When John Maynard Keynes returned from the Versailles conference at the end of what his generation called the Great European War, he observed, “The air whispered that that word was not flesh, that it was futile, insignificant, of no effect, dissociated from events.”Footnote 2 It is an arresting thought. It expressed Keynes's disappointment in the policies of Lloyd George-Clemenceau-Wilson at Paris, and it was also a memory of the great nineteenth-century liberal project: to use politics to produce policy. Keynes's statement recognized a cardinal object of the liberal project: the ways mind can become material. It was a project that drew in such diverse figures as John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen, Henry Sidgwick, and Matthew Arnold in different and sometimes contradictory ways. What liberals learned was that word and thing cannot be treated as binaries, as the opposites of each other. Mind and world are inextricably linked: all is relationship. Reflecting on the problem personally, Mandell Creighton said, “Life is the sum of relationships. There is no independent or self-centered existence.”Footnote 3 And Keynes's mordant statement also revealed the dark heart of liberalism: that attempts to achieve its purposes could fail, that liberalism could not always mediate the “chaos of incident” and the “cosmos of sentiment.”Footnote 4

Liberalism has been analyzed in many ways—as party, as philosophy, as policy, even as property—and all of them are in their own way true. One might touch on several of them gently in the following way. Party gave liberalism focus and an organizational means to establish its objectives. A wealth of historical writing has examined and explained liberalism in partisan terms.Footnote 5 As to its philosophy, Isaiah Berlin pointed out how “human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and [how they are] in perpetual rivalry with each other.” To seek some sort of ultimate principle reconciling these rival liberalisms “is to throw a metaphysical blanket over either self-deceit or deliberate hypocrisy.”Footnote 6 And liberalism was policy: civil liberties, free trade, toleration, retrenchment, reform. It is fruitless to try to define liberalism in terms of its content, because its contents, like its philosophical values, were also often contradictory. For example, it is the absence of government (free trade), and it is also the presence of government (social legislation). Then to harken back to something like its philosophical origins, liberalism was also property and possessions, material things. Mrs. Humphrey Ward, in Robert Elsmere, described a liberal home with its walls hung with prints of Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals and engravings of Dante and Milton.Footnote 7 It is a way to make liberalism tangible and physical, to locate it in space.Footnote 8 Concreteness is important. However, to treat liberalism as a kind of property, claimable like inventions, rather than what it was, figments of the imagination having their own autonomy and independence, ignores its fragilities and its anxieties. Liberalism also found expression in a patriotic political identity, in a British constitutionalism that contrasted itself to Napoleonic, Prussian, Romanov autocracy and papal infallibility on the Continent.Footnote 9 Liberal impulses also expressed themselves in empire, where, as one writer put it, “it found the concrete place of its dreams.”Footnote 10 Ireland loomed largely in the liberal project, and another historian has shown how the agitation over home rule strengthened liberalism and expanded it, leading to a “redefinition of the very meaning of ‘liberty.’”Footnote 11 It is, therefore, left to yet another writer to summarize this extremely rich and complicated situation by saying that “liberalism in its hey-day remains a curiously ill-understood phenomenon commonly viewed through the prism of the liberal political theories of the present day.”Footnote 12 Consequently, as much as one must admire and respect the richness of the intellectual platform on which the research on liberalism rests, it only gives rise to further questions about the dynamics of the politics in the liberal state.

Perhaps the subject of liberalism is so fraught that its history cannot be written. Certainly Lord Acton's career is a cautionary tale. Trained by Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Acton never escaped his master's method, and all his life he accumulated materials for the great history of liberty.Footnote 13 His notes, it has to be said, were not mere piles of facts. They contain witty aperçus and stimulating insights. He died meticulously planning the Cambridge Modern History, which, if not the history of liberty, was at least history. He may not have escaped Döllinger's diligence, but Acton seemed to sense a darker problem in writing the history of liberalism: “A history that should pursue all the subtle threads from end to end might be eminently valuable, but not as a tribute to peace and conciliation. Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas. Sharp definitions and unsparing analysis would displace the veil beneath which society dissembles its divisions, would make political disputes too violent for compromise and political alliances too precarious for use, and would embitter politics with all the passion of social and religious strife.”Footnote 14 To write a history exposing tyrannies was a moral matter from which Acton did not wish to shrink, but the very act of writing the history of liberty would destabilize the very structures and processes it was about. Acton, the skeptic, realized the unprofitability of his own enterprise. Intellectually paralyzed, he realized that the dust of archives drives out ideas and that he required Kritique as much as he required fact. As Mary Drew told him, his great work was a “Madonna of the Future”;Footnote 15 the history of liberty was never written. However, his literary fragments were published as Lectures on Modern History and were very successful.Footnote 16

It is worth troubling to try these truths by farming a further furrow in the discussion of liberalism because the research, which has been too briefly summarized here, with all its virtues, seems to trap liberalism in strictures that are too tight and taunt. Leonard Hobhouse once spoke of liberalism as breaking the “frost of custom” and bursting the “chains of authority.”Footnote 17 Tellingly phrased, no doubt, but it is unclear what replaced the custom that had been unfrozen and the authority that been burst. By treating liberalism as a series of practices, processes, and procedures rather than as a packet of policies, philosophies, and partisanship, a greater sense of its dynamics emerges. In an age of limited franchise, liberalism was, as one writer has put it, an effort to identify the capacities of those fit for participation in public life.Footnote 18 These capacities were a new kind of property. Neither physical property nor tangible property, these capacities were a kind of cultural and imaginative property. Neither populist nor democratic, they were a new kind of notability and respectability.

Liberalism made a new kind of aristocracy possible. Archibald Primose, fifth Earl of Rosebery, a landed as well as an intellectual aristocrat, famously answered the question, Why are you a liberal? by saying, “Because I wish to be associated with the best men in the best work.” Andrew Reid thought the ideal liberal's “first feature” would be “the love of his own conscience more than the approval of the conscience of the people.” The liberal would prefer “the still small voice within him” to the “shouts of the populace.”Footnote 19

Liberalism is found in Hansard, the memorandums of civil servants, barristers’ briefs, judges’ decisions, and parsons’ sermons, in journalism, novels, and poetry. Alpinists, travelers, and teachers were liberals. The writing of biography, autobiography, and history were efforts to impose shape on multidimensional experience. Considering liberalism as a process has the effect, on one hand, of penetrating a rich pattern of political, social, and intellectual life and, at the same time, of opening and exposing a series of values and meanings that would otherwise be denatured by being coerced into rigid labels and institutions. Liberalism was not mere discourse. It was the relations between mind and action that were reciprocated and negotiated.

One of the paradoxical implications of considering it as process is that liberalism turns out to be conservative. Mr. Gladstone wrote to the queen during the home rule crisis: “In cherishing a love of liberty Mr. Gladstone has always desired to cherish also his sympathy with antiquity.” It was a sympathy he thought was declining in the Conservative Party.Footnote 20 The historian E. A. Freeman said, “I am Liberal, a convert from hereditary Toryism because Toryism will not stand the test of English or any other history and Liberalism will. … Liberalism is in truth conservative of real antiquity; what calls itself conservative is conservative only of a seeming antiquity, which is in truth very modern.”Footnote 21 Liberalism's point was to restore order. That is why liberalism resonated so strongly with Greek tragedy and literature in the nineteenth century. The end of its means acknowledged a yearning for some sense that an order had been restored. But it is an odd kind of order and an odder kind of restoration. It was a figuration of an imagined condition. Liberalism imposed an order on turbulent space, and the order it imposed was internally divided and dynamic.

Two quotations set out the argument that follows. Lord Chesterfield famously said, “If you have not a graceful address, liberal and engaging manners, a prepossessing air, you will be nobody.”Footnote 22 Maynard Keynes, in 1926, said, “The republic of my imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space.” His “true home,” he went on to say, “so long as they offer a roof and a floor, is still with the Liberals.”Footnote 23 These are two sharply different ways of talking about liberalism.

Lord Chesterfield's liberalism was substantive: it referred to style and form and manners, to externalities. It was fixed and aristocratic, associated with property, with land, and with pedigree. It is a powerful thought because it was an embodied kind of identity. Without liberal manners, one is “nobody”; one has “no body.”Footnote 24 It was an enormously productive concept of liberalism. It was universalistic and cosmopolitan and shaped the thinking of generations of transatlantic political leaders because its affability and sociability were sources of civil behavior.Footnote 25 However, its writ ran in an exclusive social and political environment, regulated by confessional tests, closed except to those who acquired patronage's social lubrication. In Lord Chesterfield's world, confessional identification (to be loyal, to be trusted, was to be Anglican), personal indebtedness, the taking of gifts, the giving of bribes were all part of the repertoires of respectable people.Footnote 26

Keynes's liberalism was instrumental: attached to internal and particularistic qualities of mind. By combining economic efficiency, social justice, and liberty, he thought the political problems of humankind could be resolved. It required “criticism, precaution, and technical knowledge”—but also “an unselfish and enthusiastic spirit” and “appreciation of the excellencies of variety and independence.”Footnote 27 Imagination, as Keynes said in another place, required discipline: “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking.” However, there should be no “poetic license” in seats of power and authority: “An experimental society has need to be far more efficient than the old-established one if it is to safely survive.”Footnote 28 Keynes celebrated abstract values (efficiency, justice, and liberty), but these were tied to processes and procedures (criticism, love, and appreciation for the exceptional and the aspiring). Keynes's liberalism was procedural. As T. S. Eliot put it, “Keynes's mind was free, not only from the weakness of ambition, but from the obstruction of his own opinions. Certainly he always remained a Liberal; but he was singularly free from the intolerance of those who believe themselves emancipated; and he tended to free himself from the emotional prejudices of Liberalism.” Highly skeptical, Keynes was “free from the bias of his enthusiasm.”Footnote 29

The liberalism described by Chesterfield was displaced by Keynes's in the grand narrative of a British form of secularism, the long nineteenth-century struggle over subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles. The problem is set out by the case of William Whewell, who rose to the top of his slippery pole and became master of Trinity College, Cambridge, by subscription to the formularies of the Church of England. He was known for his massiveness and his feats of strength. But a prizefighter once said to him, “What a man they lost when they made you a parson.”Footnote 30 It might seem to be a curious thing to say, but it tells us something about liberalism. Liberalism was about free processes and their autonomy and independence. To take Holy Orders and to subscribe to confessional requirements made Whewell and clergymen with intellectual claims like his (Julius Hare, Thomas Peacock, and Conop Thirwall, for example) dependent, less free, less manly indeed, not quite capable of courage, service, and action.

John Mitchell Kemble, the pioneering Anglo-Saxon scholar, was a sharp critic of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles.Footnote 31 The universities should not be forcing houses for Church of England clergymen, he declared, calling for the abolition “of all religious tests, subscriptions and declarations, whatever, before taking degrees in [the] Arts, Law, or Medicine.” He wished to place “the education of the higher classes on a broader, wider, and more general basis.” He justified that basis by a scriptural injunction against the Thirty-nine Articles: “My kingdom is not of this world,” he said. Kemble agreed with Coleridge about the importance of a clerisy set apart for the “spiritual training of all classes of the population.” However, although they should be learned and religious, “in orders they need not be, ought not to be.”Footnote 32

Henry Sidgwick's criticisms of subscription were, as one might expect, forceful and complicated.Footnote 33 He set them out shortly after resigning his Trinity College fellowship because he could no longer accept the Apostles' Creed. For Sidgwick, the ethics of conformity and subscription was a question of honesty. Honesty, for Sidgwick, as for his friend John Addington Symonds, was a defining feature of personal identity. What one believed about one's ideas and oneself was a mirror into the self.Footnote 34 His age, he said, was one marked by free inquiry and large “conscientious differences of opinion.” Great advances had been made “toward civil and social equality of creeds.” Therefore, religion itself would benefit if religious leaders “would abandon all idea of restricting inquiry and discussion, and confine themselves entirely … to improving the method of inquiry, and elevating the manner of the discussion.” In a world in which “the divergence of religious beliefs, conscientiously held by educated persons, is great, is increasing, and shows no symptoms of diminution,” the problem of subscription can be settled “on the simple principles of ordinary morality.” Clergy and laity alike have “only to refuse to say what [they do] not believe. … There is little doubt … that the existing Anglican service, compiled in the sixteenth century from mediaeval formulae of devotion, does not, in certain points, correspond to the convictions of even a majority of the habitual worshippers in Anglican churches.” Honesty was the way forward, to “get rid entirely of the sophistries and evasions which now, I think, do more than anything else to tarnish the clerical reputation.” This extended to the Apostles' Creed, in which the phrases “the Resurrection of the Body” and “born of the Virgin Mary” were not held with anything like their literal meaning by “the majority of even orthodox laity, and many of the clergy. … If the actual state of opinion could be freely declared, and its consequences frankly faced[,] then we might fairly try what the spirit of compromise and conciliation, which, after all, is a virtue and not a vice of the Church of England, could do towards harmonizing the inevitable conditions of a national ministry with the inexorable demands of theological thought.”Footnote 35 Exacting honesty would replace the fantasies of hollow harmony and hypocrisy.

F. D. Maurice did not take a Cambridge degree, although he later took one at Oxford, because his Unitarian background would not tolerate the Trinitarianism of the Thirty-nine Articles. William Bodham Donne also refused to subscribe and, although he went on to a literary career as the editor of Francis Bacon's works, always felt hindered as he tried to make his way in the world. C. J. Monro, a man with tremendous scientific promise and a fellow of Trinity, could not take the MA degree because of his objection to doctrinal requirements. Monro was not alone. Between 1860 and 1889, nineteen senior wranglers were dissenters, and their cases were a scandal because, like Monro, they could matriculate, take the BA degree, but were ineligible for the MA.

Arthur Clough's resignation of his Oriel fellowship, Leslie Stephen's resignation of his Trinity Hall tutorship, and Sidgwick's resignation of his fellowship were telling moments. However, not all had Clough’s, Stephen’s, and Sidgwick's tolerance for such a testing regime. Some obeyed the familiar formularies. Normally scrupulous, Thomas Hill Green crossed his fingers behind his back when he signed the Thirty-nine Articles on taking up his fellowship, saying, “One kiss does not make a marriage.”Footnote 36 Lord Rayleigh dutifully signed the Thirty-nine Articles when he went to the Master's Lodge to take up his Trinity fellowship but with little awareness of what he was signing. One of the older members of the college at the time, C. W. King, an authority on antique gems, had signed the Thirty-nine Articles and took Holy Orders but boldly declared the Christianization of Europe to be a “wave of oriental superstition.”Footnote 37 It was not until 1873 that the Council of King's College, Cambridge, voted to abolish compulsory attendance at “divinity lectures, tests & exams,” and then, according to George Prothero, by a majority of only one vote.Footnote 38 Francis Cornford, when he addressed the Heretics in the early twentieth century, advanced two propositions.Footnote 39 First, the university should stand absolutely clear of all dogmatic systems and abolish all tests for teaching posts: “Appointments must be taken out of the hands of people professionally pledged to any beliefs.” Second, religion took a legion of different forms, and its study was “one of the most important branches of human knowledge.” However, the branch of human knowledge on which it perched was anthropology. Christ, Cornford said, reduced theology to “two old Hebrew doctrines—that God exists and is the father of man; it marked him as the arch-heretic and rebel of his time and country.”Footnote 40 He encouraged the undergraduates at Trinity to defy the college authorities and refuse attendance at chapel. He urged them to free themselves “from the burden of a discipline [that is] inconvenient and degrading” and, in so doing, to “strengthen the cause of religious liberty in the last stronghold of religious intolerance.”Footnote 41 It is important to be clear: these were not arguments about religious liberty or freedom of conscience; these were arguments about the nature of politics and the capacities suitable for political participation.

That the struggle over subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles lasted as long as the century itself is an aspect of the formation and invention of liberalism. A protracted process produced the practices of liberalism. Because this struggle was about trust and loyalty, it was also about belonging and identity. It was creative because it was deeply disturbing. The protracted processes of liberating Britain from the patronage values of the confessional-fiscal-military state created a febrile regime of political, social, and moral fragmentation. In this liberal regime, the universities and the professions were agents for new forms of authority. The ancient universities, and the new ones, became centers of an indeterminate intellectual authority. The honors examinations in classics and mathematics and the new courses of study after 1850 created mental repertoires suited to the political and moral fragmentation of the modern world by establishing different models of intellectual achievement. The professions—the old (church, physic, law) as well as the new (the civil service, schoolmastering, university teaching)—became centers of indeterminate social authority by reshaping old and creating new opportunities for vocations.Footnote 42 It was a British sort of secularization, a political sort of secularization, not irreligious but with its own spiritual values. In addition, liberalism opened the way to different forms of identity. Families not particularly distinguished by pedigree or wealth, thrown up by the universities into the professions, came to command positions of imaginative authority.

The repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts (1828) and the enactment of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), which accompanied the ending of the “Old Corruption,” did not so much end a period as begin a process.Footnote 43 They opened political and social space for a liberalism with new standards of personal austerity and probity. Examinations in the universities and competitive examinations for the civil service calibrated ability quite precisely and identified new gentlemen of talent for the liberal state. As Noel Annan remarked some time ago about this “intellectual aristocracy,” the Northcote-Trevelyan Report (1853) was their “Bill of Rights,” and civil service reform (1870–71) was their “Glorious Revolution.”Footnote 44

James Fitzjames Stephen, at the end of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), gave voice to the values of these liberal families.Footnote 45 It was a creed, but a creed of processes and procedures rather than a creed of principles. Of all human talents, he wrote, the most important was the ability to make “right-judgments” based on “imperfect materials”; “to see things as they are, without exaggeration or passion”; to make “a wise choice between several possible views.” The most important questions were: “What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? Are you a mere machine, and is your consciousness … a mere resultant?” These “riddles of the Sphinx” have to be answered in some way. To leave them unanswered or to waver in answering them was itself a choice that people made at their peril. An alpinist, like most of the other liberals, Fitzjames Stephen imagined himself on a mountain pass “in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive.” To stand still is to be frozen to death. To take the wrong path is to be dashed to pieces. Then he quoted Deuteronomy (31:6–7) and made an appeal to honesty that would have pleased Henry Sidgwick and John Addington Symonds: “‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. Above all, let us dream no dreams, and tell no lies, but go our way, wherever it may lead, with our eyes open and our heads erect. If death ends all, we cannot meet it better. If not, let us enter whatever may be the next scene like honest men, with no sophistry in our mouths and no masks on our faces.”Footnote 46 The liberals were “competition wallahs.” Educated in mathematics and classics, sheep were separated from goats in the civil service examinations. These competition wallahs were gentlemen, but a new kind.

Independence and autonomy were necessary for liberals’ authority. Liberal autonomy was achieved through imagination, ideas, and thought. It was an aggressive mental regime. H. G. Wells put it pretty succinctly when he observed how “the first taste of writing is like a tiger's first taste of blood.”Footnote 47 It was also an elusive regime. Meaning, value, and orientation had to be haphazardly cobbled together in liberals' writings. “The actual facts of life,” Lytton Strachey wrote, “are unimportant[;] … it is the atmosphere that counts.”Footnote 48 Because liberals attempted to define their authority by symbolic means, the liberal project was dangerous. Language is not passive, merely representational or descriptive. Because it is unstable, language is transgressive. This is particularly true of journalism, which so many liberals had to take up in order to get a foot in the door of life.Footnote 49 To earn a living, they often attached themselves to partisan factions or wrote for partisan causes. They could be criticized as hirelings, as people without principle. One writer caught the spirit of this by calling journalists “condottieri of the pen.”Footnote 50 Liberals realized the power of the word. When John Mitchell Kemble sought to wrest the Stowe manuscripts from the grasping hand of the Second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in 1840, he wrote: “My pen will outweigh his coronet.”Footnote 51 Their problem was exacerbated at the end of the nineteenth century, when the controversy over Froude's biography of Carlyle and the Wilde trial raised the suspicion that people of genius could not satisfy the requirements of domesticity: if they would not reproduce themselves, they lacked the dignity required for public responsibility.Footnote 52

But they were brave. George Otto Trevelyan went off to India after going down from the university.Footnote 53 When he returned, he spoke of being “fired at the idea of being placed with almost unlimited power” among a people who would look to him for “instruction and inspiration.” He went on: “What a position for a philosopher! What for a philanthropist! Above all, what for a philosophic philanthropist!”Footnote 54 Reformist, but not egalitarian, Trevelyan's competition wallah, grounded in university learning, criticized racial attitudes and at the same time celebrated the lives of Indian civilians.Footnote 55 Trevelyan's father, in the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, had devised a program for civil service reform that would flush out idlers and incompetents and attach a new kind of gentleman to public service. These, neither experts nor enthusiasts, recruited from the university, would have a loyalty to the public good rather than to a specific department or a narrow policy.Footnote 56 It was a liberalism of multiple processes and procedures, multiple policies and ideas, which produced multiple identities.

E. M. Forster expressed what was perhaps the last gasp of these reconstructed notions of liberal identity in “What I Believe,” which he wrote in 1939 as he contemplated Bolshevik and Nazi ideologies. “I do not believe in Belief,” he began and then went on to explain his personal creed: “I believe in aristocracy, though—if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based on rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.” All this began to smell of treason and betrayal, as Forster himself recognized when he admitted that if he had to choose between loyalty to his country and loyalty to his friend he hoped he would have the guts to be loyal to his friend.Footnote 57

Thus the sincerity and honesty that liberals claimed as liberalism's heart and soul might prove to be impossible in a populist age in which the franchise was no longer limited. Sidgwick fled Trinity to his professional duties as a philosopher, to Newnham College, and to the Synthetic Society. He would have been a founding fellow of the British Academy had he not died of cancer. But his resignation of his Trinity fellowship may not have been the act of exalted bravery it might seem to be. After all, he had saved a good deal of money from his fellowship dividends (some of which he used to fund academic positions for F. W. Maitland and James Ward), and he had Balfour money behind him. John Addington Symonds, seeking health and happiness, fled to Davos Platz.

Liberalism's strength was its tensility, its flexibility, and its adaptability. However, resting on the indeterminate truth(s) of university learning and with no firm social rooting, liberalism also seemed impotent. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt said, “Our Government is a mob.” He said, “We fail because we are no longer honest, no longer just, no longer gentlemen.”Footnote 58 As Alexander MacCallum Scott observed, the Greeks made an altar to an unknown God; the liberals made an altar to an unknown principle.Footnote 59 Lytton Strachey recognized something of the darkness, the hollowness and hypocrisy, of liberalism in Eminent Victorians (1918). The defects he identified in the families of Henry Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale, and General Charles George Gordon were precisely his own family's weaknesses. Liberals were “too enclosed in glass,” he said. And he went on, “Have you noticed too that they were all physically impotent? Sidgwick himself, Matthew Arnold, Jowett, Leighton, Ruskin, Watts. It's damned difficult to copulate through a glass case.”Footnote 60 Strachey had considered making Sidgwick one of his eminent Victorians, but, for once, venom did not drip from Venus (as he called his pen). Sidgwick had been one of the emancipators of the intellect from the trammels of dogmatic religion, but in calling attention to what he imagined was Sidgwick's impotence, Strachey was calling attention to the weakness of all liberals. Strachey turned against his own kind: “These fucking liberals! The filthy garbage of cant they give utterance to. Je tremble. Je frissonne. Is there any hope. I believe none. But does it matter?”Footnote 61 There was a reflexive preoccupation at the dark heart of liberalism with its own internal contradictions and its anxieties about its power and respectability. Liberals could not be honest and sincere, so they had to be earnest.

Finally it is possible to turn to some general points. It is tempting to try to coerce liberalism into the rigid categories of party, policy, philosophy, and property. We might overcome our anxieties and fears of a strange and dangerous past by domesticating and controlling it thereby. Liberalism was a very strange thing indeed. It may be possible to capture its workings by taking up the study of liberalism as part of the alien culture of limited suffrage and by viewing it as the efforts of some people to impose a new order on a political world they found strange and alien. Fear and anxiety give us clues to the relationship between thought and action.

This is a way of examining the internal dynamics of what Jürgen Habermas called the “public sphere” and what Charles Taylor referred to as the “social imaginary.”Footnote 62 One of those placeless places, as Foucault referred to them, liberalism had an architecture consisting of shared assumptions and values, a common repertoire of behaviors, transformed traditions and newly invented ones.Footnote 63 Factual and normative at the same time, these architectural features enabled liberals to conduct the actual business of public life as well as to understand it. In an interesting way, not only do words become flesh—flesh became words. It is in the nature of liberalism's internal dynamics that change occurs because groups are not homogeneous and behavior cannot be described on a single dimension.

For this reason, as one writer has asserted, liberalism required “arenas of practice,” where its values could be “acted and reenacted, learned and internalized.” It required “rituals and institutions” for social mobility and for the reproductions of its processes and procedures.Footnote 64 As Michael Bentley has pointed out, the notion of “civil society” (or “public sphere” or “social imaginary”) has no “substantive essence.” It is a phrase in a “language of aspiration or imagination.”Footnote 65 And this is its virtue rather than its vice. Liberalism was a sensibility, “ubiquitous and yet strangely invisible.”Footnote 66 It was a web of emotional, mental, aesthetic, and moral impulses, restraints, reservations, reflexes, reflections, and responses. Such a sensibility moves from events and toward the responses to events. Sensibilities have no single trajectory. They are often a poignant complication of dispositions. Far from being nihilistic, having no values, liberalism between 1815 and 1914 was multivalent; reaching out in several directions at once, it cut across several political and social cleavages and served as a series of devices for mediating the chaos of incident and the cosmos of sentiment.