserve the status quo—one discernible in innumerable historical situations—rather than specifically to its relationship to modern (political) conservatism.

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largely for reasons other than his indebtedness to and affiliation with the Enlightenment. The use of terms like “conservative” and “conservatism” to evoke a “conservative Enlightenment” points us to an important paradox—one that the traditional model of conservatism versus Enlightenment will have to accommodate. It was because the recasting of the theme of femininity occurred in combination with tenets fundamental to a dominant mode of Enlightenment thought that it assumed a pivotal place in Burke’s Reflections, subsequently hailed as the quintessential conservative manifesto against the Enlightenment.74

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For comments I am grateful to Gisela Bock, Edward J. Hundert, Peter Jones, Anthony La Vopa and Anna Wessely.

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 331–358
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000204 Printed in the United Kingdom

philhellenism and the furor orientalis suzanne marchand Department of History, Louisiana State University

Focusing on the study of the ancient Orient in fin-de-si`ecle Germany, this essay argues that “orientalism” had a wider range of cultural consequences than the term usually evokes in studies of Western imperialism and its ideologies. The essay describes the development of a generational movement in German scholarship that was characterized by its vigorous championing of the Orient over and against the dominant tendency to isolate and exalt classical civilizations, and especially ancient Greece, and by its role in destabilizing Western presumptions. It demonstrates that the furor orientalis did contribute to the decentering of the Greeks and the ancient Hebrews, bequeathing to the twentieth century both a much deeper and more diverse picture of the ancient Near East and an obsession with origins that could be mobilized by racist propagandists. The essay offers three case studies of groups which exemplified this furor—the Panbabylonists; the Religious-Historical School; and the iconoclastic mythographer Heinrich Zimmer, who represents a strong strain of Schopenhauerian Indology. It concludes by suggesting the more constructive directions taken by orientalists outside Germany in the 1920s–1940s, and poses the question: how long will the peaceful solutions they promoted last?

In his 1926 Kunstform und Yoga, the young Indologist Heinrich Zimmer offered the following contrast between Indian and classical art: The classical work of art presupposes an eternal eye that lingers on it, enjoying and interpreting it: it knows that it is beautiful and wants its beauty to make an impression. Like Salom´e in her desperate love proposal to the Prophet, it triumphantly calls to its antagonist: “Man, look at me !”—and if we are not spellbound and our eyes sweep past it, removing ourselves from its presence, it may grieve, like Salom´e over Jochanaan’s head: “Oh, why did you not look at me? If you had looked at me, you would have loved me ! . . .” Naturally we have no right to use here her words, “your eyes are blindfolded like those of one who wants to see his God,” but with them and with Jochanaan’s descent into the dark shaft of his lonely cistern, lighted by the face of his God, something of the world is sketched in which the images of Buddhas, gods, and the holies of India have their origin and their life.1

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Heinrich Zimmer, Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of India, trans. Gerald Chapple and James B. Lawson (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 19–20.

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Zimmer’s highly romantic analysis presumed his readers’ familiarity with Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera Salom´e, an even more decadent version of Oscar Wilde’s hyper-decadent play of the same title. His choice of metaphors may be explained by noting the young scholar’s personal relations with Strauss’s good friend and sometime librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal.2 But the wordplay remains remarkable, especially for a member of the supposedly Euro-hubristic orientalist profession. Casting himself as the “oriental” Jew Jochanaan, Zimmer reversed the usual feminization of the Orient, assigning to Greek art—the model for nineteenth-century German self-formation—the role of the amoral pagan seductress Salom´e. This cultural iconoclasm was not something Zimmer learned from his eminent father-in-law—nor was its passionate expression in keeping with the positivist philological habits of Zimmer’s own father (also Heinrich), Sanskritist and Professor of Celtic Philology at the University of Berlin. But if Heinrich the elder did not share his son’s aesthetic relativism and Schopenhauerian world view, the two Zimmers did share a common challenge, namely that of averting the public’s gaze, at least briefly, from the spellbinding power of Greek culture. Both knew that to be an orientalist was not to be a classicist, and indeed to choose what might prove to be a rather lonely pursuit: explaining Jochanaan’s apparently irrational disdain for Greek “light.” Zimmer’s reflections on the plight of the German orientalist may be overly theatrical, but they transport us into an intellectual world so remote from the one now evoked by the mention of “orientalism” that we might profitably inquire further. His remarks illuminate, first of all, the orientalist’s self-conception as cultural outsider, seeking to interpret the language of the “other” to a largely uncomprehending cultural world. They suggest a willingness to find other sources of light. And they underline the fact that the “orientalism” practiced by the Zimmers and many of their contemporaries had at its core not relationships between modern Europeans and backward “orientals” but rather the peoples of the ancient world, especially Greeks and Jews. The outgrowth of Renaissance biblical and humanistic scholarship, this “orientalism” took as its objects not the rational (but pagan) Greeks, but the rather more puzzling peoples of the East; this meant that the tradition produced not only the tools for converting the heathen (or the infidels), but also the imperative to understand them. It was a tradition which encompassed both iconoclastic critics of European norms and Christian or Western apologists—both parties drawing heavily on the same texts, including the Bible, classical authors like Herodotus and Plutarch, and an increasing number of travelogues. This tradition was very much alive in

2

Two years after the publication of Kunstform, Zimmer married Hofmannsthal’s daughter Christiane, and he would later serve as the Austrian writer’s literary executor.

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Zimmer’s lifetime—but something important was happening to it. By the fin de si`ecle, occidental scholars had accumulated and deciphered so many oriental texts in previously unknown languages that the old humanistic historical frames threatened to collapse. In such circumstances, it was becoming possible to envision breaking Salom´e’s spell—and that of the all-too-modest, and all-tooliberal, positivist fathers who had not dared to give the Orient its due. To understand the sort of “orientalism” I am describing we must see it not only in the context of the generational conflicts and scholarly innovations of the late Wilhelmine period, but also as a chapter in the much longer history of humanistic scholarship. Thus the essay seeks to carry forward the work of early modern intellectual historians such as Frances Yates, D. P. Walker, Frank Manuel, Anthony Grafton, Debora Shuger, and the great historian of classical scholarship Arnaldo Momigliano.3 The essay challenges, thereby, the presumption shared by today’s professional orientalists and their multiculturalist critics that by about 1850, the study of the Orient was being shaped exclusively by direct contacts between indigenous peoples (and/or their texts) and European scientists, whose political interests and scientific methods were thoroughly “modern.” Though I agree that, in Edward Said’s words, Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world,” I cannot concur with the central contention of his now infamous study, that imperialism was the only important factor shaping this cultural discourse.4 Of course, many travelogues and policy papers reflected this imperialist condescension; but offering this verdict on discussions of the ancient oriental world is to make either a trivial statement (yes, Europeans thought they knew better) or a misguided generalization. In studies of the ancient Near East, scholars frequently emphasized non-Western cultural achievements, compared the Orient favorably to modern Europe, acknowledged borrowings or descent from the Orient, and/or chalked up “oriental” woes to Western meddling. They did so, not surprisingly, usually with Western antagonists or personal projects in mind—but the net effect was often to destabilize Western presumptions, not to reconfirm them. This is something, thanks to Yates,

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Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964); D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972); Frank Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983, 1993); Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley, CA, 1994). Of Arnaldo Momigliano’s many important publications, I will cite only Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, ed. Silvia Berti, trans. Maura Masella-Gayley (Chicago, 1994), and Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middleton, CT, 1977). Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), 12.

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Manuel, and the others listed above, that we now recognize in the worlds of Hugo Grotius and Joseph Scaliger, Athanasius Kircher and Richard Simon, Herder and Montesquieu. That it can be said, too, of the era after the onset of “actual” German colonization in 1884—an era which also saw a colossal increase in the scale of accessible “oriental” materials, as well as the most serious threats to elite humanistic learning since the Roman Empire’s collapse—is what I hope to illustrate below. The piece of the story told here concerns a group I have dubbed the “furious” orientalists, a group characterized by their vigorous championing of the claims of the Orient to historical, religious, philosophical and/or artistic priority (and sometimes even superiority) over and against the dominant tendency to isolate and exalt classical civilizations, and especially ancient Greece. It was not a self-conscious movement, or an entirely coherent strain of thought, but it had a recognizable set of enemies (classicizing Gymnasium and university professors; orthodox theologians; and bourgeois audiences unable to shake the now conventional, comfortable philhellenism and liberal Protestant piety dispensed by these cultural authorities). Prosopographically, too, the furor has at least loose coherence: its proponents belonged largely to the generation which came of age in the 1880s and 1890s, as post-unification anxieties (including colonial ones) came to the fore, as classical learning and scholarly positivism came under attack, and as new, more intensive bouts of collecting, editing, deciphering and publishing made available a vast new “oriental” arsenal. Trained as specialized philologists, but often subjected to long delays before receiving paying academic jobs, a number of these young scholars exhibited frustration with philhellenic cultural institutions that seemed outdated and unable to provide Germans with either a reliable account of their descent or an inspiring vision of their future. This frustration, and the attempt to further personal, intellectual and ideological interests by flinging open the doors to a wider, deeper and more powerful Orient, is what I call the furor orientalis—a moniker that might well have been coined by classicizing contemporaries, for whom the movement was, quite clearly, a newfangled sort of barbarian invasion. More moderate orientalists, too, those who did not share the aspirations to cultural and/or individual transformation so central to their more radical students and colleagues, generally cast a disparaging eye on the movement. The number of players, then, is relatively small, comprising only a subset of those trained in oriental languages at the fin de si`ecle, and their names are now little known. But the three manifestations of the furor sketched below—Panbabylonism, the Religious-Historical School, and Schopenhauerian Indology—did have major cultural effects, and provide an important new context for the understanding of better-known figures such as Martin Buber, Max Weber, C. G. Jung, Aby Warburg, Ernst Troeltsch, Hermann Hesse, Werner Jaeger, Rudolf

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Bultmann and Gershom Scholem.5 The brief concluding section, finally, takes us outside Germany to examine European and American reactions to their more moderate forms of the furor orientalis. Here, as in the preceding sections, there is still much research to be done, and the author hopes this survey will provoke others to take deeper soundings. In this essay, however, I will be particularly concerned to show how the furor orientalis contributed to the decentering of classical aesthetics and history in Wilhelmine intellectual and institutional cultures. But I want also to draw attention to its contributions to the declining status of another special people in the cultural history of the ancient world, and that is, of course, the Jews. Many assimilationist Jews, like Sigmund Freud, were indeed philhellenes, the Greeks offering models for a secular, rational culture in which Jews could be expected to participate. But as Carl Schorske showed beautifully some years back,6 Athens for Freud quite rapidly lost its thrall—and did so, I might add, precisely in the prewar years in which, I will argue, the furor orientalis was at its peak. Nor was this a failing on Freud’s part; philhellenism, by about 1900, was not especially good for Jews, for as it moved into an ever more defensive phase the definition of the greatness of the Greeks increasingly set up racial and cultural models that neither past nor present Jews could imitate. But the new orientalism, in gentile hands,7 concerned especially with pushing the histories of the ancient Indians, Assyrians, Persians, and to a lesser extent Egyptians to the fore, was if anything more Judeophobic than was classics, something that became especially clear in the avalanche of publications that appeared between about 1880 and 1930 treating the non-Jewish origins of monotheism. When I suggested above that the furor orientalis was instrumental in detaching German culture from its classical and Christian moorings, I should add that the Jews, often more than the Greeks, were

5

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For a sketch of another archetypical “furious” orientalist, see Suzanne L. Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski,” History and Theory 33 (Dec. 1994), 106–30. Carl E. Schorske, “To the Egyptian Dig: Freud’s Psycho-Archeology of Cultures,” in idem, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 191–218. That there is a Jewish furor orientalis to be studied, I am certain; key proponents here would certainly be Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig, all thinkers who emphasized the non-rational, more “oriental” side of Judaism in response, I believe, to the same sort of crises in classicism and liberalism (which here would include assimilationist doctrine and the Wissenschaft des Judentums) to which the gentile orientalists I describe here reacted. For some examples, see Martin Kramer, ed., The Jewish Discovery of Islam (Tel Aviv, 1999).

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clearly scheduled for decentering. That this decentering was in some respects the continuation of enlightened efforts at increasing Christian toleration, and in others an attempt to Aryanize German ancestry, makes it, for the modern reader, both salutary and despicable, and it is time we grappled with this ambivalent legacy.8

orientalism in a philhellenic age To understand the impertinence of our “furious” orientalists, we need to venture briefly backward into the early nineteenth century, the period in which classical humanism so clearly gained the upper hand against its oriental–biblical brother. Into the later eighteenth century, both classical and oriental philology remained auxiliary sciences, subordinated to the higher science of theology, and often practiced by the same individuals. But over the course of just a few years, classics came to the fore. The educational institutions Wilhelm von Humboldt promoted to central prominence beginning in 1809, the philosophical faculty of the University of Berlin, the Gymnasien, and the Altes Museum, all gave special attention to classical languages and cultures, and helped to promote the idea that the imitation of the rational, secular, masculine and, above all, beautiful Greeks was the means to German cultural greatness. Especially after the socalled Creuzer Affair of the early 1820s, in which the Neoplatonic philologist Friedrich Creuzer was roundly denounced for seeking the source of all symbols and myths in the pagan Near East, classicists turned to secular subjects, focusing especially on the linguistic niceties and internal affairs of each of the classical lands. With the exception of a few archaeologists, Ernest Renan wrote in 1853, the scholars had all united in defending “the originality of Greek mythology against M. Creuzer. All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient.”9 In the wake of the Creuzer Affair, university philosophical faculties—the suns around which so much German cultural life orbited—were increasingly inhabited by Protestant scholars of positivist mien, for whom the rational and supposedly areligious Greeks of the classical period were both models and the objects of intense scrutiny.

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Some time ago, Frank Manuel began posing these uncomfortable questions; see his Broken Staff. See also Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT, 2002), and Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton, NJ, forthcoming 2005). Ernest Renan, “Des religions de l’antiquit´e et de leurs derniers historiens,” Revue des deux Mondes 23/2 (1853), 835.

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Orientalism, in the meantime, had also undergone a historicist revolution, one which virtually eliminated scholarly interest in things modern and transformed religious texts into Volkspoesie—something preferable, both for enlightenment thinkers and romantics, to treating them simply as catalogs of pagan errors. Orientalists, who had also long emphasized language learning (especially Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew, for the purposes of Old Testament exegesis), now added Persian and Sanskrit to their repertoires, and began to distance themselves from “unscientific” theological debates. When Germany’s first professional organization for orientalists was founded in 1844, it explicitly ruled theological questions out of bounds, and its journal, the Zeitschrift der Deutsch-Morgenl¨andischen Gesellschaft, refused to accept contributions that dealt with religious, as opposed to culture-historical or philological, issues. Then, too, the quest for non-debatable, fundamental knowledge led German orientalists to emphasize the deep past; across Orientalistik, the motto later coined by Eugen Wirth held sway: “je a¨ lter um so interessanter.”10 Focusing on the interpretation of, for example, vedic literature, pre-Islamic Arabic texts, and the Pentateuch seemed to be the means to understand cultures in their purest states—and it also made it possible to compete, and sometimes win, the “origins of ” game frequently played against the classicists. This sort of hyper-historicist philology did in fact produce path-breaking, notoriously painstaking scholarship, and new respect from colleagues abroad. But that does not mean the Orient it studied was unmediated by domestic institutions and ideologies, or without consequences for German cultural history. Positivist historicism actually worked to the cultural disadvantage of orientalists compared to classicists; rarely permitted to specialize in just one language, oriental philologists usually could not make claims to perfect hermeneutical understanding of the Other. As universal history gave way to “scientific” history, treatments of oriental origins by non-orientalists—as in Creuzer’s Symbolik or Hegel’s Philosophy of History—were increasingly frowned upon; if this gave orientalists hegemony in interpreting Asian cultures, it also enabled the bracketing or dismissal of the question of Eastern origins, and the selection of Greece, every Gymnasium boy’s specialty, as the necessary starting point for histories of art, science and philosophy.11 Moreover, the conviction that knowledge of a nation’s ancient language was the key to comprehending its soul made for 10

11

Eugen Wirth, “Orientalistik und Orientforschung: Aufgaben und Probleme aus der Sicht der Nachbarwissenschaften,” in Wolfgang Voigt, ed., XIX. Deutscher Orientalistentag (28. September bis 4. October 1975): Vortr¨age, Zeitschrift der Deutschen-Morgenl¨andischen Gesellschaft, supp. III/1 (Wiesbaden, 1977), lvii. See Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY, 1988), 148–59; Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 46–7.

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a kind of contempt for modern, spoken languages and political conditions, something that “modernist” orientalists attempted to change in the wake of Germany’s entrance into the colonial race, with little success. In 1920, Franz Babinger was still complaining about a peculiar kind of German “orientalist megalomania”: “just because someone can read cuneiform,” he lamented, “they feel entitled to pass judgments about the modern Orient.”12 What Babinger called megalomania was, of course, the legacy of the German orientalist tradition and its institutions, one which invested its energies in the ancient oriental past, and bestowed its laurels upon those with great linguistic, not comparative or analytical, talents. Decipherments and specialized publications abounded in the years 1830–80, but the main experience for orientalists in the middle of the century was that of loneliness—and often iconoclasm. This iconoclasm took them in two central directions: away from Christianity, and especially its Jewish forbears, and away from the classics. The case of Nietzsche’s best school friend, Paul Deussen, is perhaps indicative. As late as the 1860s, Deussen (1845–1919) was the only student in Indologist Adolf Lassen’s courses at the University of Bonn, and the young student felt guilty in these years for indulging in the “luxury” of studying Sanskrit, and indeed obtained a real job only at the age of 43.13 When Deussen lectured, for a few months, on Indian philosophy at the University of Aachen in the late 1870s, local newspapers denounced him for asserting that in comparison to the all-knowing Indians, Christ was an idiot (Dummkopf ). Much against his will, Deussen was eventually forced to give up lecturing on India, and teach the history of philosophy from Plato to Kant instead.14 But, by the mid-1880s, things Indian were beginning to trickle into the youth culture, as was heightened interest in other non-Greek cultures. This is the world into which, adapting a time-honored French tradition of using oriental others to embarrass modern Europeans, Nietzsche launched his Zarathustra in 1883, knowing virtually nothing about the philosophy of ancient Persia, and his all-out assaults on Christianity, the Genealogy of Morals and the Anti-Christ (both written in the late 1880s), both of them heavily indebted to orientalist scholarship, from Julius Wellhausen’s portrayal of desiccated late Judaism to Deussen’s Schopenhauerian Indology. By the later 1880s, despite having spent at least five decades as Europe’s academic pacesetters, German orientalists still felt very much second-class citizens in their central European homes, as indeed they were. Greek and Latin were still central to Gymnasium curricula, and graduation from the Gymnasium 12 13 14

Babinger to C. H. Becker, Feb. 18, 1920, in Berlin (Dahlem), Geheimes Staatsarchiv, N. Becker, Mappe 6181. Paul Deussen, Mein Leben, ed. Erika Rosenthal-Deussen (Leipzig, 1922), 87. Ibid., 177–86.

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was required for university entry. Germany’s Royal Museums were full of classical artworks and casts, purchased with state monies, while Indian, Chinese, Assyrian, and Islamic arts, insofar as they were exhibited at all, were closeted in the Ethnographic Museum (which had only opened in any event in 1886). The only place to go to learn the living languages of the Orient was Berlin’s Orient Seminar, also founded only in 1887, and presided over by Ferdinand von Richthofen, the great geographer of China; Richthofen’s Seminar was indeed busy training linguists and geographers, but scholarly philologists continued to look askance at its all too modern and “practical” pursuits. Funding for things “oriental” was largely left to private organizations, while classical archaeologists extracted large sums from the museums and the Kaiser. But now that orientalists could actually read the literature and inscriptions of the Orient for themselves, many felt they could escape their intellectual and institutional dependence on the classics. As Adolf Erman proclaimed in 1885, Egyptologists could now write the history of Egypt without the help of Herodotus and the Old Testament, testimonies hardly more reliable than modern tourist journals written by English lords and American ladies.15 It was time for a change.

from the second oriental renaissance to the furor orientalis The emergence in the later 1880s and 1890s of what I will call the furor orientalis is a complex phenomenon, both a generational attack on the philhellenic cultural institutions of the Reich, and an attempt to create both a new sort of humanism and a new hierarchy of the disciplines. It had numerous spokespersons, some of whom were what we might call cultural relativists, content to create a rough parity between West and East, some of whom were romantics, seeking a new religion, and some of whom were racist fanatics, eager to give Germany a purer past, present and future. What made the articulation of these new world views possible was: first of all, the specialized orientalist scholarship of the previous half-century (and the next 30 years); secondly, an emerging generational revolt which seriously threatened the status of the Gymnasien, and classical scholarship with them; thirdly, the onset of colonization and the new friendship established between the Kaiser and the Sultan; and finally, a neoromantic revival which made things religious, irrational, primitive and exotic once more highly appealing. I will forego, for now, most of the proof that there was, beginning about 1880, a second, and perhaps more powerful, oriental renaissance, which arrived hard on

15

¨ Adolf Erman, Agypten und a¨ gyptisches Leben im Altertum (T¨ubingen, 1885), 6–7.

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the heels of the romantic-era renaissance charted long ago by Raymond Schwab.16 Suffice it to mention that this was the era in which cuneiform decipherments were finally cleared up and simplified, and huge caches of documents were found at Oxyrhynchus and Tell-el-Amarna in Egypt; in which German scholars, itching to crown their philological preeminence with “real” cultural conquests, began their excavations at Babylon and Assur. In this period, Flinders Petrie made his way to Egypt and the French hauled home the Code of Hammurabi; Max M¨uller and J. G. Frazer, not to mention Madame Blavatsky, began to find mass readerships. Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin and the Turfan expeditions opened up (and pillaged) the hitherto unknown cultural treasury of Chinese Turkestan; Ignaz Goldziher produced his monumental studies of Islamic law and Karl May his Orient cycle of popular novels. This was the era that saw the broad new popularity of oriental art, including not only carpets, but also Japanese prints, Chinese landscapes, Indian sculptures, and Islamic architectural design. By 1905, the Orient was becoming so fashionable that, wrote Leopold von Schr¨oder, Buddha was replacing Socrates as the idol of the educated elite.17 Though this was largely, for the Viennese Indologist, wishful thinking, his statement does indicate a real change in the cultural diet of, at least, the middle-class educated elite. It is worth reiterating here that colonization had a critical part to play in enabling this new “Renaissance”—it is by no means accidental that its dates precisely coincide with those of the period of high imperialism. Colonial penetration opened the way for travel to new places, excavation in foreign territories, and the selling, by local elites, of large quantities of manuscripts, artifacts, and linguistic and ethnographic expertise. Moreover, the exaltation of the ancient East was linked to a nearly universal European disdain for the “fallenness” of modern oriental cultures, a view pervasive among orientalists as well. Though German orientalists could be vicious critics of Dutch, French, and especially English colonization, few believed the East capable of ruling itself.18 Indeed, the East was not, in their view, able to write its own ancient history or appreciate its cultural traditions either; the West had to do that for them. But shouldering that “white man’s burden” would, in the end, also have profound effects on the culture of the West.

16 17 18

Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York, 1984). Leopold von Schr¨oder, “Buddha und unsere Zeit” (1905), in idem, Reden und Aufs¨atze, vornehmlich u¨ ber Indiens Literatur und Kultur (Leipzig, 1913), 216–17. In 1885, Theodor N¨oldeke commented that the Romans had rightly taken Aristotle’s advice to Alexander to act as masters over the “Orientals” “just as, mutatis mutandis, the Europeans still today have the right to rule over the Asiatics.” N¨oldeke, Ueber Mommsens Darstellung der r¨omischen Herrschaft und r¨omischen Politik im Orient (Leipzig, 1885), 3.

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In this context, it seems, proponents of things oriental began to feel that the period of inferior status had come to an end. Now that sources could be read in the original, and independence from classical or biblical literature had been established, it was time for orientalism to become a fully fledged part of the humanities, to form more than the antithesis against which “the human” could be defined. This had already been attempted for India, by Peter von Bohlen in 1830, and for Egypt, by Christian Bunsen in 1844. But these attempts had come too early, before the Bildungsb¨urger had lost faith and interest in neoclassicism, before the clergy’s power over theology faculty appointments had been fully broken, and before the popular press had discovered secular orientalism. In all three of these categories, the fin de si`ecle bested its predecessors, and the Orient, at least the ancient Orient, was the benefactor. And perhaps the biggest winner was the Near Eastern culture least accessible to the scholars of the first oriental renaissance, but hugely popular for those of the second: Assyria.

panbabylonism, or, assyriology comes of age Formally speaking, Assyriology really begins with the agreement in 1857 of four European scholars on a proper mode of deciphering one variety of cuneiform script. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that biblical interpretation would be of central interest once decipherment had been completed; Babylonian and Assyrian rulers and cities are, after all, often mentioned in the Old Testament (God orders Jonah to preach to the pagans at Nineveh, etc.). But the first generation of professional cuneiform scholars trod rather carefully, as did Leipzig professor Eberhard Schrader, collecting, translating and editing Assyrian texts rather than drawing conclusions about their historical or theological import.19 Not so his students, a group which included Friedrich Delitzsch, Alfred Jeremias, Peter Jensen, Eduard Stucken and Hugo Winckler, all now obscure scholars, but once at the eye of the Assyriological storm. Like the “Romantics,” this group had its name imposed on it by its critics; but the “Panbabylonists” seem to have more or less accepted the epithet. After all, it captured, quite accurately, their hyper-diffusionist world view and their radical cultural aspirations. A remarkable series of archaeological discoveries, and their halting absorption into mainstream orientalism, shaped the careers of the “Panbabylonists.” They experienced, as young men, British Assyriologist George Smith’s discovery of

19

Schrader had, however, engaged in heated debate with the Jewish scholar Joseph Hal´evy, claiming that the (Semitic) Babylonians had been able to invent writing, mythology, art and perhaps even monotheism only as a result of contact with the indigenous Turanians. Jerrold S. Cooper, “Posing the Sumerian Question: Race and Scholarship in the Early History of Assyriology,” Aula Orientalis 9/1–2 (1991), 52–3.

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the “flood tablets” in the early 1870s, and would be central participants in the excavation and interpretation of the Tell-el-Amarna letters, the Code of Hammurabi, and finally the cities of Babylon, Assur, and Boghazkoi (ancient Hattusha). In specialized studies from the 1870s onward, Friedrich Delitzsch and his fellows argued that the shaping force of the Babylonians on the early Hebrews could now be proved, and the taint of polytheistic irrationality and immorality should be removed from the Jews’ pagan captors. Gilgamesh was raised to the status of an epic poem—and dated far earlier than the Iliad. The Code of Hammurabi was said to show striking similarities with the Law of the Torah, and allowed the Assyriologists to claim the first system of jurisprudence; as the Assyrians had long been credited with the invention of astrology, astronomy and other sciences as well, this now gave them superiority across much of the terrain known to nineteenth-century intellectuals as “civilization.” But other scholars, and the educated public as a whole, were slow to accept the Assyriological revolution. Classicists were uninterested, theologians were hostile, and even other orientalists usually treated the discipline’s new subfield with suspicion if not contempt (most liberal-era orientalists did not learn cuneiform). It was this combination of evidentiary triumphs and institutional disappointments that laid the foundations for the Assyriological furor orientalis. Panbabylonism had slightly different casts in the works of each of its proponents. Chiefly interested in the origin of myths, Eduard Stucken’s Astralmythen (Leipzig, 5 vols., 1896–1907) looked something like an historicized form of Charles Robert Dupuis’s enlightened classic, Origines de tous les cultes (1795), in which the primeval astrological wisdom of oriental pagans was shown to have been taken up by the next world civilizations (rather than snuffed out or perverted by Christianity, as in Dupuis’s work).20 Jeremias developed a curious sort of populist Protestant apologetics from his study of Babylonian religion. This most closely resembled the position taken by Friedrich Delitzsch, Professor of Assyriology at the University of Berlin and clearly the most respectable member of the group. Winckler, on the other hand, claimed to be an atheist; even more than the others, he seems to have been driven by his desire as an eternal outsider for academic recognition. Peter Jensen, a cranky professor of Semitic languages at the University of Marburg, put his efforts into championing the epic of Gilgamesh, the Ur-source, he argued, of the Homeric epics and the model for the fictional characters Moses, Jesus and Paul.21 What all had in common, however, was their

20

21

On Stucken see Ingeborg L. Carlson, Eduard Stucken (1865–1936): Ein Dichter und seine Zeit (Berlin, 1978). An abridged English version of Dupuis’s 12-volume work appeared in 1872, and was reprinted as The Origin of All Religious Worship (New York, 1984). The title of Jensen’s work says it all: Moses, Jesus, Paulus: Drei Varianten des babylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesh: Eine Anklage und ein Appell (Frankfurt, 3rd edn, 1910).

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frustration with the older forms of positivistic modesty and their unwillingness to defer to credentialed classicists or theologians. It is all too clear to his many critics, wrote Jensen in a defiant introduction to his 1906 Das Gilgamesh-Epos in der Weltliteratur, “that I am no scholarly writer of the old school, nor of the new school, no priest of the thrice-holy pagan temple of Greekdom.”22 He, like his fellows, was committed, instead, to an aggressive new search for truth, one ready and willing to defy academic expectations and destroy bourgeois norms. Having largely failed in the 1880s and 1890s to earn the academic accolades they thought they deserved, the Panbabylonists began to cultivate a more popular scholarly audience. Stucken’s volumes were perhaps the first steps in this direction, but other members were even more concerned with popularization. Winckler became something of the patron saint of the orientalists’ main book review organ, the Orientalische Literaturzeitung, and Jeremias and his colleagues sought to cultivate non-academic audiences by launching popular ventures like the Religionsgeschichtliche Volksb¨ucher, a series of short books for lay readers which were intended especially for students and women.23 They were aided materially by the fact that a group of publishers—Eugen Diederichs Verlag and B. G. Teubner Verlag, to cite only the most important—now eagerly sought out modernist iconoclasts, especially those peddling experimental or revitalized religious orientations, while others—like the publishers of the Volksb¨ucher, first Gebauer-Schwetschke Verlag, then P. Siebeck Verlag—saw potential profits in these popularizing endeavors.24 This was a revolt against the liberal fathers not only in ideas, but also in cultural tactics. Undoubtedly the pivotal events in the Panbabylonists’ crusade were Delitzsch’s first two “Babylon and the Bible” lectures, given before the DeutschOrient Gesellschaft—a high-society patronage organization to which numerous important businessmen, political leaders and even the Kaiser belonged—in 1902 and 1903. As numerous polemicists argued later, the content of these lectures was, for those engaged in specialized research in the field, not particularly new; as in his previous publications, Delitzsch attempted to demonstrate Assyrian origins for numerous Old Testament concepts (e.g. the Sabbath, the name of

22 23

24

Peter Jensen, Das Gilgamesh-Epos in der Weltliteratur, vol. 1 (Strasbourg, 1906), viii. See Nittert Janssen, Theologie f¨urs Volk: Eine Untersuchung u¨ ber den Einfluß der Religionsgeschichtlichen Schule auf die Popularisierung der theologischen Forschung vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg unter besonderer Ber¨ucksichtigung des kirchlichen Liberalismus in der lutherischen Landeskirche Hannovers (G¨ottingen, 1993), esp. 156–7. On Eugen Diederichs’s interest in religion, see Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), 61–76. On the involvement of Gebauer-Schwetschke and P. Siebeck Verlags, see Janssen, Theologie f¨urs Volk, 154–60.

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God, monotheism), and to suggest the superior moral qualities of the Assyrians. What created a sensation, indeed even an “affair,” was the public demonstration that orientalist scholarship contradicted and indeed could replace the Old Testament—and the clergymen who preached it. The vigor of Delitzsch’s critique surprised even Eduard Meyer, who wrote to a friend shortly after the second lecture: “He demonstrated to the Kaiser and the Kaiserin, in addition to the whole court including the Chancellor, more energetically than I had ever expected, the religious, political and intellectual inferiority of the Old Testament . . .”25 Nor did the clergy (or the Kaiser) expect the vehemence, particularly of this second lecture, and an enormous flood of books and pamphlets appeared, most of them criticizing Delitzsch.26 The Kaiser, as titular head of the Protestant churches, was compelled to distance himself from Delitzsch’s position, which he did rather grudgingly (he thought the “chosen people” deserved taking down a peg), but Delitzsch was neither burnt (like Giordano Bruno) nor dismissed (like many a young Hegelian) for his radical claims.27 He continued to serve as Berlin chair, and director of the Asia Minor section of the Royal Museums, until his death in 1921. Historians of theology have written about the Babel/Bibel Affair, but the wider cultural significance of Panbabylonism remains to be studied. If public debate fizzled by about 1905, there were strong echoes of it long afterwards, both in theology and in the humanities more generally. The propaganda efforts certainly did not let up: in 1907, Winckler established a journal explicitly dedicated to the cause, entitled Im Kampfe um den alten Orient. He and his minions also carried the feud into the Orientalische Literaturzeitung. Few readers seem really to have adopted the grand narrative the most fervent of these orientalists laid out. But what was convincing in their program was the critique of the traditional study of the East based exclusively on Greek and Christian sources; as cuneiform readers, the Panbabylonists were uniquely able to attack the older scholarship, and they made the most of their special comprehension of this much less familiar Orient.28

25

26

27 28

Eduard Meyer to Georg Wissowa, Jan. 13, 1903, quoted in Christhard Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Leiden, 1988), 166, no. 78. By 1905, the first lecture had sold 60,000 copies and the second 45,000; some 1,650 articles and 28 pamphlets appeared in the next two years. Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit (G¨ottingen, 1994), 50; Friedrich Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel: Ein R¨uckblick und Ausblick (Stuttgart, 1904), 3, 50. Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York, 1981), 255–9. E.g. Hugo Winckler, “Der alte Orient und die Geschichtsforschung,” Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft 1 (1906), 17–18.

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It is an interesting tribute to the enduring memory of the Hermetic tradition, and its emphasis on Egyptian wisdom, that this critique was voiced most explicitly in a denunciation of Egyptology.29 Winckler also discovered extensive material proof of the primacy of Assyria in his excavations at Boghazkoi (ancient Hattusha) after 1906, in which he and a few minions dug up another huge cache of letters—in cuneiform—linking the Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian empires. What others had called his “fantasies,” Winckler exulted in 1907, had now become the stuff of science.30 In the hands of men like Winckler and Jeremias, this oriental “universalism” was meant to establish the superior qualifications of the Assyriologist to speak for the Orient, or even humankind, as a whole—a claim they had to make, not incidentally, against the burgeoning occultist movement as well as against the Judeo-Christian tradition. Panbabylonism by 1910 surely had won plenty of at least partial defenders as well as antagonists in the academic community, and was central to the launching of a grand debate on the origins of science as well as myth, to which scholars such as Franz Boll, F. X. Kugler, and Otto Neugebauer would contribute. But if this debate tended to produce fair-minded assessments of Eastern and Western contributions, the thrust of Panbabylonist history, as Max Weber perceived, took the movement in a different direction. In his essays on Ancient Judaism, published between 1917 and 1919, Weber called Panbabylonism “culture-historical universalism,” but shrewdly identified two major features of the theory: (1) though supposedly universalist, it was really the creation of diffusionist-minded philologists, and as such, it radically opposed the “ethnographic universalism” of British scholars like Robertson Smith and Max M¨uller; (2) if it posed in the sharpest terms the question of “the indubitable peculiarity of Israelite religious development,” it tended to answer this question in anything but a neutral way.31 Weber’s suspicions were certainly borne out by Delitzsch’s final work, a two-volume diatribe entitled The Great Deception (1920–21), in which the aged Assyriologist—whom detractors, since childhood, had called a “Judenenkel”32 —tried to prove that Jesus had in fact been a Galilean Aryan, and not a Jew. Championed too by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, this view obtained wide popularity among right-wing Christians, including the exiled

29 30 31 32

See Alfred Jeremias, Die Panbabylonisten: Der Alte Orient und die aegyptische Religion, vol. 1, Im Kampfe um den alten Orient (Leipzig, 1907), 21–2. Hugo Winckler, Die j¨ungsten K¨ampfer wider den Panbabylonismus (Im Kampfe um den alten Orient 2) (Leipzig, 1907), 71–3. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (London, 1952), 427–8. Rumor had it that Friedrich’s father, Franz, a noted Hebraist, was the illegitimate son of a Jewish boarder who roomed with the family. Cooper, “Sumerian Question,” 56 n. 56.

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Kaiser.33 In this light, Weber’s essays, like Thomas Mann’s “Joseph” novels and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, can clearly be seen as an attempt to defend the world historical importance of Judaism in the face of Panbabylonist and other attempts to cut away these “oriental” roots from Europe’s family tree.34 If inordinately proud of Assyria’s achievement, the Panbabylonists did reopen debate on the Eastern origins of Western ideas, and helped to popularize the fruits of the “second oriental Renaissance” in ways that were both morally reckless and intellectually provocative. Precisely the same could be said of the work of another group of “furious” orientalists and theologians, which called itself the “religioushistorical school.” By no means was this group of scholars—loosely connected by similar penchants and training, but larger, and neither as coherent nor as unorthodox as the Panbabylonists—the first to devote itself to what we now call comparative religions.35 But it did so in a way that departed, once again, from enlightened forerunners, and which reflected the inroads of the second oriental Renaissance. And, like the Panbabylonists, the German historians of religion by and large rejected the ethnographic universalism of their brothers across the channel. Their quest was not the newer search for the social or psychological origins of religion—but the much older one, for the pagan origins of Christian beliefs.

the ‘religious-historical’ school, or, the discreet charms of oriental paganism Though German historians of religion at the fin de si`ecle busied themselves with the study of numerous world faiths, the most visible and consequential of their pursuits surely lay in the excavation of the sources of the New Testament. In this field, as opposed to that of Old Testament studies, orientalists entered as relative novices, contributing to a new round of powerful and painful historicization that had already been started by late romantic theologians and philosophers. Importantly, the T¨ubingen School, in the 1830s and 1840s, had

33

34

35

Wilhelm’s letter to Chamberlain of June 3, 1923 opens with the statement: “My opinion is that Christ was of Galilean ancestry, and thus no Jew !” Houston Stewart Chamberlain Briefe, 1882–1924, und Briefwechsel mit Kaiser Wilhelm II., vol. 1 (Munich, 1928), 273. On Freud’s attempt to revive the Enlightenment tradition of John Spencer and the illuminati, see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA, 1997). There is now excellent new material on early modern histories of religion; for one example, see Guy G. Strousma, “Richard Simon: From Philology to Comparativism,” Archiv f¨ur Religionsgeschichte, vol. 3, ed. Jan Assmann et al. (Munich, 2001), 89–107.

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made vigorous and, for their members, dangerous moves in this direction; here, internal philological critique (Greek, Hebrew and Syriac) and rationalist criticism were used to fuel bitter and intense debates about the chronology, veracity, and means of transmission of the Gospels. At the same time, as Susannah Heschel has shown, the Jewish theologian Abraham Geiger was hard at work on some of the same questions—though Geiger’s Christian contemporaries generally rejected or ignored his attempts to understand Rabbinic Judaism on its own terms, as a vibrant and flexible faith.36 Geiger can certainly be counted an orientalist as well as a theologian: as a young man, he had written an important book on the sources of the Koran.37 But he was not, like his T¨ubingen School counterparts, a “furious” one, in terms of either attitude or source usage. Geiger did advocate using rabbinic sources (in addition to the Gospels themselves), but here, in New Testament much more than in Old Testament criticism, the findings of the first oriental Renaissance remained largely irrelevant, and, as in the case of Delitzsch’s early work, the most radical claims did not reach either mainstream scholars or a wider bourgeois audience.38 What the theologian Wilhelm Bousset would describe as “the transition from Jerusalem to Antioch,” Christianity’s origins in the wider Hellenistic world beyond Palestine was, again, the work of the fin de si`ecle.39 A central topic of mid-century debate was the role of Gnostic thought in the formation—or desired reformation—of Christian philosophy. Understandably, most theologians, while acknowledging some “oriental” spokespersons (e.g. Philo), treated Gnosticism as a Christian heresy, heavily freighted with Platonism—a view that is abundantly documented in the heresiological writings of the Church Fathers. As such, predictably, it garnered rather more respect from post-Renaissance scholars than many heresies, especially from those enlightened thinkers who preferred the philosophy of religion to the messy business of religious history and practice. Indeed, F. C. Baur’s 1835 Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religions-Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung defined two sorts of Gnosticism, an anti-Jewish sort (which he identified with the philosophy of Friedrich Schleiermacher) and a pro-Jewish sort, which had

36 37 38 39

Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998), esp. 186–228. Abraham Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume ausgenommen? (Bonn, 1833). See William Foxwell Albright, History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism (New York, 1964), 36–7. Wilhelm Bousset, “Foreward to the First Edition,” in idem, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. John E. Steely (Nashville, TN, 1970), 13. This translation was made from the 5th edn, 1964; the 1st edn appeared in 1913.

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its culmination in the T¨ubingen School’s hero, Hegel.40 Discussions of Greek Gnosticism were important in the mid-century in the dividing, intellectually and chronologically, of the Gospel of John from the other three “synoptic” Gospels— the fourth gospel contains a fuller, and more “Gnostic,” philosophy of religion than the other three—but the subject of Jewish Gnosticism seems largely to have disappeared. When the important liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack published his study of the second-century heretic Marcion in 1902, this context was missing. He, like his contemporaries, seems to have completely ignored Moritz Friedl¨ander’s Der vorchristliche j¨udische Gnosticismus (1898), which argued that the Hellenization of pre-Christian diaspora Judaism had produced the antinomian stance most important for shaping Christian Gnosticism.41 Harnack, thoroughly trained in Greek philology and himself a great proponent of the la¨ıque view of classical antiquity, was willing to put the New Testament in Greek context—but he remained deeply suspicious of other, to his mind less flattering, forms of “orientalizing” historicization. He liked Marcion’s Gnosticism in part because he saw it as essentially a Hellenizing, and rationalizing, point of view, one which could simplify the Christian message and make it relevant once more. In emphasizing God as savior, not as creator (something the Gnostics rejected, as the world was portrayed as intrinsically evil), and love rather than moral law, this form of Christianity could simply dispense with the Church’s historical baggage and the Old Testament’s contradictory voices. It was high time to take a step Luther had not had the guts to take, Harnack infamously argued: to embrace Marcion’s excision of the Old Testament, and thereby to “clear the table” and give Christianity a rational, hopeful future.42 Again, as in the case of Friedrich Delitzsch’s Panbabylonism, it is significant that this Marcionism was being voiced, now, not by marginal and persecuted writers, but rather by the Chair of New Testament Theology at the University of Berlin, who was also overseer of the great edition of the Church Fathers, and a friend of the Kaiser.43 Reading Harnack’s Marcion today, the author’s combination of history and apologetics is quite striking—but his slightly younger contemporaries were also struck by something that takes rather more footnote digging to excavate,

40 41 42 43

Momigliano, “J. G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews,” in idem, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, 315. Birger A. Pearson, Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity (Minneapolis, 1990), 10–27, esp. 26 n. 41. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Darmstadt, 1985 [rept of 2nd edn of 1924]), esp. 215–35; quotation at 222. Von Harnack, Marcion. But Harnack would not go as far as Delitzsch’s Grosse T¨auschung; in a note added to the 2nd edn, Harnack distanced himself from the view that the Old Testament should be completely thrown out (223 n. 1).

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and that is Harnack’s reliance on Western (Christian and pagan) sources. The Orient was essentially irrelevant to the pursuit of Harnack’s great quarry, “the essence of Christianity,” and indeed in 1901 he would denounce the study of Religionsgeschichte, at least as a theological matter, and block the appointment of a chair in the field.44 But in the years that followed, his view of Gnosticism, and his liberal-historicist theology as a whole, would face a major series of challenges precisely from the “history of religions” school, voiced most poignantly, perhaps, not by Friedl¨ander, but by a classicist turned furious orientalist, Richard Reitzenstein. Like many another classical philologist, Richard Reitzenstein had begun his career in the theology faculty; unlike most other converts to secular science, however, Reitzenstein did not forget what he had learned in his younger years. As a prot´eg´e of Theodor Mommsen in the 1880s and 1890s, he was already drawn to areas of the classical tradition not typically thought respectable— but the real change in perspective seems to have occurred as a result of a trip to the Orient, taken, too, just after the death of his liberal mentor in 1903. Upon his return, in 1904, Reitzenstein published his most interesting text for our purposes, a study called Poimandres: Studien zur griechisch-¨agyptischen und fr¨uhchristlichen Literatur. This was, in fact, the first serious philological study of the Pimander, the first portion of the Corpus Hermeticum, since Isaac Casaubon’s critical study of 1614; though Reitzenstein did not dispute Casaubon’s postChristian dating of the Greek text, he did insist that the material in it might reflect older traditions, and especially pagan, non-Christian ones.45 In effect, Reitzenstein was asserting that the Pimander demonstrated the existence of a pagan, pre-Christian (and mostly Egyptian) Gnosticism—and even the existence of a practicing Gnostic community; he would later find another instance of this pagan Gnosticism in the world of the Mandaens, an Aramaic-speaking sect from the Tigris/Euphrates region.46 This was a major, if oblique, challenge to Harnack’s Graecophile view—as well as a rejection of Friedl¨ander’s Jewish origins thesis. Reitzenstein treated the Jews, rather, as recipients of Hellenistic

44 45

46

Adolf Harnack, Die Aufgabe der theologischen Facult¨aten und die allgemeine Religionsgeschichte (Giessen, 1901). For a more extensive treatment of Reitzenstein’s work, see my essay “From Liberalism to Neoromanticism: Albrecht Dieterich, Richard Reitzenstein, and the Religious Turn in Fin-de-Siecle German Classical Studies,” in Out of Arcadia, ed. Martin Ruehl and Ingo Gildenhard, BICS Supplement 79 (2003), 129–60. Naturally, there were numerous precursors to Reitzenstein here, from the Hermeticists to F. W. Ghillany, who argued in the 1860s that oriental religions, including Mithraism, had shaped Christian symbols and practices. See Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (New York, 1962; originally published 1906), 167.

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ideas from Egyptian sources, something that allowed him to admit the probability of a Jewish mystical Hellenism beyond the texts of Philo—but he did not give the Jews any special role in the development of Gnostic ideas.47 However, the critique offered by Reitzenstein’s associate Wilhelm Bousset was in many ways even more threatening. Not only did he take Harnack to task for failing to appreciate the preponderance of oriental influence in Gnostic thought; in his Hauptprobleme der Gnosis of 1907 Bousset claimed that Gnosticism was actually a backward- rather than a forward-looking religion, and as such largely irrelevant to the development of Christianity. Still, it deserved study, Bousset argued, because the historian of religion, like the geologist, was duty-bound to excavate “the ancient remains of a bypassed religious past, to render it living again and to let it speak.”48 That this was now possible as well as desirable was, again, the product of our second oriental Renaissance. As Kurt Rudolph notes, before the later nineteenth century the group of texts known as “Gnostic”—letters, poems, psalms, hymns, apocryphal stories about Jesus and the apostles, written by philosophical iconoclasts whom the Church deemed heretics—amount to fewer than fifty printed pages. In the next few decades, however, large numbers of texts were discovered, or edited for the first time, as European travelers and excavators penetrated regions beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire where actual writings of heretics—as opposed to Christian refutations of heresy—had, by accident or intent, been preserved. The new haul included the literature of the Mandaens, approximately as extensive as the books of the Old Testament, and the material known as The Two Books of Jeu (367 pages in its 1905 German edition).49 The first actual Manichean texts were brought back to Berlin in the wake of the first Turfan Expedition of 1902–3. And, after Reitzenstein’s Poimandres, it became acceptable to treat the Corpus Hermeticum as a species of “Gnostic” philosophizing. Thanks to the painstaking work of oriental philologists like F. C. Andreas, Richard Pischel, F. W. K. M¨uller, and Marc Lidzbarski, the heretics could now speak for themselves. By using these newly translated sources, or sources like the Corpus Hermeticum and magical papyri that respectable nineteenth-century classicists had disdained, Reitzenstein and Bousset succeeded in expanding the study of Hellenistic religion, and especially of Gnosticism, much beyond the Mediterranean. New sources were brought to bear, including the Mithraic images lovingly compiled by the Belgian 47 48 49

Richard Reitzenstein, Poimandres: Studien zur griechisch-¨agyptischen und fr¨uhchristlichen Literatur (Leipzig, 1904), 181–90. Wilhelm Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (G¨ottingen, 1907), 7–8. Theodor N¨oldeke, Mand¨aische Grammatik (Halle, 1875); Wilhelm Brandt, Die Mand¨aische Religion (Leipzig, 1889) and Mand¨aische Schriften (G¨ottingen, 1893). See Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of an Ancient Religion, trans. Robert McLachlan Wilson (San Francisco, 1983), 25–30.

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scholar Franz Cumont. Carl Jung, who was, circa 1910, reading deeply in the works of Cumont and Reitzenstein, Creuzer and Albrecht Dieterich, found here inspiration to break with his “liberal” mentor, and to travel mythological paths that led far beyond the classical world, into prehistory and the unconscious.50 As Hans Jonas would write of Reitzenstein’s contribution some years later, “The freeing of vision from humanistic exclusivity was the decisive act. It sharpened the eye for the radically un-Greek in Greek linguistic or conceptual clothing of the age . . . it opened the way to see the ‘barbaric’ components as positive spiritual parts of the whole . . .”51 Naturally, this ‘eye-sharpening’ involved not just new sources, but also the perceived exhaustion of the old. The Greeks—at least in their rational, liberal costumes—had lost their appeal, and although an irrationalist, Dionysian Greece had come to light, this image could not entirely replace the worn-out Apollonian one. One can see this struggle to historicize the Greeks, and to emphasize the classical tradition’s darker chapters, under way in the school of Hermann Usener in Bonn, from which innovative, but not irrationalist, iconoclasts such as Aby Warburg and Ludwig Traube emerged. This increasingly romantic abandonment of the liberal-era Greeks is reflected, too, in the prewar essays of another member of the ‘history of religions’ school, understood broadly, namely Martin Buber. In 1912, the Jewish theologian insisted that “of all the Orientals the Jew is the most obvious antithesis of the Greek. The Greek wants to master the world, the Jew to perfect it. For the Greek the world exists; for the Jew, it becomes.”52 Here Buber was clearly seeking to make Judaism more suitable to the neoromantic proclivities of his generation than the positivistic, domineering Greeks precisely by making it more “oriental.” Reitzenstein in 1910 would even try his hand at orientalizing the Greeks themselves, breaking the Creuzerian taboo and returning to the subject of ancient mystery religions in a major, again path-breaking book.53 New perspectives and new sources had flung wide the door to the East, and even for those like Warburg and Traube, who would not throw in the Athenian towel, classical antiquity would never again be so comfortable a home. But these sources had their dangers. Dates for the texts Reitzenstein and his fellows used ranged widely, but even more importantly, given the often meager knowledge of Eastern cultural contexts, it was difficult to decide whether the ideas these texts contained were archaic or contemporary, indigenous or borrowed.

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See Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York, 1997), 126–36. Hans Jonas, Gnosis und sp¨atantiker Geist (G¨ottingen, 1934), 3. Martin Buber, “The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism” (1912), reprinted in Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York, 1967), 66. Richard Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen: Nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen (Leipzig, 1910).

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Here, omission was as risky as addition; in an important sleight of hand, Bousset eliminated from his portrayal of Hellenistic Judaism all non-contemporaneous sources, which meant that he excluded the rabbinical sources Judaism itself regarded as authoritative.54 That these two, like their contemporary Hermann Gunkel, drew on oriental sources without actually knowing all the relevant languages made them vulnerable to criticism from the older generation, and indeed Reitzenstein in particular raised the hackles of the most powerful “liberal” theologian, Harnack, and the most influential classical philologist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.55 But for many who had seen the vast cultural territory between the two testaments open up over the course of the nineteenth century, who had read the recently edited Assyrian, Persian, Coptic, Manichean and Mandaen texts, and new work on Buddhism and vedic religions, the “history of religions” approach seemed the only way to make theology scientifically respectable.56 Here Reitzenstein was hardly alone, and together with scholars like Rudolf Otto, Franz Cumont, Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Troeltsch, his generation succeeded in breaking away from an historicist theology which had come to the end of its usefulness, both for apologetic purposes and for text-critical ones. Here, as in the case of Assyriology, there were both dangers in departing from older humanistic practices, and insights to be gained from expanding theology’s horizons. What most skewed Reitzenstein’s work, and that of many of his close colleagues, was the fact that their longing to probe the lesser known, more mysterious world of the pagan Orient tended to diminish or destroy their interest in the more traditional study of the ancient Israelites and Hellenistic Jews. Hermann Gunkel, in the introduction to his very important book on the sources of Genesis of 1896, claimed that he wasn’t demoting the Jews, just adding new cultures to the mix57 —but this was not entirely believable, either for Gunkel or for his colleagues like Bousset, whose first book was entitled Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum (1892). Indeed, the school of Religionsgeschichte as a whole suffered from its conflicting commitment to raise “pagan” religions to the level of monotheistic ones while still insisting on the superiority of Christianity, almost always without the prefix “Judeo-” attached.58 The tendency was to emphasize commonalities

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See George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” Harvard Theological Review 14 (July, 1921), 197–254, esp. 241–8. See Marchand, “From Liberalism to Neoromanticism.” For a good discussion of the appeal of this approach, see Hans Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaft und Moderne (Munich, 1997). Hermann Gunkel, Sch¨opfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (G¨ottingen, 1895), vii. See, e.g., Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verst¨andnis, 96; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London, 2nd edn, 1950), 142.

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between Christian and oriental pagan beliefs and practices, something which meant a subtle demotion of ethics and prophecy (where the ancient Jew excelled) in favor of theories of salvation and festivals of rebirth (where they did not). Naturally, with respect to both source materials and ethics, this was a flawed attempt at universalization, and numerous scholars, Jewish and not, were able and willing to pinpoint Religiongeschichte’s shortcomings. In this context, it seems to me, Aby Warburg’s perpetual fear that Athens (nineteenth-century secular culture) would be swamped by Alexandria (twentieth-century authoritarianism and irrationalism) takes on special meaning.59 In the wake of the Great War, however, the Orient was largely removed from this theological context, and often given a bigger, and more urgent, role to play in the project of deepening and cleansing the Western spirit. In neoromantic circles such as the one that formed around Hermann Graf Keyserling in Darmstadt, or around C. G. Jung in Ascona, the Orient was expected to play a rather different role, which, following T. J. Lears, I will call “therapeutic.”60 And here, at last, we return to the young Indologist with whom I began this essay, Heinrich Zimmer, whose postwar “coming of age” offers much insight into the transformations orientalism had undergone in the course of less than forty years.

therapeutic orientalism, or, indian art and western selfhood In an autobiographical essay written in early 1943, Zimmer described his prewar, hyper-positivistic education, in which he and his fellow Gymnasium students were fed, as he remembered bitterly, on stones rather than spiritual bread, while outside the classroom they had feasted on avant-garde delicacies— Ibsen, Hofmannsthal, Kokoschka and Stefan George.61 Heading for a career, like his father, as a comparative linguist, he had studied Greek, Latin, and even Sanskrit, but without any understanding of these cultures, and certainly with no sense of their possible relevance to his life. Apparently what had made such studies appealing to his father—a kind of brothers’ Grimm desire to understand the earliest Germanic culture and history62 —did not suffice for the son: first of all,

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E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London, 1970). Of course, this problematic also refers to Warburg’s struggle to retain his sanity. Lears uses this term to describe American Brahmin orientalism, in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981). Ibid., 246–7. For the orientation of Zimmer p`ere, see Heinrich Zimmer, Altindisches Leben: Die Kultur der vedischen Arier nach den Samhita dargestellt (Berlin, 1879; rept Hildesheim, 1973), v–xiii.

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the young Zimmer had been bitten by the Schopenhauerian bug, introduced most powerfully into fin-de-si`ecle Indological circles by Nietzsche’s childhood friend Paul Deussen. And the young Zimmer wanted more than a positivist-historicist India: “The current representation of India,” he recalled, “lacked color, depth, intensity, consistency, life. For years I was in search of the ‘real’ India, of ‘my’ India, of Schopenhauer’s India.”63 Although he had been absorbed, at the beginning of the war, in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as well as a Chinese grammar, and his Schopenhauerianism notwithstanding, it was not Zimmer’s reading but his war experience that made returning to this career afterwards seem intolerable. “The only benefit which I derived from my participation in the war,” he recalled, “was a complete liberation from the authority of the older generation who had managed the war and managed it into catastrophe. I said to myself: ‘I do not criticize anybody or anything. But henceforth I shall decide what I take seriously, if anything at all.’”64 In fact, it took him several years after he returned from the trenches to escape from the mind-numbing work of pasting together fragments of texts brought back by the Turfan expeditions. He read J. J. Bachofen, whose work on primitive, especially maternalist, myths and symbols would provide him a “master-key” in the unlocking of Indian symbolism; he studied Arthur Avalon’s work on the Tantras, material that had long been ignored by scholars because of its relatively late date and its erotic components.65 And he began to study Indian art—and to take it seriously. He did so, it should be noted, without having traveled to India, and without having seen the collections in Paris; but he had the Turfan materials before him in Berlin and, by now, decades’ worth of English as well as German publications on Indian art and mythology. Having embraced Expressionism as a young man, and studied with the formalist art historian Heinrich W¨olfflin, he was able to apply to the fruits of the second oriental Renaissance a new perspective, one shaped by his deep resentment against classicizing aesthetics and his rejection, too, of Biedermeier medievalizing. He was intoxicated, instead, with exotic India, “its dense deep fragrance in my nostrils, the jungle before me, unknown, perhaps unknowable.”66 In his first publication after his “rebirth,” Kunstform und Yoga (1926), he dove headlong into Indian art and mythology, not, however, to seek the origins of Western symbols but to understand from the inside the function of Indian art. Rather than assuming a confident positivist pose, he insisted that this 63 64 65 66

Zimmer, “Some Biographical Remarks about Henry R. Zimmer,” in idem, Artistic Form and Yoga, 258–9. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 256–9. Ibid., 248.

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task was an almost impossible one, for Westerners like himself were conditioned to delight only in the illusory beauty of the external image.67 Naturally his philologist mentor, Heinrich L¨uders, was horrified; as Zimmer himself notes, he was lucky that his father had died in 1910, and the Oedipal conflict he now experienced with the generation he still was able to call “scholar titans” occurred at one level of remove. L¨uders tried, and succeeded, in hindering Zimmer’s career; “But,” wrote Zimmer, “I had been reborn, and the price paid for it was negligible . . .”68 After Zimmer’s “rebirth,” his work rather rapidly moved from Schopenhauerian cultural critique toward a kind of philosophical therapeutics. This he articulated in two short sentences in Philosophies of India (1951): “Our academic secular philosophies are concerned rather with information than with that redemptive transformation which our souls require. And this is the reason why a glance at the face of India may assist us to discover and recover something of ourselves.”69 Zimmer’s “glance,” like that of his contemporary Hermann Hesse, was much more than a casual one: he did not relinquish it, as Goethe or even Deussen occasionally did, for the superior world of the Greeks. Indeed, as Wendy Doniger has written of him, Zimmer relished the peculiarities of Indian myths: “He liked the things that were not like Greek mythology.”70 Perhaps this was the result of his conviction that India was a better mirror of the unconscious— and its myths had important lessons to convey about the proper construction of the ego. This construction, it should be pointed out, was for Zimmer not an historical task, but rather a personal one: the situation of the king with the corpse, to take an example from a book in progress when Zimmer died in 1943, was “our” situation as well.71 Again, the distance traveled in German cultural history from Humboldt to Zimmer deserves notice; and though there were indeed philhellenists in the 1920s who tried to reiterate the special bond between Germany and ancient Greece, the Greece they now found appealing was a much more chthonic, Dionysian—or one might say, “oriental” !—Greece than that of the liberal philhellenes.72 Small wonder, then, that Freud in 1933

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Zimmer, Artistic Form, 233–4. Zimmer, “Some Biographical Remarks,” 249. Zimmer quoted in Matthew Kopstein, “Schopenhauer’s Shakti,” in Heinrich Zimmer Coming Into His Own, ed. Margaret Case (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 108. Wendy Doniger, “The King and the Corpse and the Rabbi and the Talk-Show Star: Zimmer’s Legacy to Mythologists and Indologists,” in Heinrich Zimmer Coming Into His Own, ed. Case, 56. Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil, ed. Joseph Campbell (Washington, DC, 1948), e.g. 222. For an interesting discussion of Weimar-era philhellenism, see Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, NY, 2003), esp. 46–56.

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could muse, more than metaphorically, that his Athena “had lost her spear.”73 Rational Greece, for the interwar generation, had lost its originality, its aesthetic normativeness, and its exclusive right to shape the European self; it would never entirely recover from the shift in perspective necessitated by the second oriental Renaissance, and initiated by the furor orientalis. But what then of Judaism, the other great ancient civilization to suffer decentering? As we have seen, those who tried to move in the direction of a universalizing of culture and religion often became critics of the supposed exclusivity of the Jews—and of Christian disdain for pagan achievements. Already in the premodern era, some of these writers, Giordano Bruno and Voltaire, for example, had turned this critique of exclusivity into bitter anti-Semitic polemics (from which the Churches, of course, were not themselves free). Others, like Pico della Mirandola and J. J. Rousseau, did not. The same could be said for our “furious orientalists,” the majority of them falling into Bruno’s, rather than Pico’s, camp. But Zimmer, in lectures given in New York in the winter of 1942, articulated a vision that harks directly back to Pico’s philosophia perenius. The exiled Indologist first invoked Dante’s “Elysian lobby,” where virtuous nonChristians such as Socrates, Cicero, Averroes and Moses linger, spared the worst torments of the inner inferno. A second brief reverie then offered a telling sketch of his hopes for the future: During the Renaissance, there was even a moment (represented strikingly in the figure of Pico della Mirandola) when the last walls of orthodox exclusiveness seemed about to yield, and Ovid, Homer, the Kabbalah, the Koran, were being found to be in essential concord with the sacred pamphlets of the Christian movement. Behind the variety of symbols, a universally constant, vastly sophisticated, tradition of human wisdom was joyfully recognized, and was on the point, even, of being officially conceded by the guardians of the “One True Faith.”74

Zimmer’s therapeutic orientalism may not have been politically correct from our standpoint, but a brief contrast between the work of his disciple Joseph Campbell and that of the radical racist Indophiles who remained in Germany does show that there was more than one possible culmination for the furor orientalis: it did

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Freud quoted in Schorske, “To the Egyptian Dig,” 191. Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell (Washington, DC, 1946), 218–19.

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not have to end in Auschwitz.75 It ended too, as it seems in Zimmer’s case, in Rome.76 And it also ended at Dura Europos.

dura europos and the pax orientalis Dura Europos, on the Euphrates, was the site of a Seleucid, then Parthian, then Roman-controlled city, with a diverse population which included large numbers of people of Iranian and Semitic ancestry. The discovery of the site occurred in exemplary “orientalist” fashion: ruins were uncovered during the digging of trenches to be used in British operations against the Arabs. Those who investigated the site were all exponents, albeit less belligerent ones, of the furor orientalis: James Henry Breasted published the first photos and description in 1921, and Franz Cumont came to excavate in 1924. But the lion’s share of the work, and the publications, fell to the great Russian historian Mikhail Rostovtzeff, who led excavations at Dura on behalf of Yale University after 1928. The discoveries during the years of his supervision would be the ones to turn the orientalists’ stormy furor into more pacific channels. In late 1932, the young American orientalist Erwin R. Goodenough, convinced that a non-rabbinic, mystical Judaism must have existed (beyond Philo) in New Testament times, took his speculations to Rostovtzeff. Coincidentally, the Russian exile had just received a cable from Dura announcing the discovery of a huge synagogue, whose walls, it was reported, were covered with paintings. Goodenough eagerly awaited the first photographs, which arrived in January 1933—a moment at which German orientalists were probably otherwise occupied. The images changed Goodenough’s life, and inspired a grand debate on Hellenistic culture and religions which would involve many of the major founders of what might be called a pax orientalis: Rostovtzeff, Goodenough, A. D. Nock, W. F. Albright, Elias Bickermann, Arnaldo Momigliano, and C. H. Dodd.77 In

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Though, sadly, it often did: numerous orientalists collaborated with the Nazi regime. See Ludmila Hanisch, Die Nachfolger der Exegeten: Deutschsprachige Erforschung des Vorderen Orients in der ersten H¨alfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 2003), 114–73. Though Zimmer’s biographers do not address his religious inclinations, it seems from scattered evidence that he had, by the later 1930s, developed sympathy for a kind of Creuzerian Catholic universalism, which would fit, too, with his associations with the Hofmannsthal family. For some Delphic statements to this effect, see his “Some Biographical Remarks,” 257; The King and the Corpse, 52; and Gerald Chapple, “Heinrich and Henry R. Zimmer,” in Heinrich Zimmer Coming Into His Own, ed. Case, 84. Erwin R. Goodenough, “The Problem,” in idem, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, ed. Jacob Neusner (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 32–5. See also Neusner’s “Editor’s Foreword” in this volume. See William Foxwell Albright’s attempt to balance the picture in History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism, esp. 17–40; also Arthur Darby Nock, “The Study

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the work of these scholars the Orient, both Jewish and pagan, was given its due; the fruits of the second oriental Renaissance were at last digested, and subjected to corrective testing against classical and Jewish sources (some of the latter, such as the Ugarit and Ras Shamra finds and the Dead Sea Scrolls, were only just coming to light). Generally sympathetic to religion as a lived reality and weary of debates over Ur-origins, this group was highly critical both of philhellenists and of furious orientalists, and—as their historiographical essays show—keenly aware of the cultural consequences of taking sides. It was their mission, in books like Momigliano’s Alien Wisdom, to put the “special” peoples, Greeks and Jews, into the context of the wider, now much more familiar, oriental world, without diminishing the “specialness” of either.78 Similarly, since the 1940s and 1950s, art historians and museum curators have sought to make it possible to admire oriental art without applying a blindfold, and to understand Greek art in the context of its times. Thanks to them, Europeans and Americans seem now to be experiencing something like a period of peaceful coexistence in the study of the ancient Mediterranean—though there are subjects, like the origins and ownership of monuments in Israel or the Afroasiatic origins of Greek culture, that still excite passionate polemics.79 Perhaps this is in part because we are living in an age that no longer cares so passionately, as the citizens of the early twentieth century still did, about historical origins. But as the Greeks and Indians always knew, and as the Romans found out, peace does not last forever.80

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of the History of Religion” (1933), reprinted in idem, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, ed. Zeph Stewart, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 337. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge, 1975). The latter is a reference, of course, to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization (London, 1987). I would like to thank the following readers for their enormously helpful comments on various versions of this essay: Tuska Benes, Anthony Grafton, Malachi Hacohen, Susannah Heschel, Anthony J. La Vopa, Robert Norton, Carl Schorske, and Jonathan Sheehan. Oral versions of this paper were presented at Stanford University (Department of Classics) and at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University.

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 359–385
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000216 Printed in the United Kingdom

godless capitalism: ayn rand and the conservative movement jennifer burns Department of History, University of California at Berkeley

This essay examines the relationship between the novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and the broader conservative movement in the twentieth-century United States. Although Rand was often dismissed as a lightweight popularizer, her works of radical individualism advanced bold arguments about the moral status of capitalism, and thus touched upon a core issue of conservative identity. Because Rand represented such a forthright pro-capitalist position, her career highlights the shifting fortunes of capitalism on the right. In the 1940s, she was an inspiration to those who struggled against the New Deal and hoped to bring about a new, marketfriendly political order. As a second generation of conservatives built upon these sentiments and attempted to tie them to a defense of Christian tradition, Rand’s status began to erode. Yet by the late 1960s, Rand’s once-revolutionary defense of capitalism had become routine, although she herself remained a controversial figure. The essay traces the ways in which Rand’s ideas were assimilated and modified by key intellectuals on the right, including William F. Buckley, Jr, Whittaker Chambers, and Gary Wills. It identifies the relationship between capitalism and Christianity as a fundamental dilemma for conservative and right-wing thinkers. By treating Rand as an intellectual and cultural leader of significant import, the essay broadens our understanding of the American right beyond the confines of “mainstream” conservatism, and re-establishes the primacy of the 1930s, and 1940s, to its ideological formation. Responding to a paucity of scholarship on Rand, the essay offers an analysis and summary of Rand’s ideas, and argues that despite her outsider status, Rand’s work both embodied and shaped fundamental themes of right-wing thought throughout the century.

In 1954 New York, two titans of the twentieth-century American right came face to face. Fiery pro-capitalist ideologue Ayn Rand, author of the best-selling novel The Fountainhead (1943), met a young William F. Buckley, Jr, fresh from the notoriety and success of his God and Man at Yale (1950). As Buckley recalled in later years, upon meeting him Rand declared in her imperious Russian accent, “You arrh too eentelligent to bihleef in Gott!”1 It was, to say the least, an inauspicious beginning to an acquaintanceship that would span many decades. The pious 1

William F. Buckley, Jr, “On the Right: Ayn Rand, RIP,” National Review (April 2, 1982), 380.

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Buckley never quite recovered from his immediate dislike of Rand, while she never lost her sense that Buckley’s religiosity ruined an otherwise valuable fellow traveler. Beyond the clash of two proud and ambitious personalities, the first Rand–Buckley encounter encapsulates many of the dynamics of right-wing thought in the twentieth century. In Buckley, Rand saw the first glimmers of a religious conservatism that would soon co-opt the anti-statist ideals she had been promoting for her entire career. What Buckley encountered in the person of Rand was a nearly pure incarnation of the putative “Old Right,” for Rand had formed her positions in the ideological matrix of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet Rand was far from a dusty relic of the past, as her continued appeal over the century would demonstrate. Buckley himself quickly grasped that in Rand he faced a formidable competitor for the loyalty of the anti-statist forces in America. And there was no question of collaboration, for Buckley was convinced that as an atheist, Rand missed the central truth his conservatism had to offer: that religion was the only viable foundation for victory over the collectivist madness of Stalin’s terror. But neither could Rand simply be dismissed, for her works of radical individualism advanced controversial arguments about the moral status of capitalism, thus touching upon a core issue of conservative identity. In 1957, Buckley declared open warfare on Rand in the pages of his journal National Review, publishing a scathing review of her second novel, Atlas Shrugged. Yet this rebuttal proved insufficient, and National Review returned to the subject of Rand and her relevancy to conservatism with two articles in 1961 and a cover story in 1967. When it came to dealing with Rand, Buckley wheeled out the big guns, enlisting conservative luminaries such as Whittaker Chambers, Garry Wills, and M. Stanton Evans to deliver their judgments. As distasteful as the outspoken Rand might be to Buckley, it was clear that she could not be safely ignored. Debates over Ayn Rand remained contentious for conservatives throughout the 1960s because her pro-market ideology, and its popularity, exposed the fault lines upon which modern American conservatism rested. The publication of Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, brought to the surface uncertainties about how capitalism—and justifications for it—fit into the conservative program. Responding to Rand compelled conservatives to wrestle with a profound set of dilemmas about the nature and meaning of the market economy. Was capitalism a fundamental part of the conservative program or simply a necessary evil? The answer might be a delicate blend of both, but Rand’s intoxicating novels threatened to overwhelm such subtleties with polemical sophistries. Furthermore, Rand’s vast popularity meant she could conceivably eclipse conservatives in the public eye. Therefore, managing Rand and containing her influence were critical projects if the editors at National Review were to retain any control over the movement they were so carefully nurturing into maturity. The process by which conservatives attempted to repudiate the atheistic Rand

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was an inverse of the larger process whereby anti-government, individualistic, pro-capitalist (“libertarian”, if you will) thought allied itself with an aggressive Christian outlook and tried to disown its secular roots. While conservatives might try to reject Rand root and branch, in many cases they ended up echoing her arguments and conclusions, albeit in a more modulated voice. An examination of Rand’s career, and conservative relations with her, shows how the conservative movement as a whole managed to absorb Rand’s embrace of the market while preserving the primacy of Christian ethics. Consideration of Rand also re-establishes the significance of the 1930s and 1940s to conservatism broadly considered. To date, historians have generally portrayed the ideas that Rand represented as of little concern to Buckley and the “New Conservatism” he embodied.2 Recent scholarship on the right reinforces this impression by focusing extensively on the 1960s. Yet conservatism had deeper roots than this, and the legacy of these early origins was manifest throughout the century.3 Conservatism as it was assembled under the flag of Buckley’s National Review was a rather hybrid creed.4 When he founded the magazine in 1955, Buckley

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Terminological clarity is elusive when discussing the historic right in America. I use “New Conservatism” here as it was used generally in the 1950s, as reference to a reassertion of conservative beliefs in the wake of World War II. This is not to be confused with the “New Right,” a term which scholars generally employ when discussing either the Goldwater movement of the 1960s or politically active Christians in the 1970s. I reserve the term “Old Right” for phenomena of the pre-war period. Recent scholarship has begun to emphasize the importance of libertarianism, a belief system which Rand both embodied and influenced. This new literature has also delineated the role of corporations and businesspeople in the development of conservative ideology. See Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). Although most treatments of the 1960s acknowledge her influence, academic work on Rand herself remains scarce. For this reason, I will briefly sketch key features of her thought in this piece. The most useful definition of conservatism, and the one I will employ here, is that given by George H. Nash. He defines conservatism as the postwar political and social movement which opposed liberal reform efforts and encompassed three main impulses: libertarian anti-statism, anti-communism, and reverence for tradition (usually rendered as explicitly Christian). I also employ the term “right-wing” to refer to persons and thought which might share some but not all features of this trinitarian conservatism. So, in other words, all conservatives are right-wing, but not all those on the right are conservative (e.g. Rand). George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976). Nash discusses Rand as an episode in the conservative process of “fusion.” Nash concurs with Buckley’s opinion that Rand was successfully “read out” of the movement, but does not explore the ambiguity surrounding her work or the deeper issues she raised (ibid., 142–5).

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deliberately sought to weld the established libertarian, anti-New Deal critique with a renewed appreciation for Christian tradition. Yet this accord did not come easily, and debates raged wildly about the issue of “fusionism,” or the desirability and practicality of joining Christian advocacy with a defense of capitalism. While all could agree with anti-communism, traditionalists like Russell Kirk disliked the libertarian emphasis on the free market and individual liberty. Libertarians fought back fiercely, refusing to cede any ground to traditionalists and their talk of “virtue.” Buckley and one of his editors, Frank Meyer, struggled to keep the peace and to convince everyone that they belonged in one alliance. Into this debate, Rand came like an ideological time capsule from the libertarian fringe of the 1930s. Her unreconstructed defense of capitalism and business made no concessions to religion or to the post-New Deal, welfare state consensus that had emerged. Atlas Shrugged (1957) explicitly endorsed capitalism and promoted a comprehensive system of pro-market ethics in a way that Rand’s previous blockbuster, The Fountainhead (1943), had not. It articulated a set of values that conservatives wanted desperately to disavow, combining anti-government rhetoric, staunch pro-capitalism, and atheism into a particularly noxious mixture. Yet if Rand had so clearly misconstrued conservatism, then why spill so much ink? Beyond the articles he published throughout the 1960s, Buckley took potshots at Rand during his public appearances. In 1967, he sneered to an audience at the New School for Social Research, “is there anyone more boring?”5 Buckley’s jab at Rand contains a clue to this puzzle, for he clearly expected his audience to know who she was and what she stood for, thereby implicitly acknowledging her public stature. It is difficult to exaggerate Rand’s popularity or her ubiquity in 1960s popular culture. Sales figures for her novels tell part of the story. Within five years of publication, The Fountainhead had sold 400,000 copies, and it broke the million mark soon thereafter. Atlas Shrugged was even more popular, quickly surging into the million-copy range. And neither book’s success was ephemeral, for decades after publication both continued to sell over 100,000 copies annually, making Rand’s novels the stuff of publishing legend.6 Moreover, Rand was not simply a novelist, but she was also a popular guest on national TV shows and radio programs, a favorite of political cartoonists, a syndicated columnist, a frequent lecturer at college campuses, and, as of 1962, the publisher of her own periodical, The Objectivist Newsletter. Her fictional characters quickly passed into conversational parlance and her political slogans

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John Leo, “Buckley Explains Views to a Class,” New York Times (November 22, 1967). These figures are from Nora Ephron, “A Strange Kind of Simplicity,” New York Times Book Review (May 5, 1968), 8, 42–3, and Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday Books, 1987), 180, 299.

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surfaced in magazines and newspapers across the land. For the staff of a magazine that struggled to break into the 50,000 circulation range, Rand’s capacity to draw an audience had to be a bit aggravating.7 Yet it was not just popularity that the Buckleyites craved; they aspired to respectability as well. Here, Rand’s successes hit another sore spot. Given the media’s interest in the “New Conservatism,” and Rand’s considerable cultural presence, it was quite possible that she might be anointed by liberals as a spokesperson for conservatism, and then be used to discredit their entire program. Such dangers had arisen before, in the early 1950s, when liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, eagerly took upon themselves the task of defining who was and who was not a true “conservative.”8 Buckley and his writers had bridled at this interposition on their own ideological formations, and had fought long and hard to present a united, coherent front to their liberal adversaries. But even as they pilloried liberals, they clearly wished to be taken as worthy opponents, and even as they mocked professors, their desire for intellectual respectability was clear.9 It was obvious that Rand would be of no help in this effort, for popular as she was, her overwrought literary style ensured that she would never be respectable among the country’s intelligentsia. Even worse, she might confirm the liberal stereotype that conservatism was nothing more than an ideological cover for the naked class interests of the haves. But the most important reason to reject Rand was her hostility to religion, because it meant she had fundamentally misunderstood what conservatism was all about. Nonetheless, the task of disowning Rand was formidable, because she had been a significant presence on the right-wing scene since long before Buckley entered Yale. Many leading conservatives, particularly those of a libertarian bent, had been profoundly inspired by her early work and continued to find her a valuable ally in the struggle against statism. Furthermore, while her strident atheism set her apart from many on the right, key features of Rand’s thought mimicked the dynamics of conservative ideology and ensured that her work would have continued relevance in the years ahead. Like the Catholic conservatives of National Review, Rand advanced a vituperative critique of liberalism, depicted a world consisting of moral absolutes, and touted the wisdom of the people against an overweening elite. While her advocacy of pure laissez-faire might owe much to the nineteenth century, she presented her arguments in a twentieth-century form 7

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At the time of Chambers’s review, the National Review had 18,000 subscribers; in 1961 it had 54,000; and in 1964 it reached a high point of 90,000. John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 140, 221. The controversy is covered in Nash, The Conservative Movement Since 1945, 120–24. See also Jennifer Burns, “In Retrospect: George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,” Reviews in American History 32/3 (Sept., 2004), 447–62. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., 140.

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that dovetailed easily with the rhetoric of the burgeoning conservative movement. This symmetry, and Rand’s contribution to the broader development of rightwing thought, can be seen most easily in the way her anti-communist attitudes shaded imperceptibly into pro-capitalism. In her early work, Rand focused on establishing the moral depravity of communism, drawing heavily on her own experience in Russia. Later she shifted into portraying the positive aspects of the American system, focusing on what she identified as the intrinsic moral nature of capitalism. Rand advanced both these ideas under the rubric of “individualism vs. collectivism,” which allowed her to construct a series of theoretical arguments about the good society that were not religious in nature. Rand was not the first to develop this binary of individualism vs. collectivism, which was widespread at the popular level in the 1940s, but she did much to popularize and shape its form.10 She was also one of the first to argue against communism and in favor of capitalism on purely ethical grounds. Long before the evils of communism were widely known, Rand maintained its ideals were fundamentally corrupt, and she likewise insisted upon the beneficence of capitalism when such attitudes were far out of the mainstream. In large part, her career was shaped by the penalties she paid for being an early advocate of unpopular ideas that would later pass into conventional wisdom. In order to understand why National Review reacted to Rand with such vehemence, it is necessary to see how deeply embedded she was in the pre-war conservative world, and how her work embodied core themes of conservative ideology. Rand was particularly vexing because she was only partially wrong. In many ways she looked like a friend to conservatism, which made establishing a clear policy on her ideas all the more imperative. In 1936, long before there was a cold war, Rand established herself as a cold warrior with the publication of her first novel, We The Living, a bitter indictment of life in Soviet Russia. In contrast to later anti-communist writers, Rand, a lifelong atheist, did not base her arguments on religion.11 Instead, she fictionalized her own history to depict the hopelessness and despair of life under collectivism. Rand, who had emigrated from Russia in 1926, knew from firsthand experience 10

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See, for example, Rand’s printed debate against Oswald Garrison Villard, former editor of the New York Evening Post and The Nation, on the theme “Collectivism or Individualism— Which Promises Postwar Progress?”, syndicated in the series “Wake Up America” (October 11, 1943), distributed by Fred G. Clark, American Economic Foundation. Rand was born into a middle-class Jewish family. Upon arriving in the United States, she changed her name from the unmistakably Jewish “Alissa Rosenbaum” to the androgynous, Nordic sounding “Ayn Rand.” While there is no evidence to suggest that Rand deliberately wished to cover up her Jewish roots, the name change did embody her belief that history and tradition should have little impact on the course of an individual’s life. Despite this, it is a notable feature of Rand’s career that with the exception of her husband, nearly all her close associates were secular Jews.

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what cost revolution could exact. Her father’s business had been nationalized in the first wave of communist reforms, plunging the family into dire poverty. This experience instilled in Rand a deep suspicion of government and a passionate desire to tell the truth about what communism was—to her, a corrupt system built entirely upon theft. She wrote to her agent: “No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia to tell it to the world. That was my job.”12 We The Living follows the fate of three young Russians who struggle against the injustices and violence of totalitarianism. Ultimately, Rand argues it is impossible to lead a life of integrity or meaning in a society that demands man must live for the state. While the novel is concerned with communism on the surface, its deeper theme invokes the problem of the individual against the collective. With these baseline ethics, Rand attacked communism because of its very principles. As one character tells a Party member, “I loath your ideals.”13 Because the basic unit of value for Rand was the individual, she argued forcefully that any system which prioritized the common good over the lives of individuals was ethically bankrupt. Rand’s systemic critique of communism laid the groundwork for her later dismissal of liberalism, which, she argued, fundamentally shared the ideals of communism. This early recognition of communism’s evils gave Rand considerable credibility and moral stature on the right. By 1940, Rand’s fealty to the ideals of individualism led her to Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign, where she imbibed a strong dose of traditional American laissez-faire, the hoary creed of William Graham Sumner and Andrew Carnegie that was fast becoming radicalized by the ascendancy of the Roosevelt administration.14 The Willkie campaign provided a gathering place for the slowly germinating conservative movement that stood opposed to the New Deal. Rand was drawn into a network of unregenerate individualists, including the economist F. A. Hayek and the writers Albert J. Nock, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane. The political atmosphere of the New Deal transformed these thinkers, causing

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Rand to Jean Wick, October 27, 1934, in Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Dutton, 1995), 18. Ayn Rand, We The Living (New York: Random House, 1936, 1959), 80. Robert Green McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise: A Study of William Graham Sumner, Stephen J. Field and Andrew Carnegie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951). Although some of Rand’s ideas seem akin to Sumner’s, in 1944 she had never heard of him. Rand to Leonard Read, November 12, 1944, “Freedom Quotations Book, Correspondence 1944,” Box 33, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Archives. For a discussion of anti-Roosevelt sentiment in Congress, see James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). Also helpful on this period is George R. Wolfskill, Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the Liberty League, 1934–1940 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

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them to fear that any accommodation with government could result in the dangerous state expansion typified by Roosevelt’s programs. Under the pressures of the New Deal, what would earlier have been no more than a traditional affection for limited government was fast becoming a deeply felt anti-statism. This dislike of big government was linked to a keen appreciation of capitalism or, as the more politic among them had it, “free enterprise.” The banner year for this circle was 1943, which brought the publication of Rand’s The Fountainhead, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Paterson’s God of the Machine, Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. Although Rand’s and Hayek’s books were the only ones to attain immediate success, the others went on to become sleeper classics that heavily influenced mid-century conservatives.15 Rand would carry on the legacy of these earlier thinkers, albeit with her own innovations. While she shared their basic political orientation, she disagreed with Lane’s and Paterson’s friendliness towards religion and went on to celebrate what Nock attacked as “economism.”16 Hayek she regarded with suspicion because he supported limited planning. Nonetheless, these relationships broadened Rand’s perspective on the United States and helped form her political judgments. In this period she also dipped into more mainstream economic theory, profiting greatly from Carl Snyder’s Capitalism the Creator: The Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society (1940).17 Snyder, a well-known economist and statistician at the Federal Reserve Bank, argued in this book that capitalism was the chief mechanism by which societies moved from “barbarism and poverty to affluence

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Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom might well be taken as a theoretical exposition of the themes Rand’s novel embodied. Both agreed that seemingly benevolent impulses to social planning in fact masked a dictatorial power grab, drew on their experiences in totalitarian Europe to reflect on American politics, and employed an absolutist, “slippery slope” logic to predict that socialism would lead inevitably to communism and then totalitarianism. Nock is well known to students of conservative thought, but Lane and Paterson are not. Lane’s life and work are described in William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), and Paterson’s career is briefly sketched by Stephen Cox in the foreword to a 1993 reissue of God of the Machine (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1943, 1993). Libertarians fete all three women as foremothers of their movement. See Jim Powell, “Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement,” The Freeman (May, 1996). Nock coined this word to identify a world view that “interpreted the whole of human life in terms of the production, acquisition, and distribution of wealth.” Albert J. Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harper Brothers, 1943), 111. Details on Rand’s political awakening are taken from Biographical Interview with Ayn Rand conducted by Barbara Branden, Interview # 14, tape # 8, Side 1, “Activities in Politics: 1926 to 1952, The Conservatives,” pp. 351–5. Ayn Rand Papers, Ayn Rand Archives, Irvine, CA.

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and culture.”18 His vision of creative and beneficent capitalism would soon find its way into Rand’s fiction. The laissez-faire doctrine she absorbed from Snyder, her libertarian friends, and general newspaper reading was also reinforced by her own biography, for Rand’s career embodied the Horatio Alger story. Like countless self-made men, Rand came to believe fervently in the gospel of success. These ideas and influences were manifest in Rand’s wildly popular second novel, The Fountainhead (1943), which established her as a towering figure among her political associates. In a time of right-wing ascendancy, it is difficult to envision just how enervated the movement was in the 1940s: there was no Buckley, no Ronald Reagan, no Barry Goldwater, no National Review. People who identified themselves as conservatives lacked any discernible program or institutional base. But there was Ayn Rand, and her best-selling novel of unmistakable political import, The Fountainhead. In this book, Rand celebrated the freedoms of American capitalism while also warning that there were diabolical forces afoot that threatened liberty. The novel follows the career of the brilliant architect Howard Roark, who embodies Rand’s idea of the heroic individual. Unlike the characters in We The Living, Roark finds ample room for his genius in America. Perceiving his work to be fundamentally representative of his soul and character, Roark refuses to modify his radical, avant-garde designs to gain popularity. He suffers early professional setbacks but emerges triumphant by the end of the novel because he has never compromised his own individuality. The Fountainhead departs from Rand’s first novel because it is clearly a didactic parable, rather than an attempt to portray life under totalitarianism. Each character symbolizes a certain range of human characteristics that is then linked to a specific political position. Rand took special care to skewer liberals throughout the novel. As she wrote to a friend just after its release, “When you read it, you’ll see what an indictment of the New Deal it is, what it does to the ‘humanitarians’ and what effect it could have on the next election—although I never mentioned the New Deal by name.”19 Rand even modeled her arch-villain Ellsworth Toohey on the British socialist Harold Laski, thereby situating her tale of the individual vs. the collective within current politics.20 In the dramatic climax of the novel, Roark gives voice to Rand’s anti-statism when he dynamites a government-funded housing project that has been built based on his adulterated architectural plans. He remains unrepentant about the

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Carl Snyder, Capitalism the Creator: The Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 4. Interestingly, Synder’s work was also read by Hayek. See F. A. Hayek, “Review of Capitalism The Creator by Carl Snyder,” Economica 7/28 (Nov, 1940), 437–9. Rand to DeWitt Emery, May 17, 1943, Letters, 73. Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman (New York: Dutton, 1997), 113.

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destruction and insists that the entire project was morally flawed because it set a collectivity against an individual. Defending himself in court, Roark rejects the idea of any social obligation to the poor. While he is speaking specifically of the housing project he designed, his sentiments encode a general rejection of progressive taxation or government welfare projects. Roark argues: It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim upon my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander’s credo now swallowing the world. I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.21

Luckily for Roark, a jury composed of virtuous American everymen agrees with his defense, and he is acquitted of any crime. The carefully selected jury demonstrates Rand’s faith in the level-headed common sense of the average American: it is composed of two executives of industrial concerns, two engineers, a mathematician, a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a gardener, and three factory workers. Although her novel centered on the esoteric profession of architecture, with the jury Rand extended her conception of work as spiritual craft to any individual who took pride in his or her profession, no matter how humble. With its suspicion of government projects, resolute belief in populist wisdom as superior to the counsel of Machiavellian experts, and reflexive patriotism, Rand’s novel adumbrated many basic themes of right-wing thought. It proved a heady brew indeed for those who chafed at the policies of the Roosevelt years. While The Fountainhead ’s success established Rand as a considerable intellectual force on the right, its popularity also pulled her out of the rapidly expanding conservative political orbit. After moving back to Hollywood in 1945 to help with the screen adaptation of The Fountainhead, Rand fell out of contact with many of her Willkie-era friends (although she became active in California right-wing politics).22 Soon after, The Fountainhead ’s emotive power attracted 21 22

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1993), 684. Rand’s Hollywood career is fascinating, but beyond the scope of this essay. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rand was a screenwriter for several major studios. In 1949 she testified as a friendly witness before HUAC. The Fountainhead movie, which starred Gary Cooper, opened in 1949 and was also drawn into the fight against communism. The Committee for Constitutional Government distributed postcards touting the film and encouraging families to see it together as an educational experience. Box 143-33-C4, Ayn Rand Papers. For a discussion of the film and its contribution to Cold War discourse, see Robert Spadoni, “Guilty by Omission: Girding The ‘Fountainhead’ for the Cold War (Ayn Rand),” Literature-Film Quarterly 27/3 (1999), 223–32.

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her a unique constituency in the form of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, two college students who were avid admirers of her fiction. The Brandens, who would go on to be her primary intellectual collaborators in the years ahead, fell quickly under Rand’s sway and did little to challenge her opinions.23 From 1950 until the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand isolated herself from wider society, socializing predominantly with the Brandens and their relatives. She was thus largely absent from the critical discussions about the nature and meaning of conservatism that dominated the early and mid-1950s. As conservatives struggled to extract moral meanings from totalitarianism, and to bolster religion in a society they believed had gone fundamentally astray, Rand focused exclusively on her own fictional world. After all, she had long ago made up her mind about the evils of totalitarianism and what must be done to combat it. Her opinions sprang from experience, not theology. And experience had taught her that America was the promised land because it allowed unprecedented political and economic freedom, not because it enjoyed divine favor. This freedom had made possible her meteoric rise from impoverished immigrant to literary sensation. Rand, wealthy now from sales of The Fountainhead, knew at first hand the blessings of the market. With the same sense of mission that had inspired We The Living, she turned to the political and economic ideologies of her new homeland. Atlas Shrugged, much more so than The Fountainhead, was essentially a vindication and defense of American capitalism. During its composition, she wrote that the novel’s theme was “those who are antibusiness are antilife.”24 Like its predecessor, Atlas Shrugged offers a dystopian vision of a world on the brink of ruin due to years of liberal policy making and leadership. The aggrandizing state has run amok and collectivism has triumphed across the globe. Facing exploitative tax burdens and unbearable regulation, the creative minds of America have “gone on strike” and throughout the course of the story, all competent individuals in every profession disappear. The man masterminding this strike, John Galt, appears halfway through the 1,084-page novel. He faces off against—and falls in love with—one of Rand’s dynamic female characters, Dagny Taggert, the gorgeous and brilliant head of Taggert Transcontinental Railroad. Besides melodrama and dime-store romance, the novel is studded with nuggets of politically instructive detail. Some are sheer capitalist fantasy: upon arriving at Galt’s secret hideaway, Dagny learns that all the money she has paid in taxes over her working lifetime has been collected into a secret bank account and will now be returned to her. Others are more cutting, such as her caustic descriptions of Washington insiders

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The two were Canadians n´ee Nathaniel Blumenthal and Barbara Weidman. After becoming deeply involved with Rand, they married and changed their surnames to Branden. Rand to John Chamberlain, November 27, 1948, Letters, 413.

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and a young man with “an odor of public payroll.”25 Galt’s vision of the future United States, to be restored after the corrupt liberal government has fallen under its own weight, represents a flat-out rebuttal of every major policy initiative of the twentieth century. Galt’s band will abolish income taxes, foreign aid, social welfare programs, and will return currency to the gold standard. Rand’s depiction of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged is simultaneously nostalgic and visionary. When the competent go on strike, they retreat to Galt’s Gulch, a refuge nestled deep in the mountains of Colorado, where they recreate a nineteenth-century world. Residents of the valley are on a first-name basis with each other, and attend Chautauqua-type lectures at night.26 The former head of Sanders Aircraft is a hog farmer, while a federal court judge supplies the eggs and butter. This affectionate picture of small-town America rests side by side with Rand’s definition of capitalism as the ultimate cerebral achievement, a social system that calls for constant innovation, learning, and a commitment to rationality. In a manner remarkably apropos to the late twentieth-century knowledge economy, Rand conceptualized money as mind made manifest: “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think,” claims one of her characters.27 Many of Rand’s protagonists have an entrepreneurial bent and accumulate wealth through an ingenious invention or by making a scientific breakthrough. Even Dagny, whose railroad is the emblematic old-economy business, is successful because she has an outstanding conceptual grasp of the marketplace and is the only executive who understands the potential of new technologies to improve her operations. Reprising the Protestant work ethic, Rand also suggests that money has a direct relation to values: “Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue, and it will not redeem your vices.”28 For Rand, the market not only rewarded virtue, it regulated vice. Without the interference of government, the market would evenly distribute its rewards to those who were deserving and punish those who did not make use of their talents. For this reason, Rand dismissed the dangers of inherited wealth. If an heir was not worthy, he

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Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1992), 858. For an analysis of nostalgia in Rand’s thought, see Andrew Hoberek, “Ayn Rand and the Politics of Property,” in The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 387. Christopher Hitchens suggests that Rand’s forward-looking vision of capitalism accounts for her popularity in Silicon Valley. See Hitchens, “Why So Many High-Tech Executives Have Declared Allegiance to Randian Objectivism,” Business 2.0 (August, 2001), 128–32. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 389.

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or she would soon be stripped of all financial advantage. Because it operated on pure reason and rewarded only objective achievement, Rand saw capitalism as inherently self-regulating. As in The Fountainhead, so the ethics of Atlas Shrugged posit self-interest as the highest good, and explicitly reject sacrifice or obligation. Entrants to Galt’s Gulch take the following oath, reminiscent of Roark’s courtroom speech: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”29 Rand’s heroes are a diverse band of “producers,” including industrialists, artists, and scientists, whom she intends to embody moral truths. These producers lead moral lives because they do not extract resources from others, but rather depend on their own talents and ingenuity to advance. Although all their actions are guided by selfishness, there is room in Rand’s world for self-interest that accrues goods to the commons, as exemplified by Reardon Metal. Henry Reardon, owner of several steel mills, is the only man able to bring to market a new material that will make trains safer and provide inestimable boons to industrial society as a whole. Through Reardon, Rand advances her belief that innovation and progress will happen in the private sector, and only be inhibited by government. If the greater good of Reardon Metal does somewhat undercut her emphasis on selfishness, Rand is careful to emphasize that any social benefits capitalism creates are secondary effects, and rightly so. Social welfare should never be a goal of private enterprise, but rather the profit motive should be acknowledged and celebrated as a spur to creativity. If the profit motive is considered selfish, then so be it: Rand gladly celebrates selfishness as humanity’s highest moral calling. As she elaborated these already controversial ideas in Atlas Shrugged, Rand was often deliberately provocative, even inflammatory. Beyond simply presenting capitalism as a moral system, she seemed to take an adolescent delight at sending up traditional conventions and mores. One of her admirable characters proudly assumes the nickname “Midas” Mulligan. Another declares Robin Hood to be the most contemptible symbol known to man, and makes a practice of stealing humanitarian aid intended for poor countries, giving it instead to the productive rich. A third discourses upon “money, the root of all good.”30 Moreover, in

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Ibid., 680. Ibid., 387–91. It should be noted that this speech was among the most popular parts of the book; Rand granted countless requests for reprints. Rand was a favorite content provider for business owners who sought to spread the gospel of free enterprise. For a description of organized business campaigns against unions, see Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise. Politically engaged small business owners like those who contacted Rand were also committed backers of Barry Goldwater, whose candidacy she supported. See Perlstein, Before the Storm, 4–6. Also see n. 48 below.

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her efforts to portray the ideals of selfishness, Rand often ended up glorifying singularly unappealing characters. Radical individualism might look noble in the case of Howard Roark, a single male professional. But it did not come off quite the same in the married Henry Reardon. When Reardon’s mother worries what will befall the family if he is sentenced to jail, Reardon tells her, “I don’t know and I don’t care,” and then walks out on Thanksgiving dinner to visit his mistress. That same evening, he tells his feckless brother, “Whatever affection I might have felt for you once, is gone. I haven’t the slightest interest in you, your fate or your future.”31 While Rand implies that Reardon’s family deserves the treatment they receive, what remains is Reardon’s cold manner and Rand’s depiction of this as a proper course of action. Rand called her literary style “Romantic Realism” and maintained that the goal of her fiction was to portray life as it could be, not as it was. To this end, she developed a series of sharp polarities between her characters. Her heroes are always fair of form and strong in jaw line, while her villains are correspondingly flabby and shifty-eyed. Since Rand meant to demonstrate on both a personal and a social level the result of faulty ideals, she was often merciless with her characters, depicting their sufferings and failings with relish. In one noteworthy and repellent scene, she describes in savory detail the personal flaws of passengers doomed to perish in a violent railroad crash, openly suggesting their deaths are warranted by their ideological errors.32 The spoofing of liberals in The Fountainhead was positively gentle compared to the vicious caricatures of Atlas Shrugged. Rand eagerly awaited the reviews in 1957, but she was to be sorely disappointed. While virtually no one had seen her coming in 1943, now it seemed legions were prepared. The New York Times Book Review, which had generously praised The Fountainhead, featured a scathing review of Atlas Shrugged by ex-communist Granville Hicks, who declared: “loudly as Miss Rand proclaims her love of life, it seems clear that the book is written out of hate.”33 For the most part, reviewers did not primarily object to Rand’s political or moral views, or even her adulation of the superior man. What they focused on instead was the tone and style of the book as a whole. Echoing Hicks’s comment, the Saturday Review wrote: “the book is shot through with hatred.”34 Other frequent complaints concerned Rand’s repetition and her habit of overdrawing the contrasts between good and evil characters. In many cases, Rand inspired a particularly visceral reaction. Reviews

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Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 439, 441. Ibid., 566–8. Granville Hicks, “A Parable of Buried Talents,” New York Times Book Review (Oct. 26, 1957), 7, 18. The Times’s positive review of The Fountainhead is Lorine Pruette, “The Battle Against Evil,” New York Times Book Review (May 16, 1943), 7, 18. Helen Beal Woodward, “Atlas Shrugged,” Saturday Review (Oct. 12, 1957), 25.

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were often savage and mocking commentaries, rather than literary assessments. As Time asked, “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare?”35 Such spleen may have been due to Rand’s own renunciation of charity as a moral obligation. After all, she had voluntarily opted out of the traditional expectations of politeness or courtesy. Or, it may have been due to the book’s prodigious length, which taxed even the most enthusiastic commentators. Occasional reviewers doled out grudging praise for Rand’s dramatic flair, but found such strengths overshadowed by her hectoring tone. Most glumly agreed that whatever its faults or merits, the novel was likely to outsell even The Fountainhead. Over at National Review, Whittaker Chambers went for the jugular. In an article entitled “Big Sister is Watching You,” Chambers deemed Atlas Shrugged “a remarkably silly book” and announced that “the news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously.”36 He noted Rand’s popularity and her promotion of conservative ideals such as anti-communism and limited government, but argued that because she was an atheist, her underlying message was faulty and dangerous. The book began by “rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc.” and in so doing created “a materialism of the Right” which differed little from “a materialism of the Left.” According to Chambers, Rand was foolish to think that collectivism, an essentially godless philosophy, could be defeated by anything other than religion. Without the guidance of religion, Chambers believed, societies would be led astray into the hubris of socialism and dictatorship. Rand’s work, in fact, foreshadowed this outcome, for it was marked by strong fascist elements and ultimately pointed to rule by a “technocratic elite.” But it was not just this criticism that marked the review: far more striking was the article’s vituperative tone. The insults came thick and fast. Rand’s writing was “dictatorial” and had a tone of “overriding arrogance”; she was certainly not sufficiently feminine, hinted Chambers, speculating that “children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy.” And in a stunning line that must have been particularly galling to the Jewish Rand, Chambers intoned: “from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” At base, it was a clash of two radically different versions of human nature. Rand’s world view was fundamentally optimistic, and her novel showed mankind, guided by rationality alone, achieving heroic deeds. Chambers, fresh from the traumas of the Hiss trial, saw rational man as a doomed and helpless creature trapped in dangerous utopian fantasies of his own creation. 35

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“The Solid Gold Dollar Sign,” Time (Oct. 14, 1957), 128. A prime example of a reviewer having fun at Rand’s expense is Donald Malcolm, “The New Rand Atlas,” The New Yorker (Oct. 26, 1957), 194–6. Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” National Review (Dec. 28, 1957), 594–6.

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Yet there was another source of the viciousness. Chambers was fully conscious that Rand’s ideas put conservatism, as Buckley was trying to promote it, under grinding strain. This current of thought ran just below the surface of the review. In his article, Chambers argued that Rand’s book was materialist not simply because she was an atheist, but because she was a capitalist. He wrote that if Rand’s fictional world ever became real, the only value would be hedonism, leading to cultural degradation and a “general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.” This would happen because “a free enterprise system . . . [is] in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be).” The observation came in passing, but it cut to the heart of the conservative problem with Rand. By spinning out the logic of capitalism to its ultimate conclusion, she highlighted all the contradictions that had lately caused such ferocious infighting among conservatives. Her novel showcased the paradox of defending free-market capitalism while at the same time advocating Christianity. But it was just this combination that made conservatism distinctive and, Buckley and his allies believed, was both morally defensible and politically expedient. Books like Rand’s, however, might undermine or redirect the whole venture. If this was what capitalism meant, how could a Christian possibly support it? Chambers, long a student of dialectics, grasped these contradictions in an instant. He sensed immediately that Rand’s ideas had to be quarantined if conservatism was to maintain its careful balancing act between capitalism and Christianity. Chambers’s evisceration of Rand reflected both the new importance religion had assumed for conservatives in the 1950s, and the tension they felt over the issue of capitalism. Communism was by now always and everywhere “godless,” making the presence of a strident atheist intrinsically problematic. But godless capitalism was, potentially, even worse. While postwar conservatives promoted laissez-faire capitalism as superior to the liberal welfare state, they did not wish to glorify the pursuit of wealth, or fall into what Nock had termed “economism.”37 To National Review conservatives, Rand represented a dangerous departure from the libertarian tradition, which had simultaneously bemoaned the rise of government and the degradation of a society oriented solely to commercial concerns. By contrast, Rand argued that economic life was the highest good, that in the striving and struggling to forge a career and make a living mankind achieved its highest potential existence. She sought to free capitalism of the stigma it had acquired during the Depression and to protect it from the disdain of intellectuals and religious believers alike. Her capitalism was a market infused with spirit that came complete with its own laudable moral code, not a cold system of

37

See n. 16 above.

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exploitation. While this idea might seem ridiculous to book reviewers, it would prove to be a compelling vision to millions of Americans. As it turned out, this vision even had its attractions for Chambers. In 1959, two years after he had attacked Rand, Chambers had nearly crossed to her side of the fence. Starkly, he told Buckley: “I am not a conservative.” In a series of remarkable letters to Buckley, Chambers attempted to clarify his position visa` -vis National Review and its assorted agendas. He wrote: “I am a man of the Right. I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative.”38 Although Chambers, a Quaker, retained a deep sense of personal religious belief, in the political realm he chose to endorse capitalism, giving in to his fundamentally historicist sense that in capitalism lay the future. If such was the case, it was futile to fight and impossible to maintain a position that was both pro-capitalist and truly conservative. For this reason, Chambers wished to separate himself from the program that Buckley was developing. In his review of Rand, Chambers’s comments had focused mainly on the materialism of capitalism, and how that stood in opposition to religion. Now, he tried to explain to Buckley how capitalism’s intrinsic dynamism posed a challenge to those who sought to preserve the past. And he evinced a Rand-like appreciation for the market’s innate flux: “Conservatism is alien to the very nature of capitalism whose love of life and growth is perpetual change.” Although he was fascinated with the transformative power of capitalism, Chambers’s valuation of the market was tinged with ambiguity. In a passage replete with Spenglerian undertones, he told Buckley: “I am pro-capitalist; I would only retard for an instant, seek to break the fearful impacts of change, hold back lest the rush of development (in a multitude of frightful forms) carry us to catastrophe, as, in fact, seems almost inevitable.”39 Yet if capitalism might carry us to catastrophe, Chambers, an ex-Communist, was sure that the alternatives were worse. It was capitalism that must be defended, against its enemies both conservative and liberal. Only a few years earlier, these ideas and insights had lain dormant beneath his attack on Rand. Now fully manifest, later in 1959 they led him to resign from National Review, much to Buckley’s dismay.40

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Whittaker Chambers, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 227–8. Ibid., 229. According to Buckley’s biographer, he never fully comprehended the grounds of difference between himself and Chambers. See Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., 167, 177.

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Although Buckley viewed Chambers’s review as the party line on Rand, it was far from the last word on the topic.41 The attention-grabbing article set off reverberations across the right-wing community. Many libertarians, in particular, were incensed. Supporters of laissez-faire had fought for years to be on equal footing with the Catholics of National Review, and these debates were still contentious in 1957. John Chamberlain, who had reviewed Atlas Shrugged favorably in The Freeman, was one high-profile defender.42 But he and other libertarians were disappointed in Rand, too, for if the conservatives had needlessly attacked her, it was also true that she had failed to make any accommodations to them. In a letter to National Review, Chamberlain lamented: “if Miss Rand had chosen to admit just one vocal and practicing Christian in her Fellowship of the Competent . . . there would have been no outcry against Atlas Shrugged.” He praised her “magnificent” exposition of freedom and averred that he would continue “the lugubrious task of persuading people to read it in spite of themselves.”43 Although a number of readers cancelled their subscriptions in outrage, the controversial article was invigorating for National Review. Chambers’s bold pronouncements helped the magazine stake its claim as the arbiter of the conservative mainstream. Buckley professed that conservatism was free of any formal litmus tests for membership, but the Atlas Shrugged review signaled that definitive boundaries would nonetheless be drawn. Despite this attempt at excommunication, Rand retained a considerable following among the National Review audience. In 1960, Buckley accepted an article on Rand written by poet and anti-collectivist polemicist E. Merrill Root, an English professor at Earlham College and the author of Collectivism on Campus (1956) and Brainwashing in the High Schools (1958). At National Review, Root was considered something of a second-string writer. But Buckley needed to keep stalwart foot soldiers like Root happy and engaged, and letting him write on Rand was the perfect solution. In his article, “What About Ayn Rand?”, Root openly challenged National Review’s policy on Rand and lauded her heroic vision of life 41

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Buckley referred to the article whenever he was asked about Rand in subsequent years. National Review also reprinted the article in its Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Issue (Nov. 5, 1990). John Chamberlain, “Reviewer’s Notebook: Atlas Shrugged,” The Freeman (Dec., 1957), 53–6. Another defender was Isabel Paterson, who felt the review to be unconscionably mean-spirited and possibly libelous. See Paterson to Buckley, Jan. 2, 1958, “Paterson, Isabel (1958),” Box 6, William F. Buckley, Jr., Papers, Yale University Library. Robert LeFevre of the Freedom School was also upset by the review. E. Merrill Root to Buckley, Jan. 31, 1960, “Root, E. Merrill (1960),” Box 11, Buckley Papers. John Chamberlain, “To The Editor: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” National Review (Feb. 1, 1958), 118.

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and her celebration of man as creator. He was copious in his praise, calling her “a life-giving sun among her planets” and “our most original artist-philosopher.”44 He praised Rand for “her brilliant skinning alive of all the phonies of the earth,” noting that she and the conservatives held many common enemies: “cheapjack existentialists,” relativists, behaviorists, positivists. Root’s article then descended into improbable assertions that Rand was an “unconscious” Christian and that her novels showed the deep imprint of theism. Like Chambers, Root was troubled by Rand’s irreligion, but he chose to wish it away, rather than directly attack it. Unlike Chambers, he proved unable to conceptualize the contradictions that lay under the surface. Root’s article drew an almost immediate response from Garry Wills, who represented the more cosmopolitan and sophisticated new guard at National Review. The Jesuit-educated Wills missed entirely the populist appeal of Rand, and found Root’s review “painful” to read, he wrote Buckley privately. He begged to be given space for a response. It seems that neither Buckley nor Wills had read either of Rand’s novels, although they had looked at John Galt’s famous 57-page speech in Atlas Shrugged as a pr´ecis of her thought (Rand herself identified this as the most important part of the book).45 But even if they weren’t familiar with her oeuvre, Wills and Buckley both knew enough to see that Rand needed to be restrained. Wills wrote to Buckley: I read the speech you referred me to, hard as it is to wade through gibberish. This is something too serious, it seems to me, to take a soft stand on. I know you always have a lunatic fringe to placate; and on the economics level that is all right, [but] allowing any connection to be established, in any one’s mind, between National Review and Ayn Rand is a betrayal of National Review’s stance and past record.46

Buckley replied: “I cannot agree with you more, that one cannot afford to confuse our two theses.”47 The divergent responses to Rand among National Review’s staff did not merely follow the libertarian–traditionalist continuum, but also reflected differences based on religion, educational background, and social class that affected the wider conservative constituency. The better-educated writers, such as Wills and Chambers, found little of redeeming value in Rand. By contrast, Root spoke for National Review readers who approached conservatism from a less intellectual angle. Many of Rand’s most ardent admirers were small businessmen from the Midwest, who were untroubled by Rand’s atheism or her style and saw

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E. Merrill Root, “What About Ayn Rand?”, National Review (Jan. 30, 1960), 76. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 936–93. Wills to Buckley, Feb. 10, 1960, “Wills, Garry (1960),” Box 12, Buckley Papers. Buckley to Wills, Feb. 15, 1960, Box 12, Buckley Papers.

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her as an inspiration.48 Thus the problems surrounding Rand also pointed to the difficulties of welding a coalition between well-educated, urban Catholics and more populist, pro-business Midwesterners who were relatively unconcerned with religious orthodoxy. Responding to Root’s article in February 1960, Wills demolished Root’s facile argumentation, and then honed in on the more important issue at stake. “The simple equation of capitalism with conservatism is not only naive, it is fatal,” Wills wrote. He argued: “it is treason, betrayal from within, for conservatives to endorse any fanatic who agrees with certain methods which conservatives must use to implement their view of man.”49 Here was exactly what Rand would have disagreed with: the idea that “certain methods” (i.e. free markets or capitalism) must be used, whatever their underlying morality or implications if fully elaborated. Whereas Rand saw capitalism as the ultimate fulfillment of human nature, Wills had a much more limited appreciation of its function. According to Wills, “political and economic freedom” was the basic grounds on which man must come to know himself, but it was no route to “beatitude.” Wills denied that capitalism was the true foundation of conservatism, promoting “history” instead as “the first principle of conservatism.” But if the two were not identical, they were hardly incompatible. Capitalism was simply a handy tool that American conservatives would use to shape the world according to their view of man, which was deeply informed by Catholic conceptions of original sin.50 Even so, it was an imperfect method that certainly did not deserve the turgid praise Rand bestowed upon it. According to Wills, the true conservative “knows a ‘captain of industry’ can be as ruthless as the leader of a commune.” He finished with a call to duty. Root was wrong, Rand and her ilk must be resisted: “The narrow fixations of Miss Rand, the logorrhea of Mr. Root, should meet with more strenuous opposition from conservatives than from any other group of thinkers, especially when such chaos takes to itself the unearned title of conservatism. The conservative’s job is to see complexity, to continue standards, to learn from history.”

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See n. 30 above. There was significant overlap between the followers of Rand and Goldwater. Rand corresponded frequently with the campaign and one of Goldwater’s main speechwriters, Karl Hess, was heavily involved in the Objectivist movement. See Paul Richard, “Writer Rests His Pen, Turns to Blowtorch,” Washington Post (Nov. 21, 1967), B3. Garry Wills, “But is Ayn Rand Conservative?”, National Review (Feb. 27, 1960), 139. For the Catholic influence at National Review, and in the conservative movement more generally, see Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950– 1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), and Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945.

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While Rand was odious in Wills’s sight, she had unknowingly provided a useful service to conservatism. Due to her presence, a consensus was gathering. Whatever conservatism’s relationship to capitalism, it was not to be the answer Rand proposed. Yet neither was it to be the one that Chambers ultimately found, for Wills seemed confident that capitalism and conservatism could be complementary to one another. More so than the others, Wills spelled out the reasoning behind this conclusion. And if the exact relationship couldn’t be pinpointed, Rand could always be kept at bay by sheer invective. For her part, Rand was happy to return the insults. In December 1960, she gave a lecture at Princeton University entitled “Conservatism: An Obituary.” She scorned the label “conservative”, preferring to be called a “radical for capitalism.” Much of her criticism was sheer anger at compromisers. Rand insisted that the only effective defense of capitalism was a wholehearted one. Unlike Chambers, she found conservatives not unclear or confused about their ultimate stance towards capitalism, but rather full of cowardice: The moral treason of the “conservative” leaders lies in the fact that they . . . do not have the courage to admit that the American way of life was capitalism, that that was the politicoeconomic system born and established in the United States, the system which, in one brief century, achieved a level of freedom, of progress, of prosperity, of human happiness, unmatched in all the other systems and centuries combined.51

Any compromise ceded both moral and rhetorical ground to liberals: “collectivism, the ancient, frozen, status society is offered to us in the name of progress—while capitalism, the only free, dynamic, creative, society ever devised, is defended in the name of stagnation.”52 Cowardice led conservatives to misrepresent the essence of capitalism, which impeded their ability to defend it. If capitalism were only celebrated for its true merits, as her fiction attempted to do, its defense would be simple. According to Rand, it was the very genius of capitalism that it stood opposed to all traditional morality. But conservatives “are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: the morality of altruism . . . Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.”53 What Rand called “altruism” was essentially indistinguishable from Christian ethics. Hence, like Chambers, Rand understood that capitalism opposed conservatism on two main grounds. Conservatism supported established tradition while the market demanded

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Rand later published an essay based on the lecture, from which these quotations are taken. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1967), 194. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 195.

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change; and conservatism called for Christianity, whereas such ethics were fundamentally crippling to capitalism. Although they differed in their estimation of religion, Rand and Chambers concurred on these fundamental points. As Rand’s popularity surged in the 1960s, she became impossible to ignore. In the wake of Atlas Shrugged, she became a media sensation and a star of the college lecture circuit, appearing to capacity crowds and attendant campus controversy. Her original fan base had been business people, but as the decade wore on, Rand drew to her banner increasing numbers of libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and so-called “hippies of the right.” The dogmatism and moral certainty of her novels proved especially appealing to adolescents, many of whom were marked lifelong by this early encounter. Although conservatives repudiated her atheistic philosophy, in so doing they allowed Rand to carve out a vital niche as spokesperson for the secular right. Secular and Jewish right-wing youth who were put off by Christian-inflected conservative rhetoric flocked to her lectures and the trademarked courses on “Objectivism” offered by the Nathaniel Branden Institute.54 Rand labeled her philosophy Objectivism because she taught that values were absolute and could be rationally, objectively determined. Accordingly, Objectivism promoted capitalism as a system that grew naturally out of the selfinterested ethics her novels depicted. Through her periodical The Objectivist (1962–71), Rand kept readers appraised of her views on current events and literature, providing a forum for the real-world application of her philosophical ideas.55 On most issues, she took a fairly predictable right-wing line, although her justifications for such positions were often idiosyncratic and linked to her larger agenda of promoting rationality. Once again, Rand was headed in the same direction as the conservatives, but for very different reasons. She stood in solid opposition to what she called “today’s intellectual trend,” including relativism, behaviorism, civil rights, and the welfare state. Rand was also a vigorous opponent of campus political activism and lifestyle experimentation.

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The most famous representative of this group is Alan Greenspan, who continues to speak of Rand as an important mentor. Also see Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and Women of the New Right (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987), and John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 238. It is by no means insignificant that Rand was particularly attractive to youth. Although few retained equal levels of devotion in maturity, as Karl Mannheim argues, a person’s “natural view of the world” is often formed in the ages from 17 to 25 and thus an early encounter with Rand could have longstanding impact. Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 291. The Objectivist replaced The Objectivist Newsletter (1962–5) and was later superseded by The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–6).

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The former she opposed for being a distraction to the intellectual mission of the university, the latter because drugs and sexual promiscuity encouraged irrational thought and impulsive behavior.56 By contrast, Rand taught her students that reason was the only means to the good. She insisted that all her political stances flowed directly from the ideas she had expressed in her fiction, and that she had created a fully integrated philosophical system free of contradictions or error. If ideology was dead on the left, Rand had certainly resurrected it on the right. National Review was not blind to these developments, and returned to Rand yet again in 1967, a year which marked the zenith of her national fame. This time, Buckley tapped M. Stanton Evans to write the review. Evans, a prot´eg´e of Buckley’s who had graduated from Yale in 1955, was a respected young activist who had been instrumental in the founding of Young Americans for Freedom, an organization of young conservatives that was sponsored by Buckley but heavily influenced by Rand.57 At the time of the review, he was an editor at the Indianapolis News. Buckley wrote to Evans that he wanted a “definitive” piece on Ayn Rand which would “demonstrate to people of commonsense that her ideological and philosophical presumptions make her an inadequate mentor.”58 The magazine’s cover in October featured a portrait of Rand rendered as a stained-glass window, surrounded with dollar signs, along with the headline “The Movement to Canonize Ayn Rand.” (In point of fact, the dollar sign was Rand’s personal totem, and she wore a gold dollar sign pin for many of her public appearances.) This prominent National Review story covered many of the themes Wills had raised six years earlier, but it granted Rand a far greater measure of praise and authority. It also, paradoxically, revealed how many of Rand’s beliefs had been absorbed by National Review conservatives even as she remained, officially, persona non grata. Evans clearly shared some of the instinctive liking for Rand felt by young conservatives in the 1960s. He was untroubled by her defense of capitalism and her attack upon government regulation, accepting it as conventional wisdom. She had, Evans wrote, “an excellent grasp of the way capitalism is supposed to work, the efficiencies of free enterprise, the central role of private property and the profit motive, the social and political costs of

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Rand opposed civil rights to the extent that civil rights leaders advocated government intervention to achieve their goals. On many college campuses, Objectivist students held counterdemonstrations to student protestors. The Rand-inspired Committee for the Defense of Property Rights at Columbia University even distributed “Abolish SDS” buttons and literature. Ayn Rand Archives, Box 5-01-18A. For more on Evans’s career, and Rand’s influence upon YAF, see Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties, 65, 61–2. Buckley to Evans, Feb. 28, 1967, “Evans, M. Stanton,” Box 43, Buckley Papers.

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welfare schemes which seek to compel a false benevolence.”59 He also admired her polemical fire and consistency, and defended her against Chambers’s accusation that she was an unconscious Nazi. Evans’s review reflected the more relaxed attitude of National Review in its maturity. It also indicated how capitalism had become less of a charged topic for conservatives as the arguments surrounding fusionism faded into the background. Partially, this reflected the libertarians’ success at redefining capitalism as a moral economic system, specifically when contrasted to communism or socialism. Rand herself had been harping on this theme for decades, and by the late 1960s, her arguments had been picked up by numerous politicians, businesspeople, students, and journalists.60 This openness to capitalism also reflected the experience of a new generation who had grown up in the flush prosperity of the 1950s. Evans went on to argue that despite these features, Rand remained a dangerous figure for conservatives because she mixed her good qualities up with the bad: namely, atheism. Rand’s work raised several “central dilemmas of the era,” such as “Can faith in God be reconciled with liberty for man? Is Christian belief compatible with libertarian attachment? Is Capitalism anti-Christian?” These questions were no longer deeply problematic, and failed to exercise Evans the way they had Chambers and Wills. Evans seemed confident that a general consensus on each had already been reached. The only hitch was that Rand answered all of these questions incorrectly. Evans urged that conservatives make judicious use of Rand, all the while being careful not to swallow her argument whole. Now that a strident defense of capitalism was considered fairly standard by conservatives, her atheism, which had been the original ground of Buckley ’s dislike for her, remained the fundamental problem. Chamberlain’s lament about the missing Christian in Atlas Shrugged seemed ever more prescient. These developments aside, whatever critical issues Rand raised would soon be theoretical in nature, for her career went into rapid eclipse soon after. In 1968, the Objectivist movement imploded in a series of personal schisms and Stalinesque purges.61 Rand fell into a deep depression and ceased most public activities and publishing. Yet if Rand 59 60

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M. Stanton Evans, “The Gospel According to Ayn Rand,” National Review (Oct. 3, 1957), 1067. Jerome Himmelstein erroneously claims that it was the Christian conservatives who were able to reshape capitalism as a moral system. As the debates surrounding fusionism in the 1950s make clear, it was the Christians who had the most trouble with capitalism, and it was the libertarians who argued against them that capitalism should be regarded as a moral system. Rand was the most vigorous, but not the sole, expositor of this argument. Himmelstein, To The Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 45. The trouble began when Nathaniel Branden terminated his longstanding affair with Rand. Details of these events and the relationship are given in Nathaniel Branden, My Years With

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was no longer an institutional presence, she remained a powerful ideological influence, and in the 1970s echoes of her thought could be heard throughout the Nixon and Ford administrations.62 But as far as National Review was concerned, Rand had come to the sorry end she deserved. Almost fifty years after the Chambers review, Buckley still relished his selfdeclared victory over her. In 2003, he published a work of historical fiction, Getting It Right, which was significantly oriented to Rand and Objectivism. In this novel, set in the 1960s, Buckley’s secular Jewish protagonist, Leonora Goldstein, is an ardent Objectivist. She is romantically involved with another misguided young conservative, Woodroe Raynor, who works for the John Birch Society. Over the course of the book, both Leonora and Woodroe recant their ideological foolishness, deciding to forsake their extremist positions and work instead for mainstream, National Review-style conservatism. At the novel’s conclusion the two are engaged and, to boot, Leonora is planning her conversion to Catholicism.63 Buckley’s novel intends to narrow the circle of acceptable conservatism, but at the same time underscores its diverse and unwieldy origins. Although National Review is the clear winner in this battle, it is Objectivism and the John Birch Society that inspire the young recruits and bring them into the right-wing scene. Significantly, Buckley does not probe the ideological tensions that separate National Review, the John Birch Society, and the Objectivists. Rather, it is sexual deviance that alerts both youths to the error of their ways. Leonora leaves Objectivism when she learns of Rand’s extramarital affair with Nathaniel Branden, and Woody’s disillusionment begins with intimations of homosexuality that surround General Edwin A. Walker, a John Birch favorite. For Buckley, rightwing politics are still not enough: only the Catholic Church can keep youth from falling into profound error. The novel covers much the same territory as Chambers’s, Wills’s, and Evans’s discussions of Rand, but excises any mention of capitalism, the most contentious issue historically. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, capitalism has almost faded from view, and is taken for granted not simply as a conservative ideal, but as a generalized desideratum of the post-communist world.64 As examination

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Ayn Rand (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999) and Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand. For an observation on this, see TRB, “The Ayn Rand Factor,” The New Republic (July 19, 1975). William F. Buckley, Jr, Getting It Right (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003). Two influential recent books that assume the desirability of capitalism are Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992) and Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999).

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of conservative reaction to Rand demonstrates, however, it was not always so. Because Rand represents such a forthright pro-capitalist position, her career highlights the shifting fortunes of capitalism on the right. In the 1940s, she was an inspiration to those who struggled against the New Deal and hoped to bring about a new, market-friendly political order. As a second generation of conservatives built upon these sentiments and attempted to tie them to a defense of Christian tradition, Rand’s status began to erode. Because she clung so tenaciously to her atheism and her heroic vision of capitalism, she was soon a liability to conservatism as envisioned by the newly powerful National Review. In 1957, Chambers set the terms of the debate with his controversial review of Atlas Shrugged. The fulcrum then swung the other way with the populist effusions of Root’s pro-Rand article, which drew Wills’s wrath. Finally, conservative opinion settled into a kind of stasis with Evans’s 1967 article and Rand’s subsequent personal disintegration. This resolution, however, did not come without cost. It is notable that tension over the issue of capitalism propelled two of conservatism’s brightest intellectual stars, Garry Wills and Whittaker Chambers, right out of the movement. In the early 1970s, as Chambers had done earlier, Wills distanced himself from Buckley and National Review, partially because he believed its advocacy of capitalism to be incompatible with Catholic social ethics.65 When confronted with Rand’s work, both men understood immediately that while she might appear to be simply a lightweight popularizer, her work touched upon the deepest structures of conservative thought. Rand forced both writers to consider how a creed oriented to transcendence would respond to the mundane realities and potentially devastating outcomes of the marketplace. While they might mock her style, Chambers and Wills recognized that Rand gave powerful voice to ideas that threatened to overwhelm their own allegiances. Eventually, the two major architects of conservative policy on Rand became disenchanted with their own formulations. If conservatism in the 1950s had not tied itself firmly enough to capitalism for Chambers’s taste, by the 1970s its identification with the market was deep enough to repel Wills. Although they differed in their reasons for leaving the conservative fold, Wills’s and Chambers’s encounters with Rand were part of a larger process whereby both men concluded it was untenable to rest upon an intellectual program so rife with contradictions. In Getting It Right, the eventual drawing of Leonora into the movement symbolizes conservative success at neutralizing Rand while relying on the ardor she inspired. Leonora’s fictional conversion points to a real-world similarity between the dogmatism of Objectivist and Catholic ethics, which both lay claim to 65

Wills was also dissatisfied with the conservative reaction to civil rights. For an able discussion of his career, see Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals, Chap. 7.

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absolute truth.66 This progression also mimics the broader success conservatives had in integrating capitalism into their larger agenda of revitalizing Christian values and tradition. At first, such a combination seemed impossibly jarring, but repetition would help the problem fade. And as a newly modified, stateregulated capitalism showered the country with riches and a grateful religious revival swept the land, the two seemed more compatible than theoreticians might argue. Moreover, conservative success at managing Rand, and denying her full membership benefits of the coalition, helped pave the way for later celebrations of the market. If capitalism could be modulated, or its ultimate logic inhibited by the strictures of Christianity, then it could fit right in with motherhood, apple pie, and other emblems of the American way.67

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In reality, it was more often the case that conservative youth moved from religion to Objectivism than vice versa. See Jerome Tuccile, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). A version of this essay will also appear in Imagining Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). For their invaluable assistance, I would like to thank Charles Capper, David A. Hollinger, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joyce Mao, Kristen Richardson, and three anonymous readers for MIH. This study is part of a doctoral dissertation in progress entitled “Skyscraper on a Hill: Ayn Rand and the Cultural Politics of American Capitalism, 1930–1980.”

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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 387–398
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000228 Printed in the United Kingdom

jonathan edwards in his time, and in ours david d. hall Harvard Divinity School

George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Re-enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) Amy Plantinga Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All”: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) We play tricks on the past, but the past also plays tricks on us. We try to fool the past by reconstructing it in our own image, imposing order and significance on the untidy sources we depend upon. The trick the past plays on us is to remain defiantly strange, ever able to expose what it is that our gestures of sympathetic reconstruction have altered, ignored, or suppressed. So it is with Jonathan Edwards. With the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson, no one has attracted as much attention during the past fifty years in American intellectual history, and no one else, even Jefferson, has been accorded such reverence or extolled so lavishly, all to the end of making Edwards a living presence among us. Almost fifty years ago Sydney Ahlstrom proclaimed Edwards the most significant figure in the Reformed tradition between Calvin and Barth. Before him, Perry Miller had insisted on Edwards’s modernity, and in Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966) Alan Heimert described him as a forward-looking millenarian with proto-democratic instincts. For Miller and Heimert, the significance of Edwards was his role in the shaping of an autonomous, high-flying American culture: Edwards the nation maker. More recently, the resurgence of Protestant evangelicalism has prompted those of this persuasion to employ Edwards in re-imagining the past as it bears upon their present situation. 387

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But the past plays many tricks on the project, however defined, to make Edwards current. Sometimes it is the archive that trumps such efforts, as when more careful readings of Edwards’s apocalyptic or “millenarian” texts subverted the argument—alas, still being repeated—that he imagined a distinctive role for New England/America in the end times. Or the problem may be that the past reveals the evasions of the present.1 Twentieth-century theologians of a liberal bent had to ignore Edwards’s fervent reiteration of Calvinist principles. Most modern-day evangelicals are little more likely to affirm such doctrines as a limited atonement, and neither group is entirely comfortable with how he preached the terrors that awaited sinners. For some the problem may be Edwards’s selfrighteousness, a temperament (or “constitution”) he himself noted in responding to the invitation to take up the presidency of the College of New Jersey. Addressing the trustees of the college, he told them that he was affected with “a disagreeable dullness and stiffness, much unfitting me for conversation.” A modern scholar has amplified this self-description in noting his “pastoral urge toward the reproof and correction of others, and a lamentable lack of any sense of humor,”2 qualities that contributed to the most humiliating moment of his life, the decision of his Northampton, Massachusetts, congregation to dismiss him as their minister. Yet few renounce the project of making him ours. The one historian in recent years who did so, Peter Gay, has become something of a bˆete noir to the Edwards industry. The sticking point for Gay, who denounced Miller and company in A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (1966), was Edwards’s understanding of history and Scripture—untouched, it seemed, by the critical spirit of the Enlightenment. To give credit where credit is due, the Edwards industry has rejected or sharply modified some of the claims that Miller and Heimert made. It is no longer acceptable to intimate that Edwards relied on John Locke for his understanding of experience. And although Ahlstrom may be excused for a judgment that was irresistibly appealing in the context of arguing for an independently “American” theological tradition of intellectual stature, he surely knew of Europeans who were far more important makers of the Reformed tradition—Schleiermacher, for one. What kind of theologian was Edwards? His contemporaries realized that he was no ordinary Calvinist reiterating the commonplaces of the Westminster

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I point out a few of the evasions, if not the downright lies, of the editor–biographer Sereno Dwight in The Works of Jonathan Edwards vol. 12: Ecclesiastical Writings, ed. David D. Hall (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 49 n. 4, 52 n. 6. The Works of Jonathan Edwards vol. 16: Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 726; Ola Winslow, quoted in Amy Plantiga Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All”: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 4.

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Confession. Something else was at work, a quality of thinking they termed “metaphysical.” The most serious, sustained scholarship on Edwards during the past half-century has started from the premise that he was a philosophical theologian who reflected creatively on a wide range of topics, from the nature of religious experience and the meaning of providence to ethics, the Trinity, original sin, and “the end for which God created the world.” Is there a master key to his thinking, a central argument or idea around which all the rest revolves? This is never an easy question to answer, but the task of doing so for Edwards is complicated by three circumstances. One is that Edwards did not live to write the summa he sketched in his letter of 1757 to the trustees of the College of New Jersey, where he reported having “on my mind and heart . . . a great work, which I call A History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entirely new method . . . considering the affair of Christian theology, as the whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption by Jesus Christ.”3 A second is the challenge represented by the materials that remained in manuscript when he died in 1758, in particular the private notebooks or “Miscellanies.” The public Edwards is not always the same as the private Edwards, as Amy Pauw has astutely noted. That much of this manuscript material embodies Edwards’s efforts to establish the validity and unity of Scripture or to validate the eternal torments of the damned, efforts of little interest to those within the liberal tradition, adds to the problem. The third is the classic difficulty of mapping someone’s intellectual context: what was this person reading, and how did he absorb or rework the ideas or thinkers he encountered? For Edwards, who spent untold hours with the Bible and continued to read the seventeenth-century masters of evangelical divinity, assessing influence or reaction is especially challenging. He does not always give us precise guidance on these matters, for he depended in the main on extracts and summaries he found in learned periodicals of the day, and the “catalogue” he kept of books he heard of and wanted to read is, as Paul Ramsey once remarked, “notoriously ‘soft’ evidence”.4 The prolonged and eventually fruitless quest to associate him with Locke, like an earlier and equally fruitless quest to trace his “idealism” to the influence of Bishop Berkeley, are examples of ventures in contextualizing that went astray. Though the new wisdom is that Edwards owed a great deal to British writers, any full accounting must encompass, among others, Latitudinarians, liberalizing Nonconformists, virtuosi of the Puritan “practical divinity,” deists, Continental Reformed scholastics, Scottish sectarians, historians both ancient and of his time, and “moderates”

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Ibid., 727–8. The Works of Jonathan Edwards vol. 8: Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsay (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 704.

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of the Scottish Enlightenment. Making sense of this diversity is, to say the least, a difficult undertaking, made all the more so because, as Ramsay has also pointed out, “observing and respecting a distinction between arguments for intellectual affinity and those for literary dependence is central to responsible historical criticism.”5 The project of appropriating Edwards for the present can also throw up obstacles in our way, for those who engage in this project have not always resisted the temptation to foreground only those sources that are in keeping with their own intellectual agenda. These questions of method and substance are addressed both directly and indirectly in George Marsden’s substantial, informative biography. Its stated purpose is to describe Edwards as “a real person in his own time.” Asking us to reimagine Edwards “as an eighteenth-century figure” (p. 2, author’s italics), Marsden predicates his narrative on two assumptions about colonial New England, where Edwards was born in 1703: that his social world was framed by hierarchy as ideal and as practice, and that learned men of his milieu participated in a transatlantic culture based in Britain. (It is interesting in this regard that, early on, Edwards aspired to publish in London.) The first of these assumptions allows Marsden to write without apology or embarrassment about Edwards’s lifelong reliance on high-status patrons, most especially his local champion Colonel John Stoddard, and his expectation that the townspeople of Northampton should respect his authority. The proto-democratic Edwards who figures in some interpretations finds no warrant in these pages. Moreover, Marsden turns the judgment that Edwards was a forebear of modern evangelicalism on its head, asserting that the corporatist social ethics Edwards sought to implement in Northampton, together with his efforts to sustain the alliance of civil magistrate and minister in a society he understood as hierarchical, link him with the Puritan past, not with the evangelical and republican future. To describe Edwards as a citizen of British culture is also to separate him from the world that is to come. For these two reasons alone, Marsden deserves our thanks, for he is surely right on both counts. There is more good news. The early chapters on Edwards’s spiritual life, the principal source for which is a text that dates from the end of the 1730s, the “Personal Narrative,” are remarkably skillful in mapping the ups and downs that Edwards underwent, ups and downs marked by periods of spiritual depression rooted, it seems plausible to suggest, in his uneasiness with how his father, Timothy Edwards, described conversion as a matter of strictly marked out phases. That we do not know how or when Edwards qualified for “full” church membership underscores the tensions his upbringing forced him to negotiate.

5

Ibid., 692 n. 1.

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The chapters on the politics that erupted in 1741 in response to the excesses of the Great Awakening are equally good at capturing the predicament from which Edwards was never able to escape, that the dismay and anger occasioned by the “New Lights” made it next to impossible to validate the revivals as the work of the Holy Spirit. The much caricatured Charles Chauncy, the Boston minister who helped fashion this predicament, is given his fair due, as are Edwards’s mostly evangelical kinsfolk in the Connecticut River valley, the Williamses. The chapters on the politics of the Stockbridge mission are no less excellent, and the narration of Edwards’s dismissal is, on the whole, free from the special pleading that mars almost every account of this episode, a special pleading that began with the great man himself, who wove a web of half-truths about the affair.6 The emotional center of this biography is, I think, Marsden’s fascination with Edwards’s strenuous efforts to exemplify the highest possible version of the Christian life. Thus we learn repeatedly that Edwards sometimes went without eating, or ate very little, in order to save time and gain the necessary concentration for his intellectual endeavors. We learn, too, of how rigorous he was in other everyday practices, and how he admired those in whom he found a similar intensity—famously, of course, his wife and the missionary David Brainerd. All of this material, interesting in its own right, resonates with a question Marsden brings from the present to the past: namely, what are the standards by which evangelical Christians, including those who are scholars and intellectuals, should live? Put this way, the question yields more than one answer, for the rigorism that runs through Edwards’s life and ministry had its unattractive dimensions, as Marsden is quick to acknowledge and as the townspeople of Northampton realized in their time. Thus, in the midst of the revival of 1735, Edwards envisioned a “virtually monastic standard for all of life” (p. 160) that, in the glow of that event, he regarded his congregation as exemplifying. This ascetic, sectarian Edwards seems far from being Marsden’s own ideal. When he resorts to the word “complex” in the closing pages of the book to indicate his attitude toward the great man, it gives point to feelings the reader may also be having, that Edwards was indeed quite different from ourselves. In sum, Marsden’s sympathies cannot be reduced

6

At this point I am an interested party, having worked out an interpretation of the “communion” controversy of 1748–50 and its outcome, Edwards’s dismissal, in the course of editing the Ecclesiastical Writings. The differences between my account and Marsden’s are chiefly my insistence on acknowledging expectations about baptism among the laity, or what I term “popular religion,” and noting Edwards’s contempt for the same. I treat with some skepticism the evidence he created in 1750 to prove he had shared his views with the townspeople, or some of them; and I point out that the Northampton congregation never fully embraced “Stoddardean” practices; Stoddard’s views were not what they were defending in 1750.

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to mere affirmation. Though he makes the past familiar to us, it also remains strange. As for what made Edwards tick as a theologian, Marsden mainly limits himself to citing the sovereignty of God, a traditional answer and in some respects good enough. For two of the books included in this review, however, the central thread is “history,” beginning, of course, with sacred history as embodied in the Bible and extending beyond Scripture to include the full sweep of redemption. Most of Edwards’s recent interpreters, and especially those who regard him as a philosophical theologian or wish to present him as modern, find little grist for their mill in his extensive commentaries on the Bible. Truth be told, Edwards’s understanding of the Bible is stubbornly traditional, if by traditional we mean his insistence on such matters as the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the veracity of the miracles, the harmony of the Gospels, and the self-authenticating capacity of the Word. Where he is singular in his thinking, as in his expansive version of typology, the connections with modernity, if there are any, must be sought in a putative “American” literary tradition. Otherwise, the challenge posed by his biblical work is twofold: to recover the context in which he was working and to explore the connections between that work and his broader intellectual program. Doing so has been greatly aided by the recent publication in the Yale University Press Works series of material that was little known, even to most specialists: Edwards’s writings on typology in volume 11 and his “Notes on Scripture” in volume 15.7 Several of the “Miscellanies” are treatises in their own right on aspects of Scripture. Another point of access is the sermon series he preached in 1739, published after his death as A History of the Work of Redemption, and available in the Works as volume 9 (1989). Because the phrase “A History of the Work of Redemption” reappears in the famous letter of 1757, the search for what he was envisioning has seemed to point back to those sermons of 1739. In what context did Edwards work as an exegete? Stephen Stein noted in his introduction to Notes on Scripture that Edwards shared the “common assumptions” of a long-practiced “commentarial tradition.” For him, as for others in this tradition, the Bible was “a comprehensive source of knowledge,” the canon was closed, and its texts were in harmony with one another (Works, 15:4–6). The task of commentators was to eliminate or minimize any possible confusion over meaning and to connect the texts to the ongoing life of the Church. But as Stein also pointed out, the context in which Edwards wrote 7

Edited by Wallace E. Anderson and Mason I. Lowance, Jr, and by Stephen J. Stein respectively, with substantial introductions. Stein had previously edited vol. 5 of the Works, the Apocalyptic Writings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). Still to come in this series are other exegetical writings.

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extended to the “critical” perspective on Scripture taken by Spinoza and Hobbes in the seventeenth century and, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth, by many others within the Enlightenment who privileged reason over revelation or, as in the case of Locke, used reason to question the scriptural basis for doctrines like original sin and the Trinity. Was Edwards untouched by these new currents, as Peter Gay asserted in A Loss of Mastery, or did they affect his thinking? Robert Brown’s Jonathan Edwards and the Bible strengthens the case for engagement, or, to put the matter somewhat more neutrally, for recognizing the “rationalist pressures” on Edwards.8 The scope of Brown’s inquiry is limited to the “Miscellanies” and other texts in which Edwards defended the veracity of the Bible and dealt with the epistemology of religious knowledge; there is nothing here on the exegetical aspects of Edwards’s preaching or the place of Scripture in his doctrinal treatises. Acknowledging that Edwards was entirely “traditional” in exempting Scripture from the taint of history, Brown insists that the challenge of responding to the deists required Edwards to base his defense of the Bible’s accuracy on “rational and empirical grounds” (p. xvi). Context is crucial to the success of this argument. Brown transforms the question of whether Edwards was “modern” (a question attributed to Gay) to one of whether he was “engaged with and his thought transformed by the problems of historical modernity” (p. xix), the answer being yes in both respects. To support this argument, Brown provides a distinctive version of context and of what it means to be “engaged.” Rebuking Gay for fixing on Voltaire, Hume, and their like as the standard of comparison, he insists that the reference group with whom Edwards should be juxtaposed consisted of persons who retained an “essentially traditional outlook” (p. 96) even though they may have favored “natural or historical causes” or abandoned some features of the older apologetics. Painting many Protestant intellectuals as ambivalent, neither wholly modern nor traditional, he declares, with some warrant, that “hard distinctions between critical and pre-critical thought simply do not hold for the era” (p. 98). He asks, too, that we employ an eighteenth-century framework for “critical” as synonymous with “judicious” and erudite (p. xviii). This recasting of categories comes at a price, for Brown sometimes means “engage” in the sense of “aware of,” not engage as actively learning from and acknowledging one’s opponents. The basic thesis of this book is sound, namely, that Edwards relied in part on historical evidence such as he understood it to validate Scripture. Although the significance of the letter of 1757 can never be fully settled, he was certainly thinking of history as a necessary, and possibly foundational, dimension of his grand apologetics. In Brown’s final, relatively brief chapter, he lays out the case

8

Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All”, 125.

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for the importance of history in what might have become that final synthesis or systematics, arguing that Edwards would have paid significant attention to the authenticity of Scripture in keeping with the interests that show up in the “Miscellanies” of the 1740s and 1750s. In an earlier, more substantial chapter, he describes Edwards’s place in the Enlightenment debate on the limits of reason, experience, and revelation. Here, the emphasis falls on the connections between Edwards and the Anglican Latitudinarians, with Locke relegated to the side as of minor importance. Brown’s goal is to have us recognize that Edwards had a “broader” view of reason or rationality than Matthew Tindal, who ardently employed that faculty to deflate the authority of revelation.9 Another challenge was to deal with the deists’ argument that ancient, pre-Christian wisdom was entirely divorced from revelation, that is, that “natural religion” existed apart from the historical particularities of Christianity. As Brown points out elsewhere in his book, Edwards resorted to the tradition of prisca theologia—that God has revealed divine wisdom to humans from the very beginning of time—to counter this argument. For Brown, this curiously uncritical (in any sense of the term) form of apologetics demonstrates, anew, Edwards’s engagement with critical historical concerns.10 When Brown turns to the commentarial writings, things take on a somewhat different cast. On inspiration, authorship, and canon there is not much to say. Edwards was “exposed to” or was “well aware” of problems posed mainly by the deists, yet “consistently” resolved such problems in favor of traditional answers. That he used “evidential arguments rooted in appeals to historical fact” is a valid statement on several counts, but its punch is limited by the fragile definition of historical fact, which for Edwards included a great deal of traditional lore. He was not a textual scholar equipped to deal with pre-Christian or Jewish texts. For him, it sufficed that, in his words, “the antient writers . . . inform us of it as a fact continuously received as undoubtedly true” (p. 110). For Brown, such references count as signs of Edwards’s appropriation of critical thought about history. The Edwards of Brown’s book is thus a two-sided figure. On the one hand, his writings about controverted issues of biblical interpretation almost always served an apologetic purpose, were polemical in their tone, and were modest in their departures from traditional historical judgments. He did not engage the issues in a rigorously erudite

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Edwards singled Tindal out as his opponent in a late “Miscellany” (no. 1340), a text in which, however, Edwards flatly affirmed the priority of divine revelation in establishing key matters of doctrine, revelation witnessed, perhaps, by history (that is, providence) but perceived even more securely by “intuitive” ways of knowing. But the case doesn’t seem particularly strong, especially if we bear in mind that the “historical plausibility [of this theory] was already being undermined in Edwards’s day” (Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” 54 n. 136).

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study . . . ; he worked primarily as a theologian absorbing the impact of critical thought with an intent to moderate it, rather than as a historical critic per se. Like many of his contemporaries, he found it difficult to negotiate the boundaries between tradition and its revision. (p. 94)

On the other, What is clear [from the ‘Miscellanies’] . . . is that Edwards had markedly absorbed the historical sensibilities of the age . . . Historical interpretation intruded upon and even competed with his native inclinations toward theological interpretations . . . To the degree that modern historical thought and biblical interpretation can be characterized by a preoccupation with questions of factuality and the employment of historical forms of explanation, Edwards can arguably be cast as someone who had decidedly imbibed the modern historical consciousness and had imported it into his perception of sacred narrative. (pp. 114–15)

The qualifications in the second of these statements bespeak a difficulty intrinsic to all of intellectual history, one that Brown’s narrative exposes on almost every page: what is the appropriate context or standard for judging those aspects of someone’s intellectual life that seem so out of step with our own assumptions, be it race, gender, class, astrology, or, in this instance, the Bible as history? To my taste, the careful counterpoint that Brown seeks to sustain may veer a little too close to suggesting that Edwards was really one of us (that is, participating in the modern project). Yet Marsden and others cite this book positively. Avihu Zakai’s narrative returns us to the dichotomies that Brown has been at such pains to overcome. Relying almost entirely on secondary sources for his portrait of the Enlightenment, Zakai reminds us that its radicals rejected a theological understanding of history in favor of naturalism. Hence, he insists, the program Edwards undertook to restore the presence and agency of God. A second challenge was to figure out how two orders of time that Augustine had separated from each other, historical time and the economy of grace, are connected. The stage is thus prepared for Edwards’s “radical” imagining of all historical time as encompassed within the history of redemption, a means of re-joining what Augustine had sundered. Zakai argues that two circumstances account for this project of “reenchantment.” Chronologically the first was Edwards’s conversion experience, here described quite differently from how it is by Marsden. In and through this experience Edwards arrived at a “theologia gloria,” a near rapturous appreciation of the all-encompassing reality of divine sovereignty. A second was the revivals of the 1730s, which led Edwards to wonder how such eruptions of the Holy Spirit could be installed at the center of an understanding of divine providence. Zakai’s is, then, a story of intellectual development culminating in the late 1730s, when Edwards is said to have embraced redemption as the master theme uniting grace

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and time, creation and the unfolding of God’s activity in the world. Where we encounter this radical understanding of history—radical because it departed from Augustine, Eusebius, and the Puritans’ version of providence as “arbitrary”—is in A History of the Work of Redemption and the tracts defending the awakenings of the 1740s, for like the “little awakening” of the 1730s these events reaffirmed God’s active, albeit curiously interrupted, presence in the world. This version of Edwards is at odds with Brown’s account in three major respects. Here, the emphasis is on the stark either/or of disenchantment or enchantment, with the mediating tradition Brown describes nowhere in view. Moreover, Edwards seems curiously solitary, an impression strengthened by the emphasis placed upon his conversion and the “little awakening” of the 1730s as source and provocation. And what counts as history for Brown, the critical historical ways of thinking that emerged in the late seventeenth century, differs from the theological rendering of history that we find in Zakai. For this reader, the broad (and in some respects conventional) strokes that characterize Zakai’s narrative are less engaging than Brown’s careful counterpoint. Nor am I persuaded that Edwards broke so thoroughly with the Puritan/Reformed understanding of providence, or with Eusebius’s focus on the Church as the locus of the history of redemption. In the sermons published as A History of the Work of Redemption, Edwards retold biblical history. Once past the earliest centuries of the Church, that retelling carries us through subsequent periods of Church history and the actions of Satan and the Anti-Christ in the centuries thereafter, to the final stages described (or so Edwards believed) in Revelation. So ordinary is the historical material that John F. Wilson, ever mindful of Peter Gay’s critique, reclassified the sermons as “theological” in their point of view. To the extent that we can discern Edwards’s hopes for his final summa, it surely would have been a means of foregrounding a sovereign God whose glory and love are communicated throughout the whole of creation, qualities that are also embodied in the dynamic unfolding of salvation history. As Marsden aptly remarks, Edwards was always in search of a holistic point of view. The final project was surely one that would enable him to both describe and extol the glorious “harmony” of all things, the realm of pure being or beauty in which the redeemed were able to participate. Complexity and ambivalence return to center stage in Amy Plantinga Pauw’s careful study of Edwards and the Trinity. Her disciplinary location as a theologian serves her well, for she brings to her topic an awareness not only of Edwards’s immediate historical situation but also of models of the Trinity within Christian thought from Augustine to the present day. One aspect of that situation was the Enlightenment rationalists’ dismantling of the Trinity and what Pauw regards as the “weakness” of the orthodox defense. But a more important aspect of the situation is that Edwards inherited two versions of the Trinity, each with

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its advantages and difficulties. His predecessors in the Reformed tradition, be it Peter van Mastricht or Puritans such as Richard Sibbes,11 affirmed a “social” model of the Trinity that emphasized “the love and intimate fellowship among the members of the Trinity, by likening them to a family, a society, or a community of friends” (p. 30). Within a second model that dates from Augustine, the emphasis falls on the Godhead as knowing and loving itself. In Edwards’s appropriation of this model, the Holy Spirit becomes the means by which God as a “communicative being” manifests his love to the saints and encloses them within the divine union or harmony represented by the Trinity itself. It is beyond the scope of this review to specify how Edwards reiterated or reworked each of these models or why he employed one or the other in certain situations. Rather, let me underscore what seems to me the great merit of Pauw’s book, to draw us into Edwards’s theological workshop by showing us the shifting modalities of his Trinitarianism and, as she points out repeatedly, his flexibility or “ambivalence” about which model to prefer. This ambivalence emerges with particular acuteness in her chapter dealing with the relationship between the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace; if the former is about God’s overflowing love, the latter is about a Christ who comes in love and judgment. In it, too, the covenantal language runs the risk of sliding into “bilateralism.” If the logic of the first is implicitly universalist, the explicit logic of the second is that only some are saved. Because Pauw recovers these and other tensions so skillfully, her story is historically contextual in ways that go well beyond Brown or Zakai. Moreover, her way of proceeding may be regarded as a rebuke, though modestly expressed, to the many interpreters of Edwards who regard him as a supremely logical system-maker.12 This rebuke resonates with her own situation as a Reformed theologian who quotes Rowan Williams urging us to practice a “generously expansive, assimilative and confident approach to theological language” (p. 42), the very approach she finds in Edwards’s typology. She seems also to feel that her tradition has placed too much emphasis on a narrow view of divine sovereignty. Though Pauw is not a modernizer, working on Edwards has nourished her own Trinitarianism and especially her preference for a theological method that moves beyond “the abstract” to articulating “the web of interconnected signs, relationships, and actions within which specific

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The debate within American Puritan studies over “preparationism” casts a shadow over Pauw’s preference for Richard Sibbes and John Cotton as Edwards’s predecessors, despite there being no evidence that Edwards read either and his lavish citing of Cotton’s great opponent, Thomas Shepard. Pauw’s chapter on “The Trinity and Pastoral Perplexities,” which encompasses the “communion controversy” of 1748–50, is also a rebuke to historians like myself who have largely ignored the connections between ecclesiology and other branches of theology.

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terms are deployed” (p. 188), a statement guaranteed to warm the heart of any intellectual or cultural historian. As with Brown and history, so for Pauw and the Trinity the ultimate question is, how would this doctrine have figured in Edwards’s unwritten summa? Construing the Trinity as “relational,” Pauw argues that this relationality is the central theme not only of Edwards’s metaphysics but also of redemption history. As she imagines the unwritten “History of the Work of Redemption,” it would be about the “communicative” action of the Trinity (though especially, perhaps, the Holy Spirit). Creation thus becomes subsumed within redemption in a manner that embodies the separate yet harmonious aspects of the Trinity. As Pauw so rightly indicates, the Trinity for Edwards was not merely a standard theological topos but something much more, a means of restating a theological vision grounded in an understanding of God and the Trinity as relational and communicative. Collectively, these books aspire to accomplish what all good intellectual history has as its goal, to make sense of a major figure in the context of his times. They aspire as well to explicate what made Edwards singular if not unique. In my reading, the arguments and evidence in all four (though Pauw in some respects is an interesting exception) make it difficult to sever Edwards from his Puritan predecessors, the scholastics he first encountered as a student at Yale, and the anti-deist apologists of the eighteenth century. These books also remind us that the quest for context is rarely of interest solely for its own sake. What shapes our interest in Edwards shapes our version of his times. The elasticity of Edwards that Pauw is almost alone in recognizing surely is a sign that past and present in Edwards scholarship will continue to play tricks on one another.

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 399–409
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000265 Printed in the United Kingdom

two approaches to american theology daniel walker howe Oxford University

Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) Brooks Holifield, American Theology: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) Intellectual history, after a generation of neglect, is suddenly getting attention again in the United States. Giving impetus to this renewal of energy are two major works on American religious thought before the Civil War: Mark Noll’s America’s God and Brooks Holifield’s American Theology. Both are big books, over 600 pages each, and they address a big topic stretching across time and space: the grand tradition of American theology, now a lost art. They treat a time when Christian theology as an intellectual activity enjoyed considerably more prestige and cultural influence than it does today, and surely it has seldom been so innovative and diverse as in the period they treat. Both books have been written by highly respected scholars, deeply learned in the relevant primary and secondary sources. The danger in reviewing such large undertakings is that reviewers will not treat them as a whole but simply grumble that their own specialty doesn’t get enough attention: the historian of gender wants more about women, the historian of science more about his subject, etc. These books deserve to be evaluated in toto. Having been conceived and written independently, even though more or less simultaneously, they demonstrate contrasting visions of how to deal with their subject. The two books typify the “external” and “internal” approaches to intellectual history respectively, illustrating for the reader strengths and limitations of the two approaches as well as their complementarity. Mark Noll writes what he calls “a contextual history” of Christian theology in early America. He devotes almost as much of his attention to providing context as he does to analyzing theology itself. By context Noll means principally political culture and the social history of religion, but he also provides a lot of other background information. The first half of the book, in fact, is predominantly 399

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context: one learns about the culture of republicanism and its evolution toward democracy, the growth of a market economy, changing theories of faculty psychology, and Tocqueville’s observations on American society. There are tables showing the increasing number of churches and data comparing the number of Methodist sermons with the number of letters sent through the Post Office. Through his attention to the American context, Noll has set the stage for the emergence, by the nineteenth century, of a distinctively American kind of theology: a synthesis of republicanism, common-sense empiricism, and earnest morality with evangelical Protestantism. Transcending denominational lines, the evangelical synthesis emerged as the most powerful single subculture in the country, and even, Noll argues, came to define in large part the very nature of American nationality and national purpose. It exerted enormous influence not only through the churches but also through the educational system and through countless voluntary associations promoting various causes and reforms ranging from missionary activities and the distribution of bibles to the promotion of literacy and temperance. Its impact extended to party politics and, most momentously, to the controversy over slavery. Noll stresses the “surprising” nature of this evangelical synthesis. In the first place, it was peculiar to the United States, and Noll contrasts it with contemporaneous developments in other parts of the English-speaking world, especially Canada, which one might expect to be similar but which in fact differed significantly. The emergent American synthesis also seems surprising because the framers of the Constitution had not been evangelicals; and, indeed, many commentators (both contemporary and subsequent) have associated revolutionary republicanism with deism and skepticism in religion. Nineteenth-century American evangelicals themselves expressed surprise when the disestablishment of religion turned out to foster rather than inhibit the spread of their gospel. In theological terms, it was surprising (or at least ironic) that revivalists who preached surrender to God’s powerful Spirit should in fact empower their hearers to take charge of their own lives. Among the most typically American theologians were the populist “restorationists,” who set out to recover the authentic faith and practice of the primitive, New Testament church. Social scientists provide one more surprise/irony, telling us that the restoration movements helped “modernize” American society and culture by encouraging literacy, autonomy, and personal responsibility among the common people.1 In colonial America, where Noll’s story begins, the school of the Genevan Reformer John Calvin dominated Christian theology. The Calvinist heritage

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Noll cites, by way of example, the sociologist George M. Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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was common to Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and French Huguenots; to most Baptists, many Anglicans, and even to some of the protoMethodists, like the itinerant visitor George Whitefield. Calvinism celebrated the glory of God, his wisdom, foreknowledge, and power; logically, therefore, it disparaged human ability, virtue, and freedom. Central to Noll’s account is the attempt by generations of conscientious and rigorous thinkers to restate the doctrines of Calvinism in such a way as to carry conviction to citizens of the young republic. Reconciling determinism with free will, total depravity with moral responsibility, and irresistible grace with making a human decision for Christ in the context of a religious revival constituted an intellectually challenging agenda. In response, American religious thinkers created a synthesis of Christianity with the Enlightenment. In forging this synthesis they drew with profit on the moral philosophers of Scotland, who had faced a similar problem of reconciling their inherited Calvinist tradition with the challenge of the Enlightenment, and who seemed to show the way forward for Americans. Instead of relying on the authority of tradition, the Scottish philosophers taught, a society could rely on human nature itself, on the “common sense” of innate morality and rationality, to guarantee order and stability. In Noll’s words, Scottish philosophy “provided reassurance that the kind of moral guidance historically offered by social elites could be retained, and even improved upon, in a much more democratic society” (p. 217). Respect for the common sense of the common man justified the American Protestant practice of according everyone the privilege of reading and interpreting the bible according to his/her own lights. Moral philosophy as understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encompassed much more than ethical theory. It presented itself as a science of human nature as a whole and treated all of what we consider the social sciences within a normative framework. Along with psychology it also included epistemology, that is, the philosophy of knowledge. On the subject of ethics Scottish moral philosophers divided into two camps: the “sentimentalists,” led by Francis Hutcheson, taught that the basis of morality was emotional, while the “rationalists,” led by Thomas Reid, grounded morality in intuitive reason. Confusingly, both schools invoked an inborn “moral sense,” although the first one considered this an “affection” or feeling and the other one considered it a rational power. The great American Calvinist theologian of colonial times, Jonathan Edwards, participated fully in the moral philosophy debates of his time. He espoused a form of ethical sentimentalism, which he differentiated from Hutcheson’s and synthesized with Calvinism by making true virtue depend upon a feeling (or “sense of the heart”) that only God’s grace could bestow. By the nineteenth century, however, the large majority of American theologians (Calvinist and non-Calvinist alike) embraced a form of ethical rationalism. The pivotal figure in bringing about the rationalist triumph was a Scottish Calvinist

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moral philosopher named John Witherspoon, who came to America in 1768 to assume the presidency of the College of New Jersey (what we now know as Princeton University). Noll correctly identifies Witherspoon as a key figure. Noll explains that Scottish moral philosophy “thrived in America, not for narrowly intellectual reasons, but because it suited so perfectly the needs of the emerging nation” (p. 103). Noll sees Witherspoon as a second-rate thinker but a powerful personality, who by parroting Francis Hutcheson in his lectures popularized the natural history of the mental faculties and encouraged Americans (including not only his fellow theologians but also his student and later friend James Madison) to ground a science of politics in a taxonomy of human nature. As Noll puts it, Witherspoon took from Hutcheson “the treatment of ethics as a moral science analogous to the physical sciences [and] a conception of morality as ascertained through study of universal human nature” (p. 106). There is certainly a general validity to Noll’s explanation, but a more rigorous analysis of Witherspoon’s lectures would show that he sometimes departed from and critiqued Hutcheson. Witherspoon tried to mediate between the sentimentalist and the rationalist schools of ethics (“Perhaps neither the one nor the other is wholly right,” he remarked at one point), but ultimately he came down in favor of ethical rationalism, holding that objective, immutable moral distinctions were rationally perceived by our moral sense.2 Such an analysis would help explain why, when Thomas Reid’s writings on ethical theory became available after the Revolution, they enjoyed a more widespread welcome in America than Hutcheson ever had. In short, “external” and “internal” explanations of ideas can be mutually complementary, and Noll could have strengthened his interpretation with a closer reading of Witherspoon. Other reviewers of Noll’s book have pointed out his admiration for Jonathan Edwards, which is certainly evident. Nevertheless, Noll does not write about the history of American theology the way Joseph Haroutunian did back in the 1930s, as a steady and tragic decline from Edwardsean beauty, complexity, and rigor.3 Noll has too much admiration for the young American republic, for

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John Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, annotated and edited by Jack Scott (Newark, DE, 1982), 71, 77–90. The statement that best defines Witherspoon’s ethical rationalism is this: “we have the simple perceptions of duty and interest” (87). Witherspoon’s ethical theory resembled Hutcheson’s less than it did that of Joseph Butler (1692–1752), as editor Scott explains (35–8). Witherspoon’s lectures were apparently composed between 1770 and 1772, though like many another university lecturer he continued to deliver them to his students for years afterwards. They were published in 1801, well after Witherspoon’s death in 1794. Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt, 1932).

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its confidence, its humanitarian impulses, and its democratizing tendencies, to write simply a history of declension. The central character in Noll’s book is really Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858) of Yale, theologian of revivalism and of a “New School” Calvinism that appealed to many Congregationalists and northern Presbyterians. Noll calls him “America’s theologian” (p. 308), and it is in fact Taylor who provides, in Noll’s terms, the best intellectual definition of “America’s God.” On the spectrum of antebellum American Protestant theologies, ranging from intolerant diehard Calvinism among some southern Presbyterians to the various kinds of Arminians who wrote off Calvinism altogether and embraced human free will, Taylor occupied an intermediate and mediating position. “Taylor wanted people to accept responsibility for their sins. He wanted people to realize that they had no one to blame but themselves for remaining in their sin, that there was no divine logic of things to excuse passivity in those who heard the gospel” (p. 280). But he wanted to achieve this by reinterpreting rather than refuting the traditional theology of the Reformation. Taylor’s theology linked the conversion experience with personal moral reform and a commitment to rebuilding the social order along Christian lines. The revivalist Lyman Beecher carried Taylor’s New School Calvinism into the thickets of social reform (temperance and antislavery as well as many other causes), theological controversy (crusading against Unitarians on the one hand and Catholics on the other, while defending himself against Old School Calvinist charges of heresy), and party politics. Noll has quite a bit to say about party politics, particularly that of the Whig party, which he treats as the political expression of evangelical Calvinism, following what is called the ethno-religious interpretation of American politics. Noll is interested not only in how America has influenced the development of theology but also in how theology has influenced the development of America. He notices that “America’s Christian theologians wanted very much to see people converted, to make their society godly, and to show the rest of the world how the unique blend of Protestant evangelicalism and republican democracy could open the way to the millennium” (p. 229). Strangely, Noll does not follow up on this reference to millennialism; he provides very little discussion of eschatology. We learn nothing at all about the difference between premillennialism and postmillennialism. (Premillennialism is the doctrine that Christ’s Second Coming will precede the millennium, the thousand years of peace on earth; postmillennialism teaches that the Second Coming will come after the millennium, suggesting that human efforts on behalf of peace and justice might hasten Christ’s return.) Postmillennialism was important to Beecher and other reformers of the Middle Period. Nineteenth-century postmillennialism and its social consequences would seem to be central to Noll’s concern for the impact of theology on American society and to his argument for America’s theological

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uniqueness.4 Premillennialism too flourished in the antebellum United States, as William Miller’s Adventism and Joseph Smith’s Mormonism both demonstrate— though Noll accords these movements only the briefest of incidental allusion, as if they did not have theologies. In Noll’s book, theology blends in with religion and still more broadly with spirituality, finally merging with American culture in general. Drawing a line to demarcate theology from other concerns seems very difficult. Not so in Brooks Holifield’s book, American Theology. He is interested in the history of religious doctrine. This does not restrict him to academic theology, for he includes populist charismatics and lecturers, including African-Americans and the occasional woman. Still, he concentrates on the ideas of dead white men as much or more than Noll does, and he seems less worried that writing intellectual history might appear politically incorrect. Holifield conforms more narrowly to an exposition of theological ideas, though he does not entirely ignore the context of an expanding and democratizing American society. He sometimes pairs chapters, showing first the academic and learned development of a school of thought and then its popular version, as he does with Unitarianism and universalism. In his presentation of rival doctrines, Holifield can compress wonderful insights into a turn of phrase. Thus, for example, he shows the maxim of Calvinist New Divinity, that one should be “willing to be damned for the glory of God,” actually had much in common with the universalist teaching that no one will be eternally damned. “Ballou and the other Universalists also sought, like the New Divinity theologians, an ‘unselfish’ faith that encouraged the faithful to link their own interests with the whole of humanity” (p. 230). What differentiates Holifield’s “internalist” work from Noll’s “externalism” is in the first instance a greater modesty. While Noll announces his subject as “America’s God,” Holifield backs away from such a theme: “I do not propose to reveal the meaning of America, to insist that theology preoccupied ordinary Americans, or to suggest that theological texts unlock the meaning of American religious experience” (p. vii). He continues: I try simply to show that Christian theology in America was part of a community of discourse that stretched back to the first century and across the Atlantic to Europe and that certain persisting themes and questions created a set of issues that reappeared for more than three centuries [that is, from the Reformation until the Civil War], drawing

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As shown in works like James Moorhead, World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Jonathan Sassi, Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York, 2001).

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theologians from the nineteenth century into a conversation not only with each other but also with their predecessors.

Where Noll believes theology illustrates American exceptionalism and uses his comparative examples to prove it, Holifield treats theology as an international enterprise in which Americans participate along with others. Indeed, a number of the thinkers Holifield examines saw themselves as trying to rescue American theology from provincialism and bring it up to date through increased contact with European thought. Reassuringly for the validity of historical research, Holifield and Noll agree on a great deal. Both of them place at the center of their story Calvinism and the intellectual struggles to defend and adapt it in the New World. Another major theme on which they concur is the importance of Baconian empiricism to antebellum American theology. The empirical, inductive method advocated by Francis Bacon and used in the natural sciences had been endorsed by the Scottish epistemology of common sense and applied in two related disciplines, moral philosophy and natural theology. Where Noll has more to say about moral philosophy, Holifield has more to say about natural theology. Natural theology was the study of the physical universe for what it could reveal about its divine Creator. The argument for God’s existence most favored by this generation of Christian apologists was the teleological, or argument from design. Nature provided countless indications of intelligent design, argued natural theologians; as we might infer the existence of a watchmaker from finding a watch in a desert, so we are entitled to infer the existence of an intelligent designer from the observable universe. Science in those days was divided into two branches, natural philosophy and natural history. Natural philosophy consisted of astronomy, chemistry, and physics—the mathematical sciences; natural history consisted of biology, geology, and anthropology—then thought of as descriptive rather than quantified. Although both branches of science provided illustrations of intelligent design, natural theologians (of whom the most widely read was the Anglican archdeacon William Paley) drew most of their “evidences” from natural history. The adaptation of organs like the eye to the needs of their organism, or the adaptation of organisms as a whole to their environment, provided natural theologians with their most convincing examples of divine design. Holifield, while he does not distinguish between natural philosophy and natural history, provides an excellent summary of the application of natural theology in a time when science and religion seemed to virtually all English-speaking Protestants perfectly harmonious. What were called “Christian evidences” applied not only to the study of “the book of nature” but also to the bible itself. How do we know the bible constitutes a genuine revelation from God? Baconians answered with evidence: the people

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who delivered this revelation authenticated their message by working miracles. Moses fed the children of Israel, Jesus walked on water and rose from the dead. Mainstream Protestants of this period typically confined the age of miracles to biblical times, when supernatural occurrences served to legitimate revelation. In the modern era, they believed, the alleged miracles that Catholics attributed to their saints only manifested popish superstition. One of the most important theological debates of this era occurred when romantics challenged conventional Protestant empiricism. The bible authenticated itself, romantics claimed, by its appeal to our hearts, by the way its message satisfied our religious longings and fulfilled our spiritual natures. True or not, the miracle stories seemed irrelevant; romantics did not adopt Christian faith through a Baconian examination of evidence. This fascinating and important discussion, which in America pitted Transcendentalists against conventional Unitarians and Calvinists, is treated by Holifield but only indirectly by Noll. Both Noll and Holifield, to their credit, define Christianity more broadly than some evangelical scholars have done, by including Unitarianism and Roman Catholicism, which they show mattered not only for their own sakes but also for the reactions they provoked among evangelicals. Holifield is particularly good on Orestes Brownson’s theology. However, neither historian captures the changing spirit of American Catholicism during the antebellum period as well as John T. McGreevy’s brilliant new book Catholicism and American Freedom,5 which explains not only the Catholic position on slavery more clearly than ever before but also the impact of the Ultramontane movement in the United States and the theological significance of the “schools question” (i.e., why Catholics preferred to establish their own parochial schools rather than live with a nondenominational generic Christianity in the public schools). Noll’s contextual approach causes him to devote much space to subject matter beyond the confines of theology, strictly defined. Holifield’s internalist approach is not necessarily narrower, however. On the whole, Holifield treats groups outside the American mainstream, like Catholics, Mormons, Adventists, Quakers, and Shakers, more fully than Noll does. (Holifield apparently accepts the historicity of Joseph Smith’s having experienced his first vision in 1820, though some gentile historians have called this into question.) Recognizing that opponents of organized religion can have theologies too, both historians include Deists and Transcendentalists, Holifield more fully. Overall, then, Holifield portrays America’s theological diversity more than Noll, who stresses the extent to which an American theological synthesis prevailed. While Holifield’s work is impressive for its comprehensiveness, accuracy, and lucidity, it too has its limitations. Like all of us, he and Noll make the 5

John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

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occasional little slip: Friedrich Wilhelm III was King of Prussia, not Holy Roman Emperor (Holifield, p. 408); Viscount Bolingbroke was a Tory, not a Whig, even though country Whigs made use of his writings (Noll, p. 82). More importantly, Holifield omits some topics one might have hoped would appear. A subject that he, like Noll, largely avoids is postmillennialism. He drops hints that he may feel postmillennialism has been overemphasized and/or misinterpreted, but he does not really try to set us straight. Missing too is the ecumenical Evangelical United Front with its attendant reform causes, even though it well illustrates Holifield’s points about the international nature of his subject matter and the interdenominational persistence of Calvinism. More to be expected is the absence of America’s Manifest Destiny and party politics, despite their theological aspects. The relevance of Calvinism and Arminianism to antebellum debates over public policy on subjects like education, penology, and capital punishment are left to be explored by other historians; Noll does not get into them either. In keeping with his avowedly internalist approach, Holifield makes no attempt to revive the sensitivity to urban context he displayed in his earlier book, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860.6 There is one social issue that Holifield admits theology impinged upon directly: the controversy over slavery. Here he gives a fine exposition of the biblical warrants that both sides invoked to justify their positions. In the end, Holifield comes down in much the same way that Noll does. The proslavery side proved able to find more explicit sanctions in the bible for slavery than their opponents could discover against it. Antislavery advocates found themselves having to rely on a more general argument from the spirit of the bible as a whole. The slavery controversy, Holifield and Noll agree, provided an initial exploration of rival hermeneutics that would become still more vivid later in the nineteenth century with the further development of biblical higher criticism. Like Noll, Holifield seems to have a favorite theologian who occupies a central position in his account. For him this is Charles Hodge (1797–1878) of Princeton, a learned and prolific exponent of Old School Calvinism. Hodge stood for a branch of Presbyterianism that, while not so far to the theological right as James H. Thornwell of South Carolina, still suspected the theology of Jonathan Edwards to be dangerously innovative.7 Holifield accords Hodge a thorough and sympathetic 6 7

Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978). Hodge has received belated scholarly recognition in a fine collection of essays about him, Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, ed. John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman, 2002), to which Holifield contributed. Also see the thoughtful assessment of Hodge in Paul Conkin, The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 220–35, which makes an interesting comparison with Holifield’s treatment.

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presentation, carefully explaining not only what he said but also what he meant by it, and emphasizing his moderation (for example, Hodge argued against Thornwell that some Catholics were good Christians who would go to heaven). Holifield tends to treat the New School Calvinist theologians, on the other hand, through the eyes of their conservative critics, who found them hard “to pin down” (pp. 360, 375). Once outside the bounds of Calvinism, Holifield accords everybody a fair hearing, including Unitarians, Catholics, and Mormons. Holifield has some very interesting observations on the postbellum decline of the grand tradition of rationalistic Calvinist theology in America—a decline which, all things considered, was astonishingly rapid. Though conservative “theological subcultures” did not repudiate the traditional creeds or supernaturalism, neither do they seem to have generated other great systems like those of the New Divinity, the New Haven Theology, or the Princeton Old School. Holifield, while paying due attention to the challenges posed by romanticism, the rising interest in history, and the development of higher criticism, appears to lay the strongest responsibility for this intellectual transformation on the increasing knowledge and prestige of the natural sciences. He also emphasizes the various continuities between antebellum theology and the new theological styles, above all, in “evidentialism.” One hopes he will return to this period of theological transition, about which he could here offer only the briefest summary. Would Holifield, in order to explain that transformation, find it necessary to step outside his internalist framework? Beyond their methodological difference (or complementarity), perhaps the most dramatic substantive contrast between Noll and Holifield lies in their treatment of the theologian Horace Bushnell (1802–1876). Bushnell possessed one of the most creative and fertile intellects in nineteenth-century America. He was a critic of Calvinism who nevertheless had a strong sense of sin, a critic of revivalism who revisited the problem of Christian nurture that the Halfway Covenant had addressed, and a critic of Baconianism and Scottish philosophy who put a sobered Christian romanticism in their place. Brooks Holifield accords Bushnell a whole chapter (an honor he reserves for only one other theologian, Jonathan Edwards), and, while he largely ignores Bushnell’s social thought in keeping with his strict definition of theology, treats him with respect. Mark Noll has an unexceptionable section explaining Bushnell’s critique of the prevailing American theological framework; but then, when he comes to the Civil War, he decides to make Bushnell personify what was wrong with the American public and their theologians, North and South. Noll very properly praises the spiritual insight and theological profundity of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. But he then sets up an overdrawn contrast between Lincoln and what he takes as the shallow self-righteousness of Bushnell. Bushnell’s eloquent address of July 1865, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” delivered as a memorial to the Yale graduates who had fallen in war, Noll reads as “rhetorical flamboyance.” Other scholars,

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such as William Clebsch, have noticed an affinity between the nationalism of Lincoln and Bushnell, but Noll disagrees.8 “What seems clearer now than when Clebsch wrote,” Noll declares, “is that Bushnell’s romantic nationalism of the redeemed Volk was as liable to corruption as it was to promoting the millennium he anticipated” (p. 429). Are we to blame Horace Bushnell for the rise of German fascism? Noll’s use of Bushnell to typify America’s national failings is all the more peculiar given Bushnell’s strong record as a critic of American politics, society, and culture, and indeed of the entire Lockean–Jeffersonian liberal ideology. It is not necessary to derogate Bushnell, or American theologians as a group, in order to revere the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. (Anyway, a certain kind of postwar northern “self-righteousness” served a useful purpose in motivating some northern politicians to support civil rights for the freed people.) In the final analysis, by any standards, these books are massive accomplishments that will be of enormous service. Their “externalist” and “internalist” structures illustrate classic alternative approaches in intellectual history. Beyond this, however, each of the historians we have examined has a distinguished predecessor in the history of American theology who pioneered the tone and style for his kind of work. Mark Noll writes essentially in the tradition of Perry Miller, even though Miller was an atheist and Noll is a Christian. Like Miller, Noll wants to demonstrate the central importance of religion to American culture and national identity, as well as the importance of ideas as a causal force in history. Brooks Holifield writes in the tradition of Sydney Ahlstrom. Like Ahlstrom, he exploits an encyclopedic knowledge of Christian intellectual history, upon which he constructs a pattern of organization rendering it all comprehensible. Holifield’s book is easier to use for reference; if, for example, one wants to know what Samuel Hopkins thought about a particular issue, it would be simpler to look it up in Holifield. On the other hand, there is probably a larger audience for Noll’s broader concerns. After all, “real politics,” as Holifield’s hero Charles Hodge declared, “when connected with morals and the character and interests of a country, is a subject second only to religion in importance.”9 A choice between the two approaches these historians exemplify is necessarily subjective. On the dust jacket of Noll’s book there is an endorsement I wrote calling it “a notable achievement of Christian and historical scholarship.” The same characterization applies to Brooks Holifield’s work. In the end, I find myself admiring Noll’s more ambitious goal, even while acknowledging Holifield’s as the more nearly perfect achievement. Both the historical community and the Christian community have been blessed by their powerful works.

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See William A. Clebsch, From Sacred to Profane America: The Role of Religion in American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Quoted by Richard Carwardine in Charles Hodge Revisited, 250.

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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 411–425
DOI: 10.1017/S147924430400023X Printed in the United Kingdom

the feminist imagination jan ellen lewis Department of History, Rutgers University, Newark

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Ruth H. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003) Barbara Taylor entitles her new book Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. The imagination in question is Wollstonecraft’s, but, like Wollstonecraft, Taylor is interested in the imagination more generally, both the problems that the imagination gets women into and the ways in which the feminist imagination can get women out of those problems and help them imagine a more just and equitable future. Ruth H. Bloch’s aim in Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800, the newly published collection of her essays, is somewhat more modest. Although her chief objective is to analyze the transformation in American views about women, gender, the family, and religion in the era of the American Revolution, she also offers case studies in the use of a culturalist approach to feminist history. Although there are important differences in approach and subject matter between these two books, their similarities and areas of overlap—not the least of which is that their authors are two of the best feminist intellectual historians at work today—make it instructive to review them together. Both books address roughly the same time period. Although Bloch’s title suggests that her book covers a century and a half, the focus is on the Revolutionary era, c.1750–1800, the same period covered by Taylor. And while Taylor’s book is principally about Wollstonecraft’s life in Britain and France while Bloch concentrates on America, both books describe an Anglo-American–French intellectual world. Indeed, that is one of Bloch’s points: intellectual currents crossed the Atlantic, rather than flowing only up and down the American coast. The greatest similarity between these two books, however, is their self-conscious feminism. As does intellectual history more generally, feminist intellectual history draws from and engages with theory. In this case, both Taylor and Bloch make contributions to feminist theory and practice both. 411

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In her brilliant 1993 article “A Cultural Critique of Trends in Feminist Theory,” with which she opens her book, Bloch argues that “feminist theorists too often reduce culture, and with it the cultural symbolism of gender, to the material relations of class, or some other self-interested assertion of power by one group over another” (p. 23). As she notes in the book’s preface, her original purpose was to take issue “with essentialist, Marxist, and Foucauldian approaches to the construction of gender” and argue instead for a “‘culturalist’ interpretation” (p. 21). In fact, Bloch identifies a “residual Marxism” not only in feminist social science but in feminist cultural analysis as well. This is because, for all the manifest virtues of Foucauldian and other poststructuralist forms of analysis, “its advocates tend either to lack a theory of social change or else to resort to a materialist one” (p. 25). Hence, the opposition that some posit between Marxist and poststructuralist forms of analysis is actually false. Marxist critics typically fault poststructuralism for its abstract idealism, but Bloch thinks its real problem is implicit materialism. Indeed, “the influence of poststructuralism has merely reinforced a tendency among feminist theories to reduce gender to inequalities of wealth and power” (p. 26). In order to demonstrate her point, Bloch succinctly lays out the history of modern feminist thought. She has a real talent for mapping out the history and development of various lines of thinking, and she uses it well in this article (as well as in a number of the other articles collected in this book). She says that modern feminist thought focused on the “problem of inequality,” which it conceptualized in terms either of patriarchy or of capitalism. The argument between these two schools “turned on the extent to which female subordination was caused by men, as a sex, and the extent to which it stemmed from the more impersonal dynamics of the capitalist system.” Bloch faults both schools, however, for their failure to consider “gender as culture” (p. 27). By the mid-1970s, feminist scholars had developed a new approach, that of “women’s culture.” Bloch believes that this approach assumed what it should have interrogated. Instead of examining “the broad patterns of meaning that construct notions of femininity,” scholars who wrote of “women’s culture” used the concept to describe “notions of femininity itself.” It was but a short step from there to using “women’s culture” to denominate “a set of beliefs that reflected the distinctive and concrete experience of women as women.” In this way “attention shifted from equality to difference . . . ” (p. 28). Although she doesn’t say it in so many words, Bloch believes that this was a wrong turn for feminist scholarship, bringing it perilously close to an essentialist belief in female biological difference. In this context, poststructuralist critiques of essentialism and their attention to the “social construction of gender” brought feminist analysis back on (the cultural) track. But once again, scholars focused not on gender as an open-ended system of meaning (i.e. an aspect of culture as Bloch uses the term) but as a way of representing difference. And once the focus was put on difference, scholars

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began examining the differences among women—by race, class, ethnicity—in such a way that gender itself was no longer a critical variable. Indeed, “if women no longer have something in common by virtue of being women—if, instead, we are broken into distinct groups by virtue of the multiplicity of the positions of ‘otherness’ . . . —why bother theorizing about sex or gender at all?” (pp. 32–3). This is where Foucault leaves us and where Lacan leaves us too, falling back upon analyses of the dynamics of “domination and oppression” (p. 34), whether of capitalism, liberal democracy, or the phallus. The critique of cultural feminism’s essentializing tendencies culminates in the postmodernist premise that culture essentially embodies power relations. The construction of gendered meaning in response to spiritual fulfillment, aesthetic pleasure, or the anxieties of human existence are either ignored or treated as epiphenomena of a “more real” driving force that is Nietzschean in character: it is a reflection of the quest of theologians, artists, and philosophers for increasing their prestige and the domination of their race or class. (p. 37)

Bloch asks rhetorically: “Is gender more than a metaphor for power?” (p. 37). Clearly, she believes that the answer is yes, and she suggests the means by which the baby of gender analysis can be retrieved from the materialist bath water in which it has been washed. First, recognize “that gender symbolism tends to be at least as much about interconnectedness as about power,” for people are “driven not merely by utilitarian interests but also by existential questions of meaning.” Second, insist that “gender is embedded in wider systems of meaning” (p. 40) that include religion, aesthetics, and science, none of which operates in isolation. Indeed, feminist scholars ought to pay more attention to these contexts. And with a “stronger theory of culture,” one that sees it as “an index to meaning,” we may be able to avoid being caught “between the Charybdis of materialism and the Scylla of biology” (p. 41). Bloch is quite good at practicing what she preaches, and the essays collected in this volume demonstrate her gift for a kind of careful, intellectual-cultural history that—to use one of the metaphors Bloch herself employs—untangles the roots of a particular body of thought. She is particularly sensitive to the nuances of religious thought. Many of the essays in this collection focus on the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and no one has written more clearly about the ways in which the various strands of thought in this period—classical republicanism, Enlightenment liberalism, Scottish Enlightenment thought, natural rights thought, dissenting Protestantism, evangelical sentimentalism—wound around each other. In Barbara Taylor’s extraordinary study of Mary Wollstonecraft, these strands of thought—along with Romanticism and radicalism—remain somewhat tangled. While discussing the natural rights aspect to Wollstonecraft’s thought, Taylor offers a justification of sorts for this kind of muddle: “Like most British

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radicals, natural rights was for her not a primary intellectual commitment but one of a quiverful of intellectual weapons to be kept sharp and handy for contestation” (p. 214). Although this explanation is more metaphorical than analytically rigorous, it strikes me as quite useful, a pretty accurate description of how most people who are not analytic philosophers go about their intellectual business, suiting the weapon to the quarry, or, to use a less martial figure of speech, the tool to the task. Another difference between Bloch and Taylor: Taylor does not explicitly, or perhaps even implicitly, follow Bloch’s culturalist methodology. Nonetheless, many of its elements are on display: a serious, non-reductionist consideration of religion; a willingness to use appropriate psychoanalytic methods; an attentiveness to interconnectedness—or its absence; an insistence upon situating Wollstonecraft in her broadest historical context. The result is a book that contextualizes Wollstonecraft and transcends its context, by becoming in itself a work in feminist theory. Taylor uses Wollstonecraft to work through several problems in feminist theory. She starts by noting a paradox at the heart of feminism: “the repudiation of Woman,” she observes, “has been a key element of feminism” (p. 19). Acknowledging her debt to psychoanalytic feminists such as Jacqueline Rose and Sally Alexander, Taylor notes that to be a woman—“interpreting oneself as female”—is “an imaginative act,” one that is “founded on fantasies of masculinity and femininity” created in relationship to each other and in which female sexual identity is “always partial, defensive, wishful” (p. 20). This impulse, often experienced as a kind of self-hatred, and so recognizable in Wollstonecraft, is the driving force of feminism and its central paradox. “Why would anyone who likes being a woman need to be a feminist?” one activist asked several decades ago. The question, Taylor notes, “has lost none of its saliency” (p. 20). In Wollstonecraft’s case, it is easy enough to trace the source of this hostility to women. Taylor, incidentally, makes no apologies for examining the personal roots of Wollstonecraft’s feminist thought. The personal is political, and “the notion of a politics purged of feeling and fantasy is a chimera, a modern myth” (p. 19). Wollstonecraft’s father, a failed gentleman farmer, was a hard-drinking bully, abusive to his wife and children both. Her mother was too weak to protect her children in any way. All of her affection went to Mary’s oldest brother. Nothing was left for the other children. A bullying father, a weak and withholding mother: these were the sources of Mary Wollstonecraft’s abiding hatred of despotism and her tendency to blame women disproportionately for the world’s ills. Like the late eighteenth-century radical democrat that she was, Wollstonecraft railed against the excesses of feminine sensibility and held up virility as the standard for men and women both. Trained as we have been by Ruth Bloch, Hannah Pitkin, and other scholars to recognize the misogynist strain in republican thought, it is shocking to have to confront it in Wollstonecraft. Early in her book, Taylor quotes

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one of these passages at length. For Wollstonecraft, “women’s giddy minds have one fixed preoccupation”: the desire of establishing themselves . . . by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act—they dress, they paint, and nickname God’s creatures. Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio! (p. 13)

That this passage comes from The Rights of Woman only increases our sense of discomfort. Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist icon, was a misogynist. Indeed, her misogyny was intrinsic to her feminism. Taylor’s subject is the way that Wollstonecraft imagined herself out of this fundamental feminist paradox and the role that imagination played in her imagining. “Denouncing modern woman as vicious and corrupt, what alternative,” Taylor asks, “did Wollstonecraft imagine for her sex, what revolution of inner being that would transform Woman from a degraded object of male tyranny into a worthy object of God’s love?” (p. 21). In answering this question, Taylor guides us, in roughly chronological fashion, through Wollstonecraft’s writings, simultaneously sketching out Wollstonecraft’s life history. (Taylor organizes the book thematically, but she examines Wollstonecraft’s life chronologically.) In suggesting that Wollstonecraft worked away at the problem over the course of her too-short career and, just before her death, arrived at a kind of answer, Taylor may impose more coherence and more narrative unity on Wollstonecraft’s life and work than others may find there. This is a small price to pay, however, for what Taylor has accomplished: a significant contribution to feminist thought. Taylor intertwines history and theory in her own study, letting history inform feminist theory and feminist theory illuminate history. The result is exhilarating, a reminder of what feminist history can be. Taylor situates Wollstonecraft on the radical end of the late eighteenth-century political spectrum, which was both an intellectual milieu and a social position. Wollstonecraft was one of a group of lower-middle-class writers who depended upon the income from their publications to keep them independent. Having been fired from her position as a governess, a job for which she was temperamentally unsuited, Wollstonecraft began writing for Joseph Johnson, the editor of the Analytical Review and the publisher of a number of radical thinkers. He became effectively her patron, and it is worth pondering, as Taylor asks us to, the role of such men in bringing women into the republic of letters. Wollstonecraft’s career and writings serve as a testament to the exceedingly difficult position of the female intellectual and the extraordinary difficulties experienced by women then and now as they seek equality. Yet she could not have been a writer at all, or, to be more precise, a writer with an audience, without the active support of Johnson. And “given sufficient market success, a dependant could become an equal”

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and “patronage . . . collegiality” (p. 41). In this sense, Wollstonecraft was a creature of the market. Needless to say, Enlightenment ideas about equality permeated Wollstonecraft’s milieu, and in her circle it was taken as a given that women should be better educated. Indeed, this belief was commonplace on both sides of the Atlantic, and in its most general terms, few could argue with it. Yet when one picks at it, the edges begin to fray, its threads unraveling. That is what Wollstonecraft did, and it is what feminist historians have been doing subsequently. Consider only the question of why women’s education was necessary: phrased in the right (or, depending upon the perspective, the wrong) way, it could be turned into a critique of women in their present state, which is exactly what Wollstonecraft did. As Taylor notes, The Rights of Woman “castigates its female readers in the harshest terms for classic feminine follies: vanity, irrationalism, intolerance, frivolity, ignorance, cunning, fickleness, indolence, narcissism, infantilism, impiety and, above all, sexual ambition” (p. 12). All of these flaws were the result of inadequate education, although Wollstonecraft’s condemnation of them was so harsh that it seems almost a condemnation of women’s essential nature: “the rhetorical weight of Wollstonecraft’s attack falls so heavily on her own sex as to make a reader wonder whether the aim is less to free women than to abolish them . . . ” (p. 13). Just as the problem of women’s education could be turned into a critique of women themselves, so the suggested remedies might veer off in unexpected ways. In the introduction to her collection of essays, Bloch writes that she has “always been struck by the inadequacies of unilinear models of women’s history.” Hence, the glorification of domesticity can be seen either as a “harbinger . . . of the worst aspects of the modern oppression of women”—or as the foundation for the eventual improvement in women’s status. Likewise, Enlightenment claims about women’s rationality can be seen as the foundation for women’s equality—or as the instrument for marginalizing women’s domestic responsibilities. For these reasons, Bloch prefers to focus on “creative contradiction and paradoxical change” (pp. 16–17). Bloch herself has written with great insight about the creative contradictions in Enlightenment arguments for women’s education. In two of the most important essays in the collection, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815” and “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” she documented the growing belief in the late eighteenth century that women were more moral than men, more virtuous, and the increasing identification of virtue and morality as feminine attributes. Such views, as Bloch has shown and Taylor suggests, provided the intellectual basis for what Taylor calls the instrumentalist argument for the education of women. Women must be educated to prepare them to fulfill their domestic roles, primarily as mothers and wives. Here, Wollstonecraft cut against the grain. She was skeptical

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of women’s moral superiority, and she had little interest in or temperamental affinity for domesticity. Authenticity interested her considerably more. As Taylor notes, Wollstonecraft’s biographers often present her as “an exceptional figure, a heroic pioneer” (p. 31), and that is, in fact, how she presented herself. But this self-presentation cannot be taken at face value. The concern for authenticity and the feeling that one was alone in the world were characteristic of the early Romantic world view, and they were widely shared in Wollstonecraft’s milieu. She was a member of a community all of whose members, with only slight exaggeration, thought themselves unique. But for Wollstonecraft to appropriate these notions and feelings and to claim them for herself was a radical move: women were, or were thought to be, completely embedded in their relationships with others. The whole Sturm und Drang of the alienated intellectual was a man’s thing, not a woman’s. Women lived for others, not for themselves. It was this belief, shared by women’s critics and advocates both, that Wollstonecraft challenged. To put it another way, Wollstonecraft despised weak, fashionable women, women who suited themselves to men’s desires. But she would have none of the reformist refashioning of women, which turned them into instruments of masculine betterment and justified their education on those grounds. Either way, women’s purpose was to serve others, not themselves. As Bloch has shown, the claim that women were virtuous overturned the centuries-long belief that they were weaker than men morally, unreliable, dangerous in their frailty. Bloch, in two essays written while she was still a graduate student at Berkeley and published in 1978 and a third one published nine years later (all collected in this volume), was one of the first historians to draw our attention to this sea change in the way women’s nature was understood.1 Bloch has never seen this change as unambiguously good. Rather, it is an instance of the “creative contradiction and paradoxical change” that she notes in her introduction. Taylor’s work on Wollstonecraft only heightens the contradiction and paradox: it is as if contradiction and paradox were multiplied, more than simply added together. Here is another example: Wollstonecraft’s paradoxical misogyny gave her a (paradoxical) affinity for Rousseau. Both of them, after all, were modernists in their evocation of an “alienated subjectivity” (Taylor, p. 85). Most scholars, as Taylor observes, have regarded Wollstonecraft as Rousseau’s adversary. “That Wollstonecraft was a Rousseauist is indisputable,” Taylor asserts, however (p. 73). The chapter in which Taylor makes her case is perhaps the most exhilarating in 1

See also Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs 4 (1978), 219–36, for another early and influential formulation, and somewhat more recently, Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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her book. She entitles it “The chimera of womanhood”: the imagined woman, the counterpoint to the female imagination. Taylor begins the chapter by analyzing Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Burke, the adversary against whom she wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Man. The issue that gives shape to the chapter, imagination, is the key issue, Taylor argues, in Wollstonecraft’s work. We err if we think of Wollstonecraft and other Enlightenment thinkers as super-rationalists. Reason for them encompassed the imagination; there was no necessary contradiction. Indeed, the imagination animated reason. Fantasy or fancy was another matter: a debased or lower kind of imagination, it wrought nothing but havoc. This division between the creative imagination and the destructive fancy “was, predictably, mapped onto the distinction between the sexes” (p. 61). This distinction was manifest in Burke when he described the sublime as “‘great, rugged, and negligent’,” and the merely beautiful as “‘small . . . smooth, and polished’” (p. 63). The sublime inspired respect, the beautiful only love. Wollstonecraft turned Burke’s categories against him, accusing him of “the romantic excesses usually attributed to women,” which “freed” her “to take to herself a position of rhetorical masculinity—stern, stoical, reflective” (p. 67). But having effectively indicted Burke for his feminine sensibility (“nothing more than a posturing narcissist,” in Taylor’s words, p. 69), Wollstonecraft slipped easily from indicting his views on women to an indictment of women themselves. If Burke’s encomiums to womanhood were nothing more than sweet seductions, then perhaps women themselves were culpable for being so easily seduced. “The overt message of the Rights of Man is that the male sexual imagination is to blame, but the insistently idealizing tone in which true masculinity is evoked (as contrasted to Burke’s effeminacy), combined with the hostile tone in which women and Burke’s womanliness are described, suggests otherwise” (p. 71). Here was the danger of the feminine imagination: erotic desire, turned away from the world and in on itself, in the fantasy of being seduced. (Here, too, was the danger posed by reading fiction.) This was the problem that Wollstonecraft had to imagine herself out of: how could a woman claim, or discover, an imagination that was neither chimerical and fantastic nor wholly masculine and of necessity misogynist? Such an imagination would be, as the title of Taylor’s book hints, truly feminist. It was through her engagement with Rousseau that Wollstonecraft began to think herself out of the problem that she had made for herself in her critique of Burke. “‘I love Rousseau’s paradoxes,’ [Wollstonecraft] wrote . . . and not the least paradoxical aspect of this encounter between the notorious exponent of female subordination and his leading feminist opponent is how within it a new vision of womanhood began to be forged” (Taylor, p. 74). In Rousseau’s fictional heroines Julie and Sophie, Wollstonecraft found, according to Taylor, “the fons et origo of female oppression.” These lovely creatures

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were wholly fictional, chimeras, the creations of Rousseau’s imagination, the love-objects he conjured up. But what was love, anyway—and here Taylor quotes from Emile—“if not a chimera, lie, and illusion? We love the image we make for ourselves far more than we love the object to which we apply it. If we saw what we love exactly as it is, there would be no more love on earth” (p. 76). Taylor argues that here Wollstonecraft recognized “the fictionalizing processes by which ‘females . . . are made women’ through contemporary culture. A chimera of womanhood, rooted in erotic imaginings, has been created that entrances both sexes—women in narcissistic self admiration; men in objectifying passion—to the point where real women disappear into its seductions. The Rousseauist woman,” she adds, “is a phantasm, and in this she exemplifies the female dilemma” (ibid.). It should be noted that the critique of Rousseau, which is quite brilliant, may be as much Taylor’s as Wollstonecraft’s. To put it another way, Taylor reads Rousseau through the lens of Wollstonecraft, in the process helping Wollstonecraft to solve the problem of the female imagination. But for much of the chapter, Wollstonecraft recedes, her place supplanted by Rousseau’s fictional women, in particular the captivating Sophie. It is almost as if Wollstonecraft has become one of Rousseau’s women, her personality overshadowed by his. Taylor explains that Sophie is the creation of Rousseau’s imagination, the imaginary object of his desire. But Rousseau’s imagination was such that he could imagine Sophie’s desire, too; after all, for Rousseau, men and women were equal and the same, except for—and this is a huge exception, of course—sex. But once having imagined a desirous woman, he feared her. What if her sexual desire proved insatiable? Once having imagined an autonomous, desiring woman, Rousseau had to imagine his way into controlling her and her dangerous sexuality. Hence Sophie must be married, her desire harnessed in the service of her husband. As Taylor notes, Rousseau was working through not only the problem of (or rather, his problem with) female desire, but also the problem of modern subjectivity. “The process through which females become Sophies are those by which all men and women, born free and equal, are shackled into the beardance of modern society. Becoming a modern citizen—that is, entering into that condition of psychic and political unfreedom that characterises contemporary life—is for both sexes becoming Woman: a being deprived of all inner authority, whose life is one of duplicity and dependence” (p. 84). Taylor’s point is quite striking. It is a commonplace of modern political thought that the citizen of modern democracies has been gendered male. Bloch has made this point in her essay “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue,” and Taylor touches upon it in the seventh and eighth chapters of her book. But Rousseau is not the only thinker to have imagined himself a desirous woman or to have gendered the political subject female. Flaubert famously said, “Mme Bovary, c’est moi,” and John Adams once observed that “the people are Clarissa.” On Rousseau, Taylor

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quotes Terry Eagleton: “If ‘the task of political hegemony is to produce the very forms of subjecthood which will form the basis for political unity,’ then such a subjectivity for Rousseau is realized under the sign of the Woman” (p. 90). If modern citizenship requires some sacrifice of self, some channeling of desire, then is not this sacrifice made by women, on men’s behalf ? Women are enthralled, but this is no cause for joy. In the name of civilization women are at once punished—having to sacrifice their freedom—and mourned. And it was this bargain that Wollstonecraft wanted no part of. Taylor says that she understood it, and recoiled from it. She accepted Rousseau’s Sophie— desirous, simpering, tamed—as if she were real, not the chimera of Rousseau’s imagination. Almost as much as Rousseau, Wollstonecraft feared the female imagination, feared that it would be seduced by the promise of indirect influence over men. Wollstonecraft had yet to imagine herself out of this dilemma. According to Taylor, the path lay through religion. We live in an age so torn by religious fundamentalisms that it may be hard for us to recognize other nonfundamentalist religious impulses or beliefs as truly religious. We would do well to remember Bloch’s suggestion that feminist scholars should consider religion as one of the systems in which meaning is embedded.2 If we do, we will not be skeptical when Taylor tells us that Wollstonecraft’s God-talk was not “just pious conventionalism. This affirmation of women’s capacity to apprehend and identify with the divine . . . was so fundamental to women’s sense of ethical worth, and so far-reaching in its egalitarian implications, that it can properly be described as one of the founding impulses of feminism” (p. 102). God was the source of woman’s equality, even—or especially—for Rational Dissenters such as Wollstonecraft. And a woman could achieve grace only by a direct relationship with God. This relationship—the love of God—was at base erotic, and a diversion of the erotic impulse to men alienated woman from her Creator. “This alienation from grace is the nadir of female oppression, since it denies to women that inner mirroring of God’s sublimity which is every soul’s proper achievement” (p. 105). Of course, Wollstonecraft learned about the dangers of erotic love the hard way. No one who writes about Wollstonecraft can ignore her disastrous love affair with the feckless American Gilbert Imlay. It reads like one of the era’s cautionary seduction tales, and that is certainly the way many at the time read it, using it to discredit the body of Wollstonecraft’s thought.3 Taylor, however,

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Bloch follows her own advice, admirably, in her essay “Women, Love, and Virtue in the Thought of Edwards and Franklin.” The essay is an object lesson, too, in what can be learned when gender analysis is applied to canonical male figures. See for example Chandos Michael Brown, “Mary Wollstonecraft, or, the Female Illuminati: The Campaign Against Women and ‘Modern Philosophy’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995), 389–424.

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uses her subject’s personal life to illuminate her thought. Here she makes her psychoanalytic perspective explicit: If, as William James once claimed, ‘the gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another’, then the primary demand we make of ourselves, each other and our gods . . . is the demand for a self-identity that is psychically and culturally viable.

Hence, we cannot overlook or dismiss a person’s love life or personal connections—remember Bloch’s injunction that feminist scholars be attentive to interconnectedness as much as they are to power—because “for all of us the vicissitudes of love play a decisive part in our self-formation.” Like a Rousseauian heroine jumping out of the frame, Wollstonecraft “realized that it was the evaporation of the imaginary perfections with which she had invested [Imlay] that was a major source of her pain” (p. 128—all quotations). In religion, Wollstonecraft found not simply the consolation for this and other pain—and here Taylor makes a gentle criticism of Mary Poovey4 —“but a revolutionized ethical subjectivity.” This is what the chapter on Rousseau, in which Wollstonecraft almost disappears, was leading to: “The male erotic imagination”—e.g. Rousseau’s—posits a fundamental biological difference between men and women and then conjures up an ideal female “to fit the scenario . . . A female self . . . so saturated by masculine fantasy that it appears to lack any independent moral personality—or even a soul.” Wollstonecraft imagined an alternative, “the possibility of a female moral subjectivity founded in amatory identification with God.” Such an identification offered Wollstonecraft a means of rising above not only her recent romantic hurts, but the wounds she had carried from childhood. As an unloved child, Taylor suggests, Wollstonecraft could not help creating idealized and exaggerated images of goodness and badness, but “a love directed away from other people toward a transcendent, perfect object can seem to bypass these painful issues of personal identity” (pp. 130–1). This is not to suggest that Wollstonecraft resolved her conflicts, and, by extension, those of all women, by fixing her gaze on God. Rather, this was the ideal, the goal, or perhaps a process: the creative spirit is always restless, and it is always in danger of being seduced by unworthy objects. This danger is particularly acute for women, who are always susceptible to romantic dreams, “women’s own contribution to their enslavement” (p. 133). Yet the imagination, as it was for all Romantics, was a good, “the poetic dimension of mental life, the realm of original genius and sublime invention” (p. 139), “the God within” (p. 140). Eros

4

Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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was the means to the sublime. And it was also—this is the connection between Wollstonecraft’s theology and her politics—what drew the soul to “humankind in general” (p. 141). Having explained Wollstonecraft’s thought, Taylor spends the second half of her book placing her in her world. Of course, this is not the way Wollstonecraft’s life unfolded—first coming to terms with the hurts of her youth, then figuring out painfully how to love and be loved, and finally connecting to the world. This is only the way life unfolds in the imaginative world of the successfully psychoanalyzed. Taylor is not Wollstonecraft’s psychoanalyst but the author of a book about her, and hence Wollstonecraft cannot have profited from Taylor’s insights. Moreover, one cannot help being concerned that Taylor’s “successful” psychoanalysis of Wollstonecraft—she moves beyond her childhood hurts, she stumbles through several terrible relationships, she finds a mature love with William Godwin—may distort our retrospective view of Wollstonecraft’s life: perhaps Wollstonecraft never quite got things together in the way that Taylor implies. Still, this is an elegant way to organize a book, and it gives it a dramatic thrust unusual for intellectual histories. Steeped in the writings of Rousseau and men of his cast of mind and still reeling from the emotional blows she had sustained, Wollstonecraft was slow to cast off her misogyny. Her political vision—the radicalism of Britain’s petty producers— was fundamentally male. That is, she envisioned “a society of small, independent farmers and domestic craft enterprises, all with sufficient resources for modest comfort but none with a surplus” (Taylor, p. 169). All of these independent farmers and artisans were implicitly male. When Wollstonecraft thought of women, she did not imagine their female counterparts. Instead, she focused on women who could (literally) afford the luxury of “artificial manners [and] corrupt tastes.” Indeed, the pages of the Rights of Woman are so crammed with caricatures . . . that the reader, looking up from them, finds it hard to recall the more mundane reality, that in 1792 the vast majority of British women were not rich dilettantes but poor women who spent their days labouring in field or home, tending their children, worrying about bread prices, rents, unwanted pregnancies. (p. 174)

Wollstonecraft was so fixated on what Taylor calls Emblematic Woman that she could not see the real women before her eyes. As Taylor explains it, here, in a nutshell, was the problem: in Wollstonecraft’s milieu, masculinity was admired and femininity was problematic. “Womanliness, in both sexes, as a political ill for which manliness—again in both sexes—was the cure: this notion, so common within eighteenth-century radicalism, was to prove exceptionally longlasting” (p. 214). How could Wollstonecraft construct a feminist analysis or program out of such unpromising materials? She had

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to swim against the tide as the misogyny that was part of the atmosphere at the time was codified in the French Revolution, when, for the first time, a European government “explicitly identified biological manhood as a qualification for citizenship” (ibid.). That Revolution, and the questions about citizenship it raised, presented Wollstonecraft—and every feminist since—with a particular challenge: how to “recruit” women “to citizenhood without either repudiating their womanhood or—as Rousseau had done—turning it into a sex-specific category. . . . Sexual distinctions have no place in political life, Wollstonecraft repeatedly insists. But if this is true, what becomes of womanliness, once the figure of Woman disappears into the independent citizen?” (p. 228). In other words, could women be both different and equal? (This, of course, is the problem Bloch addressed in “A Culturalist Critique of Feminist Theory.”) Taylor shows us how Wollstonecraft worked this problem through (although, once again, what we may be seeing is as much Taylor using Wollstonecraft to work through the problem for herself). The answer Wollstonecraft arrived at was independence, which is not surprising, considering her radical background. But figuring out that women could and should be independent, and without sacrificing their (proper) womanliness, was, for both Wollstonecraft and feminism, a significant achievement. Some who have written about Wollstonecraft have suggested that she advocated a sex-specific political role for women, that is, that their citizenship should proceed from their biological role as mothers. Taylor notes, however, that Wollstonecraft charted a similar path to citizenship for men. It was the private virtues, inculcated in the family, and exhibited by fathers and husbands as well as mothers and wives, that were critical to the state, not gender-specific roles. And lest anyone think that there was something “intellectually novel” about “rooting public spirit in private virtues in this way,” Taylor points out that “Protestant radicalism had always regarded personal righteousness as the foundation of a virtuous and just polity” (p. 222).5 Wollstonecraft was too critical of the family ever to see it as the foundation for the state, either for women or for men. Indeed, confinement within the family 5

Taylor’s endnote clarifies that she is criticizing Linda Colley, although implicitly she is questioning Bloch’s argument in “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue,” which, like Colley’s, may depend too much upon J. G. A. Pocock’s “writings on the republican dimension of eighteenth-century political thought [which] . . . tends to underplay the religious element in late eighteenth-century radicalism” (300, n. 34). Bloch herself seems to have come to a similar realization, which she explains in “Gender and the Public/Private Dichotomy in American Revolutionary Thought.” Her nuanced discussion of love in this essay, as well as in several others, suggests that ideals of “mutual identification and the dissolution of emotional boundaries” (166) developed along with notions of fundamental gender difference. This is a provocative example of the kind of “creative contradiction and paradoxical change” that Bloch believes cultural analysis can help us uncover.

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and dependency upon a husband was the root of woman’s problem. Although she did not say it in so many words, Wollstonecraft believed that “family life narrows women’s horizons, constricts their affections, curtails their sense of public responsibility” (Taylor, p. 224). Hence, women could and should be wives and mothers, but they had also to be citizens; they had particular obligations as a sex, but they also had “the duty, common to all humanity, to fulfil individual potential.” Here was “the paradox that was to characterize all subsequent feminisms: the simultaneous affirmation and denial of the ‘peculiarity’, the specificity of women’s destiny” (ibid., p. 226). And here’s another paradox: in order to be good wives, mothers, members of families, women had to be liberated from the family. That is, they had to be independent, free from dependency on husbands, brothers, fathers, and from romantic fantasy as well. Only if they were independent and self-reliant could they then be women. To suggest such ideas, which ran counter not only to the conservative trends of the day but also to the misogynist strain in radicalism, was a profound act of imagination: to imagine women who could be wives and mothers and independent persons at the same time. Taylor asks us, however, not to pounce on such paradoxes as revealing some disabling inconsistency in Wollstonecraft’s thought. Instead, we might “adopt a less donnish, more psychologically generous view of intellectual creativity” in which “paradox and contradiction are no longer embarrassments to be brushed aside, but keys to a realm of hidden meanings” (p. 21). And so, in one final act of generous intellectual creativity—to rearrange her terms—Taylor offers a reading of Wollstonecraft’s final major (and unfinished) work, The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria. Taylor admits that “the idea of a feminist alliance among women seems never to have occurred to her, or to any other British woman radical of the period” (p. 238). Yet Taylor finds just such an imagined alliance in Maria, in the friendship between the elite Maria and the workingclass Jemima. In a sense, Taylor finishes the novel for Wollstonecraft, or at least leaves it hopefully open-ended: “Together yet apart, the women escape their prison for an uncertain future. Hardly a utopian vision then, but a prescient one: a century further on, it was alliances like these—fragile, bias-ridden, courageous—that were to become the driving force of a mass feminist-politics” (p. 255). It is only by recognizing and accepting women—in all their particularities and dispositions, especially those of class (and presumably race and ethnicity)— that we may transcend the paradoxical repudiation of Woman at the heart of modern feminism. Taylor concludes her book with a brief chapter on “The Fantasy of Mary Wollstonecraft,” by which she appears to mean several things. First, each generation, feminists and anti-feminists alike, has had its own Mary Wollstonecraft, focusing upon this or that element in her life or thought. In this context, Taylor’s

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Wollstonecraft may be yet another fantasy, this one representing “women’s hopes of a society free from misogyny and sexual injustice.” And so we conclude with another paradox: a Mary Wollstonecraft firmly rooted in her time and place, yet for all that, relevant still: she has become a feminist icon “constantly re-moulded in feminism’s changing image” (p. 253), the historical Mary Wollstonecraft and what we need to make of her. If Taylor’s book is not precisely the sort of cultural analysis that Bloch recommends—the final nod to class, and perhaps a bit more concern with the dynamics of power and the relations of class than Bloch herself might manifest—still, both of these fine books are testaments to the power of the feminist imagination.

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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 427–438
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000241 Printed in the United Kingdom

reconstructing german idealism and romanticism: historicism and presentism john zammito Department of History, Rice University

Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002) Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002) All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente 1

When two major studies on the same thematic appear roughly simultaneously, integrating not only their authors’ respective careers but the revisions of a whole generation of scholarship, the moment cries out for stock-taking, both substantively and methodologically. At a minimum, we need to recognize the key theses of our two protagonists and the frameworks they erect to uphold them. But we need even more to step back from that endeavor to wider considerations. I advance two claims in that light. First, something has been unearthed in these studies which speaks to urgent philosophical concerns of our day, namely the rise of naturalized epistemology and the need for a more encompassing naturalism. Indeed, I suspect this current interest may have incited (if only subliminally) discernment of just those aspects of the earlier age. That signals something essential about the point and practice of intellectual history, namely (my second claim) the mutuality, not opposition, of historicism and presentism.

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i With German Idealism Frederick Beiser has now published three major works which chart the wider wake of Kantian enlightenment in Germany.2 With The Romantic Conception of Life, Robert Richards brings to culmination a series of works on the roots of Darwinian theory and its subsequent mutations.3 These two admirable arcs of scholarly productivity intersect in the epoch of Idealism and Romanticism, but they enter it with radically different vectors. Beiser wants to know how this epoch can possibly be intelligible in the light of Kant. Richards seeks to show how the epoch was necessarily inaugural for the vision of Darwin. Beiser wishes, with skeptical caution, to appraise continuities from the Kantian project to that of Idealism and Romanticism. Richards wishes, with a notable passion, to affirm creative innovation in that epoch without which Darwin would be hard to imagine. The motives have no small impact upon the methods each employs. The austerity and “internalist” strategy of Beiser’s history of philosophy stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic and intimate strategy of Richards’s biographical contextualism (see Section II below). All that makes the fact that Beiser and Richards find the same new thing signally important. A generation ago, and for generations by then, a construction of the history of philosophy prevailed which held that Kant was a great philosopher, worthy of the most intense engagement, but that after Kant German philosophy plummeted into folly. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were names for widening circles of tenebrous abyss. Bertrand Russell’s canard, A History of Western Philosophy, can stand token for all that. And so those many generations—until the last. The scene needs to open still wider. Idealism has been linked systematically with another anathema: Romanticism. From Irving Babbitt to Isaiah Berlin, generations of grand critics pounced upon Goethe’s dictum, “the classical I call healthy and the Romantic sick,” to blame Romanticism for every malady of the modern world.4 2

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See Beiser’s earlier books: The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), and Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). See Richards’s earlier books: Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1919); Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). The dictum is from Goethe’s Dialogues with Eckermann, dated to April, 1829, and, as Richards observes, “what is usually overlooked . . . is that . . . Goethe was reacting to Romantic literature in France after the turn of the century, not to the literature of the early Romantic movement” (458).

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The dream of reason and its “transcendental ego” appeared to have joined with alltoo-human empirical egos to engender monsters on all sides. But the very worst thing of all was when Idealism and Romanticism together intruded upon the holiest of holies: the domain of natural science. Naturphilosophie has always been the ultimate scandal. Even scholars sensitive to the richness of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science have been unable to find in Naturphilosophie anything but how not to do science. Nothing—literally nothing—of value could come of it: such was the wisdom of the positivist age. A generation of revisionist work has challenged these dogmas bit by bit. As a result, Idealism has seen a considerable revival. Of the Hegel “renaissance” there can be no doubt (accordingly, precious little is made of him in Beiser or Richards).5 Fichte, too, has won serious reconsideration.6 Perhaps the most striking feature of the revisionism of the last generation has been that the early Romantics—Friedrich H¨olderlin, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis—assume major stature in German Idealism as philosophers, not merely as poets. The scholars presiding over this revolution in interpretation are Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank.7 The most succinct articulation of the ambition binding Romanticism and Idealism came in what is known as the “Earliest System Program of German Idealism,” authorship of which has been ascribed to Hegel, Schelling, and H¨olderlin, but which could stand as well for the project of the Schlegels and Novalis, as the epigraph from Schlegel at the head of this essay attests.8 Now, with Beiser and Richards, Schelling is joining in the revival at last. He, more than any other figure, represents the confluence of Idealism, Romanticism and Naturphilosophie. The striking novelty of Beiser and Richards is their joint affirmation of the centrality of Schelling and Naturphilosophie in Idealism. For both interpreters, as well, aesthetics—above all, artistic insight—emerges as the crucial catalyst. Instead of seeing Naturphilosophie as an aberration, or Romantic aestheticism as a counter-movement, these two interpretations mark them as

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One might scruple whether Hegel can so easily be excluded from a reconstruction of Idealism. Is it mere coincidence that his philosophy commanded the heights for a generation and appeared to all contemporaries as the consummation of the movement? Neither of these works appears to have had time to take into consideration Anthony La Vopa’s distinguished Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), which would have complemented (and complicated) their arguments admirably. Dieter Henrich, Konstellationen: Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991); Manfred Frank, ‘Unendliche Ann¨aherung’: Die Anf¨ange der philosophischen Romantik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1997). For the most extensive recent treatment of the system program, see Frank-Peter Hansen, Das a¨ lteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus: Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989).

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quintessential for “absolute idealism,” construing Schelling as the evidencing instance. But they get to this insight on different paths and for somewhat different reasons. Beiser devotes almost half his book to Kant and Fichte in advancing his provocative thesis of an Idealist “struggle against subjectivism.” The essential divide he wishes both to recognize and to bridge is between Kant and Fichte as “subjective idealists,” at least in the eyes of their critics, and the absolute idealists epitomized by Schelling. The essentially contested question was whether rationality was a human imposition on reality or something actual in the world which informed even its human expression. To uphold the reality of the world, to carry forward the “struggle against subjectivism” that Kant had inaugurated, Beiser argues, Schelling’s cohort recentered rationality in nature as a whole, deriving human reason as a (preeminent) part of this larger whole. The metaphysical heart of absolute idealism was Naturphilosophie: a conception of “the universe as a whole, nature in itself, which subsists apart from consciousness and explains its very possibility according to necessary laws” (p. 557). To articulate it, the Idealists resorted to “intellectual intuition,” seeking precedent in Spinoza’s amor intellectualis Dei and warrant in Kant’s own writings about the intellectus archetypus. But an equally strong source of their confidence was aesthetic insight, the cognitive implications of beauty and sublimity. Here is where Romanticism intervened. The upshot is what Beiser terms, with explicit attention to contemporary discourse, a naturalism (see Section III below). Still, Beiser remains ultimately unconvinced that the metaphysical adventure of absolute idealism can overcome the epistemological scruples of Kantian philosophy. He recognizes Naturphilosophie (historically) but he will not affirm it (philosophically). From this sobriety we pass, in turning to Richards, to an almost Dionysiac revel. In Richards’s narrative we learn first of the emergence of the early Romantic circle around the endlessly fascinating Caroline and the fractiously brilliant Friedrich Schegel. Out of these intimacies Richards retrieves myriad webs of poetry and philosophy, each woven in a personalized filigree. Into that skein burst Friedrich Schelling to wrench both the erotic and the intellectual heart away to weave a fabric of his own—or, indeed, a bewildering sequence of fabrics. Schelling, for better or worse, had more a philosopher’s than a poet’s gift, and he fashioned Romanticism into a philosophy of nature. Mentor and model in this metamorphosis was Goethe, who serves as Richards’s other grand protagonist. He reconstructs Schelling and Goethe as universal evolutionists whose conceptions brought later German life scientists more readily into attunement with Lamarckian and Darwinian theories than their counterparts in France or England. Indeed, Richards believes that Darwin himself was steeped in the Romantic idea of life—through the mediation of Alexander

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von Humboldt. That is why he ends his work with an “Epilogue” on Darwin as Romantic biologist. Richards holds that Romantic biology developed not only a theory of evolution, but a holistic (aesthetic and ethical, not just cognitive) vision of nature as well. Because Darwin clearly demonstrated these impulses— at least in the generative phases of his work—the role of Romanticism in shaping nineteenth-century life science becomes pivotal. One of Richards’s most adamant claims is that Goethe’s biological science was seminal for the nineteenth century. That view bucks the bulk of the scholarship, which has not found Goethe’s scientific pretensions very credible. Moreover, Richards stresses the philosophical solidarity of Goethe and Schelling against many who seek to extricate Goethe from Naturphilosophie the better to disparage it and, perhaps, to rescue him for a sanitized science. In Richards’s account, Schelling and Goethe emerge as committed collaborators crucial for the genesis of life science. Situating them in a wider context of the emergent life sciences in Germany, his reconstruction proves quite convincing. What, then, can we harvest from these two new works for our grasp of the epoch of German Idealism and Romanticism? Above all, the unity of Naturphilosophie and Romantic aesthetics in the “absolute idealism” of Schelling. The role of the artist proved crucial for Schelling in his crystallization of Naturphilosophie. Goethe was his model, aesthetic intuition (anschauende Urteilskraft) was his exemplar of deepest insight, and Schlegel’s maxim (see epigraph) his driving impulse. It has been commonplace to write Schelling off as utterly remote from “real science.”9 Schelling allegedly disregarded empirical science to concoct speculative “deductive” science from his armchair. Yet he conducted extensive surveys of the latest scientific work in his books on Naturphilosophie. He was explicit, moreover, that Naturphilosophie was not intended to replace but to complement and complete empirical science, and he expressed enormous respect for experimental research, maintaining that all knowledge arose initially through experience. Naturphilosophie proposed that certain formidable metaphysical boundaries be torn down. There ought to be no categorical divide between the inanimate and the animate, between animal and human, between body and “spirit.” And this not because spirit should be reduced to body—or humans to (“mere”) animals,

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Richards points (464n.) to Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), to H. A. M. Snelders, “Romanticism and Naturphilosophie,” Studies in Romanticism 9 (1970), 193–215, and to Walter Wetzels, “Aspects of Natural Science in German Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 10 (1971), 44–59, as instances. He notes: “Snelders, along with others, . . . believes that Schelling regarded empirical work as trivial and opposed it – a belief . . . for which there are no grounds in Schelling’s work” (128n.).

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or animate to inanimate—in some mechanical-determinist physicalism, but because the animate emerged from the inanimate, hence the latter must have contained that potentiality in its original nature, plus the dynamism to actualize it. So, too, humans emerged from the rest of the animal order, hence, again, the latter must have had that emergent possibility. So, ultimately, the physical world must not be sundered metaphysically from spirit, but the latter instead reinterpreted as an expression of inherent possibilities in nature itself. Nature was taken to be inherently creative. Self-production in nature moved from the simpler to the more complex; it took on historical-developmental form. In his full-blown Naturphilosophie, Schelling conceived of all nature as one living organism, a vast continuum of variously developed levels of organization and “living force.” Kant had admonished those who would undertake such a “daring adventure of reason” to observe his distinction between regulative and constitutive principles: what might serve as a fruitful heuristic must never be ascribed literally to actuality.10 Our natural disposition is to share Kant’s view, but from the vantage of the philosophy of science and the practical constitution of life science at the time, Kant’s regulative/constitutive distinction proved far less congenial to inquiry than it would appear.11 Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” did not go far enough, because it accepted too much of the seventeenth-century transparency of subjectivity and of the seventeenth-century inertness in matter. Above all, the new sciences needed to reconsider the relation between matter and force, to reanimate the physical world. For the absolute idealists nature was “living activity or productivity itself (natura naturans)” (Beiser, p. 530). Thus, with reference to pivotal issues in the history and philosophy of science around 1800, both Beiser and Richards reject the efforts of Timothy Lenoir to see Kant’s regulative/constitutive distinction as essential to the emergent life sciences.12 Conversely, the boldly metaphysical recourse of Naturphilosophie turns 10

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Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902–56), 5:419n. English in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 305n. Richards puts it succinctly: “The impact of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft on the disciplines of biology has, I believe, been radically misunderstood by many contemporary historians. . . . Those biologists who found something congenial in Kant’s third Critique either misunderstood his project (Blumenbach and Goethe) or reconstructed certain ideas to have very different consequences from those Kant originally intended (Kielmeyer and Schelling)” (229). See my “‘This Inscrutable Principle of an Original Organization’: Epigenesis and ‘Looseness of Fit’ in Kant’s Philosophy of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003), 73–109; and Robert Richards, “Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences 31 (2000), 11–32. See Beiser, 507–8 and 684 n. 7; Richards, 210n., 216n. See also Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanism in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982).

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out to have been genuinely fruitful for scientific practice. The central impetus was to recognize philosophically what Beiser calls the “autonomy of nature,” that is “that the basic forces of nature must be sought within it” (p. 530). Above all, nature needed to be reinterpreted from a set of determinate things (products) to the immanent process that generated them: in philosophical terms, from natura naturata to natura naturans. This had a radical, “Spinozistic” metaphysical implication, as Richards indicates: “fecund, creative nature could replace God; and man would find himself an intrinsic part of nature and able to exercise . . . her same creative power” (p. 405). But it also brought concrete scientific advances. Richards highlights the development of morphology, linking embryology to species transformation, more widely still linking geological history to the proliferation of organic forms and these to still broader patterns of chemical metamorphosis. Emergence and process became central to natural scientific theory. No less meticulous a practicing scientist than Alexander von Humboldt publicly asserted in Schelling’s defense: “I am far from the view that the study of authentic Naturphilosophie should be damaging to empirical philosophers and that empiricists and nature-philosophers should forever repel one another as opposite poles of a magnet.”13 When Schelling undertook to create a comprehensive system of nature, of course, just like Descartes he overreached badly. Still, to theorize is simply to seek to synthesize a principle that unites and explains the particulars of empirical observation, or brings particular generalizations into a more encompassing order. To seek to unify theories—to find a grand unified theory—is an ambition hardly forsaken by our own science.14 Schelling’s Naturphilosophie further suggested the possibility of primacy for biology as foundational science. That, too, has powerful contemporary resonance (see Section III below).15

ii Beiser is a historian of philosophy, and Richards a historian of science. Each makes decisions about methods of historical reconstruction which are instructive for intellectual historians more generally. What consonance, what dissonance do their respective performances present when brought into juxtaposition? What 13 14 15

Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen einer Geographie der Pflanzen (1807), cited in Richards, 134n. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientific Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage, 1992). See David Hull and Michael Ruse, eds., The Philosophy of Biology (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); David Depew and Bruce Weber, eds., Evolution at the Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

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are the implications of these two works for the current practices of intellectual history? Beiser asserts firmly that the intrinsic philosophical problems of German Idealism are so thorny that it would be premature to venture into contextual study. Relative to standard practice among historians of philosophy, his earlier work was very attentive to contextual issues, hence it is striking that he finds it selfevident here that contextualization could provide no insight into the arguments. It appears, for Beiser, a luxury, not an essential element, in his conception of the history of philosophy. That view determines the severity of focus upon texts and arguments alone which marks the work. The chronological sequentialism of his argument—one text expounded meticulously after and on the basis of its predecessor, one philosopher expounded methodically after and on the basis of his predecessor—marks Beiser’s ambition to test the limits of continuity in concept strictly through array in time. There would appear to be no intervening variables worthy of historical reconstruction until after this philosophical exegesis is concluded. In striking contrast to Beiser, Richards leaves all expectations of diachronic order in disarray. Something quite other is at play in his organization. Originality is his target, and he suspects he will find ideas “in the making” where the passionate intersections of lives spark them off. All this gives Richards’s study a different emotional valence from Beiser’s; it is itself Romantic in tone and substance. The endeavor to fuse the personal with the theoretical shapes its strange emplotment. The book’s parts form no chronological or philosophical progression, but rather an aesthetic one: each part rises to a climax, almost like a musical movement. Figures and arguments appear and reappear, taking on ampler resonance with each layering of context. Richards is clearly caught up in the passions of his protagonists.16 Hence his thrust is always bivalent: to reconstruct—almost vicariously to relive—their febrile immediacy and to vindicate its theoretical expression in a science of life. There are two cardinal instances of Richards’s bivalent approach. The first frames his whole volume: the epiphanic fusion of eroticism and poetic creativity in Goethe’s fifth Roman elegy. The second is more singular and jolting. Richards draws the climactic moment of Schelling’s break with Fichte into intimate relation with his anguish over the death of Auguste B¨ohmer, the daughter of his lover Caroline and the object, Richards believes, of no less of Schelling’s ardor. In the

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He makes no bones of having fallen in love with Caroline: “Caroline’s magical, erotic power—the kind of power only a beautiful woman with a wonderfully creative intelligence can effect—has pulled writers into her embrace over the last two hundred years. . . . [Kuno] Fischer fell in love with her from a distance, and this historian, too, has succumbed” (Richards, 44n.).

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context of Schelling’s grief and guilt, Richards writes, “only the abandonment of Fichtean egoism and the adoption of an austere and deterministic absolutism might mitigate the responsibility for love and death” (p. 179). It is jolting that in conventional histories of philosophy—Beiser, for example—we get no inkling of the simultaneity of these crises, no opportunity to consider the connection between what Richards terms the “emotive dialectic” and the philosophical one. Richards privileges the erotic and passionate aspects of life and character as decisive for the creative process, whether in art, in science, or in philosophy. He bitingly rejects a formalist approach even to poetry, terming it “the critical equivalent of endorsing the virgin birth” (p. 350). On the other hand, Richards pays little attention to social and political forces. For him it is the individual in his or her passions that galvanizes everything. That is his “emotive dialectic.” It is not obvious that it could alone have brought about the split with Fichte, but it adds substantially to the historical richness of that passage. More pointedly, it highlights the methodological issue of explaining intellectual choices as between what we have conventionally termed “internalist” and “externalist” or contextual accounts. Intellectual history must, in my view, stand or fall with the contextual approach. It is not that we can or should not engage the arguments or ideas in themselves, but rather that our m´etier is precisely the situation of claims and the analysis of such situations for their impulse and import. Should we then simply supplement Beiser’s severe “internalism” with Richards’s intimate dialectic to achieve the contextualization that Beiser defers? Would that suffice? Or, to get at the overall dialectic of German Idealism, might we not need to conduct a far more systematic integration of institutional and political life, along the lines Anthony La Vopa pursued in his intellectual biography of Fichte? For the movement as a whole, would that be a manageable endeavor, given how extensive these two studies, with their restriction of theme and method, already are? Is contextual intellectual history on that scale simply too ambitious for an epoch as complex as Idealism and Romanticism? To write an intellectual history of Idealism and Romanticism is to insert yet another point of view into a thicket of competing, often monumental, accounts. That two major new ones should have been produced is heartening for the endeavor, yet at the same time they raise the question, both methodologically and substantively, what avenues yet remain to achieve commensurate insight.

iii Beiser and Richards offer major historical reconstructions of the German Idealists and Romantics. But one can still ask what their retrieval of Romantic Naturphilosophie has to do with philosophy today. What could we possibly learn

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from—indeed, why should we even take seriously—the ideas of German Idealism and Romanticism? What is history of philosophy for?17 What if past thought were not always surpassed thought? Might we be challenged in our complacencies by—might a real space of transformative possibility be inserted from—the past? Historicism is not antiquarianism; intellectual history is always as presentist as it is historicist. More important by far than the famous idea that each age is immediate to God, what Ranke was after in insisting upon wie es eigentlich gewesen was the idea that if we are ever to cope with our present we must learn from the past, and learn precisely from the encounter with its difference. Always, that encounter is mediated by our present; that is what the hermeneutic circle is all about. Yet it is an enabling, not ultimately a vicious, circle. It enables not merely through the concepts with which it empowers even as it restricts us (the meaning of discipline), but even more through the interests with which it motivates our inquiry. Such presentism does not undermine, it vitalizes historical reconstruction. But conversely, there is something in the past that demands recognition in its stubborn strangeness, that requires the adjustment of our categorizations. The historian of science Peter Galison writes of “constraint,” and the postmodern sociologist of science Andy Pickering writes of “resistance,” but what they both indicate is that we need to make local compromises with alterity in our language, to invent and to speak “pidgin.”18 That is what historicism has always maintained: that we must and that we can. I want to suggest that shifts in our current problem constellations bring us nearer to or farther from constellations of other epochs, make these more or less urgent to appreciate and appropriate. There have been signal shifts in historical “taste” for other periods, and we have clearly witnessed such a shift in the treatment of German Idealism and Romanticism over the last generation. This is not merely because of the rise of postmodernist literary theory but even more because of the collapse of positivism on all fronts—from philosophy of science to epistemology to (tacit) metaphysics. That collapse has highlighted all the aporias in Kant (whom the positivists had enshrined) and simultaneously rendered the

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See the discussions in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). In his own contribution, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” (49–76), Richard Rorty finds history of philosophy little more than a vehicle of condescension toward the hapless dead. Assuming one’s taste for such “irony” is limited, might we learn something from history other than its benightedness? I discuss these ideas in my forthcoming study, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: PostPositivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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concerns of the post-Kantian generation more meaningful. To understand how we can understand anew, we have to reopen questions of categorization of the world and acknowledge aesthetic resources of meaning-constitution (e.g. metaphor) which the positivist epoch disdained. And that makes us suddenly, searchingly open to the Idealists and Romantics. At issue is the limit of human reason. More pointedly, what is at stake is metaphysics and its place in our thought. Metaphysics may enable inquiry and comprehension. We are struggling, under such rubrics as “scientific realism,” “naturalized epistemology,” etc., to come up with new categories through which to order our sense of the hybridity of the world, not just our categories. From systems theory to “complexity” theory to “deep ecology,” we endeavor to reconsider our place in nature. In that context, philosophy of science must reach beyond the strictly formal; there is a place for philosophy of nature. It may be just what we are looking for to conceptualize and cope with the current dissolution of every boundary between humans, machines and the organic world.19 Naturalism has had a problematic history in philosophy, where it has served as a foil for the assertion of the autonomy of reason and especially of norms. The natural was conceived essentially as the inert, empty of value or of autonomy. Human “spirit” was always defended against the threat of reductionism associated with “mere” nature. German Idealism proposed a radically different idea. Rather than evacuate all the dynamism, creativity, and meaning from nature for deposit in the spiritual world—first of God, then of man—the German Idealists read back into nature all the spirit that two thousand years of thought had tried to dissociate from it. Rather than isolating man “above” nature, they sought to see in human spirit the ultimate distillation of nature’s own essence. Today, no less than in the era of Idealism, the question of our place in nature is thrust upon us—made perhaps even more urgent with our increased awareness of the extraordinary interdependence and mutability of natural systems at higher orders of complexity and with our headlong plunge into biotechnology, smashing through traditional boundaries simply because we can. Beiser offers us a remarkable prospect on our moment by bringing despised Naturphilosophie eplicitly into connection with highly fashionable contemporary ideas regarding naturalistic epistemology, and Richards tacitly seconds this with his demand that Naturphilosophie be taken seriously today for its philosophy of science. The key to contemporary naturalism is its placement not only of

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On this “hybridity” in contemporary thought see, e.g., Pierre Baldi, The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) and Donna Haraway’s classic “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985; reprinted in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature [New York: Routledge, 1991], 149–181, nn. 243–8).

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the object but of the subject of knowledge as well within natural processes.20 This imputes both a spontaneity to nature and a determinate emergence to human capacities which overturn longstanding pieties in epistemology. More, it suggests that fundamental problems in epistemology may not be soluble without metaphysics. How is metaphysics possible in an anti-foundationalist age? With its stress on process and emergence, naturalistic epistemology might well have a place for ideas drawn from Naturphilosophie. Certainly a contemporary metaphysics cannot resort to foundationalism, either the traditional faith in a priori logical form or the confidence in some primordial “given” of positivist empiricism. Instead, we have to reckon with finitude and fallibility without surrendering reasonable hope for empirical knowledge. It will be contingent but not arbitrary: nature resists, and that resistance constrains our hypothesizing. But that negative element is complemented by a positive one: nature develops, achieving higher orders of emergence in an ongoing process. We are not only products of this positive element, we are participants. That is the metaphysical stimulus of naturalism.

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See Abner Shimony and Debra Nails, eds., Naturalistic Epistemology: A Symposium of Two Decades (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987); Werner Callebaut and Rix Pinxten, eds., Evolutionary Epistemology: A Multiparadigm Program (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987); Nicholas Rescher, ed., Evolution, Cognition, and Realism: Studies in Evolutionary Epistemology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990).

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (2004), pp. 439–453
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000253 Printed in the United Kingdom

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival helena rosenblatt Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Recent years have seen a remarkable renewal of interest in the thought of Benjamin Constant (1767–1830). For long recognized as the author of the literary masterpiece Adolphe, Constant is now receiving increasing attention for his political writings. Paperback editions of his major works are presently available in both French and English, helping to establish his growing reputation as a founding father of modern liberalism. Constant’s stature as a seminal liberal thinker has benefited from the recent climate of opinion in the Western world and, in particular, from the return to fashion of liberalism as a social and political doctrine. Paradoxically, however, this political climate has also led to some problems, since presentist concerns have left an undeniable imprint on the image we have of Constant. Philosophers and political theorists, rather than historians, have dominated the Constant revival. By and large, moreover, these high-profile Constant scholars have been a rather gloomy lot. Disillusioned with modern politics and anxious about democracy, they have read Constant as a prophet of all their own doubts and fears. The Constant they admire is someone who criticizes, denounces and lays bare the many problems confronting modernity. Constant has thus served as a useful tool to theorists and social commentators with polemical and mainly contemporary purposes in mind. This is why Constant scholarship often seems to say more about the modern scholars who study him than it does about Constant. Like all great thinkers, Constant spoke in terms that would transcend his immediate historical context. Deeply convinced that he was living on the threshold of a new age, he deliberately addressed himself to the “modern” men and “friends of liberty” he hoped to sway, often using very general, even universalizing, language. Blessed not only with a keen eye for detail, but with an uncommon capacity for analytical thinking, he consistently sought to identify and articulate the “big picture,” or what he thought were the broader sociological and political patterns in history. In so doing, he became one of the first to advocate many of the liberal values we still cherish today, from “small government” to individual rights and liberties. 439

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All of this, along with his obvious literary talents, helps to explain why Constant’s writings seem so accessible to us today. He strikes a chord with modern readers, who often marvel at his uncanny ability to speak directly to them. It is said, for example, that Constant’s world is one that is very “familiar” to us.1 So “close” is Constant’s thought that sometimes we even have trouble “seeing” it.2 Interestingly, it is when Constant is being critical and diagnostic that his writings seem to have the greatest resonance. For example, what John Plamenatz admired most about Constant was the way he identified things that “moved him to fear or disgust.” Constant described these fearful things in a way that is “larger than life,” which is why he is able to speak to us across the centuries. Thus, to Plamenatz, as to many others like him, Constant’s value lies not so much in what he has to say about his own times, but in the way “he seems to prophesy rather than describe.” When reading Constant, “we think of our own times rather than his.” To Plamenatz, it often sounded as if Constant were speaking of Hitler’s Germany.3 Undoubtedly, it is anti-totalitarianism that has been the most powerful magnet drawing political theorists to Constant. Isaiah Berlin is just one among a prominent and growing group of liberals who worry about the “excesses of democratic politics” and the totalitarian potential lurking within. In his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,”4 Berlin warned that the connection between democracy and individual liberty was more tenuous than many of his contemporaries believed. He showcased Constant as one of the first thinkers who realized this and therefore wisely endorsed a “negative,” rather than a “positive,” conception of freedom. In contrast to theorists like Rousseau, to whom freedom meant the possession of a share in the public power, Constant viewed freedom as “non-interference” or lack of coercion. Having witnessed the French Revolution and the infernal dynamics that led to the Terror, Constant understood that liberty in the Rousseauean, “positive” sense could easily end up destroying many of the “negative” liberties that both he and Berlin held sacred. Berlin’s interpretation of Rousseau was strongly influenced by the theories of Jacob Talmon.5 Both Talmon and Berlin understood Rousseau’s theory of democracy to be proto-totalitarian. In contrast, Constant knew that one should

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John Plamenatz, “Introduction,” in Readings from Liberal Writers (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), 30. Tzvetan Todorov, A Passion for Democracy: The Life, the Women He Loved and the Thought of Benjamin Constant (New York: Algora Publishing, 1999), 6. Plamenatz, Readings, 30, italics added. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). See in particular Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960).

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival

not automatically equate liberty with democratic participation. Through his own life experiences he had imbibed the important lesson that “democracy can still crush individuals as mercilessly as any previous ruler.”6 Crucially, Constant realized that freedom meant drawing a frontier between the area of a person’s private life and that of public authority. This is what made him a much-admired founder of modern liberalism and, indeed, “the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy.”7 Berlin’s essay obviously had a polemical purpose. He himself admitted that his emphasis on negative liberty was due to his fear of twentieth-century dictatorships, in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere in the world. By the time he wrote his essay, the main danger was undoubtedly Soviet-style communism; and his goal in writing it was to defend a liberal conception of freedom against contemporary communist thought. With this aim in mind, Berlin focused on those aspects of Constant’s argument that could shore up his own. He used Constant to warn of the tendencies modern democratic movements have to become totalitarian. Discerning readers have noted that Berlin’s essay “updates,”8 rather than elucidates, Constant’s argument. For it is an obvious fact that Constant knew nothing of Nazism or Stalinism when he wrote his famous essay on the liberty of the moderns, so admired by Berlin. Constant of course had Napoleon in mind and not Hitler, Stalin or Marxism. Indeed, treatments of Constant more attentive to his historical context and intended message have shown that he wrote this piece not to denounce positive liberty and political participation, but to warn against their decline.9 They point, in particular, to the end of the essay, where Constant alerts his contemporaries to the tendency modern men have “to surrender too easily” their right of participating in political power. In this part of the essay, Constant speaks glowingly of liberty in the positive sense as “the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us.”10

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Berlin, Four Essays, 163–4. Ibid., 126. Claude Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin’s Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). James Mitchell Lee, “Doux Commerce, Social Organization, and Modern Liberty in the Thought of Benjamin Constant,” Annales Benjamin Constant 26 (2002), 117–49. Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 327. This does not prevent some fans of republicanism from continuing to caricature Constant’s liberalism as the epitome of the “negative,” laissez-faire type. See, for example, Alain Boyer, “De l’actualit´e des Anciens R´epublicains,” in Lib´eralisme et r´epublicanisme (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2000), 37–8; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17–18; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge

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Readers interested in uncovering Constant’s intended meaning have shown that his lifelong aim was not so much to distinguish positive from negative liberty, but to find ways of reconciling and sustaining them both. Counter-posing Rousseau to Constant is therefore an exercise of dubious value for understanding the latter’s thought. Several scholars have noted how indebted to Rousseau Constant actually was and have determined that his purpose was never to reject Rousseau, but rather to harmonize his thought with that of Montesquieu.11 But Berlin’s purposes led him to ignore such inconvenient aspects of Constant’s thought. Anticipating a scholarly trend, Berlin also emphasized Constant’s oppositional and critical side while downplaying his more positive contributions to political and social theory, such as his constitutional thought and his lifelong work on religion. Had Berlin acknowledged these more constructive aspects of Constant’s oeuvre, he might have uncovered a more optimistic Constant, a man who believed in progress and human “perfectibility,” and who valued both self-abnegation and sacrifice as forces for good in the world.12 But this side of Constant was quite irrelevant to Berlin’s purposes; moreover, it would probably have displeased him, since Berlin abhorred perfectibilism13 and subscribed to a type of liberalism that has been described as “agonistic” and anti-teleological.14 The liberal and anti-totalitarian turn came later to France, but when it did, it also led to a renewal of interest in the political writings of Benjamin Constant. Recent studies have described “the intellectual sea change”15 that occurred within the French academic community in the 1970s as intellectuals there abandoned the reigning Marxist paradigm and came to view both communism and revolution as totalitarian. Central to this dramatic shift in French intellectual politics was Franc¸ois Furet’s Penser la R´evolution fran¸caise, which both drew from, and contributed to, the prevailing anti-totalitarian mood.16 Denouncing interpretations of the Revolution that he believed were more commemorative

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University Press, 1998), 60, 117; and Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xiii, 5, 199. For example, Guy Dodge, Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Study in Politics and Religion (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), and, more recently, Todorov, A Passion for Democracy. Helena Rosenblatt, “Commerce et religion dans le lib´eralisme de Benjamin Constant,” Commentaire 102 (Summer 2003), 415–26. Galipeau, Berlin’s Liberalism, 81, 144. John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Mark Lilla, “The Other Velvet Revolution: Continental Liberalism and its Discontents,” Daedalus 123/2 (Spring, 1994), 148. Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: Franc¸ois Furet’s Penser la R´evolution fran¸caise in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s”,

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival

than analytical, Furet highlighted the Revolution’s negative, even pathological, aspects. Deliberately turning away from traditional social history and the question of social causes, he wished to restore to the Revolution what he thought was its “most obvious dimension, the political one.”17 Thus he focused attention on Revolutionary ideology, which he argued was key to understanding the Revolution’s tragic derailment from 1789 to 1794. He determined that this ideology was fundamentally flawed—in its views on democracy and equality and, most importantly, in its belief in “the illusion of politics”18 —the poisonous idea that every problem has a political solution. It was this defective ideology that caused the Terror and, perhaps even more ominously, made the French Revolution a founding moment of a proto-totalitarian French political culture. In his effort to reconceptualize the Revolution, Furet turned to nineteenthcentury historiography and to the many insights offered by nineteenth-century liberals, who had for long been ignored, if not disdained, by Marxists. In particular, Furet appreciated Constant as one of the first to understand the pathology of the Revolution and its proto-totalitarian nature. In Furet’s words, Constant’s “entire political thought” revolved around this question, namely the problem of explaining the Terror.19 Following Furet, other French scholars have taken a renewed interest in Constant, admiring him mainly as a historian, an interpreter and, perhaps above all, a critic of the Revolution. Constant is appreciated as someone who, like Furet himself, understood the revolutionaries’ disastrous over-investment in the political. It has been noted that Furet’s version of the French Revolution reflected his desire to forge a “useable history,”20 one that could explain both his own intellectual trajectory and France’s recent illiberal past. To Furet, studying Revolutionary culture became an opportunity to ponder “the ambiguity of modern democracy,”21 and a way of understanding the democratic malaise of

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French Historical Studies 22/4 (Fall, 1999), 557–611. See also Sunil Khilnani, The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1993). Franc¸ois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 27. On the larger context of this interest in “the political”, see Jeremy Jennings, “The Return of the Political? New French Journals in the History of Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 18/1 (Spring, 1997), 148–56. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 26. Franc¸ois Furet, “La R´evolution sans la Terreur? Le d´ebat des historiens du XIXe si`ecle,” Le D´ebat 13 (June 1981), 41. Steven Kaplan, Farewell Revolution: The Historian’s Feud: France, 1789/1989 (Ithaca, NY/New York: Cornell University Press, 1995). Franc¸ois Furet, “Revolutionary Government,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Mona Ozouf and Franc¸ois Furet, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 558.

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contemporary French political culture. In fact, upon careful reading, one can see that Furet’s interpretation of the Revolution reflected not only his own fears about totalitarianism, but even an ambivalence about the democratic project itself. It has been noted that Furet’s work, like that of several of his disciples and colleagues, is permeated by a kind of “pathological vision of democracy” which often seems to suggest that the aim of modern politics should be to contain rather than to advance democracy.22 It is, first, rather odd for Constant to be admired by people who dislike the Revolution so intensely, since Constant dedicated his life to both defending its achievements and promoting its fundamental aims. The truth is that for most of his life, Constant worried much more about reaction, or a return to the past, than he did about the future. Moreover, and in contrast to many of his recent French admirers, Constant’s thought was certainly more concerned with advancing democracy than it was with containing it. There is, in fact, little ambivalence about democracy in Constant. He admired Rousseau, was a consistent advocate of popular sovereignty, and looked very favorably upon what he hailed as the “march of equality” throughout history. Constant did not worry so much about the so-called “excesses” of democracy as he did about political hypocrisy—the abuse of words and concepts by despots with the aim of masking self-serving and oppressive regimes. Having observed Napoleon at first hand, Constant was concerned principally about the power not of the people, but of those who claimed to be acting in the name of the people. Finally, it is ironic that those who, like Furet, admire Constant also dislike social history so much. As Larry Siedentop argued some time ago, one of the great innovations of French liberals like Constant was their sociological approach to both history and political theory. It was they who first emphasized socio-economic change and invented the concept of a social revolution.23 To enlist Constant in an effort to attack the Revolution, question the viability of democracy, and dismantle social history, hardly makes any sense at all. Nevertheless, it is anxiety about modernity, democracy and totalitarianism that fuels Marcel Gauchet’s interest in Constant, first expressed in a remarkable essay published in 1980. Gauchet has since revealed that his ideas on the Revolution were formed in a generally “pessimistic atmosphere.” In his recent autobiographical reflections, he explains that his first readings on the subject were inspired by the same question that animated Furet, namely that of the relationship between

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Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, “French Democracy between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 76/1 (2004), 107–54. Larry Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 153–74.

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival

democracy and Terror. Gauchet recalls that he learned a good deal about this from Jacob Talmon, whose views on Rousseau, Jacobinism and “totalitarian democracy” had a great “subterranean influence” in France. Like Furet, Gauchet thought that studying the Revolution was crucial since it called attention to “the ambivalent nature of democratic principles” and, more specifically, to “the peril of tyranny potentially inscribed in popular sovereignty.”24 Hence the importance of Constant. Gauchet hails him as “one of the most important and penetrating interpreters of the legacy of the Revolution.”25 Not surprisingly, this legacy is described by Gauchet in predominantly negative terms. He praises Constant for having understood the Revolution’s various failures, problems and even “evil”.26 And much like Furet, Gauchet claims that the “tyrannical derailment of the Revolution” constitutes “the center” of Constant’s thought.27 Explaining his own approach to history and political theory, Gauchet recounts that he “explicitly tries to relate an interrogation of the past with the problems of the present.”28 He describes his intellectual project as essentially “philosophical”: his goal is to understand the present, and he does so by making a “detour through history.”29 Studying the thought of liberals like Benjamin Constant is important to him because it remains so relevant. Gauchet believes that “we find ourselves in a position hardly different”30 and that “Constant’s diagnosis is remarkable for its continuing validity.”31 Constant helps us to understand the various “totalitarian derailments” that followed the French Revolution. But more than that, he enlightens us as to the “devastating contradictions of modernity”32 and “the democratic problem (le mal d´emocratique)”33 itself. Constant’s “remarkable prescience” made him uniquely able to “anticipate intellectually”34 the difficulties modern men face. This is why he can serve as “one of the best guides”35 to our own self-understanding.

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Marcel Gauchet, Condition historique: Entretiens avec Fran¸cois Azouvi et Sylvain Piron (Paris: Stock, 2003), 26, 264. Marcel Gauchet, “Constant,” in Dictionnaire critique de la R´evolution fran¸caise, ed. Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 951. Ibid., 959. Marcel Gauchet, “Benjamin Constant: L’illusion lucide du lib´eralisme,” in Benjamin Constant, Ecrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 28. Gauchet, Condition historique, 8. Ibid., 10. Gauchet, “L’illusion,” 27, and similarly idem, Condition, 266. Gauchet, “L’illusion,” 54, 62. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 26. Ibid.

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Constant seems to have appealed to Gauchet in an almost touchingly personal way. To him, Constant was someone who not only saw the dangers of totalitarianism but who, like Gauchet himself, felt a profound revulsion for the power of the state. Gauchet’s anti-totalitarianism is nurtured by an underlying antistatism, a residue of youthful anarchist sympathies, and a likely result of his early intense interest in the thought of anthropologist Pierre Clastres.36 These personal preoccupations help to explain why Gauchet seems at times to present Constant’s liberalism as a reworking and refinement of essentially pro-anarchist sentiments. Indeed, it appears that Gauchet not only projects his own worries and tastes onto Constant, but even ascribes to Constant his own intellectual trajectory, at one point speculating, for example, that one of Constant’s “authors of reference” on his way to becoming a liberal was Thomas Paine.37 But viewing Constant through an anarchist lens is just as historically incorrect as using an anti-totalitarian one. Etienne Hofmann’s important work on Constant’s early political manuscripts presents a much more accurate picture of his early intellectual development and preoccupations. It convincingly shows that Constant’s route to liberalism had little if anything to do with anarchism. Constant came to liberalism not from youthful anarchist sentiments,38 but from an early sympathy for both democracy and republicanism.39 Once again, Gauchet’s picture of Constant says more about the anti-statist and anti-totalitarian concerns of a certain group of French intellectuals than it does about Constant himself. Stephen Holmes’s work on Constant reflects another intellectual environment entirely. As a politically engaged American scholar living in the United States,

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For Gauchet’s youthful anarchism and interest in Clastres, I am indebted to Samuel Moyn, who generously shared with me his article “Savage and Modern Liberty: Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of New French Thought,” prior to its completion and publication in European Journal of Political Theory 4/2 (Spring, 2005). On Clastres, see also Samuel Moyn, “Of Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 1/1 (2004), 55–80. Gauchet, “L’illusion,” 60. That Gauchet came to liberalism from a prior infatuation with anarchism is the argument of Samuel Moyn. It is true that Constant read Godwin carefully and even went to the trouble of translating him; but Constant’s precise intentions in doing so are far from clear, as are the reasons for his abandonment of the project. But it is likely that Constant’s interest in Godwin had more to do with his optimism about human perfectibility than it did with pessimism about the state. Etienne Hofmann, Les “Principes de politique” de Benjamin Constant: La Gen`ese d’une oeuvre et l’´evolution de la pens´ee de leur auteur (1789–1806), vol. 1 (Geneva: Droz, 1980). Reliable sources on Constant’s early life and intellectual development are also Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin Constant: Une biographie intellectuelle (Geneva: Droz, 1984) and K. Steven Vincent, “Benjamin Constant, the French Revolution, and the Origins of French Romantic Liberalism,” French Historical Studies 23/4 (Fall, 2000), 607–37.

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival

Holmes is quite obviously not concerned with totalitarianism. Nor is he particularly worried about Marxism. He has no sympathy at all for anarchism and, interestingly enough, does not even try to engage the work of French interpreters like Marcel Gauchet. Rather, Holmes’s intellectual project is to defend his own version of democratic, strong-state liberalism against its non-Marxist American critics.40 He criticizes his opposition for being bad historians and for misrepresenting liberalism. It is in an effort to set the record straight that he revives the thought of Benjamin Constant. According to Holmes, it is quite wrong to assume a fundamental contradiction between democratic and liberal values. It is also misleading to depict liberalism as essentially anti-statist. In Holmes’s depiction, Constant emerges as an advocate of efficacious government at the service of liberal and democratic values. For example, Holmes is anxious to argue that Constant was never hostile to the concept of sovereignty itself. In fact, he locates Constant in the tradition of French politique reformers, going so far as to argue that in some ways, Constant was “closer to Voltaire and Turgot”41 than he was to Montesquieu. Moreover, Holmes insists that Constant was never against democracy so much as he was against democratic “pretexts”, “deceitful rhetoric” and “communitarian cant.”42 Here Holmes’s own distaste for modern American communitarians surfaces. Elsewhere Holmes admits that the aim of his book Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984) is quite “philosophical.”43 He believes that reading Constant is useful because “[t]aken seriously, Constant’s insights suggest a major reassessment of the categories that still dominate the debate about liberalism.”44 It is the contemporary debate about liberalism that interests Holmes the most. This is also what leads Holmes to make some misstatements of his own about Constant’s liberalism. An important lesson Holmes wants to impart to his readers is that politics should remain instrumental and not moralizing. He is committed to refuting the notion that a “disbelief in the objectivity of values, or in the knowability of objective values”45 weakens liberalism as a force for good in the world. To this end, he enlists Constant, describing him as a “true skeptic,”46 who lacked moral certainty and yet whose very skepticism nourished “a willingness 40

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Holmes’s political commitments are most evident in his The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), but see also his Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 10. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 7. Ibid.

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to fight”47 for liberal and egalitarian reforms. Once again, this argument about Constant’s supposed skepticism says more about Stephen Holmes’s distrust for contemporary “communitarian cant” than it does about Constant. It is based on a shallow reading of Constant’s religious writings48 and a profound ignorance of his indebtedness to an important tradition of Protestant thought.49 Another modern commentator who dwells on Constant’s supposed “skepticism” is Biancamaria Fontana, although her reasons for doing so are less easy to determine. Calling him not only “a natural sceptic,” but also “essentially pessimistic,”50 she turns Constant into an almost tragic prophet of doom and gloom. Fontana especially appreciates what Constant has to say about the “difficulties of the modern condition.” She likes the way he denounces “the falsity, sufferings and moral impoverishment of the modern age.”51 She admires him for having realized that the progress towards modern democracy is “a long march through a dark and insidious labyrinth,” and for knowing that the journey “would prove more and more adverse as the game went on.”52 To Fontana, Constant’s theories are useful because they are “capable of reminding us of our own unsolved problems, present failings or impending disasters.”53 They strike a chord with all those “who have doubts” about the capacity of political theory to cure society’s problems.54 Such an extraordinarily pessimistic reading of Constant is truly baffling. Once again, it can only be the result of ignoring and/or misreading large portions of Constant’s work, in particular his abundant writings on religion. It seems to betray the influence of an earlier historiographical tradition, one that overemphasized the importance of Constant’s novel Adolphe and erroneously equated Constant with its fictional protagonist. Why such a skeptic and pessimist should dedicate himself to a life of public service is hard to fathom. The point is, once again, that

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Ibid. Holmes gets Constant’s views on religion quite wrong. See Rosenblatt, “Commerce et religion,” 422. Kurt Kloocke is the expert on Constant’s connections with German Protestant thought. Start with “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne: Individualit´e – Religion – Politique,” Annales Benjamin Constant 27 (2003), 127–71, which also contains references to his other writings. See also James Lee, “Benjamin Constant: The Moralization of Modern Liberty” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003). Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), xvi, xvii. Fontana, “Introduction,” in Constant, Political Writings, ed. Fontana, 19. Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind, xiv. Fontana, “Introduction,” in Constant, Political Writings, ed. Fontana, 41. Ibid., 42.

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival

the real, historical Constant was not as gloomy and pessimistic as many of his modern commentators seem to be. In contrast, George Armstrong Kelly, an unusually perceptive reader whose work on Constant has been strangely neglected, noted quite some time ago that Constant was both pragmatic about politics and optimistic about the future. In Kelly’s estimation Constant was actually “an eloquent advocate, but a poor prophet.” He was “wrong on a number of things” and even suffered from a “longrange blindness.”55 It is worth pointing out, for example, that there is very little about poverty, class antagonism or social welfare in Constant’s writings. This lack of prescience is what led Kelly to the realization that “Constant hardly saw or projected the problems of modern liberty in democratic ages.”56 Adopting a more rigorously historical perspective on Constant, one that judged him against thinkers of his own time, Kelly concluded that Constant was positively “Panglossian”57 in his views about the future. How might one account for this very different reading of Constant? Unlike the other scholars surveyed in this essay, Kelly approached Constant from a historical and comparative perspective. He avoided the question of contemporary relevance and restored Constant to his own political and intellectual context. Moreover, Kelly’s personal interest in religion and his interdisciplinary inclinations drew him to investigate the connections between religion and politics in Constant’s thought. Thus he could not help but notice Constant’s unflagging faith in progress and human “perfectibility” at a time when many Frenchmen were not so optimistic. Kelly determined that Constant’s real contribution to political theory lay not in any prophetic abilities regarding the “excesses” or problems of modern democracy, but rather in his innovative attempt to “spiritualiz[e] liberalism.”58 Kelly invited people to pay some attention to the interaction of religion and politics in Constant’s thought, a suggestion that has yet to be followed.59 Indeed, the other scholars reviewed in this essay ignored this side of Constant altogether, leaving us with a picture of Constant that is both dark and distorted.60 In the

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George Armstrong Kelly, “Constant Commotion: Avatars of a Pure Liberal,” Journal of Modern History 54/3 (Sept, 1982), 517. George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 46. Kelly, “Constant Commotion,” 517. Ibid., 516. But see Etienne Hofmann, “Histoire, politique et religion: Essai d’articulation de trois composantes de l’oeuvre et de la pens´ee de Benjamin Constant,” Historical Reflections 28/3 (Fall, 2002), 397–418. Also an important step in the right direction is Lee, “Benjamin Constant,” but more work needs to be done. Guy Dodge is an exception to the rule, but his treatment is disappointingly short and does not live up to his book’s title.

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case of French scholars like Gauchet and Manent, the neglect of religion is all the more remarkable given the importance attributed to religion in their own theoretical writings.61 It is a matter of some consequence that early nineteenth-century France witnessed not a decline in religious belief, or a popular “disenchantment”, but rather a strong religious revival. Constant was, of course, not the only liberal of his time to notice this. In fact, the relationship between religion and politics became a pressing issue to theorists across the political spectrum. Reacting to the devastation suffered by the Church during the Revolution, and profoundly troubled by the egoism, materialism and social fragmentation they observed all around them, many Frenchmen on the left as well as the right worried that their country was in the midst of a spiritual crisis. Some placed their hopes in a “new Christianity” that would morally regenerate and stabilize France.62 On all sides there were calls for a “unifying doctrine” that would put an end to a spiritual and intellectual “anarchy” that was deemed corrosive to social order.63 It is in this context that one should consider Constant’s religious writings, including his five-volume treatise De la religion consid´er´ee dans sa source, ses formes et ses d´eveloppements (1824–31). It is noteworthy that Constant himself regarded this as his most important undertaking and achievement. In it he addressed the religious and political concerns of nineteenth-century Frenchmen and wrote optimistically about the power of unobstructed “religious sentiment” to save France. Irreligion favors despotism, he argued, while “religious sentiment” nourishes and lends support to liberty. It does this by pulling self-interested and often apathetic individuals out of themselves, and by combating their selfishness. “Liberty,” Constant noted, “cannot be established and cannot be preserved without disinterestedness.”64

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In his The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 213 n. 21, Marcel Gauchet calls De la religion “[o]ne of the best books on the subject and undeservedly forgotten,” but he treats it dismissively as only a contribution to the history of religion and not as an integral part of Constant’s liberalism. See also Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), whose chapter on Constant overemphasizes his “skepticism”. Edward Berenson, “A New Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Radicalism in France, 1815–1848,” in The French Revolution and the Transformation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 3, ed. Franc¸ois and Mona Ozouf (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989). I explore this question further in my “Re-evaluating Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism: Industrialism, Saint-Simonianism and the Restoration Years,” History of European Ideas 30 (2004), 23–37. Benjamin Constant, De la religion consid´er´ee dans sa source, ses formes et ses d´eveloppements, ed. Etienne Hofmann and Tzvetan Todorov (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), 62.

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival

Religious sentiment was to Constant a natural and indestructible human emotion present in all varieties of religion. It was this religious sentiment, and not its mere historical “forms”, that did the crucial work of moralizing individuals, thus sustaining liberty. Moreover, history proved that religion, through a natural dynamic, took on progressively more enlightened forms over time. Christianity itself was a “perfectible” religion, and should be left free to evolve unhindered. Thus Constant insisted not only that a free society needed religion to prosper, but that religion itself, if it was to play its positive and designated role in history, needed freedom too. Politicians and intellectuals therefore should stop worrying about intellectual “anarchy” and spiritual disorder and just “let religion be.”65 The proliferation of sects was a healthy impetus to moral improvement, redounding to both the individual’s and society’s benefit. Once again, Constant’s message was a fundamentally optimistic one: the key to the spiritual and moral “crisis” France was facing was more, not less, freedom. These more affirmative aspects of Constant’s liberalism need to find their rightful place in the literature. Recent signs indicate that scholarship is moving in the right direction. Overturning the negativity of previous approaches to Constant, Tzvetan Todorov’s short but insightful book emphasizes those aspects of Constant’s work that are nourishing rather than critical of democracy. Todorov hails Constant as both a “humanist” and “the first great thinker of liberal democracy.”66 Interestingly, Todorov’s autobiographical reflections reveal a personal history that is in some ways similar to that of other prominent admirers of Constant. A Bulgarian by birth and upbringing, Todorov recounts that his own vision of the world “was structured by the experience of totalitarianism” and a concomitant loss of faith in Marxism.67 Moreover, like the others, Todorov would not define himself as an intellectual historian. His methodology does not involve a reconstruction of Constant’s historical context. Rather, Todorov tries to engage in what he calls a “dialogical history of thought,”68 which draws on the “veritable sympathy” and “almost personal attachment”69 he feels for Constant. Todorov hopes that by simply reading Constant “attentively,” he will not misinterpret him.70 Although the result has a very personal flavor, Todorov does arrive at a more positive and constructive reading of Constant. He accomplishes this

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For example, “Du d´eveloppement progressif des id´ees religieuses,” in Constant, Ecrits politiques, ed. Gauchet, 653. Todorov, A Passion for Democracy, 83, 85. Tzvetan Todorov, Devoirs et d´elices: Une vie de passeur. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 347. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 232.

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by taking a broader interest in Constant both as a person and as a theorist. Perhaps most importantly, Todorov is sensitive to what he identifies as Constant’s “spiritual aspirations.”71 In fact, Todorov has recently collaborated with Etienne Hofmann in bringing out a new edition of Constant’s De la religion, which Todorov celebrates in his preface as a “forgotten masterpiece.”72 Finally, the work of Lucien Jaume is shedding light on Constant’s more positive contributions to social, political and constitutional thought. Of all recent French theorists, Jaume also comes the closest to adopting a truly historical and contextual approach to Constant. In the introduction to his L’Individu effac´e, ou, Le paradoxe du lib´eralisme, Jaume acknowledges his debt to the work of Furet, respectfully paying tribute to “the irreplaceable master.” This intellectual affinity helps to explain why Jaume’s book has an essentially negative point. Jaume wishes to call attention to the illiberalism of French liberalism and hence its ultimate failure. In doing so, however, he uses Constant as an effective foil. Jaume shows that in contrast to French liberalism, which retained a fundamentally statist orientation, Constant’s variety, much like Mme de Sta¨el’s, was more individualistic, reflecting its Protestant and Swiss milieu.73 Jaume’s approach and interests have thus helped to call attention to the important contributions to liberalism of the “Coppet group,” the friends and collaborators of Mme de Sta¨el, who met at her father’s chateau near Geneva. He has also shown interest in Constant’s legal and constitutional thought, a relatively under-explored but important field.74 Perhaps most significantly, Jaume’s work as a whole suggests that there is much of positive and constructive value in Constant’s thought, something that bodes well not only for Constant scholarship, but perhaps even for contemporary French political theory. It has been noted that, in France, intellectual history as a discipline is still “in the process of construction.”75 Recent Constant scholarship certainly bears this assessment out. In the main, this field has been the province of political theorists

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T. Todorov, “Un chef-d’oeuvre oubli´e,” in Constant, De la religion, ed. Hofmann and Todorov, 18. Ibid. On Constant’s individualism, see the important remarks of Gerald Izenberg, “Reconciling Individuality and Individualism in European Liberalism,” Intellectual History Newsletter 24 (2002), 23–37, and Hoffman, “Histoire, politique et religion,” 413–18. See, for example, Coppet, creuset de l’esprit lib´eral: Les id´ees politiques et constitutionnelles du groupe de Mme de Sta¨el, ed. Lucien Jaume (Paris: Economica, 1999); Lucien Jaume, “Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant,” Commentaire 22/87 (Fall, 1999), and idem,“Le concept de responsabilit´e des ministres chez Benjamin Constant,” Revue fran¸caise de droit constitutionel 42 (2000). Olivier Mangin, Face au scepticisme (1976–1993): Les mutations du paysage intellectuel, ou l’invention de l’intellectuel d´emocratique (Paris: La D´ecouverte, 1994), 55.

why constant? a critical overview of the constant revival

who have treated Constant more as an analytical tool for their own polemical purposes than as a historical subject in his own right. Moreover, these admirers of Constant suffer from anxieties about modernity and democracy, producing work that tends to be more diagnostic and pessimistic than constructive or promotional. This helps to explain why Constant, although he has certainly benefited from the French “return to politics,” has also suffered from a skewed and partial reading. It can only be hoped that new discussions of methodology, already under way in France,76 will lead to broader and more nuanced treatments. Then perhaps scholars will have a fresh reason to read Constant—they will read him to gain insights into his thought and his world, and not just to see a rather sad reflection of their own. Present-day theorists need not fear that recovering the historical Constant will somehow diminish his relevance. In fact, I believe the opposite to be true. Others before me have argued convincingly that restoring a thinker to his own context and rhetorical circumstances will actually enhance rather than diminish his present usefulness.77 It does this by enriching the quality of the dialogue we can have with him or her and also by sensitizing us to the broad range of arguments and choices available to us at any given time. More to the point, the careful reconstruction of a world that is in fact quite foreign to us allows us to gain a better perspective on our own. There is indeed much for us to learn from Constant, but we should begin by approaching him in the context of his own times.

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Perhaps Rosanvallon’s “Towards a Philosophical History of the Political” in The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. Dario Castiglione and Iain HampsherMonk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) will provoke further debate and clarification about the right relationship between the present and the study of the past. See, in particular, Quentin Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Meaning & Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), esp. 286–8, and Peter Janssen, “Political Thought as Traditionary Action: The Critical Response to Skinner and Pocock,” History and Theory 24 (1985), 115–46.

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