Gareth Stedman Jones

Empire and imperialism

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

Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

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

Visions of stateless society

To be GOVERNED is to be kept in view, inspected, spied upon, directed, legislated, regulated, prosecuted, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by those who do not have the right, the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so . . . To be GOVERNED is to be at each operation, at each transaction, at each movement, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, annotated, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be reprimanded, fined, run down, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, condemned, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed: and, to top it all off, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government: that is its justice: that is its morality! (Proudhon 1923b, p. 344)

From Jeremy Bentham's radical philosophy to J. S. Mill's philosophic radicalism

The object of this essay is to explore the main philosophical features of Jeremy Benthams (1748–1832) radical thought and to identify those aspects which were later accepted or rejected by John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in his conception of philosophic radicalism. It is a study in the development and transmission of a set of ideas that helped to define the nature of philosophy and its application to politics in Britain and elsewhere in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It was believed and argued that truth in numerous fields, from politics to logic, possessed great utility (see Mill 1974, CWM , vii , pp. 11–12). The enhancement of understanding could lead to the relief of human suffering and the advancement of happiness. It would be wrong to see these fundamental beliefs as simply a development of a universal rationalism associated with the Enlightenment. Although Mill could write that ‘if there were but one rational being in the universe, that being might be a perfect logician’ (Mill 1974, CWM , vii , p. 6), neither Bentham nor Mill expected everyone to philosophise or seek the truth. But the recognition of the utility of truth led to a new kind of politics, theoretically open to all and inspired by a philosophical concern for truth, which dared, however gradually, to transform the lives of everyone. This transformation was to be achieved through a critical vision of society, released from oppression and ignorance to find security and happiness in new laws, institutions and practices.

The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism

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

Counter-revolutionary thought

This chapter begins with a discussion on counter-revolutionary writing with Jacques Mallet du Pan. Like Rousseau, Mallet du Pan approached the politics of the rest of the world primarily through the peculiar prism of Geneva. Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre shared the belief that Protestantism had sown the seeds of a fatal individualism whose logical consequence was the disorder of revolution. Bonalds writing on women demonstrates that for all his insistence on absolute power, his real conception of power was as something fragile. The theme of balance played itself out in a different way in the German followers of Burke. For these Burkean counter-revolutionaries, balance was the answer to political security. The chapter then discusses two errors that haunted counter-revolutionary thought: the doctrine of popular sovereignty and the idea of the social contract. It also examines the writings of Pierre-Simon Ballanche in which counter-revolutionary thought made the surprising transition from right to left.

German liberalism in the nineteenth century

Conventionally German liberalism is held to be one of the main reasons why Germany in the nineteenth century never managed to break the fetters of an authoritarian political system and why it eventually came to be the breeding ground for extremist movements on the right, notably radical nationalism and finally National Socialism. The history of German liberalism has always been seen as an aspect of the so-called German Sonderweg , a departure from the path towards modernity and liberal government which had succeeded elsewhere in Western Europe. In this approach, the failure of liberalism to impress German society with its values was considered a key factor. Recent research has shown, however, that this was at best a partial view. First, the parallels in the development of German and British liberalism are considerable. Secondly, the achievements and the failures of German liberalism ought to be compared with those of other European countries, notably Italy, Austria and Hungary. Such a comparison produces a far more diversified picture of German and European liberalism (Langewiesche 1988b).