George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance

This is a study of George Eliot\u27s political imagination which traces the theme of inheritance through her fiction, taking it both in its ordinary sense of property bequeathed from one generation to another and in the extended sense of the transmission of a nation\u27s culture and traditions. The theme is important in that it shows George Eliot\u27s response to the alienating conditions of modem society and defines her - with \u27her deep sense of dependence on the past, her commitment to the English political tradition, and her vision of English nationality\u27 - as an essentially conservative thinker in the tradition of Burke and Coleridge. If there is in Silas Marner and Felix Holt a recognition that individuals may be justified in rejecting their inheritance, the emphasis in late works such as Daniel Deronda falls on the binding and sustaining power of cultural traditions inherited from the past. The author is an historian of ideas and the strength of his study lies in the way that he elucidates George Eliot\u27s thinking and relates it to its wider intellectual context. He points out how her admiring essay on Riehl, \u27The Natural History of Gennan Life\u27, is designed to persuade a cosmopolitan liberal audience of the importance of national character, and that this explains why she excludes any mention of Riehl\u27s anti-Semitism from her summary of his work. It must be, Semmel argues, a tactical omission rather than an oversight. He also sets out clearly the combination of attraction and repulsion which characterizes her relationship to Comte\u27s Positivism: she accepts its moral teaching but rejects the authoritarianism and utopianism involved in Comte\u27s model of a new society. The fact that the English Positivists in the 1860s and 1870s were far more radical than Comte, believing in the need for revolutionary class warfare, could only increase her disaffection. Both Romola and Middlemarch are seen as challenging Comtean doctrines, the one by showing Savonarola\u27s utopian, proto-Comtean state to be the enemy of freedom and individual happiness, the other by promoting the politics of compromise and taking a meliorist view of the British parliamentary state. Increasingly George Eliot comes to stress the importance of the national culture and its inherited traditions, and in so doing she is closer, Semmel suggests, to pisraeli than to Gladstone and his liberal cosmopolitanism \u27(although I am not persuaded that the young Disraeli served as a model for Ladislaw). And in an interesting epilogue he compares her view of the national tradition to the patriotic beliefs expressed by George Orwell during the Second World War - his \u27devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life\u27 and his view of English civilization as continuous, persisting and organic. Like Orwell George Eliot is not a nationalist who believes in imposing on other peoples, but a patriot who holds to the inherited values of her own culture as opposed to the levelling uniformity of cosmopolitanism

On the cogency of human rights

This article queries the cogency of human rights reasoning in the context of global justice debates, focusing on Charles Beitz's practice-based approach. By 'cogency' is meant the adequacy of human rights theorising to its intended context of application. Negatively, the author argues that Beitz's characterisation of human rights reasoning as a 'global discursive practice' lacks cogency when considered in the context of the post-colonial state system; she focuses on African decolonisation. Positively, she suggests that Beitz's gloss on international human rights as an 'appurtenance' to the traditional state system offers a more promising starting point for global normative theorising, drawing attention to the requirement of sovereign competence as a necessary condition of possible human rights fulfilment. However, a concern with strengthening the sovereign competence of weak states should lead us to consider neglected public goods theorising in favour of an over-emphasis on individual human rights