On Mill on Race, and the Welsh.
The case against Hume, Part III
Yesterday, I learned that two lemmas by me were published in The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon edited by Karolina Hübner and Justin Steinberg. Together with my excellent, former PhD Student Jo Van Cauter, I am responsible for “Ambition” (here). I am very proud of this collaboration. In addition, I wrote an entry, Hudde, Johannes (1628 –1704).” It’s my first publication devoted to Hudde, which is kind of pathetic since I originally hatched a plan to write a PhD on him until Steve Nadler (and my supervisor) talked me out of it.
Let me turn to Mill. It would be an exaggeration to claim that chapter 16 of J.S. Mill’s (1861) Considerations on Representative Government (hereafter Representative Government) is central to the liberal and democratic tradition. But it is not altogether insignificant with its enduring interest and impact. It’s the chapter titled, “Of Nationality, as connected with Representative Government.” For it defends a form of national self-determination as an important principle. Let me quote a key passage.
Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a primâ facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves.
Mill roots his liberal nationalism in (recall) sympathy (see also this post on Elizabeth Anderson) which Mill notes is “sometimes…the effect of identity of race and descent.”* In fact, it is a sober reminder that such common sympathy is for Mill a necessary condition for the possibility of functional representative government (‘‘Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government can not exist.”) While the cold-war valorized Mill as the enemy of conformism, Mill was equally worried about the effect of national/cultural echo-chambers.(“The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions or what instigations are circulating in another.”)+
The repeated use of ‘race’ need not surprise; Mill’s chauvinist views on cultural superiority are well known by now. For example, a recent essay (here) by Duncan Bell quite rightly calls attention to how this is also racial (in our sense) in character.
Even so, and somewhat surprisingly perhaps, what Mill means by ‘race’ in this chapter of Representative Government is probably closer to what we are now inclined to call ‘ethnicity,’ perhaps even ‘tribe.’ This can be illustrated by a sentence in a subsequent paragraph: “Switzerland has a strong sentiment of nationality, though the cantons are of different races, different languages, and different religions.” And a few lines further down, “The Flemish and the Walloon provinces of Belgium, notwithstanding diversity of race and language, have a much greater feeling of common nationality than the former have with Holland, or the latter with France.” His race concept is much more fine-grained than the one that is usually of interest (alas). However, I don’t want to deny that a more biological concept of ‘race’ is lurking in the vicinity because Mill is very interested in how “common descent” and its absence shapes political cohesion. (It is worth noting that Darwin’s Origin appeared while Mill was drafting the book.)
A key theme of Mill’s argument in the chapter is that the utility of blending of characteristics of social groups with common descent is a non-trivial feature of political life. Let me quote an important paragraph:
Whatever really tends to the admixture of nationalities, and the blending of their attributes and peculiarities in a common union, is a benefit to the human race. Not by extinguishing types, of which, in these cases, sufficient examples are sure to remain, but by softening their extreme forms, and filling up the intervals between them. The united people, like a crossed breed of animals (but in a still greater degree, because the influences in operation are moral as well as physical), inherits the special aptitudes and excellences of all its progenitors, protected by the admixture from being exaggerated into the neighboring vices. [Emphasis added]
With my nod to Origin of Species, I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that Mill was influenced by Darwin. He could have been familiar (recall) with an argument like this from Berkeley’s (1735) The Querist (see, especially, Queries 512-514; and the nod to Plato’s Laws earlier in the text). Later in life, when he reviewed a new edition of Berkeley’s Works, Mill called The Querist “the most considerable and best known of his writings of practical interests,” so it’s likely Mill was familiar with it in the 1850s and 1860s. (The whole next page is of interest.)
In fact, as the text in my footnote(*) illustrates, Mill thinks race is of limited explanatory value when it comes to nationalism. His favorite example of this are the Swiss, but also the Italians. For example, he writes, he writes on Italian national unification, “among Italians, an identity far from complete of language and literature, combined with a geographical position which separates them by a distinct line from other countries, and, perhaps more than every thing else, the possession of a common name, which makes them all glory in the past achievements in arts, arms, politics, religious primacy, science, and literature, of any who share the same designation, give rise to an amount of national feeling in the population which, though still imperfect, has been sufficient to produce the great events now passing before us, notwithstanding a great mixture of races, and although they have never, in either ancient or modern history, been under the same government, except while that government extended or was extending itself over the greater part of the known world.”
The really important, analytic distinction that Mill relies on is the one between savage and civilized—despite also wishing to hold it partially at arm’s length:
If it be said that so broadly-marked a distinction between what is due to a fellow-countryman and what is due merely to a human creature is more worthy of savages than of civilized beings, and ought, with the utmost energy, to be contended against, no one holds that opinion more strongly than myself. But this object, one of the worthiest to which human endeavour can be directed, can never, in the present state of civilization, be promoted by keeping different nationalities of any thing like equivalent strength under the same government. In a barbarous state of society the case is sometimes different. The government may then be interested in softening the antipathies of the races, that peace may be preserved and the country more easily governed.
So, qua moralist, Mill rejects the salience of the savage/civilization distinction, but as a political sociologist he deploys it! So, for example, he goes on to claim that “experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another; and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race, the absorption is greatly to its advantage.” He then provides the following examples:
Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people—to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity and prestige of French power—than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.
I quote this passage because, as regular readers know, I am interested in tracing the idea to be found in quite a few important works of English language philosophy that the Welsh are somehow an inferior/backward or savage type. Rather peculiarly, we see in this paragraph a more general superiority toward what we may call the pre-Roman conquest peoples. (Recall my treatment of Anscombe’s use of a trope from Suetonius.) The underlying metric is being “superior in civilization, or the inferior.”
The metric itself is normative in character. But it also allows Mill to describe certain political events as a kind of demographic and cultural disaster: “The absorption of Greece by Macedonia was one of the greatest misfortunes which ever happened to the world; that of any of the principal countries of Europe by Russia would be a similar one.” (See also: “If the smaller nationality, supposed to be the more advanced in improvement, is able to overcome the greater, as the Macedonians, re-enforced by the Greeks, did Asia, and the English India, there is often a gain to civilization, but the conquerors and the conquered can not in this case live together under the same free institutions.”) As Mill notes this sets the stage for his subsequent argument at the end of this and later chapters for federalism of unequal peoples.**
Here I want to close with a wider observation on Mill’s attitude toward the Welsh which is not far removed from Hume’s. As I have noted (recall here; here), David Hume is rather important to deploying the civilized vs barbarous distinction, For example, in Hume's History (recall) in discussing Agricola's conquest of Britain, he relies on a distinction between enjoyable chains (civilization) and fierce (animal-like) un-tamedness (barbarism), and he comes close to asserting that the 'uncivilized' or barbarous are interpreted as willingly choosing death and thereby marking themselves as worth killing.
More important for our present purposes Hume applauds on consequentialist grounds Edward I's mass murder and culture genocide of the Welsh Bards in 1284. It's not absurd because Hume recognizes the significance of what one might call a 'civic culture' -- poetry of the people...assisted by the power of music, and the jollity of festivals, -- for possible future (national) political resistance. That is to say, Hume recognizes the instrumental rationality of the English king's pacification of the Welsh which requires forceful methods to succeed. Here’s how Hume puts it:
The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military valour and of ancient glory, so much as the traditional poetry of the people, which, assisted by the power of music, and the jollity of festivals, made deep impression on the minds of the youth, gathered together all the Welsh bards, and from a barbarous, though not absurd policy, ordered them to be put to death.--David Hume History of England
The passage may express some ambivalence (note that ‘barbarous’), but Hume goes on to claim — and including in his list of great deeds “he fully annexed to his crown the principality of Wales” — that Edward I was the best king England ever had (although not when it comes to justice).
Given the political sensibilities and controversies of our own age, it is no surprise that the sense of superiority toward the Welsh by Mill and Hume has not attracted much attention before. But this felt superiority is not different in kind of the sort that has so attracted it.
*The rest of the passage goes like this:
+Mill is quite clearly thinking of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
**Irish readers may find Mill’s analysis of interest.