13

AFTER SENTIMENTALISM

Liberalism and the Discontents of Modern Autonomy

Two major problems now begin to emerge, both of acute concern for the Romantics and, uniquely so, for the later Coleridge. First, it is apparent that, far from being an ontology and “source” of meaning, reason by the late eighteenth century is separating from the interiorist framework that, since St. Augustine, had revolved around a rich pallet of human intentionality that includes notions of will, deliberation, judgment, choice, and so on. Instead, by the late eighteenth century reason tends to be conceived as a type of sublimated socialization (in Adam Smith) or as the adventitious, self-organizing logic of a System (in Hegel). In the wake of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Anglo-Scottish liberalism thus tends to conceive of reason descriptively—viz., by offering various (quasi-sociological) accounts of our complex, impersonal, and economically driven behavior. No longer does the concept of reason exercise a normative function by inducing individuals to dialectically engage and jointly articulate the imperfect rationality of prevailing socioeconomic and cultural practices. Instead, liberalism considers assent to its meliorist narrative and procedural objectives to be purely voluntary and contingent, even as that narrative promises to remedy the self’s ephemeral passions and asocial desires. Second, even as the irrational passions that (beginning with Hobbes) had displaced the metaphysical idea of the will are said to be gradually transmuted into rational self-interest by the superego of the modern marketplace, the resulting “element of reflection and calculation” can only ever be concerned with means.1 Classical liberalism tends to merge the idea of the logos with the operation of a strictly interested “understanding” intent on securing those means most apt to help it secure its limited objectives.

As a result, the intellectual and spiritual curiosity of individuals and societies appears to atrophy to the point that questions concerning ends are themselves marginalized as eccentric and more or less irrational. This sets the pattern for nineteenth-century religious culture, characterized by a notably subjective and emotivist (anti-doctrinal) turn in religious practice and theology alike, and by the consequent rise of modern denominationalism that leaves religion little more than a reflex of various socioeconomic mentalités or, more feebly yet, as a cult(ure) of mere “opinion” or “private judgment” (as John Henry Newman was to diagnose it in 1841).2 By the end of the eighteenth century, the shift here summarized leads F. W. J. Schelling, and many of his Romantic contemporaries to express dismay at the chasm between an understanding profoundly transformed by the methodological and scientific advances of the last century, and a model of reason proportionately impoverished. As Coleridge puts it so eloquently, “whatever is achievable by the UNDERSTANDING for the purposes of worldly interest, private or public, has in the present age been pursued with an activity and a success beyond all former experience . . . But likewise it is, and long has been, my conviction, that in no age . . . have the Truths, Interests, and Studies that especially belong to THE REASON, contemplative or practical, sunk into such utter neglect, not to say contempt, as during the last century” (AR, 8). In this chapter, then, we will give some consideration to how these shifts manifest themselves in the understanding of rights, action, and freedom—three conceptions central to the modern subject’s self-image and yet, paradoxically, rendered incoherent by the ways in which the liberal-secular nation-state tends to deploy them.

As we saw, the passions in Hume’s account appear bereft of any discernible content and as such are destined to expire almost instantaneously because they can only ever occur in, but never (as distinct qualia) register for, consciousness. In response, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests that the passions may yet be sublated into more focused and communicable interests, provided one is prepared to endorse the behaviorist axioms and conclusions of Smith’s moral and economic psychology. Even then, however, a lacuna opens up that goes largely unnoticed by Albert Hirschman and other intellectual historians who have so persuasively traced modern liberalism to the great economic and financial transformations of the early eighteenth century. Seen as so much combustible material in need of being channeled toward identifiable and socially beneficial ends, the modern individual’s discontinuous and opaque passions are regarded as (at best) a kind of motivational fuel for a narrative of “improvement” that, though shrewdly calculative about means, is alarmingly inarticulate about ends. It is only under the purview of probabilistic and statistical systems of explanation that the self can be credited with rationality since on its own it is but a random empirical singularity unwittingly actuated by literally mindless efficient causes or motives. The incommunicable person of the Augustinian and Thomist tradition has morphed into a free-floating particular begging to be sublated into a philosophical, sociological, or statistical calculus.3 The concurrent expulsion, not only of reflexivity from the modern individual but of wisdom as a legitimate topic from philosophy itself, thus shines through in utilitarian thought (where one naturally expects to find it), yet also in philosophies as disparate as the nationalist and protectionist writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy, and the early economic manuscripts of Marx. The same axiom even informs thinkers overtly critical of utilitarian thought, though in their own ways just as committed to the Enlightenment’s naturalist epistemology and to a technocratic rehabilitation of the will such as it is attempted in the educational and moral philosophy of Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Andrew Bell, Jeremy Bentham, and even the late Kant. All share a fundamental commitment to disciplining the will by means of a procedure that, much later, Jacques Lacan was to call “introjection.”

A diagnostician of rare powers, Alexis de Tocqueville is among the first to recognize the insidious ways in which action is being supplanted by behavior, articulacy about ends by sheer cleverness about means, and independence of thought by petit-bourgeois moral conformism. It is none other than the sovereign power of modern democracy that

extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, [but] it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals.4

What so troubles de Tocqueville about the “administrative despotism” of the modern liberal nation-state is how its procedural logic encourages the cultivation of a myopic, adaptive (not to say opportunistic), and necessarily short-sighted intelligence at the expense of premodern reason. Naturally, one finds it “difficult to imagine how men who have entirely given up the habit of directing themselves, could succeed in choosing well those who should lead them.”5 Though importantly balanced by a more positive assessment of American-style democracy elsewhere in his magnum opus, Tocqueville’s observations here highlight a dilemma that we have had occasion to examine up close. Ultimately sharing the same neo-Stoic framework, the emerging social utopias of the late Enlightenment (Smith, Kant, Comte) all effectively concede the Hobbesian (originally nominalist) premise of the will as the terminally inarticulate and non-transcendable “ground” of all human agency. No longer, then, is “ground” to be understood as Platonic ratio but, rather, as unreflected, efficient causation. It is but a hypothesis on the order of Kant’s “as-if” (e.g., in his account of teleological reason) or, more mystically, as the primordially “groundless” (Ungrund) in Schelling’s account of freedom.6 With the exception of the Cambridge Platonists and Shaftesbury, and possibly Kant, who late in the century seeks to offer a more nuanced appraisal of the voluntarist legacy, the Enlightenment’s attempted rehabilitation of the will by means of sociological and behaviorist “engineering” does not seek (indeed cannot even wish) to contest voluntarism’s complex legacy. Rather, if only in somewhat jaundiced manner, the Enlightenment identifies a (supposedly non-cognitive) model of the will as the point of departure for its remedial interventions.

The internal complexity of the premodern will—as variously conceived by Aristotelian, Stoic, neo-Platonist, Augustinian, and Thomist traditions of inquiry—appears increasingly alien and illegible to thinkers too deeply implicated in some self-certifying narrative of modernity to do anything but mimic the modern will’s performative self-origination.7 The result is a condition of pervasive conceptual amnesia that continues to haunt modern liberalism to this day. While liberalism has long proven a diffuse conception, its resistance to conceptual explicitness and lack of intellectual coherence is less an accident than a logical consequence of its avowed emergentist logic and pluralist ethic. Still, the present concern is less with offering yet another definition of liberalism than with illustrating how its objectives appear to have been shaped by a persistent struggle with Ockham’s and Hobbes’s legacy of nominalism and voluntarism. While that legacy has variously been ignored or minimized by staunch adherents of modern liberalism, its underlying conception of human nature as self-interested, hedonistic, and unreflective has been subjected to withering critiques by two schools of thought making their appearance almost at the same time: conservatism and pessimism. This is not the place for a detailed account of the ways in which modern liberalism’s naturalist epistemology is unwittingly replicated by some of its most vociferous critics, such as in the pessimistic anthropology of Burke, Schopenhauer, Joseph de Maistre, Hugues-Felicité Robert de Lamennais, Hippolyte Taine, and Thomas Carlyle, among others. We can only attempt to sketch the growing tension, after 1800, between a meliorist, a utopian, and a pessimist conception of agency.

As we have seen, the central dilemma confronted by the liberal critics of Hobbesian voluntarism was how—without contesting his basic model of human agency—one might yet imagine a type of civil association premised on rational consensus rather than on legally sanctioned and state-administered force. Might there yet be a way to cultivate individual and compulsively self-seeking agents in spite of their very nature, that is, not simply to contain but, in effect, transform the irrational, compulsive, and inarticulate subject of modern voluntarism? In the event, the Enlightenment’s principal response to that challenge—viz., Anglo-Scottish political economy, the twin cultures of sentimentalism and “improvement,” as well as the neo-Stoic, millenarian, utilitarian, and cosmopolitan utopias of Rousseau, Priestley, Blake, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, and Kant—fail to meet that challenge for a variety of reasons. At least in part, these conceptions had to fail simply because of their inability or outright refusal to credit human agency with a capacity for sustained and evolving introspection. That is, a skeptic like Hume, associationists such as Hartley and Godwin, and social constructionists such as Bentham, Saint-Simon, or Comte fundamentally share the same argumentative stance of no longer engaging (nor indeed betraying any wish to engage) any alternate model of rationality. The one that most obviously would have suggested itself—the teleological model first formulated by Aristotle and, by way of an intricate genealogy, migrating into thirteenth-century Thomism—would have shown that it was by no means inevitable, indeed ultimately not even justifiable, to conceive the will as the antagonist of reason. For to take that view meant de-potentiating personhood to a mere heuristic punctum, an interchangeable, generic “self” devoid of all essence and reduced to an indifferent variable, a mere bearer of claim rights exclusively actuated by inscrutable compulsions and desires.

Smith’s paean to a “moderated sensibility” and a mimetically derived “sense of propriety” and “self-command” (TMS, 143, 146) is echoed a generation later in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet, in a significant radicalization of classical liberalism, Paine now short-circuits the entire neo-Stoic regimen of mimetic self-examination that defines Smith’s “impartial spectator.” Instead, Paine simply asserts the equivalence, and hence the de facto indifference, of man as an ontological fact: “Every history of the creation, and every traditionary account, . . . agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean, that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation.”8 It is just this approach to political argument as a set of strictly performative and apodictic claims seemingly produced ex nihilo that prompts Hegel to remark how “the reality which stands in the greatest antithesis to universal freedom . . . is the freedom and individuality of actual self-consciousness itself.” For Hegel, such an actuarial notion of society as a composite of interchangeable selves and average modes of behavior inevitably culminated in the Terror of the French Revolution. There, Hegel notes, the “sole work and deed of universal freedom is . . . death,” viz., when the universal will as “self-conscious reality heightened to the level of pure thought or of abstract matter, changes round into its negative nature and shows itself to be equally that which puts an end to the thinking of oneself, or to self-consciousness” (PS, 359–361). Extending Hegel’s critique, Charles Taylor has offered a succinct formulation of the logical paradox to which the radical egalitarian vision that Paine inherited from Rousseau gives rise. Thus, even as recognition means “that everyone should be recognized for his or her unique identity,” the acknowledgment of such specificity tends, simply by dint of its proclaimed universality, toward an acute homogenizing of human societies: “With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group.” The result is a cascade of micro-distinctions, an early version of Sigmund Freud’s narcissism of minor differences, which uncannily revives Montesquieu’s definition of honor to which Rousseau, Godwin, Paine, and virtually all their contemporaries are so strenuously opposed. Thus, just as L’esprit des lois envisions a highly stratified social order based on honor (“la nature de l’honneur est de demander des preferences et des distinctions”), Paine’s egalitarian dogma (“men are all of one degree”) ends up in a place not all that different. For if we “give universal acknowledgment only to what is universally present—everyone has an identity—through recognizing what is peculiar to each,” then precisely this “universal demand powers an acknowledgment of specificity.”9

Still, there is something beguiling about Paine’s pugnacious assertion of inalienable “natural rights . . . which appertain to man in right of his existence” and which are said to differ categorically from “civil rights,” such as “appertain to man in right of his being a member of society.” The latter, Paine notes, originate in “some natural right pre-existing in the individual” and only accrue to man “after entering into society.”10 Within the unfolding narrative of classical liberalism, a radicalization has clearly taken place in the generation between Smith and Paine; and even if “Smith’s and Paine’s is the basic liberal vision . . . [of] spontaneous and self-regulating mechanisms, peopled by rational, self-seeking individuals,” Paine’s libertarian project is far more accepting of Locke’s hedonistic conception of human agency than is Smith’s. To begin with, in Paine’s writings the notion of a sympathetic (if only virtual and quasi-behaviorist) community has effectively been abandoned, with the nation now being said to be “composed of distinct, unconnected individuals, following various trades, employments and pursuits; continually meeting, crossing, uniting, opposing and separating from each other, as accident, interest, and circumstances shall direct.”11 Second, and in apparent consequence of this shift toward radical individualism, the language of “rights” has emerged as the centerpiece of a modern liberal polity. For Paine, rights are inherent rather than contingently claimed, though it is obvious to him, too, that this seemingly absolute “fact” had only been discovered at a particular (and quite recent) point in historical time. Paradoxically, this historically specific emergence of “rights” within modern political thought takes the form of a non-contingent and seemingly incontestable claim simultaneously advanced and legitimated by the modern individual. That is, Paine alternately posits the individual as an absolute or (in his parlance) “originary” value and as the sole beneficiary of its own, performative claims concerning the “rights of man.”

Here, then, performative self-enactment has supplanted the Platonic model of dialectical reasoning as the basic form in which human agency is to be practically realized within the world. Implausibly, action is conceived as a mode of performative self-realization and instantaneous self-fulfillment. Underlying this fantasy of total self-possession is the assumption that “frameworks are things we invent, not answers to questions that inescapably pre-exist for us, independent of our answer or inability to answer.”12 The tension between a dialectically articulated, humanist ethic on the one hand (elements of which survive in the “bourgeois radicals” of 1790s Britain and in Kant’s political thought), and a proto-behaviorist and necessarily inarticulate model of sociality on the other hand, has informed political debate to this day. Thus Jeffrey Stout has formulated a thoughtful alternative to the prevailing conception of modern, secular, and democratic society—identified above all with John Rawls. For Stout, democracy’s “ethical substance . . . is more a matter of enduring attitudes, concerns, dispositions, and patterns of conduct than it is a matter of agreement on a conception of justice in Rawls’s sense. The notion of state neutrality and the reason-tradition dichotomy should not be seen as its defining marks. Rawlsian liberalism should not be seen as its official mouthpiece.” Obliquely echoing Hannah Arendt and Michael Oakeshott, Stout thus revives the Aristotelian notion of praxis as a coherent and transmissible framework. He thus opposes modern voluntaristic accounts that limit the rationality of an act to the intention or motive said to have prompted it and, in so doing, supplant the Aristotelian (teleological) conception of action with a strictly occasional and discontinuous “doing.”

As Stout puts it, “my conception of the civic nation is pragmatic in the sense that it focuses on activities held in common as constitutive of the political community. But the activities in question are not to be understood in merely procedural terms. They are activities in which normative commitments are embedded as well as discussed.”13 With a rather more overt nod to Aristotle (esp. Nicomachean Ethics, 1105^b5), Oakeshott insists that “the practical is not a certain kind of performance; it is conduct in respect of its acknowledgement of a practice.” At the same time, he takes care to desynonymize his understanding of praxis from merely mechanical and mimetic “behavior” (which, unfortunately, he simply calls “habit”). In fact, he emphasizes, praxis properly speaking

does not reduce conduct to a process or impose upon it the character of a mere habit. Customs, principles, rules, etc. have no meaning except in relation to the choices and performances of agents; they are used in conduct and they can be used only in virtue of having been learned. Nor do procedures prescribe choices or substantive actions. A rule (and a fortiori something less exacting, like a maxim) can never tell a performer what choice he shall make; it announces only conditions to be subscribed to in making choices.14

The latter point arguably eludes those who, like Paine, reject the very notion of a historically constituted, normative framework (custom, tradition, habit) as but “the manuscript assumed authority of the dead over the living.”15 Likewise, Paine’s characterization of man as categorically equivalent and indifferent (“men are all of one degree”) notably flattens out the supposed source and beneficiary of that very claim—viz., the modern individual, in effect rendering it a generic article or heuristic fiction.

Recently, John Milbank has offered a brisk genealogy of what, somewhat polemically, he terms “the hidden alliance between liberalism and political absolutism.” For Milbank, modernity’s “drift to a new despotism” is the result of “an excessive stress upon the isolated individual,” a generic fiction made possible by the “dethronement” of the Judeo-Christian “valuing of ‘the person’ . . . shaped through all her inter-relationships and yet as a unique ‘character’ . . . transcendently of more value than any conglomerated whole.” Liberalism’s narrow, monadic stress on the suum and on “human rights” as inalienable property “parodies this legacy, because when irreplaceable ‘personality’ is reduced to an inviolable but inscrutable abstract interiority of negative will, then the social manifestation of the individual person can be no more than that of an always replaceable and disposable atom.”16 Milbank’s principal debt is to a series of influential articles by Michel Villey (especially his 1946 “L’idée du droit subjectif et les systems juridiques”), which had argued that under Roman law and extending well into the seventeenth century, rights were not to be construed as subjective claims. Rather, as in the case of the ius utendi fruendi, ius signifies “an array of legal advantages and disadvantages inherent in the property. It is an objectively existing abstract thing, not a power inhering in the owner” and, as such, can only be claimed or exercised “in an objectively just social order.”17 According to Villey, once the idea of “inherent” or “subjective” claim rights takes hold in seventeenth-century legal theory, justice and the good cease to be founding, normative concepts. In the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition (as per Villey’s and Milbank’s account) claim rights necessarily presupposed and were licensed by a communal and normative conception of the just and the good. By contrast, modern liberal thought supposes that a just and good community will eventuate at some point in the theoretical future when individual rights claims have been duly recognized and balanced. Yet within the “acephalous organism” of the modern nation-state, such balancing now appears altogether adventitious, depending as it does on the disparate influence wielded by individuals within those political and legal institutions tasked with adjudicating individual claims.18

As Villey before him, Milbank traces the idea of inherent (licit) rights back to Ockham’s late “theorization of the notion [of potestas licita as] a right derived from de facto power.” For inasmuch as a theory of rights licensed by (contingent) political power views such rights as accidents or predicates of a particular sovereign, it has thereby lost sight of how the legitimacy of that political power necessarily presupposes a notion of “right order”—of ius not as a claim right but as justice, and hence as something wholly enmeshed with the ontology of a non-contingent order or logos. The main weakness of the claim rights model is principally said to stem from a failure to distinguish between the individual and the person, between the abstract species concept of “human being” and the incommunicable human person as a constitutively relational being whose dignity and flourishing are inseparable from the notion of a just community. By contrast, within the nominalist model that would eventually spawn liberalism’s notion of absolute claim rights, “the individual is himself seen as a self-sufficient ‘sovereign’ entity, abstractable from his social insertion [and thus] conversely not essential to the composition of any social aggregate.”19 Where the eighteenth-century discourse of “obligation” (even when contested, as in Mandeville or Hume) still revolved around the primal reality of the common, the language of rights tends to proceed by enclosure. Developed in more or less explicit opposition to the notion of inherited realities and obligations, it tends to divide and isolate individuals.

This is not the place to reconsider this multilayered debate in greater depth since it has but a tangential bearing on our main topic—viz., the deteriorating conception of personhood in the modern era. Suffice it to say that on historical grounds Milbank’s polemic has been weakened by the fact that Villey’s narrative, on which Milbank mainly relies, has largely been disproven by the meticulous research of Brian Tierney, Richard Tuck, Charles Reid, and Charles Donahue. Thus Villey’s failure to recognize that the beginnings of natural rights ought to be located in canon law rather than in the philosophical writings of Aquinas or William of Ockham, compounded by the fact that Thomists, Aristotelians, and nominalists “all were speaking of natural rights” as early as the mid-thirteenth century, and that even in Roman law there are several hundred cases in which a right is attached to an individual (ius esse alicui), all invalidate the historical narrative of decline from right order to individual rights.20 Nevertheless, the convoluted historical record concerning the genesis of modern natural rights does not automatically invalidate the opposition itself. If, as Tierney has shown, Ockham’s persistent appeal to a distinction between ius positivum and ius naturale, between right order and individual, “licit power,” marks the moment when the language of rights migrates from the juridical domain into that of theology and, eventually, that of political theory, the significance of that transposition will have to be adjudicated on grounds other than those of historical precedent and continuity. For however we choose to assess that shift, our arguments will invariably rest on how we perceive the link between positive claim rights and the flourishing of social and political communities. A historical development, however painstakingly traced, cannot absolve us from having to arrive at a reasoned judgment as to whether we construe communal flourishing to depend on (enforced) respect for the inherent rights of individuals, or whether our conception of what those rights are is itself derived from a transcendently sanctioned, normative conception of a just (communal) order.

Mindful of these presuppositions, Nicholas Wolterstorff thus notes that to concede “the existence of natural rights leaves open the question of whether natural rights are inherent in the worth of the bearer or conferred on the bearer by some objective norm or standard.” Clearly, a strictly historical account, however thorough, cannot per se answer that question any more than a capacity-based model can adequately ground natural human rights.21 Here one ought to bear in mind (as Wolterstorff does not) that the “capacity” model has dominated Western rights theory beginning with John Locke. This matters since even a casual historical survey shows that, once Locke’s tenuous deist framework had melted away, the notion of natural human rights quite effortlessly came to be vested in a human being’s capacity for rational agency. In other words, not only was divine love or grace no longer required as the transcendent source of natural human rights, but human rational capability, which previously had served as a type of secondary evidence for this divine gift, now supervenes on God and becomes the positive source of such rights. The narrative of rights, in other words, cannot be disentangled from the historical evolution of the concept of autonomy. Even so, Wolterstorff is quite right to point out how this capability model of rights is bound to marginalize large swaths of the human population, such as the mentally impaired, Alzheimer’s sufferers, or infants. His alternative, developed toward the end of justice, holds that natural human rights ought to be conceived as a unique kind of “bestowed worth” (Platonic rather than instrumental) whose source we find in divine love—understood as “attachment” rather than “attraction.”

Again, one’s agreement in principle is tempered by misgivings about the seemingly ahistorical way in which Wolterstorff makes his case here. It is one thing to commit to a theist (Augustinian) framework and to argue that “if God loves a human being with the love of attachment, that love bestows great worth on that human being,” and quite another to speak of such love and bestowal of worth as an instance of “benevolence.”22 That these conceptions are not interchangeable becomes evident once we recall that the language of benevolence rises to prominence precisely as the theist framework—weakened by centuries of voluntarism, Socinian anthropomorphism, and the implicit deism of modern natural theology—is all but collapsing toward the end of the eighteenth century.23 What makes Wolterstorff’s case for natural rights compelling as an argument in philosophical theology is weakened by his apparent inattention to the historical mutability of his key concepts. As it rises to prominence in the later Enlightenment the concept of “benevolence” has all but lost touch with the Augustinian theological framework with which Wolterstorff continues to associate it. Arguably, what accounts for that estrangement is a secular and anthropomorphic idea of moral agency (exemplified by Kant) sponsored by precisely those “individualistic and atomistic modes of thought” that critics of modern natural rights (Michel Villey, Alasdair MacIntyre, Oliver O’Donovan, John Milbank) had foregrounded and that Wolterstorff rejects from the outset early in his study.24

Unfolding in the lineage of Locke, Mandeville, and James Steuart (more than Adam Smith), Paine’s arguments concerning the rights of man vividly embody that shift, while also exemplifying how the oblique rhetorical maneuvers of “common-sense” or “plain” English indemnify liberalism’s axioms from having to prove their validity in a dialectical contest with Judeo-Christian conceptions of personhood and relationality, which they simply displace. Paine’s proto-libertarian affirmation of the isolated, autonomous, and generic “self” as the ground-zero for all political theorizing exposes a hidden antinomy between liberté and egalité that was to prove increasingly vexing to nineteenth-century writers of such disparate sensibility as Blake, Schopenhauer, de Tocqueville, Flaubert, Mill, John Henry Newman, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Yet it is above all Paine’s eponymous concept of “rights” that warrants our attention; for not only does it play a crucial role in the genesis of modern liberalism at the end of the eighteenth century but, even today, it constitutes an essential (if woefully unexamined) axiom in popular and academic political discourse. Some time ago, Alasdair MacIntyre called attention to a logical paradox remarkably similar to the one vitiating Paine’s concept of agency. In his critique of Alan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality (1978), MacIntyre scrutinizes Gewirth’s central claim that, “since the agent regards as necessary goods the freedom and well-being that constitute the generic features of his successful action, he logically must also hold that he has rights to these generic features and he implicitly makes a corresponding rights-claim.” As MacIntyre points out, trouble brews when we take it as an axiom that to identify certain “necessary goods” for the “exercise of rational agency” also licenses eo ipso the claim that we have “a right to these goods.”25 As he proceeds to argue, “one reason why claims about goods necessary for rational agency are so different from claims to the possession of rights is that the latter in fact presuppose, as the former do not, the existence of socially established rules. Such sets of rules only come into existence at particular historical periods under particular social circumstances. They are in no way universal features of the human condition.”26

Though otherwise critical of MacIntyre’s Aristotelian orientation, Milbank concurs and elaborates on the historical conditions that favored the emergence of a theory of rights and in time fused it with the modern notion of the individual as a self-certifying and self-possessed agent. At issue is the seventeenth-century redefinition of the classical Roman concept of dominium—then understood as rational self-government and (Stoic) mastery of the passions but, by the mid-seventeenth century, recast as sovereignty in the sense of sheer self-possession and the unfettered exercise of instrumental reason that dominates the writings of most English radicals, Thomas Paine and John Thelwall most prominently. Instructive here is Thelwall’s position as developed in The Rights of Nature (1796), a searing indictment of the “hireling” Burke whose Letter to a Noble Lord of the same year Thelwall considers the most disgraceful product yet of Burke’s “pensioned indolence.” For Thelwall, rights are coeval with divine creation itself, such that in endowing man with certain capacities or “means” the creator had implicitly vouchsafed their exercise as an inalienable right: “God created man also, a part of that universe, with all his wants and faculties; and by creating both the wants and the things wanted, HE dictated the rights by the means.” Without any hesitation whatsoever, Thelwall here conceives rights as the exercise of power, unconstrained in the way it is discharged and without any obligation to give a reasoned account of why it is being exercised thus at a particular moment in time and under specific circumstances. Right here is but a projection of a voluntarist model of power: “Man is the sovereign; the material universe is the subject; his faculties are the powers by which he enforces his authority; and expediency is his rule of right. He is a despot, to the limit of his power, over the physical universe; and he has a right to be so.” That the Jacobin sympathizer Thelwall should so unapologetically be channeling Hobbes, or foreshadowing the libertarian gospel of Ayn Rand, ought not surprise. Nor is the matter mitigated by Thelwall’s attempt to institute a categorical limit to his equation of right with “expedient” power. For to argue that “this very right precludes him from despotising over his species: for the argument that applies to one, is of force for all, and to know the natural rights of others, it is only necessary to know our own” presupposes (but in no way argues) the recognition of the other person’s ethical and political reality. Yet nowhere in The Rights of Nature do we find a warrant for why such recognition ought to precede the exercise of our innate powers/rights, let alone that it actually does.27 Under the heading of sovereignty, the self’s private passions and interests effectively are its reason. As a result, rationality takes on an exclusively presentist cast and is equally opposed to “theological dogma,” received intellectual traditions, and “state absolutism.”28 Particularly in the writings of Hobbes and Hugo Grotius self-possession is asserted—though no longer argumentatively established within a supra-personal, normative framework—as the most elemental or “natural” right of all. Consequently, ius no longer denotes “what is ‘right’ or just, or a ‘claim right’ to justice, but active right over property. As the traditional link between person and ownership remains, this means that self-identity, the suum, is no longer essentially related to divine rational illumination, or ethics, but is a sheer ‘self-occupation’ or ‘self-possession.’”29

The consequences of Paine’s and Thelwall’s arguments are both conspicuous and alarming, particularly if one looks ahead to what is arguably their apotheosis: the uncompromising possessive individualism and principled a-sociality that has been enshrined as the political program of contemporary American libertarianism. Here human claim rights have contracted to the unlimited acquisition and possession of commodities, just as the distinction between goods and the good has been definitively erased. No doubt, Paine would have recoiled at the legally sanctioned defeat of public reason by private money that characterizes political and electoral practice in the United States today. Yet this outcome was all but inevitable once his assertion of claim rights as the individual’s supposedly “imprescriptible” moral-cum-political estate had established itself as the baseline of modern liberal-republican thought. The contradiction here is that even as such claim rights are invested with seemingly timeless and unconditional force, the individuals advancing them refuse to specify a coherent, let alone normative vision of justice and goodness for the sake of which such claim rights are being invoked. Normativity has retreated to the subjective realm of negative liberty (“freedom from . . .”), thus rendering the modern liberal increasingly agnostic and, in time, inarticulate about ends and goods relative to which such rights might plausibly function as appropriate means. It is telling that what renders Paine’s assertion of non-contingent, universal rights so powerful (yet also so vulnerable) is precisely its refusal to acknowledge the specific historical moment in which that very claim is embedded and by virtue of which it becomes possible. Indeed, for a conception of universal (inherent) rights to be successfully enacted—as in the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (27 August 1789) or the Bill of Rights (15 December 1791)—it is imperative that the historical conditions enabling their conception and performative declaration be neutralized by their allegedly universal and timeless authority. Already for Grotius, “the concept of the law as such is not founded in the sphere of mere power and will but in the sphere of pure reason . . . Natural law is not simply the sum total of that which has been decreed and enacted; it is that which originally arranges things. It is ‘ordering order’ (ordo ordinans), not ‘ordered order’ (ordo ordinatus).”30

Firmly committed to this self-authorizing mode of reasoning, Paine’s and, nearly two hundred years later, Gewirth’s assertion of the rights of man as an unconditional (if also strangely empty) “natural” fact is, however, weakened by the absence of any corresponding notion of the good or telos for the sake of which the rights in question have been conceived. As Milbank notes, “because it is rooted in an individualistic account of the will, oblivious to questions of its providential purpose in the hands of God, it has difficulty in understanding any ‘collective making,’ or genuinely social process.”31 Beginning with Paine, the language of inherent and claim rights effectively supplants, rather than complements, concerns with moral obligation such as had clearly dominated eighteenth-century philosophy. Making its appearance in European political thought of the late seventeenth century and dramatically flourishing a century later, modern rights theory reflects liberalism’s virtual and performative (rather than concretely empirical and morally normative) outlook on politics; as a result, politics increasingly turns into a theoretical endeavor based on a small number of non-negotiable and (supposedly) non-contingent claims.32 Burke was arguably on to something when indicting modern liberalism as a recklessly speculative venture whose only security is the (likewise speculative) hypothesis that some good will eventually derive from the acknowledgment of its abstract claims, even as no normative and practical notion of the good is ever identified in the present. For all its paranoid and extravagant rhetoric, the Reflections shrewdly identified and challenged a distinctly modern type of political argumentation that, in deploying the non-falsifiable idea of universal, inherent “rights,” gives rise to a new model of agency—viz., an abstract self credited with reality independent of any specific human commitments and obligations and established as the sole proprietor, guarantor, and beneficiary of those very rights.

Curiously, Burke’s misgivings about the apparent disconnect between modern claim rights and a normative conception of the good and reason (absent which we would be hard-pressed to exercise our rights in a meaningful fashion) are echoed by Godwin who, on this crucial issue, clearly breaks with his closest political allies. In so many words, Godwin flat-out rejects any notion of right as pure, unfettered, subjective discretion. As he insists, we only ever act for a reason, and by that token alone find our actions dictated by that reason: “There is no sphere in which a human being can be supposed to act where one mode of proceeding will not, in every given instance, be more reasonable than any other mode. That mode the being is bound by every principle of justice to pursue.” Quite unexpectedly, then, a version of Aristotelian right reason has reappeared and here licenses Godwin’s conclusion that the rational and the just cannot be understood as mere epiphenomena of subjective volitions, passions, or interest. Rather, the rational is that at which our judgment, however imperfect, must be aimed: “If then every one of our actions falls within the province of morals, it follows that we have not rights in relation to selecting them . . . We are bound to regulate ourselves by the best judgment we can exert.” By contrast, to assert a right to do as subjective discretion and ephemeral volition might dictate is to abandon one’s capacity (and inherent obligation) to exercise judgment, that is, to make reasoned “choice.” Consistent with Aristotle’s prohairesis and Aquinas’s electio, Godwin understands judgment and choice as circumscribed “by the immutable voice of reason and justice.” The obverse case, in which a modern individual invokes the “liberty to regulate his conduct in any instance, independently of the dictates of morality,” would, at best, be an “imperfect . . . right, the offspring of ignorance and imbecility.”33 As Godwin sums up his case, “there cannot be a more absurd proposition than that which affirms the right of doing wrong.” Rarely does Godwin seem more removed from the anarchist program that he is often credited with inaugurating than when, in classical realist and normative fashion, he tethers all human action to acts of judgment and choice that “derive [their] real validity from a higher and less mutable authority.”34

While the convergence of Godwin’s argument and terminology with that employed by writers whom he would ordinarily consider his intellectual and political opponents may be fleeting within the overall project of Political Justice, it is of significance nonetheless. For it highlights for us why a modern conception of natural and inherent rights remains incomplete unless it is correlated with a coherent account of judgment and action. Yet if we accept Godwin’s objection to a purely voluntarist and discretionary model of rational agency, according to which a specific “right” seemingly relieves a human agent from giving rational account for her or his elections, it is clear that action cannot be pared down to the sheer implementation of subjective interests but requires a supra-individual conception of rationality—a normative framework such as allows movement from the sheer “right” to pursue action X toward showing how that action, rather than originating in some ineffable subjective preference, was chosen for a specific reason that can be made intelligible to others. Reason here is not simply the catalyst but the telos of action, which is both prompted by and undertaken for the sake of it. To act, then, is not just to do something for a reason but to give fuller shape and reality to reason (in the realist sense of logos or ratio). Once again, the Romantic era offers an unusually diverse range of voices and insights in this regard, with Coleridge (as remains to be seen) arguably the most probing of his generation. Yet we will begin, briefly, by entertaining the seemingly counterfactual case of Blake, a thinker as far removed from the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of philosophical realism and, it would appear, deeply committed to a particularly radical version of modern individualism.

Like many of the first-generation Romantics, in his early illuminated books Blake seeks to contest the seeming opposition and demonstrate the potential complementarity of the communal and the singular. Appalled by the syncretistic conception of art preached by Joshua Reynolds, whose mobilization of painting for political purposes suggests that he had been “Hired to depress art” (CPP, 635), Blake’s own aesthetic “criticizes both the radical and conservative views of writing.” Viewing formal mediations such as Reynolds’s syncretist aesthetics or indeed the productions of commercial print culture with great suspicion, Blake intends to “heal the split between speech and writing, . . . [and] close the gap between the pictorial and the linguistic use of graphic figures.”35 He “resolutely attack[s]” the Whiggish narrative of progress, represented by Adam Ferguson and Edmund Burke, which disaggregates “mental from manual labor by concentrating intellectual power in itself and delegating brute physical labor to its remoter appendages—human machines.”36 Yet Blake is no less estranged from the self-authorizing secularism and unimaginative “plain-language” ideal propagated by the bourgeois radicals of the Joseph Johnson circle. Often at his most incisive when thinking through the material and formal challenges faced by the human individual as it seeks to give expression to its radical singularity and spiritual potential, Blake proves a consummate organicist for whom individuality can only be realized in the most “minutely particular” and exact interpenetration of idea and medium. Individuality is “expression” and nothing else: “Ideas cannot be Given but in their minutely Appropriate Words, nor Can a Design be made without its minutely Appropriate Execution” (CPP, 576); everything else, of course, is mere copying. Vigorously opposing any conception of liberty as self-interested, rational choice or as elective compliance with generic social forms and practices, Blake’s ideal is the “strong Man [who] acts from conscious superiority, and marches on in fearless dependence on the divine decrees” (CPP, 545), and whose “Vision” is strongly reminiscent of St. Paul’s antinomianism.

Yet such a vision clearly challenges, perhaps even shatters any framework of collective responsibility and intelligibility. Blake’s claim that it is solely “in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too” (CPP, 560), and that “to Generalize is to be an Idiot” is principally aimed at the modern notion of the “social” that has terminally blurred the line between the private and the public, interests and goods, the expedient and the normative. By contrast, Hannah Arendt notes, ancient Greek culture understood “a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion) and outside the world of the common, [as] idiotic by definition” (HC, 38). Indeed, Blake’s conception of “the Human Imagination” as “Divine Vision & Fruition / In which Man liveth eternally” actually is fundamentally consonant with Arendt’s understanding of the Aristotelian antithesis of public and private. For in enjoining us to “[d]istinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. / States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease.”37 Blake is anxious to restore the classical Athenian ideal of public man, which is to say, to locate authentic and inalienable sources of meaning and so overcome the spurious sociality of the isolated, hedonistic self that Locke and Mandeville had established as the default model of human agency. Far from constituting the goal of its affective or economic development, the radical singularity of the Blakean subject is understood as the source of its artistic and spiritual strength as a public agent. Hence Blake’s affirmation of the artistic temperament as radically singular and non-conformist, rather than conflicting with the classical ideal of the public as the locus of virtue, excellence, and meaning, directs its “honest indignation” at the inherently corrupt public/private distinction and at the procedural notion of sociality that “embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength.”38

Above all, then, art involves constant acts of strong, qualitative “discrimination” as Blake puts it in “A Vision of the Last Judgment” (CPP, 560). Opposed to Whigs and Tories alike, Blake’s critique of empire, commerce, and commodity-art ultimately rests on an extreme anti-rationalism bound to disquiet even the most sympathetic liberal imagination today. Yet, like Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s anti-rationalist arguments later in the nineteenth century, Blake’s aesthetic pivots on the radical contingency of the self as essential. It resists the Circe-call of instrumental reason no less than it scoffs at the behaviorism of polite manners, commercialized culture, and Blake’s contemporaries’ class-specific notions of taste and sensibility. Not surprisingly, Blake’s “Song of Liberty” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ties the achievement of genuine, spiritual freedom to the repudiation of precisely those tropes most strongly associated with British “liberty”: commerce (“O Jew, leave counting gold! Return to thy oil and wine”); modern law (“the son of fire . . . stamps the stony law to dust”); empire (“Empire is no more!” [CPP, 44–45]). Blake’s “Song of Liberty” grasps freedom as the spiritual contrary of the prevailing, strictly secular definition of “liberty” as the commercial and legal project of polite and commercial society and the modern nation-state (or empire). For Blake only genuine vision is freedom—realized under the aegis of strong artisanal praxis rather than conformist (“social”) behavior. Blake’s account of freedom rejects the false opposition that modern (Whiggish) reason has set up between oppression and emancipation, exclusion and inclusion, prejudice and rational transparency, servitude and rights. For all those generalizing, political-theory types of argumentation inevitably point back to the generalizing mechanism of the “stony Law” as the cause of spiritual and political oppression, even where they urgently draw on the law as a means for obtaining redress for political injustice. Still, in his political, aesthetic, and spiritual commitments, Blake remains deeply at odds with an Enlightenment culture bent on the dismantling and disavowing of all frameworks and traditions since for him freedom is not some agnostic and indeterminate state but a condition of plenitude that “Demands a firm & determinate conduct on the part of Artists” (CPP, 580).

More than anything, Blake is dismayed by the apparent evacuation of “action” and “character” from the kind of moral framework envisioned by Ferguson, Smith, and Steuart, as well as the concurrent loss of expressive intensity and commitment of the entire person that he sees perpetrated by the state-sponsored aesthetics of Reynolds & Co. What his stress on “vision” and “energy” opposes is the absorption of moral agency into something called “system,” as well as the notion that value and meaning are to be achieved procedurally, that is, by implementing or conforming to a moral law that is little more than a composite of the kind of doing that comes naturally—that is, routine behavior that, as Kant puts it, encompasses “no more than what lies in the common moral order.”39 This is not the place to address the longstanding critique of Kant as moral formalist and rigorist whose “rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it.”40 Certainly, that account has been subject to a sweeping revaluation of late, one that seeks to present a kinder and gentler moralist concerned with the (partial) rehabilitation of virtue, the empirical formation of moral character, and the articulation of a “substantive” rather than formal conception of value. While Kant will emerge as a crucial point of reference in Coleridge’s critical survey of modern moral philosophy, our broader concern here is with how Smith’s mimetic and proto-behaviorist account of moral sentiments had further eroded the meaning and significance of basic humanistic conceptions such as action, person, deliberation, judgment, responsibility, and self-awareness. Their disappearance from moral thought, already intensely disturbing to Blake, will also preoccupy numerous nineteenth-century novelists (from Jane Austen to Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Theodor Fontane, and Thomas Hardy). Concurrently, the specter of a seriously atrophied moral vision, clarity, and articulacy also is of great concern to a remarkably wide spectrum of intellectuals throughout the century—from Heine to Emerson and Nietzsche, and from Coleridge to John Henry Newman, de Tocqueville, and Matthew Arnold, to name but a few.

To sharpen the point, we may recall Hannah Arendt’s neo-Aristotelian account of action. “To act,” she notes, prima facie “means to take an initiative, to begin . . . to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere).” Action is never something derivative but positively originates a state. In ways that substantially elude the transactional and behaviorist model of the Scottish Enlightenment, action originates a new and distinct kind of awareness in the same way that “vision” and “making” are thoroughly fused in Blake’s aesthetics. Action is never merely a “doing something” in the sense of being busy; nor is it merely the antonym of indolence or idleness (e.g., watching someone else do something or sleeping). Rather, action establishes the agent’s involvement with the world in an original and transformative sense. As Arendt puts it, “action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis” (HC, 205). Transcending the world as the mere sum-total of facts or an inventory of the mundanely “given,” action instead conceives of the world qua vision—that is, action drives toward the world’s transformation in word and/as deed. Action pivots on an act of imagination that approaches “world” as a space of sheer possibility, of “play” and consequently of “risk”—a space whose openness the later Friedrich Hölderlin was to trope so poignantly as das Offene, albeit without recoiling from it as did Blaise Pascal.41

Fearful of the causal indeterminacy and unpredictability of action, and wary of committing to the good to be realized through action, the modern individual is prone to accept the world as something “objective,” determinate, and non-negotiable. Lived existence thus is de-potentiated into mere “behavior,” which acquiesces in facts and circumstances as objective constraints and thus exhausts itself in fine-tuning the myriad protocols (moral, administrative, economic, social, etc.) that govern the relation between self and world. By contrast, action aims to re-imagine and transcend that very relationship, for which reason Aristotle had already linked it to the notion of “excellence” (aretē). Similarly, the sociologist Arnold Gehlen links the possibility of action to a “motivational surplus” (Antriebsüberschuβ), such that “only a being who . . . has a surplus of motivation that extends beyond short-term gratification can turn his world-openness [Weltoffenheit] into something productive. The motivations for his actions come from outside himself. From the generative, social, and economic context, he creates more sophisticated tasks, which are then reflected objectively in the various social orders.”42 A distant conceptual echo of Aristotelian “excellence” (aretē), such motivational surplus explains why action (Handlung) ought not to be confused with a merely intentional doing of some kind; for action is not merely oriented toward the manipulation of some specific object or to the attainment of some contingent objective. Rather, by its very nature, action transforms the agent’s very sense of “being-in-the-world.” As Coleridge, Newman, and the great novelists of the nineteenth century grasp so well, the very idea of a person as a responsible and (potentially) flourishing being can only arise from action. For, in Arendt’s pithy formulation, action “is not the beginning of something but of somebody” and, as such, involves the “disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is” (HC, 177). Blake’s gnomic pronouncement that “The most sublime act is to set another before you” (CPP, 36) furthermore hints that action by its very nature establishes the person’s relation to the other, that its focus belongs to the eternal “openness” (and infinite responsibility) of the I-Thou to another person.43 Hence, Arendt stresses, we must resist the temptation of construing action in terms of efficient, instrumental causality “as a means to an end” or “as a willful purpose” (HC, 179).

Unlike mechanical causation, then, action discloses “the unique and distinct identity of the agent.” Indeed, “without a name, a ‘who’ attached to it, [action] is meaningless” (HC, 177–181). Such a model of action has several important characteristics: (1) it transcends the matrix of our present socialization by reimagining community, justice, and human flourishing as anterior to and of more elemental reality than mere subjectivity; (2) it shows “person” or “character” (ēthos) to be anterior to self and, importantly, sees the meaning of personhood disclosed only in narrative, albeit one of which we are “not an author or producer” (HC, 184); and (3) the narrative dynamics of action and the life whose contours it fills in are not only unpredictable but will prove only partially legible to the individual agent. All this does not mean, however, that action is free of internal conflict. Thus, as MacIntyre has shown, the heroic model of action first articulated in Homer produces strong contradictions between what are to count as “goods of excellence” and “goods of efficiency.”44 For the sociologist Arnold Gehlen, whom Arendt here cites in an approving footnote, it is above all the concept of Handlung (“action”) that lays bare the “unique biological position” (biologische Sonderstellung) of human beings; Gehlen’s project is to identify “the common root of knowledge and action” that coordinates the entire spectrum of human engagement from the motor system to esoteric speculation. Rejecting any hierarchical schemes that divide human activities into “higher” or “lower,” Gehlen defines man as “the acting being” (das handelnde Wesen). Yet precisely for that reason, man remains necessarily indeterminate and a constant challenge (and potential liability) to himself: “One might also say he is a being who must establish a stance [stellungnehmend]. Actions are the expression of man’s need to achieve a reasoned hermeneutic view on the outside world,” a constant and burdensome existential requirement inasmuch as human beings lack “organic means and instincts.” While Gehlen’s thesis as to man’s “lack of instinctual guidance” (Instinktentbundenheit) was certainly challenged by some (eminently by Konrad Lorenz), the basic argument seems sound—viz., of the human being’s “unique position” (Sonderstellung) in that it is constitutively obligated “to develop its potential” and meet “the challenge of interpreting its own existence.”45 Action is “the key to understanding human impulses” because of its “hermeneutic indeterminacy” (weltoffen), thus confirming the foundational importance of interpretive and imaginative activity: “between elemental needs and their external gratification . . . [there] is interpolated the entire system of world orientation and action.”46

There is reason to view the demise of “action” as a meaningful category not only as a peculiar entailment of Enlightenment moral philosophy but as the final phase in modernity’s progressively more stunted conception of the will. What distinguishes the late phase of this development (whose beginnings we had located in Ockham’s voluntarism) is the divergence of two distinctive strands within political philosophy that correlate with the emergence of the nineteenth-century nation-state. The first of these continues the liberal Enlightenment project, albeit in a more technocratic and institutionally based form, and it is represented by G. W. F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, Bruno Bauer, Thomas Macaulay, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Max Weber, among others. The other strand rejects the meliorist or utopian aspirations of the Enlightenment by reviving Hobbes’s voluntarism and taking his mechanistic conception of the will as the premise for a sweeping philosophical and cultural pessimism. This resurgence of Hobbesian positions is often accompanied by a neo-pagan revival of ancient Greek concepts of necessity, fate, and tragic action. The central representatives of this intellectual orientation—effectively a roll-call of modern anti-liberalism—are de Maistre, Chateaubriand, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Carlyle, Jakob Burckhardt, Hyppolite Taine, and the young Nietzsche, who has not yet discovered the idea of an “overcoming” of man and the “transvaluation” of history’s pseudo-rational values. In time, they are succeeded by the young Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler, and a host of poets and intellectuals (Friedrich Gundolf, Stefan George, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn) some of whose fictive counterparts we find assembled as the ominous clique of Munich’s right-wing intelligentsia in Chapter 34 of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). In their grandiose and implacable anti-rationalism—“not a one believed any longer in ‘free institutions’” and all insisted that Europe was doomed “if one did not simply toss all that emotional stuff about human rights overboard from the start”—they are distant but unmistakable descendants of Schopenhauer.47

The anti-liberal implications of Schopenhauer’s project did not fully register until after 1848, at which point a failed revolution and the rise of Otto von Bismarck’s neo-Machiavellian politics fueled the dystopic narratives of modernity that pervade the writings of Carlyle, Jacob Burckhardt, Taine, Arnold, the early Nietzsche, Ludwig Klages, Georg Brandes, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, and indeed the young Thomas Mann himself. Their consistent focus is on the stunted intellectual culture of the modern person—formally rational but of dissociated sensibility; politically dependable but lacking inner goals; reliably productive but denuded of introspective tendencies—a self plagued by proto-existentialist indifference. Diagnosing such trends in mid-Victorian culture, Elaine Hadley has observed how the quest “for a less-intense, less saturated political domain” rests on liberal principles “that paradoxically pacify the liberal subject in unplanned ways.”48 Similarly, Colin Gunton has rejected the prototypical narrative that liberal-secular modernity tells about itself: viz., that it has replaced the hegemony of the one (transcendent) God with the lateral and pluralist community of the many. In fact, Gunton notes (drawing on voices as disparate as Wordsworth, Kierkegaard, and Mill), modern “individualism is a non-relational creed, because it teaches that I do not need my neighbour in order to be myself.” Such an “eschatology of the impersonal” can only furnish the “flat unity of homogeneity” that would be ruthlessly exploited by a modern totalitarianism whose genesis Hannah Arendt had earlier traced.49 A different narrative than the one here being pursued might well turn up significant affinities between Schopenhauer’s and Marx’s account of modernity, specifically as regards the question why during those precarious years between 1848 and 1852 both the German and French bourgeoisie were so ready to betray their avowed moral and political ideals for real (economic) interests, thereby revealing the Enlightenment utopia of a rational, deliberative, and transparent commitment to a liberal polity to be unsustainable and likely chimerical.

As remains to be seen, the limitations of Schopenhauer’s pessimism and extreme voluntarism tend to become apparent when juxtaposed to the conception of will and person that Coleridge works out in his later writings. Even so, Schopenhauer’s dystopic vision of human agents terminally encased in the windowless noumenon of the will furnishes some nineteenth-century novelists with a compelling thematic provocation, perhaps none more than Stendhal for whom the transition from pessimism to a modern existentialist and nihilist stance seems quite effortless and full of sinister hilarity. One might recall Julien Sorel’s dogged attempt to inspire jealousy in Mathilde de la Môle by copying out reams of love letters to the wholly unattractive Mme de Fervaques. Following some Russian prince’s manual for seduction by mail, Julien overcomes excruciating boredom as he transcribes a first love letter “full of virtuous phrases, and killingly dull, [with] several sentences nine lines long.” Faintly bemused by the utter insincerity with which he directs these generic missives to “so celebrated a font of virtue,” Julien slips into yet another one of his existentialist reveries: “I will be treated with the utmost scorn, and nothing would amuse me more. At bottom it is the only comedy I could appreciate. Yes, to cover the odious object that I call myself with ridicule would divert me. If I believed in myself I would commit some crime or other for the sake of amusement.”50 As so often, there is something unrelenting and cruelly transparent about the consciousness of Stendhal’s protagonists. Barely sustained by derivative effusions of love to be tendered to a woman for whom he feels nothing, Julien appears crushed by self-loathing, itself the result of an acute sense of the impossibility of meaningful action. Yet Stendhal also shows how the apparent disappearance of meaningful political and social action atrophies several closely related conceptions, including those of person, conscience, and indeed the very possibility of meanings uncontaminated by (self-)interest. More than anything, Stendhal’s proto-nihilism stems from his diagnosis of the three basic institutional frameworks—church, state, and family—as irremediably corrupt and broken, thus presaging critiques of the modern, liberal, and secular nation-state’s profound loss of moral orientation and authority that were to take center stage decades later.

In his own time, Stendhal—whom Nietzsche was to credit with having “the most thoughtful eyes and ears . . . of this century”—appears a prophet of institutional collapse even as Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, and the young Mill are engaged in making the best case yet for the necessity of modern secular institutions.51 That such arguments were urgently needed was certainly apparent, and it has much to do with modernity’s progressive disaggregation of reason from nature, and of the will from reason that Hegel in particular had diagnosed as a dangerous legacy of the Enlightenment. This is not the place to take up Hegel’s response—consummately set out in his Philosophy of Right—to the question that Kant’s project had left essentially unresolved: viz., how to imagine a rational community that is neither simply wedded to the empirical status quo and the reactionary preservation of group-specific interests nor in denial about the substantial miscarriage of the French Revolutionary project.52 How, in other words, can we ever hope to mediate the “is” of the empirical world with the “ought” of a fully rational and moral community? The late Kant’s utopian claim that rational morality “cannot be effected through gradual reform but must rather be effected through a revolution [Sinnesänderung] in the disposition of the human being” such as will give rise to “a new man” certainly shows the scope of his ambition.53 Yet regardless of whether Kant ever succeeded in specifying the pedagogical and institutional process whereby that vision might be realized, there is mounting evidence that beginning with the 1830 Revolution in Paris, this project had effectively foundered. Even if Kant is no longer read as the moral rigorist who seems to present himself on so many pages of his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and the second Critique, it was this reading that informed the generation that succeeded him. Among them, Schiller and Hegel were especially vexed to find robust conceptions of action, character, judgment, and self-awareness seemingly vanquished by the abstract formalism of a “pure will wholly cleansed [völlig gesäubert] of everything which can only be empirical.”54 It was in Hegel’s mature work above all that an answer was formulated under the heading of speculative dialectics, itself deemed uniquely capable of grasping rationality as a process rather than as a set of abstractions imposed ab extra. As is well known, doing so meant above all to conceive philosophy as a meta-narrative of reason whose dialectical “movement” (Bewegung) is fueled by deficient conceptions and articulations such as cannot but produce their own negation and correction over time.

Yet what distinguishes Hegelian dialectics from the meliorist narrative of Scottish political economy is his far more complex understanding of “mediation” (Vermittlung). Unlike the meta-agency of the market—which in Smith and Steuart functions as an inherently protean, albeit severe superego—Hegelian mediation does not merely contain contingent and insufficiently conceptualized individualities. It becomes a subject in its own right, and we know it by the name of “institution.” A number of shifts in political history, theory, and demographics at the beginning of the nineteenth century—some coincidental, others causally linked—contribute to the emergence of strong national institutions as the most promising material and conceptual new strategy for containing a rigidly individuated notion of the will. Perhaps the most striking example here involves Prussia’s sudden transformation into a modern nation-state following the collapse of the old, superannuated Reich in 1806 and the sweeping territorial reorganization of German-speaking Europe under Napoleon. Concurrent with its prolonged struggle against Napoleonic occupation—and ultimately the foundation for Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815—Prussia’s aggressive, centralized modernization of its economic, political, and military structures mirrors the concurrent ascendancy of utilitarianism and its legitimation of an impersonal and systemic conception of state power administered by a new type of post-feudal, professional bureaucrat. All these shifts—well-documented by social historians—ultimately rest on one premise that was to define the nineteenth-century nation-state above all: viz., the idea of institution as the one truly indispensable, because impersonal, source of social, cultural, and indeed moral meanings.55 As Arnold Gehlen’s brilliant analysis of the logic of modern institutions suggests, a consistent effect of institutions is their systematic atrophying of basic conceptions of agency by way of “autonomizing and habitualizing entire clusters of motives and complex practices; yet also by virtually or metonymically allowing objectives to be supplanted.” Defining of a life circumscribed by institutional frames, we observe “that self-certifying autonomy [selbstzweckhafte Eigengesetzlichkeit]” and a relentless “proceduralism [Betrieb]” whose “supra-personal coordination [überpersönliches Gefüge]” will gradually infiltrate and hollow out the conceptual legacy of classical humanism with its stress on contemplation, deliberation, judgment, choice, and individual responsibility.56 It is this relocation of the agency most centrally responsible for establishing socially relevant meaning (Sinnstiftung) to institutions that shows nineteenth-century liberalism addressing the oblique and adventitious logic of Smith’s sympathetic community.

Yet insofar as the enlightened, deliberative, and autonomous individual is, paradoxically, both the theoretical premise and the empirical beneficiary of modern (post-Kantian) liberalism, philosophers and intellectual historians of various persuasions (from Hans-Georg Gadamer to Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, John Milbank, Louis Dupré, and Brad Gregory) have questioned liberalism’s apparent inarticulacy about both its core presuppositions and its ends. Arguably, these failures are to be expected in a stance whose relation to the past is largely one of negation or emancipation and whose speculative outlook on the future is constrained by its present(ist) agendas. Once again, Tocqueville appears especially alert to the incoherence of a political philosophy prone “to take tradition only as information” and arrogating to itself the power of defining and managing what shall count as objective reality. For one thing, such a project (presumably to be launched anew by each successive generation) would seem terribly inefficient: “I find that dogmatic beliefs are no less indispensable for him to live alone than to act in common with his fellows. If man was forced to prove to himself all the truths that he uses every day, he would never finish doing so . . . There is in this world no philosopher so great that he does not believe a million things on the faith of others, and who does not assume more truths than he establishes.”57 Yet in its peremptory view of all political and social meaning as necessarily secular, “democracy diverts the imagination from everything that is external to man, in order to fix it only on man” and, not coincidentally, also “dries up most of the ancient sources of poetry.”

A narrowly procedural and institutional conception of rationality—both achieved by and confined to the exigencies and objectives of the present generation—threatens to atrophy the individual of any capacity for transcendence. Tocqueville here does not necessarily have in mind overtly religious or metaphysical matters (on which he can sound surprisingly equivocal) but, more immediately, human beings’ distinctive capacity for suspending the immediacy of problems and desires by framing them in a matrix of goods and norms such as can be expected to benefit future generations. Yet because it rejects all transcendence as both conceptually indemonstrable and a threat to the fetish of autonomy, modern liberalism typically punts on questions of intergenerational symmetry and, thus, operates with a dramatically impoverished conception of time: “As soon as [people] have lost the custom of putting their principal hopes in the long run, they are naturally led to wanting to realize their slightest desires without delay, and it seems that, from the moment they lose hope of living eternally, they are disposed to act as if they had only a single day to exist . . . The instability of the social state comes to favor the natural instability of human desires. In the middle of these perpetual fluctuations of fate, the present grows; it hides the future that fades away, and men want to think only about the next day.”58 Here, then, the aristocratic Tocqueville and the Lambeth radical Blake stage a meeting of true minds; for both understand action as inseparable from transcendence, just as transcendence cannot be achieved without vision. The alternative, already apparent to Blake as he struggles against the usurpation of art by commerce, is a hidebound and self-interested, petit-bourgeois mentality whose relationship to “eternity” (an idea of obvious centrality to Blake) is neither rational nor irrational but, if anything, minimally articulated as skeptical prevarication or agnostic indifference.

That liberalism might suffer from an inadequate grasp of its metaphysical assumptions and of supposed “ends” should not surprise; for neither can easily be articulated by human agents whose intellectual range and curiosity are overwhelmingly defined by formal procedures and present exigencies. If anything, these strictures on warrantable assertions are more pronounced in the neo-Kantian systems of the late nineteenth century (Heinrich Rickert, Georg Simmel) wherein “values are described as ‘irreal,’ and the term ‘good’ for moral value is avoided, precisely because of the traditional metaphysical implication of convertibility with ens.”59 The notion of “freedom” that is eponymous to modern liberalism turns out to be not coextensive with rationality. On the contrary, freedom presupposes an agent’s assent (itself inaccessible to rational discipline) to the reality and apparent significance of phenomena before they can be scrutinized by means of inferential and propositional reasoning. As the radically contingent ground of reason itself, this uniquely human capacity for what Newman would call “real assent” acts as a crucial constraint on the utopian aspirations of Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism. Where it is correlated with assent, judgment, and choice—viz., as acts undertaken by a responsible will— human freedom cannot be reduced to a function of subjective (and likely ephemeral) preference for this or that value or meaning. Rather, it presupposes an intuitive and unconditional commitment to supra-personal ends to be sifted and internalized with increasing clarity by our discursive understanding and deliberative judgment. Newman’s Grammar of Assent (1870) takes such commitment to be a case of assent, as opposed to inference. Being “in its nature absolute and unconditional,” assent commits us to a “view” and so shows mind and world to be engaged and enmeshed from the outset. Assent thus contrasts with the methodical prevarication of the Cartesian cogito, which is limited to inferences and “notional assent” because it regards knowledge to be exclusively propositional in nature.

Defined by a perpetual fear of error, the Cartesian subject does not understand knowing as action but, ever so tentatively, as reaction to phenomena that have been inexplicably received. The opening stance of distance, detachment, and distrust may in time result in the kind of epistemic certainty afforded by some (putatively warranted) act of inference. Yet whereas inference is necessarily confined to the realm of the notional and can only ever be “an acceptance of a proposition,” it presupposes what Newman calls “real assent,” which is to say our “acceptance of the premisses” of that very proposition. With its “palpable philosophical paranoia,” the modern turn that René Descartes is often said to have inaugurated thus “appears locked in a kind of self-created vacuum, determining by argument or reason a method for making claims about the world, but unable to argue convincingly that what results is anything other than what the method tells us about the world, be the real world as it may.” In fact, the triumph of Cartesian method as the sole warrant for propositions about the world made it exceedingly difficult “to get us where we wanted to go, ‘back’ to the world we suspended in the moment of doubt.”60 Yet the appearance that is to be subject to the Cartesian regimen of doubt must, for that to happen, first appear—not as an object or something given, but as what Jean-Luc Marion calls the phenomenon’s sheer “givenness” (donation): “this movement of imposing itself on me, of arriving upon me from before or in front of me.” Prior to all talk of subject, object, certainty, doubt, proof, and so forth, we “can therefore legitimately posit that the phenomenon gives itself.”61 It is this positing that Newman had theorized under the heading of “real assent” in the late 1860s. At that time, both Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins (then studying at the Birmingham Oratory) anticipate precisely this phenomenological turn, which seeks to lead the modern self out of the methodological dead-end into which it had been led by Descartes. In their sheer givenness and organized presence (what Hopkins develops under the heading of “inscape” and “instress”), images above all command our real assent, though Newman acknowledges that assent here “is no warrant for the existence of the objects which those images represent.”62 Anticipating developments in modern phenomenology, Newman’s distinction between notional and real assent thus resolves itself into that between “certitude [, which] is a mental state,” and “certainty [, which] is a quality of propositions.”63 Though principally concerned with epistemology, Newman’s Grammar also points to the weakness of a strictly procedural or methodological understanding of rational agency. In so doing, his argument continues a line of questioning begun by the Romantics who had variously taken exception with the Enlightenment’s negative definition of freedom as the ability to choose unconstrained by emotive bias, political authority, or transcendent norms—be they inherited or privately conceived.

Alternatively, a critique of Enlightenment freedom may take a mystical turn, such as when in his 1809 treatise Schelling insists that “only out of the darkness of unreason (out of feeling, out of longing, the sublime mother of understanding) can clear thoughts arise.”64 With his residually Gnostic conception of freedom as “a power for evil,” Schelling is only the first of several major philosophers to argue that the Enlightenment utopias of laissez-faire liberalism, state-sponsored utilitarianism, or Kantian cosmopolitanism rest on decidedly shaky foundations.65 Echoing a point previously made in Burke’s Reflections and in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister—viz., the asymmetry between freedom and rationality—Schelling’s famous characterization of freedom as the “irreducible remainder that cannot be resolved into reason” prepares the ground for Schopenhauer’s Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will (1839) and Nietzsche’s vehement indictment of free will in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), which warrants quoting in full:66

I feel . . . an obligation to sweep away a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding about all of us that has hung like a fog around the concept of the “free spirit” for far too long, leaving it completely opaque. In all the countries of Europe, and in America as well, there is now something that abuses this name: a very narrow, restricted, chained-up type of spirit whose inclinations are pretty much the opposite of our own intentions and instincts (not to mention the fact that this restricted type will be a fully shut window and bolted door with respect to these approaching new philosophers). In a word (but a bad one): they belong to the levelers, these misnamed “free spirits”—as eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern ideas.” They are all people without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy, solid folks whose courage and honest decency cannot be denied—it’s just that they are un-free and ridiculously superficial, particularly given their basic tendency to think that all human misery and wrongdoing is caused by traditional social structures: which lands truth happily on its head! What they want to strive for with all their might is the universal, green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety, contentment, and an easier life for all. Their two most well-sung songs and doctrines are called: “equal rights” and “sympathy for all that suffers”—and they view suffering itself as something that needs to be abolished.67

A searing indictment of liberalism’s axiomatically progressive view of history, the passage reaffirms Nietzsche’s fundamentally tragic conception of life as suffering. Not to suffer, it is intimated, would mean being deprived of memory and, ultimately, of “life” itself—a notion that, more than any other modern thinker, Nietzsche tries to rehabilitate as the center of philosophy. Notably, life and consciousness pivot on solitude (Einsamkeit) as the apparent basis of all introspection. Rather more surprising in light of Nietzsche’s own theses regarding the “overcoming” (Überwindung) of man, his argument here also rejects “modern ideas” inasmuch as they purport to improve the human condition by analyzing and gradually transforming “traditional social structures.” Covetous of “security, safety, contentment, and an easier life,” modern social psychology is defined, in Nietzsche’s view, by its fundamentally escapist or “aesthetic” mode of cognition. The ultimate opiate thus turns out to be “freedom” itself inasmuch as the self’s vaunted emancipation from past values and traditions seeks to attenuate the variously bracing or exhilarating, and ever unpredictable nature of life and action. Not without reason, Freud would eventually come to think of modern consciousness as shaped by the overwhelming desire not to be stimulated, know, or remember. His vituperations against Augustine elsewhere notwithstanding, Nietzsche here appears as a moralist keen to recover suffering and memory as integral conditions of personhood.68 His “understanding of enhanced life, which can fully affirm itself, also in a sense takes us beyond life; and in this it is analogous with other, religious notions of enhanced life.”69 In particular, Nietzsche’s amalgamation of life to a strong model of “action” (Handlung) and “deed” (Tat) bears an unmistakable resemblance to Augustine’s conception of the divided will, itself a powerful catalyst of suffering and introspection.

Nietzsche’s passage is but a particularly strident instance of nineteenth-century writing revealing the experience of freedom as a metaphysical burden, a point echoed by major studies of the concept since.70 Writing in the momentous year of 1871, Nietzsche’s erstwhile teacher Jacob Burckhardt remarks on how, “for two hundred years, people in England have imagined that every problem could be solved through Freedom, and that one could let opposites correct one another in the free interplay of argument.” Yet the result has been “a complete disintegration of the idea of authority,” as well as the apparent downward transposition of the “idea of goodness . . . into the idea of progress, i.e., undisturbed money-making and modern comforts.” Notwithstanding the universal, “merciless optimism,” he continues, “our assumption that we live in the age of moral progress is supremely ridiculous,” being constantly belied by “our vulgar hatred of everything that is different, of the many-sidedness of life.”71 Burckhardt’s despondent summation—only “turpitude is immortal on earth”72—is famously echoed by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. For as Ivan Karamazov’s famous parable argues, Christ’s exemplary rejection of the temporal trappings of power and authority (“earthly bread”) “in the name of freedom and heavenly bread” only intensified the susceptibility of man to material and ideological temptation: “Now see what you did next. And all again in the name of freedom! I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born.”

Just what it is that this vexing freedom consists of can only be inferred from the ways in which, according to Ivan’s parable, humans proceed to divest themselves of it: “give them bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience—oh, then he will throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience . . . For the mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for.”73 At a more abstract, philosophical level, Ivan Karamazov’s parable merely reiterates that the choice was never between the terrifying reality of humans as a predatory species and the Nietzschean “pasture-happiness” supposedly guaranteed by modern liberty, rule of law, and economic prosperity. For it is the latter dispensation that, as Hegel argued, brings the “terror” (Schrecken) of “absolute freedom” into full view and thus confronts modernity’s disembedded individual with its own isolated and unfathomable singularity.74 In rather more forthright terms, Hannah Arendt’s closing paragraph to The Human Condition draws out the central implication of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Eliot, and a host of other eminent intellectuals; as she so laconically puts it, “it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think” (324).

Arguably, it is one of the main achievements of early Romanticism to have located tyranny not merely in the caprices and excesses of the ancient régime or the younger William Pitt’s repressive domestic policies but also in the oblique coherence of social conventions, customs, and manners that comprise the humdrum life of the modern petit-bourgeois individual. In so doing, writers like Blake, Coleridge, and Goethe alight on another “unapproachable freedom from which thought itself proceeds,” a freedom that can be claimed neither as the ground nor as the object of instrumental thought.75 Consider Blake’s careful parsing of the false opposition between Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible and Paine’s Age of Reason, Coleridge’s brilliantly ambivalent rumination of “free will” in Aids to Reflection, John Keats’s “negative capability,” or Hölderlin’s poetic image of “openness” (das Offene): in each case, thinking is suffused with creative imagination—that is, a counterfactual, nonlinear, non-instrumental, and necessarily provisional mode of being. Traversing uncharted and unpredictable terrain, freedom reveals existence to be always something more than mere facticity, self-possession, certainty, or righteousness. We are drawing close here to Heidegger’s conception of truth as the dis/closure and un/veiling (aletheia), and of lived existence as characterized by Meister Eckhart’s ek-stasis. Freedom, on that view, “is that which, in thinking and of thinking, must, simply in order to think, tend in spite of everything toward a liberation as well as toward the very reality of the existence that is to be thought of. Without this, thinking would have no meaning. All thought, even when skeptical, negative, dark, and disabused, if it is thought, frees the existing of existence.”76

Long before Freud was to make the point in his late work, nineteenth-century literary and philosophical narratives explore just how the infinitely complex textures of social life and religious culture offer humans refuge from the terrifying enigma of freedom. Among the most astute analyses of a social and cultural matrix subtly denuding the individual of its inscrutable singularity and freedom is George Eliot’s novelistic oeuvre. Particularly her late novels offer an abundance of examples of quasi-unconscious patterns of socialization and moral inarticulacy powerfully at work. Surely no reactionary in such matters, Mill perceives England as “the native country of compromise” and seems pleased that “there is in the English mind, both in speculation and in practice, a highly salutary shrinking from all extremes.” Yet his qualification, immediately following, that “this shrinking is rather an instinct of caution than a result of insight . . . [and hence] too ready to satisfy itself with any medium, merely because it is a medium” betrays anxiety about a new type of hidebound and intellectually stunted “herd mentality” that Nietzsche and even a reluctant liberal like Fontane would soon identify as a troubling consequence of modern liberalism.77 Just how the petit-bourgeois individual’s mimetic view of morality obfuscates its covetous and hedonistic psychology emerges vividly in two memorable scenes from Daniel Deronda. Showcasing the powerful influence of Darwin’s oeuvre, the novel’s famous opening chapter at the gambling table in Leubronn offers us a decidedly unglamorous cross-section of Europeans, “Livonian and Spanish, Graeco-Italian and miscellaneous German, English aristocratic and English plebeian.” Transfixed by the circular motion of the roulette wheel, those present betray “a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask—as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action.”

Another instance of what the narrative sardonically characterizes as “a striking admission of human equality” involves an archery meeting at the Brackenshaw estate. Really a Darwinian mating ritual enacted in genteel disguise, this cultivated soirée held in a “carefully-kept enclosure” casts an unsparing light on the uniform, somnambulist placidity of female life in the Victorian upper middle class: “What could make a better background for the flower-groups of ladies, moving and bowing and turning their necks as it would become the leisurely lilies to do if they took to locomotion? The sounds too were pleasant to hear . . . musical laughs in all the registers and a harmony of happy friendly speeches, now rising towards mild excitement, now sinking to an agreeable murmur.”78 As Eliot (and, at times, Mill too) saw, the effect of modern liberalism involves not “the destruction of consensus,” nor indeed “the substitution of another consensus” of equal or perhaps superior articulacy. Rather, it pivots on informed political and social consent having been supplanted by mere “sentiency,” by the mindless tropism of individuals as they replicate behavioral conventions in quasi-instinctual form, rather than scrutinizing and where needed transcending what is objectively given by means of action. It is just this progressive extinction of capable agency that shapes the plot of Gwendolen Harleth; and it is her character (seeking counsel from Deronda but lacking the clarity and resolve to act on it) that illustrates how “the result of accepting Mill’s advice to decide everything for ourselves is not decision but indecision.”79

In this regard, George Eliot’s focus on the maimed or irresolute nature of the psychology of mid-Victorian women connects her oeuvre to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Fontane’s Effi Briest, and a host of other eponymous, female névroses of the nineteenth-century novel—all of whom appear to have seized on emotion as the last remaining avenue toward self-possession. Yet that strategy of conspicuous sentiment, already equivocal and often treacherous in Rousseau’s Julie and Goethe’s Werther, has become a dead-end in Flaubert. Misidentifying freedom as “choice,” Emma frantically pursues various forms of hyper-stimulation (sex and death being uppermost on her list) merely so as to evade her terminally secure and aimless, provincial existence by various means: “She longed to travel; she longed to go back and live in the convent. She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris” or (surely everyone’s favorite) “she conceived the idea of becoming a saint.”80 In passing we recall what may justly be termed a philosophical analysis of Emma’s predicament, tendered as it were avant la lettre in Schopenhauer’s 1839 Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will—a work whose diametrical opposition to Coleridge we will have occasion to consider later on. Separating from the very outset the concept of “liberty” and “rights” (which “only refers to an ability, that is, precisely to the absence of physical obstacles to the actions of the animal”) from “moral freedom,” Schopenhauer homes in on the one, all-important question, viz., whether “the will itself [is] free.” The customary protestation by classical liberalism’s autonomous subject (viz., “I can do what I will”) evidently misses the underlying question, viz., “whether the will itself is free” or whether “you can also will what you will.” For the self-conscious individual to say “I can will, and when I will an action, the movable limbs of my body will at once and inevitably carry it out the moment I will it” is to define freedom strictly as “being able to do in accordance with the will.” Such had been the dominant view of Enlightenment thought, as categorically expressed by Voltaire: vouloir et agir, c’est précisement la même chose qu’être libre.81 Yet precisely here trouble lurks; for even as “self-consciousness asserts the freedom of doing under the presupposition of willing,” Schopenhauer reminds us that “what we have inquired about is the freedom of willing.” Consistent with liberalism’s erroneous construal of human freedom as “multiple choice,” Emma consistently mistakes wishing for willing. It is indeed possible, Schopenhauer notes, to “wish opposite things, but [one] can will only one of them, and which one is first revealed even to self-consciousness by the deed.”82 Emma’s failure to understand as much reflects modernity’s fundamental loss of “action” (or “deed”) as a meaningful category.83 Like the equally severe case of Frédéric Moreau in L’éducation sentimentale, Emma’s life presents a wholly “negative balance sheet, the end of action in ennui.”84

For Robert Pippin, Madame Bovary exemplifies “bourgeois culture’s growing dissatisfaction with itself, a sense that modernity’s official self-understanding—enlightened, liberal, progressive, humanistic—had been a misunderstanding.” Fully aware that the dissociated sensibility of mid-nineteenth-century petit-bourgeois individuals had by then permeated every aspect of their existence, Flaubert realized that a fundamentally new conception of narrative art was called for. At the macro-level, this means that “the story is redeemed, rendered worthy of interest, important, only by its telling, not by the discovery of an internal point or purpose to the suffering and misery of the characters.”85 Concurrently, at the micro-level of narrative technique, the correlate of this psycho-historical decline can be found in the “studied irresponsibility” with which Flaubert deploys the style indirect libre, a mode of speech that “refuses to designate who is responsible for a given statement.” As speech is shown to have deteriorated into “cliché, belonging to everyone and to no one,” action has not only been absorbed into “behavior,” but the resulting narrative turns out to be conspicuously “anti-novelistic” by converting its protagonist’s terminal obtuseness into a frustrating reading-experience. For what supplants action is the mindless implementation of a subjective attitude or desire that is almost instantaneously shown to be empty. Consequently, Flaubert’s novels forever “preclude turning fascination into knowledge.”86 With nothing more than the hallucinatory and transient force of desire to sustain the bourgeois subject, it makes little difference whether the attitude in question is Kant’s formal feeling of respect for the moral law or the wayward, psychosexual cravings and sensations so ubiquitous in Flaubert’s prose. Indeed, few writers capture more effectively how Aristotelian praxis and its underlying, public and normative sense of a telos have been supplanted by modernity’s autistic notion of a self defined via its exclusive dominium or “right” to access the fantasized, virtual realm of economic and erotic fulfillment.

The price continually exacted from a liberated and emancipated bourgeoisie in the later nineteenth century is that it will become incrementally more conscious of the essential pettiness of its founding vision; having tied the notion of happiness to trivial socioeconomic aspirations (and no less banal psychosexual fantasies) rather than to the fulfillment of a normative good (telos), it finds quotidian life aimless, phantasmagorical, and replete with proto-Freudian neuroses and incipient despair that glance ahead to the existential parables of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus: “But to [Emma] nothing happened. It was God’s will. The future was a pitch-black tunnel, ending in a locked door.”87 Emma’s predicament is not that of a supposedly lively and distinctive imagination gratuitously snuffed out by the oppressive humdrum of small-town provincial life and a stultifying marriage. Rather, as her “choice” to marry Charles already suggests, her petit-bourgeois imagination itself is utterly banal and cliché-ridden, a storeroom cluttered with the banal titillation and commodity-like fantasies infused by her desultory perusal of romance literature; she is said to be “deep in Walter Scott,” Parisian weeklies, and jejune fantasies of religious rapture.88 Hence, as the self-styled “bourgeoisophobus” Flaubert takes pains to illustrate at every level of his narrative art, his protagonists do indeed “dwell in possibility” (as Emily Dickinson had put it). Yet in so doing, they turn out to be effectively paralyzed as agents, not to mention the fact that the possibilities in question have themselves been utterly colonized and denuded by commercial culture.89

1. Hirschman, Passions, 32.

2. On the fragmentation of Christianity into denominations, see Martin, On Secularization, esp. the essays on Pentecostalism and on the “Plurality of Faiths,” 141–170; Berger, Sacred Canopy, 105–125; on anticlericalism in conjunction with secularization and denominational fragmentation, see Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 180–234; Chadwick, Secularization, esp. 107–139; C. Taylor, Secular Age, 352–459; on the anthropological dimension of this shift, see Gauchet, Disenchantment, 162–207; on secular communities in British Romanticism, see Jager, Book of God.

3. On the “mathematization of nature,” see Husserl, Crisis, §9 (pp. 23–59); the process rests on what M. Polanyi calls the “axiomatization of mathematics” and its continuing strides toward ever-increasing possibilities of non-tautological generalization; see Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 184–193; and also Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 149–164.

4. Tocqueville, Democracy, 4:1252.

5. Ibid., 4:1260.

6. Following Jakob Boehme, Schelling’s 1809 essay On Human Freedom develops a mystical (in part Gnostic) account concerning the origin of evil and reason, respectively: “Following the eternal act of self-revelation, the world as we now behold it, is all rule, order and form; but the unruly [das Regellose] lies ever in the depths as though it might again break through . . . Out of this which is unreasonable, reason in the true sense is born. Without this preceding gloom, creation would have no reality; darkness is its necessary heritage” (Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries, 34; Schelling’s neologism of “the groundless” (Ungrund) appears on p. 87.

7. On the centrality of performative models of self-origination and speech in the Romantic era, see Esterhammer, Romantic Performative.

8. Rights of Man, 66; Godwin echoes Paine’s contention in a short chapter on physical and moral “Equality of Mankind” (Enquiry, 181–184), though as we shall see he diametrically opposes Paine, Thelwall, and most other English “Jacobins” on the question of rights. Just five years later, Joseph de Maistre vehemently rejects Paine’s claim that men are “all of one degree”: “there is no such thing as man [l’homme] in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him” (Considerations, 53). On Paine, see Kramnick, Republicanism, 133–160; on de Maistre, see Pfau, “Rational Theology.”

9. “The nature of honor is to demand preferences and distinctions” (Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, I.3.7). Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 38–39. As Taylor goes on to argue, the “distinction” affirmed by an egalitarian politics of recognition is less the manifest reality of the person than his or her presumptive “potential, rather than anything a person may have made of it” (ibid., 41).

10. Rights of Man, 68.

11. Kramnick, Republicanism, 147; Paine quoted in ibid., 154.

12. C. Taylor, Sources, 30.

13. Democracy and Tradition, 3–5.

14. On Human Conduct, 57–58 (italics mine); for a discussion of Oakeshott’s theory of moral practice in relation to Wordsworth and Hegel, see Pfau, “Immediacy and Dissolution.”

15. Rights of Man, 42.

16. Milbank, “Against Human Rights,” 2, 5. Milbank rejects Wolterstorff’s thesis that modern individual claim rights originate in early Christianity, which entails suspending the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of “right reason” as bound up with (and derived from) the ontology of the cosmos itself; and he specifically faults Wolterstorff for misconstruing Villey’s thesis, which “was not . . . that a ius was anciently a ‘thing’ on our modern model of thing as object that could only be shared in terms of literal partition. To the contrary, it was a ‘thing’ in the sense of an objective ideality that could be participated in. . . . Ius up till at least the 13th century meant always the ‘objectively right,’ that which was just, and it was linked to a notion of justice as distribution which meant always measuring the proper situation of persons and things in relation to each other” (“Against Human Rights,” 8, 14). Regrettably, Annabel Brett’s detailed study (Liberty, Right and Nature) of the split between objective right and subjective rights in Scholastic and early modern thought came to my attention too late to be factored into the present discussion.

17. Reid, “Canonistic Contribution,” 53–54. Following Brian Tierney’s ground-breaking work on The Origins of Natural Rights Language, Reid is critical of Villey’s initial thesis, and also of his later attempt to connect the emergence of modern rights theory to Ockham’s voluntarist epistemology. Some of Reid’s many and rich examples support his point better than others; leaving aside the panoply of Latin legal terms often subsumed under the bland word “right” (e.g., libertas, potestas, facultas, immunitas, dominium, justitia, interesse, and actio [64]), a bishop’s right to tax churches (the so-called cathedraticum) would not appear to be a modern claim right since it appends to his person only ex officio rather than in virtue of his status as a human being. While conceding that the initial formulation of canon law in Gratian’s Decretum (ca. A.D. 1140) never yielded an explicit “treatise on rights,” Reid nonetheless affirms the link between twelfth-century canon law and modern rights theory: “one should not mistake the absence of theoretical speculation for the lack of a consistently deployed concept” (57). In fact, one should; for the historical effectiveness of an idea or conceptual tradition—what Gadamer calls its Wirkungsgeschichte—hinges on the explicit and dialectical ways in which its core propositions or beliefs are probed by successive generations. Intellectual traditions are not something virtual or conjectural but eminently real; prolonged periods of latency tend to undermine their reality. For Wolterstorff, Villey’s account is the archetypal “narrative of decline” that proceeds from “the dominance in ancient and early medieval times of the concept of the right and the conception of justice as right order to the emergence and eventual dominance in modern times of the concept of rights and the conception of justice as grounded in natural rights” (Justice, 45–58; quote from 45).

18. The phrase is from Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of Nations (quoted in Wolterstorff, Justice, 52).

19. Milbank, “Against Human Rights,” 13, 16.

20. Wolterstorff, Justice, 56. Aside from Ockham, whose position in the rights-controversy remains somewhat unique even now, Wolterstorff (drawing on Tierney) mentions numerous other writers, including Dominicans and Aristotelians, who make repeated use of ius as a natural right (Hervaeus Natalis, Marsilius of Padua, Godfrey of Fontaine).

21. Justice, 63.

22. Ibid., 350–361; quote from 360.

23. See Pfau, “Rational Theology.”

24. Wolterstorff, Justice, 361.

25. AV, 66–67. On Gewirth’s (Kantian) attempt to tether rights to the capacity for rational agency, see Wolterstorff’s critique, Justice, 335–340; echoing MacIntyre’s critique of Gewirth, Wolterstorff rejects as “fake” or “pseudo-rights” many of the rights claims found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted 10 December 1948). For in many cases (e.g., the right to being educated) “one does not have a right to the life-good” in question, simply because “there is no one against whom one has that right. In that situation, one is not wronged by not receiving such an education” (ibid., 315–317). Yet for Wolterstorff, it is important to distinguish between “inherent rights and human rights,” the first of which is contingent on a human being’s specific status whereas the latter is “essential to the human being who has that status.” As he contends, much of the criticism (including MacIntyre’s arguments in After Virtue) directed at modern rights theory has ignored that distinction and misconstrued all rights as “inherent.”

26. AV, 67; MacIntyre’s contention invariably (and perhaps uncomfortably) recalls Burke’s and de Maistre’s critique of modern rights as a frivolous attempt to exempt one’s standpoint as a rational agent from the contingent flow of history. As de Maistre had so stridently put it, “the rights of the people are never written, or at any rate, constitutive acts or fundamental written laws are never more than declaratory statements of anterior rights about which nothing can be said except that they exist because they exist” (Considerations, 49).

27. Thelwall, Politics of English Jacobinism, 457–458.

28. E. Cassirer, Enlightenment, 238.

29. Milbank, Theology, 13–14; similarly, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan remarks how “the modern liberal concept of right belongs to the socially atomistic and disintegrative philosophy of ‘possessive individualism’ . . . In this tradition the rights-bearing subject is conceived first and foremost as the immediate, exclusive proprietor of his/her physical and spiritual being and capacities, and derivatively as proprietor of those external objects necessary to their preservation and development. The rights-possessor is portrayed as sovereign over his/her human and non-human environment, in relation to which his/her orientation is controlling, acquisitive, and competitive. He/she is typically occupied in actions of disposing, using, exchanging, commanding, and demanding. The proprietary subject forms social and political relationships through the formal mechanism of the contract, modeled on an economic-legal transaction undertaken from calculations of self-interest” (“Natural Law,” 20).

30. E. Cassirer, Enlightenment, 239–240.

31. Theology, 14.

32. Notoriously, MacIntyre insists that such claims must be classed as “one with belief in witches and unicorns.” For just as with these fabled creatures, “every attempt to give good reasons that there are such rights has failed. The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths” (AV, 69). For a standard account of modern rights theory, see Tuck, Modern Rights Theories, and, critical of MacIntyre, Wolterstorff, Justice; on natural rights theory in early Romanticism, see White, Natural Rights, esp. 1–40; for a concise survey of the evolution of rights from the thirteenth century onward and the recent project of “redeeming the ‘Human’ through Human Rights,” see Assad, Formations, 127–158.

33. Godwin, Enquiry, 192–194.

34. Ibid., 197.

35. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Visible Language,” 61–62.

36. Makdisi, William Blake, 124.

37. Milton, Pl. 32, in CPP, 132.

38. MacIntyre, AV, 41. On Blake’s political vision, see Erdman, Blake, esp. 198–279; Makdisi, William Blake, esp. 16–77; on Blake’s iconoclastic aesthetic in the context of the late eighteenth-century engraving and the commercialization of art vis-à-vis Blake’s aesthetic iconoclasm, see Eaves, Counter-Arts Conspiracy, esp. 1–91; on the broader institutional and political contexts of late eighteenth-century art, see Barrell, Theory of Painting, esp. 1–67 and 222–257; on the rhetorical and figural strategies of Blake’s prophetic idiom, see Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition, 8–85 and 124–184; Balfour, Rhetoric, 127–172; McGann, Social Values, 32–49 and 152–172; and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Visible Language.”

39. Religion and Rational Theology, 93.

40. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 2. The image of Kant as a strict formalist and rigorist (as G. E. Anscombe, Bernard Williams, and Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, had argued) has recently undergone extensive revision; for attempts to locate a “substantive value theory” in Kant’s moral philosophy, and to bring transcendental reflection into alignment with the empirical practice of “character formation” and a quasi-Aristotelian initiation into the virtues, see Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought and, on Wood, Pippin, “Kant’s Theory of Value.” For a substantial, rather than formalist, understanding of moral agency in Kant’s ethics, see Munzel, Kant’s Conception, esp. 187–334; Herman, “Making Room for Character” and “Training to Autonomy.” On Kant’s relation to virtue ethics, see Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 322–340; Engstrom, “Happiness and the Highest Good”; and Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, esp. 121–186.

41. “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (Pensées, no. 201, p. 66). On the relation between imagination and risk in a modern conception of “play” aimed at recovering rationality as an emergent property and at salvaging reason from the voluntarist fate of a merely ascriptive value, see Pfau, “Appearance of Stimmung.”

42. Gehlen, Man, 50 (trans. modified)/Ger. Der Mensch, 58.

43. As so often, Blake’s proverb is deliberately ambiguous in that it also allows “another” to mean “another [act]” rather than “an Other.” In that case, the gnomic enjoinder to set “another [act] before you” might ask us to focus on “act” as something more than intention or self-realization, such that the act realizes the ethical substance of the agent, not the other way round.

44. Whose Justice? 12–46.

45. Man, 24, 27/Ger. Der Mensch, 32, 34 (trans. modified). Gehlen later qualifies his view of human beings as largely devoid of “instinctual guidance,” arguing instead for “a reduction” (Instinktreduktion) such that “the instinctual residues found in human beings exhibit high degrees of plasticity and fungibility [in hohem Grade plastisch und verschmelzbar] and, to use Freud’s expression, are ‘convertible’” (Urmensch und Spätkultur, 149; trans. mine).

46. Ibid., 45/Ger. 53. Approaching the same issues from the perspective of analytical philosophy, Michael Thompson reaches strikingly similar conclusions; see Life and Action, esp. 25–82; likewise, David Burrell explores how the Thomistic notion of actus as “intentional activity” unfolds “in conceptual independence from accomplishment” and, for that very reason, “opens actus to the range of uses it enjoys” (Aquinas, 187); see also Blondel, Action, arguably still the most comprehensive and thoughtful inquiry into what he convincingly portrays as a basic phenomenon of human existence.

47. Mann, Doctor Faustus, 385.

48. Living Liberalism, 39; Hadley’s thesis helpfully corrects Amanda Anderson’s generally positive view of nineteenth-century liberalism’s cultivation of “impartiality” and “detachment” (Powers of Distance, 3–33).

49. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 32–34; Kierkegaard’s horror of the quintessentially modern “phantom” of the “public . . . made up of unsubstantial individuals who are never united . . . and yet are claimed to be a whole” suggests “that when God is displaced as the focus of the unity of things, the function he performs does not disappear, but is exercised by some other source of unity—some other universal” (ibid., 30–31). Kierkegaard’s (and Mill’s) alarm at mindless conformism routinely mistaken for an expression of unconstrained selfhood (albeit en masse) is anticipated by Coleridge, who in 1816 characterizes Britain as a “busy ant-hill in calm and sunshine. By the happy organization of a well-governed society the contradictory interests of ten millions of such individuals may neutralize each other, and be reconciled in the unity of the national interest.” Raising the obvious question: “whence did this happy organization first come?” Coleridge adduces various “misgrowths,” including the triumph of a “mechanic philosophy, . . . an unenlivened general understanding, . . . and a Reading Public . . . diet[ing] at the two public ordinaries of Literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press” (CLS, 21, 28, 36–38).

50. Stendhal, Red and the Black, 424.

51. Nietzsche, Gay Science, no. 95 (p. 92).

52. See Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, esp. Part II (121–179) on the psychological and social dimensions of the will; Hegel’s grim diagnosis of the French Revolution prompts him to view the modern state “as an organic whole; it cannot be seen simply as an aggregation of its elements, be these groups or individuals . . . If we start with men fractioned in individual atoms, no rational state or indeed common life will be possible” (C. Taylor, Hegel, 439).

53. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as translated in Religion and Rational Theology, 113; an alternate rendition of Kant’s pivotal term, Sinnesänderung (Werke, vol. 8: 727) would be “conversion.”

54. Kant, Grounding, 2.

55. For standard accounts, see Sheehan, German History, esp. 207–388 and 451–487; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 174–230 and 297–457; and Nipperdey, German History, 223–236 and 560–578.

56. Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, 38 (trans. mine).

57. Tocqueville, Democracy, 3:699, 713–715.

58. Ibid., 3:835, 966–967.

59. Milbank, Theology, 77.

60. Pippin, Modernism, 23, 25.

61. Being Given, 63, 68.

62. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 135, 76, 80. On the phenomenology of the image, with specific reference to G. M. Hopkins and the work of Jean-Luc Marion, see Pfau, “Rethinking the Image.”

63. Grammar of Assent, 271.

64. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries, 35 (trans. modified).

65. Ibid., 28.

66. On Schopenhauer, see Pfau, “The Melancholy Gift,” and Safranski, Schopenhauer, 307–326. In sharp contrast to Kant’s notion of freedom, autonomy, and duty, Schopenhauer’s account of human freedom rests on the strictly non-cognitive, indeed noumenal causality of the “will.” See also below, 471–477.

67. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, no. 44 (pp. 40–41).

68. On Augustine, see esp. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, no. 59 (p. 63), as well as his vituperative characterization of the Confessions in a letter to Overbeck (31 March 1885), Sämtliche Briefe 7:34.

69. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 374.

70. Nancy, Experience of Freedom, 44–59; Bieri, Handwerk, esp. 29–83.

71. Burckhardt (2 July 1871), in Letters, 143; last quote from Burckhardt, Reflections, 103. In a late letter (17 March 1888), Burckhardt sharpens the point: “Democracy, to be sure, has no sense for the exception, and when it can’t deny it or remove it, hates it from the bottom of its heart. Itself the product of mediocre minds and their envy, Democracy can only use mediocre men as tools, and the ordinary careerist gives it all the guarantees it can desire of common feeling” (Letters, 225).

72. Reflections, 241.

73. Brothers Karamazov, 254.

74. Hegel, of course, only highlights the “bad infinity” of a freedom thought merely as the absence of all constraint in order to promote his own conception of freedom as the reflexive determination of substance as the universal; see Nancy, Experience of Freedom, 5.

75. Ibid., 17.

76. For Nancy, thinking thus is “‘only’ the putting into question of an affirmation, . . . [and] freedom is not the freedom of this or that comportment in existence: it is the freedom of existence to exist, to be ‘decided for being,’ that is, to come to itself according to its own transcendence” (ibid., 18, 23).

77. Mill, “Coleridge,” in Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, 117, 134. On the “herd-mentality” in Nietzsche, see Gay Science, nos. 116, 354, 369; Beyond Good and Evil, nos. 44, 191, 199–202; Genealogy of Morals, Pt. 2, nos. 13, 15, 18; the term also figures prominently in Nietzsche’s Nachlass, esp. his posthumous writings of the 1880s. More surprising is to find a poignant discussion of the apparent demise of bona fide “action” in the modern “herd” in Fontane; see Ch. 38 in Der Stechlin, where Pastor Lorenzen admiringly speaks of a “severe action” [die schwere Gegentat] that cuts through all convention: “to intuitively feel the right thing in moments like that, and to do something terrible in the conviction of what is right, decisively and unshrinkingly, something that out of context runs counter to honor, that is something which impresses me tremendously. In my eyes, that’s the real thing, true courage . . . Batallion courage, the courage of the masses, with all due respect for it, it’s nothing but the courage of the herd [Herdenmut]” (The Stechlin, 290/Der Stechlin, 344).

78. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 8–9, 100.

79. Chadwick, Secularization, 35.

80. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 56, 201.

81. Voltaire, Traité de Métaphysique, 32:57; as E. Cassirer notes (Enlightenment, 250–251), Voltaire later expressly reversed himself, conceding that the will itself cannot be thought otherwise than as wholly determinate.

82. Schopenhauer, Prize Essay, 4, 6, 14–15.

83. Schopenhauer echoes Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1111^b20–30; for Aristotle, “wish” and “choice of will” are different genera altogether since a wish is solely concerned with an end (telos), whereas “we deliberate not about ends but about what contributes to ends” (1112^b10). Noting the “general devaluation of human agency” in Flaubert’s prose, Peter Brooks’s reading of L’éducation sentimentale locates a strikingly analogous confusion in that novel’s protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, who is characterized in the novel as “worn out, full of contradictory desires and no longer even knowing what he wanted; he felt an overwhelming sadness, a wish to die” (Reading, 181, 185).

84. Ibid., 203.

85. Pippin, Modernism, 31, 33.

86. Brooks, Reading, 194, 187.

87. The image seems to be echoed by one of Kafka’s many architectonic images, developed in his “Kleine Fabel”: “Ach,” sagte die Maus, “die Welt wird enger mit jedem Tag. Zuerst war sie so breit, dass ich Angst hatte, ich lief weiter und war glücklich, dass ich endlich rechts und links in der Ferne Mauern sah, aber diese langen Mauern eilen so schnell aufeinander zu, dass ich schon im letzten Zimmer bin, und dort im Winkel steht die Falle, in die ich laufe.” “Du musst nur die Laufrichtung ändern,” sagte die Katze und fraß sie (Zur Frage der Gesetze, 163). Eng. “‘Alas,’ said the mouse, ‘the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so vast that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.’ ‘You only need to change your direction,’ said the cat, and ate it up.”

88. Madame Bovary, 59, 210.

89. Letter to Louis Bouilhet (December 1852), quoted in Gay, Modernism, 6. Perhaps Adorno’s best book, Minima Moralia, can plausibly be read as a running commentary on the dystopic world of the great nineteenth-century novel.