It has been the hallmark of criticism directed toward a working politician or a man whose principal focus lay outside of the contemplative sphere that some historian has managed to find some basis, more often than not obscure, to sully said man’s reputation with as a thinker, and then to level charges of blatant hypocrisy such that character assassination is brought out in the open, with mud-slinging and shit-throwing part of this cabalistic rite. And this, as you may have guessed, has been the sorrowful position of our hero, Benjamin Disraeli, who has been subject to the torturous examinations of unsympathetic historians more frequently than any other in the tradition of conservative thought. While his predecessor Edmund Burke was indefatigable and found enough time to address to the sympathetic listener a rebuke of those who thought he was acting out of line with his principles,[1] the same privilege was not afforded to Disraeli, for whatever reason one might attribute it to. “The truth,” Lord Blake remarked, “was that Disraeli had never at any time in his life been an easy man to know.”[2] But that difficulty in examination, that pedestal upon which Disraeli stood that set him apart from illustrious peers, many of whom are now extinct in the popular and moral imagination of today, seems so alien to us that we tend to curl and walk to the familiar. The strength of Disraeli’s convictions affects us significantly, and we find ourselves questioning the motive and the effect without understanding the world in which Disraeli operated, or whether his thoughts were mere purple prose and not some extensive and seriously held positions that ought to have been followed in due stead.
A denunciation along these lines is readily forthcoming. Prof. Ghosh writes, representing that vicious view: “not only were these causes [‘England’s greatness’ and ‘the preservation of her territorial aristocracy’] vague in themselves, tending to get mixed up with ‘mere nonsense and rhodomontade’, but Disraeli’s actions are also variously stigmatised as impracticable, incomprehensible, foolish, inconsistent, and opportunist.”[3] This, Ghosh remarks, is the result of a systemic and “longstanding Peelite and Liberal dominance over Victorian historiography [which] has been covertly perpetuated.”[4] Ghosh’s assessment, finally, is mixed: while he admits that insofar as Disraeli was the mastermind of a few budgets of note, whether as Chancellor or Prime Minister, was “far from being an unprincipled opportunist,” Disraeli’s career was embodied by his pseudo-Gladstonian economic policy “in favour of low taxation, low expenditure and a consequently unadventurous foreign policy.”[5] However, as evidence of “Disraeli’s person vanity” and “intellectual pretensions,” Ghosh trots out Coningsby in a footnote.[6] Ghosh’s argument, then, can be seen as this: that Disraeli had principles, that he was not a Machiavellian-in-moralist’s-clothing, but that the thought he embodied in his rhetorical and literary adventures was not the thought of Disraeli the politician. Although Ghosh looks to exonerate Disraeli on the charge of being a power-seeking opportunist, his qualified answer and reproaches directed at Disraeli’s other writing shows that he cannot manage to see Disraeli the thinker as a substantial part of Benjamin Disraeli.
In a similar vein, Paul Smith references Lord Blake’s ultimate assessment of Disraeli,[7] quoting from Blake’s Disraeli: “The truth is that Disraeli had principles when he led the party and believed in them sincerely, but they were not the ‘principles,’ if that word can be used at all, of Young England.”[8] Lord Blake thinks Disraeli’s work to be a flight of fancy, once that bore no relation to the man at all, and represented the ramblings of a young dilettante and not the sophisticated and programmatic thought of a pragmatic, senior statements. On other fronts, especially the political, Lord Blake is generally hagiographic of Disraeli’s deeds and more often than not dismissive of Disraeli’s misdeeds, but the ‘Young England’ ideal poses to be a problem for even the astute hagiographer who seeks to appropriate for the present a subversive and somewhat unrecognisable romantic conservatism that seeks not to diminish the government but only the “dead hand of a centralising Benthamite bureaucracy.”[9]
Such a view has not been met without objection. Paul Smith recognises that both Ghosh and Blake are peas of the same pod, and their argument is of a similar lineage: apart from being rather untrue, it makes “Disraeli sound dull” and rests on “banal precepts.”[10] He notes: “It is questionable whether the disjunction which the views just summarised introduce into their subject’s life would have been understood by Disraeli himself,” noting the continual use of the same lines of rhetoric and similar terminology, means, and methods in classifying his thought and the Whigs.[11] His case in point is the general preface Disraeli wrote to the Longmans collected edition of his works shortly after his appointment as Prime Minister.[12] Smith tries to make a whole out of the parts, but, in my humble opinion, he misses the mark, though he is the most sympathetic of recent academic commentators on Disraeli. He cannot bear himself to find a philosophy of politics, rigorous and systematic, in Disraeli. Aspects of Disraeli’s thought are always alluded to with offhand references to his conduct. For example, Disraeli’s Vindication is tied to the necessity to “do something more than simply confect an anti-Whig creed reconciling his Radical and Tory strands.”[13] The study of Disraeli has, then, always been of a historical or a literary character: in the former his thought is dismissed and negotiated with some form of his conduct; in the latter his thought is conflated with some methodological fetish or pushed into some category — social problem novel, gothic novel, and so on and so forth. But no one seeks to take Benjamin Disraeli seriously. Why is that?
Part of the reason why Disraeli seems to have been banished from the realm of the philosophy of politics is his subversive character: he is always hard to qualify. If, at the time, he was coming up with unique apologias for his line of thought — neither wholly Tory nor wholly Radical and most certainly not Whig — he poses those dilemmas even today, where he is conservative, broadly speaking, but is also radical in that the middling station of professional life[14] is a transitional phase but never an end in itself. The question of neat categories is never to be played with Disraeli, and that very thrust is amplified by the strength with which he holds his convictions. It is the tragedy of our present situation, and of his situation and station, that the ideals he espoused were not brought into play on a larger scale and that a man most famous for his Vindication would require one of his own. Lord Blake, in his assessment of Disraeli, comments that both he and Gladstone
“were extraordinary figures, men of genius, though in widely differing idioms, and that, like most men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy, they inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind. Not only among mediocrities.”[15]
But in diminishing Disraeli’s philosophy of politics to some fanciful phase, some romantic aria suited better to the opera hall than to the fields: it was “the reaction of a defeated class to a sense of its own defeat,” yet, it was “evidently … to be something more than a partie carée.”[16] If the best, most polished, and most remarkable of Disraeli’s thought is supposed to be thought of as nothing but a youthful fancy that one ought to ignore for his own sanity, then, Lord Blake necessarily thinks that no ideal form of government can exist, and a defence of the best regime that brings together the familiarity of the English idiom with the remoteness of the rich romantic experience that Disraeli breathed until his last breath could imply that the philosophy of government is not a worthwhile activity, even when difficulties necessarily exist translating it into action.
What does that great romantic imagination mean? Is it an essentially historicist error to condemn Disraeli without giving him a fair hearing. Must he be permitted to present his thought — and only his thought — loud and clear? It was not that Disraeli’s actions were incongruous with his beliefs, but rather that he knew that they were not politically viable and that his expression of Young England would only invite animosity and distance from the Old Tories. In another sense, Disraeli, save for the Vindication, relied on the popular press — ‘anonymous’, thinly veiled letters, and novels — to distribute his information and not the conventional philosophical treatise. In their richness and complexity, Disraeli’s novels have little to compare them with except the more directed conceptions of Plato’s Republic, which has a similar structure but lacks wholly in empathy and other human qualities. The former celebrates man; the latter seeks to eradicate it. This is the power of Disraeli’s romantic imagination.
The other aspect we must necessarily contend with is his subversive character. What can we say about a man who thinks the landed aristocracy have a categorical duty to those they sustain, and that they ought not to shirk their duty but rather do it with pride, for that is part of the priceless privilege accorded to them? While this has led many to identify Disraeli with a paternalistic and benevolent state, a grand society, with everyone in his place but ample space for mobility of the social sort, it poses a problem: the ‘progressive’ is a modernist, but Disraeli decries much of modernity, as can be seen in his wholesale rejection of the classical idiom of architecture and of the excesses of the Reformation, and prefers an aristocracy and a landed gentry to the cold, heartless bureaucracy of the ‘progressive’ cult; the liberals, the Whigs, he accuses of standing in for oligarchy and constantly working to push for money as the metric of power; the laissez faire group at the Cato is subject to the accusation of running a covert despotism that has something that is clearly not the summum bonum in mind. Who does Disraeli actually like? For a man so critical of others, it is a wonder that he even managed to win elected office, much less become Prime Minister!
But it is not a portrayal of abject cynicism that characterises the ‘Young England’ trilogy: they all present neat resolutions and, perhaps most importantly, look to the past as the key to present felicity. They are not wholly reactionary in posture, but rathe ruthless descriptions of the inner workings of what Disraeli considered a largely Whig aristocracy with the prospect of renewal and rejuvenation as Tories, as conservatives who believed in the English ideal. Whether or not Disraeli intended for an abstraction of his thought ought to have been a complex question, but he addresses it succinctly and fully in his ‘General Preface’ in the Longmans collected edition of his works: he still espoused hopes and believed in the ideals of the ‘Young England’ trilogy to the very end and continued to push for them as the bearers of his thought. Disraeli provides — for the reader whose skills in abstraction are necessarily deficient and for those cynics who choose not to derive from his writings such necessary principles as may guide action — the understanding of his philosophy of politics. Such a philosophy cannot be mistaken for anything else but an understanding of the word around him, even if it must wear the garb of fiction and the aura of a romantic dreamer, wholly unmoored from reality.
Disraeli, constrained by circumstance, could never have achieved the ambitious project he set out to accomplish with ‘Young England.’ A statesman of his caliber could have deduced that with sufficient contemplation, and we have no reason to believe that this prolific hero of ours proved deficient in either. But, then, we must beg the question: what relation did the ‘Young England’ novels have to his mode of action? To that end, we might ask Aristotle the same question: to what end did the Politics serve his tutoring of Alexander the Great, who seemed to follow markedly little of the philosopher’s teachings? To what end did Plato seek to influence the Sicilian tyrant Dion? Why did Marcus Tullius Cicero, the consul of Rome, not restore Rome to the ideal state which he described in De Re Publica and De Legibus? To some degree, the ideal form of each regime — whether it was Cicero’s Rome, which features the same yearning for the past in its ‘perfect’ form as Disraeli does for his England and engages in a similar self-fashioning, or some imaginary city from the Platonic dialogues — is divorced from an acceptance of the present. The conditions for their creation may not be present in the moment; the range of effects that may be permissible for the actions one is permitted to carry out might also be limited in number and extent. Even the practical Cicero, who extols the virtues of the practical life, the vita coactiva, in De Re Publica, over the vita contemplativa, cannot manage to save the Republic from the populares, and even his fellow optimates could never fully rally behind him. Perfection in thought is different from perfection in action; the latter requires a degree of control over others that may or may not be entirely possible. It may require the ‘Brutilitarian’ calculus of sacrificing moral methods for ends that might seem desirable. For what it mattered, Cicero’s defence of the mixed constitution is original, remarkable, and essential in the history of political thought, and he managed to save Rome from the seditions of Catiline. Disraeli defended the landed aristocracy, the richness of the spiritual experience, and the social, economic, and political alliance between the real aristocrats and the rural poor, and managed to be the leading proponent of the British Empire without countenancing its abuses (he was famously opposed to the cozy relationship between the East India Company and the Tories, and encouraged the Crown to take up India and rule directly, something he achieved with the crowning of Queen Victoria as the first real and substantial Empress of India and thereby launching the golden years of the British Raj).
If Disraeli, as is said, was a product of his time, does it mean that he had nothing to say for all time? The question, thus understood, is simple, because it relates to the entirety of the philosophy of politics. Those who seek to deny Disraeli a place in the philosophical study of politics do so for various historicist reasons—not for any other. To study Disraeli’s ideas, we must necessarily keep his political activities at an arm’s length, even though they were intimately connected: the novels made him a force to be reckoned with. But this artificial separation, however absurd it may seem, is necessary: we must not allow present, anachronistic judgements to push away such a brilliant mind in so reckless a fashion.
[1] Edmund Burke, ‘A Letter to a Noble Lord (1794),’ in Edmund Burke, 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), 464–514.
[2] Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), 175.
[3] P. R. Ghosh, ‘Disraelian Conservatism: A Financial Approach’, The English Historical Review 99, no. 391 (1984): 268–96, at 268.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid, 294, 293.
[6] Ibid, 294, 294n.
[7] Paul Smith, ‘Disraeli’s Politics’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 37 (1987): 65–85, at 67.
[8] Blake, Disraeli, 762, cf. 761–66 for a general ‘adumbration’.
[9] Ibid, 762.
[10] Smith, ‘Disraeli’s Politics’, 67.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Benjamin Disraeli, ‘General Preface’, in Lothair, vol. 1, Collected Edition of the Novels and Tales of the Right Honourable B. Disraeli (London: Longmans, 1870), vii–xx. For an analysis of that text, see my essay: https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/otemporaomores/2020/08/14/the-moral-economy-of-benjamin-disraeli/
[13] Smith, ‘Disraeli’s Politics’, 69.
[14] There is some interesting discussion of this in Susan E. Colón, The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–50. But on the whole Colón mistakes Disraeli’s wishes for a competent aristocracy with a demand for an inherent ‘professional’ meritocracy. However, as a reading and interpolation it proves to be a useful foil, if not wholly true to the spirit of Disraeli’s works and ideas.
[15] Blake, Disraeli, 761.
[16] Ibid, 171, 174.