The publick must take notice, that the leaders of that party, who have been for these last ten years involving us in confusion by displaying all the defects of our parliamentary system, and labouring to bring that system to the ground, aware as they are that that system is the cause of our distraction, now take the other side of the question, and in supporting the system are labouring to perpetuate that confusion, which by attacking and exposing the system they created, valeat quantum [for what it’s worth].
—Thomas Grady, 17991
The subject of the parent-teacher conference that ended chapter 4 was system. It, rather than the students or their master, was the primary candidate for praise or blame. Like the “world” to Newton, “education” was for this grandmother a system. As that mode of engaging things spread, systems mediated human behavior in more and more specific ways. Stow’s embedding of system in dialogue enabled him to prescribe not only how education should work—for students and for the master—but also how a responsible grandmother should behave. In similar fashion, Malthus’s embedding of system in essay, as we are about to see, led him to do the same for every “man.”
System was the genre that mediated the relationship between the two modern meanings of discipline: the shaping of knowledge into narrow-but-deep areas of expertise and the disciplining of the subjects constituted by doing so. All of the newly “detached parts of knowledge,” to use Britannica’s terms for its protodisciplines, drew their enabling boundaries by using system to claim their shares of expertise in the human.
The word we use to describe this kind of shaping and reordering—systematize—first appeared in English in the late eighteenth century. The earliest OED examples described how “general notions” were “gradually systematized” (1767) and how “rules” were “systematized in form” (1780). Today, we see no need to add the words “in form”; describing rules as systematized would be taken as sufficient. Untethered to any history of system as a form, we do not hesitate to deploy systematize—as in the example of “memory systems” offered earlier—without regard for time or place.
The benefit of taking both of those contexts into account is to better understand what was at stake in coining the term in the first place. What generated the need for a specific word to describe the act of putting other things into the form of a system was more systems—the proliferation of that form. And not only were there more systems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; there were more of them within and attached to other forms. Those embedded and hybrid systems, I have been arguing, were increasingly more mobile; instead of scaling up into Master Systems, they traveled in different disciplinary directions, gaining explanatory power by including more things.
The word systematizing, then, entered the language as shorthand—or “short writing,” as they would have been called back then—for all of the historically specific ways that more of everything was put “in form.” Those “ways” included the modes of proliferation just described, and the “more” included entities of all kinds: human activities and behaviors, as we have just seen, as well as objects. Putting them “in form” was—per the OED’s first use (1811) of the word systemization—a reordering: “placing the several denominations,” in Jeremy Bentham’s phrase, “in systematic order.”
That adjective, systematic, did appear earlier in the eighteenth century, though infrequently,2 for it marked things as displaying characteristics of system. What these variations of system at the century’s end—systematize, systematizing, systemization—signal is not just the presence or increasing number of things called “system,” but the spread of a social practice: of using system’s scalability to provide order within and across more things. As those things were put into the form of system—their parts reordered into new wholes—those wholes became parts of a larger whole. The reordering, that is, replicated itself at a larger and larger scale, producing a historically specific effect: that extraordinary sense of the social—of the totalizing of the social—that we now call “The System.”
Part III of this book, then, discovers the social incarnations of system—the ways that system re-formed society itself, ranging from politics to clubs to cultures to the subjects that constitute them. It situates system as a form that mediated modernity, and thus it highlights connectivities as well as differences between past and present. And it explores, in this chapter, the cumulative effect of those incarnations, explaining how we came to blame The System.
In our histories of system, this is the third primary intersection with the history of blame:
At both of these intersections, system was targeted for its methodological failings—falling short or simplifying too much or too little. But as system’s social incarnations—its embodiments of specialized expertise and discipline—increased in number and visibility, system was targeted not just for its ambitions but as an object.
At one extreme of this objectification was the almost metaphysical sense of The System I have just noted—the sense of being haunted by, and even a part of, something that is both ubiquitous and blameworthy. But system was also incarnated in a growing body of enterprises that took substantial physical form. Systemization in the late eighteenth century went hand-in-hand with institutionalization. In the earlier senses of “institution” as both the action and result of “instituting or establishing” (OED, 1a) the two terms had occupied the same semantic ground. Both referred to “the established order by which anything is regulated”; in fact, the OED (2b) offers system as a synonym for institution in that sense.
When “institution” took on its more modern, specialized meaning at the turn into the nineteenth century—
an establishment, organization, or association, instituted for the promotion of some object, esp. one of public or general utility (OED, 7a)
—system scaled up from being a synonym to supplying principles and purpose. The 1790s and the opening decades of the next century saw an explosion of this form, from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the British institution, and the London Institution, to the Plymouth Institution, the Liverpool Institution, and the Royal National Life-boat institution. Institutions of this new type were often cast as parts of encompassing systems that acted as contexts for their particular tasks. Thus a parliamentary debate in 1817 praised “our system of public schools and universities” for the manner in which its “institutions” provided “a due supply of men, fitted to serve their country” (Canning 1817, 30).
Objects of praise could, of course, easily become objects to blame, particularly when they are understood to have the power to make men “fit” their purposes. Returning to Malthus can provide us with a dramatic example of how system turned into The System. We saw earlier that the embedded systemic principle in his Essay posed questions of behavioral fit. How, for example, should men act in the face of the inevitably recurring famine that principle predicts? But the link to these moral issues, I emphasized, was not easily made, requiring a second edition.
The difficulty was, in terms of the reshaping of knowledge I have described, a matter of how embedded systems adjusted to their new disciplinary homes. To join these new kinds of specialized conversations, systems had to do more than—per Kevin Kelly’s observation cited earlier—talk to themselves. “A thermostat system,” he argued, “has endless internal bickering” about whether to turn the furnace on or off (Kelly 1994, 125). Could the commands of embedded systems (on or off) carry their authority into the disciplinary adventures of essay? Could the principle, to employ the metaphor I introduced earlier, travel to produce more knowledge and fit men to it?
And once on that journey, could it manage as well the change in terrain signaled by Malthus’s insistence on “truth” (1798, ii) as the basis for that knowledge? That insistence was a disruptive departure from knowledge based on probable sentiments per Smith. The severity of that disruption was underlined by Godwin’s claim that Malthus’s Essay “completely reversed” everyone else’s shared assumptions about the “state of the human species” (Godwin 1820, 616). Could system, that is, move from truth to truth without the shared ground of probability? If it did, how did that change the experience of system—the sense of its efficacy, numbers, location, and the influence it wielded?
In Malthus, this traveling question posed the particular problem of whether his particular thermostat—the on and off of growth governed by the population principle—could and should extend into and re-form human behavior—specifically, the moral issue of whether men who find themselves naturally turned on—“the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state” (11)—should, with the misery of overpopulation in mind, turn themselves off. The answer was that the commands traveled, but not all that well. Malthus had to revise the Essay’s morality substantially between 1798 and the next edition in 1803. Fitting system into essay in order to make men fit required ongoing work, as reflected in the change in the subtitle: As it Affects the Future Improvement of Society became or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness. In this edition, following the vector of accumulating more things, Malthus turned from describing affect to enumerating specific “effects.” To “misery and vice” as effects of the needed checks on population, Malthus added “moral restraint” (Malthus [1798/1803] 1992, 23).3 This revision may at first appear to be only a change in content—Malthus adding a new idea to his argument—but it was the change in form I have just described that established the need for revision in the first place.
That need generated not only specific revisions but also a specific effect. Just as the sense of explanatory power attributed to The Wealth of Nations arose, as we saw earlier, from the process of embedding systems within Master Systems, so the embedding of systems in essays produced its own formal effect: the certainty of system extended into essay resulted in a sense of expansive but attenuated authority. In terms of the travel metaphor, this was the sense of an adventurous but difficult journey never quite at an end. System now worked both too well—the answer venturing into all kinds of questions—and not well enough—it didn’t quite fit.
This was yet another variation of the falling-short scenario. When something repeatedly raises expectations but then repeatedly fails to quite fulfill them, it becomes an object of blame, habitual blame. And that is precisely what became the identifying marker for the very special effect that I am arguing emerged from the proliferating use of embedded systems at the end of the eighteenth century. That effect became a central experience of modernity: the experience of “The System” as something works both too well—“you can’t beat The System”—and not well enough—it always seems to “break down.” Its power is indexed by our capacity to find it everywhere and blame it for everything. The more systems we use, the more we’re convinced that the System uses us: we can’t beat it because we feel we’re part of it, leaving no one outside to control it. Invoking The System has become a primary—perhaps the primary—modern means of totalizing and rationalizing our experience of the social and the political.
Dating what sounds like an attitude—when did systems first become something that could be blamed in this way?—would be a very difficult task. But if we link it to something that happened to a genre—to a specific change in mediation, in how system was used—then we can begin to understand “blaming the system” as a historical event. This event marked a new chapter in what I have termed the history of blame. Individual systems, as I have documented, had previously and frequently been blamed for exploding or falling short of the real. And we have also seen that the genre itself was looked on with suspicion by Bacon and others. But with system proliferating per my diagram of its linear rise—and proliferating into other genres and thus into the newly forming disciplines at the turn into the nineteenth century—it began to cast a shadow larger than itself.
In 1820, two decades after Malthus used system in the manner I have just described—embedding it in an Essay—William Godwin described a world that lived in the shadow of that act:
It has not been enough attended to, how complete a revolution the Essay on Population proposes to effect in human affairs. Mr. Malthus is the most daring and gigantic of all innovators. (Godwin 1820, 622–623)
Since, as noted earlier, Godwin’s own essay, “Of Avarice and Profusion” (1797), had been the immediate occasion of Malthus’s effort, Godwin in this assessment was in part trying to keep up his end of the debate over perfectibility. But it was now twenty-two years later, and he is not so much arguing as bearing witness:
Man, in the most dejected condition in which a human being can be placed, has still something within him which whispers him, “I belong to a world that is worth living in.”
Such was, and was admitted to be the state of the human species, previously to the appearance of the Essay on Population. Now let us see how, under the ascendancy of Mr. Malthus’s theory, all this is completely reversed. (1820, 615–616)
Godwin’s analysis of “how” primarily focuses on ideas, and they were certainly an important factor in Malthus’s “revolution.” But their meaning cannot fully explain why that revolution was experienced as “complete” and its instigator as “gigantic.” What was, we might ask, the form of amplification?
Despite his focus on content, Godwin does point to that form as a matter of form, for his account of the ideas of the Essay attends to how those ideas were shaped into an argument. In Malthus’s voice and then his own, Godwin proclaims to mankind:
He [Malthus] has said, The evils of which you complain, do not lie within your reach to remove: they come from the laws of nature, and the unalterable impulse of human kind.
But Mr. Malthus does not stop here. He presents us with a code of morality conformable to his creed. (621, emphasis mine)
What Godwin is ventriloquizing in the first paragraph of this quotation is Malthus’s system—its principle acting as a law of nature, something that haunts us and yet is of us. But that system, the next paragraph tells us, did not stand still. It traveled, disciplining itself by striving for a fit with other kinds of knowledge—in this instance, moral knowledge.
This phenomenon—the traveling of embedded systems—was how, as Godwin saw it back then, “the Essay on Population … effect[ed]” its “revolution” in “human affairs.” In retrospect, it is how knowledge of our own affairs came to be shaped by The System. Our characteristic reactions to it today—which define our sense of what it is—consist of various combinations of the responses Godwin inscribed. Well before he addressed the specific negatives of Malthus’s revised code, Godwin observed, “The main and direct moral and lesson of the Essay on Population is passiveness” (616). That passivity could both carry “accents of despair” and erupt into the activity that Godwin himself pursued: blame. For him, and back then, the target could be personified as Malthus; for us, after being immersed for more than two centuries in writing configured in this manner, it is more amorphous, extending across all fields—not just population and morality—into The System as our particularly modern sense of things as they are.
Although great rivals in content—their debate over perfectibility helped to configure turn-of-the-century politics—Godwin and Malthus were comrades in form. In fact, that strategic similarity played an important role in elevating their debate to its prominent place in the war of ideas4 at that time. They both found forms that amplified their arguments. Just as Malthus inserted his system of population into an accessible Essay, so Godwin made another form, the novel, the popular home of his “principles” of political justice. For Godwin, however, this embedding was not a matter of hurrying to join the conversation—per Malthus’s apology—but an effort to keep his place in it.
The work that first earned him a spot in that conversation, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), took a standard form of written system: a list of “principles” followed by expository prose. But the English reaction to the French Revolution and its aftermath made an exposition of that content in that form dangerous. With most of his friends in jail, Godwin took generic cover behind a fictitious narrative. Not only would a novel protect his person from his principles; as a genre growing in popularity, the novel would also, he hoped, appeal “to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach” (3).
Attracting readers, however, was but the first step. As in Malthus, fitting system into another form enabled its principles to travel. Just as the principle of population carried consequences for the morality of those interpolated by its logic, so Godwin posited his political principles as reaching into “things passing in the moral world.” “It is but of late,” he insisted, “that the inestimable importance of political principles has been adequately comprehended” (3). Godwin set the vector for this reach into human behavior in his title, first invoking the existing system—Things as They Are—and then the fiction into which it traveled—The Adventures of Caleb Williams ([1794] 1988). The plot then elaborated a causal relationship between them.
Godwin’s plotting was but one chapter in the interrelations between system and fiction—under such rubrics as “histories,” “romances,” and “novels”5—during the eighteenth century. At the head of chapter 2, for example, I cited Henry Fielding’s narrator of Tom Jones: “I am not writing a System, but a History.” That assertion of difference tells us that system was a form to be reckoned with in the eighteenth century. Fielding’s fictions repeatedly feature such generic comparisons, each of them an effort to heighten the value of his own enterprise by juxtaposing it with other “high” forms. The preface to Joseph Andrews is the most elaborately plotted: Fielding tries to push his “comic romance” up the generic hierarchy by calling it a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose” predicated on a lost Homeric model (Fielding 1742, v). The point, of course, is to keep the right company, gaining value by proximity without being overshadowed.
In this case, Fielding appropriated the value of the epic as a prestigious form by invoking it as an absence—a move that corresponded to his audience’s sense that the epic’s power lay in the past,6 whether classical or Miltonic. System, however, required a slightly different approach. Since its power as a genre, particularly in the wake of Newton, lay very much in the present, Fielding had to invoke system as a lively other. Thus, he valorized Tom Jones not as a reincarnation of a lost model but as a worthy alternative to a popular rival: system.
The interplay between the two throughout the eighteenth century included variations of two basic kinds: fiction-in-system and system-in-fiction. We have seen how the former emerged from the ongoing concern that the making of parts into wholes inevitably entailed acts of making things up. This was the temptation in Bacon’s words, “to publish a dream of our imagination as a model of the world” (Bacon [1620] 2000, 24). Giving in to that temptation, as we saw Newton’s editor, Roger Cotes, put it, meant “merely putting together a romance, elegant perhaps and charming, but nevertheless a romance” (Newton [1687] 1999, 386). This fear of fiction as the Achilles’ heel of system was what led Adam Smith to characterize “all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phaenomena of nature” (Smith [1795] 1980, 105). What drove Smith and the other makers of Master Systems to forge ahead anyway was the conviction, inspired by the Newtonian system, that connection just might be possible: the world could be known. But they worried that in that final leap to completion—to matching the full complexity of nature—there would be a necessary fictiveness.
Systems undermined by faulty fictions became, in turn, a standard motif for writers of fictional narratives during the eighteenth century. In these examples of system-in-fiction, tales of system failure often configured both the portrayal of characters within novels and the overall shape of the novels themselves. Such protagonists, Eric Rothstein has argued, try
to be led by a system. … Thus Rasselas asks only one kind of question, whether each mode of life he sees can give him the same thing with which the Happy Valley has tantalized him, a static “choice of life” in which he can confidently repose. Toby Shandy, aching from and for war, interprets life as should an ideal soldier, and soldier in idea. The invalid Matthew Bramble makes nosology an absolute. (1975, 8)
All of these characters dramatize the fate of system portrayed as fictions relentlessly imposed on reality. And to the extent that the characters’ behaviors dictate the overall movement of the plot, readers are forced to reenact the same pattern of disillusionment. In the case of Rasselas, for example, they experience, chapter by chapter, the insistent repetition of the Prince’s systematic effort to order “life.”
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, writers of fiction in the particular form of the novel articulated their relationship to system in a new, hierarchical fashion. “Let me make the novels of a country,” wrote Anna Barbauld in 1810, “and let who will make the systems” (Barbauld 1810, I.61–62).7 This bold assertion came at a crucial moment in the history of fiction and in the formation of the disciplinary category of Literature (Siskin 2001): the “institution” of the novel as we now know it (Brown 1997, 179–185). In fact, if Homer Brown is correct in linking that institutionalization to the editorial enterprise of Barbauld (The British Novelists) and Scott (Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library 1821–1824), Barbauld’s statement is not only descriptive but constitutive. As the last sentence of the introductory essay that explains and justifies Barbauld’s pioneering project of anthologizing the novel, it participated in what critics have called the rise of the novel.
To see that “rise”8 in Brown’s terms is to see it as part of the widespread historical phenomenon of institutionalization I have just described. From that perspective, Barbauld’s downgrading of system was itself, ironically, a “systemization”: the newly minted term for the procedure by which modern institutions were formed. Barbauld crowned the novel by putting it in systematic order. As we saw with “systems versus essays,” the apparent rivalry of novels versus systems could and actually did work in a mutually productive fashion: more systems and more novels as exemplified by Godwin’s two-for-one (a system-in-a-novel).
If Barbauld’s claim announced the initial arrival of the novel as a high form in terms of its interactions with system, an article in the Edinburgh Review a generation later (1832) announced its maturity in the same manner (“Review of the Waverly Novels and Tales of My Landlord,” 1832, 61–79). It singled out Sir Walter Scott for praise, but that praise formed the basis of a larger claim.9 The knowledge that previously would have been contained in less entertaining genres was now, argued the Review, being conveyed in a more appealing form. The reform-minded public of 1832 wanted “facts,” and fiction was now valued as a practical way of meeting the demand (Born 1995, 31–32).
“In consequence of this newly-enlarged view of the principles on which fiction should be written,” declared the Review,
we have, since the appearance of Waverley, seen the fruits of varied learning and experience displayed in that agreeable form; and we have even received from works of fiction what it would once have been thought preposterous to expect—information. … We have learnt, too, how greatly the sphere of the Novel may be extended, and how capable it is of becoming the vehicle almost of every species of popular knowledge. (77)
Using philosophical terms and mechanistic images that echo back through Newton and Bacon, the Review described the “extended” novel as beginning to behave as we have seen system behave: new “principles” allow it to be the “vehicle” for more things. In the terms I have suggested, the embedding of systems in other forms transformed their hosts—in this case, giving the novel a role in the work that system took up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the production and circulation of knowledge. To the surprise of the Review, novels began to function as what we would now call “information” systems.
Whereas Barbauld names system only to dismiss it, this reviewer does not directly reference any other genre, including system. The purpose here, after all, was to announce that the novel had come into its own. By this point—after more than a century of constant interplay—system had become a largely silent partner in celebrations of the novel. Those developmental details were part of the transformation of history I described in detail in chapter 2: the turn to disciplinary-specific histories of ideas animated by the agency of individual subjects. The tale of how system mediated the novel’s rise requires both engaging system as a genre, and not just as an idea, and opting for a history geared to describing how genres mediate each other. Barbauld’s statement makes sense only within such a history, as does Godwin’s effort to embed system in the genre Barbauld helped to systematize less than two decades later.
The narrative of Caleb’s “adventures” was configured by variations of the interplay with system I have described. It is presented as extending to include all things, for Caleb believes that only the total transparency of complete disclosure can defeat Falkland’s obscure power. The narrative also features a variation of the practice of presenting each character as having a single informing principle—curiosity in Caleb’s case, the “love of chivalry and romance” in Falkland’s (Godwin 1988, 349, 6, 12).
The embedding of system in Caleb Williams put the concept of character itself into a new relationship to the “things” ordered by system: as Godwin observes in the Preface, they “intrude” into each other (3). As a result, Caleb comes to feel part of the very things that oppress him. This is, let me emphasize, a formal phenomenon in novels of that time—one that overrides distinctions of content, whether cast as dissenting versus conservative or as ideological versus aesthetic. Just consider how Jane Austen’s independent heroines can find themselves only in marriage; how Walter Scott’s Jacobite heroes inevitably tell the tale of the Union they opposed; and how the Union itself takes on the character of a “country,” in Barbauld’s terms, only as the product of its own collective fictions. They all experience, that is, that extraordinary sense of the social—of the totalizing of the social—that we now call “The System.”
What makes that sense so powerful is the feedback loop between character and things: the more Caleb tries to “vindicate” his character, the more “things as they are” erase it—requiring, in turn, more vindication. This circularity of the novel of character is an effect of the embedding of system; it is another version of Kelley’s thermostat talking to itself in an “endless internal bickering” about whether to turn the furnace on or off. Novels with embedded systems became self-regulating, their—if I may coin a term—logostats systemically keeping the internal conversation of character going. The result was a novel of regular selves whose internal bickering became the mark of the modern novel’s fully rounded—think circular—character, their regularity valorized aesthetically as realism.
Godwin’s goal in putting his system into fiction, however, extended beyond constructing realistic characters. He sought, in addition, to alter the reality of readers by including his audience in the feedback loop. Readers would thus become characters: “‘I will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man he was before.’”10 To do so, he had to put the power of his system of Political Justice into the tale. Like any good systems engineer—think of the cloning of the IBM PC—Godwin proceeded “methodically,” as he put it, to replicate the original through what we now call reverse engineering: “I began with my third volume, then proceeded to my second, and last of all grappled with the first” ([1794] 1988, 350).
The theory here is straightforward: to ensure that the narrative takes the characters, and the reader-as-character, to the desired state of “excitement” at the end, Godwin simply starts there, and then works back volume by volume. But here, again, the system embedded in the novel talks back: before publication, Godwin returned to the ending and rewrote it. Even in reverse, traveling proved difficult for system; as with Malthus, in the end it did not quite fit, requiring further revision. This novel told the tale I am retelling: how the genre of system became The System—and thus ushered in the modern era in the history of blame.
It does so by proceeding systematically; its comprehensive “consistency,” we are told in the book’s first paragraph, “is seldom attendant but upon truth” (5). Taking that connection between system and truth as a given, Caleb believes that anyone hearing his tale as he has configured it will necessarily believe him; the self-validating logic of system—the way it talks to itself—should make its truth self-evident. “Will you hear my justification?” he says to Mr. Collins. “I am as sure as I am of my existence that I can convince you of my purity” (320).
By the end, however, Caleb must face the fact that something has gone generically awry. Mr. Collins does not believe him; neither does Laura, nor, in the original ending, the judge. In that ending, his system, as he has constructed it, begins to break down, feature by feature. It cannot withstand Falkland’s own systematic attack: he argues that the only principle that can explain all of the things that Caleb has recounted is “revenge” (342). Caleb cannot respond effectively, and he goes back to prison while Falkland flourishes.
Godwin portrays this defeat in a rather astonishing way—one that makes sense only within the history of system as a genre that I have been constructing. Back in prison and writing only in “short snatches,” Caleb retreats from system to one of its primary eighteenth-century rivals: he struggles, Godwin specifies, “to proportion” an “essay” (344). For a true believer in system like Caleb, the psychological equivalent of this generic fall from complete system into fragmented essay is madness. The original manuscript ends with the snatches getting smaller and smaller until even the sentences break up. The exclamation points, dashes, and capital letters that remain work more like hieroglyphs than English prose, an appropriate marker for a man who becomes, in his own words, “an obelisk” (346).
Godwin may well be referring to this original ending in the final words of the published version. There, a very sane Caleb justifies completing—in perfect prose—his characterizations of himself and Falkland by noting that “the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale.” Whereas in the original ending, the collapse of system brings down the whole generic house, mangling the tale in which it is embedded, the novelistic structure survives in the revision. The fate of system then becomes an event in the novel’s narrative and can thus be thematized. That’s why the published version differs so radically from the original—the embedded system now formally gives this novel of character its abiding theme—or, as Godwin put it, the “new catastrophe.”
At the very moment of vindication, with Falkland helpless before him, Caleb realizes that his system of vindication has worked, but too well—Falkland dies—and thus not well enough—Caleb has nothing to live for. “There must have been some dreadful mistake,” he concludes, “in the train of argument that persuaded me to be the author of this hateful scene” (330). The thing Caleb’s own “argument” missed, but the novel’s now lucid ending conveys, is a fundamental incongruity, one articulated formally by the historically specific mix of novel and system, an incongruity between character and “things as they are”:
But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. All that in a happier field and a purer air would expand into virtue and germinate into usefulness, is thus converted into henbane and deadly nightshade. (336)
Embedded in the novel, system, I am arguing, becomes a vehicle not for rational explanation but for habitual blame. In the original ending, Falkland remains a tyrant and is clearly the reason for Caleb’s descent into madness. Read the revision, and you have entered a different world—the world represented by and emerging from Barbauld’s triumphant genre. It’s the one we know, the one in which we know that it’s no one’s fault—and everyone’s. For us, Caleb and Falkland are both victims of something other than each other, for we have The System to blame.
If we want to place the blame for having The System to blame, we need to look into forms of nonfiction as well as fiction, and a particularly important place to look is political economy. Through the mid- and late eighteenth century, it was a primary site for the totalizing and rationalizing of the social. By writing systems that presented society as functioning as a coherent System, Adam Smith and others laid the groundwork for turning it into an object that could be blamed. As we have seen, their project of methodizing knowledge met with considerable success, raising Scotland—and Britain’s—profile in the learned world by flooding it with Master Systems that reordered what was known.
They did so not just out of nationalistic vanity—nor, as we have seen in recovering the importance of probability, a will to truth—but out the conviction that the increase of knowledge brought material gain, a link that was particularly active in political economy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith systematized knowledge that first took shape, in the hands of William Petty and the Experimental Philosophy Club, as explicit efforts not only to discuss productivity but to be productive (Siskin 1988, 46–47). As David McNally points out, political economy “represented an attempt to theorize the inner dynamics of changes [toward capitalism] in order to shape and direct them” (McNally 1988, 1).
When the strategy of containing systems within a Master System gave way—under the pressure of its own success—to the dispersing of systems into other forms, the effect was twofold. Not only did political economy begin its nineteenth-century split into the narrow-but-deep specialties of political science and economics, but those newly specialized disciplines took on a new relationship to change. Whereas Smith’s Master Systems were vehicles for the pursuit of change, embedded systems, I have been arguing, became objects to change—something to blame. Politics and economics thus turned to debates over reform—debates that saw system scale itself up by occupying every position in them.
This centrality of system in political behavior extended a thread that in Britain dates back to the Glorious Revolution. The social and political body that emerged at that time became known as “the English system,” a polity characterized by a set of what were called “checks” through which king and Parliament kept each other’s power in line. For much of the eighteenth century, the emphasis fell on the adjective, since this system was seen as constructed by and peculiar to the English. But here is where political economy came into play. Its proliferation in Master Systems and then embedded systems grounded that political system in economic norms, insisting that both “obey,” as J. G. Merquior puts it, “the same explanatory principles and conform to the same regularities” (Merquior 1991, 25).
Having lost political sovereignty as a result of the Union earlier in the century and yet having gained economic flexibility through the facilitating of trade, Scotland was well served by this form of political economy. Its regular principles were not understood to be the product of human revolutions, Glorious or otherwise, but of the force that shaped them—shaped them through the natural workings of what came to be called an “invisible hand.” Thus, for Scottish writers such as Adam Smith, “the English system” became but one example of what he called “the simple system of natural liberty”—a system, Smith insisted, that “establishes itself of its own accord” (27). As the system to which all historical and national variations tend, that “simple system” came to be known, simply, as “the system.”
For Smith, the system was, by its nature as nature, blameless, its apparent problems not features of the system itself but of misguided efforts to change it through the imposition of other “systems either of preference or of restraint.” In one of the earliest instances of system versus the system, a “Freeholder” published in 1784 The source of the evil or, the system displayed, a set of letters that announced itself on the title page as “printed and sold by all the booksellers in town and country.”11 It described the undermining of “the system of our mixed monarchy” by a “system of policy” instigated by “the Cabal” (Freeholder 1784, 10, 8, 19). This subject, the Freeholder tells his “Friends and Countrymen,” is “next to what you owe to God, of the greatest importance to yourselves, and to your children” (3).
To make this case, the Freeholder first puts these systems into history:
From the Revolution to the beginning of the present reign, the nation enjoyed, I may say, uninterruptedly the blessings secured to us at that glorious period. The different boundaries established by the Constitution, as then declared and ascertained, were, during that period of near eighty years, held sacred and inviolate. (6)
But “from the day that Mr. Pitt, the father, was first dismissed” (1761), the “secret abettors” of a new “pernicious system have been labouring to establish their power on the ruins of every maxim of constitutional Government.” Rather than giving a “definition” of this system, the Freeholder opts to “trace it in its progress and effects, as the best means of giving you a complete knowledge of it in all of its parts and tendencies.”
Characteristic features of the genre of system abound in this description, from the aspiration to completeness to the recognition of many parts. The stakes were political, and the argument was to resist change. But the mid-1780s was precisely the moment that the cyclical upturns and downturns that we now identify with nascent capitalism began (Foster 1974 19; Siskin 1998a, 140–142). By the 1790s, Britain was experiencing an extraordinary tension between wariness of large-scale change and a perceived need for it—a need fueled at that moment by both war with France and what David Fischer calls the “great wave” of inflation that brought the gap between prices and wages to a breaking point (Fischer 1996, 154). During the next quarter-century, change was demanded—and negotiated—in the growing economic as well as political discourse of institutional reform.
William Cobbett exemplified the ways in which system became a lingua franca of that discourse. “Where the ‘English Jacobins’ of the 1790s had proved vulnerable to the charge of systematic conspiracy,” points out Kevin Gilmartin, “Cobbett turned the tables in launching a relentless attack on the systematic organization of British elites and the British government.” His attack on system as a “totalizing mode of social organization” (Gilmartin 1997, para. 2)—a “thing” that should be blamed—contributed to the extraordinary shift in diction and institutions that reset British politics during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Whig versus Tory metamorphosed into the opposition that marks political modernity in the West: Liberal versus Conservative.
The genre of system, I am arguing, played a crucial role in that metamorphosis: the increasingly common tactic on both sides of putting it into position to assume blame proved critical to the formation of liberalism as we know it. In blaming The System, we configure “things as they are” in a very particular way: as needing change, as capable of being changed, as providing the means of effecting that change, and, crucially, as always failing enough to maintain an ongoing need for change. That was how liberalism first took shape and how it still works to perpetuate itself: its object will always be in need of reform because those reforms will always fall short.
This cannot simply be understood as a complex of ideas thought up by individuals beforehand and then put into practice—insisting on ongoing failure, for example, would have been an unlikely strategy. This is, rather, “things as they are” reconfigured by the transformations of the genre of system that I have been describing. Liberalism emerged from those reconfigurations as a label for those who sought to mediate the demands for change. As its current association with big government suggests, its history is tied to totalizing conceptions of the social, particularly in regard to the bond between a society and its government. That bond was repeatedly tested at the turn of the century, resulting in the institution of the income tax in 1798, followed by governmental intervention in labor relations through the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800.
System’s role in those debates and in the ones that followed, just as with its role in the instituting of the novel, emerged in its interplay with other genres. In these policy matters, that chemistry entailed the various kinds—including the oral and the journalistic—that gave form to reform. Both the political debate over the Reform Bill, as well as the contemporaneous economic debate over the Poor Law, were shaped by those interactions. Just as system configured character in the novel, those debates came to be haunted by the legacy of Master Systems: the manner in which their totalizing drive was dispersed, feature by feature, into the newly mixed genres of the political and economic sciences.
In the famous speech by Thomas Macaulay that electrified Parliament into passing the Reform Bill, for example, references to system mixed with apostrophic turns to the House, geographical description, brief historical narratives, and features of many other genres, but there was no attempt to master all of the parts within a single whole. Thus, at the key moment, when Macaulay juxtaposed the demand for interventionist change with an invocation of the system that insists on the principle of hands off, he slipped the knot, insisting not on a systematic resolution but on conducting the argument in other terms. The System, as he embedded it, was no longer an encompassing form for methodizing and arranging everything, but a feature to be negotiated.
“It is said that the system works well,” Macaulay asserted. “I deny it.” This sounds as if it must have been a systematic claim about the truth of the System, but the mixing I have described allowed another startling alternative. Listen to this rhetorical turn:
The House of Commons is, in the language of Mr. Burke, a check, not on the people, but for the people. While that check is efficient there is no reason to fear that the King or the nobles will oppress the people. But if that check requires checking, how is it to be checked? If the salt shall lose its savour, wherewith shall we season it? The distrust with which the nation regard this House may be unjust. But what then? Can you remove that distrust? That it exists cannot be denied. (Macauley [1831] 1965, 59–60)
This is the mix of modern politics. The systematic question, “Is the system really flawed?” simply doesn’t matter—maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s time to act. You do not need to judge the validity of the system; you can simply blame it. Embedded within the discourse of reform as transformed by Macaulay, The System preserved itself by becoming an object in the history of blame. In Macaulay’s famous words announcing the end of the systematic opposition between interventionist change and laissez faire and the start of modern, liberal democracy, “Reform, that you may preserve.”
The economic side of the reform agenda may have looked different, but the final object at issue was exactly the same. As Macaulay’s philosophical rhetoric turned the House politically, the Poor Law debate turned to official statistics; the new language of economics thus highlighted and expanded the role that numbers had played in political economy since Petty’s exercises in political arithmetic. But the same commissions that gathered the figures also sought verbal testimony about the need for change, and, there, as in the Reform Bill debate, a now-familiar object dominated the proceedings. Asked about the need to replace the old law with the new one, Joseph Ellison of Dewsbury exclaimed, “What a pity that a system that has worked so well, and has produced so much good, should be now broken up!” Despite his protests, the powers that be did just that, leaving Mr. Ellison to reenact the gesture that was rapidly becoming a habit on all sides of every issue: as the poor rates ceased and the workhouses opened, he blamed The System—in this case, for changing the system.
In this maelstrom of systems undoing systems, victims of all kinds proliferated across the political spectrum, aggravating existing fault lines not only of politics and wealth but also of gender. We have had particular difficulty grasping what happened along that last divide, because we tend to conflate liberalism’s rights of man with the rights of woman and assume that they mutually supported each other. But as Anthony Arblaster points out, “the issue [of women] has a uniquely ironic relation to liberalism” for a politics that
takes as its focus the individual and the rights and freedom of the individual, ought logically to make no distinction between persons on the ground of sex. … It might therefore be thought that the oppression of women … would be particularly obnoxious to liberals. Yet liberals who championed women’s rights, such as John Stuart Mill … stand out by virtue of their isolation. Their consistency was seen at the time as eccentricity. (Arblaster 1984, 232)
Arblaster himself stands out from other twentieth-century students of liberalism, particularly men, in his even mentioning gender in his history. There are, of course, notable exceptions, particularly scholarship by women on issues of contract, but even those efforts do not explain the earlier silence cited by Arblaster.
To do that, we must start with what was present—the norm that made Mill eccentric. No other author was more normal in the discourse of liberalism then and still today than Adam Smith—not in the system-specific way I have been elaborating but in the history of ideas. The bible of British liberalism in what is called its “negative” phase—individual freedom in the state as opposed to state intervention to ensure that freedom—was and is The Wealth of Nations. One of its foundational claims about human nature—like the “love of system” I highlighted earlier—first appeared in Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): “every man is by nature first and principally recommended to his own care.”12 The question of care is especially important when it comes to Smith, for the issue of who really takes care of what leads to the most famous passage in The Wealth of Nations.
Laski frames it as follows: it is man’s
good fortune that, as he attends to his own wants, he is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” For Adam Smith the myriad spontaneous actions of individuals, made for their own private benefit, results, by a mysterious alchemy, in social good. (Laski [1936] 1977, 178)
Recent work such as Anne Mellor’s Mothers of the Nation has gone a long way toward helping us to dispel the mystery of who actually transformed private good into public good during the early nineteenth century (Mellor 2000). But our purpose here is to focus on how Smith’s alchemy worked within liberalism itself to absent women from its calculations. Liberalism as a politics that, as Laski and others have argued, has sought to articulate property’s role in capitalism did not overlook women as a matter of accident or irony; it made them disappear—and in a manner that we can make visible in a history of blame.
Turning particular hands into an encompassing invisible hand was part and parcel of Smith’s scaling up of all other systems into his own. But once that Master System became an object that did draw blame, its parts became targets: particular kinds of hands materialized as mysteriously as they had disappeared. The women whom political economy had left out of the discourse of rights and contracts—and that the Reform Bill left out of the vote—reappeared in this new political science of blame as fair game; they became the usual suspects of liberal reform so that the blame could be absorbed without really disturbing the fundamental norms of The System itself.
The targeting began in earnest in the mid-1830s, immediately after the passage of the bill. Attacks on individual women with the most obviously busy hands—as in Reverend Polwhele’s sexing13 of Mary Wollstonecraft (The Unsex’d Females, a Poem 1798)—gave way at that point to larger-scale broadsides. Instead of Polwhele’s verse, these broadsides were launched in the mixed genres of the newly forming disciplines, particularly those we now call the social sciences. “Journalism and sociological discourse alike,” points out Daniel Born, “buttressed the predominant belief that the sufferings of the poor could be traced to individual defective will or desire.” With increasing frequency and precision during subsequent decades, these attacks narrowed in on their prey. “Prominent Victorian sociologists,” Born argues, citing Anita Levy’s work, “identified the ultimate cause of poverty and misery not as working conditions, hours, and pay, but rather the loose morals of poor women” (emphasis mine). In 1836, for example, Peter Gaskell identified the problem as “‘sluttishness’ versus wifely virtue” (Born 1995, 33).
Such pronouncements marked the emergence of modern liberalism. The century that began with the proliferation of system and of the rhetoric of reform came to a close as they mixed generically into the disciplinary liberalism of the modern state. That politics of blame and sluttishness has remained with us into the twenty-first century in attacks on feminism and on welfare mothers and in the fight for family values. My point in pointing out their persistence is not to participate in those politics but to document system’s ongoing role in configuring them—in turning them into a norm of modernity that is reinforced every time we blame The System.