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and a largely consistent one.
. He wrote in his journal: “As regards ‘law and order’ in London, there is an idea
that the lawless and disorderly party have got the worst of it for the present, and
know it; nor can I learn from any one whose opinion I regard that the problem
of ‘distress of unemployed’ is really formidable at present; but there is an uneasy
feeling that it may soon become so, and that ‘something must be done’ – something,
I suppose, in the direction of recognising the ‘Right to Labour,’ or rather the right to get wages. I have always thought myself that our system of poor relief required
development in this direction” (M –).
. Again, contrast the accounts in Collini, Kloppenberg, and Harvie, cited in previous notes.
. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” in Whitman: Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, ), pp. –.
. Quoted in Elshtain, Jane Addams, p. .
. Again, the best recent treatment of Mill on India is Zastoupil’s John Stuart Mill and India, though Eric Stokes’s The English Utilitarians and India is virtually a classic on the subject.
. Rothblatt, Revolution, p. . Shannon, in The Crisis of Imperialism, –
(London: Paladin Books, ), also observes that “Jowett at Oxford and Seeley
at Cambridge thought in terms of a very deliberate and calculated teaching pro-
gramme to prepare an intelligent ruling class for the tasks of government. Theirs
was an educational theory of legitimacy and morality, merit and service, just as
Gladstone’s politics was a public theory of the same” (p. ).
. See his Introduction to Seeley’s The Growth of British Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. xii–xiii.
. Ibid., pp. xiv–xv.
. Ibid., p. xx.
. Quoted in Sir John Seeley, Introduction to Political Science, ed. H. Sidgwick, (London: Macmillan, ), pp. v–vi.
. Ibid., pp. x–xi.
. Of course, not everyone was impressed with this approach, and Sidgwick had his
usual reservations; Maitland wrote to H. A. L. Fisher about “a discussion with
Sidgwick in which I endeavoured to convince him that ‘inductive political science’
is rubbish, and I had far more success than I expected.” See The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, ed. C. H. S. Fifoot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
), p. . Contrast Browning, Memories of Sixty Years, p. .
. Seeley, Introduction, pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
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. Ibid., pp. –.
. Sidgwick was one of the electors; see George Feaver, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Sumner Maine, – (London: Longmans, ),
pp. –.
. Indeed, Sidgwick never tired of citing Maine on the historical development of
land tenure.
. Maine, Popular Government, p. .
. Shannon, Crisis, p. .
. Seeley, Expansion, p. .
. Which is to say, it is rather worse than the “enabling violations” described by
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. . Spivak’s work has surprisingly little
to say about the utilitarian side of philosophical reason as a subject for her critique.
. Seeley, Expansion, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Again, the brutal ongoing reality of British imperialism at this time is better
depicted in such works as Kiernan’s Lords of Humankind.
. Woodcock, Who Killed the British Empire? An Inquest (London: Jonathan Cape,
), p. .
. Ensor, England, p. .
. Shannon, Crisis, p. .
. Quoted in Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, ), p. .
. Quoted in Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, ), pp. –.
. It was in some ways already behind the times, given how Canada and other parts
of the empire had come to regard dominion status as a step toward self-sufficiency
rather than confederation within some grand imperial parliament. Still, as Ensor
records, the League “formed the chief nursery of imperialist thought at this early
stage. W. E. Forster had been its first head; Lord Rosebery, W. H. Smith, Froude,
J. R. Seeley, and James Bryce were among its supporters; and it enrolled some
of the best-known colonial statesmen. But its members could never agree on a
positive policy; and in it broke up” (p. ).
. These are the words of a descendant, Humphrey Trevelyan, in The India We Left (London: Macmillan, ), p. . Sidgwick admired his friend’s book Cawnpore
(M ), a work betraying considerable racial prejudice.
. The original of this letter (which is reproduced in CWC) is in the Lytton Papers, Knebworth House Collection, Hertfordshire Record Office.
. For example, Peter Singer. See his recent One World, a work that also makes an interesting concession to Sidgwick’s case for esoteric morality: “If it is true that
advocating a highly demanding morality will lead to worse consequences than
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advocating a less demanding morality, then indeed we ought to advocate a less
demanding morality. We could do this, while still knowing that, at the level of
critical thinking, impartialism is sound” (p. ). This is indeed a more truly
Sidgwickian perspective than that of Singer’s previous works.
. In H. A. L. Fisher, F. W. Maitland: A Biographical Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.
. By “State” Sidgwick generally means “a political society or community; i.e. a
body of human beings deriving its corporate unity from the fact that its members
acknowledge permanent obedience to the same government, which represents the
society in any transactions that it may carry on as a body with other political soci-
eties. And I shall assume this government to be independent, in the sense that it is
not in habitual obedience to any foreign individual or body or to the government
of a larger whole” (EP ). He also assumes a certain “degree of civilisation”
and “supreme dominion over a particular portion of the earth’s surface.” Inter-
estingly, agai
nst the identification of “State” with “Nation,” “attempts to give
definiteness to the implications of this latter term are liable to obscure its real
meaning: since I can find no particular bond of union among those that chiefly
contribute to the internal cohesion of a strongly-united society – belief in a com-
mon origin, possession of a common language and literature, pride in common
historic traditions, community of social customs, community of religion – which
is really essential to our conception of a Nation-State” (p. ).
. National and International Right and Wrong, eds. J. Bryce and E. M. Sidgwick (London: George Allen and Unwin, ), pp. –.
. E. M. Sidgwick, The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects (London: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
. Singer, in One World, ingeniously uses this very passage to turn the tables on Williams, challenging the latter’s critique of Sidgwick’s indirect utilitarianism
(see Chapter ). Although many of the narrower attachments that Sidgwick listed
are justifiable on impartial grounds – and would have been seen as such even by
Bentham and William Godwin – taking “an impartial perspective shows that par-
tialism along racial lines is something that we can and should oppose, because our
opposition can be effective in preventing great harm to innocent people. . . . Thus we can turn Williams’ aphorism against him: philosophers who take his view have
one thought too few. To be sure, to think always as a philosopher would mean that, in our roles as parent, spouse, lover and friend, we would indeed have one
thought too many. But if we are philosophers, there should be times when we reflect critically on our intuitions – indeed not only philosophers, but all thoughtful people, should do this” (p. ).
. On this, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
. This review originally appeared in the Spectator (November ).
. See Shannon, Crisis, p. .
. Bryce, American Commonwealth, p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
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. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. The chief thesis of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. See also Orientalism: A Reader, ed. A. L. Macfie (New York: New York University Press, ), for an excellent overview of the issues. To my mind , the evident racism of such figures
as Bryce, Pearson, Seeley, Rashdall, Sidgwick, and so many others powerfully
supports Said’s basic thesis.
. Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press,
), pp. –.
. Unfortunately, I have been unable to determine precisely which article Sidgwick
sent Bryce.
. On this, see Georgios Varouxakis, Mill on Nationality, especially Chapter , and his contributions to Classical Utilitarianism and the Question of Race, ed. Schultz and Varouxakis.
. See Chapter ; that the familial cotton interests did so as well might seem a
plausible suspicion, if it were anyone other than Sidgwick.
. Interestingly, he always seems to use the word with reference to blacks, never
in the larger (and at the time common) sense as applying to all people of color.
For a cogent exploration of the history of the “n word,” see Randall Kennedy,
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon Books,
). For a broader historical perspective, see George M. Frederickson Racism:
A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).
. Whitman himself wrote, “As if we had not strained the voting and digestive calibre of American Democracy to the utmost for the last fifty years with the millions of
ignorant foreigners, we have now infused a powerful percentage of blacks, with
about as much intellect and calibre (in the mass) as so many baboons” (Reynolds,
Whitman, p. ). Apparently his notion of sympathetic comradeship really was quite Greek.
. Symonds, Papers, pp. –. To be sure, there were many, many possible sources for Sidgwick’s racist pronouncements, including even Kant. As Robert Bernasconi
has pointed out, “Kant saw race mixing as leading to a degradation or pollution of
whites, as loss of some of their talents and dispositions” (“Kant as an Unfamiliar
Source of Racism,” in Philosophers on Race, eds. J. K. Ward and T. L. Lott [Oxford: Blackwell, ] p. ). And this is not to mention the infamous Carlyle–Mill
exchange, “On the Nigger Question,” for a trenchant account of which see David
Theo Golderg, “Liberalism’s Limits,” in Philosophers on Race, pp. –.
. In fact, as Hobsbawm has observed, “the pressure to ban coloured immigrants,
which established the ‘White California’ and ‘White Australia’ policies be-
tween s and , came primarily from the working class, and Lancashire
unions joined with Lancashire cotton-masters to insist that India must remain
deindustrialized. Internationally, socialism before remained overwhelm-
ingly a movement of Europeans and white emigrants or their descendants”
( Age of Empire, p. ).
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. Pearson, Character, pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Harvie, Lights, p. .
. Pearson, Character, pp. –.
. Charles Henry Pearson: Memorials by Himself, His Wife, and His Friends, ed.
William Stebbing (London: Longmans, Green, ), p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Sidgwick to Pearson, Feb. , , Bodleian MS.Eng.Lett.d.,.
. Bryce, American Commonwealth, p. .
. Included in The Mind of Arthur James Balfour, ed. Wilfrid Short (New York: George H. Doran, ), p. . Bryce would also go on to give an inaugural talk
for the new Eugenics Society.
. Ibid.
. These paragraphs are highly indebted to Young, Arthur James Balfour, especially pp. –.
. Young, Balfour, p. .
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. The essay as reprinted in MEA was unchanged from
its original published ver-
sion, in The National Review (December ), pp. –. For some fur-
ther remarks on the significance of this piece, see my “The Methods of J. B.
Schneewind,” with the “Response” by Schneewind. Clearly, Sidgwick, for his
part, regarded Pearson’s work as philosophically and epistemologically loaded,
much to the discomfort of his later scholarly commentators.
. Indeed, they clearly did not – see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, and Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology (New York: HarperCollins, ).
. Bryce, “Relations” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –, p. .
. Bryce, American Commonwealth, p. .
. Dicey to Bryce, Bryce MSS, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
. See the correspondence concerning this contained in the Sidgwick Papers, Wren
Library, Add.Ms.c... Leslie Stephen also found nothing to which to object,
and Dicey in fact praised the book as the only kind of historical work worth doing.
Chapter . Last Words?
. Quoted in Jones, Victorian Political Thought, p. x.
. Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind, pp. –. Kiernan’s work is an antidote to such nostalgic visions of empire as Cannadine’s Ornamentalism.
. Rayleigh, “Some Recollections of Henry Sidgwick.”
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. Ibid. Indeed, Sidgwick was apt to say that since he had no “physical” courage, he
hoped he at least had “moral” courage.
. T. O. Lloyd, The British Empire, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), p. .
. James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa (New York: Century, ), p. . The first edition of this work appeared in , and Sidgwick must have known it.
. Another tragic upshot of such notions came when Prime Minister Balfour coun-
tenanced Milner’s schemes for the importation of Chinese laborers to work the