Rogers, Nicholas

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 231of non- and anti-Marxist historians. To take an example that we have alreadyencountered, the notion that Britain, even when it was the workshop of the world,was far from a thoroughly bourgeois society has been a staple of non-MarxistBritish historiography for a long time. Anderson unwittingly appears to share the viewheld by many Jewish socialist garment workers in New York City in the 1920s and1930s that the communist Morgen Freiheit and the social democratic Jewish DailyForward told lies to the workers, but that the Wall Street Journal told the truth to thebosses. There may be another aspect to this problem. A tension has long existed in theMarxist tradition between Marxism as a self-contained and self-sustaining body ofdoctrine on one hand and as something that can and should help itself liberally to otherschools of thought on the other. Anderson (and I) belong to the latter camp, butAnderson takes things to an extreme that is not often encountered.I began this review in a sour mood, wondering whether Anderson was stillsmarting from the demolition job that Thompson did on him in The Peculiaritiesof the English. I was wrong. In the October 21, 1993, issue of the London Reviewof Books, Perry Anderson paid handsome tribute to Edward Thompson. It was aclass act. Whatever ones final assessment of the book, the arguments in EnglishQuestions were not driven by anger, spite, or an obsessive desire to have the lastword.Joseph WhiteUniversity of PittsburghJames Vernon  Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture,c.1815–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii, 429.James Vernons monograph on English political culture between 1815 and 1867 isa provocative but ultimately frustrating book. Written from a postmodern perspec-tive, Vernon examines the form and content of political language during thesetempestuous decades, drawing his principal examples from a study of five parlia-mentary constituencies, namely Oldham, Tower Hamlets, Lewes, Boston, andDevon. Initially Vernon had intended to write a comparative study of these constitu-encies, whose social and economic structures were strikingly different and whosepolitics, one might presume, would register these differences. But Vernon quicklyabandoned this enterprise in order to avoid having to manufacture political differ-ences to which I would then have to attach undue structural significance (p. 11).In other words, Vernon rapidly rejected a research strategy that might commit himto a sociology of popular politics in which the themes of interest groups and classhave routinely emerged. That would have contradicted the postmodern project inwhich language itself constitutes the political subject rather than being shaped byalterior realities. The result is that the five case studies, if one can call them that,fit rather oddly in a book that stridently seeks to avoid a referential methodology.Why, one might ask, if the central task is to deconstruct the commonalities oflanguage that defined political identities, did Vernon persist with these micro-studies232 Histoire sociale / Social Historyat all? The only plausible explanation seems to be that Vernons expansive defini-tion of language, which thankfully avoids the lococentrism of other postmodernstudies, merited such a step. If one is going to include symbol, ritual, and space ina definition of language, they have to be grounded somewhere.Vernon makes high claims for his findings. He argues that the conventionalhistoriography of late Hanoverian and Victorian politics is not only recklesslyreferential but suffused with a liberal-Marxist teleology that sees liberalism anddemocracy marching to the drum of party and class. In his view the period between1815 and 1867 was one in which the institutionalization of politics (best exemplifiedby the rise of party and print culture) closed down political space and inhibiteddemocratic potential. Yet the novelty of his thesis is surely forced. Most historianssee the triumph of liberalism as an antidote to democracy rather than an induce-ment, making Britain one of the last of European industrial nations to embraceformal democracy at the ballot box. Moreover, those historians who still insist onthe importance of class within the political terrain would not subscribe to anystraightforward teleology that saw 1832 empower the middle class and 1867 or18841885 their working-class counterparts. There is, in fact, a pretty weightyhistorical debate about why aristocratic forms of governance persisted in VictorianEngland and the degree to which interest politics and religion fractured and disas-sembled class solidarities. Vernons claim to be breaking the interpretive log-jamof a triumphant teleology that stresses the forward march of labour and the triumphof Liberal democracy (p. 338) is thus ultimately pretentious.Vernons analysis of the fall of public man [sic] and the closure of the consti-tutions radical libertarian democratic potential (p. 336) is centrally related to theexclusion of women and to definitions of political subjectivity that privileged thepropertied male citizen. Over the long term this argument is creditable, but itrequires a more nuanced approach. Vernon stresses womens participation in theinformal politics of the marketplace and their gradual exclusion from more associa-tional modes of political organization, yet he ignores, most crucially, womensenhanced presence on the early mass platform and in the various clubs and societiesassociated with it. The emergence of womens political societies in 1819 in thewake of a broadening political frontier after the Napoleonic wars and their subse-quent participation in reform and Chartist organizations is almost completelyignored. Moreover, no distinction is made between the essentially demotic interven-tions of crowd politics, with their implied reciprocity between rulers and ruled, andthe democratizing experiments in popular political organization that grew apace after1815, with no less than 500 Hampden clubs in existence in England and Scotlandby 1817 and a mass membership approaching half a million. Indeed, the politics ofthe mass platform, the most central feature of popular political culture in the periodof Vernons book, is given only fitful analysis. Quite amazingly, no investigationis made into the rich vein of Home Office papers that illuminate the politicalsemiology of such a mass movement. Vernons sources are confined principally tothe terrain of constituency politics, despite the proliferating diversity of politicalcontention that spilled out beyond its confines. This is a serious drawback for abook that professes an expansive review of political language.Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 233Indeed, it could be argued, contra Vernon, that the period up to the 1840s at leastwas a democratizing experience for ordinary men and women, arrested only in theyears of triumphal liberalism that succeeded it. To readjust Vernons chronology inthis way would also cause one to reflect upon the constraints upon democratic spacein this period. Vernon makes much of the constraining forces of party, and muchmore implausibly, the constraining influence of print. He routinely downplays therole of the state and the law in de-legitimizing radical democratic activity, despitethe impressive evidence to the contrary. To suggest that this battery of sanctionswas ineffectual because it did not stem the flow of seditous writings and speechesis to overlook the ingenuity and courage of radical printers and leaders in evadingor defying the law, and the real constraints that such legislation placed upon demo-cratic debate and organization. Eileen Yeos account of the way in which thecorresponding societies act influenced democratic practice within the Chartistmovement, published in The Chartist Experience over a decade ago, is a tellingreminder of the power of the state to define the parameters of political citizenship.I do not wish to be unduly critical of this book. There are some useful sectionson political and architectural space, upon Tory traditions of sociability, upon localhero-worship and its permutations particularly with respect to the Cobbettite tradi-tion in Oldham. The chapter on the discourse of popular constitutionalism deservesclose reading, not only because it gives a good sense of the eclecticism of theradical tradition, but because it ably reveals the melodramatic tropes of constitution-alist narratives. It should, however, be read alongside James Epsteins recentRadical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850(Oxford University Press, 1994), which attempts to encode these narratives in aclass context. Vernon predictably cavils at this, so anxious is he to exorcise thatillusory beast working-class radicalism  (p. 328) from the political history of theperiod. This is a book that continually attempts to write class out of the nineteenthcentury, on the central premise that popular constitutionalism was always capableof a multiplicity of readings, was too fluid and indeterminate to serve as a classdiscourse. I am not convinced by this reasoning, nor by procedures that see lan-guage as constitutive of reality without being shaped by it. Others may be.Nicholas RogersYork UniversityPaul Crook  Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of Warfrom the “Origin of Species” to the First World War. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994. Pp. ix, 306.The basic question posed by this rich, intriguing study is whether there emerged,in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an alternative Darwinian legacythat legitimized peace and mutual aid rather than pugnacity, war, and racist imperi-alism culminating in the slaughter of 19141918. It is Paul Crooks contention thata mythology of Darwinism as an explanation for human bellicosity has tended to

James Vernon — Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815-1867

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James Vernon — Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815-1867

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