Helen Small

Liberal Editing in the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century

The Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century have strong claims to be considered the two journals which did most to provide the late Victorian intelligentsia with open forums for debate on science, literature, politics and religion. The Fortnightly enshrined independence from party affiliation and church doctrine in its 1865 prospectus, though almost all of those writing for it shared a commitment to the new historical method and to Millian rationalism. By the early 1870s, however, the journal had come to be seen as the unofficial organ of radical liberal thought and, somewhat to its editor John Morley’s frustration, of Comtean Positivism. The Nineteenth Century, founded in 1877 by James Thomas Knowles after a provocative editorship of the Contemporary Review, quickly challenged the Fortnightly’s claim to be the most intellectually progressive organ of the day. Like its rival, the Nineteenth Century espoused ‘the natural emergence of truth by free expression and interplay of as many points of view as possible’ (Hamer, 1968, pp. 73–4), but, while clearly Liberal on party political matters, it carefully avoided the other journal’s increasingly pervasive party bias and soon secured a much wider audience.

Argument as Conflict: Then and Now

Where once literary critics and historians of Victorian culture tended to be at pains to distance themselves from Victorian values (the moralism, the imperialism in matters of thought as well as politics, the belief in the value and virtue of objectivity), current criticism is often readier to acknowledge positive debts. The passage above, taken from Amanda Anderson’s The Way We Argue Now (2006) is among the most striking recent examples. For Anderson, the Victorians were ‘modern’ before their time: ‘early antifoundationalists’, as it were, but with the important difference from today’s antifoundationalists that they understood the commitment to rationalism as having a desirable characterological dimension for its practitioners. Mill is an especially influential antecedent in this regard because, as Anderson puts it elsewhere, he was dedicated to ‘detached evaluation’ of ‘embedded modes of existence’, but nevertheless remained ‘aware of the importance of custom, tradition, and ingrained sentiment’.2 In this renewed respect for Mill, Anderson’s book has close affinities with another recent work, if anything more positive in its identification with certain aspects of his moral and political thought: the philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (2005). Like Anderson, Appiah finds in Mill an influential precursor — not quite a model, but a formative historical voice, and now a positive help to our thinking about how far the politics of identity may or may not be reconcilable with liberal universalism. ‘In so far as this book has a totem’, Appiah acknowledges, ‘it is, of course, John Stuart Mill’.3

Does Self-Identity Persist Into Old Age?

This chapter considers the main areas of philosophical dispute bearing on the question of whether, and how, self-identity persists into old age. The author treats the salient aspects of larger debates about whether bodily continuity should be a criterion for self-identity, about the durability or otherwise of character, about possible definitional limits on how far self-identity can persist over the long duree, and the about whether there may be, as Strawson suggests, differences of ‘“existential” style’ affecting how individuals experience, and think about, the ontic depth of the self. The primary political and psychological significance of such arguments about identity persistence is seen to lie in how we apply the available criteria for personal and self-identity as we move between third- and first-person accounts of the self. There is, it is argued, a gap here in the philosophical literature, and in our public discourse – most starkly evident in responses to cases of serious cognitive impairment.