Elaine Hadley. Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-226-31188-3. Price: US$45.00/£29.00

Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism is a careful, subtle and persuasive study that provocatively explores the blurred boundaries of literary studies, political theory and history. She sets out to isolate the characteristics of a formation of discourse and practice extending from 1859 to the early 1880s that she calls mid-Victorian liberalism. The book is not about any particular liberal political movement or any particular set of liberal claims during this period, but about the theorization of the practical dimensions of liberal politics, of how liberalism is to be lived. In this period, she argues, the ideal of disinterested reason came to be thought and lived through the category of what she calls “abstract embodiment” (16). This apparently oxymoronic formulation seeks to capture a core tension in the liberalism of this period – its insistence, in the wake of the increasing severance of politics from property and interest, that disinterested reason was something that had to be practiced by liberal individuals. Liberal individuality thus took the necessary form of embodied personhood, but an embodied personhood that, in so far as it could be described as “liberal,” was not a site of private desire or idiosyncratic character, but rather of the disinterested and rational production of individual opinion on the basis of what she calls “practices of moralized cognition” (9). Sincere opinion – opinion in its individual rather than impersonal form – thus became a key organizing category of mid-Victorian liberalism, as it expressed simultaneously the abstraction of liberal reason and the necessary embodiedness of the capacity for such reasoning. Thus, the anchoring of reason in individuals capable of disinterested reasoning--and hence capable of forming opinions through which they could participate in public debates conceived as the exchange of ideas among individuals (rather than as the diffuse uncertainties of mass opinion)--was, in the end, the distinguishing characteristic of the liberalism of this period. Of Hadley’s examples, the one that most stands out for its elucidating clarity is the discussion of the controversy surrounding the introduction of signed articles in the Fortnightly Review in the 1860s. Signature liberalism, as Hadley calls it, represented most of the tensions of abstract embodiment. The articles of the Fortnightly Review expressed not a party line but a whole range of opinions; and the articles in which those opinions were expressed then had the author’s byline attached at the end. The name thus appended to the article marked it as the product of a particular individual. But that individual was not simply a person, but rather a liberal individual. That it to say, the presence of that individual’s opinion in the Fortnightly Review presumed that the opinion expressed in the article had been arrived at through the exercise of a disinterested reason that abstracted the individual from the concreteness of mere personhood such that “he” might become a mindful character. That it was in fact an “opinion” that the article expressed, rather than simply “truth,” was the guarantee that it was the product of a rational mind – a rationality that could only be trusted to the extent that it was lodged in the particularity of an individual body, rather than floating nebulously in the dangerously vaporous realms of popular opinion. Individual reason, embodied abstraction, thus tied the exercise of reason to the individual mind; and the only way it could do that was by severing the transparency of the relationship between reason and truth through the recourse to the role of opinion in public debate. The individual who engaged in such debate was necessarily, however, something less than a personality: it was the individual as the holder of …