Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

The abandonment of society’s traditional moorings, the substitution of the practical for the transcendental, explained the widespread unease about the future, Carlyle said. He placed much of the blame on utilitarian thinkers of the mechanical age, the followers of Bentham and Mill, whose equation of happiness with material progress he lumped alongside the promises of deluded chiliasts down the ages. “At such a period, it was to be expected that the rage of prophecy should be more than usually excited,” he wrote. “Accordingly, the Millennarians have come forth on the right hand, and the Millites on the left. The Fifth-monarchy men prophesy from the Bible, and the Utilitarians from Bentham. The one announces that the last of the seals is to be opened, positively, in the year 1860; and the other assures us that ‘the greatest-happiness principle’ is to make a heaven of earth, in a still shorter time.”5

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The teachings of the Millenarians and the Utilitarians were so unrealistic that they might simply “dissipate, and die away in space,” Carlyle commented in this essay.6 But as the 1830s proceeded, it became clear to him that industrial capitalism and utilitarianism were making further advances. The Great Reform Act of 1832 extended the franchise to many members of the emerging industrialist class. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 applied the harsh precepts of political economy to the labor market, presenting many impecunious members of the lower orders with a choice between starving and entering the loathed workhouses that Dickens would immortalize in Oliver Twist. As the decade went on, many members of the working class coalesced behind the Chartist movement and demanded political rights that the Reform Act had denied to them, including universal male suffrage.

As these events unfolded, Carlyle became a major literary figure, hailed at home and abroad. In the summer of 1830, a package arrived from Paris. Sent by a member of the Saint-Simonian Society, it contained a copy of Henri de Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme, in which the French philosopher called for a new Christian brotherhood of man. After reading “Signs of the Times,” some followers of Saint-Simon “thought they had found a kindred soul in England, and, to some extent, they were right,” the American scholar Fred Kaplan, the author of a deeply researched biography of Carlyle, notes.7 Like the French utopian socialists, Carlyle rejected materialism, criticized the ruling class, and called for spiritual renewal. Unlike Saint-Simon, however, he had no faith in technology as a redeeming force. Still, Carlyle was sympathetic enough to the French cause to translate Saint-Simon’s work into English.

Carlyle’s early writings also reached the United States, where the rise of modern science and industrialization had generated a counterreaction that took the form of a religious revival and Romanticism. This was the era of the Second Great Awakening, when Adventism and Mormonism sprang up. In New England intellectual circles, members of the Transcendentalist movement rejected the mechanical and the rote. They celebrated the glories of the natural world, the unity between humankind and nature, and the potential for individual spiritual revelation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist poet and philosopher, read and admired Carlyle’s early essays on German literature. Like the Scot, Emerson came from a religious background: he had served for years as a Unitarian minister. During a visit to Europe in 1833, Emerson met John Stuart Mill, who advised him to look up Carlyle. Emerson traveled to Scotland and showed up uninvited at the door of the remote farmhouse that the writer and his wife shared. The man who answered it was “tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow,” Emerson later recalled, but also “full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humour which floated everything he looked upon.”8 This wasn’t the maudlin fellow that Carlyle’s wife and family were familiar with. Grateful to the American for making the journey to Scotland, the Scot struck up a lasting friendship with his visitor.

Like the Saint-Simonians in France, Emerson and his associates in the United States viewed Carlyle as a soulmate who venerated nature, individualism, and spirituality. How far Carlyle actually shared the views of the American Transcendentalists can be debated, but he kept up a long correspondence with Emerson. In 1831 Carlyle published the novel that made his literary reputation, Sartor Resartus, an elaborate satire that purported to tell the story of a German philosopher named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. A few years later Emerson arranged for the book to be published in the United States. He did the same thing for Carlyle’s threevolume history of the French Revolution, which appeared in 1837. After reading that work, Emerson commented that Carlyle possessed “an imagination such as never rejoiced before the face of God, since Shakespeare.”9

By the time Carlyle’s history appeared, he and Jane had moved from Scotland to London, where they leased a house on Cheyne Row, Chelsea. They became fixtures of the capital’s literary scene, meeting Dickens, Coleridge, Tennyson, and others. Although Carlyle also associated with J. S. Mill and other Philosophical Radicals who constituted a progressive faction of the ruling Whigs, he remained a party of one. Unlike most of the Radicals, he was deeply skeptical of laissez-faire economics, utilitarianism, and any dogma of social improvement. He also placed little stock in the many official and unofficial inquiries that were delving into many aspects of British life—including marriage laws, the finances of the Church of England, and the material conditions of the working classes—and publishing voluminous reports packed with statistics. “A witty statesman said you might prove anything by figures,” he wrote in Chartism, a lengthy pamphlet he wrote in 1839 and published the same year. “We have looked into various statistic works, Statistic-Society Reports, Poor-Law Reports, Reports and Pamphlets not a few … with as good as no result whatever … Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.”10

The political movement that gave Carlyle the title of his pamphlet arose from a feeling of betrayal on behalf of the politically active elements of the working class. After the passage of the Great Reform Act and the Poor Law Amendment Act, their leaders organized a great extraparliamentary movement to turn Britain’s oligarchical political system into a democracy. The 1838 People’s Charter, which listed the movement’s demands, was written by the leaders of the London Working Men’s Association, which was founded in 1836. But the great strength of Chartism was that its support was drawn from many different sources all across Britain: labor unions; local friendly societies, which were often based at public houses; radical newspapers, such as Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star; and countless individuals.

In June 1839 the Chartists presented a petition containing 1.3 million signatures to the House of Commons, which summarily rejected it. Large demonstrations followed, a few of which turned violent. In Wales, thousands of Chartists marched through the center of Newport and demanded the release of some of their brethren who had been imprisoned. They were met by hundreds of special constables and soldiers from a British Army regiment that was stationed nearby. In the ensuing confrontation, both sides fired shots, and more than twenty Chartists were killed. The leaders of the Newport Rising, as it came to be called, were tried for high treason, convicted, and sentenced to death. After a national outcry, the sentences were commuted to exile in Australia.11

Rather than dwelling on the violence in Newport or the events that had led up to it, Carlyle took a broader approach. In his opening chapter, which he titled “Condition-of-England question,” he described Chartism as the product of “bitter discontent grown fierce and mad.”12 According to the newspapers, “a Reform Ministry has ‘put down the chimera of Chartism’ in the most felicitous effectual,” he noted. But in reality, “the living essence of Chartism has not been put down  … The matter of Chartism is weighty, deep-rooted, far-extending; did not begin yesterday; will by no means end this day or tomorrow.”

Official efforts to downplay the economic deprivations of the working class were unconvincing, Carlyle said. Figures on wages were scant, and even where they were available they didn’t say anything about the variability of income and employment, which was “perhaps even more important than … quantity.”13 Then there was the mental strain of working in the industrial economy. “The labourer’s feelings, his notion of being justly dealt with or unjustly; his wholesome composure, frugality, prosperity in the one case, his acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin in the other—how shall figures of arithmetic represent all this?” Carlyle asked.14 Despite all these questions, the authorities had gone ahead and passed a draconian reform to the Poor Law. Perhaps that measure was intended as an experiment to answer the question of whether a worker who was willing to work could find employment at a living wage, Carlyle suggested, before adding: “Chartism is an answer, seemingly not in the affirmative.”15

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Carlyle insisted that the real root of popular discontent was misrule on the part of the governing class, which had violated its duty to protect the social norms and mutual bonds that were an essential part of civilization. He referred to this new mode of governance as “laissez-faire,” which “having passed its New Poor-Law, has reached the suicidal point.” The Scot was interpreting the famous French phrase not only in its economic sense but also in its literal meaning of doing nothing and letting things, including bad things, happen. In preindustrial times, he noted, the aristocracy had engaged with the lower orders not just as employers or landowners but “in many senses still as soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king.” But when this paternalistic system had been in place, “Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man,” Carlyle said. Now, “with the triumph of Cash, a changed time has entered.”16

Here, for the first time, was Carlyle’s famous invocation of the “cash nexus” as the basis of social relations in a modern industrial society. “O reader,” he wrote, “to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!”17 Carlyle wasn’t blind to the wealth and new consumer products that industrial capitalism was producing, but he insisted that money and materialism couldn’t fulfill the spiritual needs of the rich or the poor. “Cash is a great miracle; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth,” he wrote. “‘Supply and demand’ we will honour also; and yet how many ‘demands’ are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply!”18

If people needed more from life than capitalism and utilitarianism had to offer, where could they find it? Not from their rulers, who had effectively admitted “that they are henceforth incompetent to govern, that they are not there to govern at all, but to do—one knows not what!” It was this abdication of governance, Carlyle said, that had created the vacuum into which Chartism and other popular political movements had stepped:

What are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings, from Peterloo to the Place-de-Grève itself? Bellowings, inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain; to the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers: “Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself!” Surely of all “rights of man,” this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest. Nature herself ordains it from the first.19

This was one dark side of Carlyle’s political philosophy—an unvarnished contempt for ordinary people, whom he referred to as “the multitude.” In his estimation, popular demands for political representation were merely a sublimated appeal for more effective aristocratic rule. Democracy was ultimately self-negating, he wrote: it “is, by the nature of it, a self-cancelling business; and gives in the long-run a net-result of zero.”20 At most, it could provide a temporary stopping point on the road to a more durable and more autocratic form of government: “Not towards the impossibility, ‘self-government’ of a multitude by a multitude; but towards some possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe struggle.”21

The reactionary nature of these passages was surely evident. But lest any readers might have misinterpreted it, or perhaps assumed that their author had been carried away by his own rhetoric, Carlyle reiterated his central message:

Cannot one discern too, across all democratic turbulence, clattering of ballot boxes and infinite sorrowful jangle, needful or not, that this at bottom is the wish and prayer of all human hearts, everywhere and at all times:

“Give me a leader; a true leader, not a false sham-leader; a true leader, that he may guide me on the true way, that I may be loyal to him, that I may swear fealty to him and follow him, and feel that it is well with me!” The relation of the taught to their teacher, of the loyal subject to his guiding king, is, under one shape or another, the vital element of human Society; indispensable to it, perennial in it; without which, as a body reft of its soul, it falls down into death, and with horrid noisome dissolution passes away and disappears.22

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As well as being a disbeliever in democracy, Carlyle was a racist and an antisemite. In Chartism, he referred to a “sooty African.”23 Elsewhere, he wrote of “crowds of miserable Irish” in their “rags and laughing savagery”24 and “usurious insatiable Jews.”25 That such a prominent writer would so openly express his racial and ethnic prejudices reveals much about Victorian Britain. Far from being ostracized for his bigotry, Carlyle was hailed as “the sage of Chelsea.”

In 1839 the British economy went into a slump, which created widespread joblessness and swelled the ranks of the Chartists. The following two years saw poor harvests, which kept food prices high and prompted workers to demand higher pay. Sporadic political unrest continued. In 1842 the Chartist leaders prepared a second petition of Parliament, which reiterated their political demands and called attention to the “wretched and unparalleled condition of the people.” During the summer of 1842, tens of thousands of textile workers in Lancashire and Yorkshire went on strike. To ensure that production stopped, some of the mill workers removed boiler plugs from steam engines. In August, striking mill workers held a series of mass demonstrations in Manchester that, although largely peaceful, became known as the Plug Riots. The striking workers demanded higher wages, shorter working hours, and the enactment of the Charter. The authorities responded with mass arrests. Subsequently, hundreds of demonstrators were put on trial, and their leaders, including O’Connor, the newspaper editor, were charged with inciting riots.26

In this unsettled atmosphere, the “Condition of England” question that Carlyle had raised continued to dominate political and policy debates. He didn’t return to it immediately. After he completed the Chartism pamphlet, he prepared a series of public lectures that he subsequently published under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. At the start of his first lecture, Carlyle expostulated a theory of history as the work of great men: “For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”27 The lectures were organized on this basis. In one entitled “The Hero as Prophet,” he singled out Mohammed, the founder of Islam. Dante and Shakespeare featured in a lecture on “The Hero as Poet,” and Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon in “The Hero as King.”

Given Carlyle’s upbringing in a family of Calvinists and his veneration of autocrats, it was perhaps inevitable that he would write a book about Cromwell, the Puritan soldier who served as the dictatorial Lord Protector of Britain after the English Civil War. In late 1842 he took a break from this project, which never came to fruition, to write another book on the state of Britain. His biographer Kaplan suggests that this idea might have been prompted by the publication of a parliamentary “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain,” which showed, among other things, that workers in industrial Manchester lived considerably shorter lives than workers in rural Rutland. In a letter to Edwin Chadwick, the Utilitarian social reformer who had prepared the report, Carlyle called this gap in life expectancies “one of the most hideous facts … in the history of Mammon-Worship and Laissez-Faire.”28

Rather than writing another journalistic essay in the vein of Chartism, Carlyle concocted an elaborate history lesson, which he told through a number of real and imagined characters and a godlike narrator. He titled the book Past and Present. Combining dazzling wordplay with characteristic overstatement, it began by pointing out that of England’s 15 million productive workers, “some two millions it is now counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons; or have ‘out-door relief’ flung over the wall to them.”29 This economic distress was a ringing indictment of the political system, Carlyle said. The Great Reform Act and Benthamite radicalism had failed, and Chartism had risen up. “All England stands wringing its hands, asking itself, nigh desperate, What farther?”30

The crisis wasn’t merely, or mainly, economic, Carlyle insisted. Above all, it was moral. In adopting the religion of money, the country had abandoned the path of virtue, with consequences that were always going to be disastrous. “Money is miraculous  … but also what never-imagined confusions, obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind!” Carlyle wrote. Adopting the biblical voice of God, he went on: “Behold, ye shall grow wiser, or ye shall die! Truer to Nature’s Fact, or inane Chimera will swallow you; in whirlwinds of fire, you and your Mammonisms, Dilettantisms, your Midaseared philosophies, double-barrelled Aristocracies, shall disappear!”31

Having set the scene, Carlyle shifted back in history to a more settled society: the twelfth-century Benedictine monks at Bury St. Edmund’s Abbey in East Anglia. Drawing on a recently republished chronicle written by a monk who lived at the abbey, one Jocelinus de Brakelonda, he portrayed its inhabitants as devout, if primitive, believers who were in communication with a higher spiritual power. The abbot, one Samson of Tottington, Carlyle described as a heroic figure who had displayed the sort of leadership found in all great historical figures. Before he took over, Carlyle explained, the monastery had fallen into debt and dilapidation, with rain running in and the monks often drunk. Samson, an austere, abstemious figure, a man of few words but decisive action, had rapidly turned the abbey around. Roofs were repaired, debts were repaid. The monks returned to their prayers and found new moral purpose.

Carlyle’s premise was absurd but clear. In this remote twelfth-century monastery there could be found an antidote to the anarchic, Godless industrial society that had arisen in nineteenth-century Britain—a society in which the cash nexus dictated social relations and capitalists like his fictitious Bobus Higgins, a sausage maker from Houndsditch who fed adulterated meal to his swine, held sway. “In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel of Supply-and-Demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached,” Carlyle remarked.32 Raising himself onto his tallest soapbox, he went on:

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. “My starving workers?” answers the rich mill-owner: “Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?”—Verily Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed.33

Carlyle’s call to lift up the poor had persuaded the Saint-Simonians that he was one of them, and his invocations of “Nature” had attracted the attention of the American Transcendentalists. Past and Present convinced a new generation of radicals and socialists that his intent was benign. But it wasn’t. He despaired of ordinary people, of politicians (such as “Sir Jabesh Windbag,” one of his fictional creations), and of the prospects for democratic reform. If change were to come, Carlyle insisted, it would have to be imposed from above by an authoritarian hero-figure, a modern-day Cromwell or Frederick the Great. “Oliver Cromwell,” he wrote, “whose body they hung on their Tyburn gallows because he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this country, remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have had here for the last five centuries or so.”34 Of Frederick the Great, the enlightened absolutist who ruled Prussia for much of the eighteenth century, Carlyle remarked, “I reckon that this one Duke of Weimar did more for the Culture of his Nation than all the English Dukes and Duces now extant, or that were extant since Henry the Eighth gave them the Church Lands to eat, have done for theirs!”35

Carlyle didn’t flat-out call for an autocracy—he may have thought that would be a provocation too far—but he didn’t shy away from raising the prospect of it, or from warning of what else may lay ahead if the ruling class didn’t mend its ways. Addressing directly the “Captains of Industry,” Bobus Higgins and his ilk, he warned them that their workers “will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand principle: they will not; nor ought they, nor can they.” The way things were going, Carlyle wrote, “it is becoming inevitable that we dwindle in horrid suicidal convulsion … Will not one French Revolution and Reign of Terror suffice us, but must there be two? There will be two if needed; there will be twenty if needed; there will be precisely as many as are needed. The Laws of Nature will have themselves fulfilled. That is a thing certain to me.”36

In closing his narrative, Carlyle returned to the theme of crisis and dissolution. In a country where “millions of men can get no corn to eat,” he wrote, the people would rise up and shoot for food the “Last Partridge of England”— a reference to the game bird that British aristocrats loved to hunt.37 The only way to avoid this outcome was for the country to abandon Mammon and return to virtue under the leadership of a great man. Before ending with some lines from Goethe’s “The Mason Lodge,” Carlyle made another reference to Frederick the Great, whom he would later make the subject of a mammoth and admiring biography: “In hope of the Last Partridge, and some Duke of Weimar among our English Dukes, we will be patient yet a while.”38