In 1858 an aged and weakened James Stephen, the once-formidable “Over-Secretary of the Colonies” whose influence on the course of British imperial administration included such momentous tasks as drafting the bill to end slavery in the colonies and contributing to much of the administrative–constitutional groundwork for colonial self-government,Footnote ¹ wrote his son James Fitzjames words of encouragement on his rising writing career: “Time was when I enjoyed a repute as a writer of Edinburgh Reviews and from the bottom of my heart I hope as I sincerely believe that you will eclipse me even more than the elder Mill has been eclipsed by the younger.”Footnote ² For all the power he had exercised in the Colonial Office, and for all the worldly success that Fitzjames might enjoy in the legal profession he had been practicing for a half-decade at that point, there was something unique about literary fame that James wished his son to have.

James's wish was certainly fulfilled. In addition to a long, fruitful, and varied legal career that included a short but important stint as “legislator for the subcontinent” (Law Member in the Government of India) and culminated in his receipt of a High Court judgeship, Fitzjames became one of the most prominent Victorian voices on a breathtaking array of subjects—politics, law, religion, empire, literature, and history among them. And if Fitzjames alone never reached the heights of Mill fils (who could have?), James Stephen has the posthumous better of Mill père in the cumulative literary impact of his progeny: Fitzjames's brother Leslie was an influential historian and literary critic, and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and his niece (Leslie's daughter and James's granddaughter) was Virginia Woolf. Not a bad record for someone who hoped his descendants would eclipse him in the world of letters.

Sadly, though, Fitzjames's writings, notable as they were in his time, have not always benefited from the subtlest analysis since. This has been especially true of the reception he has gotten from political theorists and philosophers, who, when they have attended to him at all, have presented him as a kind of ideological caricature. This mistreatment was presaged as well in James's good wishes to him, for the text of Fitzjames that is best known today is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a biting work of analysis and polemic directed largely against the younger Mill, whose writerly celebrity his father had held up for inspiration. As a result of his targeting of Mill, consideration of the breadth and complexity of Stephen's social–political thinking has given way to celebration or (more often) condemnation of him as Mill's adversary. Given Mill's stature as the supposed incarnation of liberalism and progressivism, the conclusion has proven irresistible that the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, with all its attacks against Mill, must have been a sorry comforter of authoritarianism and reaction. Some theorists have even claimed to find in Stephen's thought a manifestation of something like a basic structure common to all “illiberal” modes of thought.Footnote ³

Fortunately, such misleading portraits of Stephen as the locus of all manner of “illiberal” attitudes and arguments have begun to be balanced by more accurate assessments which restore his thought within the large and discordant family of varieties of Victorian liberalism—as indeed it was understood by contemporaries and by himself.Footnote ⁴ Clinching this move toward a better-rounded and richer appreciation of Stephen's thought and its place within the contested domain of Victorian liberalism is Oxford University Press's Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen series, after which the implausibility of ideologically overhyped appropriations of his ideas will, I hope, be unignorable. Since 2013 five of a projected nine installments have appeared, expertly edited by a group of historians and literary and legal scholars. Much as the Harvard University Press/Economist series of the Collected Works of Walter Bagehot facilitated scholarship on “the greatest Victorian,”Footnote ⁵ Oxford's Stephen series promises to smooth the approach of scholars to another thinker who might have laid claim to G. M. Young's laudation, a writer whose trenchancy of thought and forceful style still have the power to dazzle and provoke. As with the Bagehot Collected Works, the editorial introductions are valuable pieces in their own right. But Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen goes well beyond the former collection in the quality of its critical apparatus, which situates the reader within the sprawling succession of literary allusions, intellectual interlocutors, and personal connections the mention of which dots Stephen's pages. While even the planned nine volumes will hardly encompass the full range of text churned out by a writer whose rate of work was obscene even by the elevated standards of Victorian men of letters,Footnote ⁶ the five currently available already do much to mark the major grooves along which Stephen's mind ran.

In an inspired choice, one of the volumes in Selected Writings is not a production from Fitzjames's pen, but rather a window onto his life: his brother Leslie's Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. The Life is a notable document for several reasons. First, it typifies a style of biography—blending the narrative of life events with heavy doses of intellectual reconstruction, both of the ideas of the subject and of the various contexts through which he moved—which thrived in the Victorian milieu. This genre was a sort of secularized version of evangelical spiritual testimonials that were so important in popular literature in the century's early decades (and which the brothers Stephen, raised in the devout milieu of evangelical political and religious leaders like the Venns and Wilberforces, knew all too wellFootnote ⁷). It exemplifies, furthermore, the crisp, unadorned manner in which Leslie wrote not only biography but also literary, religious, and political commentary, and which makes his massive histories of ideas, The English Utilitarians and English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, still so usable and enjoyable. Finally, and most significant for the student of Fitzjames, the Life is indispensable for orienting him within the overlapping imperial, intellectual, literary, legal, and familial circles which shaped his life and colored his prose.

Among the four volumes composed of Fitzjames's own writing, the most notable is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, his most enduring work and the closest he ever came to producing a systematic piece of political theory. The edition is expertly introduced by Julia Stapleton, who marshals her vast knowledge of the longue durée of British public-intellectual life to develop an interpretation of Stephen as belonging to a via media tradition of liberalism that sought to steer “between unfettered liberty, on the one hand, and war to the finish on the other.”Footnote ⁸ It also contains a valuable set of appendices, including four of the most interesting immediate reviews of the book. Most importantly for historians of political thought, among these is an article by Henry Sidgwick, the greatest utilitarian after J. S. Mill and purportedly Mill's disciple. Despite several grumbles about the book, Sidgwick strikingly conceded that Stephen has taken up “the right ground for attacking [Mill's views of liberty].”Footnote ⁹

Also falling within the category of political thought, conventionally construed, is a selection of essays, On Society, Religion, and Government. While, given Stephen's crushingly great output, devoted Fitzjamians will be able to come up with other essays which they would have wished to see included, the collection gives a fair impression of the contours of Stephen's social–political commentary, drawing from articles over a thirty-year period that illustrate different preoccupations and phases of his career. The editor, Thomas Schneider, presents the selections as a kind of stand-in for the large, constructive work of moral and political theory (perhaps something like Leslie's rather unfortunate Science of Ethics) that Fitzjames longed to write but never did. Like Stapleton, Schneider's introduction emphasizes the location of Stephen's political ideas within liberalism, rightly pointing to Stephen's proximity to Mill with regard to the basic epistemic principle of Victorian liberalism: that “opposing points of view” should be presumed to embody partial truths, and that right judgment on human affairs consisted of a balance of contending claims.Footnote ¹⁰

The other two volumes occupy somewhat opposite positions in Stephen's corpus, though they can profitably be read together. One is A General View of the Criminal Law of England, his first major authorial achievement, composed when he still was a relatively young man. A General View sought to expound the basic principles underlying a system of criminal law and to evaluate the state of the English criminal law in this light. The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey, on the other hand, was his final book, and a quite atypical enterprise from him. Rather than having the broad ambition to tackle fundamental legal and moral problems, it deals entirely with one set of notorious episodes in the history of the British Empire. It attempts, via an excruciatingly detailed reconsideration of the evidence, to overturn the received (from Macaulay and Burke) wisdom that William Hastings, governor of Bengal, and Elijah Impey, the chief justice of the supreme court of Bengal, conspired in the wrongful execution of a Bengali diwan in 1775. The Story of Nuncomar will be the least accessible of Stephen's texts for all but the devotee of imperial true-crime procedurals, but it is revealing how deeply he felt the need to exonerate of the stain of judicial murder two seminal figures in the development of the legal–governmental structure of British India in which he worked and felt great pride.Footnote ¹¹ The Story of Nuncomar also dramatically demonstrates Stephen's lifelong fascination with the mechanics of criminal justice and his conviction that it was in its handling of crime that essential traits of a social system were revealed.Footnote ¹² The technicalities and procedures involved in criminal trials, determinations about what constituted a crime and how crimes were to be investigated, the drama generated in the courtroom and the public narratives built around crimes and their punishment, the carrying out of the sentence against the offender itself—all of these, in Stephen's eyes, were profoundly intertwined with political, constitutional, and moral considerations, although he believed that these connections were overlooked by more squeamish and less acute commentators.

Still to come in the series are three entries that will build on themes central to those already released: two selections of essays (On History and Empire and On Justice and Jurisprudence) and his History of the Criminal Law of England, a magisterial three-volume work that contains much material of interest not only to legal historians but also to intellectual historians and political theorists, for example on the criminalization of belief and expression. A ninth installment, On the Novel and Journalism, edited by the great literary critic Christopher Ricks, will move into territory largely unexplored by the others—although the hatred of sentimentalism that governed Stephen's literary judgments shared much with his political attitudes.Footnote ¹³ When completed, the series will undoubtedly become the starting point for future work on Stephen, and will be a resource for scholars across the many disciplines—political theory, literature, law and legal history, the history of empire and of Victorian society, religion, and culture, to name a few—who will long have reason to turn to him. At the least, Selected Writings will make it harder than ever for students in these fields to depict Stephen solely as a stock figure representing something called illiberalism or authoritarianism against a Millian liberal consensus.

From the perspective of political thought, however, a more nuanced and complex appreciation of Stephen might appear a mixed blessing. If he was not simply one side of a pitched battle between perennial ideological foes, might he not be less interesting to us? There are, after all, reasons why such stylized contrasts appeal. On the contrary, I believe a fuller and more refined picture of Stephen makes the study of his thought an even richer resource for historians of political thought. It is naturally beyond my remit here to attempt any sweeping interpretation of Stephen's politics. Instead, I want simply to sketch one profitable way of approaching Stephen which the Selected Writings facilitates. And this is to see him as an analyst and critic of what we might call the shape of Victorian political ideas and public discourse. Stephen's writings penetratingly diagnose the condition of political opinion in his time—a time which witnessed, among other important things, the formation of mass political parties, the development of many aspects of the modern bureaucratic–democratic state, and important changes in the way the empire was ruled.Footnote ¹⁴ With the remainder of this essay I want to make three points about Stephen's conception of political thought in this epoch which the Oxford series enables us to see clearly.

The first is that Stephen believed that grand, and more or less coherent, frameworks of ideas advanced by devoted adherents in search of a popular following—ideologies, in our parlance—were the motive forces in Victorian intellectual and political life. Whether it is appropriate to think of the nineteenth century as an “age of ideologies” has been a frequent point of historiographical contestation. Whatever judgment we may pass today on the aptness of such descriptions, Stephen's political analysis was concerned above all with programs or worldviews—what Stephen called, among other names, “-isms” or “creeds”—which (a) connected stances on live political issues with a set of first principles about human nature, the character of moral norms, the arc of history, und so weiter, and (b) had advocates with a degree of organization who competed in the press, civil society, and occasionally the hustings for citizens’ allegiance. Indeed, it can sometimes seem as if Stephen thought that British political culture just was the aggregate of these units. This way of thinking held constant throughout Stephen's career: compare his commentary from the early 1870s about how “the influence” of “‘the isms’ … long has been, and continually is, growing in strength” with remarks from a decade and a half later on how “the freedom of discussion on all subjects” and the liberation of “every kind of association” had led to a proliferation of organized bodies of political opinion whose believers vied, sometimes ferociously, both for political power and, even more, for the psychological–intellectual investment of the public.Footnote ¹⁵ A major task of the Victorian “public moralist” was to identify and assess the ideological or ism-like formations as they appeared on the political horizon.

That units of this sort were what largely occupied his attention comes out with especial clarity in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The preface to the second edition lays out a response to the two “most important of my critics”: the radical–liberal journalist and future statesman John Morley and the proselytizer of positivism Frederic Harrison. Stephen there made clear that the reason he had chosen to privilege these two rebuttals was not their intrinsic worth (he thought they had little enough of that). Rather, it was that they were “representative performances” of important ideological camps: “the one represent[ing] the Radical, the other the Positivist objections to my views.”Footnote ¹⁶ It was similar for the purposes of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as a whole: despite its reputation as a counterblast to Mill, in this book what was of the deepest moment about Mill was not his unique genius, but that he stood for one important popular “school” of self-identified “liberals.” The rationale behind placing Mill at the center of the book's analysis was instrumental: it was “absolutely necessary to take some definite statement as a starting point” if one wished, as Stephen did, to unpack the logic and assumptions driving major political currents. Stephen allowed that this method was not without its drawbacks. In particular, it could lead to some confusion about when he had strayed into areas which were peculiar to Mill's philosophy rather than shared by a broader range of activists and “worshippers” of these “dogmas,” and a couple of times he disrupted the flow of the argument to clarify that he had ceased for a time to treat Mill as an “exponent” of a wider “popular sentiment.”Footnote ¹⁷ But no modus operandi was perfect, and this was one of the ways which Stephen thought most fruitful for analyzing the important elements in Britain's intellectual–political life. Furthermore, this practice of analyzing specific authors as an entry into the potent “-isms” guiding politics was hardly specific to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: one can find him employing it in his innumerable articles where figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Bossuet, de Maistre, Tocqueville, and the like are treated as illustrations of core outlooks which persisted in his country's, and Europe's, present divisions.Footnote ¹⁸

The language I have been quoting hitherto—“-isms” and “creeds” and “dogmas”—hints at a second point about Stephen's perception of the ideological field of the mid-Victorian era on which Selected Writings sheds light, namely that it was quite pluralistic. This was not a vision of politics as a single-front clash between right and left. The “struggle for ascendancy”—a phrase which Stephen lifted from Mill's discussion of federalism but then deployed to describe the conditions of human sociability so long as “men are really men” and have not been reduced to mere “limpets” or “weathercocks”—took place among various “doctrines” competing along several dimensions.Footnote ¹⁹ Perhaps the polyvalence of this perception was dictated fundamentally by his temperament: Stephen was a great hater—arguably better even than his friend, the dyspeptic mystic–reactionary Thomas Carlyle—and the scorn he felt compelled to pour upon “popular humbugs of every kind” of the day could hardly have been exhausted if public opinion had comprised merely a bipartite cleavage.Footnote ²⁰ Among the ideologies which he identified and targeted for derision I think we can parse out the following: French radicalism or the revolutionary tradition, from which the title of the book was drawn; English radicalism à la John Morley, which differed from the former although it had sadly been inflected by it; positivism, which for Stephen meant Harrison and other English epigones, as he boasted that he knew better than to actually read much Comte; nationalism, above all the Irish variety; Catholicism, especially its ultramontane form. And there were two other “egalitarianisms,” one economic—“socialism”—and the other the sort of “worship of equality” which he saw propelling the movement for women's emancipation. Both of these had to be distinguished at least from British radicalism since, as Stephen was aware, most self-described “radicals” of 1870s Britain were in favor neither of state control of industry nor of women's rights. Stephen would have agreed with Crane Brinton that the political–intellectual climate of the Victorian age was one of “conflicting faiths”Footnote ²¹—with hardly any of which he found himself in much sympathy.

The mapping of the ideological landscape that one encounters in Stephen is as notable for its omissions as for its inclusions. One such absence is conservatism. Despite Disraeli's remark that Stephen, had he not been a judge, would have been a sterling Conservative Party leader,Footnote ²² and despite the facile linkage of Stephen with some kind of transhistorical conservativism,Footnote ²³ Stephen certainly did not identify as a conservative at the time of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Even as his distance from the Liberal Party became more pronounced later in life, he understood this more as an alienation from the pathologies of electoral politics and “constituency government” altogether than as a switch of party affiliation.Footnote ²⁴ More interesting for our purposes, though, is that he not only did not associate with “conservatism,” but also did not seem to think that any such thing really existed, at least not on par with other “-isms.”Footnote ²⁵ Stephen appears to have seen Conservatives as only a political party, a coalition of politicians in search of power who had an ingrained backing from certain social strata and shared certain temperamental commonalities. Unlike positivists, radicals, or the French revolutionaries, they were not in possession of a set of principles derived from a broader science of history or human nature. Indeed, despite his prolific output, Stephen barely commented at all on conservatism as a philosophy or Weltanschauung—certainly much less than Bagehot or Mill did. Hence in one of those ironies that enrich the history of political thought, it is a Victorian who seems to have been indifferent to the claims of Conservatism as any kind of master lens on politics who wound up being embraced by later conservatives as key to their tradition.

While Stephen did not identify as a conservative, he did identify as a utilitarian. However, he likewise understood utilitarianism in such a way that it did not rise to the level of the other “creeds” or “doctrines,” contention among which was the lifeblood of modern public life. This was for two reasons. The first was the typical conceitedness of the self-conceived clearsighted, commonsensical man—while Stephen believed that the commentary of almost everyone around him was distorted by a “religious” investment in certain systems and precepts, he was able to take an unvarnished look at the “facts.” Such a “just-the-facts” disposition was, at base, what utilitarianism amounted to for Stephen: the core of Benthamism was the resolution to judge actions and policies solely by the light of “experience” and “observation,” without appeal to non-experiential intuitions or moral laws which, upon scrutiny, always resolved into nothing but the arbitrary “sympathies and antipathies” of particular individuals.Footnote ²⁶ Stephen had the bullish self-confidence to assert that, while others spouted empty “dogmas” and sought under the cover of abstract ideas to impose their own preferences, he remained untouched by ideology, in other words, remained a true utilitarian.

Yet there was another reason why Stephen did not treat utilitarianism as of a piece with positivism, radicalism, ultramontanism, and so forth. Interestingly, this one cut against the hubristic claim to be among the few who had retained Bentham's gift for seeing things as they were. For in one crucial respect Stephen had a more modest conception of utilitarianism than Bentham had had, namely he had a keener sense of the indeterminacy of the concept of utility. Bentham had promised nothing less than that “the principle of utility” would bring an end to “disputes” between “opposite persuasions and parties.” Disagreement was a result wholly of the “perplexity of ambiguous and sophistical discourses,” which would vanish—or at least be mitigated—now that utilitarianism was there to direct our attention toward real “evidence” and “matters of fact” and to put our divided polities on the path of “reconcilement.”Footnote ²⁷ Much as he plumed himself on his fidelity to Bentham's thought, Stephen rejected this aspect of it in withering fashion. Utilitarianism, he wrote against his master, supplied a manner of reasoning grounded in the attempt to evaluate moral and political issues in light of lessons learned from experience about the likelihood of their proving “expedient,” but it did not, and it could not, settle what “expediency” or “happiness” was. Hence, even in a world in which we were all utilitarians in the sense of having dropped the fruitless efforts to find sources of moral truth that were independent of the weighing of consequences,Footnote ²⁸ deep conflicts would remain: utilitarian Catholics and utilitarian Puritans, Benthamite radicals and Benthamite reactionaries, would all still disagree, precisely because signing up to utilitarianism left unchanged the fact that the “conception[s] of general happiness” of these groups were widely discrepant. While utilitarianism contained the bedrock truth that “from the nature of the case some external standard [based on experience] must always be supplied by which moral rules may be tested, and happiness is the … least misleading word that can be employed for that purpose,” the claim to “base a universal moral system on the assumption that there is any one definite thing, or any one definite set of things, which can be denoted by the word ‘happiness’ is to build on the sand.”Footnote ²⁹ In sum, for Stephen, utilitarianism both stood above other “-isms” in its less biased treatment of the facts and its greater epistemic honesty, and was below or dependent on them insofar as it was a kind of category mistake to expect utilitarianism to deliver answers to ultimate questions about value.Footnote ³⁰ In this agonistic, almost existential, character of his pluralism, and in his appreciation of something close to a fact/value distinction, he reads as more modern than many other Victorians.

It was fundamental to Stephen's outlook as an analyst and critic, then, that Victorian political thought was a kind of polyvalent ideological welter. But that does not mean that he considered all of these conflicts and cleavages as of equal importance. Instead, I would submit, one particular divide stood above the rest in his eyes—a fact about his thought that Oxford's collection helps to make clear. This divide was between, on the one hand, various stripes of what we might today call “libertarianism” and what Stephen denominated by such titles as “the religious dogma of liberty,” and the “degraded” or “mere police functions” view of the state, and, on the other, the defense of an active state that employed expertise and vigorous administration to realize a vision of the common good.Footnote ³¹ Stephen sometimes framed this as a clash between two ideas of “liberalism” (“a word which has had so great a charm for a whole generation”): the latter of the above, his own, which thought that government guided by reason—“highly instructed, large-minded, and impartial intellect,” in his phrase—could solve collective problems and achieve great ends; and the former, a pathological liberalism which, forgetting that “power precedes liberty—that liberty is dependent upon [the existence of] a powerful, well-organized, and intelligent government,” inflated liberty understood as simply “not being interfered with” and “everyone indiscriminately be[ing] left to do what he likes” into an absolute good in itself.Footnote ³² In short, a technocratic, activist liberalism versus a libertarian, nightwatchman-state liberalism.Footnote ³³

So fearsome did Stephen consider the threat posed by these extreme forms of antistatism that, just months after Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was published, he put a castigation of them at the heart of a pair of lectures on Britain's political institutions:

In light of these conditions it was of the utmost importance to apply ever more “skill,” “special knowledge,” “information,” and “real wisdom” to “public affairs.” And yet too much of the political theory of the day, far from addressing these needs, was characterized by a kind of unreality or denial. The course of “political speculation” was tending in precisely the opposite direction, toward “diminish[ing]” the need for the state's sage but forceful direction in a time marked by “the growth of the importance and intricacy of [common] affairs.” Instead of devotion to the task of reforming government so that the maximum of enlightenment and expertise could be brought to bear on solving the community's problems, “the great mass of speculative men … have set themselves either to challenge the right of Government to meddle with anything but police subjects, or to prove that in point of fact they can never do so with advantage.” As a result, “political opinion,” rather than rising to this great occasion, was “small” and “narrow.”Footnote ³⁴ Revitalizing confidence in an active and expert state was thus the primary task facing one who would reform British public opinion.

Although studies of Stephen have not foregrounded this dimension of his thought, Victorians were cognizant that this was how Stephen saw the central ideological fissure of his era and that the defeat of these libertarians was one of his major objectives. His brother made clear that Fitzjames hated nothing more than those liberty fanatics and “Manchester school” adherents who would “degrade the State to a commercial concern” and deny it the faculty of “vigorous government action.”Footnote ³⁵ John Morley, Mill's self-ordained spokesman on earth after his death, was especially sensitive to Fizjames's attacks on this score, explicitly denying that Mill could be grouped with “some writers” who thought that “social institutions” ought to do nothing but “let [people] alone.”Footnote ³⁶

On Stephen's accounting, it should be said, Mill had a more equivocal relation to these despised libertarians than the common caricatures of him would have led us to expect. In practice Mill was, Stephen admitted, “too rational” to endorse the full range of pieties of the popular “liberty and retrenchment” types.Footnote ³⁷ But this did not change the fact that Mill's “very simple principle” about the scope of freedom did provide theoretical justification for the follies of the “enthusiastic” and the “worshippers” of the “creed” of liberty who would make (as he put it in a later text) all “well-organized and really powerful government” impossible.Footnote ³⁸ For Mill's principle was that society was only justified in interfering with the liberty of individuals to prevent them from harming others. But was not taxation interference—and indeed a particularly visible and intimately felt form of it?Footnote ³⁹ “To force an unwilling person to contribute to the support of the British Museum is as distinct a violation of Mr. Mill's principle as religious persecution,” Stephen insisted. “The difference between … paying a single shilling of public money to a single school in which any opinion is taught of which any single taxpayer disapproves, and the maintenance of the Spanish Inquisition, is a question of degree”; the former “infring[ed] the principle of liberty as stated by Mr. Mill” no less than the latter.Footnote ⁴⁰ Cultural institutions, state education (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity appeared just a few years after the 1870 Elementary Education Act, when controversies about the legitimacy of public funding of education were still burning), a state church, and, of course, the empire which both Stephen and Mill cherished—all of this and more would have to go out of the window if Mill and the other devotees of liberty were to be taken at their word. Consequently, the ideology into which On Liberty fed, whatever Mill's own intentions may have been and whatever policies he endorsed as a practical matter, amounted to an “attack on all government whatever.”Footnote ⁴¹

Stephen thought that, for all the “fatal” talk he heard, even the most vociferous backers of the liberty creed—including Mill himself—did not in fact wish to live in the world that their slogans and principles entailed.Footnote ⁴² Rather than maximizing liberty or shrinking the government, Stephen believed himself to be part of an effort to reset liberalism in a direction that would be all at once more empirical, more technocratic, more conflictual, and more statist. The healthy condition of politics was for people of different worldviews and interests to try to convince their fellow citizens of their conception of the common good; and the best which we could hope for was that a spirit of “moderation” and “fair play” would characterize these disputes, and that a respect for intelligence and expertise would allow the state which was to act on the prevailing notions of the common good to be staffed by the best and the brightest.Footnote ⁴³ While readers today often find aspects of Stephen's social thought distasteful, in this regard at least he is more the ideological forerunner of twentieth-century liberalism than the liberty worshippers whom he criticized. And indeed, although the fact has seldom been recognized, a surprising number of idealists of following generations drew inspiration from Stephen in theorizing the expansive moral state which they were hoping to build.Footnote ⁴⁴

We have here been focused on the diagnostic or critical side of Stephen's ideas. To delve into the positive or constructive side—into his vision of the objects this moral state should pursue, of the laws and institutions appropriate to it, and of the theories or proto-theories justifying it—naturally requires a fuller investigation. And for that task, as for the investigation of Stephen as an interpreter and maligner of the ideological trends of his era, the Selected Writings will be a better place than any to begin—making it easy for readers to go beyond the rather stereotyped notions of Stephen and his period.

Let me conclude with just one example of a subject on which the Selected Writings shed light. Given both Stephen's reputation as a critic of Millian notions of tolerance and liberty, and the urgency with which issues of social intolerance and non-state-based interference with speech and association are publicly debated today, it is especially welcome that On Society, Religion, and Government includes three remarkable but little-known treatments of these issues: “The Logic of Persecution,” “Carlier's Early History of the American States,” and “On the Suppression of Boycotting.” These articles reveal Stephen's sophistication as a theorist of toleration. They illustrate his annoyance with the “showy premisses” underlying what he took to be trite but false claims that there was something “illogical” or “absurd” about persecution—either because there was any such thing as a “right of private judgment” that had to be respected, or because there was a distinction between the religious and political, between “things spiritual and things temporal,” or because persecution was ultimately ineffective or counterproductive. Worse than platitudes, such assertions were simply lies. Stephen, in contrast, agreed with the purveyors of such formulas that to reject an expansive sphere of intellectual liberty was for the most part “a very bad thing,” but that it was so solely because a “long and varied experience” had shown that “to abstain from interference with all kinds of inquiry is the best way of arriving at truth”Footnote ⁴⁵

The final of the aforementioned essays, one of Stephen's last efforts at the peak of his powers, was written in horror at the practices of the Irish Land League. (Unsurprisingly, Stephen was not a Home Ruler.) It brings out more clearly than any other text an aspect of his thought that has been noted but not sufficiently dwelt upon: the extent of his Hobbesianism,Footnote ⁴⁶ and how he made this Hobbesianism accord with certain “liberal” notions. Perhaps the most fitting way to end this essay, which after all is meant to entice readers to pick up Stephen's texts, is to let his powerful prose speak for itself on this point:

In short, a society that upholds commonsense notions of tolerance and respect for individual rights is not endangered, but created and upheld, by a Leviathan state that guarantees order through a monopoly of lawmaking and coercion. Stephen remains to this day among the most cogent articulators of this perennially recurring political outlook—one the satisfactoriness of which the Selected Writings will help the reader to judge.