Like many of us today, early-nineteenth-century critics working to make the case for the public value of the forms of knowledge that were crystallizing into the humanities did so in the face of sometimes intense resistance, much of it, as William Hazlitt put it in his essay, “The Utilitarian Controversy,” from voices within the reform movement who dismissed “polite literature and the arts as frivolous and contemptible, or pitiable things” at a time when more useful forms of knowledge were urgently required (20: 258). As Hazlitt’s essay suggested, the “controversy” which was “at present raging with all the fury of ancient polemics … respecting the useful and the agreeable” played itself out most conspicuously in a series of exchanges between two of the leading periodicals of the day (20: 255). The Utilitarian Westminster Review had started the fight with a series of aggressive attacks on the two leading quarterlies, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly . Of the two, the Edinburgh ’s reformist pretensions were its main target. Happily disclosing his own bias, Hazlitt explained that “the Westminster contends that there is nothing useful but what is disagreeable… the Edinburgh , with better taste and manners, maintains that the agreeable forms part of the useful; and we confess we incline to the same side of the question, if common sense is not to be left quite out of it” (20: 255–56).
The parallels with our own debates today are sometimes uncanny, but also like our own debates, the tensions between these positions were more complex than Hazlitt’s distinction suggested. Where the Edinburgh (to which Hazlitt contributed regularly) charged the Westminster with being hopelessly reductive in its narrow obsession with useful knowledge, the Westminster attacked the Edinburgh for what they denounced as its political hypocrisy. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly were widely assumed to occupy antithetical positions on either side of a deep political divide, but for the Utilitarian Westminster , the Whig-Tory division was a distraction that masked a more fundamental unity in their service to Britain’s establishment; they were two sides of the same aristocratic coin. With its strong Tory leanings, the Quarterly was the most obvious culprit in “carrying on this warfare against liberty” on behalf “the governing few” (WR 1827: 7: 228). But despite the Edinburgh ’s insistence on the Whig tradition as a proud defender of the liberty of the British people, the Westminster repeatedly insisted that the Edinburgh was itself just as much a servant of the country’s aristocratic establishment. If the Edinburgh tended to be distinguished by “a much higher kind of intellect” than the Quarterly , it argued, this was in part because the particular challenge it faced, appearing to espouse the cause of liberty while serving the interests of the privileged classes, was a more difficult one (WR 1824: 2: 464). “The necessity of finding something to say which will please both the people and the aristocracy, leads to a perpetual shifting of position; but some skill is necessary to hide the operation. Something of ability is required in the conduct of the see-saw” (1824: 2: 465). This rhetorical “see-saw” was a frequent metaphor in the Westminster ’s discussions of the Edinburgh , a sure sign of literary ability wasted in an ongoing act of political bad faith.
However straightforward the polarized language of many of these exchanges might have made it seem, it would be a mistake to assume that these debates played out in easy oppositional terms between two clearly defined camps. Not only did “polite literature and the arts” find support among both reformers and conservatives, those reformers who argued for the public value of the humanities shared many of the larger political goals of Utilitarians who were, on this cultural issue, their most vocal opponents. Approaching these various positions in the debates about the useful and the agreeable as “a field of strategic possibilities” highlights both the complex nature of the differences that were sometimes at stake and the surprising convergences that were also a feature of these debates (Foucault 37). Controversy foregrounds difference, but these lines of convergence were often just as important. However firmly the Westminster might position the Edinburgh on the far side of a deep political divide, the Edinburgh ’s Scottish Enlightenment outlook meant that it actually shared many Utilitarians’ enthusiasm for the reformist power of ideas about political economy pioneered by Adam Smith and for many of the age’s educational initiatives. Utilitarians’ celebration of the notorious “greatest happiness principle,” or in other words, the idea that policy decisions should be decided by “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as “the principle most at war with aristocratical abuses” struck an overtly reformist tone that coincided with many of the Edinburgh ’s own positions (WR 2: 1824: 412). Some of the Edinburgh ’s founding members, such as Lord Brougham, were themselves enthusiastic supporters of Utilitarianism. But none of this prevented the Edinburgh from insisting that however inclined some people may be to regard the Utilitarians as “the lights of the world,” they regarded them as
Especially in its early years, the Westminster provided its critics with plenty of ammunition. In its opening number, it insisted that “the exclusive culture of the faculty of imagination has but too strong a tendency to impair the powers of judgment; and how much soever poets may wish to instruct as well as amuse, (“et prodesse volunt, et delectare poetæ,”) it rarely happens that they accomplish this double purpose” (1824: 1: 18). Nor should this be surprising, it warned. “Truth can be attained no otherwise than by a minute and comprehensive examination of all the details of a subject, and general conclusions on which reliance may be placed can only be drawn from a dry and painful exhaustion of almost innumerable particulars…. To the ardour and rapidity of poetical genius, such a task is repulsive and difficult, if not impossible” (1824: 1: 19).ordinary men, with narrow understandings and little information. The contempt which they express for elegant literature, is evidently the contempt of ignorance. We apprehend that many of them are persons who, having read little or nothing, are delighted to be rescued from the sense of their own inferiority by some teacher, who assures them that the studies which they have neglected are of no value, puts five or six phrases into their mouths, lends them an odd number of the Westminster Review, and in a month transforms them into philosophers. (1829: 49: 160)
Elsewhere, it adopted the opposite position, mocking the small mindedness of “a set of dunces” who, being incapable of holding more than one idea themselves, found it impossible to imagine that Utilitarians, being “somewhat logical,” might be poetical as well. This error shouldn’t be too surprising, it insisted. “Their own poetry is as destitute of logic, as their logic is of poetry” (1830: 12: 1). Citing a list of poets, from Milton to Wordsworth, the Westminster insisted that “great poets” were always strong logicians as well (1830: 12: 2). Charges that Utilitarians, being logical, were therefore unable to appreciate poetry, said far more about the small mindedness of these critics than it did about their own abilities. Ramping up its polemical tone, the Westminster insisted that not only was “Mr. Bentham” far more poetical than his “carping critics” were prepared to allow, but what would have been even more surprising to many critics, Coleridge was “a Benthamite in his poetry; a Utilitarian; a ‘greatest Happiness’ man; for, as a poet, he writes under the controlling and dictating power of truth and nature, under the inspiration of his own profound convictions and emotions” (1830: 12: 3). Critics might well have agreed that these final claims about the power of truth and nature were true of Coleridge, but given his well-known resistance to the “cold beneficence” of the sort of reformer who “chills me while he aids,” most would have been reluctant to align him quite so readily with Benthamite Utilitarianism.1 Whatever their real differences, these exchanges were often fuelled by caricatured versions of each others’ actual thinking about the relations between the arts (especially poetry) and more “useful” forms of applied knowledge. In doing so, they conspired to ensure that reductive accounts of assumptions about the relations between different kinds of knowledge prevailed on all sides. Like today, the greatest downside of this impasse was the extent to which it undermined efforts to reimagine the very idea of usefulness in more productive ways.
With his roots in the Dissenting world of rational inquiry and his passion for poetry and the fine arts, Hazlitt was uniquely situated in these debates. Like most radical reformers, Hazlitt was deeply committed to an Enlightenment belief in the reformist power of knowledge as it became widely diffused through an expanding public as a direct result of active critical debate. His essay, “What is the People?” offered a classic snapshot of this democratic vision that “the voice of the people” is “the best rule for Government”: “The sincere expression of the feelings of the people must be true; the full and free development of the public opinion must lead to truth, to the gradual discovery and diffusion of knowledge in this, as in all other departments of human inquiry” (7: 272). In his 1828 essay, “The Influence of Books on the Progress of Manners,” Hazlitt distilled this process into a single vivid image. Before the spread of reading had helped to create an enlightened public, he acknowledged:
No one, not even the owner of a baronial stronghold, would want to be on the wrong side of this kind of history. These sorts of accounts were animated by an appealing teleology that reinforced their triumphalist tone, but this apparent simplicity was unsettled by a layer of complexity implicit in Hazlitt’s reference to “the feelings of the people.” The emancipatory vision of these passages was grounded in an understanding of reason as an active disposition for critical inquiry and debate, but crucially for Hazlitt, this remained inseparable from a related emphasis on people’s capacity for moral sympathy. When “reason” became a shorthand for philosophical approaches that emphasized the importance of logical abstraction in ways that negated the power of the human feeling, Hazlitt was just as quick to reject it as the basis of new forms of tyranny that were in many ways worse than the problems that reformers were struggling to eliminate. In his attack on “people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions” in his essay “On Reason and Imagination,” Hazlitt hailed “passion” as “the essence, the chief ingredient in moral truth; and the warmth of passion is sure to kindle the light of imagination on the objects around it… What does not touch the heart, or come home to the feelings, goes comparatively for little or nothing” (12: 44, 46, 50).the owner of a baronial castle could do as he pleased, as long as he had only to account to his tenants, or the inhabitants of the adjacent hamlet, for his unjustifiable proceedings, to crush their feeble opposition, or silence their peevish discontent; but when public opinion was brought to bear upon his conduct, he could no more stand against it than against a train of artillery placed on the opposite heights to batter down his stronghold, and let daylight into its dark and noisome dungeons. Just so the Modern Philosophy ‘bores through his castle-walls, and farewell LORD!’ (17: 325–27)
Taking aim at the infamous emotional detachment that distinguished Utilitarianism’s commitment to logical analysis based on strict moral formulas by invoking one of the most deeply emotional political controversies of the age—the struggle to abolish the slave trade—Hazlitt insisted that “more real light and vital heat” had been “thrown into the argument” by reformers’ efforts to personalize these debates as a “struggle of natural feeling to relieve itself from the weight of a false and injurious imputation, than would be added to it by twenty volumes of tables and calculations of the pros and cons of right and wrong, of utility and inutility, in Mr. Bentham’s hand-writing” (12: 49). Continuing to develop his critique of the moral and strategic limitations of Utilitarianism by highlighting the power of emotional rather than strictly logical appeals, he insisted that “an infinite number of lumps of sugar put into Mr. Bentham’s artificial ethical scales would never weigh against the pounds of human flesh, or drops of human blood, that are sacrificed to produce them. The taste of the former on the palate is evanescent; but the others sit heavy on the soul. The one are an object to the imagination: the others only to the understanding” (12: 49). It wasn’t just that people’s interest could most effectively be won by appealing to their feelings; on a more fundamental level, he argued, people’s “moral sense” depended on a well-developed sympathetic imagination that needed to be cultivated in ways that abstract reasoning could never hope to achieve (12: 49). What Utilitarians such as Mr. Bentham forgot, he argued, was that “man is an animal compounded both of imagination and understanding; and, in treating of what is good for man’s nature, it is necessary to consider both” (12: 50).
At the end of the day, though, Hazlitt’s commitment to Enlightenment ideas about the power of knowledge developed through critical debate precluded simplistic approaches that negated either the force of human passions or the contributions of logical abstraction. Narrow-minded Utilitarians might ignore the fact that “man is an animal compounded both of imagination and understanding” at their peril, but this reminder worked in both directions. Those who stressed the primacy of the imagination were often just as guilty of forgetting the other half of people’s compound nature by underrating the importance of appealing to people’s understanding, a word that suggested the value of those processes of rational analysis that objections to Utilitarians’ emotional detachment might initially seem to disqualify. In his essay on “The Spirit of Philosophy,” Hazlitt warned that “having the power to think” required having the “patience to wait… for the proofs till they come in, however slowly or painfully,” rather than giving into the more immediate force of opinion (20: 369). “We may indulge our fancy or prejudices to a certain extent, so long as we do not mistake prejudices for reasoning. We must keep the understanding free; the judgment must be unbiassed” (20: 369). It was impossible and ultimately undesirable, he acknowledged, “to shut out and suppress all natural feeling and inclination,” but these emotional impulses could not be substituted for the hard work of philosophical reflection (20: 369).
The key was to develop a m...