Regenia Gagnier. Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859-1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-230-24743-7. Price: US$85.00/£50.00

In this stimulating and original study, Regenia Gagnier analyzes a distinctive feature of fin–de- siècle intellectual history that has probably been neglected because, to a scholar trained in twentieth-century political paradigms, it seems so counterintuitive: the coincidence of extreme professions of individualism with devotion to socialism. In his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” for instance, Oscar Wilde asserts that only under the coming socialism will the full development of the personality become possible. Rather than seeing this constellation merely as less politically prescient than Wilde’s sexual radicalism, Gagnier finds in this era’s fluid politics an inspiring interest in relation rather than identity, in cosmopolitan social formations rather than nationalism, and in performative rituals rather than fixed ideologies. Gagnier’s reevaluation of nineteenth-century liberalism reflects the new tone in recent scholarship about Victorian politics, which is now more inclined to take liberalism’s aspirations to many-sidedness seriously (as in David Wayne Thomas’s 2004 Cultivating Victorians) than to dismiss it as a fiction of Western imperialism. It also contrasts interestingly with Gagnier’s own critique of the hidden economic selfishness of aestheticism in her 2000 The Insatiability of Human Wants, which pointed out how the connoisseur’s discourse of exquisitely-chosen commodities mirrored the rise of marginal utility theory. Another change from this earlier volume is a shift in Gagnier’s organizing interdisciplinary paradigm from economics to biology. One of the great pleasures of reading Gagnier’s work is its openness to so many different intellectual models, from feminist business ethics to the economic history of pre-imperial Asia to recent work on the cellular biology of altruism. Gagnier’s work is a model of engaged scholarship, with historical studies arranged to illuminate our own globalized era as well as the past. Her juxtaposition of forgotten movements like Charles Godfrey Leland’s defense of the gypsies or John Davidson’s poetic anthropology with reflections on Giorgio Agamben or systems analysis can at times be a little rhetorically disorienting, but it is also brilliantly consilient, creating an exciting sense of connection between facets of the past and present. Gagnier sees the bohemian political movements of the 1890s, like William Morris’s, not as historical dead ends but as creative attempts to think about collective social life in ways that might help overcome some of our current political blockages. Gagnier draws her central theme of part versus whole from Havelock Ellis’s remarkable 1889 argument that the “individual is the social cell” and should thus remain “subordinate” to the social organism; “but if the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole” (2: italics in original). Ellis’s definition of decadence neatly links biology to aesthetics by denoting the “decadent style” as “one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page … and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word” (2). Though this biological concept of decadence typically relies on certain moralizing assumptions about the value of social totality, Gagnier presents decadence less as a cultural apocalypse to be feared or celebrated than as a spectrum of alternate communities ranging from the monastic ideal of Joris-Karl Huysmans to the utopian Fellowship of the New Life. Her decadent individuals share appealing traits of tolerance and hospitality, resisting the statist concepts of nation or empire in favor of microcosms like the extended family or macrocosms like a cosmopolitan ideal of European identity, as referenced both in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “good European” in 1886 and Etienne Balibar’s vision …