Past minds, present problems: Historicism and Hellenism in mid-Victorian thought
This paper uses John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of history to make an assessment of the role that classical Athens played in forming normative political attitudes in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. This is an argument in itself; current historiographical orthodoxies, epitomised by the work of Frank Turner, argue that Athens was interpreted through ‘Victorian’ concepts; that thinkers exercised tyranny over the historical narrative of Athens by interpolating the fears, hopes, and conventions of a relative modernity.[1] Such analyses facilitate a dichotomous, and therefore oversimplified, understanding of the relationship between the Victorian moderns and Athenian ancients. They presuppose that Athens assumed the role of ‘subject’, Britain the role of ‘despot’. This creates conceptual problems for the historian. If they are making a postmodernist assertion about the inescapable recursion of historical material – the ubiquitous reinterpretation and rendering of past events – then they are not saying anything specific to the Victorians’ intoxication with Athens.[2]Their argument must be, then, that that the use of ancient ideas was a self-containing modern pursuit, leaving no room for an input-output scenario in which the past, perceived as an independent authority, interacted with the present. They subordinate the process of historical reception to a teleological understanding of what the Victorians ‘wanted’ from the Athenian ancients. During this paper I hope to demonstrate that there was a fierce conceptual tension, of which many Mill and his circles were aware, between ‘normative’ Hellenism and what we now term ‘historicism’. Examining this tension properly illuminates the relationship that was constructed between moderns and ancients. Mill’s retinue saw themselves as scientific men, applying balanced quantities of history and philosophy to produce solutions for modern problems. Far from undermining the efficacy of Athens, the increasing ‘precision and certainty’ with which it was treated engendered, among other things, a reassessment of the democratic polis.[3] The effect of Niebuhr’s school was not to make ‘the ancient world less relevant to public issues’.[4] Its overarching effect was to foster enthusiasm for a science of history. Only once that science had been established could the Athenian polis be theoretically excavated in modern contexts.
[1] Examples include Turner, Greek heritage; Culler, Victorian mirror; Most significant are R.W. Livingstone (ed.), The legacy of Greece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921); G. Highet, The classical tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949); M.I. Finley (ed.), The legacy of Greece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
[2] On the problem of recursion and the ‘representations of antiquity that have come down to us’, see M. Arnold (ed. R.H. Super), Complete prose works (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), I, 135.
[3] Turner, ‘Antiquity in Victorian contexts’, p. 14.
[4] Ibid.