Simon Gunn and James Vernon, eds. The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9845909-5-7. Price US$29.95/GB£20.95

This collection of essays reflects the strong revival of interest in nineteenth-century liberalism since the 1980s. It also reflects the extent to which the revival continues, in some quarters, to be driven by a post-Foucaultian concern with the disciplinary exclusions of power. Viewed from that theoretical perspective, the history of British liberalism provides a testing ground for critics now habitually skeptical about the degree of alignment between liberal ideals such as freedom and equality and the evidence of their theoretical and practical development. The current volume originated in a 2008 conference to mark the retirement of the social historian Patrick Joyce, who contributes a brief foreword commenting on recent changes in the historiography of liberalism. The most marked, he observes, is a shift from seeing Britain as “the exemplary case of liberal modernity…corroborating a particular kind of Anglo-American liberalism” to recognizing Britain’s “peculiarity” (xii). Collectively these essays represent that peculiarity as the product of factors operating across the scales of governmentality whether imperial, national, regional, or local. Individually the essays touch on economic, intellectual, and party political history, but the most common preoccupation is with liberalism understood (after Michel Foucault) as a political “technology” (25) at work in contexts as various as colonial Australia, the West Indies, India, English history writing, information management, entertainment, bio-politics, sociological taxonomies, ecology, and finance. Scattered though the subject matter is, the overwhelming emphasis is on demonstration of “the logic of exclusion” (53). Classical liberalism aims at removal of obstacles to political, economic, intellectual, and social freedom, and views liberalization as the key to progress; but British political theory and practice have always seen some liberal subjects as more eligible for freedom than others. So, Catherine Hall’s examination of the liberal historicist credentials of Thomas Babington Macaulay draws attention to the racial discriminations that “fractured” his notion of a “great human family” along a stadial model of historical development (34). The colonizing nations were deemed mature enough to qualify for liberal subjecthood (though with internal distinctions along lines of ethnicity, class, and gender); those over whom they ruled deemed not yet ready. The claims are prosecuted with verve, but at this stage in the debate they are truisms and the conclusion—that Macaulay’s liberalism “was strictly limited” (36) (he remains better described as a Whig)—is unsurprising. James Epstein and Tony Bennett are on similar ideological terrain, Epstein exploring the malleability of the idea of freedom as reflected in attempts to interpret the principle of free labor for the West Indies and Bennett scrutinizing successive developments in the socio-biological and anthropological theory of habit that supported the exclusion of Australian aboriginals from the project of European modernization. Two essays focus on liberal governmentality’s failure (more sympathetically, its inevitable failure) to sustain any ideal of a “total” and transparent system (79). The less substantial is Tom Crook’s, which offers a quick summary of Stefanos Geroulanos on the unverifiability and excess of the panoptic gaze, and Giorgio Agamben on biopower and the “foundational violence” (76) of the law, before speeding through three spheres in which liberal governmentality is openly reliant upon secrecy: spying, masturbation, and voting. The joining of those three activities under the title of a common “logic” (89) suggests how excessively pliable key terms in recent theorizations of liberalism—including “logic,” “epistemology,” “rationality,” and “technology”—risk becoming. Total systematization was seldom an avowed aim of classical liberal theory. Many liberals (including John Stuart Mill) believed that the secret ballot was counter to liberalism. Spying certainly presents moral problems for liberalism, but it is disputable whether it is logically inimical to it (states have the right to defend themselves against …