PAMELA PILBEAM CARLYLE, THOMAS (1795–1881)

PAMELA PILBEAM CARLYLE, THOMAS (1795–1881)

The ‘Victorian Sage’, perhaps the most influential critic of laissez-faire political economy and utilitarian philosophy in Victorian Britain, Thomas Carlyle was born 4 December 1795 at Ecclefechan, Scotland. From his father he received a commitment to education; from his mother, a sense of original sin and the virtue of piety. Precociously adept at languages, and enamoured of fiction, he attended Edinburgh University from 1809–12 with the aim of becoming a minister, but found the city contemptibly sinful and his fellow students riotous and libertine. By 1815, his religious faith plagued by scepticism, mentally agitated and depressed, he considered other careers. By 1820, animated by reading Schiller and Goethe, he conceived German Idealism to provide an answer to his spiritual problems. Moving to London, he gained work as an essayist and translator, and became one of the foremost interpreters of German thought to his contemporaries. In the early 1830s he came under the influence of the Saint-Simonians (see SAINT-SIMON, HENRI DE), and sympathized with their proposals to end the exploitation of the poor, and to guide society and organize industry meritocratically, while reviving a spiritual variation of Christianity. He also found of interest the Saint- Simonian philosophy (see MAIN CURRENTS IN PHILOSOPHY) of history, with its emphasis on the necessary historical progression from feudalism to industrialism, and the resulting supersession of existing institutions by rule based on science and wisdom rather than privilege and land-ownership. Accordingly he translated Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme, while dismissing the effort to revive Christianity without God as senseless. In 1827 he married Jane Welsh; despite a wedding-night fiasco they remained together for 40 years.

Many of Carlyle’s leading social themes were outlined in an early essay, ‘The Signs of the Times’ (1829), in which he condemned an ‘Age of Machinery’ which placed its faith in nostrums, reform programmes and secular philosophies like utilitarianism and materialism, rather than reinforcing individual endeavour, internal perfection, a politics founded in moral goodness rather than a Benthamite (see Bentham, Jeremy) calculation of profit and loss, and a truly spiritual religion that reveals the superiority of ‘a higher, heavenly freedom’ above mere civil and political freedom. In his essay ‘Characteristics’ (1831), similarly, Carlyle indicated a willingness to wed mystical, religious and metaphysical arguments to practical proposals for government guarantees of employment for the working classes. Carlyle’s first publication, Sartor Resartus [The Taylor

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Reclothed], 1834, was an elaborate semi-autobiographical excursus into the perils of religious scepticism, the belief in the universe as a mere mechanism, and the need to rediscover the essence of divinity by renouncing hedonism and materialism, and realizing that the essence of humanity lay in embracing the spiritual world. Its quaint combination (‘Carlylese’, it would later be called) of Germanic prose, Idealist philosophy and anguished introspection met with scant approval, though its delineation of a Godless world as quintessentially a modern outlook would find many subsequent adherents, notably among the twentieth-century existentialists. Carlyle here sees mankind solely as an embodiment of spirit, ‘a soul, a spirit, and divine apparition’ merely disguised by bodily and external arrangements. Virtue, he insists, cannot be derived from the pursuit of happiness: the ‘soul is not synonymous with pleasure’. A universe devoid of purpose is a life devoid of purpose, and of the essential grounds of sociability, which are for Carlyle also founded in religious belief, because mutual respect and care was founded on the recognition that all people were ‘temples of the Divinity’, and belonged to the ‘Communion of Saints’. The liberal ideal of maximizing the ‘independence’ of individuals from each other is thus for Carlyle mistaken; independence was mere rebellion, while hierarchy, if those above were worthy to govern and those beneath worthy to obey, was the ideal to be maintained. Obedience and ‘hero-worship’, two of the key Carlylean themes, are thus first explored and justified in detail in Sartor Resartus, as is the notion that the purpose of life was ‘to do some work therewith’, that ‘the end of man is an action, & not a Thought, though it were the noblest’.

Carlyle’s first great success, a quirky, colossal history of the French Revolution, appeared in 1837, and immediately won him acclaim. His influential essay on ‘Chartism’ (1839), which condemned the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act as regarding the poor as a bothersome nuisance, acknowledged the justice of the labourer’s claim to a ‘fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’, but dismissed both laissez-faire and democracy—being anarchical variations on the same theme—as viable solutions in favour of government by

a ‘real aristocracy…a corporation of the best and the bravest’, who would recognize that work was ‘the mission of man on this earth’, and secure the just obedience of the working classes in return for assisting them. Practically, Carlyle advised both universal education and large-scale emigration to ease the problem of overpopulation. This established his peculiar melange of political principles: he opposed democracy (see democracy, populism and rights) and laissez-faire, and supported the reinforcement of authority, but of a non-traditional form, and with the aim of creating an interventionist and regulatory government closer to socialism than any other contemporary ideal. As a non-socialist and non-radical critic of political economy, Carlyle had now succeeded in creating a distinctive critical niche for himself.

In the spring of 1840 Carlyle gave a series of public lectures, published as Heroes and Hero-Worship . It was the perspective here presented that led mid-twentieth-century commentators to view him as the grandfather of fascism, through the degeneration of the cult of the hero in NIETZSCHE and later National Socialism. Though it is true that Carlyle sought to reinforce authority, this is largely a misplaced charge. In presenting history as an account of the actions of great individuals, Heroes had two essential aims: to delineate those qualities accounted ‘heroic’ throughout the ages, offering an account of heroic types chronologically and the-matically from the semi-mythical and divine (the Scandinavian divinity Odin) through the prophetic (Mahomet) and poetic (Dante,

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Shakespeare) to the hero as priest (Luther and Knox) and on to more modern forms of leadership, religious, literary and political (Cromwell, Napoleon); and to suggest why and how leaders continued to affect the masses—in other words, why liberal individualism would constantly be undermined by leader-worship and the inevitable emergence of hierarchies. In light of twentieth-century cults of leadership, particularly in totalitarian societies, this remains one of the most important pre-sociological accounts of the problem of authority in the modern world, and an important precursor to the studies of Le Bon and others, and the philosophy of GEORGES SOREL in particular. A tertiary goal in the work is a more precise accounting of the displacement of the authoritative role played historically by the priesthood in the modern world by ‘the organization of men of letters’. This new historic type, having emerged in the eighteenth century, and defined by the qualities of ‘originality, sincerity, genius’ (compare J.S.MILL, On Liberty, ch.3) was capable of discerning ‘the Divine Idea of the World’, and of becoming ‘the world’s priest’. ‘The man of intellect as the top of affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim’ proclaimed Carlyle. But Carlyle’s discussion of his chief examples, Rousseau, Johnson and Burns, is convoluted by an attack on Bentham, which reveals that not all intellectuals have accepted Carlyle’s mandate, or aim at self- annihilation and spiritual affirmation. At bottom there is a vitalist or activist philosophy expressed here that condones both simple action as such, and following ‘true sovereigns, temporal and spiritual’, or great men, as such, more because of their faith in themselves than in what they substantively had faith in. ‘A world all sincere, a believing world’ remains Carlyle’s ideal, but it is a nostrum that encourages following virtually any charismatic leader at all, and it is difficult to be persuaded that there is ‘no nobler or more blessed feeling [that] dwells in man’s heart’ because people raises themselves ‘by revering that which is above’ them. It is the sociological fact of hero-worship and the light his discussion sheds on this vital facet of mass society, rather than Carlyle’s explanation of its value, which remain important for modern readers.

To contemporaries Carlyle’s next major work was more immediately applicable to the difficult circumstances of the economic depression of the early 1840s, now frequently referred to as the ‘Condition of England problem’. Past and Present (1843) remains of interest to later readers for two chief reasons. First, it approaches contemporary problems through an examination of medieval social and political attitudes, by recounting a lengthy tale of a twelfth-century monastery fallen on hard times and under poor management, but saved by prudence, justice, frugality and other virtues enjoined by a worthier leader. Thereafter Carlyle would come to be seen as the architect of the medieval revival, and the notion that a close-knit, homogeneous medieval community, bound by noblesse oblige from above and a sense of the sacred duty of obedience from below, had been torn asunder by modern competition and individualism, but might yet be revived in some form. Aspects of this vision were to be developed by two of Carlyle’s most important successors, JOHN RUSKIN and WILLIAM MORRIS.

The second reason Past and Present remains influential derives from its social and economic analyses and prognoses. Taking up the main themes of both ‘Chartism’ and Heroes, Carlyle acknowledges that the plea for ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’ was ‘as just a demand as Governed men ever made of Governing…the everlasting right of man’. No simple legislative nostrums, nor any further adhesion to the ‘Gospel of Mammonism’ would help, but an ‘aristocracy of talent’ could provide a solution thereto, The second reason Past and Present remains influential derives from its social and economic analyses and prognoses. Taking up the main themes of both ‘Chartism’ and Heroes, Carlyle acknowledges that the plea for ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’ was ‘as just a demand as Governed men ever made of Governing…the everlasting right of man’. No simple legislative nostrums, nor any further adhesion to the ‘Gospel of Mammonism’ would help, but an ‘aristocracy of talent’ could provide a solution thereto,

The practical reform programme outlined in Book 4 of Past and Present is one of the most extraordinary proposals, outside of the socialist camp, of the period. Besides pleading for a new aristocracy and priesthood, a reinforcement of the role of the monarch as ‘pontiff-king’ (Victoria, of course, was Queen), and an acknowledgement of the governing role of the ‘industrial aristocracy’, Carlyle proposes an ‘organization of labour’ into industrial armies, led by captains of industry, who would instil a new sense of chivalry and just subordination. To ensure obedience from below, workers would be offered a permanent labour contract, subject to working properly, and potentially some share in the management of industrial enterprises. To secure the protection of the workforce, legislation should ensure conditions of safety and comfort. ‘Interference has begun; it must continue, must extensively enlarge itself, deepen and sharpen itself’, proclaimed Carlyle: factory regulations, mine regulations, sanitary regulations, parks for workers, the right education and free emigration, were all to be incorporated into the social programme of the future. This was an extraordinary set of proposals that helped to popularize a collectivist approach to economic problems, which would become much more widely accepted by the 1880s. The classification of his mature social theory defies easy categorization, however, indebted as it is to certain forms of authoritarian conservatism, to the socialism of the Saint-Simonians and, in part, the Owenites, to liberal assumptions about meritocracy and the worth of the rising middle and industrial classes, and to a Saint-Simonian philosophy of history wedded to his own understanding of the meaning of the supernatural.

Carlyle’s writings after Past and Present did not contribute substantially to his reputation. His essay on ‘The Nigger Question’ (1849) brought offence for its ever- shriller authoritarianism. Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) was similarly poorly received, being illiberal on the slavery issue, and dismissive of laissez-faire, again, just as free trade seemed to be ascendant and successful. Here Carlyle recommended that the Prime Minister, Peel, whom he fêted as a new Cromwell, should choose the ten best men in the country and place them in charge of ten new ministries supervising all vital areas of public life. In the early 1850s he began to acquire serious followers, notably John Ruskin,

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whom he met in 1851. Elected Rector of Edinburgh University in 1865, Carlyle supported Governor Eyre’s ruthless suppression of the Jamaican slave rebellion that year. His final great historical study, of the life of Frederick the Great, appeared in eight volumes between 1858–65, while a magisterial edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches offered similar homage to one of his heroes. He supported the South during the American Civil War, though at least partly in the view that emancipation would prove a cruel deception, and in the 1870–1 Franco-Prussian War took the German side. In ‘Shooting Niagra’ he contended against the Reform Act of 1867. Declining a knighthood offered by Disraeli in 1874, and the offer of a Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1875, he died on 4 February 1881. His reputation in the late nineteenth century was more as a literary figure and semi-prophetic moralist than as a social theorist, but the light Past and Present, in particular, sheds on the more collectivist strands of liberalism after 1880 and the turn towards ‘positive’ conceptions of liberty indicate that Carlyle remains a necessary reference point in any evaluation of Victorian LIBERALISM.