Abstract
Starting from the uniformity of moral statements about social inequality during the Obama presidency, this article historicizes those statements by analyzing an archive of discourse drawn from Victorian England. Despite its distance in time and place, the archive reveals striking commonalities with the terms and phrases that invariably populate debates about social inequality in the American political field today. Drawing on critical theories of the archive, this article leverages those commonalities for the hermeneutic purpose of historicizing moral discourse. As I argue, moral statements like “equality of opportunity” and “equality of reward/outcome” resulted from the application of civil ideas and oppositions to interpret phenomena like poverty and social inequality during the eventful history of the Victorian period. The findings challenge T.H. Marshall’s classic argument about the origin of social rights as descendent of civil rights. The article concludes by discussing the broader implications of historicizing moral discourse, demonstrating the reflexive use of the archive to engage in a politics of meaning about social inequality.
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Notes
The White House, “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility” (4 December 2013).
Here I follow “the archival turn” in historical scholarship that is deeply informed by postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis (see Steedman, 2001).
A colligation refers to the empirical practice of “grouping of events in an identifiable process” (Spillman, 2004, p. 224).
The use of history for the purposes of defamiliarization finds eloquent statement in Heidegger’s claim about art: “What seems natural to us is just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and wonder.”
This also reflects my main argument against much of the historiography of the Victorian period, which treats the distinction between the early-Victorian and late-Victorian period as categorical in their different moralities. This makes what transpired in the 1880s–1890s “a problem” or a puzzle (see Emy, 1973). Some historians place the turning point earlier than the 1880s (like the 1860s; see Hennock, 1976), but the general consensus is, echoing Marshall, that something fundamentally changed between 1834 and 1890 (see Himmelfarb, 1991; Harris, 1992; Bevir, 2011). I claim that while changes did occur, they were not the fundamental departure that this implies, but instead a rearticulation of the same discursive strain.
As Somers and Block put it: “For 500 years the poor had been a sociological classification of the propertyless that carried no moral judgment … By grafting the moral categories of desert, merit, and self-sufficiency onto the condition of poverty and a volatile labor market, Malthus [helped institute an] ideational change from poverty to perversity…” (2014, p. 176).
As Steinberg (2003) reveals, the legal apparatus for the capitalist employment relation during the Victorian period remained at least partially founded on master/servant forms of labor control. This is alluded to in Burke’s comment, though it remained contradictory vis-a-vis independence/dependence as the basis for moral evaluation of the poor and, as emphasized below, “the labouring class.”
How intentional or inadvertent was Malthus’ use of civil discourse? The question is beyond the scope of this article to draw a reasonable conclusion. But several clues are readily available. The Essay on the Principle of Population was written in response to “speculations on the perfectability of man and society” (Malthus, 1992, p. 7) by, among others, William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. In no small sense was the book framed in reaction to “radical” interpretations of the French Revolution in Britain, of which Malthus’ own father was partial (Claeys, 2007).
This not to imply that the New Poor Law was only informed by Malthusianism or that the influence was purely secular. The “theology of scarcity” developed by a group of clerics and lawyers referred to as the Noetics was also profoundly influential (see Dean, 1991). The Noetics were notable for combining two hitherto unrelated disciplines: political economy and natural theology. This led them toward a strong defense of Malthusianism while subscribing to a Providential view of social order that made economic activity the site of tests of moral condition (Hilton, 1988, p. 21). In this view, the workhouses that the New Poor Law emphasized were not meant to improve its inhabitants, but rather to deter the poor from seeking aid and violating Providence by receiving it (Mandler, 1990, p. 101). The civil discourse that informed the problematization of poverty was partially drawn from this theology.
This seems less surprising given the paradoxical correlation between the rise of “free markets” and the rise of the penitentiary (Harcourt, 2011). As Losurdo argues (2011, pp. 297–323), if liberalism is present here, it is present in the binary between “sacred and profane spaces” and the tests that maintain the boundary. Only certain subjectivities can enter and remain in the sacred space.
While Booth doesn’t explicitly use the term “social inequality,” his several references to “equality” are indicative of this kind of integration between economic and civil. They usually reflect on a process of social structure that determines outcomes and judges whether this preserves individual “responsibility.” Compare this to W.H. Mallock’s early 1880s study of Social Equality where “social inequality” is either a measure of “character” or functions as a “motive to men who [desire] to rise” (1882, p. 189).
The “utopian” label was not formed from within these movements but attached to them in a subjugating move by Engels (1892) to distinguish his own branch of “scientific” socialism.
Recall the cases of Beatrice Webb and Samuel Barnett.
Taylor states the logic of a transcendental argument of this sort as follows: “They move from their starting points to their conclusions by showing that the condition stated in the conclusion is indispensible to the feature identified at the start” (1995, p. 27).
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The author specially thanks the American Journal of Cultural Sociology reviewers and Editor for their criticism and suggestions on earlier versions of this article, and also Becky Strand for her help with the title.
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Strand, M. Historicizing social inequality: A Victorian archive for contemporary moral discourse. Am J Cult Sociol 5, 225–260 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0008-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0008-4