The Politics of Diversity in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This dissertation places the problem of social and ideological diversity at the center of nineteenth-century British political thought. Given our contemporary preoccupation with the diversity of beliefs, perspectives, and identities, it is tempting to assume that this diversity has always been regarded as a central political issue. Surprisingly, however, I contend that ideological diversity was identified as a political problem in a recognizably modern sense only in the aftermath of the French Revolution. A novel conception of ideological diversity emerged in nineteenth-century Britain, generating theoretical advancements above all in two areas: toleration and freedom of expression, and representation.

My examination of the first subject starts with the reconstruction of an important and neglected set of arguments from the 1810s-40s about the impact that the liberty of discussion and the press had in securing social peace and stability. I then move on to explore the extraordinary but little-known burst of theorizing about freedom of discussion that took place in the last third of the century. Contrary to what most political theorists today would expect, I show that the thought of John Stuart Mill was not considered to be representative of the theory of free expression – in part because Victorians, who were committed to a consequentialist and historicist account of the value of toleration, saw him as illicitly importing ahistorical principles of natural right into his work; and in part because he was thought to have expanded his theory beyond a proper notion of toleration to embrace a cluster of beliefs and attitudes (such as the neutrality of the state or the refusal to judge the quality of different opinions) which were unjustified and harmful.

Part two demonstrates how central the concern for diversity was to the era’s famous debates about parliamentary reform and political representation. It depicts three leading institutional paradigms for the relationship between representation and diversity. The first is what I call the variety-of-suffrages school. These authors put forward plans for electoral reform that deliberately varied the suffrage across constituencies in order to ensure seats in the House of Commons for different classes, interest groups, and ideological movements. Adherents to this school subscribed to an ideal of descriptive representation – they held that Parliament should “mirror” the diverse society for which it made laws. In contrast to this ideal, a uniform suffrage entailed bestowing an illiberal hegemony on only one part of the body politic: if the property requirement for the vote were restrictive, only the opinions of the upper classes would be included; conversely, if the property requirement were abolished, the working classes, by virtue of their vast numbers, would consistently outvote or “swamp” the other groups in society and lead to their exclusion from the assembly. Beyond simply being unfair to those excluded, such uniform suffrages would impair parliamentary deliberation by diminishing the range of ideas heard and rendering debate “partial.” These defects would in turn lead to ill-judged legislation and political instability.

Victorian democratic theory, the second paradigm that I identify, developed two main counterarguments to the variety-of-suffrages tradition. The first was to affirm that the working class was characterized by a diversity of opinions, and thus that a democratic suffrage would not eliminate the contestation among viewpoints that gave the assembly its deliberative character. The second response was that anxiety about social-ideological diversity had no place in the evaluation of electoral structures. For these more radical democrats, descriptive representation and democracy were opposed and irreconcilable. The final vision of the relationship between diversity and representation was the theory of proportional representation. The motivation for the scheme of the single transferable vote which Thomas Hare and JS Mill championed, and the stunning range of benefits predicted from its implementation, cannot be understood in isolation from the anxious search for a reform which would expand the electorate without causing the Commons to become unrepresentative and undeliberative. PR was supposed to square this circle and deliver democratic representativeness – to provide an electoral system which could, even under universal suffrage, produce an assembly that was a mirror of society in its diversity. While PR was arguably the most consequential political innovation to emerge from the Victorian era, it was unable to convince the British public of its superiority to these alternative paradigms of representation, and it combined elements from the other two schools of representation in ways that were not always internally coherent or mutually reinforcing.