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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 2 Fellows David Abulafia FBA Professor of Mediterranean History, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Nicholas Crafts FBA Professor of Economic History, University of Warwick Rebeca Fraser Author Rowan Williams FBA (Rt Revd and Rt Hon Lord Williams of Oystermouth) Semir Zeki FRS Professor of Neuroaerthetics, University College London A.N Wilson Author Paul Lay Author Corresponding Fellows Sholto Byrnes Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia Editorial Team Hywel Williams Director of the Erasmus Forum Fergus Butler-Gallie Research Associate Deirdre McCloskey Professor of History and Economics University of Illinois in Chicago Julio Crespo-MacLennan Director of the Spanish Observatory and Associate professor at IE University Madrid Alin-Claudiu Luca Research Associate

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 4 Notes on Contributors Sholto Byrnes Fergus Butler-Gallie Deirdre McCloskey is a Professor of History and Economics at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a Fellow of the Erasmus Forum. She has written sixteen books and around 400 scholarly articles on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. The final book in The Bourgeois Era trilogy, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World was published in 2016. Deirdre McCloskey Jeremy Black Sholto Byrnes is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia - which is effectively the country's national think tank, and is the lead coordinator for the ASEAN network of national think tanks. He is a weekly international affairs columnist for The National, Abu Dhabi. Jeremy Black is Senior Fellow, at the Center for the Study of America and the West, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. Fergus Butler Gallie is an author of books, articles and reviews. He has written and spoken on Church History across the United Kingdom as well as with stints in Prague and lecturing at the College of the Transfiguration of the Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Angus Brown is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on debates on constitutional guardianship and constitution-making in the French and American Revolutions, with a particular focus on the origins of constitutional courts and the legal doctrine of the Pouvoir Neutre. Angus Brown Julio Crespo MacLennan Julio Crespo-MacLennan is director of the Hispanic Observatory think tank and Associate Professor of International Relations history at IE University, Madrid. John Martin Robinson John Martin Robinson is Maltravers Herald Extraordinary and Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk. His many books include: The Latest Country Houses 1945-83 (1984); The Country House at War (1989); The Regency Country House ( 2005) and James Wyatt, Architect to George III (2013). Like a surprising number of architectural historians he does not drive: ' I loathe cars and the ghastly, selfish, atomised society they represent.' Richard Shannon (1931-2022), was Professor of Modern History, University College of Wales, Swansea 1979-1998. Author of Gladstone: Peel's Inheritor 1809-1865. 1982); Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865-1898 (1999). Richard Shannon Rowan Williams Rowan Williams was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and is a former Archbishop of Canterbury.. A Fellow of the Erasmus Forum, he is now chair of the independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 5 Introduction by Hywel Williams ‘The reinterpretation of the past, sometimes known as ‘historical revisionism’, can be an unsettling business. Individuals and Institutions, tides of opinion and cherished beliefs, events and circumstances that have dominated the established chronologies: all are subject to the pitiless scrutiny of the historian intent on the stripping away of illusions and the revelation of occluded truth. Iconoclastic impulses propel the critical historian through the sources, chipping away at those marmoreal reputations, looking quizzically at ‘the facts of the matter’ and concluding that these were in fact mere assumptions. The contributors to this volume of the Erasmus Forum Bulletin show the many ways in which our knowledge of both past and present gains in focus and clarity when we start to question assumptions. Deirdre McCloskey in her inaugural lecture as a Fellow of the Forum dismantles much of the methodology that guides the framers of ‘policy’ including the idea that the future is in some sense knowable and can therefore be predicted. Realism, she suggests, counsels a more modest approach- one guided by historical knowledge about human behaviour at certain times and places. Fergus Butler-Gallie offers us a reinterpretation of the supposed affinity between the English Lollards and the Hussites of Bohemia- both traditionally seen as the ‘morning stars’ of an European Reformation which was, as it were, waiting in the wings and ready for action. These, late medieval, reformers should instead be understood in their own context and not as part of a pre-determined future. Sholto Byrnes’s dispatches from South-East Asia show how the region resists its interpretation by those who follow Western categories of thought and action. And Mr Gladstone emerges from the pages of the late Richard Shannon (in a hitherto unpublished lecture) as a figure far removed from being the high minded hero of Liberal historiography. Is it possible to resolve contemporary quarrels about gender and identity by finding common ground- an area of ‘common culture’ which amounts to something more than a splitting of the differences? Rowan Williams’s deft exploration of this contested terrain asks us to dig deeper into the historical origins of the rights which, contested and affirmed, may have more in common that appears at first sight. Contemporary events can force a radical reassessment of what really mattered in the historic past. The antiquarian energies , for example, assessed by John Martin Robinson in his review of Rosemary Hill’s Time’s Witness; History in the Age of Romanticism were fed by the Europe-wide reaction against the French Revolution. ‘Constitutionalism’ , the subject of Angus Brown’s review of The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World, by Linda Colley, was a major cause and consequence of the age of revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. A written constitution however, as these Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Quentin Massys, oil on panel, transferred to canvas, 1517

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 6 authors show, may not be the panacea beloved of the liberal mind in its contest against the corrupt and despotic. General ideas drawn from a partial understanding of the past are a particular source of illusions. ‘Globalism’, with its extended lines of communication transporting goods- and some services- across the continents, had been deemed to be the defining, and original, feature of the world economy in the late twentieth century. The subsequent revival of protectionist impulses, never far from the surface in any economic system, has undermined the belief in globalism’s inevitable progress. And the idea that it was an original development- a late twentieth century arrival- is easily dispelled. The late nineteenth century world economy, shaped as it was by imperial patterns of trans-continental trade, witnessed its own kind of globalism. In fact many, much earlier, epochs have been struck by the ways in which their societies and nations have become dependent on each for the transmission and exchange of news, ideas and technologies – as well as goods. David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, reviewed in these pages by Jeremy Black, has enriched beyond measure our understanding of how these earlier economies understood their place within a wider world. History without illusions is a clarion call for those who had previously wanted their history to be all too neat and tidy, a tale of easily identified heroes and villains, a source of propaganda rather than a tool in the search for truth. Human motives are mixed as the life story of Magellan, graphically recounted in Felipe Fernandez Arnesto’s biography, illustrates. This year marks the five hundredth anniversary of the return to port of the expedition originally captained by Magellan, he himself having died en route. Julio Crespo Maclennan, in his review, reminds us of the magnitude of the achievement and of its place in the history of global endeavour. Hywel Williams Director, Erasmus Forum Editor, Erasmus Forum Bulletin October 2022

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 8 St Clement’s, the home of Prague’s Anglican congregation, is not on any particular tourist route. As the crowds tromp the tourist run from the castle, across the Charles Bridge and through the Powder Gate, the little yellow church dedicated to a long dead Pope sits up by the Vltava, largely ignored. It is a shame, because, standing out from its largely whitewashed interior, are the fine remnants of a series of wall paintings, which adorn the curved arc of the sanctuary. They are not in absolutely complete condition, but their subject is very clear: they depict the instruments of Holy Communion, in particular the chalice. They date from the period when the Hussite Revolution shook the Kingdom of Bohemia. Much of the physical legacy of that period- from the ornaments on the great church of Týn to the location of Jan Hus’s pulpit, the Bethlehem Chapel itself- is gone, either replaced with the partisan Baroque and Rococo, calling cards of the furies of the Counter Reformation like the former or clumsily redesigned into the shape it should have been by enthusiastic Marxists under the Socialist regime like the latter. Map of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the fifteenth century. Source: Alchetron Yet the paintings at St Clement’s still, just about, survive, perhaps courtesy of the fact the building is somewhat tucked away. Now they witness worship in another vernacular, or rather, lingua franca, for the international congregation that gathers there. The paintings are not viewed with particular affection, I am sorry to say. I recall a former chaplain there informing me that he didn’t care for them at all and would strategically direct people to stand in front of the remains of the paintings as the congregation received Holy Communion, lest they prove a distraction to proper devotion. Despite its somewhat iconoclastic motivation, in fact, such an act was deeply symbolically and utterly appropriate. Whilst the writings and preaching of Jan Hus chastised the Church on a wide range of subjects, all well known to students of late medieval ecclesiastical corruption, it was the reception of the Eucharist in both kinds- bread and wine- by the people that was to become the defining question of the Czech Reformation. Jan Hus was a Czech academic and priest who had been executed at the Council of Constance in 1415, specifically for his ‘doctrine’ and his teachings about what needed to be done to reform the Church.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 9 The imposing Prague Castle seen here at sunset. Source: Shutterstock, 2018 His followers- in particular Jerome of Prague- took up his mantle and soon developed a coherent, reformed vision of Catholic Christianity which took root among the people of Prague and its environs. Long before England focussed her efforts on debates about magisterial authority, or Germany searched her soul on the questions of faith, conscience and the role of the individual, the then Kingdom of Bohemia rent itself asunder on religious matters, with the question of communion front and centre. It was no coincidence that the symbol of the wider movement which took Hus’s name chose as the symbol of their movement, installed on top of churches and on battle flags, the chalice. It is no coincidence that the eventually victorious faction that emerged from the internecine struggles around Hus’s legacy became known as the ‘Utraquists’; those who received communion sub utraque rather than sub una. It may seem strange, perhaps even lightweight, to begin a discussion of the reception of ideas with a vulgar anecdote about place, but in the case of the symbiosis between England and the historic Czech lands, the two themes- place and thought- have necessarily been intertwined. Misconceptions or half remembered truths about where ideas were from have routinely haunted understandings of what those ideas actually were. In no case could this be more true than in the reception of the ideas that emerged from the reform movements in Bohemia in the early fifteenth century. As I have argued below, to see the Hussite movement merely as the intellectual foreplay preceding the Reformation ‘proper’ is a mistake, albeit a historically popular one. We would be better, to my mind, viewing what is known as ‘The Bohemian Reformation’ as the last great attempt at internal, pre-Reformation Catholic reform. The prioritisation of eucharistic theology in the debates that followed Hus may have played well into later, especially Reformed and particularly Reformed English polemic but ought to point us clearly to the fact that we are dealing with a movement with its own . Doubtless its proponents objected to clerical wealth and privilege and the doings of an over mighty Papal State, but so in their own way, did Francis of Assisi and Bridget of Sweden, and we would hardly seek to only view them refracted in the light of Luther. Despite this, it seems to be the fate of Hus and Bohemia’s Reformation which he initiated to ever be shackled to other movements, or viewed through the lens of other theological

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 10 struggles. So it was with Luther, Cranmer and Foxe, and so it was on that Sunday morning at St Clement’s, Prague. Such accidental engagement with the world and influences of Hussitism is typical of much English engagement with Bohemia more generally. Indeed, one might specifically single out England as a nation determined to misunderstand both the person and legacy of Jan Hus and the land of his birth. Such a trend is particularly notable given how close the links between the nations were in the pre and early Lancastrian era. Whereas Richard II marries Anne of Bohemia and actively encouraged the flow of scholars, by the age of Shakespeare, Bohemia is- as in The Winter’s Tale, merely an imagined Ruritania, synonymous with the strange and far off. When one considers that a mere hundred and fifty years previously the Hussite delegate to Constantinople, who was charged with the weighty task of attempting to build an ecumenical agreement with the Orthodox Church in order to ‘outflank’ the Bishop of Rome, was one ‘Peter the Englishman’, the shrinking of Bohemia into a byword for the distant is quite an astonishing and speedy process; and that is to say nothing of the comparative level of engagement with Constantinople. The Wilton Diptych, Richard II of England with his patron saints, left to right: King Edmund the Martyr, King Edward the Confessor, St John the Baptist. (c.1395–1399) Source: WikiCommons Partly, of course, that is testament to the enormous changes which the century from 1450-1550 wrought on the European mind and body politic, but it is salutary to remind ourselves that knowledge and levels of intellectual engagement and understanding can go backwards as well as forward. As such, the history of the reception of Hus and Hussite thought- both real and imagined- is one which gets less clear, less coherent as time goes on. As such, the topic and period are a helpful tonic for historians who still, inexplicably, subscribe to an idea that the only direction in which our knowledge of the past might go is ‘wider still and wider’. Here I must confess an interest of sorts: my undergraduate degree was in History and Czech/Slovak, I then undertook further study, including helping convene a seminar group in

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 11 what is confusingly known as the Hussite subdivision of the Charles University’s Theological Faculty. In it, all those who are not Roman Catholics or Calvinists rub along together, nominally overseen by members of the church that bears Hus’s name today, but which has very little to do with his teaching or the theology of the original Hussites, instead being founded in a fit of patriotic (or rather, anti-Habsburg) fervour at the time of the First Czechoslovak Republic. This piece was written just after I left Oxford and whilst I was still back and forth from Prague. The bulk of the text and almost all of the research of this piece were presented to the Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice Symposium in Prague back in 2014, in the proceedings of which it was later originally published. Karolinum, the seat of Charles University, Prague, one of the oldest universities in Central Europe. Source: WikiCommons, 2017 It was specifically conceived of to redress the lack of writing on the Hussites in English- although figures such as David Holeton, Zdeněk David, Thomas Fudge and Petr Havliček have done an excellent job at balancing the ledger a little more fairly. Specifically though, English scholarship has historically been uninterested in the possible influences of so major European figure as Hus on the religious and intellectual worlds in England of the following two centuries or so. This paper was- and is- a direct attempt to move us a little further that avenue of conversation and consideration. I do not think there is much that I have changed- certainly in the thrust of the argument. If anything, I think we are now more aware of the link between conceptions (or misconceptions) of place and the reception of ideas. We have become more aware of the rich- and threatened- heritage of Central-Eastern Europe itself, as opposed to merely as a satellite region of the self styled cultural and political hegemons which have fought, and continue to fight, over it. More than being solely an exploration of the religio-intellectual relationship between two specific nations of Europe, one at its heart and one at its Western periphery, this essay began life as a work looking at communication between intellectual elites and specifically how political powers sought to shape recollections of shared history in order to suit narratives and movements which evolved after the events. As debates once again rage along similar lines, in

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 12 particular using new forms of communication technology, nothing could be more pressing than to revisit previous instances where shared memory, and shared intellectual discourse, has been a cause of and a weapon in later intellectual developments and in the attempts by political and intellectual elites to address them. Czech religious leader Jan Hus is executed, burnt at the stake for heresy. Woodcarving by W. Camphausen, 1882 Source: Getty Images *** The past is, almost always, less foreign a country than we like to think and it scarcely needs repeating here that the level of exchange between intellectual, and specifically professional academic, elites of Europe in the late 14th and early to mid 15th centuries was consistent, complex and complimentary. There is a certain comfort in understanding the Reformation and Renaissance worlds as being thus interlinked, but a stubborn resistance in popular culture to acknowledging similar networks in the late Middle Ages. In truth, thought and ideas flowed around the continent- and not in some one-way emanation of ideas from the ecclesial centre of Rome or from the political centres of the nascent nation states, but in particular through the exchange of writings and the physical movement of scholars themselves between centres of learning. In England, the University of Oxford was one such international community of scholars, with particular links to other communities of learning north of the Alps. By the early 15th Century, regular political friction with France, as well as the desire of the Plantagenet dynasty to establish political and dynastic links further afield, meant that whilst relations with the more ancient University of Paris were strained, links with the newer University of Prague- founded in the early years of the previous century by Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor- were very healthy indeed.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 13 Charles IV in the Votive Panel of Jan Očko of Vlašim, c. 1371. Source: WikiCommons However- and here we begin to see the beginnings of the problem which will surface again and again in analysis of this relationship- whilst much admirable work has been written relating to the influence of Oxford and England on the nascent Hussite movement in Prague and on the thinking of Hus himself. There is, however, very little that addresses influences coming in the other direction, the extent to which the example and thought of Hus and the other Prague reformers was received and had influence in England in the period after 1415. This paper is conceived as an Oxonian attempt at counter balance. It is arguable that the two nations which underwent the greatest religious turmoil at the start of the fifteenth century, were England and Bohemia, with the movements (defined in the very broadest possible of terms) of Lollardy and Hussitism respectively. Yet, for two movements with such similar origins in the pan -European Wyclifite underworld of the great continental universities, the divergence could not have been more different. By the 1450s the ‘vitality’ of Lollardy was gone and England was once again ‘Our Lady’s Dowry.’1 In stark contrast, Utraquism was establishing a hierarchy and a clear place in Bohemian national life. That is not to say Hus’s influence on England was negligible. The links between England and Bohemia remained strong, not least in the minds of those leading the reaction against heresy in England and the rest of Europe at the time. It was, rather, more the fear of Hus and the Bohemian example that spurred powerful bishops such as Fleming and Beaufort in their repressive efforts than terror at the mutterings of the peasantry around Coventry, or a resurrected Lollard leader/soldier such as Sir John Oldcastle. In short, I would argue that, in those early years of reception, Hus’s influence on England was a negative one – in the sense that he was defined largely by through what was misunderstood 1 Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation, Wycliffite texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988) 8–10.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 14 about him and largely by those who opposed him. It became the case that he was viewed as a bogey man- one who encapsulated exactly what the establishment feared might be replicated in Oxford, Cambridge, and London and with concomitant social implications in wider society. This ‘negative’ influence extends throughout until the sixteenth century English Reformation really takes hold and, even then, in the writings of Cranmer, Foxe and the eccentric Bishop Aylmer, the example of Hus is not cited for his theological virtue, but rather as a demonstrative case in point of the inherent wickedness of the Church of Rome and, due to the influence of Wyclif, the nascent Protestant piety of England and her Church. * * * For Oxford the year 1427–28 was tumultuous. It saw the attempts at reform of the university by the vigorous opponent of heresy, the Bishop of Lincoln, Richard Fleming. Oxford was within the diocese of Lincoln (it was not itself a diocese until the Reformation). Thus, with the seat of episcopal authority some 150 miles away from the great university, it could provide fertile ground for dissent in the pre -Reformation period. Fleming’s first move against heresy was to lay out the statutes for a new college, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and All Saints, now known as Lincoln College. In his preface to the statutes he makes it very clear that the college was to provide learned scholars to combat new and heretical doctrines.2 Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, in a drawing by John Faber Sr, mezzotint, early 18th century Source: The National Portrait Gallery Over the next 100 years, the colleges of Magdalen, Corpus Christi and All Souls would follow suit in prioritising the combat of heretical doctrine in their statutes.3 Fleming also enacted a personal command of Pope Martin V and ordered the burning of Wyclif’s bones as a tangible statement against academic heresy.4 Tellingly these events occurred in the late 2 Statutes of Lincoln College, Oxon., “Praefatio domini Ricardi Fleming,” [Statutes of Oxford Colleges, Lincoln, i] (London, 1853) 4–6. 3 3 J. A. F. Thomson, Later Lollards (Oxford, 1968) 212. 4 Records of Norwich Heresy Trials 1428–31, ed. Norman P. Turner [Royal Historical Society] (London, 1977) 7.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 15 1420s. They have often been identified as a reaction against Lollardy. Yet even before the 1420s, Lollardy had ceased to be an academic, Wyclifite movement associated with scholars such as Peter Payne and statesmen such as Sir John Oldcastle, who had either fled the country (mostly to Bohemia as in the case of Payne) or had been executed (as in the case of Oldcastle). Both Payne and Oldcastle were completely removed from the English religious/political scene by 1417. Instead of the academic and political movement of the period immediately after Wyclif’s death, what was known as Lollardy had morphed into a blanket term for expressions of religious and social dissatisfaction by localised peasantry or yeomen. For example, in the diocese of Norwich only one priest was tried for heresy between 1428–1431, the rest of those tried being peasants or yeomen. In these cases, the complaints rarely went along complex or even especially unified or coherent theological lines, but rather they reflect the wider sense of heresy as transgressive behaviour. When they are explicitly theological, they tend to concern popular piety as opposed to weighty theological issues, e.g. objection to the local shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.5 A Portrait of Pope Martin V, made after Pisanello (1395-1455) Source: WikiCommons Similar local specific expressions of popular dissent grouped under the umbrella of Lollardy might be found in London, Coventry and Bristol at the time.6 Crucially the theology of Lollardy had also significantly departed from its more respectable academic and philosophical origins with tendencies towards Millenarian doctrine (akin to the contemporary Taborites in Bohemia). Ideas such as that of the invisible universal Church, the ‘real’ Pope being actually the holiest simple person alive on earth at that time and a literal understanding of the priesthood of all believers, inevitably did not invite much noble or clerical support. The great expulsions and reaction that occurred in Oxford in the period 1414–1415 had already removed academic Lollards, but, even this had more to do with continental heresy than domestic unrest. Wyclif’s bones were removed from consecrated ground in 1415 5 Ibid., 14. 6 J. A. F. Thomson, Later Lollards (Oxford 1968) 139.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 16 because of his leading role in influencing the heretic Hus.7 Similarly Peter Payne was ejected from St Edmund Hall for his links with Bohemian heresy, not his excessive influence over ‘lolling’ English peasants. We should be wary of false dichotomies but these were more explicitly actions that related to questions of intellectual purity within an academic elite than ones which resulted from the a fear of mass political unrest. The nature of the punishments necessarily reflects that; the Lancastrian regime had been willing to kill a king in order to secure their new position, the idea that it would have baulked at executing scholars had they represented popular political threat is laughable. As well as these specific Oxonian events, wider parliamentary acts such as the De Heretico Comburendo of 1401, the 1414 local Leicester Statute against the Lollards and, crucially, the defeat of Oldcastle’s rebellion in 1415 had ’sealed’ the fate of Lollardy as anything other than a disparate peasant movement long before the late 1420s.8 In short, given the accepted changes to Lollardy at the time, it would be surprising if Bishop Fleming’s campaign of the late 1420s was entirely motivated by a desire to shield scholars from the influence of something identifiable as Lollardy given its effective death as an academic heresy after 1414. Rather it would appear that he, and others, had the wider European intellectual situation in mind; as represented by the nature of both the constructive and punitive attempts to counter any influence in Oxford in particular but also across England more generally. *** This was a period when the international reaction against Hussite heresy in Bohemia was at its height, a fact that did not go unnoticed in England. At the pope’s suggestion, Bishop Fleming exhumed and burned the bones of Wyclif (a particular favourite of Martin V, Fleming had earlier been recommended by the pope to the archiepiscopal see of York, but that nomination went unapproved by the Royal Council). Crucially, Fleming had spent two years at the Council of Constance in the period directly after Hus’ execution (1416–1418) and so would have been acutely aware of the situation in Europe and the centrality of Hus and the Prague Masters in initiating and spreading the heresy that was at this point engulfing the lands of the Czech Crown. He and the other ecclesiastical authorities were themselves intertwined within the fluid and interlinked international scholarship of the time. The court of the deposed Richard II and Anne of Bohemia had been a centre for Anglo-Bohemian dialogue. Peter Payne’s flight from St Edmund Hall to Prague did not go unnoticed. And, finally, at the trials of Oldcastle and Payne’s pupil, one Ralph Mungyn, letters to Bohemia and to Hus specifically were used as evidence of heresy and treason.9 7 Bertie Wilkinson, The Later Middle Ages in England (Cambridge, 1977) 218. 8 Ibid., 220. 9 J. A. F. Thomson, Later Lollards (Oxford, 1968) 144–145.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 17 The original Crown of Saint Wenceslas during its exhibition in 2016. Picture by K. Pacovsky Source: Wikicommons, 2016 Bishop Fleming’s link with the Papacy (and proven desire to implement its official policies) and clear awareness of the international situation suggest that the bishop’s references to heresy in his official statutes were more likely to indicate the academic influences of Hus and Jerome of Prague and their potential influences than the mutterings of a disgruntled English peasantry. Importantly, there is no evidence of Hus’s actual writings circulating in Oxford at the time and, given that Fleming and the rest of the University authorities were prolific in their burning of heretical tracts in the post-Wyclif period, they were unlikely to have lasted long when they did. Consequently, what we see is Hus and Bohemia as convenient, but largely symbolic, bogeymen for parts of the English Church. The masters of Prague University and Hus in particular, served as cautionary tales for any academics hoping to follow Wyclif and therefore stray from the newer, more strictly controlled academic path that bishops such as Fleming, Waynefleet of Winchester (founder of Magdalen) and Chichele of Canterbury (founder of All Souls) were trying to establish by their founding of the new colleges and formalisation of statutes. Fleming was not the only one with awareness of the Bohemian situation and whose actions were arguably influenced by it and by reaction against the perceived teachings of Hus. There is ample reference to and awareness of the Bohemian situation in England at the time, but exclusively in an anti -Hussite way. For instance we see Pope Martin’s crusade voted on and supported by the Convocation of the Diocese of Durham and being preached in Yorkshire, when one John Pigot Esquire gives ten marks to sustain the campaign in Bohemia.10 Both of these northern dioceses had little or no history of Lollard insurrection, yet references to combating heresy are plentiful, especially in the records of the Diocese of Durham. This, combined with the preaching tours and financial contributions in favour of the crusades against the Hussites suggest that here, as in other places, when heresy was discussed, it was often associated with Hus and Bohemia. 10 Ibid., 193 (10 Marks = £32K or CZK 1.2M today).

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 18 Durham Cathedral, seen from a train on the East Coast Main Line. Source: Wikicommons, 2014 One figure who looms large over English engagement with the Hussite crusade is Henry Cardinal Beaufort, bishop first of Lincoln, then Winchester. A half-brother of the Lancastrian Henry IV, Beaufort was in the vanguard of a coup that overthrew a court sympathetic to Wycliffite innovations and, crucially with regard to international influences, its Bohemian queen, Anne. This political change was critical for turning England from a place where the intellectual and ecclesiastical elite were sympathetic to ecclesiastical reform and open to the exchange of ideas between England and Bohemia to one which was instinctive in its obedience to the Papacy and determined to suppress potential heterodoxy at its great universities. Given his personally combined roles as Lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and successively bishop of two important sees, Beaufort was a dominant figure in the ecclesiastical, legal, and intellectual spheres in England during the period of suppression of Lollardy. His achievements were impressive, culminating in the great expulsions from Oxford in 1414 and the execution of Oldcastle in 1417. This success soon caught the attention of Martin V, who created Beaufort a cardinal in 1426. The cardinal subsequently became the leader of the fourth Crusade against the Hussites in 1427. Beaufort’s mandates and exhortations against the Hussites were read throughout England and, as we have seen, money poured in from across the country to help the cardinal’s cause.11 By the late 1420s, under Beaufort’s leadership, England arguably played a greater role than almost any other European nation in the crusades against the Hussites, sending money, commanders, and troops. Beaufort’s rise to power is perhaps symbolic of the rapid changes in English political, ecclesiastical, and academic life wherein regard for Hus changed from one whom academics and gentry admired, to a figure vilified and denounced. It seems justifiable to postulate that references made to heresy in the late 1420s in Oxford are more likely to be references to the Bohemian situation than to any domestic heterodoxy. This is so especially in the light of: (1) the decline of Lollardry, 11 Loc. cit.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 19 (2) the centrality of Beaufort in national life, (3) England’s willing part in the papal actions against the Hussites, and (4) the authorities’ awareness of the fluid and international nature of potentially heretical dialogue. Hus and Hussites became bywords for academic heresy both as demonstrated in the trial of Ralph Mungyn of St Edmund Hall and by the new authorities’ attempts to reform and make the universities more orthodox, as seen in Fleming’s statutes for Lincoln College. After his death, the idea of Hus in the English late medieval mind was of one associated with international, academic heresy but also a name inherently associated with the widely disliked previous English regime of Richard II and his Bohemian queen. It was convenient for Beaufort and his fellow Lancastrians to associate that reign with all forms of moral corruption, including heresy. England had first to be purged of the Wyclifite error and then, with the papal crusade, Bohemia itself was to be cleansed of the subsequent heretical infection. We do not therefore see any real theological analysis of Hus’ writings and reforms, nor links with Hussite leaders in Bohemia. Rather, Hus and the Hussites exerted an influence only in their being typical of heretics and heresy that the international academic community, and the new English Lancastrian regime, were set to defeat. Historical painting by Paul Delaroche showing Cardinal Henry Beaufort interrogating Joan of Arc in prison. C.1857 Source: WikiCommons There are, of course, positive English representations of and allusions to Hus and the Hussites. They appear, however, a century later and in common with any previous influence they may be said to have exerted over English ecclesiastical and intellectual life are largely symbolic. In neither case was English theology, philosophy, liturgy, or ecclesiology affected. As may be expected, positive aspects of reception date from the period of the English reformation. As Henry VIII’s quarrel with Rome over his divorce became greater, Protestants in England sensed an opportunity. After the mid -1530s, greater availability of Protestant tracts reintroduced Hus and the Hussite experience to England in a different light. However, this was not a direct transition from Prague. It is critical that almost all continental reforming

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 20 literature made its way to England via Antwerp (where Tyndale was working on his English Bible translation). As a consequence, once again, English images of the influence of Hus are not taken from direct experience of or communication with the Hussites still extant in Bohemia, nor from analysis of the work of Hus. Rather, they are coloured by the use of Hus at the hands of other continental reformers, most notably Luther. Often, however, Hussite experience is given a specifically ‘English’ edge. This ranges from the use by Archbishop Cranmer and John Foxe of Hus’s martyrdom to demonstrate the error of Rome (and the implied supremacy of the King over the Church), to the bizarre appropriation of Hus by Bishop Alymer of London, a man who famously exhorted his flock to thank God seven times a day, because they had been born English.1213 It is with Aylmer that the idea that “Wyclif begat Hus[se] who begat Luther who begat truth” began. Hus’s undoubted links to Wyclif provided a helpful polemic point to the English reformers as he could provide the lynchpin that might conceivably give Protestantism an English origin story. By viewing Luther as a successor to Hus and Hus as successor to Wyclif, nascent English Protestantism could btied more effectively to the nascent English nation state. Equally, it is telling that Aylmer chooses Hus rather than the Lollards as the keeper of Wyclif’s reforming flame, arguably demonstrating the perceived pedigree of the English Reformation in the academic world of the pre-Reformation era, as opposed to a popular, egalitarian movement, again, not an unhelpful heritage for figures like Alymer to point to. Painting of John Aylmer (1521–1594), Bishop of London (1577–1594), oil on canvas, unknown artist. Source: WikiCommons 12 Andrew Pettegree, “Printing and the Reformation,” in The Beginnings of English Protestant‑ ism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge, 2002) 169. 13 In John Aylmer’s An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects, 1559 quoted in William Haller, “Foxe and The Puritan Revolution,” in Studies in English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope, ed. Richard Foster Jones (Stanford, 1951) 209.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 21 Such a pedigree may be seen as proof that by the sixteenth century Bishop Fleming’s efforts had failed. Although this is ostensibly a different usage of the persona of Hus and in a different time, the essence of the influence of Hus (i.e. he is only seen as important in relation to English figures) remains the same. Whereas Fleming and Beaufort were contemptuous and suspicious of Hus and his influence, Aylmer praised him. Each, however, essentially viewed Hus as merely a negative or positive exemplar for their own arguments and of relevance only when he could be co-opted to either enforce, or challenge, the Roman party’s influence within the English Church. * * * Even in the more respected works of the English Reformation, such as the works of Cranmer and Foxe’s famous Book of Martyrs, Hus is appropriated as a polemically useful bridging figure, rather than seen as a theologian or reformer of any use or interest in or of himself. For example, he merits only one mention in Cranmer’s Confutation, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the chapter against general Councils. His purpose is to show the deviation of the recent Councils of the Church of Rome from the ancient Councils and creeds of the primitive church. He identifies Hus and Jerome of Prague as condemned for holding that Christ was fully human and fully divine, a ‘heresy’ held by the Athanasian Creed and yet, Cranmer notes, “these malicious clergy [of the Council of Constance] were not ashamed to condemn the same for heresy.”14 Hus’ doctrine is mentioned, but there is no sense of it directly influencing the thought of Cranmer. Rather Cranmer, in common with his late medieval episcopal forebears, simply uses the example of Hus and Jerome as a rhetorical device. Whilst Cranmer clearly does express sympathy for Hus’ doctrine, it is only because it is in agreement with that of the Early Church. One wonders whether Cranmer, resident in Lambeth Palace and architect of the most magisterial of Reformations, would have been so generous in an assessment of Hus’s exhortations to clerical poverty. Portrait of Thomas Cranmer, by Gerlach Flicke (1495-1558), oil on panel, c. 1545 Source: WikiCommons 14 Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Works and Writings of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge, 1846) 37

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 22 The other important writer of the English Reformation to make use of Hus is John Foxe, in his famous martyrology. Acts and Monuments was first published in 1563 and, like Cranmer’s work, sought to root the Protestant movement in England to the early Church, in this case, through the link of martyrdom at the hands of Rome, in either imperial or papal form. Foxe’s aim is to place Hus within the wider chronology of martyrdom, but also to connect the Bohemian reformation to that of England. He makes regular reference to the honourable role that he perceived the nobility of Bohemia and Poland to have played in Hus’s trial and in the subsequent persecution of Hussites by Pope and Emperor.15 This can be of little surprise given Foxe’s reliance on sympathetic nobles and patrons and the political nature of the Reformation in England. The nobility were direct beneficiaries of land and money taken from the church in the dissolution of monasticism, receiving patronage from the crown. To show a clear precedent for an aristocratically led reformation was a core aim of Foxe (it occurs in his descriptions of the persecutions in Germany as well). This not only justified the English reformation as it had already occurred but also encouraged the nobility of England in the face of uncertain times ahead. Even with the Marian reaction (1553–1558) over, the future glories of the Elizabethan age and the security of an Anglican ascendancy were by no means a sure thing by 1563. Furthermore, Foxe’s lack of real knowledge of the Hussite situation is revealed by his absolute failure to mention the reign of Jiří of Poděbrady or Jan Rokycana. Given his desire to justify the Church of England’s position, it would have made sense to underline the periods where Hus’s successors came closest to achieving an established Church along the lines of that which would appear in the later English model. Yet Foxe makes mention only of the persecutions, suggesting his knowledge of Hus and the Hussite movement was filtered directly through the narrative of continental Protestantism.16 This narrative preferred to emphasise Hus as a dejected John the Baptist figure to Luther’s Christ, rather than identify Hussitism as a continuous, independent movement. Again we see that Hus is viewed as a useful exemplar with whom parallels might be drawn, but nothing more. With regard to doctrine, Foxe merely notes that Hus was “strongly attached to the doctrines of Wyclif.”17 Given that Hus and Wyclif differed strongly on a number of issues (not least the central issue of the eucharist) and it was on his own doctrine, rather than Wyclif’s, that Hus was condemned at Constance, we must assume that Foxe had no knowledge of or interest in Hus’s doctrine or teaching. Again, Hus is only perceived as relevant in his links with England and the example he might set as a type of academic reformer. In this sense, by viewing Hus and Hussitism more as symbols than as independent entities of reform, Foxe is no different in his attitudes than Fleming and Beaufort before him. * * * Finally, there is no tangible evidence of knowledge of any of Hus’s doctrine or teaching, or even record of his work being present in England in the Reformation period. The inclusion of Hus’ work on a list of banned books given by Archbishop William Warham to the Bishop of Exeter in 1526, could suggest previous evidence of Hus’ work in the country. It may be, however, that Archbishop Warham was simply replicating a list of books subject to a wider papal ban. If they were present then they were almost certainly smuggled in through the North Sea ports near to Cambridge. But, as mentioned, if indeed they were present, then they may have been susceptible to Lutheran editing in transit.18 In truth, the Hussites in Prague were largely opposed to Luther. The Town Council wrote a strongly worded rejection to 15 John Foxe, Universal History of Christian Martyrdom (London, 1817) 117–120, 16 Ibid., 105: “His excellent sentences were received as so many expressions of treason.” 17 Ibid., 118. 18 David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1992) 24.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 23 overtures by Luther and his supporters, and Hussite preachers made much of the linguistic similarities between the German monk’s moniker and the Czech lotr meaning a scoundrel or imp or demon. Yet still, Lutheranism was most likely the lens through which Englishmen eventually read Hus’s works, if they ever read them at all. Once again, we see Hus’s presence in England framed by others and co-opted for the advancement of ideas other than his own. Portrait of William Warham, Hans Holbein the Younger, tempera on panel, 1528 Source: Wikicomms Given the difficulties of access to Hus’s work in England between 1415 and 1540, it can come of no surprise that he became little more than a symbol, and a very mutable one at that. First he appears as a model of intellectual heresy and then, due to the political expediencies of a century later, as a heroic Protestant forebear who stood up to Roman aggression and paid the price for it. A certain idea of Hus and the Hussites was undoubtedly strong in the minds of the intellectual elite in England, and later through Foxe, in the common people also, for several centuries after his execution. However, this idea was just that: symbolic, eminently mutable depending on what the English political situation demanded and with no regard to the specific theological, political, or philosophical implications of the Hussite movement. In short, if we are to examine the question of whether Hus and Hussitism did have an influence over England, in a way that undoubtedly England had an influence over Hussitism and Hus, the answer must be ‘yes’. However, it was not in or of or as themselves. Hus became a personality- a cipher almost= who was, rather. always viewed through the lenses of official papal policy (by the enforcers of the initial Lancastrian reaction) or through the typical Protestant viewpoint of seeing Hus as a voice making straight the way for Luther and, by extension, for the English reformers. It is testament to the success of men like Beaufort and Fleming that direct contact between England and Bohemia, so vibrant at the start of the fifteenth century, had been reduced to hearsay and half-remembered symbolism by the middle of the sixteenth. There was no knowledge of Hus’ work, no need to write responses in

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 26 Which countries exert a sphere of influence, anyway? Great powers exerting regional dominance is 'a fact of international life' So long as there have been empires and great powers, there have been “spheres of influence”. The term may not always have been used, but the concept goes back thousands of years. From the tributary system under China’s Ming emperors, whereby states in East and South-East Asia provided symbolic obeisance but often practised little or no political subordination, to the 19th-century colonial carve up of Africa and much of the developing world, powerful countries have exerted degrees of suzerainty over or effective control of, say, the foreign policy of less powerful polities. According to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, that era is over. “One country does not have the right to dictate the policies of another or to tell that country with whom it may associate; one country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.” Mr Blinken was speaking last month, but he was echoing Condoleezza Rice, former president George W Bush’s then secretary of state, who in 2008 described spheres of influence as “archaic” and no longer appropriate as a defining characteristic of great powers. Former President George W Bush and former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice attend the funeral of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in Washington, DC on November 5, 2021. AFP

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 27 Both Mr Blinken and Ms Rice were targeting Russia. In 2008, it was after Georgian forces entered the breakaway region of South Ossetia and Russia invaded Georgia in return, forcing the latter to capitulate. Moscow then recognised and backed the independence of South Ossetia and another region, Abkhazia. Today the dispute is over Ukraine and Nato. Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding a guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted to Nato, and he also wants the alliance’s armed forces to roll back from their current positions in other former Eastern Bloc countries that joined Nato after the end of the Cold War. The massing of Russian military personnel on Ukraine’s eastern border has led to fears of war if Mr Putin is not assuaged. This is not to deny that countries should have the right to their own agency Critics warn darkly that the Russian president is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union piece by piece. Others, myself included, thought the advance of Nato to Russia’s borders was bound to be seen as a threat by Moscow and missed the opportunity to forge a new relationship in an era when Nato’s very purpose – opposition to the Communist bloc – had ceased to exist. But the Biden administration’s insistence that Russia has no right at all to a sphere of influence in its historical backyard, and that the very concept should be junked, is quite apart from that. It is “more than a little hypocritical”, as a Cato Institute paper put it in 2014. America wants to deny any regional dominance to both Moscow or Beijing. “Yet, Washington has intervened militarily as recently as the 1980s [Grenada and Panama] or even the 1990s [Haiti] within its traditional sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.” The paper rightly notes that US opposition to spheres of influence is “highly selective”. No one, it appears, has the right to have one apart from America. The US claim to dominion over the Western Hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine, was declared “over” by then secretary of state John Kerry in 2013. But in 2018, Rex Tillerson, Mr Kerry's successor under former president Donald Trump, said “it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was written” and in 2019, Mr Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said it was “alive and well”.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 28 Russian President Vladimir Putin, escorted by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, and General Staff Valery Gerasimov walk after attending a meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry Board in Moscow, on December 21, 2021. Kremlin Pool photo via AP Going by the US reaction to the suggestion that Russia might deploy troops to Cuba and Venezuela if the current talks fail, Mr Bolton was right. Even were Russian forces and missiles to be requested by the governments of those two countries, their presence so close to US soil would be simply unconscionable in Washington. But if America can insist on such a veto, many Russians – and not just supporters of Mr Putin – would ask why they shouldn’t have one, too? This is not to deny that individual countries should have the right to their own agency, nor is it to argue in principle that varying forms of regional hegemony are desirable. I would, however, agree with the US defence analyst Ben Friedman, who recently tweeted that “spheres of influence are natural in a non-normative sense, like mountains, a fact of international life. And while they’re not necessarily conducive to great power peace, ignoring them is a good way to get great power war.” Others have put such self-evident truths of international life more bluntly, as when the then Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi told an Asean meeting in 2010 that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that's just a fact". It was very frank. But it was also true.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 29 Russian peacekeepers attend a welcome ceremony upon returning from a mission in Kazakhstan on the military base in Ivanovo, Russia, 15 January. EPA As it is, Russia already has a sphere of influence, through its leadership of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (deployed recently in Kazakhstan) and the Eurasian Union. China could be said to have one, too, in the sense that many countries in the region think long and hard about the potential reaction in Beijing before making sensitive policy declarations. And what is the EU doing but flexing its muscles in its own putative sphere of influence with its frequently overbearing sticks-and-carrots approach to states to its east and south? Supporters of Mr Blinken’s position would probably argue that the US and its allies are “good” actors, while others are not. But claims to moral superiority won’t wash outside certain western circles too insular to see that this looks like neo-colonialism to much of the rest of the world. Never mind Cuba and Venezuela: could Canada pursue a truly independent foreign policy at odds with its neighbour to the south? Could Mexico? If the Biden White House wants to consign spheres of influence “to the dustbin of history”, how about they start with their own? It could be the beginning of something new; I have a suggestion for a name. Perhaps we could call it “the truly rules-based [with no exceptions] international order”.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 31 An inaugural lecture delivered on 1st June 2022 marking Professor McCloskey's election as a Fellow of the Erasmus Forum That is to say, for one thing, most of our lives happen outside of state coercions—coercions, for another, that commonly do not work as ‘designed’, and if they do, for still another, are commonly not desirable. The coercions are ‘impossible’, then, in the usual sense of not being in fact available to the state’s scheming, such as passing a law that wages ‘must’ be raised. Or the coercions are ‘impossible’ in the extended sense of a wife exclaiming in mock or actual irritation, ‘Oh, John you are impossible!’ True, the rights declared in the nascent liberalism of the 18th century to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by free innovation and free exchange are in some small part enforced by the state, and, in part, to secure these rights a state is instituted among people. The fourth of the rights of man written out in France in 1789 declared that ‘liberty consists in the power to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights’. Yes. Yet most rights, except in a society of utter slaves in the silver mines of Laurion, are implemented by DIY, door locks, self-protection, shopping trips, family life, friendships, neighbors, mutual respect, blame, fictions, dreams, and a liberty of choice having little or nothing to do with state coercions by kings or parliaments. Wikipedia is a spontaneous order. The international order of nations evolves with no world state supervising. The German language evolves through the non-state action of adolescents, not through state-financed committees of professors. The stocking of US grocery stores evolves through the supplying and the demanding of 30, 000 or 40,000 new packaged consumer goods every year, under one percent of which become regular items. A society not entirely supervised by a tyrannical state or by brutal masters evolves largely by itself in art, science, sports, language, journalism, cuisine, hobbies, manners, child raising, conversation. There is no case that state coercions are any more foundational, and a good case that they are much less so, than ethics and convenience, what philosophers of language call ‘conversational implicatures’ and what the rest of us call common sense. Even auto traffic is a spontaneous order, largely. Yes, the rule for driving on the left or right side of the road occasionally requires enforcement by the state’s police and courts. See for example A. P. Herbert’s Uncommon Law, the case of Rumpelheimer v. Haddock. But the left-side rule, after evolving spontaneously as it did anciently in England, or occasionally by legal imposition as it did on 3 September 1967 in Sweden switching to the right side, is of course largely self-enforcing, without state coercion. It is most unwise to emerge from the ferry from Calais to Dover driving on the right side of the road. Speeding too is limited, except on the Autobahn, as much by prudence as by law. Safety belts, too, are coerced by law to some degree, but not mainly thereby becoming common. After their introduction by Volvo in 1959, the belts gradually became habitual, by prudent habit rather than by a coercive law enforced by issuing fines. Even pet care depends hardly at all on state regulation. From the 1980s, except in Paris, scooping the poop of one’s dog rapidly became customary. Social disapproval and, mainly, internal ethical conviction ruled, not the state. True, some of what the state does ‘gives us services’. The scare quotes on the phrase point to reasonable if not decisive worries about each term. As to ‘gives’: the state giveth yet the state must therefore also taketh away. The wherewithal is not received in the post from some outside St. Nick, but from taxation or borrowing or inflation imposed on actual people. As to ‘us’: the gifted are almost always a favored part of us—say, the sons and daughters of high-income Dutch lawyers and businesspeople subsidized by ‘free’ higher education, at the

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 32 expense of general Dutch taxpayers; or French farmers subsidized and protected by the EU’s agricultural policy, at the expense of other EU citizens; and, if you wish them well, though they admittedly have no property right to our well-wishing, of the farmers of the Sahel who could provide food and fibre to Europe at lower cost. And as to ‘services’: the services, for one thing, are sometimes better provided by non-state efforts. Economists have long known for example that in theory the private ownership of roads with pricing would be more efficient than state provision without pricing. Congestion, for example, would vanish, as in fact it did in rough form when London imposed a price to come into its centre. A century ago an American economist showed it on a blackboard. The electronic miracles of the present age would permit pricing the roads costlessly, unlike the traditional cost of a man with a pike to turn for each carriage allowed onto the road. Yes, the services of preventing the Canadians from invading the US, or the French invading the UK, are genuine and good. But many ‘services’ of the state do warrant the dubiety of scare quotes, such as Sicily’s proliferated and empty autostrade provided to give construction jobs in exchange for Sicilian votes for the Christian Democrats; or such as the HM Queen Elizabeth seen riding in the Gold State Coach during celebrations organised for her golden jubilee. Source: SkyNews, 2012

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 33 US’s selling of military hardware to Saudi Arabia; or such as (many republicans would say) the pomp and circumstance of the British monarchy. It is often claimed that ‘we’ can achieve with the state many activities that would be impossible without it. Set aside in charity the many evil activities of the state thus enabled, such as the lynching of Blacks enabled by the non-action of the legal authorities in the US South, the mass jailing of Japanese Americans during World War II enabled by the action of the President and the Supreme Court, the Russian Federation invading Ukraine enabled by the previous non-action of democratic states. Still, the claim does sound lovely. ‘Let’s cooperate’ by state taxation and coercion to predict the weather, to provide lighthouses, to enforce meat inspection, to get the children educated, to build the Grand Coulee dam. But in such claims, put forward more and more insistently as state expenditures over the century past have risen from 10 to 40 percent of GDP, supposes without evidence that the desirable activities would be impossible without the state. Non-economists in particular seldom realize that between individual action and state action lies an enormous realm of spontaneous cooperation by market or by conversation. The Nobel laureate Ronald Coase showed that lighthouses could be done mainly privately, and it happened. The Nobel laurate Elinor Ostrom showed that restocking the Los Angeles aquifer could be done by mainly non-state negotiation, and it happened. The Nobel laureate Milton Friedman showed that a non-draft army and non-coercive drug regulation were efficacious and desirable, and they happened. What does not meet the test of being privately financed, further, turns out often enough to be a glorious boondoggle. The discipline of cost and benefit is set aside. The canals of Britain’s Canal Age were privately financed, and proved profitable to the nation. America’s and Sweden’s later canals by contrast were constructed or financed or guaranteed by the state One of Sicily's numerous, empty autostrade Source: iStock Photos, 2014

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 34 as lovely ’internal improvements‘, copying what was imagined to be the British model. Almost all of them, such as the longest canal in the US, the Wabash & Erie, were economic disasters. The Anglo-French Concorde supersonic airplane1963-2003 never justified its expense. Nor did manned space flight. Nor Alaskan bridges to nowhere. § The more notable coercions by the state that we recognize by the word ‘policy’ are regularly inefficacious or undesirable or both. An evil idiocracy of policy reigns. The War on Drugs in the US from 1971, which was imposed on other countries in a widening ripple, failed to reduce consumption, if that is seen as desirable. But it did enrich private and public specialists in coercion, and caused innovation in addictive drugs, and corrupted the police and polity worldwide. The rare coercions by the state that are both efficacious and desirable, and not either wicked reshuffling of income or inefficient seizing of production or infantilizing provision that adults should provide for themselves, are commonly those that bring to an end some wicked or inefficient or infantilizing coercion by the very state, or occasionally by of its wicked neighbors. The British state vigorously supported slavery in law, in court and in Parliament until ethically it didn’t, in 1772, 1807, and 1833. The American state vigorously supported slavery and then racial segregation in law, until ethically it didn’t, in 1865, 1953, and 1965. The Second World War ended ethically the coercions of most fascism, until fascism revived a A British Airways Concorde (G-BOAC) taking-off from London Heathrow Airport. Source: Eduard Marmet, 1986

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 35 little in populism. The Cold War ended ethically the coercions of much of communism, until communism too revived a little in more populism. Most of the efficacious and desirable alterations in the economy and society, that is, come from expanding voluntary interaction among liberated adults, not by contracting it. When in 1681 Louis XIV’s Comprtoller-General Jean-Baptiste Colbert kindly offered to help the businessmen of Paris, the story goes, they replied, no doubt alarmed by the proposed extension of state coercion, Laisez-nous faire, Let us do [it]. ‘Thanks anyway, L’état. We’ll carry on with our spontaneous cooperation, as in the French language or the making of furniture’. Most such un-policy policies to leave people alone do work, and should. The revolutionary armies of France invading the German lands immediately outlawed the monopolistic guilds, in line with an enactment of the National Assembly in 1789: In 1861 Tsar Alexander II ended serfdom. In 1944 France extended the vote to the second sex. In 1968 the UK ended censorship of the theatre. Laws of individual US states forbidding homosexuality were slowly eliminated from 1962 to 2003. Laws forbidding interracial marriage existed from colonial times in most US states. The last was Virginia’s, overturned by the Supreme Court, in 1966. These were good outcomes from good policies, yet not coercive but on the contrary fresh liberations from earlier coercions. State regulations originally designed—the word is always so used—to achieve this or that good outcome for the poor and weak are regularly, as any adult observer of politics understands, corrupted to achieve good for the rich and powerful. The rich and powerful are skilled at that. State power, unlike the non-power power of rivalrous companies, consists of physical coercion or its threat. Shoe companies offer you a deal. The state offers to jail and execute you. Such power tends to corrupt. In the UK the regulation of textile manufacturing favored the big mills run by the boiling of steam as against the little ones run by the falling of Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, by Philippe de Champaigne, oil on canvas, 1655

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 36 water. The pattern recurs. Big companies with big legal departments look on detailed state regulation with an equanimity approaching glee. Get rid of those pesky little competitors, thank you very much. The big companies, or the little ones gathered in trade associations, also stand ready of course to lobby for control of the regulations, diverting state coercion to raise their profits. Within a few years of the setting up in 1887 of the US Interstate Commerce Commission, which was ‘designed’ to decrease railway rates to Midwestern farmers, the railways were running the Commisssion, preceding to increase railway rates to Midwestern farmers, and then to obstruct competition from the new road trucks. ‘Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men’, George Washington observed in his Farewell Address in 1796, ‘will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government’. Absolute state power corrupts absolutely. The special interests of cunning men aside, red tape tends to proliferate, even innocently. The US Food and Drug Administration, ‘designed’ in 1906 to prevent adulteration of milk with chalk, eventually prevented the swift introduction of vaccines against covid 19. The pain reliever Voltaren was available in Germany over the counter many years before approved in the US. The interest of the no doubt honest and sincere functionaries of the FDA is to repeat over and over their earlier, accidental success in delaying in the 1960s the introduction of thalidomide from Germany. Their foot-dragging policy implies, no doubt inadvertently, that they do not care how many people suffer who could have been relieved by the (unobserved) option of swift introduction. The list of incompetent schemes of our masters is long, and lengthens daily. Boris Johnson scheme to save his premiership by implementing a regional’ ’levelling up’,’ for example, would give subsidies and protections to ‘regions’, instead of to people, as though the very land was a proper ethical object. Ill fares the land, it says. It overrides for present electoral benefit the future decisions of individuals about where production and consumption should be located. Boris Johnson, UK PM ( 2019-22) seen here in 'levelling up' pose, visiting a construction site in Ealing Fields. Source: Bowmer & Kirkland, 2020

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 37 Consider a few score of findings of a similar sort from actual historico-economic inquiry over the past few decades. They are not merely opinions, but findings from hundreds of serious scientific inquiries into the past. Yes, there are others that argue in some cases the opposite. But at any event the certitude of indignant assertion or counter-assertion is not going to help get such matters straight. Wittgenstein said, that ‘certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified’. We need to inquire soberly. In the 19th and 20th centuries ordinary Europeans were hurt, not helped, by their colonial empires. Economic growth in Russia was slowed, not accelerated, by Soviet central planning. American Progressive regulation and its European anticipations protected monopolies of transportation like railways and protected monopolies of retailing like High Street shops and protected monopolies of professional services like medicine, not the consumers. ‘Protective’ legislation in the United States and ‘family-wage’ legislation in Europe subordinated women. State-armed psychiatrists in northern Europe and its offshoots jailed homosexuals, and in Russia jailed democrats. Some of the New Deal prevented rather than aided America’s recovery from the Great Depression. Unions, at length protected by the state, raised wages for plumbers and auto workers but reduced real wages for the non-unionized. Minimum wages protected union jobs but made the poor unemployable. Building codes sometimes kept buildings from falling or burning down but always gave steady work to well-connected carpenters and electricians and made housing more expensive for the poor. Zoning and planning permission has protected rich landlords rather than helping the poor. Rent control makes the poor and the mentally ill un-house-able, because no one will build inexpensive housing if housing is coerced by law to be expensive. The sane and the already-rich get the rent-controlled apartments and the fancy townhouses in once-poor neighborhoods. Regulation of electricity hurt householders by raising electricity costs, as did the trammeling of nuclear power, which is less dangerous, as he French have shown, than most other energy sources. The Securities Exchange Commission in the US did not help small investors. Federal deposit insurance in the US made banks careless with the money od depositors, and made banking crises worse. The conservation movement in the western US. enriched ranchers, who used federal lands for grazing, and enriched lumber companies, which used federal lands for clear cutting.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 38 Germany’s economic Lebensraum was obtained in the end by the private arts of peace, not by the public arts of war. The lasting East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was built by Japanese men in business suits, not in dive bombers. Protectionism in foreign trade has regularly damaged poor people, such as those who indirectly use steel, and helped a few rich people, such as stockholders in steel companies. Protectionism in domestic trade, as in the US farm program and the EU’s agricultural policy, has done the same. Free trade in food and fiber would provide literally ten times more income to the Sahel and Latin America than all foreign aid. State-to-state aid to the Third World has enriched tyrants, not helped the poor. Europe recovered after its two 20th-century hot civil wars mainly through its own efforts of labor and investment, not mainly through state-to-state charity such as Herbert Hoover’s Commission or George Marshall’s Plan. The importation of socialism into the Third World, even in the relatively non-violent form of Congress Party Fabian-Gandhi-ism, stifled growth, enriched large industrialists, and kept the people poor. Eugenic theories hatched in the West were enforced by compulsory sterilization on a large scale in Sweden and Norway into the 1970s, and then applied to poor countries. Malthusian theories hatched in the West were put into practice by India and especially China, resulting in missing girls and sterilized women. Birth rates have in fact fallen, or are falling, to replacement rates in poor countries, not because of state coercion but because of female autonomy, birth control, child vaccination, and enrichment. The innovism of the Green Revolution of dwarf hybrids was opposed by green politicians everywhere, but has made places like India self-sufficient in grains. State power in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa has been used to tax the majority of farmers in aid of cousins of the tyrant and a minority of urban bureaucrats. State power in many parts of Latin America has distorted land reform and sponsored disappearances. Later it merely impoverished the countries by diverting investment into idiotic state schemes, such as the building of Brasilia. State ownership of oil in Nigeria and Mexico and Iraq and Venezuela was used to support the party in power, benefiting the people not at all. Muslim men have been kept poor, not bettered, by using state power to deny education and driver’s licenses to Muslim women, and to kill journalists. The seizure of the Mahatma Gandhi pictured while practising as a lawyer in South Africa. Source: unknown, 1906

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 39 state by the clergy has corrupted religions and ruined economies. The seizure of the state by the military has corrupted armies and ruined economies. Industrial policy has propped up failing industries from Japan to France, such as small-scale retailing, instead of choosing winners who actually win. Regulation of dismissal has led to high unemployment, once in Germany and Denmark, and especially still in South Africa. In the 1960s the public-housing high-rises in the West inspired by Le Corbusier condemned the poor in Rome and Paris and Chicago to holding pens. In the 1970s, the full-scale socialism of the East ruined the environment. In the 2000s, the ‘millennial collectivists,’ whether Red, Green, or Communitarian, opposed a globalization that helps the poor but threatens trade union officials, crony capitalists, and the careers of people in Western non-governmental organizations. Thus policy. § The Age of Policy, then, is upon us—an age of economists and calculators, and the liberty of Europe is approaching extinguishment forever. Its inspiration is the French, Raison side of the Enlightenment, eventuating in Bentham and Comte, socialism and fascism, and the innocent yet mushrooming schemes of the middle for an ever-expanding state to discipline or to assist the bad or sad peasants or proletarians, namely, you. Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness articulates the principle of statism in the terms of the French Enlightenment: ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded’. The Scottish, Liberté side of the Enlightenment denied it, and in the denial repudiated such slaveries as in Leopold II’s Congo. The Blessed Adam Smith, repudiating British imperialism and Black slavery, advocated instead ‘the obvious and simple system of natural liberty’—though he was willing to include in it some modest statism in the parish schools of Scotland and the Royal Navy’s defense of the realm. The reasons for the impossibility of state policy are well known, reported every day in the news, though without diminishing the confidence of our dear friends the statists in tomorrow’s apparently fresh scheme. Herbert Spencer noted as early as 1853 two of the major Aerial picture of Brasilia, vast, planned and lifeless. Source: WikiPictures, 2015

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 40 templates for modern news stories, still in vigorous use today: ‘Take up a daily paper and you will probably find a leader exposing the corruption, negligence, or mismanagement of some state-department. Cast your eye down the next column, and it is not unlikely that you will read proposals for an extension of state-supervision’. (1.) The first reason for the impossibility of policy is that even honest and intelligent masters do not know how, indeed cannot possibly know. At the London School of Economics during the 1930s those economists who remembered their Latin from school would laugh at the phrase on the lips of the other economists to describe information necessary for laying down the future in the new social engineering: ‘given data’. In Latin data means ‘things given’, and so the ignorant were positing knowledge of ‘given givens’. Beyond the sneer, said Ronald Coase and Friedrich Hayek, both later to win the Nobel prize in economics, such knowing is not given, but impossible, for many subsidiary reasons: (A.) For one thing, today’s valuations of goods and resources are known only down at the level of the minds of consumers and producers, and down at the level of the detailed prices today that their spontaneous dealings yield. The level of the Food and Drug Administration or the Competition & Market Authority is not where they are ‘given’. It is what Hayek noted in a famous article in 1945. Information is distributed among us only person by person, and is not available to the mind of the central planner. It is not ‘given’ in sufficient detail to plan whether to make green or brown raincoats, or to build flats or houses, or to use this or that process for making steel. Only the price system does the job. (B.) And for another the future is not profitably knowable. (i.) If a planned future is not profitable, speaking economically, it is not desirable. A perfect central planner would agree that unprofitable projects reduce the wealth of the nation. Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) Source: Unknown, December 1893

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 41 That is what Ludwig von Mises argued in the ‘socialist calculation debate’ during the interwar period. Mises did persuade the more thoughtful of the socialists—that an ideal socialism would recommend exactly the same plans as would have arrived spontaneously from an ideal market. Progress is progress, and is recommended ideally in both ‘capitalism’ and socialism. The unsettling disturbances arising from progress are not a special feature of a market society, as is often asserted, but of any non-traditional society, whether spontaneously or centrally planned. Ideal with ideal, perfect compared with perfect, then, was the theoretical frame of the theorists of the 1930s. The debates about ‘capitalism’ vs. socialism down to the present tend to stay on the blackboard. But the practical, technical question is how far from perfection each system actually diverges, considering that both do. The history of actually existing socialism suggests, as for example in the comparison between the old East and West Germany, that a socialism even run by Prussians wastes 50 percent of income. It is to be weighed against ‘capitalism’s’ share of profit, if you erroneously regard profit too as waste, of 10 percent. (ii.) But the difficulty of prediction is not merely technical. When Queen Elizabeth asked querulously of the LSE economists why they did not predict the crash of 2008 she was supposing that they had merely run their econometric machinery incompetently. Most people believe, as no sophisticated economist does, that economists are economic weather forecasters. But what will be profitable in the future is not known to even the most statistically muscular planner—or else the planner would be rich. The point takes the form of a cheeky joke. But the proverbial question— ‘If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’— is a wholly serious challenge to the statist economist, enthusiastic for leveling up, industrial policy, infant-industry protection, Anglo-French Concordes, counter-cyclical macroeconomics, or any other of the recycled proposals since Colbert for state policy in the economy. (iii.) After all, economics is always about the future, not the past. It is about imagination. That the inputs used once to make a now-old car were this or that amount of embodied labor does not play the slightest role in its present value. The car may be now a wonderful antique, or merely junk. Its value depends on its future uses of delight or of melting down. The backward-looking labor theory of value, as economists realized in the 1870s, is therefore gravely mistaken, and the numerous policies still using it are incompetent as economics. Future human delights and uses are what matter to value. Expectations and predictions, that is, are dispositive in the economy. And as the great baseball manager and philosopher Yogi Berra put it, ‘It’s difficult to predict, especially about the future’. Yogi Berra supervising a New York Yankees baseball game. Source: Googie Man, 2007

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 42 The result is that policy-making, planning, directing, designing, regulating, driving the economy is like driving a car when you can’t see the instruments and can’t see the road. You will drive the car into the ditch, killing people on he way. Auguste Comte’s rationalist formula for social engineering, ‘understand to predict, predict to control’, is sensible if confined to high-level constitutional understanding, prediction, and control: ‘Understand markets to predict qualitatively the effect of price controls, which should not probably be controlling’. But it is dangerous when applied by the sweetest Fabian or progressive, and hideous when applied by the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping. Said the party man O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty Four, ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face –forever’. (C.) Of course, the conventional statist reply is that a market society is notably imperfect, and that state action, with the advice of wise and sweet economists, can easily correct the imperfections. It is what Alberto Mingaredi calls ‘naïve Hegelianism’, he conviction of the Master that the Prussian state existed, and therefore the Wisdom of History must be guiding it to its cameralism and mercantilism and imperialist policies. Economists have accumulated since 1848 fully 108 ‘imperfections in the market’: among them monopolies, externalities, bubbles, inequalities, irrational consumers, business cycles, economies of industry scale, informational asymmetries, lack of state institutions necessary for the market to function. The economy since 1848 therefore should have disastrously failed. Yet in the event it has yielded, as any economic historian can show you, an astounding 3,000 percent increase of incomes per head of the poorest. Embarrassingly for the scientific standing of statist economists, very few of the 108 imperfections has been shown scientifically to be important in reducing GDP. Environmental externalities are one of the few exceptions, though not entirely settled yet in view of uncertainties of predicting technology, or for that matter the climate. Yet, alarmingly for Comte’s social engineering, the determination has not been made for the bulk of the 108, despite two centuries of assertion that it has been. And almost none of the 108 statist remedies for fixing the imperfections has been shown to be feasible or important, quantitively speaking. Antitrust, for example, is a failure, as is counter-cyclical policy. Economic scientists have lingered on the blackboard, and have not done the homework that might possibly justify their social engineering. (D.) And none of the increase of 3,000 percent, it can be shown, came from the state. Overwhelmingly, the innovative enterprise of individual workers and business people made the world rich to an historically shocking degree. State policy, by contrast, almost always reduced average income, as for example protectionism in Latin America following the ideas of Paul Prebisch, or stop-go policies in the UK following the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. (2.) And he second, obvious reason for the practical impossibility of state policy is that few states are close to honest. State policy therefore reduces to robbing Peter to pay Paul. In this matter the honesty of Sweden is to be set against the corruptions of China, 10 million souls against 1,400 million. One can reply, “Well then, we will work to make China honest.” It’s a fool’s errand in China, and in India, Italy, the US, and most of the others. Politicians and staff in the US Congress are to this day permitted to speculate in the stock market on the basis of their early knowledge of changes in law. And such an astonishingly corrupt ‘policy’ is of course not the worst of state actions worldwide, ever since the Israelites so ill-advisedly demanded that God give them a king (Samuel 8: 4-22). George Washington Plunkett (1842-1924) of New York explained in a candid interview in 1907 that he took only ‘honest graft’,

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 43 by which he meant using inside knowledge: ‘I seen my opportunities, and I took ‘em’. Most states worldwide are such rackets in favor of the rich and powerful, or those who want to be. The less such power is given to the state, the smaller is the incentive to corrupt it. And in a state properly confined to the few things it does best, such as a just war or a sensible vaccination policy, the corruption that does occur has less of an effect. The French state now takes 55 percent of French GDP for its lovely purposes, and regulates much of the rest. Such a magnitude is well beyond reason, or even raison. The American humorist of the 1920s, Will Rogers used to say, ‘Just be glad you're not getting all the government you're paying for’. My own city of Chicago is a case in point. In the late 19th century it was fantastically, comically corrupt, at Russian or Saudi or Italian levels. Everyone with coercive powers had his hand out: police, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, politicians. My own flat is a couple of blocks from where the so-called Mickey Finn was invited, a non-lethal poison in a drink to knock out and then rob the traveling salesman in town for day while making the transfer of trains from Grand Central to Dearborn Street Station. (‘Change in Chicago’ was the motto, an inconvenience for the profitability of taxis, hotels, and restaurants arranged at another level of corruption, as in Paris or London or Berlin). The proceeds were shared with the local alderman protecting the racket from any just application of countervailing power by the state. Yet Chicago was in the late 19th century the fastest growing city in the world. How could that be? Because the state by modern standards was very small. At 10 percent it didn’t matter much. At 55 percent it does. The just responsibility of the state is no more to run the economy than to run, steer, design, drive, regulate music or science or language or personal life. It would not make sense, obviously, to turn over the regulation of the English language to Parliament. Language is in fact the leading example of a spontaneous order. But so too is the economy. To be sure, states have in the 20th century interfered for nationalist or imperialist reasons even in language, as the Italian state did after 1861 by imposing the dialect of Tuscany on the whole, or as in the endless disputes in Norway and Greece about the Genuine National Language. The Welsh language was suppressed by state policy in state and religious schools, in the way native American languages were in the New World, north and south. George Washington Plunkett (1842-1924) Source: Unknown, c.1910-1915

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 44 But that the state can influence the language or the economy does not imply that it should, considering that the case is so very weak that it knows how, or ever could know how, or is properly motivated to use such knowledge of given givens honestly and for good purposes. The state could influence the world of art, and in the Soviet Union it did, with unhappy results. Suggestively, the Soviet state did favor top-down arts like choreography of ballet or conducting of orchestras, while trying to suppress or regulate the bottom-up, liberty-instantiating arts of painting, jazz, and writing. The Ukrainian Jew Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) was a convinced communist and highly favored Soviet journalist and novelist until during the 1950s he lost faith in communism, and wrote two anti-socialist, liberal novels, Life and Fate (1959; 1970 published in Russian in 1988) and his last, Forever Flowing (1964; unpublished in Russian in 1988). Together they have sometimes been described as the greatest Russian novels of the 20th century. The state suppressed spontaneous thought. The British state if it took a mind to could mightily influence your personal friendships, or your decision to commit minor violations of law, such as jaywalking or gum chewing or reading uncensored editions of The Economist. In Xi Jinping’s China and Lee Hsien Loong’s Singapore, it does, with unhappy results. One can ask why economic decisions would be any different. The unscientific but ever-popular reply on the lips of modern economists, I repeat, is that the economy has those 108 imperfections, and the state has not one. Ah, yes. Late 19th century Chicago, bustling and 'comically corrupt'. Source: unknown

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 45 A premise underlying statism and its proliferation of policies seems to be that the decisions of businesspeople are easy to make and easy therefore to second guess. A certain lofty contempt for mere business rumbles underneath. The Big Short shows, says the un-economist, that predicting the future is dead easy. Let us therefore lay down the future by state policy. Art and science and journalism, says the scribbler, are difficult, and cannot be planned or in the slightest way interfered with by the state. Sociology is to be left alone by the prince. But selling meat or groceries for profit is supposed to be easy, and therefore state-policy-relevant. The poet and professor of Latin A. E. Housman gave a presidential address at Oxford to the Classical Association in 1921 on ‘the science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it’ in Greek and Latin manuscripts. He contrasted what he disdained as the numerous thoughtless practices of the textual critics with the application of thought by ‘comparatively thoughtful people, such as butchers and grocers, who depend on their brains for their bread’ . An arts graduate raised to Chancellor of the Exchequer believes that he or she has the right and competence to intervene in the decisions of butchers and grocers. The actual Attorney General under Johnson in 2022 believed she had the right and competence to intervene in the decisions of the parents and teachers of transgender children. As Adam Smith said, ‘It is the greatest impertinence and presumption. . . of kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people’. Thus again policy § And that is the other impossibility of policy, namely, that is it impossibly unethical. It arrogantly proposes that you as a mere subject of the prince are a child relative to the mother and father state. In ancient Greek the word for child, pais, was often an alternative for ‘slave’ (doulos), used as an arrogant insult, the way southerners in the US would address a Black adult male as ‘boy’. A conservative statist views the mere citizens as bad children. A statist of a progressive views them as sad children. Bad or sad, to be spanked or to be given sweets, the non-liberal political philosophies propose to keep us as children. The usual defense is that the state follows the general will, Rousseau’s imagined volonté generale. Yet despite two and a half centuries of trying to justify such a construct, it is an impossible aggregate of individual wills. When did you sign le contrat social ? Even the economist’s GDP, of which I am personally very fond, has deep problems. Here’s one. All economic progress, though overwhelmingly desirable for letting the wretched of the earth raise themselves up, hurts someone. If you write a better book on economics or history than I do, I am hurt, though scholarship or education is served. The Declaration of the A. E. Housman (1859 - 1936) Source: E. O. Hoppé, 1910

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 46 Rights of Man and Citizens speaks of ‘tout ce qui ne nuit pas à autrui ‘, ‘everything that does not injure anyone else’. But no one is an island entire of itself; everyone is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. In society we necessarily bump against each other. So the ne nuit pas à autrui is as impossible as state policy. It’s for this reason that state schemes of protection and regulations re so very popular. Someone is always hurt, and so applies to father and mother state for relief. Let us impose a policy of protection. NIMBY. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. John Stuart Mill tried to formulate a distinction in On Liberty: ‘Society admits no right, either legal or moral, in the disappointed competitors, to immunity from . . . suffering [caused by legitimate competition or customers]; and feels called on to interfere, only when means of success have been employed which it is contrary to the general interest to permit—namely, fraud or treachery, and force’. Well, John, tell that to the local chippy who feels hard done by a better one just opening down the road. The problem accompanies democracy, of course, but more so a tyranny. The unsuccessful poet demands that his books be made school texts, and if he is high enough in the Communist Party he can achieve it, though the children are misled. We must therefore think of what is to be done at a higher level than narrowly defined policy, of help and hurt, of GDP, of utilitarianism or positivism, or of any other of the fantasies of social engineering. We need to ask in ethical terms what sort of society we wish, on something other than narrow and present instrumental grounds, such as the narrow and technically incompetent grounds of John Rawls’ premise of maximin utility functions. We then need to commit to the good society ideologically, emotionally, as we did in some places in the first wave of liberalism. The economist and philosopher Frank Knight came to a similar conclusion in the 1930s, that item-by-item utilitarianism in policy is not very good, and a society-wide commitment to ‘government by discussion’, as he called it, is all we can ask for . If nothing else can be learned from the past two centuries of political and economic and social history, though denied by statists of left and right, it is that a society of liberated adults Is best for humans. That is all. The Age of Policy—of our masters taxing, subsidizing, designing, nudging, regulating, protecting, penalizing, and jailing us, with expert guidance from the economists and calculators—needs to end. The metaphor of the childlike character or the inferior races justified world slavery, European imperialism, US Indian removal. The childlike character of Aboriginals justified in Australia the stealing of their babies. The childlike character of women justified domination by men. And the childlike character of citizens has justified statism. An age of loving, liberal adults needs to commence. State policy made us children, as we had so long been treated during the millennia of agriculture. Time to grow up, into liberalism, “adultism.” Now we are 36, dears, not 6.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 48 MR. GLADSTONE AND SWANSEA, 1887 An Inaugural Lecture by Professor Richard Shannon, Professor of Modern History, University College, Swansea, delivered on 18 November, 1980. Gladstone’s grand progress from Hawarden to Swansea in the spring of 1887 signalled as no other event did, or could, the inauguration of modern Wales. In choosing as my theme the great emancipating movements in later nineteenth-century Wales of national consciousness and religious equality, I can plead justification much in the manner of Mr. Gladstone himself. Like Mr. Gladstone, I have certain fortuitous connections with Wales; enough, perhaps, to compensate in some· measure even for my rather untimely connections with New Zealand. I can echo Mr. Gladstone’ s statement to the Eisteddfod at Mold in 1873: ‘I own to you that since it has been my duty to make myself in some degree acquainted with the past and present relations of Wales and England, I have found the subject to be full of interest.’ Mr. Gladstone had a home in North Wales; I have a home in Mid-Wales. I have not, like Mr. Gladstone, married, so far, a Welsh lady; but I did go to Cambridge by grace of that munificent son of Caius, David Thomas, Viscount Rhondda. And like Mr. Gladstone, I first came to Swansea in the spring time, and in the dripping rain, via the Mid-Wales railway, to High Street Station. There, alas, the comparison ends abruptly: Mr. Gladstone drove off through cheering crowds and the thunder of saluting cannon in a carriage with Sir Hussey Vivian to a select dinner party at Singleton Abbey. I proceeded, via a hamburger parlour, to a quite different kind of select party at the Abbey. Why did Mr. Gladstone progress from Hawarden to Swansea in the spring of 1887? It was not for the lack of previous invitations. Hussey Vivian had invited Gladstone in December 1875 to attend the first anniversary in January 1876 of the Swansea Working Men's Club. They deserve, Vivian argued, ‘a little countenance in these parts, for Glamorganshire- I believe the only County in the United Kingdom which returns an unbroken phalanx of Liberals.’ ‘I need not say’, he added, ‘with how much pleasure Mrs. Vivian and myself would receive you if we could induce Mrs. Gladstone and your daughters to accompany you. We have much that is worth seeing both industrially and otherwise in this neighbourhood.' Hitherto, as far as I can make out, Gladstone had not been nearer Swansea than when on holiday in July. 1852 at Tenby, with visits to Pembroke, Carmarthen, and the Tywi vale; and then to Builth- 'all beautiful’- Rhayader and thence to Hawarden via Hereford. Perhaps the notion was revived on the occasion of a dinner invitation to Vivian from Gladstone for 16th 1854 photograph of Singleton Abbey, National Library of Wales. The seat of Sir Hussey Vivian who was Gladstone's host during his visit to Swansea.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 49 April 1887 at Dollis Hill in Willesden. (The· young. H.H. Asquith, newly elected to the Commons, was a fellow guest.) At all events, the invitation which eventually bore such splendid consequences was made by Sir Hussey when sitting next to Gladstone in the House of Commons prior to the Whitsun recess. Upon learning from Gladstone that he had no engagements for the latter end of the recess, Sir Hussey invited him to visit Swansea by way of returning to Westminster for the renewed session. It was decided that Gladstone should receive the freedom of the borough and open the new free Public Library to lend formal official ostensibility to what would in fact be a shameless political and partisan manifestation. Vivian (since 1882 a baronet by Gladstone's grace) assured his chief in Hay about all the detailed arrangements for the real purpose of the visit: to stage a Liberal political demonstration of unprecedented dimensions to the greater glory of the 'Grand Old Man', to the greater glory of Swansea, of Welsh Liberalism, of Liberalism in general, of the Vivians of Singleton, and, somewhat, of Home Rule for Ireland. Vivian promised Gladstone ‘such a reception as has I think never been given to anyone.’ There would be a 'grand march past of the Representative Bodies of whatever kind', headed by 'Chairmen and Committees’, in 'long procession’, presenting their addresses as they pass. ‘I have mentioned this to pretty nearly all the South Welsh members and they approve cordially and without exception. They are communicating with our Committee at Swansea.’ There were, however, difficulties and, predictably perhaps, they came from Cardiff. ‘If Cardiff does not join but seeks to get up a separate function’ grumbled Vivian, 'it must at any rate diminish our numbers’. Sir Hussey, as we shall see, tended to be too anxious on the score of numbers. Cardiff, indeed, very unwilling to cede the primacy of South Wales to a town indeed civically senior, characterised as 'horrible and sublime', but which in the opinion of Cardiff was much more of the former than the latter, insisted on a ‘separate function’; and poor Sir Hussey was put to shifts to mollify Cardiff's offended dignity by arranging for the Grand Old Man to spend three hours there on the journey on from Swansea to the recalled parliamentary session in London. Still, even the jealous and beady eye of Cardiff could not deprive Hussey Vivian of his heady anticipations. 'I propose to ask all the Welsh members and other Representative men to meet you at dinner on the 4th June which Morley told me was considered most suitable', he informed the no doubt suitably impressed and gratified Gladstone. ‘I hope that we shall have the pleasure of receiving Mrs Gladstone and yourself William Ewart Gladstone by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt, oil on canvas, 1879, National Portrait Gallery

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 50 and Mr. W. Gladstone early in that week; the earlier the better: we think -could make four days agreeable and that you would enjoy our coast scenery.’ Accordingly, the Gladstones (accompanied by the Reverend Stephen instead of Willy) left Hawarden on the morning of Thursday, 2nd June and joined their special chartered train at Saltney, whence they set off at 12.30. By 12.44 they arrived at Wrexham, where Gladstone was treated to a vigorous harangue from the local Liberal Association on the issue of disestablishment and on the necessity of recognising that the Welsh were a nation and that while devotedly loyal to the Throne of Great Britain and Ireland, they had national aspirations to manage their own affairs. This indeed was the leading theme of the innumerable addresses Gladstone would receive as he made his way south. By 2.30 he was at Newtown, where there was another brief stop. A special platform had been erected and Gladstone was induced to leave his saloon to allow the crowd of 2-3,000 a glimpse of him and to sing ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. Gladstone in reply dilated upon his leitmotif theme that 'the cause of Ireland is the cause of Wales’; and Mrs. Gladstone was presented with a Welsh wrap. At Llanidloes ‘a number of fog signals' were discharged in Gladstone's honour and Mrs. Gladstone was presented with a shawl of Welsh manufacture. Then by way of Rhayader to Builth at 4.20; where, getting a little hoarse, Mr. Gladstone expressed himself particularly gratified at the references in the address to the providential government of a Higher Power. At Talgarth the weather started to deteriorate; and by now Mrs. Gladstone, no doubt to her relief, received only flowers at Tallyllyn, white lilacs, where indeed was a triumphal arch of the same. An immense crowd greeted Gladstone at Merthyr at 5.45, to which the Hero of Wales continually and speechlessly bowed for ten minutes, to cheers for the ‘Grand Old Man' and 'Liberation of Ireland. Mrs. Gladstone got her hands on a pot of tea and as ‘Land of my Fathers’ was fervently sung Mr. Gladstone appeared at the door of his saloon and toasted Merthyr with a cup of tea. Rain now fell steadily, notwithstanding which, crowds of people lined the route through Neath. By now Gladstone was quite speechless; and to a vociferous demand for ‘one word'; croaked, 'God bless you, sir’. By now also his saloon was filling with the local notabilities taken on en route: Lord Aberdare, Stuart Rendel, and Henry Richard prominently among them. At Neath, once more; ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. Salutes were fired at Landore junction by men from the works adjoining the line; and by 7.15 the train steamed with dignity into Swansea High Street Station. A ‘privileged number' of 400 were admitted to the station, while outside thousands packed in the steady drizzle. As Gladstone stepped onto the platform, ‘Land of my Fathers’ was once, more struck up, led by Mr. 'Mabon’ Abrahams, M.P. for Rhondda Valley. Gladstone’s party entered Sir Hussey’s landau, drawn, we are told, by two champing hays and with coachmen and footman in Singleton mourning livery, and drove off for their select dinner party at the Abbey along Alexandra Road and Walter Road. (An attempt to detach the horses was foiled by Capt. Colquboun’s alert constabulary.) The Abbey was no stranger to exalted guests. Only a few years earlier the Vivians had received the Prince and Princess of Wales on the occasion of the opening of the great new dock. The difference was that then Sarah Vivian, the formidable dowager, still lived; and

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 51 Hussey and Averil had much ado moving the old lady out and moving themselves in from neighbouring Park Wern in order to do the honours of the Abbey. By 1886 Sarah was dead and Sir Hussey and Lady Averil were at last able to call Singleton their own. The Gladstone visit in fact inaugurated Hussey Vivian’s long awaited, and, as it happened, rather brief, possession of his patrimony. Friday the 3rd of June was a day of recuperation. The day, as The Times correspondent noted with a certain malicious satisfaction, ‘broke unpropitiously, a heavy mist obscuring the Mumbles Head’ and the ‘interesting programme’ including a cruise in the bay, designed for Mr. Gladstone's entertainment had to be cancelled. Nevertheless, a dauntless and intrepid tourist, Mr. Gladstone prepared himself at Singleton by reading the Swansea guide with care. (Mrs. Gladstone struck Sir Hussey as being a’ sensible woman with a silly manner, but all there’.) After luncheon there was a drive to Oystermouth and a walk around the heads to Bracelet Bay. Gladstone was bullied by a Mumbles oysterwoman into eating oysters, a dish he detested; and that evening the Swansea United Choir rendered a selection of Welsh airs for the entertainment of the Singleton party on the Abbey terrace. Hussey and Lady Averil were undoubtedly disappointed with the Swansea weather but they put a brave face upon it. The music, at any rate, was ‘most lovely'. The following day, Saturday the 4th, was the great day at the Abbey; and perhaps indeed the greatest political day Swansea has ever seen. There was a general holiday in the district; all collieries and tinplate works were closed. Sixty special trains poured Liberal deputations in from all parts of Wales, and some indeed from Ireland. An immense procession formed in the town and, 'wearing green and white rosettes, marched out six deep linking their little fingers 'Yorkshire style' to Singleton, brave with bands, banners and flags, arriving at noon. They marched through the Abbey gate on the Mumbles Road and swung round across the great sward in front of the south terrace of the Abbey and marched out by the lower gate further down the road. Hussey noted in his diary: 'This was the day of the great demonstration when not less than 49,000 people marched past Mr. Gladstone. They took four hours and 25 minutes to pass. Nothing could have been more successful and Singleton looked its best.· I had taken a great responsibility and was very thankful that all went well. We dined 74 in the dining room and 20 in the Library’. On the platform on the south terrace, wearing a large leek in his right lapel, Gladstone took the salute surrounded by the flower of Welsh Liberalism: the Vivians, Rendel, Aberdare, Lord Kensington, Richard, and a clutch of Welsh members of Parliament. and representative notabilities. Fortified during the grand event by sandwiches and claret thoughtfully disguised in teacups, Gladstone was certainly impressed. He confided to his Diary: '12 -4½ the astonishing procession. Sixty thousand! Then spoke for nearly an hour. Dinner at 8. Near a hundred. Arrangements perfect. Spoke for nearly another hour’.· To others of his entourage it was a spectacle more sublime than astonishing. It was Wales on the march. To Henry Richard of Tregaron, M.P. for the Merthyr Boroughs since the great Welsh political resurgence of 1868, it was no less than just that: 'Our Welsh nation marching up from Edam and Bozrah!' The senior member for Merthyr was observed to bend his head and shake with emotion. Even the correspondent. of the Cardiff Western Mail conceded the unique grandeur of the phenomenon, in defiance of the editorial hostility of his paper. Clearly

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 52 he did not believe his editor’s insistence that there were only 10,000 marchers; and indeed he was put in mind of Plutarch's description of that epic march long ago, of the Cymry into Italy. The procession took on a kind of remorseless dynamic of its own: a battalion of 300 divines, the flower of Welsh Nonconformity, assumed that they could exert the privilege of the cloth and pause for a special tribute of their own; but they were disconcerted to find themselves haplessly swept along by the human tide. On the Sunday the Gladstones attended twice at St. Paul's, Sketty, the Vivian church built a generation before in the north-eastern corner of the Singleton estate; and where Hussey, as Lord Swansea, would be interred. In the morning service they were treated to a long and eloquently aggressive sermon by the Rev. Canon Smith, Vicar of Swansea, in defence of the Church Establishment in Wales, which Gladstone, a connoisseur, marked as ‘notable’. Gladstone received an Irish deputation on his return to the Abbey and afterwards, as one who piqued himself on his expertise as a landscaper, inspected the grounds and the gardens. Hussey was pleased that the Rhododendrons were looking ‘quite superb’. On Monday the 6th, again a general holiday in the district, was the opening of the Free Library and the presentation of the freedom of the borough; after 'looking in' at the Mayor's luncheon (there was some municipal chagrin at the brevity of this part of the proceedings) there was a drive to the Gower for tea at the Vivians’ model farm. On Tuesday the Gladstones left Singleton and set off for London. Hussey accompanied them for the demonstrations at Cardiff and Newport. ‘It really has been a "progress”!’, noted Gladstone; 'and an extraordinary one’. On the Wednesday Hussey recorded himself as ‘At home all day pulling myself together after all the excitement’. Hussey Vivian had every reason to reward himself with a holiday. He had pulled off a superb stroke of political impresarioship both for Singleton and for Swansea. It was a pity that Cardiff should be so grudging; but then, had not Cardiff only itself to blame? The Cardiff Corporation remained Unionist, and sturdily refused to present an address to Gladstone. And at the grand Singleton demonstration, a protest was delivered from the leading shipowners, merchants and professional men of Cardiff by the ‘ex-officers of the Cardiff Liberal Club’, denouncing the sentiments about Irish Home Rule presented to Gladstone in the name of Cardiff Liberalism and urging him not to be misled by 'fictitious appearances of a unanimity which does not exist in fact’. Possibly, had the ex-officers of the Cardiff Liberal Club wished to open old wounds and rub in salt, they might have drawn attention to the fact that Sir Hussey Vivian himself had voted against Irish Home Rule in 1886; and that only with some difficulty was he later constrained to conform to the extra-ordinary consensus on this issue among Liberals in what was, as Gladstone pointed out in wonder and admiration, the most Protestant country in Europe. I mention these circumstances to introduce what might be termed the unofficial dimension of the great event. Let us try to edge around behind the imposing scenes of public display. One thing that becomes quite evident as one pokes about amid the props and stage carpentry of this superb exercise in political theatre is that Cardiff was not the only place which looked upon Swansea and Singleton with a jealous and beady eye. There was a North Welsh

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 53 perspective on the matter, represented by that redoubtable Montgomeryshire duumvirate Stuart Rendel and his faithful henchman A. C. Humphreys-Owen, which viewed Sir Hussey’s performance as impresario with a certain- what shall one say?- critical detachment? Was not Sir Hussey, after all, for all that he was sound on disestablishment, rather Whiggish for a Welsh member of parliament in those post-third Reform Act days? And if the ex-officers of the Cardiff Liberal Club refrained from reminding the world of Sir Hussey’s shuffling on Home Rule, both The Times and the Western Mail certainly felt no such compunction, acidly contrasting Vivian's sad twists with the principled honesty of John Bright. Rendel had little enthusiasm for his role as super upon a stage set by Sir Hussey. His main concern was to secure maximum exposure for the G.O.M. under his auspices in the progress through Montgomeryshire. Randel handled the press; Montgomery-Owen was entrusted with the task of organising the railways particularly to make sure that rail arrangements were kept out of the hands of the Great Western and put into the hands of the much more amenable Cambrian and Mid-Wales companies. (Willy Gladstone, who handled the initial negotiations at Hawarden on his father’s behalf, remarked rather pointedly on the extra fatigue of time imposed thus on his aged fathers but then, what is a Hero for if not to be Heroic?) Thus, possibly, reasoned Rendel and his henchman. Not that Humphreys-Owen was particularly ruthless in exploiting his directorship in the Cambrian company. He bullied Conacher, the secretary; but even so, when he reported to Rendel on 26th May that the railway people were urging strongly that there should be no stop at Newtown – ‘they will take the train through quite slowly so that Mr. Go might be well seen’, thus allowing ten minutes at Llanidloes, ample time for presenting three or four addresses -he admitted his nervousness of criticism. ‘It will be politic to yield', he advised Rendel, ‘for I fancy there is in the air that I am using the railway for my politics’. Rendel was made of sterner stuff. No stopping at Newtown? What nonsense! ‘It will not do to throw Newtown over’, he admonished his henchman on the 27th. He was willing, indeed, to add another special on the route and charge £10 or £15 a head ’rather than cut too short the stoppages in Montgomeryshire’. Not only would there be a stop at Newtown, there would be a special platform designed for the better display of the sacred icon on its passage among the adoring faithful; those adoring faithful who sent Rendel to Westminster, and, after Rendel’s elevation to a peerage on Gladstone’s retirement, Humphreys-Owen in his place. Suitably chastened, Humphreys-Owen jumped on the bandwagon: ‘I have your telegram as to the Newtown Station. If the Llanidloes folk are sharp they will ask for the same’. The Llanidloes folk were sharp enough to get a stop, too, with Gladstone, ushered by a beaming Rendel, ‘just showing himself outside the station door’ on another specially built platform.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 54 A second object dear to Rendel was to make sure that that Jerusalem of Welsh Radicalism, Merthyr, should be piously catered for. Here, indeed, Sir Hussey’s Whiggery was too shamelessly exposed. He· expressed apprehensiveness that Gladstone's passing through Merthyr might set off a kind of chain reaction of explosive enthusiasm which would compromise the éclat of his Swansea production. Rendel was impatient. ‘In this Sir Hussey is too anxious.’ Doubtless Hussey would have preferred the route via respectable Brecon, that town of regimental garrisons and the Church. Perhaps he had reason. The original plan was to leave the train at Cefn and drive through Merthyr and rejoin the train at the station there. This plan was abandoned: would Mr. Gladstone ever have got to Swansea? As it was, we are assured that 'Excited men literally stormed the central platform’ at Merthyr as the train steamed out. Even Humphreys-Owen conceded that Merthyr had its dangers. ’You know what a Welsh crowd is. If they can get hold of him no power on earth would prevent their parading him all round the town and beside the fatigue to Mr. G. himself punctuality at the stations further South would be hopeless and his arrival at Swansea might be delayed 2 or 3 hours.’ Rendel was perhaps in two minds about this. There was no love lost for Sir Hussey: 'if he gets a chance, he may put a spoke in our wheel’. On the other hand, he could hardly avoid appearing in the Swansea show, and, if so, being in the official Gladstone party at Singleton would be much the most convenient and graceful mode of playing his part. The problem here was that the beady eye he trained upon Sir Hussey was only too keenly reciprocated. Rendel was dubiously persona grata at Singleton. This put Rendel in a quandary as to whether to continue in Gladstone’s train to Swansea. ‘I suppose this will be wise’, he confided to Humphreys-Owen, ’but it will be a great nuisance especially as I suspect Sir Hussey Vivian may not invite me until the Saturday’. It was not until 29th May that a relieved Rendel could report ‘I am to be at Singleton on Thursday’. The public decencies would be observed. Swansea, the 1886 cartoon by ‘Spy’ in Vanity Fair of Sir Hussey Vivian. Source: Abe Books. The ‘anxious’ Vivian would prove Rendel’s nemesis over the tour.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 55 There is a second level ‘behind the scenes' probably best expressed in a remark made by Humphreys-Owen to Rendel during the 1886 elections on the issue of Home Rule for Ireland: ‘We must go to the country on the Gladstone ticket, say as little as we can about Ireland and as much about Church and Land’. Yet what is so clearly apparent in Gladstone’s utterances on the way to Swansea and in Swansea in 1887 is that he said as much as possible about Ireland and as little as possible about Welsh disestablishment and Welsh land. To the massed throng at Singleton he had this to say about disestablishment: ‘I am going to be very stinted and jejune indeed on this subject with you’. And stinted and jejune indeed he was. On tithes, at a time when waves of riots were sweeping through rural Wales, especially in Gladstone’s own northern diocese of St. Asaph: 'l am not going to enter this question, but what I have to say is this: it is extremely urgent and should be discussed'. In general, to the glittering dinner party that evening: ‘I have a great horror of premature decisions’. And to his diary: ‘Got through a most difficult business as well as I could expect’. The Times, after denouncing Gladstone’s ‘coarse flattery of a spurious and belated nationalism', took the point very accurately. Gladstone was ‘skating on thin ice. He has not fallen, and he has not broken through and he deserves our admiration for his cleverness’. The bitterly hostile Western Mail rejoiced indeed that all that the ‘Wales of Dissent and disintegration' got was to have their objects postponed till the Greek Kalends. Even the loyal Swansea Cambrian remarked on Gladstone skipping ‘lightly and gracefully over a wide extent of ground', with his ‘wonderful mastery of circumlocutory eloquence’, ‘not leaving many clearly-defined footprints to indicate the way he had passed’. ‘We hope that Mr. Gladstone means more than he clearly expressed at the Singleton dinner table.’ Looking at this episode It is not too difficult to discern what most of its component participants were ‘up to’. Hussey Vivian was setting the seal on his grandeur in Swansea and Glamorgan, consummated logically by his peerage when Gladstone next returned to office. Likewise the intrepid Montgomeryshire duumvirate were ingenuous of motive. In the maximizing of the benefits for Wales of Welsh strength within British Liberalism it is easy to -what the Welsh Liberal politicians and Liberal Associations were up to. It is easy enough to discern what the Welsh crowds were up to, as they converted their chapel, radical and national emotions into a hero-worshipping response to the first major British statesman who had, in his turn, responded sympathetically and encouragingly to Welsh grievances and Welsh aspirations. But what was the Grand Old Man up to? As in all attempts to penetrate his motives several layers of complexity are involved, usually, as with geological faults, extruding or intruding upon each other. On the surface, there was no stint of general sympathy and vague encouragement. ‘Wales is not only a nationality, it has grievances.’. Beneath this, Gladstone's purpose of converting the energies of Welsh nationalism and Welsh grievance into tractive power for the benefit of Irish nationalism and Irish grievance was not lost on the clutch of Welsh politicians and notabilities who clustered busily about him. They were recharging the batteries of their prestige, and reputation by public proximity to the most powerful source of political electricity; at the same time they were shrewdly bargaining with a fellow politician from the unprecedented position of advantage which the elections of 1886 had conferred upon Wales. In choosing to undertake

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 56 the progress to Swansea in 1887 Gladstone acknowledged this great practical fact. The ‘natural' Liberal majority widely assumed to be inherent in the third Reform Act of 1884 was shattered in 1886. Gladstonian, or Home Rule, Liberalism was thin on the ground in the English heartland of the British Isles. It had been superseded in Ireland by the Nationalist party. Its strength remained in the 'Celtic fringe' of Great Britain, and nowhere was that strength manifested more triumphantly than in Wales. As Gladstone publicly flattered Swansea, he privately calculated what he could get and what he would have to give for it. The flattery, it should be said, was not, in The Times’s word, ‘coarse’. He pronounced fervently on 'this beautiful district’ and this 'marvellous development of industry less beautiful perhaps (laughter) than the rest of the district’. Perhaps it was fortunate that he could press his notorious passion for porcelain into service. 'Although Swansea had suffered in the battle of life’, he told the audience at the Library opening, ‘and Distribution of parliamentary constituencies' party political representation following the General Election of 1885 Blue: Conservative. Yellow: Liberal. Dark Green: Irish Nationalist. Light Yellow/Green: Crofters Land League. University constituencies: until 1950 U.K. universities elected their own Members of Parliament Note the near complete dominance of the Liberal Party in Wales. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 57 had some defacements and mutilations on some of its beauties, yet …she had not lost her love for the beautiful manufacture of porcelain. I assure you that I had not forgotten that manufacture, and I call upon my kind host and hostess both to bear witness that one of the first things I asked after I reached Singleton was whether they had any good specimens of Swansea porcelain. I made it one of the positive conditions of my stay that I should be allowed to see and admire the specimens’. The tactical consequences in 1887 of the facts of 1886 are sufficiently evident in Gladstone’s pronouncements at Swansea. But what is not at all evident, I think, is a deeper layer of strategic explanation. of Gladstone's motives, deriving from a perspective which embraces almost the whole span of Gladstone’s career. For he was I believe, fundamentally a very consistent man; there is a pattern of continuity about him which transcends particularities and especially which transcends the division between his earlier Toryism and his later Liberalism. Gladstone’s was, I would argue, a singularly designed career. Underlying it was an extraordinarily intense religiosity which he translated into both social or philanthropic and public or political action. At its core was his own early Evangelical experience of election and redemption; and his life was in essence a series of efforts on both the smallest and largest scales to offer various kinds of redemption. His work to ‘rescue’ prostitutes. From their fallen state is well known; but needs to be set in a larger context. which included in the 1840s the Thames coal-whippers and ballast heavers; which commenced in the 1850s to embrace a new notion of what, at Manchester in 1853 he saluted with a frisson of novel excitement, 'the people’. His earliest public vocation in the 1830s and 1840s had been a mission to redeem the State from Christian consciencelessness and reintegrate it with a Church redeemed from sordid Erastianism. Having convinced himself of the hopelessness of that enterprise he transferred his vocation into a fulfilment of Peel's financial policy on the grand and crucial moral mechanism of a new prosperity and a new reconciliation of classes, inaugurated by his 1853 budget and completed, despite the. interruption of the Crimean Var and Palmerston, in the 1860s. His interpretation of the politics of the 1860s was that that grand design had succeeded: beneficent executive power had evoked a corresponding public response of confidence and deference. That confidence and deference could be mobilized for further great strokes of executive potency by harnessing its energies in an expanded parliamentary franchise. For that purpose he needed to camouflage himself as a Liberal, because it was only in that form that executive power could have scope. The important thing that needs attention called to it is Gladstone's confidence as a wielder of power, a harnesser of public energy, and a successful promoter of issues. Of course Gladstone's intense religiosity, especially its Evangelical residuum, made it perfectly natural for him to see himself, however unworthy, as an agent of Divine providence. It is easy to discount his innumerable claims in this respect as pious verbiage, eccentricity, fanaticism, or hypocrisy. He was, I believe, perfectly sincere and perfectly serious. There is no way otherwise of satisfactorily interpreting his intellectual obsessions with Bishop Butler as the great guide in the conduct of the worldly warfare of righteousness against evil; and of Homer as a secular teacher of the great lessons of human nature who yet had a divine legation as the pre-cursor and complement of the Jewish dispensation. ‘Why have I not come by this time

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 58 habitually to recognise my proper and peculiar exercise’, he demanded of his Diary on 21st March 1841: he had ‘not yet got that higher natural theology, which reads and applies to practice design in all the forms of incident that beset and accompany our daily course’. It was his pertinacity in this quest together with his immense natural energy and talents which made Gladstone so formidable. By the end of his life Gladstone was convinced that he had trained himself in the higher natural theology to read and perceive the great truth about the relationship between design and himself: There is a providence that shapes our ends: Rough-hew them how we may. I think that no one can be more deeply penetrated with these words, than I am or ought to be. The whole of my public and exoteric life has been shaped as to its ends by me, scarcely rough hewn by me. The mode by which he translated higher natural theology into political action Gladstone described thus: if Providence had entrusted him with a ‘striking gift', it has been shown, he thought ‘at certain political junctures, in what may be termed appreciation of the general situation and its result'. Gladstone insisted that this must not be confused with a mere reading of public opinion, 'founded upon the discernment that it has risen to a certain height needful for a given work, like a tide'. Gladstone saw it rather as both a much higher and a much more manipulative accreditation: 'It is an insight into the facts of particular eras, and their relations one to another, which generates in the mind a conviction that the materials exist for forming a public opinion, and for directing it to a particular end’. This was indeed a doctrine of supreme political confidence. It subsumes Peelite executive arrogance; it presumes deferential manipulated popular response to imperious initiatives. We tend to think of Gladstone’s later career in the 1880s and 1890s as a failure: glorious or inglorious. Gladstone himself saw it in no such light: especially as he reviewed the phenomena so astonishingly furnished by Swansea in 1887. His record of success, after all, was in its own way no less phenomenally astonishing: he cited a series of 'political junctures’ in which he interpreted his 'insight' as playing a crucially directive and decisive role. The first was his inaugurating his second vocation in his budgetary evangel of 1853. The response, he thereby evoked made him leader of the Liberal party and eventually prime minister. His second insight was to go for Irish Church disestablishment in 1868. On the popular energies generated by that issue he powered his ministry of 1868-74. He failed to find a new insight in 1874; but the public found him one by itself, without benefit of his insight, over the Bulgarian issue of 1876: so well by now had it been trained. Gratefully Gladstone took over that foreign affairs vocation and led it to conspicuous success in 1880. The third great insight he claimed for himself was the imperative of going for Irish Home Rule in 1886. There was no doubt whatever in Gladstone’s mind in Swansea in June 1887 that, despite the split in the Liberal party in 1886, he would succeed once more as he had never yet failed to succeed since the 1850s.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 59 Yet, of course, we know that Gladstone failed, and that his Irish Home Rule insight had more in common with the failure of his first, State-Church vocation of the 1830s and 1840s, than of the grand series of intermediate triumphs. What Gladstone crucially over-estimated was his capacity for manipulation. He should perhaps have learned the lesson of 1876: a public opinion had learned to come to its own conclusions. Gladstone translated his reading of this instructive capacity of the ‘masses’ to act virtuously in 1876 in a great controverted public question as against the narrow selfishness of the 'classes' into his own capacity, by means of the instrument under his control, the Liberal party, to apply mass moral energy to the next great, necessary political purpose of Home Rule. But, in fact, Gladstone misread the signs. He had no insight into the facts of the era; there were not enough materials available to be shaped and directed by him for the desired end, his appreciation of the general situation was inaccurate. Nor did the great march, of the 'Welsh nation' at Swansea in 1887, like Plutarch's account of the march of the Cymry into Italy, or like Israel marching up from Edom and Bozrah, inspire the English and the Scots to go and do likewise. When, in 1893-94, his last 'insight' told him that the materials existed for forming a public opinion against the House of Lords for its blocking of the second Irish Home Rule Bill, neither his government nor his party believed him. Swansea in 1887 represented, as far as Gladstone was concerned, a great miscalculation. It was not so as far as Wales was concerned. But Wales may very well have helped very materially to deceive Gladstone or rather, to encourage Gladstone to deceive himself. If the most Protestant people in Europe was prepared to accept the justice and necessity of Irish Home Rule, what was not possible? What was not possible was precisely the transmuting of celebration of Welsh nationhood into anything wider and larger. What Gladstone wanted essentially to do was to gear the energies of the great public of 1876 and 1880, rewarded by a further franchise extension in 1884, in with the energies evidenced in Swansea in 1887. But the cogs were of different shapes and would not mesh. We are left, then, with the sublime spectacle of the mighty army of righteousness marching up from Edom and Bozrah- which is to say, from the Mumbles Road. We are left, above all, with the irony of the inner, mutual misconceptions between the splendid mass of the saluters and the intrepid Modern St George and the Dragon by William Mecham, a cartoon of Lord Salisbury as St George slaying the Dragon of Home Rule (portrayed as Gladstone) in the St Stephen’s Review, 1888. Source: Cornell University

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 62 The Consequences of War, by Peter Paul Rubens, oil on canvas, 1637-8, Palazzo Pitti, Florence 1. One of the themes that emerged in different forms and in different places in the philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century was the recognition that ‘meaning’ is a social project and a social product. Wittgenstein’s famous dismantling of the idea of a private language – still quite commonly misunderstood as a simple attack on the idea of interiority itself – is no more than an analysis of how we cannot decide for ourselves what counts as a valid, recognizable move in our speech; even if we are ‘talking to ourselves’, we have to posit continuities and structures, whose only possible source is the structured language we are always already hearing as participants in a linguistic world. From a very different intellectual standpoint, the defence of tradition – and even of ‘prejudice’ – by Hans-Georg Gadamer insisted that the skills of understanding were always learned: to be inducted into any active human exchange is to absorb perspectives that are taken for granted, pre-judgments that we as individuals do not construct for ourselves. 19 To put it succinctly, we cannot teach ourselves to speak; and if that is the case, then there is always in our claims to knowing and understanding an irreducible element of dependence. We are born into a process we have not initiated. We may stand back from it, critique it, seek to change its protocols and boundaries, but we cannot begin without it. Grasping this is grasping that – at the very least – any kind of social agency, any human activity that is necessarily shared, requires that words and gestures be mutually recognizable, that we know what counts as a move in the game, what is likely to produce a response that is intelligible in turn to me as speaker and so continues to enable collaborative action. That we talk with each other and that we identify actions that can only be performed in collaboration are inseparably part of what has to be said about human identity as such; and both point to the inescapability of learning a ‘grammar’ of action, and acknowledging that our emergence as human agents – which includes our emergence as self-reflective subjects capable of scrutinizing and revising what we say – assumes a structured world of meaning. John Haldane puts it neatly: 19 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second revised edition, translation ed. Joel Weisheimer and Donald C. Marshall, London and New York, Continuum 1989.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 63 ‘The very idea that we can conceive of ourselves as agents entering into a scheme of political association independently of knowing ourselves (however inarticulately) to have a particular, socially-constituted nature is incoherent. As incoherent, indeed, as supposing that one could think of oneself as entering into a commercial transaction as a banker independently of locating oneself within a pre-existing order of financial exchange.’ 20 What is more, we learn this ‘socially-constituted nature’ by a variety of means, many of them more or less tacit. We pick up cues from custom and story, from what T.S. Eliot called ‘forms of festivity’21 , the rhythms of a calendar, even the conventions of a cuisine22, just as much as from explicit instruction in ideals or proprieties. And in this connection, it is clear enough that learning how to understand is precisely not a matter of absorbing universal rules of reasoning: circles of recognition and recognisability gradually widen, press at their boundaries, advance or retreat, in and through the contingent tensions of actual encounter. Think of the common experience of discovering how to decode physical gestures in an unfamiliar setting: what is a harmless hand movement in one setting turns out to be seriously offensive in another; a shake of the head may indicate assent in one context and negation in another. A recognizable ‘grammar’ comes to light only gradually, as a result of attention and willingness to spend time being taught. All this is to say that if the notoriously slippery word ‘culture’ has a central area of definition, it has something to do with these meanings we do not make for ourselves, Gadamer’s ‘prejudices’; and ‘tradition’ is the process of transmitting such meanings, the pedagogy of recognition. As Gadamer and his followers have been at pains to underline, this has nothing to do with somehow privileging inherited wisdom over innovative thinking. It is a serious intellectual warning against the fantasy that we can definitively locate a thinking-place free from pre-judgement and the givenness of certain social determinants. Effective and adequate interpretation begins with the acknowledgement of this, with a self-questioning that informs our questioning of the system we stand in.23 In slightly different terms, we need to be aware of what it is in what we have received that allows (or indeed mandates) the challenge we may put to that received set of meanings; our 20 John Haldane, Practical Philosophy:Ethics, Socierty and Culture, Exeter, Imprint Academic 2009, p. 279. 21 T.S.Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, London, Faber and Faber 1948,p.16, n.1 22 Eliot, ibid., e.g. p.51. 23 Gadamer, op.cit., pp.305-41, esp. 320-5. T.S.Eliot, by Wyndham Lewis, 1938, Oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery. Eliot (1888-1965), poet, literary critic and publisher; his celebration of cultural tradition was a response to modernity's fractures.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 64 critique is never generated or delivered from ‘nowhere’, from a given or self-evident territory of universal rationality. The last seventy-odd years in philosophy have thus left us with a rehabilitation of tradition in some quarters, at least to the extent of a radical questioning of certain myths of universal rationality. Alasdair MacIntyre’s vastly influential work24 has familiarized the English-speaking world with the conceptual weaknesses of such mythologies and made a powerful case for rethinking our theories of knowledge and reasoning so as to do better justice to the material and historical inheritance of reasoning practices. But does this mean we are left with no general criteria for what counts as reasoning itself? Pope Benedict XVI argued on several occasions25 that the malaise of modern Europe was largely to do with the abandonment of an ideal of reason that transcended cultural specificity or partisan interest; does the rehabilitation of tradition condemn us to relativism? Is the price of a new seriousness about tradition and inherited belonging an opening of the door to a chaos of identity politics and a comprehensive postmodern pluralism – with the unwelcome implication that stability can come only by way of victory in a contest of coercive power? The current era of ‘culture wars’ and assiduously-fostered scepticism about public truth is one in which we might well wonder whether the retrieval of tradition simply entrenched and canonized a violent tribalism. In this lecture, I hope to suggest that this negative conclusion is not the only way of reading the possibilities opened up by the philosophies of Gadamer or MacIntyre. Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the debates about tradition and reason suggests another perspective, and a way back to some sort of ‘universalism’ about the human condition; and a family of theological reflections on tradition can fill this out further, helping us to see that the contemporary configurations of what tradition and culture mean have to be questioned very seriously. And understanding the flaws in these contemporary configurations may help us see that certain modern appeals to tradition are part of the problem rather than the solution in recovering what ‘tradition’ once meant and why it matters. 24 From the publication in 1981 of After Virtue, (University of Notre Dame Press) and in 1988 of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press) to the second volume of his Selected Essays published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press, Ethics and Politics. 25 Most famously and notoriously in the ‘Regensburg address’ of 2006; see James V. Schall, The Regensburg Lecture, South Bend Indiana, St Augustine’s Press 2007. Photographs of Winston Churchill: left: courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, right: courtesy of the Mirror Group. Hand gestures which can be interpreted differently- depending on the culture. Churchill did the V sign occasionally with palm facing inwards as well as , more regularly, outwards.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 65 2. In 1973, Paul Ricoeur published two substantial essays, overlapping a good deal in their argumentation: an article on ‘Ethics and Culture’26 and a somewhat better known and longer piece on ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology’27. Taken together, they offer a particularly acute and suggestive intervention in the Gadamer-Habermas debate about the relation of tradition and critique – or rather the relation between two idioms of philosophical analysis, one conceiving the philosophical task as essentially the ‘participatory’ taking forward of an always presupposed human conversation, the other insisting on the priority of exposing the distortions that routinely and covertly pervade and frustrate universal communication28. Of special interest for the subject we are looking at here is Ricoeur’s parsing of what underlies the ‘critique’ idiom, the exposure of interests which undermine claims to straightforward truth telling. Ricoeur summarizes29 Habermas’s identification of the three kinds of interest that are at work in human claims to knowledge. ‘Instrumental interest’ is the particular kind of selectivity that operates in our reading of our environment so as to deliver effective control over the ambient processes within which human agency occurs. ‘Practical interest’ is to do with how we set out to acquire a knowledge that will enable the communication of norms and expectations, the maintenance of certain sorts of human continuity in a way that allows those involved in the exchange to ‘own’ for themselves the ongoing processes of society at whatever level. In academic terms, these two interests correspond roughly to the work of the natural sciences and the traditional humanities, and there is no great gulf between Gadamerian and Habermasian accounts thus far. The key divergence comes with the identification of the third kind of interest, the ‘emancipatory’, which belongs to the critical social sciences. This is the interest that focuses on the ways in which power distorts communication: it is, you could say, an interest in the idea of ‘interest’ itself, ‘interest’ as the intrusion into communicative relationships of an agenda that has to do with advantage and privilege – ultimately with the control of other human agents, not only of environmental processes. It is generated ‘at the same level where work, power and discourse are intertwined’30; and this is the complex of intellectual phenomena designated by the term ‘ideology’. Critical philosophy thus enjoins a suspicion of alleged consensus and inherited conceptualities; in relation to any claim about ‘given’ truths, it will ask cui bono? Whose interest is served? Modernity is generally predicated – with more and more explicitness – on the priority of this emancipatory questioning; it encourages us to see inherited thinking and custom, tradition, as no longer neutral. It is either a necessary support or ‘a form of violence exercised against our thinking, which prevents us from advancing to maturity of judgement.’31 The problem is that if we come to see what is inherited as intrinsically 26 Paul Ricoeur, Political and Social Essays by Paul Ricoeur, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien, Athens Ohio, Ohio University Press 1974, pp. 243-70. 27 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and translated John B. Thomspon, Cambridge University Press 1981, pp. 63-100. Some of the same territory is also covered in ‘Science and Ideology’ (originally published in 1974), ibid. 222-46. 28 ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique…’, p.99: ‘The first [sc.hermeneutics]…is turned towards a consensus which precedes us and, in this sense, which exists; the second anticipates a future freedom in the form of a regulative idea which is not a reality but an ideal, the ideal of unrestricted and unconstrained communication.’ Ref.G/H debate text. 29 ‘Ethics and Culture’,pp. 254-7; cf ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique…’, pp.80-3. 30 ‘Ethics and Culture’, pp.255-6. 31 Ibid., p.246.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 66 ‘violent’, we are left with the impossible imperative of constructing meanings that are untouched by dependence – which, strictly speaking, would entail meanings that were beyond language (Nietzsche said, we might recall, that God was not dead so long as we still used grammar…). If there is no legitimate authority anywhere, there is no reliable path of learning. And this leaves us with a human subject condemned to the godlike task of creation out of nothing; a godlikeness indistinguishable from total impotence. This is not a sustainable intellectual position, and cannot be what Habermas, or critical philosophy in general, really intends; so Ricoeur interrogates critique and emancipation a bit further. It does not make sense, he notes32, to try to ‘explain without understanding’: human interaction, crucially human linguistic/cultural interaction, is not an object whose mechanisms we can observe from outside. We cannot reduce emancipatory interest to some form of instrumental interest. Emancipation is an ethical ideal: it begins in a judgement of value, the value of human communication itself, and as such it is significantly different from a valuation grounded in instrumental judgements of functional success or practical problem-solving33. And that in turn entails a valuation of the transmission of perception, habit and so on, the processes by which we are inducted into the sphere of mutual recognisability which is human community. Critique devoid of this valuation of transmitted understanding is ‘empty and anemic’, says Ricoeur34; worse, it itself becomes an ideology, privileging the systematically repressive reign of functionalism, the tyranny of technological modernity. The regulative ideal of open communication which Habermas looks to is one that takes for granted that communication is a human good . Ideology is an ethical problem because it impedes active common life – because it impedes tradition, we might provocatively say. We know something of what ‘communicative action’ means, and so why it is important to resist what corrupts and limits it. And in the background is a point Ricoeur does not make in any very explicit way, but which may turn out to be of significance for this discussion later on: communication is the means by which we are made actively human, and unrestricted communication is important because it allows the exchange of what a more overtly religious discourse would call gift and communion. 32 Ibid., p.265 33 Ibid., pp. 266-7 34 Ibid., p.266 Photo of Pope Benedict XVI: defender of objective reason and relativism's foe, courtesy of Teen Vogue Magazine.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 67 And the complementary insight that Ricoeur notes in hermeneutical philosophy is that, characteristically, interpretation is not a simple process of unquestioning reception because its objects are – in the widest sense – ‘textual’.35 Traditions articulate themselves and become objects of reflection to themselves in the various symbolic codes in which they work and live. Meaning is distanced from individual authors or speakers, it is mediated in cultural production and so becomes a site for debate: the truth, rather than being a direct, unassailable presence, is something glimpsed, pointed to, contested, no less than it is affirmed and trusted. And the text (remembering that various forms of conscious and living communicative practice are included in the term) becomes a world into which the subject is invited so as to ‘stake’ and articulate a linguistic identity, a presence as subject by way of what Ricoeur memorably designates as ‘imaginative variations of the ego’36. The point is that the hermeneutical exercise is clearly involved in a kind of critical practice. The ‘suspicious’ critical subject is reminded that it is itself open to suspicion because it is located, addressed, ‘invested’ (to borrow Gillian Rose’s favoured term), as it seeks to engage with other located and invested subjects; critique is turned on itself, not in a destructive way but in the sense that the critical subject has to come to terms with being both questioned and invited. We are close here to MacIntyre’s insistence that a well-functioning tradition ‘is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.’37 Tradition, in communicating vision, perspective, priority and so forth, in claiming authority to shape the understanding of new human situations as they arise, does not foreclose but generates argument because it provides the tools for the speaking subject to act. 35 ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique…’, pp. 91-5; cf ‘Ethics and Culture’, pp.258-60. 36 ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique…’, p.94. 37 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p.206. Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), of the universities of Paris and Chicago, gets ready for further scrutiny of cultural traditions. Photograph courtesy of the Gifford Lectures.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 68 There is no interpretative practice that is not in some degree inflected by what Ricoeur calls ‘ethical distance’ for what has been inherited.38 This or that current formulation is being scrutinized for its adequacy in transmitting a life-giving truth, not simply repeated; and in the process, the subject determines and risks a specific place to speak from, which is not identical with any other. The ‘critical’ subject is first (like every subject) a learner; the interpreting and participating subject is inescapably an innovator. Ricoeur’s contribution to the debate is to highlight two fundamental facts – that hermeneutics and critique belong on a spectrum, and that ethical and normative elements are built in to the discussion. The ‘emancipatory’ worry about distorting agendas is already present in hermeneutical practice if it knows its business, simply because the interpreter’s investment in unimpeded and authentic transmission within a historical community requires a sharp ear for axes being ground that would fracture the community by privileging one part of it and silencing or disenfranchising another. If both the hermeneutical and the critical thinker assume that communal life is the essential context for the project of maturing human subjecthood, both are assuming an anthropology in which it matters supremely to attend to whatever unbalances and divides that communal life and entrenches inequalities of participation. A concern with tradition is likely to see such participation as in some ways intrinsically differentiated, even hierarchical, while the perspective of ideological critique will be more deeply invested in the ideal of undifferentiated access. There are major theoretical issues to be argued in this connection. But the key factor is the assumption of an irreducibly common human project; and, following on from that, such a formulation implies that a basic question about the health and (in the fullest sense) rationality of a society will be that of trust: the project into which we are invited is one that is meant to work in everyone’s interest, in the sense at least that it is seen as what makes possible a just and appropriate share in common goods and common good. Absent this anthropology it is impossible to assume trust. If we cannot take it for granted that either the specific human neighbour or the social institution can be seen as invested in a common project whose aim is some sort of shared flourishing, the obvious imperative is to defend my interest against a potentially hostile neighbour or social institution. Ricoeur, as we have seen, identified the instrumentalizing tendencies of technological and capitalist modernity as the prevailing ideological force of late modernity; nearly fifty years on from the writing of these essays, we can recognize his prescience, but might carry the analysis a bit further. The triumph of the instrumental interest has fostered a model of human subjecthood as a disconnected sequence of problematic needs to be met or gaps to be filled: the subject identifies a lack, and the system moves into operation to supply it. ‘Consumerism’ is one word for this, but perhaps too weak a designation, as the issue is not simply one of marketized commodities – or more accurately, perhaps, it is about the perception of any and every lack in terms of marketized commodities39, discrete, purchasable solutions to discrete kinds of wanting. Habermasian critique was envisaged as a scrutiny of social history, forces and phenomena that could lay bare interests which prevented critical participation in a common task; but how is it to cope with an ideology that assumes the irreducible conflict of interest to be the fundamental truth of social life? 38 ‘Ethics and Culture’, p. 268. 39 An influential recent discussion in Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2012.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 69 3. If the social fabric overall fails to generate trust, people will look all the more eagerly for affiliations that will provide the context of mutual recognition which enables them to grow and thrive; affiliations whose relation to a wider social or global nexus will be varied, to put it mildly. This is the point at which – for example – nationalisms become not merely affirmations of the value and human resourcefulness of specific local inheritance but ideologies invested in heady dramas of innocence, purity, victimhood and the like. The local, the particular, has to be not only valuable but beyond critique; and as such it is considered as needing unquestioning and uncompromising defence against any suggestion that its history is morally shadowed (like other histories). The pattern is reproduced in many forms of identity politics when they move beyond the pressure for just reparation and inclusion into a territory where any uncertainty about the exact vehicles for such reparation and inclusion is seen as treachery and any questioning or delay is cast as actively and maliciously threatening. The effect of this is, inevitably a further fragmenting of identity and an intensified hostility between different sub-groups within a marginal or subaltern population; an effect which can consolidate precisely the unjust or violent status quo which is being challenged. And here is one of the central paradoxes that needs naming and considering. Faced with the twin problem of an instrumentalized public sphere, with the alienation attendant on it, and a Balkanised landscape of competing interests, there is a temptation to reach for a reaffirmation of ‘tradition’ that will once again connect individual lives and experiences with a common social project operating in accord with universal and unchallengeable law. But ‘reaching for’ a tradition is precisely what those inhabiting a tradition do not do; they inherit a perspective which they continue to accept as trustworthy; they do not survey a field of options and decide on one. ‘Traditionalism’ as an elective position is quintessentially modern in that it presupposes a prior distance from any specific traditional scheme. It becomes an ideology, a scheme of ideas and perspectives whose purpose is to defend a particular interest; as such it is in part designed to tell you who cannot be trusted or recognized. It must present itself as a conscious bid for certain sorts of power or liberty of expression, and so must also create the narrative of a disempowerment or repression against which it revolts (hence the enormous rhetorical weight of discourse around ‘freedom of speech’ in current debate). But to the extent that it sees fidelity to tradition as a choice whose possibility has to be secured, it presupposes that the subject – and the community of subjects – exists first in an indeterminate and contested space in which solidarity has to be created and its terms defined. This, though, is tantamount to saying that in certain crucial respects we can and do exist in a pre-symbolic context40, in that we need to articulate, define and rationalize the symbolique by which we live and understand; and this is precisely the assumption that is made in the critique of tradition that has characterized so much of intellectual modernity. In other words, the deliberate adoption of a tradition or the defence of a ‘traditionalist’ stance as one amongst others, accepts the premise of tradition-critique. It is a mirror-image of what it purportedly refuses. This does not mean that ‘traditional’ convictions or perspectives are impossible to hold in the contemporary intellectual world. As we shall see, a certain suspicion of self-conscious traditionalism generates some hermeneutical questions that leave open a number of constructive possibilities. But those possibilities will not come to light so long as we are held captive by the model of simple binary conflict between modernity and a tradition that is 40 See, for example, Ricoeur’s essay on ‘Science and Ideology’ (Hermneneutics and the Human Sciences, pp.222-246), pp.237-8.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 70 imagined as antithetical in every point to modernity. Dissolving this binary in the terms in which it is usually presented these days – dissolving the notion of a ‘culture war’ – involves some further thinking about a theme we have already touched on, the learned character of our convictions and the reflexive feedback that makes tradition an active and formative force. We have noted how Ricoeur highlights those elements in the Gadamerian picture of tradition which emphasize that a living tradition continues to generate new problems for itself and is defined by a shared history of debate as much as by a set of fixed positions.41 One of the oddest aspects of the current landscape of dramatic polarities is the failure to enquire about how new positions are actually arrived at and what authority they appeal to; and when such questions are pursued, the map will look rather different. A number of neuralgic problems will appear as conflicts internal to a shared discourse rather than a collision of self-contained intellectual worlds. We can illustrate this by looking at some of the issues currently debated with a good deal of heat and often treated as tribal markers in the supposed culture wars. The bitter controversies over the rights of persons to determine their gender identity and to have a voice in shaping the social conventions that would guarantee recognition of their self-determination have brought to light a number of apparent polarities, not least among feminist theorists and advocates.42 One strand of feminist thinking has resisted the case for regarding transgendered individuals as having the gender recognition in the public sphere that they argue for, on the grounds that the historic struggles of biologically female/cisgendered women for safe spaces in a threatening world of masculine dominance and violence are undermined by the creation of spaces that can be occupied by formerly male-identifying individuals. Some have also argued that the linking of gender to socially-sanctioned conventions of behaviour, dress and so on reverses the historic feminist concern to separate gender from social convention and expectation and implies a reversion to the ‘gender essentialism’ that feminism historically sought to escape . At the same time, the movement for fuller recognition of transgendered - and non-binary – individuals has been opposed by more conservative voices arguing that the biological givenness of gender identity cannot be overturned by individual human choice; religious voices on this side of the debate have spoken about a repudiation of the fundamental order established by the Creator. In response, advocates of the recognition of gender-fluidity of various kinds have presented the case in terms of two basic ethical concerns – the liberty of the individual to adopt whatever kind of public presence does not create unmanageable inner tension or cost, and the duty of society not only to accept the self-descriptions of minorities on their own terms rather than imposing roles and restrictions, but also to protect such minorities from demeaning and threatening speech or behaviour on the part of others. What might strike someone reviewing the controversy is the degree to which it illustrates how a single discourse generates sharply diverse questions and conclusions. Feminism identifies at least two basic ethical concerns as essential to a just and participatory social order: no group or class of human beings should be at risk simply in virtue of their identity; and the biological givens of any individual’s identity should not determine what is socially possible for them. The force of feminist argument, especially since the beginning of the last quarter of the last century, lay in the abundant demonstration of modern Western society’s failure to honour these ethical concerns where women were concerned. But those concerns inexorably press further: what if the ‘identity’ in question is not straightforwardly and exhaustively correlated 41 Along with MacIntyre’s comments on this, see the classic discussion by W.B. Gallie of ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’ in his lecture of that title, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56, 1956, pp.167-198. 42 A recent helpful overview of the social and practical, not only the ‘ideological’, issues is Ben Vincent, Non-Binary Genders: Navigating Communities, Identities and Healthcare, Bristol, Policy Press 2020.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 71 with the ‘biological givens’? and what if the separation between biology and potential social role is – so to speak – reversible, so that the public performance of gender need not depend on original biological determination? Even as regards the religious criticism of gender-fluid discourse, the issues are not quite as completely clear as might be thought. The givenness of the body’s identity and the acceptance of materiality have never been understood simply as a refusal of therapeutic interventions which seek to remedy profound tension or cost, to recall the terms used a little while ago; the case has to be made for regarding gender particularity as the one area in which no intervention is permissible or defensible to mitigate suffering. The point is that the evolution of this debate shows the way in which moral traditions push at their own boundaries as the implications of how to implement the tradition become clearer over time. The fundamental convictions do not in fact alter; the disagreement is not about the principles but about whether this or that possible implementation so undermines the principle that it effectively moves into a different moral landscape. To take the most familiar objection to newer developments in this discussion, does the opening up of exclusively ‘female’ spaces (restrooms, female prisons) or opportunities (women’s sports) to transgendered individuals undermine the hard-won protection of biologically female individuals? Or again, does the recognition of a self-identified (but not originally biologically female) woman somehow trivialise the specific physical constraints and struggles of the biologically female? But to cast the questions in those terms is to acknowledge that there is a set of goals that both parties can recognize; it does not prescribe an answer in general terms, but it permits a conversation to continue that does not assume a destructive or non-moral purpose on either side. By looking at the process by which people reach conclusions on the basis of recognizable principles, the debate can be configured as something other than a collision of completely alien moral universes. It may even be transformed into a debate about the actual resolution of specific challenges or injustices rather than a global war. A second issue that could be analysed in a similar but distinct way is the question of immigration policy in the United Kingdom. Here too the debate seems at first to be cast in the language of a competition between ‘total’ moralities, rival and mutually impervious systems – the vision of a hospitable society opposed to a nationalist and exclusive one; or the vision of a secure and manageable society opposed to an irresponsible and chaotic one incapable of employing and caring for its own citizens and colluding with an economic model of disposable and mobile labour that is dehumanizing for all43. 43 For an attempt to navigate between the poles of the debate, see Paul Collier Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World, Oxford University Press 2013 Photo of migrants in the Channel, courtesy of BBC News. The 'homeless global proletariat' arrive in Kent.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 72 This instance is slightly more complicated than the first in one respect; whereas it would be hard to find a transgender advocate who actively wanted to eliminate biological difference or to sanction the humiliation of women, or a critic of gender fluidity who actively wanted to enshrine discrimination and legal penalties for people who have experienced transition of any kind, there really are opponents of more open immigration policies whose words and actions provide evidence of racism, crude ‘cultural protectionism’ and an allegiance to mythical and unhistorical pictures of national or ethnic purity. How conversation unfolds with such people is not exactly obvious. But it is still possible to configure the more serious debate within a single moral universe. There is widespread acknowledgment of a general duty to rescue others at risk, even if they are not immediate kin; there is acknowledgment of the profound dangers of policies that actively encourage the development of a homeless global proletariat, and thus an acknowledgment of the imperative to build sustainable local economies in all the world’s nations; there is recognition of the irreversible cultural diversity of many developed societies and a scepticism about myths of racial and cultural purity. Once again, there are points of convergence and mutual intelligibility that can focus attention on specific questions that do not instantly appeal to ideological concerns – questions, as in our first case, of which particular policy decision risk undermining some element in the moral hinterland: when a restrictive immigration policy imposes unbearable costs on the most highly vulnerable, when a more open policy actively destabilises less developed economies by skimming off talent and enterprise,44 and so on. If the debate is understood in this framework, it is possible to take a strong, even uncompromising position on this, as on the transgender question, without assuming that only total warfare can resolve the disagreement. Tracing positions back to the ‘moral hinterland’ helps to weaken the tendency to focus on the immediate present of confrontation, to see present debate as symbolizing rival ideologies that are timelessly opposed; and it helps to identify specific issues of policy that might meet reasonable estimates of moral risk. Something comparable might be discerned in the controversies over the visible legacies of slavery and colonialism, though this is still often a dialogue of the deaf45. Without going into detail, the irony has been noted that those uncomfortable with the demand for removing or ‘contextualizing’ memorials connected with slavery and racism have presented their arguments as a plea not to edit the historical record, whereas the advocates of change would (rightly) point out that the problem is an already edited history. Neither party in fact wants to suppress the past, but the serious difference is about how a more adequate moral perspective on the past is to be expressed. If statues of slavetraders are not to be removed, the memory that is conserved is effectively one that declares impartiality about their actions if there is no effort at contextual comment. The question is whether the disagreement is really about edited history or is to do with the admission of historical wrongdoing (which so many societies find impossibly humiliating); both parties in fact assume an accountability on the part of the state and public authorities to a moral standard, and this is in itself a promising aspect to what has otherwise been a pretty sterile conflict. Once again, part of what needs doing is identifying the problem that actually needs solving on the basis of working to bring to light some shared moral concerns about truthful chronicling, and the possibility of a moral critique of one’s own nation as a form of patriotism. 44 Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present, London, Allen Lane 2019, chronicles in detail the ways in which migration was encouraged in the postwar period as a deliberate strategy for the rapid rebuilding of certain European economies, focusing the question of the longer term effects of such strategies on existing inequities within and beyond Europe. 45 A relevant recent discussion in Alex von Tunzelmann, Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, London, Headline 2021.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 73 But to broaden the perspective and connect it with the earlier discussion, one thing that all this shows is that some of the most visible and contested markers of contemporary, self-consciously ‘progressive’, social conviction share more than they sometimes think with inherited moral vision: the progressivist has learned a perspective shared with others even when what has been learned is then put to work to extend and alter the received limits of its application. It is a point that needs reflection within the context of theological as much as political dispute. There may be disagreement about whether women can receive Holy Orders, but not about whether the Church should confer Holy Orders; there may be disagreement about the permissibility of blessing same-sex marriages, but not about the continuing significance of lifelong sexual commitment as the context both for growth in shared discipleship and for the nurture of children. The challenge is not about how the Church defends its tradition against the onslaught of contemporary theories of gender that threaten to dissolve its fundamental insights, but how the Church discerns what unavoidable new decisions will conserve a principle without destroying an ‘ecology’ of practice and symbol. Something of this was at least tacitly at work in the more evident discontinuities of Christian history – the acceptance of interest on loans, the abandonment of any defence of slavery, and (in practice) the radical opening–up of possibilities for women in public religious roles. In all these instances of moral debate that are so routinely treated as a stand-off between ‘tradition’ and a ‘revisionist’ or ‘feminist’ or ‘LGBT+’ agenda, what we are actually seeing is a working out of Ricoeur’s analysis of the interaction between self-critical tradition and historically literate critique. The seductive narrative of ‘culture wars’ in fact enshrines a struggle between two forms of hegemonic modernity, two sorts of ambitious ideological choice; it is heavily and destructively invested in abstract systems and so is eager to categorize this or that current problem in the terms of rival world-views competing for the allegiance of abstract individuals or groups. It directs our attention away from the actual forms of belonging across boundaries which we experience in many areas of our lives and from the shared ancestry and conceptuality of many apparently opposed views. And – as a phenomenon that exists primarily in the world of the political and religious right – it rather paradoxically adopts for itself a typically modern emancipatory rhetoric: progressivism is an unaccountable tyranny, an ideology imposed by a sacralised, mythologized system of power, repressing a minority which is denied the freedom to define itself in its own terms. As expressed in such terms, the culture wars narrative is an essentially ideological rhetoric that needs some probing and challenging, whatever position is taken on some of the contested The same-sex marriage of 19th United States Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg at the Episcopal Cathedral of St James in South Bend, Indiana, USA. Courtesy of the New York Times

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 74 issues. And it has to be acknowledged that there is also a rhetoric of the progressive left that gives some grounds for the reaction of ‘culture warriors’, a rhetoric of ‘being on the side of history’, being vindicated by the simple and continuous triumph of emancipatory politics as conceived by optimistic activists. The confrontation between a traditionalism determinedly in denial of its own evolution and a progressivism determinedly in denial of its contingency, and alienated from the normative and teleological assumptions of Habermasian critique (emancipation for the sake of proper participatory communication), is a depressing and sterile intellectual prospect. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), philosopher of culture and language, takes tea with a dedicated follower, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons 4. Thus far my argument has been that the ways in which we are so often encouraged to think these days about tradition and autonomy, inherited categories and innovative ideas, the nature of modernity, human solidarity and human purpose are seriously inadequate and at worst contradictory. One aspect of the work that needs doing to spring us from the trap of tribal binaries is, I suggest, a sharper attention to how arguments actually form and develop and adjust over time; so that we can see an apparently revolutionary perspective as belonging in a tradition, learned, even if obliquely, from inherited prejudgements that have survived test and scrutiny over time. It is important to do the genealogical work which allows us to see that our categories of personal dignity, our understanding of ‘right’ and liberty, our recognition of the claims of the vulnerable upon us do not come from nowhere; they grow from ‘tradition’ in the sense that they are part of a continuing argument.46 Ultimately what they seek to honour is what an older discourse seeks to honour; and if there is scepticism about how on earth this or that current development can indeed ‘honour’ what has been inherited, that scepticism needs to be spelled out in terms that can be recognized on both sides of the disagreement rather than cast in terms of an assault on what has been received or what has been immemorially agreed. But all this is also to do with identifying more accurately what does need to be seen as inconsistent with the very idea of a moral tradition, and thus as a proper matter for contest. While we indulge in conventional culture warfare, we miss a conflict that is more 46 On this, the groudnbreaking work of Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, London, Allen Lane 2014, is an essential point of reference.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 75 fundamental. This is something we have touched on already in thinking about Ricoeur’s diagnosis of ‘instrumental interest’. What he and many other since him47 have argued is that the triumph of instrumental views means that the human subject is conceived only as the ensemble of finite and definable dispositions of wanting and choice – as it was expressed earlier, ‘a sequence of problematic needs to be met or gaps to be filled.’48 What recedes is any ground for morally serious collaboration beyond a calculation of immediate interest. If the human map is a jigsaw of territories marked out by disconnected and potentially competitive agendas for gratification, the trust that is needed for longer-term security, the trust that comes from recognizing convergent shared concerns, has nothing to build with. So the really interesting and constructive arguments are those that turn on teasing out what in any current moral proposal can be linked to a serious trust-building tradition, and what embodies an unreflective and fragmenting instrumentalism. The point of trying to show convergent trajectories within apparently opposed attitudes to ‘received’ moral and cultural perspectives is that if those trajectories do indeed reflect a shared tradition that has not been fully acknowledged, if they can be located in the same overall process of learning on the way to participatory and just social exchange, there may be more chance of seeing clearly and critiquing effectively the implicitly anti-human ideology of instrumental interest. As Timothy Gorringe puts it49, ‘The constant and painful negotiation of difference does not commit us to a soggy liberalism.’ Testing the actual limits of difference and the extent of recognizability is not a lazy acceptance of static pluralism or an avoidance of necessary confrontation: it may be a moment in discovering where conflicts need to be brought to light – in terms not of a contest between rival moral universes but of the contest for the very idea of a moral universe, a proper humanism as we might say, the refusal of a reductive and functionalist account of human identity50. C.S. Lewis’s celebrated lectures on The Abolition of Man, first published in 194451, while commonly seen as a text to be appealed to in the canon of arguments in defence of tradition, is in fact a more ambitious project, in that it offers a prescient analysis of how ‘instrumental interest’ inexorably delivers human beings up to a world devoid of the possibility of emancipatory critique. The putatively objective claims made for the definition of functional success conceal the reality that a world conceived in these terms leaves no room for critique; it is bound to be a contest simply for control. It is, in that sense at least, the final triumph of ‘ideology’, for all the claims that may be made to transcend ideological argument. What Lewis calls ‘the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity’52, is a world in which the dialogue between a tacitly moral critique (looking towards an optimal state of human participation and mutual transparency) and a complex of inherited communal moral habits and conventions of recognition or belonging will have become impossible. We do not have to share completely in Lewis’s sanguine belief that a common moral culture can be read off from the facts of anthropology to see that his analysis 47 In addition to Michael Sandel’s work, see also the recent books of Adrian Pabst, The Demons of Liberal Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press 2019, and Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal ,Cambridge, Polity Press 2021. 48 Above p.[5] 49 Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture, London, Ashgate 2004, 258. 50 Some helpful perspectives in Jens Zimmermann, ed., Re-envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity. Oxford University Press 2017, especially the essays by Jens Zimmermann and Martin Schlag. 51 A new edition of the original text appeared from Harper Collins in 2021, as well as a separate volume with a very full commentary by Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S.Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (New York, Harper and Collins 2021). 52 Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p.75

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 76 has some common ground with Ricoeur’s: the problem lies with a model of human awareness and interaction that sidesteps any concern with connection or interdependence, whether between self-interrogating subjects or between the diversity of what is interrogated ‘outside’ subjectivity. Tradition and critique alike are to do with the hope for, and the care and curating of, communication for the sake of common work and so of common ‘culture’ – that is, of a world of discourse and exchange in which people continue to know how to recognize and be recognizable to one another. The facile binaries of culture war rhetoric absolve us from the hard work of discovering whether we can in fact build a common culture at all in an age of reductive instrumentalism; but in many areas of apparent standoff it is possible to see how tradition continues to shape and mark new convictions in a way that encourages alliance and co-operation, or at least a readiness for mutual listening and learning. Not only is premature cultural despair a practically risky policy, it is also – as I have tried to show here – a strategy that can play into the hands of reductionist thinking by casting tradition as an option alongside others, an option for a certain style of cultural performance, in contrast to the more robust definition with which we began of cultural tradition as the entire apparatus of induction into a human world in which we must negotiate meanings we did not choose . The religious defender of tradition in this broad sense will want to articulate and to probe both the degree of unexpected convergence there may be even in the fractured moral discourses of modernity, and the abiding questions raised about the transcendent ground of the moral grammar constantly and unreflectively assumed by apparently secular moral language – not least in the area of assumptions about the unique worth of the personal subject. And this means a thorough retrieval of those theologies of tradition that see it as bound up with the communal disciplines of contemplating and absorbing the vision of a human task that is ultimately about becoming fully receptive to the uncontrollable excess of divine presence and agency. In such a light, the uncontainable and irreplaceable hinterland of the finite other – that which eludes reduction to function and definition and so presents itself for unending interchange and mutual attention – is seen as a doorway into the understanding of this comprehensive task. In such a light also, we might make sense of Ricoeur’s bold swerve into theology at the end of his essay on ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology’, where he speculates that ‘there C.S.Lewis (1898-1963), literary historian, theologian and novelist. Photograph from the Encyclopaedia Britannica archive

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 77 would be no more interest in emancipation, no more anticipation of freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the memory of mankind…’53 Tradition of some kinds is, as we have seen, the ground on which serious critique grows. There are ‘traditional’ narratives, not least, as Ricoeur affirms, theological narratives, that valorise self-scrutiny, complementarity and the significance of the time taken to clarify and transmit insight, even revealed insight. Indeed, it could be said that certain sorts of theological narrative, the kind that present the human task as one of persistent self-scrutiny in the interest of radical exposure to a truth that exceeds (even if it does not contradict) formulation, are a discipline whose absence intensifies the reductive battles of rival ‘cultural’ discourses. To go beyond the binaries I have been challenging, to move from ‘traditionalism’ to the larger question of how anything like effective cultural tradition (‘traditioning’ as some have liked to say) can survive in our commodified social world, requires spending a bit longer with these models. What is needed is not a rush to the barricades but the attentive labour of discovering where coalitions can be built for the sake of a proper and sustained argument about moral priorities in public life – as opposed to the acceptance of an amoral instrumentalism as if it were a neutral default position, over against a tolerated set of competing options for individual consumers to construct meanings that suit them as individuals (it hardly needs saying that the educational policies of most modern states appear to have settled for this unhelpful polarity and minimized to vanishing point the idea that education might have something to do with nourishing a capacity for morally informed critique and the imaginative enrichment this requires)54. This in turn carries at least two consequences. Societies need dependable institutions of democratic participation at every level, so that learning how to argue and make decisions in the light of (often ongoing) argument becomes the common experience of citizens. And society at large needs the courage to develop large collective narratives that allow both celebration and critique of what has been received, and a constantly adjusted and renewed attention to the stories of those previously silenced. Religious tradition does not exist to solve the problems of a rudderless pluralism, and its significance is not to be measured by its potential role in such a cultural environment. But it is capable of making serious contributions in the tasks just itemized, with its assumptions about continuities that are rediscovered on the far side of rupture, about the necessary complementarity of human identities and the necessary relationality of human subjectivity, and about the possibility of repentance and restoration, ‘realignment’ with a stable metaphysical reality. Understanding the symbiotic relation between tradition and critique, between the grateful reception of inherited insight and the moral pressure to identify its failures or shortcomings, may yet deliver us from a tribalism that is as historically illiterate on the right as on the left, and restore to us a sense of why it matters to resist the universal acid of functionalism and the idealising of universal systems of exchange; why it matters to keep working for the rediscovery of a symbolic order and a common social project involving the interdependent flourishing of all. Theologies and philosophies of tradition help here; the characteristically modern styles of traditionalism don’t. There is harder work to be done than the slogans of the culture warrior might suggest: tradition when ‘vital’ – to borrow MacIntyre’s word once again – has to be built not merely adopted, and that involves some fundamental work on what sort of subjects we think we are. If we do not have some sort of vocabulary for this, religious or metaphysical or whatever, we should not be surprised if we are trapped in our sealed echo chambers. To look for a sustainable anthropology is ultimately to try to do justice to the linguistic nature of our humanity; to the intuition that other human 53 ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique…’, p.100 (ellipsis in original). 54 See Zimmermann, op.cit.; and cf Haldane, op.cit., pp. 260-1 on the need to allow ‘comprehensive doctrines’ their voice in public debate.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 80 Norwegian Constitutional Assembly 1814, Oscar Wergeland, oil on canvas, 1885 The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World, Profile Books. by Linda Colley. Profile Books, 512 pages, £10.99. Today, it is generally taken for granted that constitutionalism, liberalism, and political modernity are inextricably linked. When we think about modern democracy, we are thinking about constitutional democracy, in which the constitution acts as a limit on state power and a prerequisite for a stable, broadly free, political regime. If not a sufficient condition for democratic government, then the adoption of a constitution is nevertheless usually seen as a definite step in the right direction. Not so, argues Linda Colley in her latest book, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World, which sets out to challenge “a lingering notion that written constitutionalism has been invariably benevolent and normally acted as a liberating force.” In particular, Colley is keen to puncture self-assured liberal democratic notions about both the origins and political function of written constitutions. Instead, she presents a sweeping new history of global constitutionalism as a ‘political technology’, whose noble ideological

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 81 underpinnings are coterminous with a history of war, empire-building, and oppression. As the title of the book suggests, warfare plays a central role in Colley’s narrative. In her telling, the rapid spread of written constitutionalism beginning in the mid-18th century was principally a product not of liberal principle, but of the technological and military advancements of the period, which unleashed a new and globalised ‘hybrid’ mode of warfare This had a dual effect: on the one hand, the growing frequency of warfare destabilised polities across the world, generating pressures for regime change and state formation for states to survive in a competitive international environment. On the other, the growing scope of ‘hybrid warfare’, and the spiralling cost of supporting the vast new armies and navies fielded by the European powers, generated pressure for rulers to make concessions to their subjects particularly around taxation, representation, and participation in government. If men were going to sacrifice their lives and fortunes for the state, they increasingly demanded a say in how it would be run. Or, as Max Weber put it, in the new world of hybrid warfare, states were “compelled to secure the cooperation of the non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms political power, into their hands.” As Colley acknowledges, this thesis owes a considerable amount to the America sociologist Charles Tilly’s* famous thesis that war makes states and states make war, as well as long-running debates in both history and political science on the emergence of representative government in Britain as a concession made by the state to secure higher tax revenues. But, going beyond these works, she supports this thesis with a historical narrative which is stunning in its combination of world-historical breadth and granular detail. As she shows, the spread of both written constitutionalism and hybrid warfare occurred in four waves. The first wave began in the mid 18th-century, as rulers like Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and other so-called ‘Enlightened Absolutists’ propagated law codes which Colley characterises as ‘proto-constitutional’ as part of broader modernising projects designed to retool their states for the new world of mass warfare. The second, came in the wake of the Seven Years War, with the wave of canonical ‘Atlantic Revolutions’. This wave began in Britain’s Thirteen North American Colonies in the 1770s, and spread to Europe in the 1790s with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, before returning to the Americas with the collapse of the Spanish Empire in the early 19th-century.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 83 In all four stages, a growing global print culture facilitated the spread of new constitutional ideas. Intercontinental travel and communication, meanwhile, generated networks of writers, activists, international revolutionaries and soldiers of fortune who variously took advantage of conflict and crisis to in service of their constitutional dreams. Whilst frequently outlining how canonical historical figures like Bentham and Bolívar responded to one another in this new world, Colley also illuminates the lives of lesser-known figures. Some of the most fascinating sections of the book are thumbnail sketches of figures like Nikita Muravyov, a Russian soldier and friend of Benjamin Constant in occupied Paris in the 1810s, who would become a leader of Russia’s ‘Decemberist’ revolt in 1825, or of unexpected influences like that of the Mexican revolutionary Augustín de Iturbide on James Silk Buckingham and Ramohan Roy, proprietors from 1818-1823 of the liberal Indian nationalist Calcutta Journal Along the way, Colley is keen to stress the stories of “those not meant to win, [and] those unwilling to lose”, as the title of her sixth chapter so elegantly puts it. As she shows, this Portrait of Henry Christophe, King of Haiti, Richard Evans, oil on canvas, 1818

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 84 militarist and imperial process of constitutional dissemination had as many losers as winners. Though the rise of mass warfare, conscription, and the tax-based ‘warfare state’ saw the extension of suffrage to more and more of the male population, women’s exclusion from warfare meant that emergent constitutional rights were strictly gendered. Often, indeed, the regularisation of voting laws and the extension of the franchise to poor men was accompanied by new restrictions on the rights of women. Likewise, constitutions often served as instruments of empire-building. A written constitution could often legitimate and enhance state power, bolstering authoritarian regimes like Napoleon’s empire, or Símon Bolívar’s rule in Gran Colombia. So too, were constitutions often deployed to secure colonial expansion, as in the United States, where state constitutions were often used as a means of asserting settlers’ sovereignty over Native land, or Singapore where Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles produced a constitution designed to turn the city into a civilised, productive, imperial outpost. The famously liberal 1812 Spanish Constitution of Cádiz likewise dramatically extended the franchise to Spain’s imperial subjects whilst binding them into an explicitly and exclusively Catholic and imperial political order. If, as Colley demonstrates, constitutionalism was often also wielded by the oppressed peoples of the world to resist these pressures, these stories are tragic as often as they are hopeful, as she deftly shows in a striking vignette about James Africanus Horton Beale. Beale, an African-born doctor, British colonial officer, West African constitution-maker, millionaire stock market speculator, and perhaps advocate for women’s suffrage, attempted in the late 19th-century to create a federation of African constitutional states, sometimes with British support. But his ambitions ultimately foundered in the face of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the late 19th-century, as so many similar efforts at indigenous anti-colonial constitution-making did. These insights are undeniably important today, even though we so often characterise ours as an age of constitutional erosion or dissolution. In the last decade, considerable ink has been spilled over the efforts of demagogues and aspiring authoritarians to subvert constitutions and legal orders in the pursuit of power. Less time, however, has been spent on public discussion of how anti-democratic forces use this archetypically liberal political technology to their benefit. Yet as a substantial literature in political science has shown, authoritarian regimes often combine undemocratic rule with democratic institutions in pursuit of legitimacy and stability, and in order to ‘legiblise’ political opposition by funnelling it into a controlled electoral process. Print of Arthur Beardmore, at the moment of his arrest, teaching his son Magna Carta, James Watson, print, 1765

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 85 This was a model pioneered by Napoleon, but it pertains equally to Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbàn’s Hungary. In failing to recognise the illiberal possibilities of constitutionalism, we are unable to counter the mobilisation of constitutionalism rhetoric by these regimes in service of distinctly authoritarian ends. Similarly, the assault on democracy in the United States today has been affected as much through the exploitation of the anti-majoritarian features of the American constitution as through attempts to undermine it. As the rise of 21st-century populist strongmen has demonstrated, moreover, constitutional devices sometimes intimately associated with ‘democracy’, particularly referenda, can often be wielded to provide the plebiscitary legitimacy these figures need to circumvent genuinely constitutional politics. Likewise, the technological transformations of the 21st-century have created an environment both conducive to and dangerous for constitutionalism. The internet is a signal example: although this revolutionary technology is discussed in only one brief and platitudinous paragraph in the book’s conclusion, its potential as an agent of rapid political change with greater speed and range than the printing press is extraordinary. But, as the events of the abortive democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring revealed, the dissemination of political ideas facilitated by the internet can lead to immense destabilisation, and a rapid slide from initial optimism into disaster. But if these crises present serious challenges to modern constitutionalism, they also highlight the urgency of a revitalised democratic constitutionalism. Indeed, whilst Colley is right to challenge liberal myths that constitutionalism is, in itself, inherently good, and to show how, throughout history, constitutions have been exploited to oppressive ends, in doing so she at times downplays the emancipatory role of a democratically authored, codified, constitution. If the United States Constitution and Bismarck’s German Constitution, or the Meiji Constitution in Japan, or even Catherine the Great’s Nakaz of 1767 are all alike in the sense that they provide codified charters of the institutional structures of the state, only the former does so on the principle of the people’s power. Indeed, in her description of the writing of the US Constitution, Colley is keen to stress that this process was elite-led and top-down in order to place it in continuity with earlier French Constitution of year VIII (13 December 1799), Page 3, Located in the French National Archives

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 87 Constitutional of Portugal (Peter I with his daughter D. Maria II and the Portuguese Constitution of 1826 - lithography). c. 1832 Nonetheless, where democratically authorised constitutions become ossified and impossible to reform to meet the needs of the people and the age, they too can cease to be tools of liberation and become fetters on the people’s will. In the United States, for example, no one born after the constitution was last amended in 1992 has had any say on the fundamental laws under which they live, and the majority of the constitution has remained unchanged for over two centuries. As Colley provocatively argues in her conclusion, if we wish for constitutions to form the bulwark of our freedom, we must be willing to challenge and change them. In doing so, we might be advised to move beyond the reification of the United States as the ideal-type of the constitutional state, and question how well its largely static constitution functions in the 21st-century. Nor should we forget the power of constitutions as expressions of our highest emancipatory aspirations, even if in practice we often fail to live up to them. A constitution is not only a body of particular constitutional laws, but also the profession of a certain set of ideals about how we wish to live together, and a beacon of hope in an often cruel and oppressive world. That this is, and always has been, the case is demonstrated best by Colley by way of a vignette from the life of Mary Wollstonecraft who, in 1794, amidst the violence of revolutionary Paris could nonetheless write hopefully that: “A constitution is a standard for the people to rally round. It is the pillar of government, the bond of all social unity and order. The investigation of its principles make it a fountain of light; from which issue the rays of reason, that gradually bring forward the mental powers of the whole community.” Colley does not shy away from showing constitutionalism’s darker legacies, but she also illuminates its radical potential as a force of liberation and inspiration for the oppressed of the world. Insofar as she does, we can find few better guides to recapturing the constitutional and political optimism which so inspired Wollstonecraft than this book. *Charles Tilly, Professor of Social Science, University of Michigan, 1969-84, and, subsequently, Columbia University

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 89 Time’s Witness; History in the Age of Romanticism by Rosemary Hill, Allen Lane, 2021 This is an engaging book. It is witty, warm, well-researched and enjoyable. Ostensibly a treatise on late-Georgian and early-Victorian antiquarianism in Britain and France, it is a disquisition on one of Georgian Britain’s more significant contributions to European intellectual life. Romantic antiquarianism was a pioneering combination of research-based historical studies and Picturesque aesthetics. In Britain it provided the stimulus for the Tractarian religious revolution, the Gothic Revival in architecture, and the invention of tourists’ Scotland. In France it led to the ‘nationalisation of heritage’ and the state protection of historic monuments, where Louis Philippe’s government led the way. Dr. Hill claims that in this the French overtook the English Georgian antiquarian initiative, but this ignores British India and points up the principal lacuna of the book, the British study and preservation of the historic cultures and monuments of India which were perhaps antiquarian scholarship’s most astonishing achievement. British state protection of monuments in India was exactly parallel to that in France from the 1840s, including the first of three major restorations of the Taj Mahal, the protection of the first century AD carved granite Malipuram friezes, the rock-cut Pallava Temples, the collecting and display of the medieval Chola bronzes and other antiquities in specially-built museums in Madras, Madurai, Calcutta, the protection of both Buddhist religion and its monuments, and the cataloguing of Sanskrit manuscripts. Sir William Jones had popularised the study of Indian material as well as written culture from the late-eighteenth century, and the Royal Asiatic Society was founded by Henry Colebrooke in 1823. The Delhi Archaeological Survey was established in 1847 and developed into the Archaeological Survey of India with the powers to protect, restore and acquire monuments nationwide. All this gained traction in the late-1850s and ‘60s after direct Crown Rule took over, with projects like the re-erection of the Ashoka Pillar on the Delhi Ridge ‘by the British Government’, the second repair of the Taj Mahal or the restoration of the Moghul Durbar Hall in the Naijack Palace at Madurai by General Napier in 1858, all culminating in the work of Sir John Strachey and then Lord Curzon at the end of the nineteenth century, with the third restoration of the Taj Mahal, the Agra Fort, Fatipur Sikri, and a comprehensive raft of new cultural protection laws. When the first active state preservation of ancient monuments was finally established by Parliament in England itself in Watercolour painting of a column from the Pallava Temples sketched by Colin McKenzie, 1803, as part of his survey of India on behalf of the colonial authorities

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 90 1910, it was on the model of the system which had been developed by British scholars and British Government in India over the previous century. Dr. Hill makes clear in her introduction that this is a partial coverage of British antiquarian activity. The book is restricted mainly to England, Scotland and France. As well as omitting the British Indian dimension, it also excludes the strong and distinctive antiquarian tradition in Wales. It concentrates on the period between the fall of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 and the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and explains how the cool grandeur of European Enlightenment thought was overturned by a radically new historical approach. An emphasis on people’s everyday lives, customs, dialects, food, old buildings – cottages as well as castles – ballads and literature came to be seen as part of the serious study of the past, and a new way of understanding the present. An interest in kings, statesmen, empires, wars, classicism, formal thought-structures, gave way to a more ‘rugged’ (in the Johnsonian sense), imaginative academic sensibility: Romanticism. This was a movement that while accepting the importance of recording and researching documentary material and surviving objects, also appreciated the place of imagination and subjectivity in the history of the past, sometimes allowing them to trump reality, as in the case of tartan. The period covered was one of revolution and political, economic and social upheaval which, stimulated a historically-informed preservationist backlash. The Terror and organised cultural vandalism in France (vandalisme was a term invented in Revolutionary Paris), a world war, and widespread social unrest helped to encourage nationalist historical study. Rapid industrial development and urbanisation in Britain (including Wales and Scotland), and deliberate iconoclastic destruction on the Continent posed serious threats to material culture and fuelled a passionate crusade to study medieval remains before they disappeared, as well as the urge to rescue antiquarian objects and memory from imminent oblivion. Late-Georgian historians and antiquarians agreed with Sir William Dugdale’s comment during the English Commonwealth that ‘Man without learning and the remembrance of things past falls into a beastlye sottishness and his life is noe better to be accounted of than to be buried alive.’ Though the core of the book deals with the six decades (or two and a half generations) between the French Revolution and High Victorian England, a preliminary chapter gives an overview of Romantic antiquarianism’s antecedents from Hellenic Greece, the European Renaissance and, in England, the onset of serious, historical, topographical studies in the aftermath of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,. A continuous succession is traced from the Tudor and Stuart students of the nation’s antiquities: from John Photograph of the Agra Fort, built 1565-73 and subject to extensive restoration by the British in the 1870s. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 91 Leland (the ‘father of local history’), William Camden, John Stow, Henry Spelman, John Selden and Robert Cotton. Camden’s Britannia, the first historical study of English monuments was published in 1586, the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries was founded at the same time, and Clifford’s Tower at York Castle was the first English building to be preserved as an ancient monument. The problem faced by the early antiquaries in Tudor and Stuart England, with their enthusiasm for medieval architecture, churches, cathedrals, chantries and abbeys, was the taint of Popery. That suspicion still lingered in the early Romantic period. George III described the blackballing of James Wyatt from the Society of Antiquaries (in reaction to his destructive renovation of Durham Cathedral) as a ‘Popish Plot’. The king was not entirely joking, as Rosemary Hill demonstrates. One of the refreshing strands in this book is her objective appreciation that Gothic architecture was Catholic, a view shared with her hero Welby Pugin. She is sympathetic in handling the antiquarian’s perception that the Church of England was not a continuous national development from early times but the imposition of Protestantism by State force accompanied by orgies of violent destruction and iconoclasm. It is difficult for the modern mind to grasp that the bureaucratic organisation now manifested in Archbishop Welby’s combination of kitchenette prayer and social-services cliché could ever have had the intellectual presumption to claim to be the same sacramental Church as that which built Lincoln and Ely cathedrals. But, for nearly four centuries that was not only generally believed but was taken as the bedrock of English constitutional liberty and Etching of Clifford’s Tower, York by William Lodge, c. 1673, The British Museum

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 92 patriotism. To question it, as those antiquaries who looked at the historical evidence were bound to do, was seen as near-treasonous. Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686), the patron saint of English antiquarianism had squared the circle by creating the myth of an ancient Apostolic English Church descended from Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. This hypothesis convinced his contemporaries, and the Georgians to a lesser extent, but was exploded by the researches of the Romantic era, not least by Fr. John Lingard who was the first English historian to use the Vatican archives and the papers of Philip II preserved in Spain, which gave a different picture. The other semi-treasonous taint affecting late-Georgian antiquaries was Jacobitism, especially in Scotland. But, as the author amusingly demonstrates, this was almost single-handedly defused by Sir Walter Scott who made it possible to be romantically Jacobite while being intellectually Hanoverian, a position most of us still share. Thus Queen Victoria was able to embrace an extravagant tartan-draped Scottish romanticism which objectively denied her right to the throne. The same mental indulgence was not extended to John Lingard, most scrupulous and sceptical of historians, whose re-writing of the English Reformation was seen as a seditious attack on the State. Charles Kingsley denounced it as ‘One huge libel on the whole nation.’ Though the royalties from Lingard’s controversially popular History of England paid for building the Catholic chapel at Hornby in Lancashire, its porch ornamented with stone busts of the Emperor Constantine and King Oswyth of Northumbria, the rulers responsible for establishing Christianity in the North of England. Romantic antiquarianism produced a tremendous cast of characters, and one of the achievements of this book is the affectionate handling of the parade of eccentrics, curmudgeons, heroes, forgers, and geniuses that march across its pages. The tone is pitch-perfect: affectionate, even-handed, and drily witty but never supercilious or dismissive. The author draws out her subjects’ good points without disguising their ‘bitchiferous’ characteristics (to quote Scott). The picture painted oscillates between a vision of dedicated Equipt for a Northern Visit, a cartoon by Charles Williams, published in London on 7 August 1822, now in the Highland Folk Museum, features a grotesque Sir Walter Scott and a similarly anatomically inaccurate George IV

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 93 colleagues constructively corresponding with each other, and spectacular rows, sulks, blackballings, savage reviewings and back-stabbings. It is worthy of a novel. Many of our old friends are here: Sir Walter Scott, John Lingard; brilliant Pugin; ultramontane Bishop Milner; easy-going, destructive James Wyatt; his nemesis John Carter; fat, drunken, bitchy Francis Grose; and rich sulky Francis Douce. There is perhaps a danger of stereotyping, and some unfounded generalisations. Did the Victorians lack a sense of irony? But there are lots of nice turns. Of John Kemble, the pioneer of antiquarian costume in the theatre, it is remarked that he was enthusiastic because of his serious scholarship, informed classical taste – and, not least because he had very good legs which showed to advantage in a toga.’ Antiquarian scribblers are noted as rarely resorting to print ‘without the spur of an argument’. The architect Edward Blore, who designed Goodrich Court in Herefordshire for Sir Samuel Mayricke, the armour expert, had a reputation for dullness not ‘helped by having a name that rhymed with bore’. The English Catholic nobility was proud of its medieval descent, and their antiquarian interests were partly fuelled by ancestral pride and wish to revive dormant or attainted peerages to which they were the legal heirs-general. Antiquarian research underpinned the claims whereby the Stonors became Lord Camoys; the Stapletons, Lord Beaumont; the Constable-Maxwells, Lord Herries; the Jerninghams, Lord Stafford; and the Frasers of Strichers, Lord Lovat. To take one example, Edward Jerningham who researched the successful legal claim to the ancient Stafford barony for his older brother, was a lawyer, antiquary and amateur architect who rebuilt Stafford Castle and designed the Gothic chapel at the family seat Costessey in Norfolk, with rescued French medieval stained glass arranged as a coherent scriptural programme by Bishop Milner. Edward Jerningham was deeply proud of his seize quartiers and French connections and could sketch his family heraldry from memory at the breakfast table. Madame de la Tour-du-Piri, memoirist and Lady-in-Waiting to Marie Antoinette, was his first cousin; his great-uncle, the Archbishop-Duke of Narbonne, was the last primate of Ancien Régime France. This is hardly a world which could be described as ‘socially marginal’. A similar figure, who gets only one very brief mention (on p242) as an expert on Norman charters, Thomas Stapleton (1805-1849), was a similar prominent antiquarian, being long-serving vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries, founder of the Camden Society and one The Facade of Abbotsford, the Home of Sir Walter Scott, seen through the Entrance Gate. by Sir William Allen, Watercolour 1832, National Gallery of Scotland

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 94 of the major English scholars of Norman antiquities, a protégé of the Stonyhurst educated Sir John Gage Rokewood, Director of the Society of Antiquaries. He was the younger brother of the (restored) 8th Lord Beaumont, with his own landed estate in Yorkshire, obsessed by his medieval descent from John de Brienne, the last Christian king of Jerusalem and Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Thomas’s engraved book plate shows the Stapleton lion on a trompe stone, flat iron shield, as if from a medieval tomb. His library of 3000 books survives intact at Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, and some of his collection of medieval documents is on loan to the East Yorkshire Archives. Stapleton is not alone in being overlooked. The Welsh antiquarians are conspicuous by their absence. Edward Lhuyd (1660-1709), Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and Fellow of the Royal Society is not mentioned, though he more-or-less invented the idea of the Celtic nations. He was succeeded by shoals of interesting eighteenth century Welsh antiquaries: Yorkes of Erthigg, Vaughans, Joneses, Pennants, but they are not included in this story. The book is arranged as a series of balanced chronological chapters each with a theme: ‘the Georgian Antiquarian Landscape’, emphasising the Wye Valley and Tintern Abbey (which some thought could be improved as a picturesque composition with some light hammer-work); the French Revolution and its influence on both sides of the Channel; Waterloo as an instant historic landscape, combed for relics by thousands of tourists including Walter Scott; ‘Anglo-Norman Attitudes’, where the monuments of Normandy at Rouen, Caen, Jumièges were seen as much part of English history as Yorkshire; the Romantic Interior, with the heraldic stained glass artist Thomas Willements’ Davington Priory in Kent, Samuel Meyrick’s armour museum at Goodrich Court, and not least Walter Scott’s Abbotsford transformed into a ‘monastic grange’ from its previous incarnation on Clartey Hole Farm; the Tartanisation of Scottish History; Shakespearian ‘bardolatry’ and the recreation of Elizabethan Stratford; and finally the ‘Victorian Antiquarian Landscape’, much more serious and informed than its Georgian predecessor (Picturesque hammer-work, now very much discouraged). Each of these could be a book in itself, and some of them have been like Clive Wainwright’s pioneering volume on the Romantic Interior. But Rosemary Hill’s distillation and analysis is masterly. Through it all runs the connecting thread of the study of Gothic architecture from Thomas Rickman and his French contemporaries to Richard Willis (‘the first architectural historian’) and passionate Welby Pugin. Tracing the origins of Gothic, analysing the character of Gothic vaults, and the categorisation of stylistic developments were a key scholarly achievement of Romantic historians. There were also not necessarily productive archaeological diversions, not least to Stonehenge and prehistoric antiquity, where ‘Bards and Druids [were] the graveyard of many an antiquarian career’. A high point of Romantic antiquarianism was the Anglo-French rescue, study, and display of the Bayeux Tapestry as part of the ‘Anglo-Norman project’. It had been admired in the eighteenth century by the priest, Abbé Montfaucon (better known for his studies of classical Rome) as the ‘Trajan’s column of the Barbarians’, but had nearly been chopped up for horse covers before being rescued by the Bayeux Commissioner of Police in 1792. The record drawings by the English

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 95 artist Thomas Stothard and his wife Eliza made it world-famous. An enjoyable detail is that Stothard was responsible for the ‘restoration’ of the arrow in Harold’s eye. Had it been there or not? There is a sense of mounting authorial glee as the book builds towards a crescendo in Pugin’s Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition, through Sir Walter Scott’s novels set in the Middle Ages, George IV’s expensively historicist coronation and bekilted visit to Edinburgh, the ‘racket of anachronism’ in the Wardour Street manufacture of ‘antique furniture’ incorporating bits of dispersed Flemish choir stalls, the Eglinton Tournament and, not least, the Sobieski Stuarts! The ‘Stuart’ brothers represented full-grown Scottish antiquarianism as a tartan farrago. Born Allen in London, before several name-changes, their fantastic career exemplified both the lasting achievements and the bogus streak in the Movement. Their book Vestiarum Scoticum, supposedly an ancient manuscript which they had ‘discovered’ in the Stuart papers, popularised tartan and the kilt forever as Scottish ‘national dress’. The Gaelic signs recently erected on Edinburgh stations are its living descendants, as Gaelic is a language that was not spoken by most of Scotland’s twenty different races, and never in the Lowlands, just as tartan had never been worn there. Ancient Greek would be more appropriate in the Athens of the North. Vestiarum Scoticum was only finally proved a fake as late as 1980, but as Dr. Hall demonstrates, antiquarian scholarship was often popularly effective when it was at the most subjective and imaginative. 1842 was the Annus Mirabilis of British Antiquarianism, the year of publication of Pugin’s Contrasts and of the completion of Willis’s definitive study of the Gothic vault which finally cracked Taymouth Castle, by Eleanor Julia Stanley, watercolour, 1852, Royal Collection, a suitably primitive and romantic depiction of the castle a decade after Victoria’s visit there

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 98 A Mediterranean harbour with Turks and Orientals bringing goods ashore, three galleys and a man-o'-war at anchor, Lorenzo a Castro, c. 1680, oil on canvas. Source: WikiCommons The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia, Penguin Books, 2020, 1088 pages, £16.99 To Rule Eurasia's Waves: The New Great Power Competition at Sea by Geoffrey Gresh, Yale University Press, 2020, 376 pages, £25.00 A concatenation of trends and events has and is jet-starting the need to revisit and revise geopolitical assumptions, and not least those focused on the oceans, their strategic meaning, politically, militarily and economically, and their interaction both with each other and with the continents. These trends and events include global warming, with its impact in opening up sealanes to the north of Asia and America, the growth of Chinese naval power and pretensions, the impact of new technology, including the role of anti-ship missiles, smart-mines, and drones, larger container ships and the change accordingly in harbours and the Panama Canal, and much else. These two books offer much for those interested in contextualising the moment. David Abulafia, an important and distinguished scholar of great intellectual range, insight and flexibility, deliberately does not concentrate on recent decades, but his longue durée offers a perspective through which to assess them. It is as if, having matched Braudel in his valuable discussion of the Mediterranean, Abulafia has gone on to surpass him by providing a more grounded globalism than Braudel’s often diffuse, bitty and overly schematic attempt on global history.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 99 With Abulafia, there is theme, thesis and scholarly exegesis. The particular strength is the writing with authority across a global range. That is most notable in the repeated insights stemming from an understanding of maritime archaeology and what it can contribute to a written record that is very limited for much of history and for many cultures. Thus, we have the benefit here of Abulafia scrutinising the finds held around the world in naval museums and other sites. His particular interest is trading vessels, not warships, for, as he makes clear, this is a maritime more than naval history, but trade of course was the underpinning of the latter, not only because it provided capacity, expertise and funds, but also as it gave strategic weight to particular areas and sites. Indeed, with Abulafia and a good atlas, you can follow the geography of naval history and understand why individual straits and harbours were, and remain, of great consequence. In directing our attention to trade, Abulafia necessarily shows us the mechanisms by which links were created within the world, including, as he did brilliantly in his Mediterranean book, links between cultures, not least often hostile ones. These links were, as he repeatedly demonstrates, a matter of shared interests. Thus, slave sellers, slave transporters, and slave buyers, all created slave trades, both on land and at sea, with those in the Atlantic, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean being particularly important as maritime ones. Again as with the Mediterranean book, both intermediaries and population flows are of great interest in creating a world of diasporas. The great waters of the world indeed emerge from his work in this light, for example when he discusses the movement of Austronesians into the South-West Pacific and also Madagascar, both formidable achievements, not least given the shipping of the period. So also with the navigational knowledge and aid. Deficiencies in both help explain the challenge of the oceans, and notably the problem of sailing across open waters. Indeed, this accounts for the general tendency to remain within sight of the coastline. Such a practice also helped provide the opportunity to take shelter on the coast from bad weather, including by running boats onto shore. Moreover, the coast provided opportunities to get fresh water and food. All of these were key constraints and factors in discouraging shipping from taking to open waters. Moreover, even if the latter led to success, it was not easy to record the knowledge of such a voyage so that the same trip could be repeated. In Abulafia’s excellent account, European expansion frequently becomes just another stage in these diasporas, as with Spaniards following that of Tainos in the Caribbean or Portuguese that of Arabs on the Swahili coast of East Africa. Moreover, many of these imperial presences worked through adopting or adapting to existing networks (and vice versa), as with the British use of Indian networks in the Persian Gulf. As a result, this attractively priced book, which is excellent value for money, is one that throws much light on transnationalism, and notably so in terms of the shared interest that made both maritime systems and trans-oceanic empires. This approach very much subverts the crude adversarial, zero-sum, approach to empire, and, indeed, history, that has become so popular and influential as the Left seeks to wage a culture war across every front. In practice, theirs is a two-dimensional history, whereas Abulafia provides a three-dimensional alternative, one that is able to understand the values of the past, and to offer nuances in interpretation. The contrast between two-dimensional and three- dimensional systems and styles of analysis and exposition is crucial not only to modern culture, but also to the method, content and maturity of political thought and practice.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 100 At the same time, Abulafia’s work enables us to see how these processes of creating trans- oceanic systems were and are far from universal. He is searching on cultures that did not, as well as those that did; although, in every case, did and did not have a range of meanings, and should be seen across a continuum of possibilities. Moreover, ‘Did Not,’ in terms of developing mercantile and naval capability, did not mean that purposes could not be gained by selling products and services to those who took the risk, physically, commercially and in credit terms, by coming as maritime traders. The Europeans who traded across the oceans had to offer something in order to insert themselves into existing commercial and fiscal systems, or simply to gain recognition. This was very much the case with China and Japan, as force could not provide the means. So also with India as, although force could destroy non-European warships and capture coastal positions, it could not determine trade routes. Africa demonstrates the same. Europeans were not strong enough to overcome coastal polities such as Dahomey and had to persuade them to sell slaves. This, of course, is not a welcome narrative at present, and scholarly research on this topic does not tend to attract proportionate support. This, however, underlines the need to integrate into the debate on the present, a mature understanding of the past. Ironically, any presentation of Africa as simply a victim of the slave trade and international capitalism denies Africans agency and thus not only misrepresents the co-operation that was integral to the trade, but also downgrades the African capacity for agency. In contrast, the ability of coastal- based networks to use co-operation in order to tap slave sources in the interior served as an instance of the extent to which the oceans were not frontiered by a coast but, instead, interacted with a broad littoral zone. Moreover, aside from land routes, the oceans were made more significant by the extent to which river routes offered ready access far into the interior. This could be a matter of direct access by oceangoing vessels or of transhipment. The significance of the oceans were greatly enhanced by the extent to which, prior to the changes brought by rail, the population across much of the world concentrated in littoral regions. Thus, about 75 per cent of the population of the Thirteen Colonies lived within 75 miles of the coast in 1775, and rivers such as the Hudson and the James, and bodies of water, such as the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound, also interdicted the continental mass. Ocean-going ships could sail to Albany, the Plate estuary and the very extensive river network that followed into it, notably the Panama and Paraguay rivers. The situation was different when there were no such rivers or bodies of water, as on the Pacific coast of South America. So also for California with the exception of San Francisco Bay. Any history of the oceans necessarily is one of oceanic cities, and vice versa, and it is no surprise that New York, Rio, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Sydney, Auckland and Tokyo have been so important to the history of their countries. Indeed, Abulafia’s book leaves much room for thought about the contrast between such countries and those, such as France and Spain, with inland capitals. Here the significance of choice, including re-choices over the last 150 years, plays a role: London not Winchester, Delhi not Bombay or Calcutta, Washington not New York, or Philadelphia, Moscow not St Petersburg, Brasilia not Rio, Canberra not Sydney or Melbourne, Pretoria not Cape Town, and Beijing not shanghai or even riverine Nanjing. As more recently in Myanmar and Nigeria, the move to inland capitals is frequently one away from commerce and freedom, and toward the business of government, notably regulation and the politics of lobbying. Thus, the failure to open out to the oceans has often had consequences that were at best unfortunate and more obviously malign. Would not the history of Germany have been different if Hamburg had been its capital rather than Berlin.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 101 It should not be assumed that maritime activity, especially beyond the range of coastal trade and inshore fisheries, was a necessary or even natural goal. Much depended on geographical factors, such as currents, the availability of harbours, and the fertility of the coastline, so that, for example, South-West Africa did not see much activity. However, Abulafia is no determinist, indeed being more subtle and searching than Braudel in that respect, and he draws attention to the particular role of mercantile entrepreneurialism, diaspora links, and political ethos. The absence of all three helped ensure that inland cultures such as Inca Peru and Aztec Mexico did not pursue such courses, while there was also a lack of interest in Manchu China. The last offers an opportunity to bring in the book by Geoffrey Gresh, Professor of International Relations at the National Defense University in Washington. He focuses on the recent engagement by China in particular in a more assertive maritime capability system and ethos, and provides a geopolitical way to consider the resulting dynamics, one in which India and Russia are other key players. New shipping routes made possible by global warming are part of a changing context and the book to a degree is a call to arms for America and the liberal global order. In part, the challenge is presented as a move away from an Atlantic-dominant world. China is seen as the key challenger. Thus, on the Bay of Bengal, the development of a deep-water port at Kyaukphyu is being funded by China. This links to projected oil and gas pipelines and rail links that constitute a China- Myanmar Economic Corridor that will provide a strategic enabler for fuel imports that bypass the Malacca Straits as well as enabling China in effect to span from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. This represents a maritime geopolitics different from the idea of a canal across the Kra Isthmus, and one that indicates China’s engagement with a geopolitics that spans land and sea. The content and tone in Gresh’s thoughtful and important book are very different to those of Abulafia, and the scholarship is more that of the present-day. That ensures that they complement each other. To a degree, Gresh would benefit from taking on board Abulafia’s subtle probing of the shared interests bound up in trade and the same point could be made about geopolitics. Both scholars also raise important questions about how and how far interests and values change through time. For Western European states, from Denmark to Portugal, trans-oceanic roles were important to their history, identity and interests. These states are largely inconsequential in Gresh’s book. That represents a challenge to current European commentators and politicians anxious to assess how European societies can find valid maritime roles in a changing world, and what this task should entail. Jeremy Black’s books include Geopolitics, Naval Power, and Strategy.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 103 Straits: Beyond the myth of Magellan by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Bloomsbury, 2022 The pioneers in the European expansion through the world, as the great Arnold Toynbee described Spain and Portugal, made some of the most important geographic explorations that have deeply marked the history of globalisation. Together with Columbus’ discovery of America and Nuñez de Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean the first circumnavigation of the Earth has been hailed as a major achievement and even the greatest voyage of all times. It took place between 1519 and 1522, long before Francis Drake repeated this feat in 1580. Ferdinand Magellan who led the first part of the voyage around the globe has gone down in history as one of the great heroes of this golden era of maritime exploration. What is even more extraordinary is that his stature seems to have grown over the centuries, not only are the famous straits that he first crossed between the Atlantic and the Pacific named after Magellan but we have a Magellan telescope, Magellan space mission and a number of scientific awards named after him. Moreover, he has been left unscathed in the recent wave of popular anger and revulsion against major representatives of imperial history. Unlike the statues of Columbus or famous conquistadors, no statues of Magellan have been toppled. But the truth is that the real Magellan is very different to the visionary explorer that has been described in most history books and much of what we know about him is simply not true, as this magnificent biography reveals. The distinguished historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto has already published very revealing biographies about other great personages in the rise of the Spanish empire like Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. On this occasion, drawing on meticulous research of the available resources, combined with his vast knowledge of maritime and Iberian history, he has produced an unputdownable biography that largely discredits all previous studies of this navigator. Magellan was one of those cash-strapped Europeans who chose a career as a navigator in order to fulfil his dreams of fame and fortune, just like Columbus and Vespucci, although in his case he was born into a more affluent family of the lower nobility around 1480. But fame is not always the result of merit and the evidence that this biography presents seems to indicate that it more appropriate to describe him as a villain rather than as a heroe. Magellan was not only born in the right country at the right time to embark on a successful career as a navigator but also in the right circle that allowed him to be a member of the Portuguese royal household from an early age. But after participating in several maritime expeditions that allowed Portugal to lead the colonisation of Asia and Africa he abused his position in the Portuguese fleet and even faced some criminal offences. For this reason when Magellan proposed to lead an expedition to find a new route to the spice islands, the Portuguese King Manuel refused as he did not trust him. Magellan defected to neigbouring Spain for which he was to be considered by the Portuguese as a traitor. He settled in Seville where he married the daughter of an influential Portuguese merchant who pulled powerful strings and allowed Magellan to reach King Charles I of Spain and propose the voyage that had been turned down by the Portuguese King. The Spanish King-Emperor not only supported Magellan’s plan but exceptionally acceded to pay 77 per cent of its cost. But according to Fernández-Armesto, he got the commission to make the voyage that would make history less because of his own merits than because of the representations on his

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume VII Autumn 2022 104 behalf that friendly merchants made. In spite of all the Spanish sovereign was concerned that Magellan, once afloat would disobey orders as he eventually did, for the gold in the Philippine archipelago was more attractive than the rewards of a new route to the spice islands. Fernández-Armesto describes with rich detail and characteristic wit what was perhaps the most disastrous journeys in the history of navigation. It took a year of suffering to find the straits in the south Atlantic that were later to be named after Magellan, but this was only the beginning of the crew’s endurance as it confronted the crossing of the endless Pacific ocean while food and water became scarce. It was then that Magellan’s lack of leadership skills became evident, his despotic manners and failure to earn the respect of his crew led to numerous clashes and even a mutiny. Magellan did not even reach his nominal destination, instead he ended up in the Philippine archipelago where he culminated a life of recklessness by getting involved in a local conflict from which his crew had nothing to gain, and this led to a battle against the locals in Mactan Island where he was killed. Therefore Magellan never completed the circumnavigation of the Earth for which he was to be remembered. But even if he had survived the author of this biography does not think that he would have completed it as this was never his aim, for as he states: “his ambitions did not include the circumnavigation of the globe, there is no evidence that he ever thought of such a thing, despite the fact that common opinion continues to credit him for it.” The Basque sailor Juan Sebastian Elcano replaced Magellan as leader of the remainder of the expedition and embarked on a journey back home through the Indian and Atlantic oceans that was even more disastrous than Magellan’s. It finally reached the Spanish port of Sanlucar on 6 September 1522, with only 13 survivors out of a total of 250 who had left the same port three years before. It was an unmitigated failure and Felipe Fernández- Armesto even doubts that it was profitable if we balance the cargo that reached Spain against the total cost of the journey. As regards the scientific consequences of the first circumnavigation of the Earth the author does not think that there were any, as it simply proved what was already well known: that the Earth was round. Several works, particularly Stefan Sweig’s famous biography have repeated heroic shibboleths about Magellan and the journey that he never made. This biography that marks the five hundredth anniversary of the circumnavigation of the globe, finally presents the truth beyond myths and legends. On the other hand Fernández-Armesto does admit that Magellan had qualities that earned him his posthumous fame like dauntlessness and perseverance and that he contributed to the exploring spirit without which the West would not have been what it is.