Much has been written about Benjamin Disraeli, but more so about his life and his actual conduct in the political arena than his work. Those who tend to study his work congregate in departments of literature, not of political philosophy, and thus the social and political thought of Benjamin Disraeli, distinct from his actions, is left to be condemned to appropriation and recasting by politicians of all veins, whether it be Ed Miliband or David Cameron. Disraeli the thinker had much in common semantically with Edmund Burke the pamphleteer, but they share important differences, despite the former’s attempt to fashion himself in the style of the latter in his Vindication of the English Constitution, a work that takes aim at the utilitarian creed of Bentham and other rationalists of his time. Although both thinkers, one more prominent in the conservative tradition than the other, were products of the romantic imagination, they came to be its bookends in the manner in which they represented its political thought: if Burke represented the commercial interest and tolerance and a respect for hierarchy, Disraeli turned that around to subvert the expectations of the commercial by tearing it away from the desire to profit without duty.[1]
Disraeli’s romantic imagination was, in many ways, like what Turner’s was for the aesthetic world: it was a recognition of the new creed of industrialism that had spread like a blight across Europe. “Before Disraeli,” Anthony Quinton notes, “conservative thinkers had kept the social problems of an industrial society at some distance from their thinking.”[2] But not any longer. If the England of Burke had been slowing walking into the arms of the market — and slowly it was, for the commercialisation of all society was far from complete — by the time Disraeli started putting pen to paper, the English countryside was an indecipherable mass of factories and smokestacks. If Wordsworth could praise daffodils, “Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in a sprightly dance,” only two score years later the number would refer not to those exquisite beauties of nature that were scattered across the bucolic countryside, but to the horrific plants that churned out grime and dust and misery in the name of unspoken prosperity. Burke was more amenable to the commercial interest, if only because
“In the age of Burke the human symbol of rapid economic success was a canal-building Duke, a member of the ancient governing order, deftly exploiting new opportunities. In the age of Coleridge and Newman, the symbol came to be a man like Hudson, the railway magnate, a man sprung from nowhere and unencumbered by traditional habits of conduct or acknowledgement of public responsibility.”[3]
The realm of business had changed. It changed precisely because the ancien regime had seen business differently from the new money, which sought to make money without any responsibility or duty to those who worked for their interest. They lacked, in short, the defining characteristic of noblesse oblige, and in their ascent to power they showed how easy it was to assume no responsibility whatsoever for their actions. It is the animating principle of human nature that greed can inflict, slowly but steadily, the most grievous harms on the noblest of principles, and for the vast majority of the aristocracy the sense of noblesse oblige seems to have fallen by the wayside in the lust for money. The old money was becoming like the new money, and it was this that shocked Disraeli. In that sense, Burke and Disraeli are cut from the same fabric: they took similar positions, but the former did not need to articulate the unspoken expectations of property and land, whilst the latter was driven by a sense of acute desperation and necessity to do so.
If one were to look to a single text among Disraeli’s corpus for a definitive statement of his social and political thought beyond the gossip-laced, thinly autobiographical novels of his Tom Wolfe period, one ought to look to Sybil, or the Two Nations.[4] I intend to start this analysis with the ‘General Preface’ Disraeli wrote to the collected editions of his novels,[5] published in 1870 with his authorisation and blessing, and then proceed to an examination of Sybil, where I consider his views on social and economic concerns.
The General Preface
The ‘General Preface’ was written by Disraeli as a reflection upon the publication of the first volume of the Collected Editions of the Novels and Tales of the Right Honourable B. Disraeli, published by London’s Longmans & Co in 1870. But instead of addressing the subject he sets out to examine — namely, the reception of his novel Lothair, he does everything but that, reflecting instead on a long literary career, and in particular the so-called ‘Young England’ trilogy of Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred.[6] His objective with the novels — even if it was not his intent when he first wrote them, almost two and a half decades prior, was to investigate:
“The origin and character of our political parties, their influence on the condition of the people of this country, some picture of the moral and physical condition of that people, and some intimation of the means by which it might be elevated and improved, were the themes which had long engaged my mediation.”[7]
Disraeli fashioned himself as a political novelist, and whatever category he may be shoehorned in — the ‘Social Problem Novel’[8] being one of those vicious categories that devours and sterilises the brilliance of each thing that it touches, not to mention the assumption that all novels are about an individual and some degree of social interaction, making such a category trite and paradoxical to say the least — is immaterial. We shall aim to consider here first what Disraeli thought of his oeuvre, on the assumption that in his retirement his self-fashioning had ceased and he expressed a more genuine reflection of his writerly activities. It is, then, no surprise that Disraeli seeks to place on a pedestal such works of his as would reflect the memory he seeks to fashion, the durable works of a disposition toward government that he knows will speak for all time, not merely for the few decades in which he lived. Even the sole major collection of his writings on politics, Whigs and Whiggism, failed to address the key issues he raised in his novels, but if one reads the preface one is astounded to see the failures of such a collection.[9] In the ‘General Preface,’ we see the ingredients for the remedy of this deficiency.
Disraeli’s narrative of the decline and fall of England stems from the rising commercialisation of relationships that were not ostensibly commercial in nature, or otherwise involved considerations of matters that had a financial component but were not wholly commercial. This is how he links the political parties of his time — he is still as disenchanted with the Conservatives as he is with the Whigs — to the ‘moral and political condition’ of the English.[10] With the rise of the Whigs, especially since the Glorious Revolution of 1688,[11] “an oligarchy had been substituted for a kingdom.”[12] The travesty of the Whigs was that they had promoted the interests of business activity to the detriment of the peculiar characteristics of the English, and thus had condemned the English to the rapacious demands of capital, of the lust for the reproduction of that which is sterile, and in doing so they had turned the country over to a financial association. This was anathema to Disraeli, an ardent romanticist whose work was “in factor a swan song, a romantic aria of medievalism.”[13] Isaiah Berlin notes that Disraeli “was passionately convinced that intuition and imagination were vastly superior to reason and method.”[14] It was this sentimental attraction to the responsibilities of those better off that appealed to Disraeli, and that is what he intended to convey in his book. But this was not a principle applied after Disraeli had been anointed the Earl of Beaconsfield in exchange for styling Queen Victoria the Empress of India — it was a steady current in his thought. As early as 1833, he notes what he terms “a great truth”: that “THE ARISTOCRATIC PRINCIPLE HAS BEEN DESTROYED IN THIS COUNTRY.”[15] That the commercial interest — opposed to the landed interest upon which the principles of feudalism have been founded — were of no interest to him is wholly consistent with his views in the long run.
What makes the Whigs so peculiar, apart from their love for power? In the tract referenced above, the Whigs are decried because they destroyed the “aristocratic principle … not by the reform act, but by the means by which the reform act was passed.”[16] They use whatever means they have at their disposal to do what they must to achieve ends. Even before considering the ends to which the Reform Act was aimed, the Whigs seem to have stooped to operate by Machiavelli’s playbook. Disraeli paints the Whigs as power-hungry, and his dislike for their cold-hearted rationality came from the same place that his contempt for the acolytes of Bentham stemmed from: “it was rooted in his particular vision, which made their values seem to him dreary and vulgar.”[17]
Thus his romantic imagination and his appreciation of the medieval coalesce: “The feudal system may have worn out, but its main principle, that the true of property should be the fulfilment of duty, is the essence of good government.”[18] The Whigs are as cold and calculating as the Benthamites are, but at least the latter feigns to have some popular maxim that could be, but is not, the principle of a just government; the former only care about general prosperity to the detriment of all else. Property, for Disraeli, is not an absolute right that exists to secure the gains of one to the detriment of all; it must comport itself to some conception of the summum bonum. If those who are privileged to have access to land, they must not behave like beasts animated by greed — Homo Economicus — but by a reverential piety to those less fortunate than them. In Sybil he contrasts the church with the factory owner, and criticises however subtly the Protestant Reformation which took away from England the last vestiges of property that was governed not by the need for maximisation but by a sense of enforce oblige, for the Fathers of the Abbey could have no offspring, no motive to maximise but only do as much as was warranted by the demands the abbey made upon the land it was allotted.
For Disraeli, the Church was the soul of the nation, and even if we had reason to doubt his own piety and devotion to the Church, he understood fully its significance and value. “Once,” Disraeli notes, the Church “had been in practice, the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people,” but now it was only so “in theory.”[19] If the feudal aristocracy had been the paternal protectors of those dependent upon them, the Church was the steward of their souls. It engendered a love for the rich spiritual experience of medieval society that had been wantonly destroyed by the rising tide of modernity, slowly yet steadily. It promoted a goal for life that was diametrically opposed to the commercial interest: God, not Mammon. But the shift to commercial society necessitated its degradation and devaluation, for its absence would be too jarring and conspicuous. This was, along with the degradation of the Sovereign as an appointee of the Whig interest, the cause of the degradation of the social fabric of England.
Disraeli writes: “The people were without education, and relatively to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior classes, their condition had deteriorated, and their physical quality as a race was threatened.”[20] The ascendancy of the Whigs had a direct correlation to the despondency of the masses; the commercial interest consciously defunded the studia humanitatis, broadly understood, and promoted science in its place. It took science away from philosophy, separating the study of what we are from what we ought to be. The rise of inequality did not mean that the rising tide lifted all boats, but that those on the top had reached there by the subjugation of those below and by the wilful abrogation of their unwritten but omnipresent moral duty of care. This was “the plea of liberalism” that sought to convert man to beast and take away from him the only thing that could support him when he was forced to count upon it: liberalism was directly opposed to the patriarchal aristocracy that took its duties most stringently, even if it faltered occasionally.[21] But the problem of anomie was not merely a creation of the Whigs: the conservatives had failed in their duty, too. While the Whig oligarchs were busying “themselves on the plunder of the popular estate,” the conservatives took it upon themselves to advocate for “exclusive and odious” policies that seemed to warrant an increase of power but without the necessary rise of responsibilities for the common weal. If the English government “was based upon an aristocratic principle,”[22] such a government entailed the care of the common people, and in abandoning those who needed the government most, the conservatives threatened to do by other means what the Whigs sought to accomplish, namely turn the aristocratic English constitution into an oligarchic tyranny. This leads Disraeli to decry the “perverse deviation of political parties” which has “result[ed] in the degradation of a people.”[23]
This ends the list of complaints, more or less steady, that can be traced in the earliest of his political writings, even as a pamphleteer, and brings forth a positive programme: now that the faults have been identified, how must they be addressed? In this Disraeli differs immensely from Rousseau; while Rousseau terms himself “the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart,” his “denial was comprehensive, embracing civilisation as a whole.”[24] Disraeli offers a solution, for he is a practical man who has been enchanted by the vital, romantic imagination, and not driven to complaint and criticism without end. This makes him unique among the Romantic Conservatives of his age; he does not merely frolick in defence and parry without an end in sight. This redeeming quality is subversive; it takes away from the conventional understanding of conservatism any sense of conventionalism insofar as it decries the torrid marriage between the libertarian Whigs and the power-hungry Conservatives; it disapproves of the ‘conservative’ coalition of laissez faire, laissez passer pseudo-conservatives that maintain a deathly stranglehold over conservatism every where. To reverse the degradation of the vast majority of the peoples, Disraeli recommends the following:
“To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church, as the trainer of the nation … ; to elevate the physical as well as the moral condition of the people, by establishing that labour required regulation as much as property; and all this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past than by political revolutions founded on abstract ideas, appeared to be the course which the circumstances of this country required, and which, practically speaking, could only, with all their faults and backslidings, be undertaken and accomplished by a reconstructed TORY PARTY.”[25]
This is Disraeli’s visions for the Tories,[26] a group that has similarities and common memberships with the Conservatives but is wholly different in its ideology. It comes from a dispositional conservatism, but more importantly, a hatred of the market’s vicious effects on the social fabric of the body politic. If there was ever a political manifesto written as briefly but as vividly as this, it would prove to be wholly inadequate, but Disraeli’s magic touch lies in the manner in which he can twist and turn language to desirous and articulate ends. If this understanding of the conservative romantic imagination is subversive, it is not wholly so. Even though some of the results that Disraeli hopes for may be shared in common with radicals and other belligerent and seditious groups, his means are wholly conservative, and the end to which they are employed can never bear the mark of other ideological commitments. This is best seen through his comment on revolutions.
Perhaps as a corollary to his defence of the English constitution from the utilitarians — irrational rationalism, one might call their creed — and the philosophes, who lacked any reason for him whatsoever. The Englishman, whose liberties and equality differed substantially from those under which their neighbours across the Channel suffered under the yoke of, had a responsibility to be careful, to prevent revolution over abstract principles of right and instead secure the tangible liberties of the Englishman. Here, his tone and content mirrors Burke’s Reflections, but even the passage of four score years has not diminished the ferocity of Burke’s rhetoric, which Disraeli adopts wholesale when it comes to matters of the French. If such changes were warranted as would serve the summum bonum, which Disraeli explicitly identified with the rights and responsibilities of the landed few to the dependent many, then they would have to be accomplished within the framework of the ‘ancient constitution.’[27] Writing of the Whig Prime Minister Viscount Melbourne, Disraeli observes: “Hie mind is impregnated with a sort of bastard French philosophy, filtered through the pages of blue and yellow, and relieved with an occasional gay or poignant reminiscence of an ode, or epistle, of the Roman epicurean.”[28] Discourse and governance centered around the abstract ‘Rights of Man’ and ‘the People’, both of which are vilified at length in the Vindication, are critiqued at length and presented here as the means one must avoid taking. The ends, even if they superficially resemble the ones Disraeli seems like he desires, are wholly different: their character is revolutionary and breeds unrest and contempt, while change in the appropriate manner and having as its aim the revitalisation of the English state and constitution is most certainly beneficial. Disraeli sums up his “economic principles” as valuing “the health and knowledge of the multitude” as a key part “of the wealth of nations,”[29] but this differs from socialism conventionally understood: he does not intend for the State to replace the Individual, but for the liberties of the Englishman to be preserved alongside his dignity. It is the “high spirit of a free aristocracy” that provides and the people who labour in a paternal relation to one another;[30] and it is on this count that we shift gears to Sybil.
Sybil, or the Two Nations
This book has the distinction of containing “the most often cited passage from Benjamin Disraeli’s” novels, and was first published in 1845, before Disraeli had any substantial and stable political power.[31] This analysis is shorn of dramatic details — we are less concerned with the action of Disraeli’s Sybil and more concerned with the ideas they profess to expound. We will analyse, in turn, the attitudes expressed toward the Whigs, the Church, cities, alienation and industrialisation. The themes analysed have their expression in the preface studied above, but they are expressed with a level of detail and emotion unseen in the preface.
The Whigs and the Reform Act
Disraeli, writing as the narrator, opens the book with a strong condemnation of the Reform Act, which he criticised from his earliest writings forth.[32] In the midst of a long tirade against the Reform Act, passed by the Whig interest to the determined of the English, Disraeli writes:
“Has it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence than the debasing qualification universally prevalent in this country since the fatal introduction of the system of Dutch finance? Who will pretend it? If a spirit of rapacious coveteousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose an Utopia to consist only of WEALTH and TOIL, this has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage.”[33]
The Whigs, this time, are blamed to have imported the commercial principle from the Dutch, a principle that inspired rebellion against the state, and not to mention the equalising of all into burghers and workers, sterilised by money. The Dutch golden age was, in most ways, living hell for Disraeli, and for what it is worth he takes the care to attack them on the count of owing allegiance not to the organic English body politic but to a foreign power. The ‘system of Dutch finance’ is also a possible jab at the Glorious Revolution, when the English were forced to import a monarch from the Netherlands in a brazen show of whatever it was that was going in (it was a matter of religious obedience). The Dutch, then, are everything that the English are not: and the Whigs are solely responsible for bringing in the Dutch. This does not necessitate a fear of outsiders — Disraeli himself was far too proud of being from another time, another place, and fashioned himself part of a successful line of Venetians — but a strong love for being English. It was the sentimental and the aesthetic comport of the English disposition that fatally and fully captured Disraeli’s attention, and it is this that the Whigs were so deeply opposed to. The Reform Act was the bursting of the dam, the violent rupture of modernity, the substitution of God for Mammon.
Whatever the Act’s contents may have been, Disraeli, having drawn a sharp contrast with Thomas More’s Utopia,[34] criticises the decline and fall of virtue and its unfortunate replacement with a disposition “to acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other,” criticises it for letting loose a monster. Implicit in his tone is the recognition that once it has been unleashed, this leviathan can never be gotten rid of: even Disraeli’s romantic imagination could see at least this modicum of reason. It may seem somewhat defeatist, but Disraeli understands the practical realities of undoing something that has been the source of unerring prosperity for the few — those precious few for whom the government works, and not the many who desperately need the government. The Reform Act crystallised the principle of Whig government: it took away from the government any reference to the summum bonum and instead furthered what for Disraeli could only be the summum malum. The utopia of the Whigs was the dystopia of the Tories: it has been involved in “desert rafting all the humanities of life, has been besetting sin.” It brings to mind some notorious doggerel, the Anglo-Dutch ‘philosopher’ Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which reads, in part:
“Thus every Part wad full of Vice, [155]
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice,
Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars
They were th’Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives. [160]
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make ‘em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn’d a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence, [165 ]
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.”[35]
The notorious Mandeville warned England of the Utopia of Virtue: only commercial vice could save it from itself. Disraeli, who may or may not have read Mandeville, but seemed familiar with the ideas expressed therein, could have possibly conceived of Dutch finance along the lines of Mandeville’s brutish ‘poem’, which advocated for sin and for worship at the altar of Mammon. Perhaps this was the thinly disguised attack — and even it was not, the plausibility of such an inquiry is most certainly admissible. Disraeli’s denunciation here of ‘Dutch finance’ and ‘philosophic phrases’ alongside ‘voracious strife’ and mentions of virtue and sin make it highly likely that he referred to the poem in consideration, which at any rate is so notorious as to warrant severe emotional distress in its reading, a source of pain unlike most other things that have been read so far. It is only sufficient to bring forth this snippet of dinner table conversation from Egremont to compare the two parties: “Fie, fie, Sir Vavasour,” said Egremont very seriously, “remember principle: no expediency, no compromise.”[36]
Property
Charles Egremont, our hero, is the younger son of the late Lord Marney, who has been succeeded by Charles’ elder brother. On a visit back home, after being successfully ‘returned’ to a Parliamentary seat in what I can only assume was a rotten borough, Egremont chooses to walk through the lands which his family is the traditional custodian of. Part of this land is the town of Marney, which occupies a somewhat ambivalent position in the novel. The town is the object of much criticism: the poor live in horrific conditions, in houses that are barely shanties; Disraeli calls them “hovels.”[37] And why? Disraeli, writing as the narrator, points out:
“This town of Marney was a metropolis of agricultural labour, for the proprietors of the neighbourhood having for the last half century acted on the system of destroying the cottages on their estates, in order to become exempted from the maintenance of the population, the expelled people had flocked to Marney, where, during the war, a manufactory had afforded them some relief, though its wheels had long ceased to disturb the waters of the Mar.”[38]
The laws for poor relief imposed upon landowners the responsibility of providing for those resident on their land; it codified in essence an unspoken but important diktat of English socioeconomic hierarchies. It sought to keep within the confines of parishes the poor and impose upon landowners and the better off a poor relief rate that would subsidise wages. While it was not as widespread as Karl Polanyi contends in The Great Transformation, it nevertheless provided the last vestiges of relief for the rural poor.
But Disraeli muses on about something else: about the rich evading their responsibilities. Lady Marney, wife of Lord Marney, Egremont’s somewhat estranged elder brother, tells Lord Mobray during a polite visit that he ought to “think as property has its duties as well as its rights, rank has its bores as well as its pleasures.”[39] If rank bestowed privileges, it also brought along with it a set of ‘bores’, necessary but not necessarily interesting tasks that were mandated by one’s position. In the Vindication he argued that even “the meanest subject of the our King … is born to the noblest of all inheritances, the equality of civil rights.”[40] For Disraeli, the presence of a privileged aristocracy — privileged in economic as well as political terms — is compatible with a general equality, because the equality is juridical. Even more so, those who seek privilege seek it as part of their duty to the nation and to the summum bonum, and not in the service of the spirit of “rapacious coveteousness.”[41] If those allowed to rise up from the unknowing hordes and despondency of the masses are permitted to privilege beyond a hereditary baronetcy, which is so commonplace as to not be a rank of distinction anymore, they must assume the corresponding duties that their rank demands of them.[42] Disraeli is aghast at those who have willingly abrogated such duties as was warranted from them by virtue of the privilege of their position; if equality is the norm, then any deviation from it must be met with some function. Even if the aristocracy lacks in humanist learning or superior virtue, it has to fulfil the performance of their essential duties, which involves the all-important duty of care to those they are raised above. The aristocracy is defined in relation to their land; those who seek profit over rank always squeeze what they can and exploit whoever they can before moving on to their next lot of hapless victims.
If Charles Egremont can be understood to be a projection of Disraeli’s views, it is worth reproducing and examining this cryptic conversation between Egremont and Lord Marney:
“Where have you been all the morning, Charles?” said Lord Marney …
“I have been walking about Mowbray. One should see a factory once in one’s life.”
“I don’t see the necessity,” said Lord Marney; “I never saw one, and never intend. Though to be sure, when I hear the rents that Mowbray gets for his land in their neighbourhood, I must say I wish the worsted works had answered at Marney. And if it had not been for our poor dear father, they would.”
“Our family have always been against manufactories, railroads — everything,” said Egremont.
“Railroads are very good things, with high compensation,” said Lord Marney; “and manufactories not so bad, with high rents; but, after all, these are enterprises for the canaille, and I hate them in my heart.”
“But they employ the people, George.”[43]
The Marneys are conflicted about the encroachment of industrial activity on their traditional lands, and understandably so. They are most certainly envious of the Mowbrays, who have gone with the times and let their land out for commercial gain. This is in sharp contrast to the Marneys, who have been traditionally opposed to the “manufactories, railroads — everything.” Elsewhere Egremont denounces the railways as the great steriliser, having a similar effect as money does on everything it touches. While they help provide employment, Egremont is conflicted as to the costs they entail. Is it fair to subject the people to such unspoken despondency and spiritual degradation, to degrade them into living in hovels and industrial towns with conditions that make for horrific existence? In his description of the town of Marney,[44] Egremont notes the fleeting nature of industrial activity: it is so dependent on the market that it draws labour to it when needed, but abandons it immediately when it has been used. Industry takes no care of the people; it is ruthless, heartless, and cold and calculating — just like the Utilitarians, who he called “Brutilitarian Sages.”[45] The cold, calculating lot was thoroughly disenchanting and reduced everything to self-interest, even the noble spectre of the monarchy was deduced to have arisen solely from greed and expediency for their perverse minds.[46] It is thus that Disraeli writes in his ‘Peers and People’:
“It does not become an ancient nation to be inquiring for ever into the origin and ‘utility’ of every traditionary custom and immemorial institution, like one of the vulgar parvenu societies formed ten years back, and which in half a century will be forgotten.”[47]
The Brutilitarian defence of property is the same as the Whig defence — indeed, they are often spoken off in the same breath — in that they recognise only the profit it can get and not the duty it necessary incurs in those possessing it. That property should be a means to securing a greater end seems to be the position that Disraeli develops and maintains is certain; what is even more certain is that this represents a lineage in British political thought that finds no uncertain expression in R.H. Tawney. Except for some of Tawney’s more radical proposals about solutions to inequality, much of his Acquisitive Society mirrors Disraeli’s conception of property:
“Long after political changes had made direct interference impracticable, even the higher ranks of English landowners continued to discharge, however capriciously and tyrannically, duties which were vaguely felt to be the contribution which they made to the public service in virtue of their estates. When as in France, the obligations of ownership were repudiated almost as completely as they have been by the owner of to-day, nemesis came in an onslaught upon the position of a noblesse which had retained its rights and abdicated its functions.”[48]
This brings us to the next important principle in considerations of property for Disraeli: not all property is created equal — its worth is influenced singularly by the style of ownership it is subject to. Disraeli would reject the popular aphorism of nowadays, that all ‘Benjamins’ are equally green. Our case in point is an entire chapter that Disraeli dedicates to the dragging of a certain Mr. Warren, formerly a waiter in an establishment of certain repute, but later elevated to the House of Lords. He was part of the nouveau riche, the recently elevated and newly titled ranks that could care little about the institution of the English aristocracy and more about elevating himself; everything “was a step in the ladder to the great borough monger.”[49] But there was no denying the fact that he had gained his fortune by dubious, immoral means, and bore only a manufactured relation to the land — “his Norman origin and descent from the old barons of this name [different from his birth name] having been discovered at Herald’s college”[50] — and consequently, he could countenance vice and industrialism in his lands because he was not cut of the same cloth as the Marneys, who were of older and more reputable stock.[51] Disraeli’s narrative commentary is most revealing:
“Of all these characters, the one that on the whole made the largest fortunes in the most rapid manner, — and we do not forget the marvels of the Waterloo loan, or the miracles of Manchester during the continental blockade — was the Anglo-East Indian about the time that Hastings was first appointed to the great viceroyalty. It was not unusual for men in positions so obscure that their names had never reached the public in this country, and who yet had not been absent from their native land for a longer period than the siege of Troy, to return with their million.”[52]
The insinuation — between this and the suggested fudging of accounts — and snide references to Edmund Burke’s decade-and-and-half long prosecution of Warren Hastings, the governor he ostensibly organised accounts for, cement the poor pedigree and the lust for money, power, and status that captivated the shallow Homo Economicus. It was the proceeds of despotic conduct and tyrannical governance: while Warren Hastings was busy starving children in the Bengal and making more money than was considered possible before. Burke, in his speech on Fox’s East India Bill, argued:
“In effect, Sir, every legal regular authority in matters of revenue, of political administration, of criminal law, of civil law, in many of the most essential parts of military discipline, is laid level with the ground; and an oppressive, irregular, capricious, unsteady, rapacious, and peculating despotism, with a direct disavowal of any authority at home, and without any fixed maxim, principle, or rule of proceeding, to guide them in India, is at present the state of your charter-government over great kingdoms.”[53]
Disraeli alludes to this, and to the contents of Burke’s speeches, letters, and writings on the subject of the East India Company, adding only that “he had a natural talent for accounts.”[54] It is all but evident that the vapid emptiness of John Warren and his dealmaking and profiteering of epic proportions would be the dramatic device that leads Egremont to cavort with Sybil and not with the Fitz-Warenes, who were the descendants of John Warren: “His Majesty thought him pompous, full of pretence, in short, a fool.”[55] But political expediency and an astute understanding of political power led the Fitz-Warenes — “six votes for Canning”[56] — led them to an Earldom. And who was responsible for thus but the Whigs?
From this a general position can be surmised: that property and rank bestow honour and privilege and duty as a bundle, and that one cannot be alienated from the other. Those who have had possession of money and land for time immemorial are much more likely to have in possession the aristocratic spirit so necessary for the sustenance of those dependent on them. The nouveau riche are, if we are to borrow from Burke, students of “Tacitus and Machiavel … professors of the art of tyranny,” and “their cold way of relating enormous crime.”[57] The aristocracy lives by the Burkean maxim that “the situation of man is the preceptor of his duty”;[58] the nouveau riche despises it and fashions themselves after the beast of Homo Economicus. That the ownership of property had come to those least deserving of it and unable to discharge the duties integral to that ownership was the source of the anomie of his times.
Anomia
Anomia, from the Greek, was a common feature “in English theological literature of the seventeenth century,” and later in sociological discourse pace Emile Durkheim, but we do not intend to use it here in that manner: only as a general word that encapsulates the various meanings of the “absence of rules, norms, or laws … [with the] negative connotations of disorder, inequity, and impiety.”[59] We observed an instance of anomia when we saw those unspoken laws of money and status being wantonly infringed by the rapacious nouveau riche, but the more significant iteration of the same concept, having the same principal cause but a magnified effect, can be observed in the status of the labouring classes and those less fortunate. Sybil notes with more than a healthy tinge of nostalgia that the English people she sees in front of her are not the celebrated Englishmen of yonder:
“When I remember what this English people once was; the truest, the freest, and the bravest, the best-natured and the best-looking, the happiest and most religious race upon the surface of this globe; and think of them now, with all their crimes and all their slavish sufferings, their soured spirits and their stunted forms; their lives without enjoyment and their deaths without hope; I may well feel for them, even if I were not the daughter of their blood.”[60]
Sybil understands that the rise of industrialism has brought prosperity only for a select few, but for the large mass of Englishmen; that the social fabric had been eaten by the worms of Mammon; and that the liberties of the Englishman, once substantial in name and in effect, had been reduced to some de jure benefits with no de facto ability to exercise them. In their suffering, the Englishmen had lost the means to exercise their liberties, and had lost meaning in their lives. Gone were the days of Henry V, who could stand in front of an outnumbered English army, and spur them on to action by telling them a story:
“This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”[61]
That band of brothers had dissolved. Sybil surely has in mind the degradation of those ‘happy few,’ the subjects of English liberty and happiness and gallantry, and their transformation into objects of “slavish sufferings.”[62] It was the very presence of that story that made the present condition so unfavourable. The pursuit of wealth without bounds and the sacrifice of those peculiar inheritances that could be termed ‘Englishness’ caused “the altar of Mammon” to blaze “with triple worship.”[63] Disraeli does not stray from his organicist theory of explaining the present, but he is ready to decry that artificial fertiliser which spread instead like a pest and caused unspeakable terrors in its rapine.
What is this social fabric that has been mentioned so often, and yet appears as ambiguous as it did upon first mention? We find a working definition in the conversation between a stranger and Egremont in the ruins of Marney Abbey. The ‘younger stranger’ remarks to Egremont: “It is a community of purpose that constitutes society … without that, men may be drawn into contiguity, but they still continue virtually isolated.”[64] For an Englishman, gifted with “reverend antiquity,”[65] there was only one principle: he “was the child of the State, and born with filial duties.”[66] It was, in effect, “the noble offspring of liberty and law.”[67] Tautological as it may sound, to be English entailed respecting and propagating the act of being English: it meant respecting one’s place in the hierarchy, performing one’s duty as expected, and rising to the occasion when called to. It entailed the exercise of the spirit of liberties that the law had bequeathed to each Englishman. Disraeli’s approach was decidedly communitarian: to be English meant to be a full member of one’s community, acting in the interests of that which was best for all, not for one.
However, in the present moment, the Englishman had been alienated from all his freedoms. A time-travelling Englishman would have recognised the men he met in Disraeli’s age but their conditions would seem too alien to his eyes. “Behind that laughing landscape,” Disraeli writes, “penury and disease fed upon the vitals of a miserable population.”[68] Thus, we get this statement:
“It is their condition everywhere; but in cities that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.”[69]
Man was not destined to live in this rat race: his virtues lay in the more romantic, aesthetic elements of life and not the desire to gain wealth at the cost of all else. Men competed instead of collaborated;[70] where they were expected to love, they showed a severe deficiency of it. They saw no relation to each other, and turned to the cold, utilitarian calculus of self-interest. Disraeli criticised this at length in the Vindication, but what stands out is the assumption of human nature it warranted: “it is in the interest of man to be a tyrant and a robber.”[71] It is this horrid principle that had been actualised in the cities of his day and age, and it reflected the “absence of rules, norms, or laws … [with the] negative connotations of disorder, inequity, and impiety.”[72] Such an impulse had arisen everywhere, but it was most prominent in places where there was an increased competition for resources. Thus, we are led into perhaps the most famous exchange in Sybil:
“Yes,” resumed the younger stranger after a moment’s interval. “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
“You speak of—” said Egremont, hesitatingly.
“THE RICH AND THE POOR.”[73]
The proud English nation had been torn into two — not between the nobleman and the common man, but between the rich and poor. The rich had neglected for too long their solemn responsibilities, and had caused the moral and aesthetic degradation of the poor. Nowhere was this more visible than in the town of Marney, the sole urban locale that Disraeli describes in the novel. The Englishman, once born into a proud nation, was now born as “another victim to our thoughtless civilisation.”[74]
“These wretched tenements … These hovels were in many instances not provided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed the dung-heap on which every kind of filth was accumulated, for the purpose of being disposed of for manure, so that, when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dunghills.”[75]
What dignity could one have in such an existence? These hovels were not fit for animals, much less men. If they were a brutish assault on the senses — their economic situation was no better. The absence of the workman’s cottage, conspicuous as it was, was explained by their destruction: the rich no longer wanted to have them on their land because they would have to pay the poor rates if they kept them on their land. The residents were de facto slaves, owned not by a man — slavery was illegal in the British Isles — but to the commercial interest. In one of the most moving passages from Sybil, a hand-loom weaver, facing privation, delivers a monologue that is rendered with such sensitivity and much insight:
“Twelve hours of daily labour at the rate of one penny each hour; and even this labour is mortgaged! How is this to end? Is it rather not ended?” And he looked around him at his chamber without resources: no food, no fuel, no furniture, and four human beings dependent on him, and lying in their wretched beds because they had no clothes. “I cannot sell my loom,” he continued, “at the price of old firewood, and it cost me gold. It is not vice that has brought me to this, nor indolence, nor imprudence. I was born to labour, and I was ready to labour. I loved my loom and my loom loved me. It gave me a cottage in my native village, surrounded by a garden of whose claims on my solicitude it was not jealous. There was time for both. It gave me for a wife the maiden that I had ever loved; and it gathered my children round my hearth with plenteousness and peace. I was content: I sought no other lot. It is not adversity that makes me look back upon the past with tenderness.
“Then why am I here? Why am I, and six hundred thousand subjects of the Queen, honest, loyal, and industrious, why are we, after manfully struggling for years, and each year sinking lower in the scale, why are we driven from our innocent and happy homes, our country cottages that we loved, first to bide in close towns without comforts, and gradually to crouch into cellars, or find a squalid lair like this, without even the common necessaries of existence; first the ordinary conveniences of life, then raiment, and, at length, food, vanishing from us.
“It is that the Capitalist has found a slave that has supplanted the labour and ingenuity of man. Once he was an artizan: at the best, he now only watches machines; and even that occupation slips from his grasp, to the woman and the child. The capitalist flourishes, he amasses immense wealth; we sink, lower and lower; lower than the beasts of burthen; for they are fed better than we are, cared for more. And it is just, for according to the present system they are more precious. And yet they tell us that the interests of Capital and of Labour are identical.
“If a society that has been created by labour suddenly becomes independent of it, that society is bound to maintain the race whose only property is labour, from the proceeds of that property, which has not ceased to be productive.
“When the class of the Nobility were supplanted in France, they did not amount in number to one-third of us Hand-Loom weavers; yet all Europe went to war to avenge their wrongs, every state subscribed to maintain them in their adversity, and when they were restored to their own country, their own land supplied them with an immense indemnity. Who cares for us? Yet we have lost our estates. Who raises a voice for us? Yet we are at least as innocent as the nobility of France. We sink among no sighs except our own. And if they give us sympathy — what then? Sympathy is the solace of the Poor; but for the Rich, there is Compensation.”[76]
The Industrial Revolution had succeeded in the most gruesome and deplorable of all tasks: it had robbed him of his patrimony, previously inalienable, now dragged away from him while he faced a precarious existence, an uncertain future, and certain privation. What centuries of war and assaults by philosophes could not do, Capital had done. Disraeli is ardently opposed to that Lockean conception of man that enables him to tear free from his social existence and into the unitary world, without a safety net. No conservative could in good conscience could stand by and watch as the society he loved and appreciated was torn apart — and for what? Money? Was it worth it?
Man has been separated from his labour: what was once the part — work — become the whole of his existence. He toiled without dignity, with recompense that just about secured him the energy to live another day, and had no attachment to the land. He was subject to the cruelties of the market, and although the rising tide lifted his boat, frequent tsunamis overwhelmed him, and the daily motion of the tides, of the vagaries of the business cycle, afflicted unspoken torture upon him.
Nostalgia and the Church
If the State and society had failed in its duty, so had the Church. The “Holy Church at Marney had forgotten her sacred vision.”[77] The Church was the last bastion of that noble love for the nonmaterial. It was the last refuge for the poor. It represented the heart and soul of an England that was long gone, and it was tinged with all sorts of nostalgic overtones. The role of the church can be divided into two: aesthetic and socioeconomic.
AESTHETIC
As Charles Egremont walked through the ruins of Marney Abbey, he could see the abbots of the years gone by, engaged in ritual and ceremony, adding to the Abbey and its surroundings a sense of beauty that found no comparable expression elsewhere. He laid his eyes upon the Abbey church, and in doing so, drove Disraeli to describe it as: “a beauty that had at least turned away the wrath of man, still rose, if not in perfect, yet admirable, form and state, one of the noblest achievements of Christian art.”[78] As he gazed upon the organic grandeur — the church being a palimpsest with visible signs of “great antiquity,” much like the English state[79] — he contemplated the present events. But it was not the contemplation that we are concerned with, or with the destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII — but by the politics of space. The disestablishment and plunder of the abbeys were profoundly political. Disraeli describes one of the towers of the Church: “It was tall and light, and of a Gothic style most pure and graceful …”.[80] In this early episode of the battle of the styles, we see the Gothic being identified with expressly moral and spiritual concerns: it became the symbol of an ancient past, when Englishmen were free, but now they all lay in ruins, plundered by the state, and for what?
Almost contemporaneous to Disraeli’s early writing is Augustus Pugin’s most prominent work, Contrasts. While Disraeli surely did not subscribe to Pugin’s Catholicism,[81] the general overtones of Pugin’s critique were more or less accepted by Disraeli; there is considerable evidence of their shared interest in the Young England movement and of a more-than-coincidental familiarity with each other’s work:[82] “Disraeli’s three-decker roman a` clef included friends and admirers of Pugin.”[83] If Pugin “pioneered in the idea that building was a statement of value, reflecting the ethic of the builders,”[84] then Disraeli gave expression to that sentiment in the form of his masterfully crafted descriptions of the fallen nature of the present and the glory of the medieval past. Like Pugin and Coleridge, Disraeli saw the medieval world “as a paradise lost,” and in that world that was no longer accessible but through the ruins of the abbeys, the three found “a comprehensive symbol of the good society — all that modern England was not.”[85]
With the loss of this paradise came the loss of that which formerly drove man in his time apart from the field, or away from whatever it is that was demanded of him. Mr. St. Lys, the vicar of Marney’s present church, tells Egremont:
“Formerly religion undertook to satisfy the noble wants of human nature, and by its festivals relieved the painful weariness of toil. The day of rest was consecrated, if not always to elevated thought, at least to sweet and noble sentiments. The church convened to its solemnities under its splendid and almost celestial roofs amid the finest monuments of art that human hands have raised, the whole Christian population; for there, in the presence of God, all were brethren. It shared equally among all its prayer, its incense, and its music; its sacred instructions, and the highest enjoyments that the arts could afford.”[86]
With the fall of the Church, man lost the chance to realise and express “the noble wants of human nature.” It did much to provide man meaning, but in its absence man had replaced those higher needs with the lower bestial wants that would otherwise spring forth from undirected and aimless passions. The contemplation afforded to each man on the day of rest was now as distant as the memory of the Church itself. The aesthetic degradation of the Church had as its corollary the destruction of the safety net that the Church afforded.
SOCIOECONOMIC
The Church was not merely an important aesthetic force in medieval England, but also played the role of the great leveller. The stranger tells Egremont in the abbey that “as long as the monks existed, the people, when aggrieved, had property on their side. And now ’tis all over.”[87] The Church was the estate that represented the interests, aspirations, and needs of the common people: the other two being the sovereign and the nobility, which tended to different interests. It kept the balance of the power, all said, equal: the people had their say in how they were to be ruled through the ecclesiastical interest. And, if nothing else, the Church was the landlord and donor of last refuge: the Englishman did not have to give away his dignity and receive alms, but could work on the Church’s land for a benevolent master. The economic power of the Church lay not in their small pockets of land they owned, but their vast magnitude: no one was forced to work for an oppressive landlord, a brutish Lord of the Manor. It forced the aristocracy and the landed gentry to treat their subordinates well and provide for them. “The monks were in short in every district a point of refuge for all who needed succour, counsel, and protection; a body of individuals having no cares of their own, with wisdom to guide the inexperienced, with wealth to relieve the suffering, and often with power to protect the oppressed.”[88]
The appropriate symbol for this was the changing meaning of the word ‘hospital’: “a name that did not then denote the dwelling of disease, but a place where all the rights of hospitality were practised.”[89] In a time now lost and irrecoverable, the hospital was warm and welcoming, a place of solace and respite from the misery of the world, from the capricious weather or the rotten roads. It was a place for the soul to recover from the harm the world had inflicted upon it: and the cure was faith and that spiritual experience of the medievals that was lost to Disraeli’s world, and is inconceivable in even small parts now. The disease was once confined to the soul, but it took over like a cancerous growth when the doctor was sent to the gallows, affecting limb and body, rendering the patient dead from the soul and leaving him a beast in the shape of man. The stranger remarks: “After an experiment of three centuries, your gaols being full, and your treadmills losing something of their virtue, you have given us a substitute for the monasteries.”[90] And what were these substitutes? They were “union workhouses,”[91] where people laboured for virtually nothing — in conditions no better than the hand loom weaver. If the monks of yonder “expended their revenue among those whose labour had produced it,”[92] the commercial interest of today would never permit any investment beyond the bare minimum required for sustenance. In the world of the monastics, “there were yeomen, then, sir: the country was not divided into two classes, masters and slaves; there was some resting place between luxury and misery. Comfort was an English habit then, not merely an English word.”[93] Now, there were two nations: England had been torn apart in the name of money. With the looting of the monasteries died community in England: “with the monasteries experience the only type we ever had in England of such an intercourse.”[94] In tearing apart the monasteries, the Tudor had shorn apart the social fabric of England.
What Next, Then?
The stranger tells Egremont that “there is so much to lament in the world in which we live … that I can spare no pang for the past.”[95] The stranger’s demands are rooted in the present, as should ours be. Knowing what we know, what must we do? What can we do? The powder of revolution was in the air; the matchstick was at hand. All it would take is one small incident to blow up this precarious balance, teetering on the edge of destruction. But that is not the English way: “Assuredly this summum bonum is not to be found ensconced behind a revolutionary barricade, or floating in the bloody gutters of an incendiary metropolis.”[96] The English spirit could not countenance vicious means for ends that may seem desirable. If the Whigs were wannabe despots aligned solely with the commercial interest and the burghers of Dutch finance — not English at all in spirit but solely in physical origin — then the only thing that remained was the Conservative party. But, as Disraeli writes:
“In a parliamentary sense, that great party has ceased to exist; but I will believe it still lives in the thought and sentiment and consecrated memory of the English nation. It has its origin in great principles and in noble instincts; it sympathises with the lowly, it looks up to the Most High; it can count its heroes and its martyrs; they have met in its behalf plunder, proscription. and death. Nor when it finally yielded to the iron progress of oligarchical supremacy, was its catastrophe inglorious. Its genius was vindicated in golden sentences and with fervent arguments of impassioned logic by St John; and breathed in the intrepid eloquence and patriot soul of William Wyndham. Even now it is not dead, but sleepeth; and in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment, as men rifle cargoes on the verge of shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb over which Bolingbroke shed his last tear, to bring back strength to the Crown, liberty to the Subject, and to announce that power has only one duty — to secure the social welfare of the PEOPLE.”[97]
Disraeli can bear no sight of the Whigs — “the common object of this party was not only to preserve the one [Free Trade], but to change the other [the English Constitution]”[98] — but neither can he stand the conservatives, which has “ceased to exist” in form but not in spirit. It is the dead spirit of medieval conservatism, shorn of its obsession with the extinct Stuarts,[99] that Disraeli pushes forth. In Disraeli, we have an icon of conservatism whose hatred of the industrial, of modernity in general, is unparalleled. In him we have a figure that can, and should, inspire us to think beyond conservatism as a slightly toned down version of that absurd laissez faire creed. It puts in the front and centre of conservative thought a preoccupation not just with custom and tradition, but the summum bonum, a love for hierarchy and duty, and for the nonmaterial aspects of man.
To be sure, Disraeli played the game of politics well. But we are wholly unconcerned with that; we are only concerned with his political thought. And although it might be argued that in fact the relation between his political praxis and thought might be intimate, in the former he was bound by the realities of the world and of more mundane concerns. When he put pen to paper, he let loose his imagination, and swiftly condemned all with a thin layer of disguise. It was where his social criticism and political philosophy had the most effect and the widest range of expression: it is Disraeli the thinker we are concerned with, and I hope that over the last ten thousand words or so, we have caught a glimpse of a great man who has laid buried under the weight of his own success. I hope for a collection of Disraeli’s works dedicated to Disraeli the thinker, not Disraeli the politician: but until then, I think this ought to suffice as a spartan introduction to the rich romanticism of the Earl of Beaconsfield.
[1] For a brief excursus of Disraeli’s thought, see: Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott, The T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures 9 (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 79–84.
[2] Ibid, 82.
[3] Ibid, 73.
[4] The edition of Sybil I used comes from the ‘Collected Works’, but is numbered by paragraph for ease of reference, and can be found at http://www.ibiblio.org/disraeli/sybil.pdf.
[5] Benjamin Disraeli, ‘General Preface’, in Lothair, Collected Edition of the Novels and Tales of the Right Honourable B. Disraeli 1 (London: Longman, 1870), vii–xx.
[6] Disraeli, ‘General Preface,’ viii.
[7] Ibid, viii–ix.
[8] See: Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, eds., ‘Sybil’, in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780199608218.013.7306.
[9] The edition — and even the editorial introduction — is wholly lacking, for it concentrates on Disraeli’s pamphleteering and snide attacks in the popular press, but deigns to mention even once the political novels. The same edition was printed by Metheun & Co in London. Benjamin Disraeli, Whigs and Whiggism: Political Writings, ed. William Hutcheon (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914).
[10] Disraeli, ‘General Preface,’ ix.
[11] See Disraeli’s ‘Vindication of the English Constitution,’ in Whigs and Whiggism, esp. Chapter 21, pp. 183–84, and Chapter 23, pp. 191–98.
[12] Disraeli, ‘General Preface,’ ix.
[13] Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 84.
[14] Isaiah Berlin, ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity’, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, by Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 317–60, at 333.
[15] Disraeli, ‘What is He?’, in Whigs and Whiggism, 16–22, at 19.
[16] Ibid, small caps removed by me.
[17] Berlin, ‘Disraeli, Marx, and the Search for Identity,’ 333.
[18] Disraeli, ‘General Preface,’ ix.
[19] Ibid, x.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Disraeli, ‘What is He?’, 17.
[23] Disraeli, ‘General Preface,’ x.
[24] Judith N. Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Two Models: Sparta and the Age of Gold’, Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 1 (1966): 25–51, at 25. The first quote is Rousseau’s, quoted in Shklar’s own translation.
[25] Disraeli, ‘General Preface,’ x–xi.
[26] See Disraeli’s ‘A Crisis Examined’ in Whigs and Whiggism, 23–41, for an early expression of his Tory principles.
[27] Disraeli retains much of Burke’s discussion of the ancient constitution but differs most prominently on the Glorious Revolution, among other points. For Burke’s conception, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution-A Problem in the History of Ideas’, The Historical Journal 3, no. 2 (1960): 125–43.
[28] Disraeli, ‘Peers and People,’ in Whigs and Whiggism, 42–110, at 43.
[29] Disraeli, ‘General Preface,’ xiv.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Deborah Nord, ‘Spaces and Places (I): The Four Nations’, in The Cambridge History of the English Novel, ed. Clement Hawes and Robert L. Caserio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 325–40, at 325.
[32] See ‘What is He?’, in Whigs and Whiggism.
[33] Sybil 1.5.3.
[34] Jocelyne Malhomme, ‘Disraeli on More’s Utopia (1845)’, Moreana 16, no. 62 (1979): 147–48.
[35] From: Bernard Mandeville, ‘The Grumbling Hive: or Knaves turn’d Honest,’ in Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F.B. Kaye, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).
[36] Sybil 2.2.32.
[37] Sybil 2.3.4.
[38] Sybil 2.3.5.
[39] Sybil 2.11.18.
[40] Disraeli, ‘Vindication,’ 229.
[41] Disraeli, ‘Vindication,’ 228ff. Quote from Sybil 1.5.3.
[42] Lady Joan tells her guests: “A baronetcy has become the distinction of the middle class; a physician, our physician for example, is a baronet; and I dare say some of our tradesmen; brewers, of people of that class. An attempt to elevate them into an order of nobility, however inferior, would partake in some degree of the ridiculous.” — Sybil 2.11.38.
[43] Sybil 2.15.1–6.
[44] Sybil 2.3.4–5.
[45] Disraeli, ‘Peers and People,’ 68.
[46] Disraeli, ‘Vindication,’ passim.
[47] Disraeli, ‘Peers and People,’ 92.
[48] R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920), 60.
[49] Sybil 2.7.14.
[50] Sybil 2.7.11.
[51] cf. Sybil 2.3.5.
[52] Sybil 2.7.2.
[53] Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Fox’s East India Bill (1783),’ in On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters, ed. David Bromwich, The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 282–370, at 345.
[54] Sybil 2.7.3.
[55] Sybil 2.7.14.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Burke, ‘Speech on Fox’s East India Bill,’ 312.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Philipe Besnard, ‘Anomie’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 714–17, at 714. An alternative definition is: “the normlessness of modernity,” especially “the negative consequences of the loss of cultural moorings in modernity,” which fostered “a cycle of mental ambiguity, restless desire, frustration, and existential meaninglessness.” Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 25f.
[60] Sybil 2.14.61.
[61] Shakespeare, Henry V, 4.3.56–67.
[62] Sybil 2.14.61.
[63] Sybil 1.5.3.
[64] Sybil 2.5.27.
[65] Coke quoted in Disraeli, ‘Vindication,’ 125.
[66] Ibid.
[67] Ibid, 126.
[68] Sybil 2.3.2.
[69] Sybil 2.5.29.
[70] Adam Smith understood fully that his system required “emancipation from the reign of virtue that made commerce possible …”. Joseph Crospey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 86.
[71] Disraeli, ‘Vindication,’ 117.
[72] Besnard, ‘Anomie,’ 714.
[73] Sybil, 2.5.40–42.
[74] Sybil 2.3.4.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Sybil 2.13.15–19.
[77] Sybil 2.3.7.
[78] Sybil 2.4.16.
[79] Sybil 2.4.17.
[80] Ibid.
[81] Schorske remarks that Pugin and Disraeli shared in common “a somewhat similar Tory historical myth of the fall: Catholic Church corruption was the original sin. Tudor excess in breaking the economic independence of the Church magnified the consequence of sin.” Thinking with History, 72.
[82] Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 255, 313f.
[83] Ibid, 314.
[84] Schorske, Thinking with History, 76.
[85] Ibid, 72, 71.
[86] Sybil 2.12.25.
[87] Sybil 2.5.17.
[88] Sybil 2.5.9.
[89] Sybil 2.5.15.
[90] Sybil 2.5.17.
[91] Ibid.
[92] Sybil 2.5.15.
[93] Sybil 2.5.7.
[94] Sybil 2.5.20.
[95] Sybil 2.5.23.
[96] Disraeli, ‘Vindication,’ 126.
[97] Sybil 4.14.18.
[98] Disraeli, ‘To The Whigs,’ in Whigs and Whiggism, 436–470, at 444.
[99] Quinton, Politics of Imperfection, 79.