'I will be as modest as possible': A brief foray

In my experience it is rare to come across a book that is entirely without merit; rarer still that I would actually own one. At worst, some books qualify as being almost completely useless, without quite going all the way. Even the stupidest book I’ve ever read, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse  (1997), written by the five-foot-tall, super-conceited, ultra-reactionary, Indian-born Anglophile Nirad Chaudhuri, provides some useful insight into how political thinking works in the absence of intelligence. (Chaudhuri is the subject of a chapter in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, which I guess makes sense).

Luckily, I've been able to extract something, even if it is something small, from all the books I own. 

L. T. Hobhouse’s Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911), which I ordered via Abebooks late last year, is on the whole not a satisfactory book. This is mainly due to its datedness. The lengthiest chapter is a very mild critique of eugenics that gives the impression that either Hobhouse was something of a waif when it came to polemics or - more likely - that eugenics was unfortunately still respectable enough in 1911 to not merit complete ridicule. Not only are the concerns dated, but the style, methodology and conclusions are of an old vintage. It is a good reminder that just because a book is hidden away in the dark end of the library stacks, doesn’t necessarily make it an unjustly-forgotten masterpiece awaiting re-appraisal. Academic libraries in particular are full of reminders that most books are collecting dust in the corners because they’re not very good.

But it has some nice stuff. This, and the fact that it is a marvellously well-preserved maroon-coloured hardback published before WW1, is what earns it a comfy little place on my bookshelf. The same goes for J. M. Robertson’s not-all-that-valuable The Meaning of Liberalism (1925), which was also an Abebooks purchase. Both Hobhouse and Robertson were figures belonging to that school of thought known as ‘New Liberalism’ or ‘Social Liberalism’ that came of age in the Edwardian era. My interest in this group – which also included figures like John Hobson and Cecile Deslile Burns – has steadily grown in the last few years as I've become interested in investigating the genealogy of reformist liberalism. Hobhouse published Social Evolution and Political Theory the same year as his Liberalism (1911), the work he is most famous for. Liberalism is probably the central text of the New Liberalism, regarded by C. Wright Mills as the best twentieth-century articulation of liberal principles he knew of. 

One of the nice passages in Social Evolution and Political Theory is where Hobhouse writes of his desire to put forward some guiding assumptions of his social philosophy, but would very much not like to go too deeply in grounding his assumptions in first principles. This would mean delving into ethics, values, and metaphysics. Not that he was incapable of doing so, more because in the context (the book is comprised of lectures he gave at Columbia University), it would be too labour-intensive. But I share the sentiment for my own purposes. Being someone who loves reading about ideas but hates developing them, I also go by certain assumptions without building strong foundations for them. This is too much work for an amateur. Like most lay people, I’m happy to tell you what I think, but would find it too hard to plausibly justify why I think it.

Hobhouse declares, as a preface to presenting his guiding assumptions, that ‘I will be as modest as possible’. I dare say that most lay people, including me, don’t always follow this strategy. It seems like an amiable anachronism in today’s world, where people defend their positions very immodestly. This is the theme of many post-2016 books, beginning in earnest with Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise (2017), and becoming more philosophically focused with Michael Patrick Lynch’s Know-It-All Society (2019) and Quassim Cassam’s Vices of the Mind (2019). While pretty much all books on politics lately attempt to untangle the nature of today’s divisions (educated versus uneducated, city versus country), these books in particular look at how divisions are exacerbated by the growing vice of intellectual arrogance. It seems we’re all in danger of inflating our sense of intellectual superiority, and act dismissively and derisively towards those whom we disagree with. These books can also be read as sort of self-help guides for the perplexed. They all caution some form of intellectual modesty or humility.

In this context we could do worse than re-visit some our old ‘new’ liberal pals from the early 20^th century for some additional advice. Books like Social Evolution and Political Evolution, like countless other books written in a different era, cannot be of any programmatic value today. I think what can be extracted though are lessons in temperament. We can never have enough modesty when enunciating our guiding assumptions in life.

And finally, what were those guiding assumptions of Hobhouse’s?

I will not assume that life is something intrinsically good, but I must assume that the good for man is to be found in some kind of life, not in the negation of life. I will not assume that fullness of vitality is as such desirable, but I must assume that, other things equal, the fuller life is on the whole the more desirable. I will not assume that happiness, however attained, is good, but I must assume that there is some form of happiness which is good, or, at lowest, that misery is an evil. I will not assume that the full realization of the capacities of mind defines the end of life, but I must assume that some form of such realization is an integral element in a desirable life. Finally, I will not assume that all social life is good, still less that social growth is necessarily a change for the better, but I must assume that a life which is completely social – which fully realizes the social capacities of man – is good, and that if we use the phrase “social development” in a precise sense as a short expression for the accomplishment of such a life, social development is good.