Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

D. Craig, J. Thompson, D. Craig, J. Thompson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137312891
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensible and accessible portrait of the various 'languages' which shaped public life in nineteenth century Britain, covering key themes such as governance, statesmanship, patriotism, economics, religion, democracy, women's suffrage, Ireland and India.

1

Good Government

James Thompson

This chapter examines debates about the purpose of politics. It does so by reconstructing the language of ‘good government’ that provided an important and enduring means whereby Britons discussed politics and politicians through the long nineteenth century. The theme tackled is a large one, and could encompass a vast, indeed endless, range of arguments about what constitutes desirable political action. The approach taken here is to concentrate upon the notion of ‘good government’ as a useful way into nineteenth-century discussions of the ends of politics that yields insights into the periodisation and character of British political debate over the long run.

While the question of what constituted good government is in one sense an obvious, even inescapable one, for a book about nineteenth-century languages of politics, it has arguably not received the coverage that one might expect. As the introduction to this book argues, much writing about nineteenth-century politics has been organised through the history of parties and their ideologies. This chapter, along with the others in the book, seeks to offer a different perspective, firmly anchored in the political discourse of the period, by recovering a number of political languages that often cut across party allegiances. Much recent and often very good writing about Victorian politics has been concerned with questions of citizenship and belonging often approached through debates about the constitution in general and the franchise in particular.¹ There has lately been less attention given to the matter of the ends of politics, to debates about what it is for, and what counted as doing it well. There is certainly a long established and important historiography focusing upon ideas about the state in which the late nineteenth century features as a turning point towards a more interventionist conception of the role of the state.² This has though often focused primarily upon the contemporary discussions of the size of the state, and upon the merits of social legislation, rather than upon evaluations of what counted as good government, and more general discussions of what government and politics was for.

This chapter, like the rest of the book, is concerned with periodisation, and more particularly with the legacy of eighteenth-century modes of thinking about politics for the nineteenth century, and with changes in political culture in the later nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century language of good government was, like the idiom of patriotism explored by Jonathan Parry, one indebted to eighteenth-century precedents. Indeed, the roots of nineteenth-century invocations of good government are much older. One set of sources was classical, nicely encapsulated in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century frescoes in the Palazzo Publico in Sienna. In Lorenzetti’s paintings, good government is identified with the pursuit of the common good. Good government is virtuous government that delivers peace, prosperity and justice. Scholars differ somewhat over which virtues are presented as most crucial to the achievement of good government, but prudence and fortitude are generally thought to be among them. The bequests of good government are seen as extensive, embracing glory and greatness. In one well-known interpretation, the maintenance of good government and through it the common good is portrayed as depending upon the active self-government of the people of Sienna themselves.³

Fourteenth-century Sienna may seem very distant from the world of nineteenth-century Britain. This might, however, be misleading. In his 1893 penny pamphlet for the Liberal Unionist Association, Hugh Seymour Tremenheere sought to explain How Good Government Grew Up and How To Preserve It. For Tremenheere, the existence of good government brought prosperity and was founded upon just laws. Its erection depended upon the courage and wisdom of past generations and its preservation required the active and educating citizenship of public men. Tremenheere strenuously upheld the value of ‘mixed’ government. In support of his views, he quoted at length from Plato and especially from Goethling’s 1824 edition of Aristotle’s Politics upon the object of government, urging that ‘just pride’ should be inspired by the realisation that England was unique in safeguarding the principles of government dear to ‘three of the greatest minds that ever adorned humanity – Solon, Plato, and Aristotle’.⁴ Much of Tremenheere’s pamphlet was devoted to such disparate contemporary issues as the eight-hour day, which he opposed, or the advantages of Belgian midwifery schools, which he praised. In the ideal and language of good government upon which it drew, however, it owed much to the classical inheritance.

In his panoramic account of the birth of the modern world, C.A. Bayly argues that a conception of ‘good government’ that he links to ‘civic republicanism’ was widespread in eighteenth-century Europe and America. Indeed, for Bayly, this way of thinking about good government – with its emphasis upon political engagement and the claims of community – was also evident in the ‘patriotic communitarianism’ that was a feature of Indian, Islamic, African and East Asian societies. In Bayly’s grand vision, liberalism emerges as in part an extension of these established traditions that was able to ‘reinvigorate and sharpen the older discourse on good government’, but that was at its most disruptive when it focused in on the importance of individual rights.⁵ This chapter’s scope will be singularly parochial in comparison to Bayly’s portrait of global trends, but his work reminds us of both the broad European inheritance upon which British debates about ‘good government’ drew and the parallels between that inheritance and political languages beyond Europe. It was perhaps amongst British imperial administrators and politicians that a more traditional idiom of good government would prove most persistent.

The other much older set of sources for nineteenth-century appeals to good government was religious in origin. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sermons could make good government their theme, sometimes taking Isaiah as their text, with its emphasis on ‘reigning in righteousness’ or Timothy with its appreciation of the peaceable life.⁶ In this tradition, good government was godly government. Here, too, there was an emphasis upon the moral qualities required of the governor and indeed the governed. Within the classical inheritance, good government was sharply contrasted with corrupt government, or government that was factional in its favours. Similarly, the ideals of good government rooted in Christianity apparent in eighteenth-century moral philosophy distinguish it strongly from corrupt or tyrannical rule.

Many of these associations had a very long shelf life in the Anglophone political world. Movements to cleanse big city politics in the United States of jobbery and graft often adopted the language of good government, apparent in the pamphlets of the National Municipal League with their emphasis on improving urban political morality in the name of Christianity.⁷ The language and ideals of good government also provided a means of discussing issues of what might now be called corporate governance, and the proper running of civic associations. At the heart of the idiom of ‘good government’ was a cluster of values – about virtuous conduct, about devotion to the common good, about disinterested service – that had long histories. Whereas it might seem at first sight that ‘good government’ was a purely consequentialist idiom, solely concerned with assessing the effects of government, whether through administration or legislation, it was in fact intimately connected to the qualities possessed and the attitudes espoused by those in government.

The rest of this chapter is in three parts. These serve to trace ways in which the language of good government was contested and developed over the century. It is, to some extent, a story of the declining purchase of the inherited conceptions of good government outlined above. The first section explores the early part of the nineteenth century, including the different, but also overlapping, ways in which radicals and Whigs construed good government. It re-examines in particular the language of utilitarianism with its highly consequentialist approach. The historiographical tide has, for some time now, been running towards a downplaying of the influence of utilitarianism in nineteenth-century politics.⁸ There is much that is right in this reassessment. There is, however, a danger that it rests upon too narrow a focus upon full-blown adherence to the felicific calculus. Utilitarians could recast the language of good government in their own image, and in these less philosophically sophisticated ways, contribute to a conception of ‘good government’ that came to identify its appearance closely with the supposedly hard-headed virtues of the English.

The second section focuses upon mid-Victorian discussions of ‘good government’. It examines the relationship between the language of good government and the notion of politics as a kind of business. More generally, it develops the earlier account of Whig and liberal invocation of good government, tracing its evolution in the 1850s and 1860s. It focuses on contemporary debates about government performance, and about the kind of government that was most appropriate to the age. The broader intellectual context is one in which the need for politics to adapt to changing mores, and the importance of national character in determining the possibilities of political action, were much stressed. Debate about good government often addressed the form of government, and in these years institutional analysis was often informed by a pretty positive view of British arrangements in comparison to those abroad, which was bolstered by an equally benign view of the social and psychological bases for politics.

The third part concentrates upon the last third of the nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth. As we have noted, the idea of just rule, and of governing for the common good, were integral to traditional conceptions of good government. In the last part of the nineteenth century, the claims of jus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Good Government
• 2 Statesmanship
• 3 Patriotism
• 4 Religion
• 5 Popular Political Economy
• 6 Democracy
• 7 Women’s Suffrage
• 8 Irish Nationalism
• 9 The Silence of Empire: Imperialism and India
• Select Bibliography
• Index