Karuna Mantena: Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the End of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

 

Shaken by the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, the British Parliament abolished the East India Company and transferred rule of India to the Crown. This and similar uprisings induced British imperialists to abandon liberal-utilitarian reformism and to replace it with rule animated by a conservative form of historicism. Undertaking to govern the empire indirectly by managing local customs, the British held fast to their goal of modernizing ‘traditional’ socieites, but now proceeded much more slowly and cautiously—eventually undermining their own claims to rule. “The era of [the British Empire’s] greatest geographic expansion—the period between 1857 and 1914—directly coincided with a phase of liberal retrenchment and the repudiation of central assumptions and imperatives underlying the ‘civilizing mission'” (1).

After serving six years as Law Member in the Viceroy’s Council, Henry Sumner Maine provided the intellectual foundation for indirect rule, and along the way pioneered the disciplines of sociology and anthropology in the English-speaking world. In the United States, Maine is best known for his 1885 book, Popular Government, in which he praises the United States Constitution as (so far) effective measure of prudence moderating a regime founded upon popular sovereignty and criticizes the First Republic of France as lacking such a carefully-designed set of governing institutions. He warns that the combination of ill-designed regimes incorporating a degree of popular sovereignty with a “passion for national dignity” issuing in imperialism (exemplified by the German Empire and the Italian Kingdom) may lead to a valorizing of “military virtue” that will destroy popular sovereignty (as the civil virtue of popular self-government and the military virtue of obedience conflict). Further, one people’s identification of national dignity with imperial rule may well provoke an equally nationalistic passion in the hearts of the peoples they rule, again introducing a destabilizing tension into the regime.

That “sound aristocrat,” “History,” denies that “the multitudes” possess the knowledge required “to be capable of understanding their interest.” Athenian ‘democracy’ contributed to Western civilization because it was really an aristocracy; similarly, modern popular governments will succeed only insofar as they adhere to such quasi-aristocratic institutions as representative government, separation and balance of powers (including an independent judicial system), confidential deliberation in the executive cabinet, and other “securities against surprise or haste.” The democratic “passion for change” or “change for its own sake” endangers popular regimes. Given the power of the people, the state controlled by such a regime will incline toward excessive power, harnessing the techno-scientific conquest of nature to provide popular demands, inflaming appetites at the expense of reasoned self-government. But ‘progress’ is anything but natural; human nature, unchanging or repetitive/cyclical insofar as it exhibits change, cannot flourish under a regime of scientism spurred by popular passion. The scientistic aristocracy of the administrative state lacks the prudence of the older aristocracies. Unlikely to succeed in governing, even if it did it would not likely rule with benevolence.

Mantena’s study of Maine’s theory of imperialism shows these principles applied to the problem of ruling foreign peoples. “Maine’s seminal contribution to imperial policy debates stemmed from his evocative account of the unique dynamics of primitive, ancient societies, of which India was a prime example” (3). To rule such societies required, paradoxically, stepping back from strictly political considerations and to respect the ways in which “native society” must be understood as “apolitical,” a structure “held together by stable bonds of custom and structures of kinship” (3). To put it in Aristotelian terms, these societies were pre-political or tribal; they had not achieved the way of life of the polis. For this reason it was not only pointless but dangerous to attempt to push modern liberal politics upon them, as the native peoples would surely push back, as they had done in the Mutiny. Native religious beliefs, animating kinship relations and tribal life generally, must be understood and respected. “The native was thought to be best ruled through his/her own institutions and structures of authority” (5), that is, by indirect rule, “protect[ing] native society from the traumatic impact of modernity” (7). This new strategy did not imply an abandonment of the intention of the “universalism”—the eventual liberalization of ruled societies—but instead a more careful and (as Maine would say) prudent approach toward that purpose.

A tension immediately developed between universalism and “culturalism,” a strain of thought seen at least as far back as Montesquieu, and continued in various ways by Diderot, Kant, Herder, and some of the Scottish historians (13). Culturalism tended toward historical determinism and away from the very prudential, political rule that leaves room for human “agency” (14-15). Political science loses much of its authority to sociology and anthropology; given the fact that ’empire’ means ‘rule,’ this bodes ill for imperialism because it erodes the self-confidence and self-knowledge of imperialists. But it is likely that Maine understood himself as following not in the line of some determinism but along the way opened by Edmund Burke in his famous speech occasioned by the impeachment trial of India’s first British Governor-General, Warren Hastings, which Mantena calls “the founding political drama of British India” (22), not an instance of historical fatality but “a verdict on the moral basis of future empire in India” (23).

Burke regarded political foundings very much as Machiavelli had done: bloody affairs of “violence, conquest, and usurpation” (23). What redeemed them was what the conquerors did thereafter “to secure stable and lawful governance” (23). In British India, this meant institutional checks on the East India Company, subjecting its rule to Parliamentary oversight aimed at securing the trust and consent of the ruled and aiming at the good of the ruled. Crucially, such rule must respect the traditions of the Indians and not aim at replacing them wholesale with British practices because a people “cannot change their maxims, lives, and opinions” (Burke, quoted p. 24). This is precisely the argument Burke made against the French revolutionaries, who also sought to wipe out centuries of custom in the name of Enlightenment. Such efforts tyrannize more than they reform.

Hastings had classified the many Indian political societies as specimens of “Oriental despotism” (25). On the contrary, Burke “articulated a reverent image of the ancient laws, customs, and institutions of India,” which registered its unique geography, society, and politics (25). Victorious conquerors shouldn’t preen themselves on their military prowess, which hardly reflects superiority to the conquered people ‘across the board.’ The longstanding character of Indian civilization bespoke time-tested qualities which should “evoke a humility and appreciation” for them in the souls of the new rulers.

‘Enlightenment’ intellectuals struck back in the next generation, whose utilitarians had little patience with Burkean traditionalism. James Mill, who worked for the East India Company from 1819 to 1836, wrote a book-length critique of “every claim made on behalf of the achievements of Indian arts, science, philosophy, and government” (26). Measured by the standard of utility, India lagged behind on the march of “social progress” (26); Indians exhibited the traits of indolence, mendacity, and superstition characteristic of peoples long ruled by “political despotism and religious tyranny” (27). It was Great Britain’s imperial responsibility to push them forward. The “infinite malleability of human nature” made this project possible (30).

Evangelical Christian writers also demurred. For Charles Grant, Hinduism was a form of paganism, “despotic in character, maintained by a crafty priestly class,” desperately in need not of the light of the Enlighteners but the light of the Gospel (28). It is “our duty” as Christians “to impart to them knowledge, light, and happiness,” not to “wink at the stupidity which we deem profitable to us” (Grant, quoted p. 28). In the long run, such greed is short-sighted even in its own blinkered terms: trade with civilized men is more profitable than governing savages.

No evangelical Christian, John Stuart Mill also (and famously) opposed the narrowly ‘economistic’ utilitarianism of his father and his father’s colleague, Jeremy Bentham, for a broader form of that doctrine, one that made room for a more capacious understanding of human happiness. Unlike them, he emphasized “the importance of government as one of the great instruments of forming national character” (31). With Burke, he understood that “liberty was not an unqualified benefit in all times and for all peoples,” that prudent political rule must perceive and adjust for the customs and habits of the people ruled (32). Neither the “savage” customs and habits of a people who refuse to obey any commands nor the hidebound customs and habits of those who cannot think for themselves will conduce to ready development toward self-government. Over such peoples, only what Mill called a regime of “vigorous despotism” would do, one aiming at civilizing the subject people in the literal sense of that word: making the civil, amenable to being ruled and to sharing in rule (33). The human capacity for self-government is universal in the sense that it is a natural potential of all peoples—Mill firmly rejected the naturalist racism of Thomas Carlyle—but its actual implementation is not universal. Bridging that gulf is very hard to do, as the several colonial revolts against British imperial rule during Mill’s lifetime so violently illustrated. This debate intensified because it became entwined with the simultaneous British regime debate over democratic republicanism, seen in the controversies surrounding the three major reform acts of the nineteenth century, which gradually widened the franchise to include all classes of Englishmen.

James Fitzjames Stephens spearhead the reaction against Mill’s liberal imperialism, and indeed against liberalism generally. Stephens scored liberalism as too ‘soft’ to rule India effectively; liberals only invited revolt. “Unapologetic authoritarian rule in the colonies” was necessary to maintain the basic conditions of “law and order” needed to prevent social and political chaos. He differed from Mill primarily in insisting that such rule must be permanent, justified by English “virtue, honor, and superiority” over the Indians (41). “Stephen sought to undermine the normative appeal of the goal of self-government more generally. Through the claim that self-government was unfit for India, Stephen hoped to expose its limitations for England as well.” (42)  He denied the existence of fundamental human progress, not simply on the basis of natural right but on a Hobbesian form of natural right: Man is “at heart selfish and unruly and therefore needed to be continuously compelled to live peaceably and morally in society” (42). The more Britain democratized socially, the more such absolute rule would be needed. Absolute rule was not despotism or tyranny because it aimed at the good of the people ruled. But that ‘good’ scarcely allowed them to attempt to govern themselves, a task for which few people can be fitted.

Maine shared much of Stephens’s skepticism about liberal hopes for popular self-government although, as his argument in Popular Government shows, he was not an unqualified ‘absolutist,’ either. He came down somewhere between Mill and Stephens. Nonetheless, “in rendering the moral grounds of empire in more ambivalent terms,” critics of liberalism caused liberalism to lose “a straightforward purpose or substantive agenda” (46), as indeed the Liberal Party itself headed for decline and eventual dissolution. Despite Mill’s best efforts, the sense of the political was never fully established in English liberalism, as the more sociological and anthropological approaches to understanding foreign societies prevailed. One is tempted to suggest that the very democratization esteemed by liberals gave the critics of liberalism an opening for ‘cultural’ arguments intended to show that political republicanism abroad and even at home were unsound, dangerous, illusory. In his seminal study, Ancient Law and Village-Communities in the East and West, Maine criticized the ‘abstract’ modes of liberal thought, insisting that India and other non-modernized colonies could only be governed if rulers understood “the unique logic of primitive society” as seen in its “ancient usage and ancient juridical thought” (51). The encounters of such societies with modernity would dissolve them, promising not improved rule but anarchy, no-rule. This brought Maine to formulate his strategy of “indirect rule” over the colonies.

Mantena carefully distinguishes the new, social-cultural approach to understanding human communities from modern social-contract and classical regime theory. The “idea-typical model of traditional society [was] a central innovation of nineteenth-century social theory” (56). True, both the social-contract philosophers and the regime-centered political philosophers of antiquity clearly distinguished between philosophy and convention. But between them and thinkers like Maine and Emile Durkheim stood Hegel and historicism, of which the early sociologists and anthropologists stand as inheritors, but on the ‘Right’ wing of the family. “Traditional society” as conceived by Maine is “apolitical, dominated by nonrational—customary and kin-based—norms of politics and economics” (58). Such non-rational and apolitical customs and ties decisively influence political forms, not the other way around; in this claim Maine departs from the claims of Aristotle and Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu would have agreed, who regarded political regimes and state forms as decisive influences on customs and kinship ties. Nor is Maine a Hegelian in the sense of positing a set of dialectical laws of historical progress. Mantena rather points to the reaction against the excesses of the French Revolution seen in the writings of Benjamin Constant, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and others who distinguished between the traditionalism of ancient societies and the rationalist/contractualist theories of the moderns. Niebuhr identifies the several social structures in ancient societies, as Aristotle had done, but claims that “the ancient state” or polis had no territorial boundaries. (This is implausible, given the importance of (for example) border walls in ancient Athens and elsewhere; Niebuhr unduly downplays the political).

Niebuhr’s scholarship notwithstanding, his argument does anticipate Maine’s critique of the individualism seen in much of modern social contract theory and his insistence on the patriarchal family and status-based kinship ties  as the keys to understanding the ancients. Maine regards this observation as no less scientific than Hegel regards his dialectical laws of ‘History,’ but Maine’s historicism (if one wishes to call it that) does not assume the existence of inevitable progress toward the modern state and an eventual World State. Traditional societies have a ‘logic,’ to be sure, a discernible order, but that logic is not the logic of ‘high-modern’ political philosophy. Nonetheless, in this respect like the Hegelian historicists, Maine denies that this logic was discernible by the ancients themselves, including the philosophers of classical antiquity. Therefore, the ancient philosophers who praised prudent, statesmanlike consideration of regime types, and even Montesquieu, the “founder of modern social science,” had failed to understand the narrow limits in which political deliberation and action operate. As a “historical animal,” man’s “political will” doesn’t amount to all that much. Societies have “an internal coherence and logic that [is] prior to and independent of politics” (72). ‘The social’ “mark[s] the limits of politics” (73), and is exceedingly hard if not impossible to change by means of political reform, including regime change. In antiquity, public law seldom penetrated into the family, which was “imperium in imperio“; its “closest modern analogy” is international law (77).

This is not to suggest that Maine regarded kinship societies as natural. On the contrary, kinship ties was highly artificial, as the practice of adopting adult members of other families had a ‘political’ motivation and obviously nothing to do with natural birth-relations. Adoption and intermarriage enabled patriarchal families to expand, eventually developing into tribes and gentes. It is not clear, however, that Aristotle’s description of how families eventually link together to form tribes, gentes, and eventually poleis really differs from this account, except that Maine understands the ancient family as more or less patriarchic/despotic, whereas Aristotle’s view is considerably more nuanced. Aristotle would regard Maine’s account as applicable rather to the ‘Cyclopean’ families of barbarians, including Greek families of what was ‘antiquity’ in his own day. At any rate, for Maine as distinguished from many historicists, there was no impulsion, dialectical or otherwise, for such traditional societies to evolve into anything else, even a polis. “In contrast to [the] perfectionist and progressive notion of culture, the modern anthropological concept of culture stressed the historicity, plurality, integrative capacity and relativity of cultures understood as bounded wholes, one that saw culture as a determinative shaper of human behavior” (85). If there is a human nature at all, it is seen in an “inherent psychological resistance to change and innovation” (86).

What, then, should imperial rulers do with the British Empire? Although Maine did not expect India to modernize anytime soon, he did recognize that its traditional way of life was disintegrating in contact with modernizers. In his time as Law Member in the British government in India and in his work thereafter he did not suppose that English-all-too-English common law would bear transplantation to the subcontinent—that one tradition could replace another. (For one thing, judge-made law will not survive where there are few or no judges to formulate it.) Instead of England’s unwritten, judge-made common law, he advocated an entirely new, codified system of law, the Indian Penal Code. At the same time, he saw that treating India as a “blank slate for speculate legislative experimentation was a recipe for political disaster” (97). Taking his bearings from the writings of Karl Friedrich von Savigny, eminence of the German Historical School of jurisprudence and critics of the “pure abstract universality” of the Napoleonic Code and other ‘Enlightenment’ law codes, Maine paid attention to the existing customs of the country and proposed culling them for “wholesome and expedient” usages and practices (104). This would give the appearance that the law code was familiar, not some radical revision imposed by foreigners. Modest progress in modernization then would be achieved, first by the very act of writing these things down so that British rulers and Indian subjects could learn them, shifting Indian custom from a non-literate to a literate practice, even while seeming to maintain a strict fidelity to tradition. Second, Maine rejected the assumption that the extant Brahmin legal systems—the products of one of the most rigid aristocratic orders ever established—should provide the materials from which British jurists should select wholesome and expedient laws. On the contrary, the customs of the villages should be combed for this purpose; reaching ‘down’ to the ways of villagers this democratize, and therefore modernize, the laws governing India without causing the society to fall victim to the vices of democratization, so often associated with the lawlessness of majority tyranny. “With the disintegration of any native alternative, legal codes based on rational principles were the better option than the existing state in which English common law was arbitrarily and haphazardly introduced through judicial legislation” (112). But those rational principles were prudential/Burkean, not abstract/utilitarian or abstract/’Enlightenment.’ To this Burkean sensitivity to custom, however, he did not neglect to add a strong dose of Hobbesian state formation. Hobbes, after all, was not simply arguing abstractly, but also responding to an acute practical crisis, religious civil war in England, something not unheard-of on the Indian subcontinent. What he wanted to avoid above all, in India and in Britain was a state that combined Hobbesian absolutism with democratic restlessness, perpetual change, a “never-ending revolution in customs and manners” (117) which would destabilize and even destroy even the most beneficial imperial rule.

In addition to the rule of law, India needed to establish a system of property rights. Like Locke, whose writings he seems either not to have consulted or not to have understood, Maine holds that “property was originally held in common” but over time has become divided, resulting in “forms of individual ownership” (119, and see Locke, Essay Concerning Civil Government, V. 25-26). When Mantena asserts that “Maine’s thesis about the communal origins of rights in property (and of modern conceptions of rights in general) effectively called into question the historical and logical priority of the unitary conception of individual proprietorship” (119), that isn’t quite correct: He was really calling into question the Lockean version of modern natural rights respecting the labor theory of value. Locke emphasizes that property arises from the fact that, first, “every man has a property in his own person,” equal to that of every other man because he is of the same species as every other man; second, when a man removes something from commonly-held nature for his own use, he “hath mixed his Labour” with it, joining it to something already his own, namely, his person. If I fail to gather acorns and prepare them to be edible, the communal property that is nature is of no use to me or anyone else. What Maine asserts, based on his historical research, is that the first step in establishing conventional individually-owned property isn’t taken by an individual but by a kinship-based commune. Individual property arose only after its disentanglement from the conventional communally-owned property (127). Indian society before the British conquest exhibited this communally-owned property; the English were attempting to establish private property rights there.

Maine objects to “unmooring the law of nature from actual legal practices,” as seen in modern natural rights theory (124). But natural law should never be derived from the state of nature, as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau all do, even as they conceive of the state of nature in somewhat different ways. “For Maine, the important question was less why people began to appropriate things individually, but rather why appropriation or occupancy created a sentiment of respect by society” (125). Locke would answer that human beings formed the social compact because enforcement of the law of nature by individuals secured their life, liberty, and property weakly; Maine might reply by saying that human beings have existed in a social condition from time immemorial, that one would need to recur to the Garden of Eden or whatever its materialist/evolutionary equivalent would be to find human beings existing in an asocial state. In this, Maine registers his main philosophic target, who is not Locke but Rousseau, the thinker he associates with the excesses of the French Revolution. Maine “transformed a speculative/logical account of origins into a historical explanation” (126); in Locke, the law of nature is reason, but not for the historicist Maine, for whom individual rights to property originated in a transition from property conceived as based in kinship/status to property conceived as based on contract. This is especially true of landed property, which “began when larger groups of self-styled kinsmen (the tribe of gens) settled and worked the land collectively” (134); as these villages increased in size, the individual families began to stake out their own plots, on the one hand, and tribal chieftains used military power to stake out their own, vaster, landholdings, on the other. The next step was to make land alienable, inasmuch as family plots initially had been considered sacred soil where one’s family ancestors, deified after death, were buried (as per Fustel’s account). Although moveable property became salable early on, land “was often the last [type of property] to be incorporated into the law of sales” (136). For this, a modern, centralized state was a highly useful instrument for the establishment of rights to alienable property, both for individuals and for rulers in need of revenues. But this is not natural. “The idea that human beings are naturally inclined to sell goods and services at the highest possible price was not a given fact of nature but was made possible only in economic systems where the ideology of the market had taken hold,” system which replaced “the primitive community” (142). Having denied the natural-law or rule-of-reason standard of Locke, Maine can regard kinship, even the Indian caste system, as no more or less natural than contracts and markets.

Crucially, Maine found this movement toward private property to be widespread. He therefore spared no nostalgia (pace Rousseau) for man’s earlier, communal societies. As a historicist, he regarded the “movement” toward private property as “a product of processes of change that were immanent to the social formation,” a “progressive and legitimate development” (137)—immanence (whether in the form of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Marx’s materialist ‘iron laws of history’) being the centerpiece of the historicist understanding of reality. In terms of imperial rule, Maine drew a straightforward conclusion: Yes, Indian practices should be reformed, brought forward toward the protection of private property; but no, these practices must not be reformed too quickly, as Brits had been attempting to do. Such precipitous reform disoriented a traditional society. But at the same time, what was done was done. “We British,” Maine wrote, “should stand even by our mistakes,” which “is better than perpetual meddling” (145). Attempting somehow to reconstitute the now-disrupted social customs of kinship would only make things worse. This was true not only in India but in Ireland and elsewhere throughout the Empire. Neither ‘reaction’ nor over-hasty ‘progress’ would work, only the slow but firm guidance of indirect rule, a policy not of meddling but of muddling—of the time-honored English practice of ‘muddling through.’

Indirect rule amounted to “the insinuation of imperial power in the customary order of native society rather than through its repudiation and transformation” (150). Direct rule governed by the principles of liberalism “had set in motion a process of modernization that overwhelmed the traditional adaptability of native society,” which by the middle of the nineteenth century remained “intact” but “vulnerable” (151). Indirect rule “signaled the intellectual triumph of historicism over the tenets of classical political economy” (152) and, it might be added, over modern natural-right theories in modern universities throughout the West, as seen in the rise of Marxism and various forms of ‘progressivism’ which soon animated political parties from the United States to Russia. Although Mantena does not emphasize the point, Maine evidently understood that he was addressing the religio-political question, which had convulsed European politics would continue to do so in much of the world, including India, for the next century-and-a-half and counting. The caste system of India, which Maine was at pains to describe as not so rigid as most Westerners suppose, was infused with religiosity (157), as Indian Muslims clearly saw. Maine’s historical analysis did not commit him to moral and cultural relativism with respect to native customs, including religious customs. He was rather intent on enabling English rulers to see Indian society in its own terms, and so to “temper the arrogance of imperial power” (159), making it more prudent. Unlike Burke, that other great English advocate of prudential rule, Maine did partake in historicist assumptions leading to “reading differences in institutions as differences in stages in a unilinear trajectory” or evolution (159), although not in the grand dialectical manner of a Hegel or a Marx.

Mantena identifies Alfred C. Lyall as Maine’s “most respected intellectual successor” (165). Having joined the Indian Civil Service in 1856, the year before the Sepoy Mutiny, Lyall enjoyed a long and distinguished career, capped by his appointment to the King’s Privy Council in 1902. Lyall viewed India through a Tocquevillian lens, concerned that the introduction of modern statism would ruin the intermediate institutions and associations Tocqueville understood as necessary bulwarks against centralized despotic rule in democratized modern (and modernizing) societies. Lyall identified the Rajput tribal kingdoms as examples of such a well-articulated socio-political order, “worthy of free men,” as he put it (167). Without such institutions, despotism—whether ‘Oriental’ or Napoleonic, whether of the East or of the West—would prevail in the modern world. “Lyall was especially concerned with the cumulative impact of Western education on the transformation of religious belief,” as native students were educated out of their traditional convictions in English-style schools (168). New and more fanatical religious movements might result, threatening British rule with violent resistance. At the same time, ‘secularized’ Western-style ‘intellectuals’ (one thinks of Jawaharlal Nehru, in the next century) might well turn out to be “vocal critics” of foreign imperialists and “agitators” against their rule while at the same time having no real connection with the vast majority of their countrymen (170-171). This turned out to be somewhat true in India, where the remarkable figure of Mohandas K. Gandhi understood the problem and deliberately managed to connect what he had learned in the English university system with the traditional life of villagers, and far more and sadly true in Africa. There, British indirect rule tolerated local government not by the many or even the few but by local strongmen, establishing a system of “decentralized despotism” inclined both to rebellion against their overlords and refusal of genuine self-government of, by, and for the people in their territories (176).

Mantena criticizes indirect rule because it provided an “alibi” for imperialism by “shift[ing] the burden of imperial legitimation onto native societies” (177). This tended to prolong imperial rule by limiting it to things it could really do, while denying full sovereignty to the colonized peoples. She nonetheless prefers it to direct rule founded upon liberal principles, which she describes as violent in practice if not in theory, precisely because they require forceful implementation against native customs and beliefs. This of course raises the complex question of whether societies animated by those customs and beliefs have benefited from Western modernity, corrosive but also constructive. To begin to answer that question, however, criteria of judgment would be needed, and the various historicisms typically do not do very well in providing such criteria.

 

 

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.

Ali A. Allawi: T.: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Originally published in the Claremont Review of Books. Fall 2009.

 

Retired, near the end of his life, Charles de Gaulle wondered about history, “what Rome called Fortune.” He said to his friend André Malraux, “No historian has attempted to analyze the most singular element of History: the moment when the current passes. For us or against us.” Rome rose, declined, fell, but what “gives a soul to a people?”—or an army, the general added. What disorients that soul, inducing it to lose its way? A statesman or a military leader can rally his people, but there are knowable “limits to action,” as even the Caesars and Napoleon learned.

In France de Gaulle had seen the current shift more than once. He also saw a larger current, in the world. “There remains but one generation separating the West from the entry of the Third World onto the scene.” Malraux observed, “It is the end of empires,” but de Gaulle replied, “Not only of empires. Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, Nehru, even Kennedy, it is the funeral cortege of a civilization.” Malraux speculated that the West might be replaced by “Mao” (meaning some combination of Chinese nationalism and communism) and “to some degree” by “Nasser” (that is, by Arab or perhaps more generally Third-World nationalism). De Gaulle offered a correction. “Mao, oui. L’Islam, peut-être.” Arab nationalism, so visible at the end of 1969, when the two men conversed, would not shift the new current or guide it. But Islam—dismissed, disparaged religiosity—might do so. As an army officer, de Gaulle had known Syria in the early 1930s, writing to his wife that we French, with our mission civilisatrice, “have not made much of an impression here.” Had he sensed the undercurrent even then?

Ali A. Allawi sees the direct the now-surfaced current has taken. In The Crisis of Islamic Civilization he wants to understand how and why “the spirit of Islam” has declined and whether it might be revived. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed the tyrant Saddam Hussein, Allawi found not liberation there but sectarian murder and corruption. After serving as minister of defense and minister of finance in the new governments, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton University, giving himself time to think about his country and his religion. Like de Gaulle, he wants to understand how and why the current passes—specifically with respect to the decline of he takes to be the genuine “spirit of Islam”—and how that decline might be reversed. He attends to Islam as a set of religious beliefs and as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility, wondering whether “a modern society, with all its complexities, institutions and tensions” can “be built on the vision of the divine.”

In the decades since de Gaulle and Malraux spoke, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called ‘political’ Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Abul A’ala Maududi to being the lifeblood of real regimes and real revolutionary movements. By ‘political’ Allawi means the kind of rule Machiavelli’s prince practices: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity for the benefit of the prince. But according to Allawi, Islamic civilization—that sense of balance, of proportion, “between the individual and the collective” and “between this-worldliness and other-worldliness”—has been ruinously undermined, “undergoing a monumental crisis.”

For Muslims, the modern West lacks genuine civilization, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success. Much of the modern East, with Japan in the lead, now pursues such success, too—albeit corporately, not individualistically. West and East alike conjure the impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces of markets and technologies, and succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. (As Malraux asked de Gaulle, “Why conquer the moon, if only to commit suicide there?”) Allawi argues that the followers of Allah underestimate the modern West, assuming that they have little or nothing to learn from the adherents to imperfect religions. One may nonetheless think that Muslims correctly judge the atheist currents of the new Western irreligion, consonant with Machiavellianism, for being against the ummah, the body of believers. In particular, Western modernity substitutes Machiavelli’s invention, the centralized and acquisitive modern state, for the tribes and loosely confederated empires of Muhammad’s day, for the ummah, and for the European feudal societies that the armies of the ummah so often conquered.

In response to Western moral relativism and politique statism, Muslims pray but they also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although “dozens of nation-states…claim, one way or another, to be guided by Islam,” Allawi sees “few signs that anything like this has been taking place.” He insists that Islam is the only religion that might go beyond a mere critique of modernity to reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing modernity’s benefits, most notably the discovery of modern science. But he does not go so far as to deem this likely.

Allawi describes how Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad, “nearly always…coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims”—and, it might be added, rule by Muslims over non-Muslims. The believers held that the Islamic world flourished according to divine right and with divine aid, morally and politically. With respect to morality, the Koran teaches that “there are no human virtues as such,” only divine gifts to individual souls, who cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, as reflected in Islamic politics. “The specifically Islamic form of political life” consisted of several elements. The first was empire, but of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort. Governmental functions included the administration of sharia law and military defense as well as “expansion and conquest.” Kingship was the characteristic Muslim regime, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls “key” to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, although the project was undertaken most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. “Political” Islam arose even earlier, in the 18th century, in “the uncompromising and literalist monotheism” of Muhammad ib Abd al-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of modernism and Islamism—to which Allawi adds Western imperialism—”by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural and psychological unity of Islamic civilization had been torn apart.” The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam—both severed from the faith’s spiritual roots—more or less guaranteed Muslims’ political weakness from then until now.

Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed both secularism and the non-spiritual, legalistic, and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, “the great poet of modern Islam” and a defender of Sufi spirituality as “the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual”; Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld a civil-associational strategy against statism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabi, who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms, as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

Israel’s stunning victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes behind those armies. The enrichment of the Saudis, and thereby of the Wahhabis, in the 1970s, along with the 1979 Iranian revolution brought political Islam to power in core Islamic states. Allawi argues that this was too little, too late. Scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Koran, had lost much of its original meaning, as many words took on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. (For example, in modern Arabic deen means religion; in Koranic Arabic it means “the indebtedness of the created to the Creator,” a debt discharged by following the ways of life —the regime—of God as revealed in “Islam or the unsullied revealed religions,” Judaism and Christianity.) The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions—secularism, historicism—far removed from Islam learning. As for the madrassas, insofar as they teach political Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an “entirely Sharia-defined,” legal-literalist Islam. This is the Islam of the Wahhabists and their offshoots the Salafists, who “radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connection with the classical schools of law,” which had been “moderate, restrained and subtle in their decisions,” being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. “The death knell for Islamic law is sounding,” Allawi writes. “All its vitality, originality and appositeness fades away, turning it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training.”

Allawi defends a version of Islam that accommodates the variety of Islamic sects as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the 11th-century theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who made arguments similar to those of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the theological-political question required no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully, but rather an acknowledgment o a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike. Within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shia Muslims to hold high offices under the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabists and Salafists. “The closing of the Islamic mind,” he avers, “at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon.”

He suggests that if Muslims had glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance, they might have followed a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But “the maturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islam’s civilization by European powers.” Absent this imperialism, Islam could have produced, on “its own impetus,” “its own version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy.” He finds a basis for Islamic self-government in “a short but decisive Quranic verse [Koran 42:38]”: “[The Muslims’] communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.” Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term “themselves,” maintaining that it refers to the “entire community; in effect, across the entire adult population,” not merely tribal elders or adult males. In this he might be said to register two other Tocquevillian themes, those of social democratization and political republicanism.

Would such a “civilized” politics include non-Muslims in the ruling body? Allawi does not say if “accommodation” means shared rule. He inclines to brush aside non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam “with fanaticism and violence” has become a “deeply rooted” habit “in the psyche of westerners.” But in places like Southeast Asia, he asserts, Muslim conquests were mostly not conquests at all but voluntary conversions “prompted by the example of Muslim merchants.” And dhimmitude—the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes—was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

This description of peaceable, accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring if it were more believable. From its beginning, Islam came to sight as a fighting faith. It combined the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always been imperial in its ambitions. Like the experienced merchant he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible; but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it a great deal less.

Today, Allawi writes, “the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others.” Indeed so, but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve such a strategy as a temporary measure, would he deem ‘live and let live’ a godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although “the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural law which would be separate from divine revelation,” modern human rights derive from Western convention or “tradition.” Such modern “ideals” as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its “separate civilizational space.” For example, Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to “change it”—a violation of Islamic law, which permits conversion to Islam but never from Islam. This means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is—negotiable, a stance impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern, and not easy to reconcile with either the Hebrew or the Christian Bible.

Allawi assures his readers that Islam is the only major religion that rules no major state—or “core state,” to use Samuel Huntington’s term—and therefore harbors no new empire. Perhaps so, but hasn’t that made terrorism all the more attractive to radical Islamists? Neither the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, nor the attempted attack on the White House could make America collapse, but they were to say the least vigorous attempts in that direction, and part of a larger war of attrition against the United States and, in principle, all regimes radical Islamists anathematize—a fair number, as it happens. Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, but the two do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts. He doesn’t help his case by insisting that “the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself.”

These criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well. He strikes me as a successor to the sober, moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to ‘privatize’ religion, to reduce its authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively ‘privatized’ himself within the ummah? Can his  form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home—except in exile? Is he finally, despite his longings, most nearly at home in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jews, and Quaker so long as they “demean themselves as good citizens”?