Gregory Claeys: Imperial Skeptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 2011.
In his 1917 essay Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, V. I. Lenin highlighted a then-recent study by the British economist J. A. Hobson. No Marxist (as Lenin immediately observed), Hobson nonetheless shared the Marxian assumption that economic interests largely determined political behavior, including empire building. Given the wide distribution of Lenin’s book, Hobson’s name often stands alone at ‘the beginning of the end’ of British imperialism. Not all the names of earlier anti-imperialist writers have been forgotten, but the fact of their anti-imperialism often has been. Claeys provides a much fuller and more finely textured account of anti-imperialism in British political thought than any previously available. He concludes too trendily, ascribing to his thought “the foundational ideals of modern identity politics” (290); what he has found turns out to be more interesting than that.
European imperialism found justification in Christian evangelism—Catholic and Protestant—whose advocates viewed with suspicion “indolent savages” who “committed the crime of living in an environment where little effort sufficed to attain a sufficiency” (13). For this violation of the curse of Adam (somewhat redolent of the atmosphere prevailing in a university faculty), “millions were enslaved and worked to death,” Claeys tartly observes. Imperialism also found justification in modern natural right as integrated into the philosophic accounts of the law of nations. Emer de Vattel, for example, argued that peoples who refuse to cultivate the soil and instead live by plunder “fail in their duty to themselves, injure their neighbors, and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey.” Other, more pacific peoples who merely tend flocks, hunt animals, and gather edibles injure no persons but do “occupy more land than they would have need of under a system of honest labor, and they may not complain if other more industrious Nations, too confined at home, should come and occupy their lands” (17). Theodore Roosevelt could not have said it more concisely—nor, as you might imagine, did he. Both writers were following John Locke’s Essay on Civil Government. Critics of this argument (including Diderot, Kant, and Herder) found no influential readership in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.
The first important British anti-imperialists came not from the natural-rights or the Continental protohistoricist schools but from the liberal utilitarians Richard Cobden and John Bright—free traders (today we would call them libertarians) who rejected all intervention in the domestic concerns of foreign countries as ultimately unprofitable. But the main intellectual influence on British anti-imperialism came from Auguste Comte the founder of positivism, who derived his ideas from his “spiritual master,” Nicolas de Condorcet. As is well known, Condorcet stands at the pivot of the transition of European Enlightenment thought from natural right (by then in its Rousseauan form) to historicism; anticipating human progress toward humanistic universalism, Condorcet comes off rather as a Hegel without the massive and intricate historical/ontological dialectic. Comte elaborated a new social science, inventing the term “sociology” for it; ruled by industrialists, “including engineers and scientists,” Comtean social science called for an initial dictatorship not of the proletariat but of the scientists, to be followed by a degree of democratization as the masses relinquished their old religion for an altruistic “Religion of Humanity”—guided, to be sure, by a new priesthood “living in colleges, and trained in science, but without celibacy,” and teaching the altruistic creed. “Live for others” (48-50). For his British readers, anti-imperialism followed from this humanitarianism. Wedded to the evolutionist-historicist thought of Darwin, positivism optimistically assumed that no coercion would be needed to aid the march of progress; therefore, both balance-of-power geopolitics and imperialism wasted time and resources (including lives) while encouraging retrograde selfishness and atavism. Positivism began to become popularized in Great Britain in the late 1840s, at the time of Chartism at home and other revolutionary stirrings on the Continent.
Perhaps on the grounds of a humanist/universalist sympathy for which nothing human was foreign, British positivists inclined toward praising the religions of the conquered. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt celebrated Islam, hoping that Africans would convert to it as a means of avoiding absorption into Europe (37); consistent with the Religion of Humanity, Blunt stipulated that Islam modernize its teachings on slavery, marriage, concubinage, and divorce (40). Blunt, Richard Congreve—a lapsed Aristotelian teaching at Oxford—and Frederic Harrison also praised Hinduism and even showed distinct sympathies for Irish Home Rule. The most influential of the British positivists, Harrison likely turned against imperialism in reaction to “the bombardment in 1863 of Kagoshima in Japan, where a city of 100,000 persons was destroyed in reprisal for the murder of one Briton” (84). Oddly, Harrison blamed Christianity for this atrocity—claiming that “on the Christian theory, the Japanese are absolutely inferior to Christian Britons, whereas “on the human theory [i.e., positivism] they are relatively our equals, occasionally our superiors, and essentially our brothers” (85). Evidently none too conversant with Christian theology, Harrison more soberly blamed the massacre on “the devilish antipathies of race” and the imperial ambitions of British aristocrats “pandering to the English merchant” (86).
Comte envisioned a world organized as a federation of small states. “The state had to be relatively small, akin to the Greek polis or perhaps Holland” (97-98). Modern nation-states and the empires they built launched the masses of the world’s people to subordination, squalor, and death. “Little-Englandism” followed from this. Little England would combine compact size with modern industry; like all of its sister statelets around the world, it would confederate peacefully under the “spiritual direction” of the Religion of Humanity (100). This vision could readily accommodate the socialism that gained intellectual adherents in the later nineteenth century. The following century proved disappointing to such visions; Claeys bravely contends that “the Positivists had not failed Humanity; humanity had failed the Positivists” (114). One might say that humanity had failed Humanity, as it so often does; reportedly, God has been no less disappointed.
As a social and political movement positivism “did not survive its second generation of leaders” (118). Prussian militarism and the arrival of the United States as an increasingly well-armed world power, along with the new, harsher creed of Social Darwinism, all dampened the spirits of positivists. But a portion of positivism lived on in socialism—an influence much attenuated by the sympathy for imperialism among the British working classes and by the Marxian argument that imperialism represented a necessary historical advance over sack-of-potatoes peasant societies. Still, imperialism itself, modernizing force though it may be, was slated for destruction along with the capitalism that directed it. William Morris’s famous utopian-socialist prose poem News from Nowhere embellished Little-Englandism with a synthesis of modern egalitarianism and medieval charm. But many of the Fabian socialists, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and the Webbs, judged imperialism indispensable to efficiency, civil service, and the advance of internationalism. Such Independent Labour Party luminaries as Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie eventually endorsed “not anti-imperialism but an alternative imperialism” “based on assumptions, if not of British superiority then at least of a British genius for administration that was of benefit to the colonized” (201). “Many socialists thus moved relatively easily towards a position of seeing the empire as a potential socialist commonwealth, capable of extending the benefits of socialist civilization to the less developed regions of the world” (227).
J. A. Hobson took a middling position. He concurred with both capitalist and later socialist thinkers (and ultimately with Vattel, against Comte) that “if a nation or the government of a nation holding possession of a piece of territory refuses to utilize fully its resources or to permit others to do so or otherwise makes itself a nuisance to its neighbors, or to the international public, the sacred rights of nationality ought not to protect it from coercion imposed on behalf of the general good of nations” (243). “These peoples have no natural or inalienable right to withhold the natural resources of their country from the outside world, and they cannot develop them without the assistance of that outside world” (258). He rejected, however, the imperial claim to a right to run over national claims altogether in great-power rivalry in the late nineteenth century’s ‘scramble for empire.’ In this, he sided with the Comtian Little-Englanders. With the socialists, he insisted that the social and economic inequalities of capitalist societies drove such societies outward in search of wider markets and more wealth. Unlike most Fabian socialists he did not accept a radically internationalist program for the internationally-needed development of weaker, nonmodern societies. In this, “he adopted the standard Positivist party line respecting nationalism, namely that a balanced and unchauvinistic patriotism was a natural focal point for human affection and identity” (261).
“Natural” turns out to be a pregnant word. Beyond the notion of “Humanity,” Hobson saw the need of a “spirit of religion [that] must transcend humanity, seeking a One which is higher and holier” (279). This One turns out not to be God, except perhaps in Spinoza’s sense; it is nature. “It had been Positivism’s failure to include nature, save as a contribution toward the progress of humanity, that was responsible in part for the slight hold Comte and his disciples attained” (280). Hobson called for “a recognition of nature as the larger and higher value” (280). Driven out with a pitchfork, nature returned—if only in a form more evocative of the mystical forms of our contemporary ‘environmentalism’ than of natural right, ancient or modern.
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