Elie Halévy became famous as a historian of England in the years before World War I, due to his lectures on England at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, his three-volume analysis of utilitarianism published between 1901 and 1904,Footnote 1 a 1906 article on the birth of Methodism,Footnote 2 and the 1912 book L’Angleterre en 1815.Footnote 3 In these last two works he argued—in what became known as the Halévy thesis—that English Protestantism, and especially the evangelical forms of English Protestantism associated with Methodism, were a key element of Britain's sociopolitical stability.Footnote 4 This deep-seated religiosity, he argued, was supportive of British liberalism and British philanthropy; it was responsible for an England that, in his own words, “governs itself, in place of being governed from above.”Footnote 5
The other distinctive component of English culture was utilitarianism. Halévy was fascinated by the popularity of this doctrine in English high culture, and devoted three volumes to an analysis of the utilitarian movement and its inherent contradictions. As has been pointed out frequently by subsequent scholars, Halévy's analysis focused on a tension at the center of this movement. There were, he argued,
two distinct principles which are, in some ways, in competition in the interior of the system, the one in virtue of which it is necessary that the science of the legislator intervene in order to identify naturally divergent interests, the other in virtue of which the social order is realized spontaneously by the harmony of egoisms.Footnote 6
That is, utilitarian doctrine justified both an activism and a quietism: activism by political leaders who were to intervene to rectify misguided policy and natural conflicts between selfish individuals, but quietism facing the market, where it was assumed that selfishness miraculously conformed to the general interest. Halévy was struck by how powerfully this doctrine, and the contradictions at its heart, informed British radicalism and British politics. Indeed, his turn to history, and away from philosophy, is largely explained by his growing conviction that history was the appropriate discipline for understanding how such a radically contradictory doctrine could become so foundational to a national culture.Footnote 7 A similar realization subsequently informed his lectures on the history of European socialism: he became convinced that to understand European socialism, he must expand his analysis of “doctrines” to a broader historical analysis of socialist “movements.”Footnote 8
The majority of Halévy's subsequent scholarly attention was devoted to the history of nineteenth-century England, though the history of European socialism was a close second. I wish to suggest, however, that his concerns were broader. Like his famous French predecessors, he was interested in questions of rights and morality, and more broadly in the causes and the nature of political stability and social transformation. Moreover, like his predecessors, Halévy thought about these comparatively, fascinated by the divergent trajectories of modern European societies. There is evidence of this in his lecture notes on the history of England and in his multivolume history of England in the nineteenth century, and it is even more pronounced in his correspondence, his interventions in debates at the Société française de philosophie, and his lectures on the history of European socialism—lectures that he gave in alternate years (alternating, that is, with his lectures on England) at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques.Footnote 9 These sources demonstrate that Halévy believed that one was better able to understand national trajectories, and therefore gain insight into what fostered stability and what stimulated social convulsion, if one proceeded comparatively.
Central to this comparative agenda was a consideration of religiosity and the broader issues of culture. Halévy was a careful student of the classical economists and of socialists including Marx, and gave these theories careful scrutiny in his lectures on socialism. He did not conclude, however, that humans were driven primarily by material interests—the orientation, in his mind, of classical economists and most Marxists. To give one example, in a 1902 confrontation with Georges Sorel at the Société française de philosophie, Halévy, though commending Marx for historicizing Ricardo's conception of labor, criticized Marx for embracing the latter's narrow conception of human motivation:
For Marx, as for Ricardo, the fundamental motive of the human soul is egoism, or more exactly the economic or utilitarian motive, the desire to appropriate wealth (because the egoistic or individualist motive is, according to Ricardo, only one of the historical specifications of the first motive). Only to satisfy itself, this motive employs different instruments of labor, and endlessly modifies it: “a principle of change is thus introduced in the static psychology of Ricardo.”Footnote 10
This is not the place to consider whether this assessment of the classical economists and of Marx is correct (though I believe it is correct). What is significant is that Halévy was critical of this view of human motivation, which he considered too narrow. He believed that it was necessary to consider, in addition to utilitarian calculations or drives for material gain, other human sentiments, as well as ideas, rational assessments, and cultural traditions. As Charles Seignobos stated concerning Halévy's doctoral defense (of a thesis devoted to the philosophy of Plato), Halévy “penetrated to the level of active sentiments and of real forces.”Footnote 11 As Halévy himself put it: “It is not interests, it is beliefs and passions that animate men.”Footnote 12 This orientation clearly informed Halévy's analysis of England and the English.
HALÉVY AND ENGLAND
Halévy was captivated by England and its people from his first visit in 1892, when he was twenty-two years old. He subsequently visited for several months every year (except for a brief hiatus during World War I). His initial reaction was critical fascination. In one of his first letters to his family, he referred to the English as “brutes.” “I say brutes in the most noble meaning of the word. Brutes by their incapacity to reflect, by their scorn of theories, by their frankness, their courage, their love of the open air, their pride.”Footnote 13 To René Berthelot, he reflected that the English oscillated between Scottish sang-froid and Irish imagination, but remain poorly equipped for metaphysics.Footnote 14 However, he was soon giving more qualified assessments, and quickly became seduced by aspects of Englishness. Visiting Oxford in November 1892, he wrote to his mother that “there is not a university in Europe, nor in the world, where it would be better to live than Oxford, where one has the best impression of peace, of sanity, and of quietude.”Footnote 15 Though the English remained somewhat enigmatic to Halévy—in 1898 he wrote that the English were “the most indecipherable of all people,”Footnote 16 in 1900 he referred to them as “inscrutable and difficult to understand,”Footnote 17 and in 1905 they were characterized by a “singular mélange of religious exaltation and imperturbable coldness”Footnote 18—he was increasingly enamored of English society and English moeurs. This did not mean that he was entirely uncritical. In 1912 he noted the “phlegmatic temperament of the nation.”Footnote 19 In his letters to Bertrand Russell, he criticized the English tendency to embrace a position in favor of an ahistorical form of laissez-faire.Footnote 20 And in his book about the British Empire, published in 1905, he acerbically noted that since 1895 British imperialism had become more and more driven by chauvinistic, racist, and self-serving motives:
The English tend thus, with the growth of their Empire and by the mere fact of their imperialism, to become a nation composed no longer of industrialists, traders and workers, but of capitalists and administrators, no longer men who work, but men who, in order to live, automatically deduct a part of the labor of others.Footnote 21
Halévy's fascination was intertwined with his attempt to understand why the English had not been as radical or as revolutionary as the French. And this led him, as suggested above, to his analyses of utilitarianism and Methodism. He concluded that English stability did not have much to do with English politics or with English economics. Halévy analyzed carefully British party politics and the institutional structure of British parliamentarianism. And he investigated diligently the economic forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the class divisions that this created. But neither English political institutions (which had been emphasized by previous French thinkers like Montesquieu and Constant) nor its economic growth (the focus of those enamored of English industrialization) were sufficient, in his mind, to explain the peculiarly nonrevolutionary nature of British society in the nineteenth century. The English constitution, in Halévy's opinion, did not give to the government sufficient authority to overcome radical opposition,Footnote 22 and he judged the electoral system “incoherent, disorganized.”Footnote 23 Moreover, English industrial growth was characterized by cycles of overproduction and unemployment (he followed, here, the analyses of Sismondi). These recurring economic crises were not created by the imprudent actions of the government, according to Halévy (and as argued by the “free-exchange party”); rather, they were created “by the general organization of commerce and industry.”Footnote 24 The result was a troubling social instability. In short, Halévy judged English politics to be chaotic and he believed English economic growth to be unstable.
To explain the peculiar stability of nineteenth-century England, it was necessary to look elsewhere. It was necessary to focus on its culture—on les moeurs publiques Footnote 25—and the key here, Halévy believed, was the unusual British combination of a high culture informed by bizarre varieties of utilitarianism and a popular culture informed by religious movements like Methodism.
What traits of Methodism were so important, according to Halévy? First, it embraced the Protestant doctrine of the mysterious personal relationship of the individual with God, as well as the traditional Protestant belief in justification by faith alone. However, unlike some other Protestant denominations, it remained hierarchical in its internal organization and defended itself against a rigorous embrace of predestination that would have threatened to sterilize human effort.Footnote 26 Second, Methodists, and English evangelicals more broadly, took conscience seriously, meaning that they emphasized deep reflection about moral behavior and supported, more generally, sober social moeurs. In his initial exploration of the issue in 1906—in the articles on “La naissance du Méthodisme en Angleterre”Footnote 27—Halévy wrote of how Protestantism had produced “grave, reserved, silent, and melancholy” Englishmen, who experienced a sense of awe at the “incomprehensible mystery” of the universe.Footnote 28 He also claimed that the reservoir of Protestant emotionalism tapped by Methodism came, more broadly, to inform the Anglican Church, and led to the formation of numerous voluntary societies “to combat vice and to edify the faithful.”Footnote 29 Halévy suggested, in sum, that Protestant religiosity stimulated English associational life, and helped inculcate a culture of self-imposed restraint. It provided the “mystic foundation of English liberalism” among the popular classes, and therefore helped save the country from the revolutionary turmoil that visited countries like France at the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 30 As Halévy put it in L’Angleterre en 1815 (the first, and most famous, volume of his history of the English people in the nineteenth century), “‘Liberty’ now signified ‘spontaneous voluntary discipline’ in opposition to a discipline forcibly imposed by a government.”Footnote 31 On the final page of L’Angleterre en 1815, he famously summarized his argument:
Methodism is the true antidote to Jacobinism, and the free organization of the churches is, in the country that it governs, the true principle of order. Saying “England is a free country” means, if one goes to the foundation of things, that England is the country of voluntary obedience, of spontaneous organization.Footnote 32
“Spontaneous voluntary discipline,” “voluntary obedience,” “spontaneous organization”—we shall return below to a further consideration of these elements.
What of utilitarianism? What contribution did Utilitarianism make to English culture? In a curious way, the English utilitarians, in Halévy's accounting, also embraced an ascetic way of life, closer to the stoics than to the epicureans, and therefore also supportive of “organization” and “obedience.” Halévy's extensive analysis of what he labeled “philosophical radicalism” was penetrating in its exposure of the contradictions at the heart of the theory, and in its critique of the authoritarian tendencies of its legal and political philosophy. But he was nonetheless respectful of the impact it had on English society. In the closing pages of the second volume of his history of utilitarianism, he noted that by 1815 the principle of utility was “the very foundation of the English understanding, and that all English thinkers, conservatives or democrats, communists or partisans of individual and hereditary property, partisans of free exchange or protectionists, referred back instinctively to this principle.”Footnote 33
Utilitarian theory was based, as commonly noted, on a relatively simple notion of human motivation and on a straightforward associationist psychological theory. Bentham, Halévy argued, had recognized the importance of “sympathy” (an important sentiment in the moral theories of predecessors like Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith), but he had emphasized egoistic sentiments:
Bentham was inclined to admit, like Hume but with fewer reservations, that egoism was, if not an exclusive, at least a predominant influence on human actions: more narrowly yet, he declared that “of all the passions, that which is the most accessible to calculation” . . . is the passion “that corresponds to the motive of pecuniary interest.”Footnote 34
In short, the economic drive for personal gain—what Bentham would call the “dogmatic of egoism”—was stronger than any other sentiment. In addition, Bentham was a rationalist, believing that humans acted by rationally weighing benefits in terms of the quantity of pleasure or pain that actions would produce. On the basis of this simple idea of human motivation, Bentham believed that he could “establish morality as an exact science”Footnote 35 and, on this foundation, erect a program of juridical, political, and economic reform. These would be based on the famous ethical maxim—“the utilitarian principle”—that one should always act in ways that would produce the greatest good for the greatest number.
At the heart of Halévy's analysis of Bentham and his followers, as mentioned above, was his claim that there was a tension at the heart of utilitarian philosophy. On the one hand, utilitarians assumed that unrestrained selfishness was beneficial, or at least sufficiently benign, for there to be no need for intervention, governmental or otherwise, to prevent injurious activity. This “natural harmony of interests” was true for the economy, where the utilitarians followed the economic theories of Adam Smith. On the other hand, it was not assumed that unrestrained human action in the juridical or political realms were moral or benign. Here, utilitarians argued that government intervention was needed to create an “artificial harmony of interests” that would maximize good. This undergirded an authoritarian strain, according to Halévy, that was especially strong in the thought of Jeremy Bentham:
Morals, for him [Bentham] have a commanding, governmental nature; or again, if you like, he accepts the principle of utility in the specific form of the artificial identification of interests. The science of human nature permits the conquering of human nature for the good of mankind, just as, in the interest of mankind, the science of physical nature permits the conquering of physical nature. Further, he writes, in language directly inspired by Helvétius, “that it is the business of government to work to increase social happiness, by punishing and rewarding.”Footnote 36
Halévy concludes that Bentham's philosophy of law “is essentially a philosophy written for legislators and men engaged in government, that is to say for men whose profession it is to restrict liberty.”Footnote 37
Halévy had a more complex understanding of human nature than Bentham, as we shall see below. He disagreed with the assumption of Bentham, who drew from the economic theories of Adam Smith, and who argued that individuals acted selfishly and rationally. Halévy also distrusted the tendency of both Smith and Bentham to pronounce general theories under which empirical variations were subsumed and eliminated:
One should thus have the right to ask if Adam Smith, instead of having given, through his theory of the division of labor and of exchange value, a demonstration of the principle of the natural identity of interests, had not simply returned to postulate the truth of this principle, in order to neglect the exceptions to which, in fact, his theory of exchange is liable . . . Not only is each individual interested, each individual is [assumed to be] the best judge of his interest: this is the fundamental postulate of the method. This postulate is able to be considered as confirming, in a sense, the rationalist character of the new doctrine: it supposes that individuals, perfectly egoistic, are also, as a general rule, perfectly reasonable.Footnote 38
Bentham was even less subtle than Smith, according to Halévy, falsifying the latter's economic theories in his endeavor to simplify them.Footnote 39 Halévy preferred a methodology respectful of empirical complexity: there were overlapping variables, there were empirically demonstrated variations within societies, and there were historically demonstrated divergences between different societies and nations. Utilitarian doctrine was too often insensitive to these important dynamics.
This is important to emphasize. Halévy's analysis of the conflict at the heart of utilitarian doctrine—the tension between the presumed “natural harmony of interest” and the “artificial harmony of interest”—led him to consider carefully the divergent views of social dynamics that this suggested, and the divergent views of human nature that were ignored by this utilitarian view of these social dynamics. How could thinkers embrace such contradictory analyses of social dynamics? What did this say about their social theories? In pondering these issues, Halévy was led to consider the complexity of historical developments.Footnote 40 And this in turn led him to consider how profoundly moeurs varied in countries at different times, and also in different countries at the same time.
Nonetheless, he was impressed, despite his appreciation of the divergent theories in the ranks of English utilitarians, by the popularity of the rigorous, even ascetic, strain of thinking that the utilitarians inserted in the culture of the middle and upper classes in England. He suggested that its pervasiveness had instilled in England a stern and very sober view of moral action:
The morality of utility is not a generous morality that distributes pleasure without measure, because pleasure is good; it is an economic morality, to use Bentham's expression, which measures the immediate pleasure of individuals from the perspective of guaranteeing for them the future possession of pleasure.Footnote 41
In short, Halévy was convinced that the early utilitarians like Bentham and Godwin shared a stern moral outlook. Later utilitarians like James Mill and Ricardo, for all their talk of happiness, were no different; they too embraced what Halévy termed a “reflective egoism.” Happiness was based on “sagacity, prudence, and all the egoistic virtues.” Utilitarianism was responsible for spreading “a plebian or sooner bourgeois morality, made for working artisans and sensible tradesmen, which teaches subjects to take up the defense of their interests; it is a reasoning, calculating and prosaic morality”:Footnote 42
The utilitarians are much less preoccupied with freeing instinct, and of establishing the right of everyone to all the pleasures, than to defining the conditions, which are often painful, which nature puts in the way of the satisfaction of needs, and, to use a Malthusian expression, the “moral restraints” which are the logical consequence of these conditions . . . It is necessary to work and to save in order to live happily. Also one must know how to accept inevitable suffering . . . Without going back to the sages of Greece, one is able even to establish certain analogies between the moral temperament of the Utilitarians and that of all the Puritanical sects which modern England has produced . . . In short, ethics, according to Bentham and his disciples, is a laborious act.Footnote 43
Halévy's assessment of English culture of the nineteenth century consistently emphasized this dimension. The influence of the utilitarians, he wrote, “seems to have been immense.”Footnote 44 Even when he noted significant cultural changes (as he did, for example, in his historical examinations of England written after World War IFootnote 45), he continued to emphasize continuity. In the first volume of his Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle, he wrote of “the miracle of modern England, anarchist but orderly, positive, industrious, but religious, and even pietist.”Footnote 46 In volumes published after the war, in 1926 and 1932, he suggested that in the decades immediately before the Great War there had been a growing “decadence” on both the religious and the economic fronts. He worried about the decline of the individualist form of Protestant Christianity that his early volumes had analyzed.Footnote 47 And he was concerned that the form of socialism gaining power in England was one that undermined the “spirit of productivity” within British industry. But, while noting these developments—developments that he found disturbing—he recognized the persistence of a “permanent foundation”:
In England, today as yesterday, all is instinctively trial and error, mutual tolerance, and reciprocal adjustment, under the action of this moral and religious constitution of its people, the nature of which we have analyzed previously. This constitution remains, in its major traits, unchanged: it remains the foundation of these admirable political moeurs, loathed but at the same time envied by all those who, on the continent, be they in parties of the right or the left, profess the philosophy of violence.Footnote 48
HUMAN NATURE AND POLITICS
The English case raised, for Halévy, the issue of culture and its relation to political stability. As we have seen, he suggested that, in England, “voluntary obedience” and “spontaneous organization” were central. “Voluntary obedience” was inextricably intertwined with the moral rigor of individuals; “spontaneous organization” was related to the varieties of sociability that provided the necessary antidote to political authoritarianism. These were the bases of Halévy's optimistic analysis of English society. These same variables were the bases of his hopes, more generally, for a well-ordered society. I will turn below to how this informed his assessment of France. But, first, a few more details about how these were related to his views of human nature and to his understanding of the larger issues of morality and sociability.
Halévy argued that “inquietude” was an important element of the makeup of human beings, and that this disposition was a central constituent element of moral action. “I have written a plan, and some fragments, for an essay on liberty,” he wrote to Bouglé in 1902, “where I demonstrate that inquietude is the moral essence of man; that all conscientious moralities imply it, even when they pretend to be moralities of solidarity, of submission to the laws of nature and to the laws of society.”Footnote 49 “Inquietude” referred to an emotional state characterized by agitation and feverishness; the term comes from the Latin inquietus, which literally means “unquiet” or “stormy.” Halévy's use of the term indicates that he was part of a long French tradition that viewed individuals as continually apprehensive, uncertain, and restlessly seeking satisfaction.Footnote 50 This anxious state led humans to act in various ways, according to Halévy, some preferable to others. He worried that inquietude could lead to an embrace of unreasoning enthusiasm, lyricism, or mystical spiritualism.Footnote 51 He worried about “accumulated superstitions” associated with Christianity and, more generally, about the power of state religions (especially Catholicism) that believed in “the unanimity of religious consciences.”Footnote 52 And, he was especially concerned about the dangers of the “new and excessive sentiments” connected with modern patriotism.Footnote 53 Finally, he expressed “a lively antipathy for aristocratic, religious, and provincial sentimentalisms,” claiming that this antipathy was “the most tenacious prejudice of my nature.”Footnote 54 In short, “inquietude” could lead in directions that Halévy found disturbing. “Inquietude” clearly did not lead “naturally” to benign or positive social interactions; they did not lead “naturally” to stable politics.
In fact, Halévy rejected the notion that the first social sentiments of individuals were ones of peaceful coexistence.Footnote 55 And he was skeptical of the tendency of some socialists to assume that cooperation could be easily universalized.Footnote 56 How, then, could the “spontaneous organization” that was so beneficial in the English case be encouraged? He argued that it must be based on a firm moral foundation and on carefully constructed traditions of sociability. Writing to Bouglé in 1900 about individual pleasure and the nature of social stability, he emphasized the centrality of individual morality.
There is social equilibrium, about which the politician ought to know the laws, and which in part is the condition of the equilibrium of individual functions. But society, being itself composed of individuals, cannot remain well ordered if the individuals of that society do not first make order prevail within themselves. What one can say precisely on the subject of morality, is that it is the science of equilibrium.Footnote 57
This emphasis on individual morality—what we might term “self-mastery”—was important because individuals were not, according to Halévy, naturally sociable. “The individual,” he wrote in an unpublished manuscript, “is an antisocial phenomenon; however, he has need of society to exist and to develop.”Footnote 58 In another fragment, he referred to the tension between the needs of individuals and society.
One is able to declare, without doubt, with Rousseau that the existence of all social institutions is absolutely contrary to the development of the faculties of the individual, and that the individual ought to free himself of all species of social intrusions that prevent the ability to live a happy, safe, free, and good life. But Rousseau has also written the Social Contract, and in the Social Contract he singularly extended the rights of society over the individual. It seems, in the last analysis, very difficult to sustain, without contradiction, that the individual has no need of society for the safe development of his highest faculties. The question is to know if society, which is the necessary condition for the development of individual faculties, ought to be, once these faculties are developed, the unique object of their activity.Footnote 59
Halévy did not believe that society should be the unique object of individual activity. But he did believe that it was necessary to arouse in individuals, and in society more generally, adequate motivation for unselfish action. There was a preoccupation with overcoming strictly individual satisfactions, and with fostering what Halévy referred to as “the idea of obligation” or “the morality of obligation.”Footnote 60 “Morality,” he wrote in an unpublished manuscript, “commands that the individual regulate his relations with other individuals in a manner such that, in the city, the common interest of all individuals results.”Footnote 61
These issues of morality were inextricably intertwined with considerations of character, in particular with the valorization of self-restraint, perseverance, strenuous effort, and courage in the face of adversity. These were obviously efforts of will, the voluntary actions that were required to overcome giving in to the immediate gratification of impulse, or to avoid submitting to weak habits.Footnote 62 In a letter to Bouglé in 1897, Halévy challenged them both to recognize that
the approach in matters of individual morality was in need of being entirely renewed. The ancients were on a good path, but Christian civilization lost everything: one now proposes as the content of individual morality only obligations toward others and toward God; that is to say, to act because of the fear of others and of God.Footnote 63
Halévy clearly wished to situate morality on more robust and positive foundations. “It is better to be Stoic than Christian,” he wrote to his brother Daniel.Footnote 64
In an intriguing interchange with Vilfredo Pareto in 1904, Halévy carefully considered the relationship between individuals and society. He focused on Pareto's arguments in favor of “individualism,” but suggested that there were in fact three overlapping levels of meaning that should not be confused.Footnote 65 The first level of “individualism,” Halévy suggested, referred to a method of interpreting societies that assumed that all social phenomena were additions of individuals. Halévy cautioned against this, arguing that “there is something that is irreducible to the phenomena of individual psychology, and inexplicable by the phenomena of individual psychology, [and] that society constitutes a whole [un phénomène d’ensemble] that dominates and extends beyond the individual.”Footnote 66 Methodologically, both individual actions and social forces needed to be considered, though he warned against sociological theories that ignored the individual.
The second meaning of “individualism” defined the end toward which human activities should be directed: the goals of individual freedom, of individual development, of what John Stuart Mill had termed “individuality.” Halévy was sympathetic to this notion of what we might term “expressive individualism,” but he insisted that this goal should not be confused with the means used to attain it. Even Marx, he pointed out, agreed that “individualism” was the appropriate goal of historical change. Where Marx and Halévy differed from radical “individualism” was on the third level, which focused on the appropriate means to attain this goal; that is, it focused on politics and on social policy. “Individualism” on this third level called for the limitation of the role of the state. Halévy was unconvinced, objecting that there needed to be institutions that transcended the individual.
What institutions were necessary? Perhaps most important in the modern era were nation states. Opposed to both classical liberals and revolutionary syndicalists, Halévy insisted that states performed a critical role in protecting individual liberties. They were
essentially the instrument of the defense of all individuals against all groups. One cannot thus, without absurdity, under the pretext of protecting the liberty of individuals, reduce the functions of the state to nothing, as called for by the anarchists, nor reduce the functions of the state to a defined minimum, as called for by classical liberals.Footnote 67
Halévy expressed similar defenses of state action in the final volume of La formation du radicalisme philosophique:
It should not be said that men were born free and founded the State to increase their security at the expense of their liberty. It should be said that men wanted to be free, and that, in so far as they wanted to be free, they constituted the State to increase simultaneously their security and their liberty.Footnote 68
The goal of individualism, in short, required institutions like the state.
Were other institutions also important? Halévy, to my knowledge, never answered this question categorically; he never produced an abstract sociopolitical theory. He approached such questions as a historian, insisting that different societies had developed different institutions, and that these institutions had cultivated different cultures, some more supportive of liberty than others. His analysis of England, however, suggests that religious groups that fostered a stern morality were especially important, and that religion often cultivated more or less attractive social moeurs. In the notes he took when reading the works of Tocqueville, Halévy recorded the latter's point that there was nothing in Christianity that was absolutely contrary to modern societies, and many things favorable, especially “the ideas and passions” that Christianity instilled.Footnote 69 Nonetheless, Halévy articulated the familiar liberal opposition to the intolerant stance taken historically by the Catholic Church, and obviously approved of religious toleration. England, he argued, benefited from the diversity of churches:
Briefly, if one wants to understand the difference which exists between the history of modern England and the contemporary history of the other nations of Europe—we think particularly, being French, of France—it is always necessary, if our analysis is correct, to be alert to the silent action exercised on the nation by the autonomous churches of the petite bourgeoisie . . . Because of the existence of these free churches [in England], the two watchwords, revolution and reaction, lose all their significance. The idea of Church is not identified with a single Church to which the State is viewed as uniquely giving support; nor do people, when they protest against governmental abuse, revolt at the same time against all spiritual discipline.Footnote 70
Beyond this salutary separation of state and church, Halévy also argued that England benefited from having numerous churches that performed the function of comforting the disadvantaged in times of economic crisis, while at the same time instilling a morality of tolerance and compromise. “They [the Protestant sects of England] offered a distraction from the despair of the proletariat in times of hunger and misery, providing an obstacle to the propagation of revolutionary ideas, and replacing a despotism of laws with a despotism of moeurs.”Footnote 71
Halévy was less forthcoming about other associations, though he wrote warmly of unions and workers’ syndicats, and of educational institutions. In November 1901, he visited Albi and admired the workers’ cooperatives that had been established by glassworkers.Footnote 72 He found appealing the view that labor was creative and social, and he was attracted to the stance of those who recommended associations of producers and, more generally, peaceful and cooperative economic relations. He also found appealing the “spontaneous collectivism” developed by societies of “individuals who consider themselves co-proprietors of social capital.”Footnote 73
The overall result was a view of the relationship of individuals, societies, and institutions that recognized the importance of individuals and of larger forces, and that insisted on the responsible recognition of the interdependence of individuals and societies. Halévy provided his own definition of what was desirable:
It implies that we are conscious and reflective, capable of reasoning about our acts and about other things: the culture of our reason, understood in the development of our individuality, is thus a necessary part of our notion of what is desirable. Society ceases to appear to us as a sentimental fusion, in which the personalities of the members who compose it is lost, in order to become a reflective collaboration of individual intelligences: where there is recognition of the necessity of relations of collaboration and even of subordination. It is thus that a rational individualism accepts some limits to the excessive loosening of the social bond, which seems the desired result of the radical application of the individualist principle.Footnote 74
This quotation points to two additional elements that informed Halévy's view of individuals and their relation to society: first, the importance of sentiments other than egoistic self-interest; second, the importance of reason. An important element of Halévy's discontent with utilitarian theories was the limited nature of their understanding of human nature, reducing it to considering the individual “as a purely egoistical being.” Fortunately, according to Halévy, sociologists had come to recognize the importance of empathy and altruism. “The new sociological method,” he wrote,
distinguishes itself from the old Utilitarian method in that it accepts sympathy, or altruism, as an irreducible given of experience, and considers as primitive not the individual, but the social fact as such . . . Is it not much better to avow that sympathy cannot be deduced from egoism, and that our social existence implies the presence in us not only of personal sentiments, but also of disinterested sentiments . . .?Footnote 75
Equally important for Halévy were reason and critical thought. He never identified culture with sentiment; no society should be ruled by unreasoned emotions. As he put it in a letter to Bouglé in 1899, “where ideas are lacking, the passions become masters.”Footnote 76 Society should always be led by those who exercised rational deliberation. This did not mean that there existed some abstract standard of reason that, insensitive to context, should guide action. The standard that Halévy recommended was social action that did not contradict reason. “I remain devoted to the truth, with Socrates and Descartes, who demanded of social life not to contradict the progress of reason, of wisdom, of speculative thought: there is a ‘provisional’ morality, which is eternal.”Footnote 77 This stance was closely related to the neo-Kantian agenda of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, the journal Halévy founded with his contemporaries Léon Brunschvicg and Xavier Léon in 1893. They wished to rehabilitate critical reason against the assault of Comtean positivism on the one hand, and of Bergsonian mysticism on the other. In Halévy's own words, they needed to be “rationalists with rage.”Footnote 78
HALÉVY AND THE POLITICS OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC
Halévy's assessment of France focused on these same variables. Halévy did not write a book on France or the French, so what we know of his attitude is indirect, with national comparisons often implicit in his analyses on England. Moreover, when noting national differences, he was sensitive to the similarities that marked the cultures of European countries. European populations, he wrote, “differ less, when all is said and done, in the elements which compose their respective civilizations, than in the diverse proportions in which these elements, common to most or to all, are combined.”Footnote 79 However, the contrasts are significant.
We have noted already Halévy's criticism of the Catholic Church and his valorization of the evangelical sects of England. As we have seen, Halévy was impressed that English society was animated by a “moderate individualism” (individualisme tempéré) that led to “voluntary obedience” and “spontaneous organization,”Footnote 80 a culture that supported the strength of parliamentary democracy. These qualities, according to Halévy, were not robust in France, and representative democracy, as a consequence, was not entirely secure. In his early articles on the birth of Methodism, Halévy noted that the French, unlike the sober English, were “gay, light-hearted, expansive, and frivolous.”Footnote 81 These sentiments, curiously, were connected with a deep cultural commitment to a rigid form of rationalism.Footnote 82 What this implied for his assessment of French society was a critical attitude toward the swings he perceived between a rigid appeal to reason and revolutionary emotionalism. In his mind, these had led to an unfortunate alternation between an exaggerated respect for authority on the one hand, and, on the other, an equally exaggerated embrace of revolutionary change.
In his correspondence, Halévy expressed more freely his frustrations concerning French moeurs, and explicitly articulated his anxiety that this was intimately related to the instability of French politics. In October 1892, he wrote to his mother that
the problem [of the French] is to be too reasonable and to prefer reason to simple good sense. And this is why there is always a conservative party in England because all the English are conservative, while there has never been a conservative party in France because not one Frenchman is conservative. I know well that there are some anarchists in England; but these are eccentrics, classed and tolerated as such, who have some clubs and whose eccentricity enters into beautiful harmony with the English people taken as a whole.Footnote 83
In France, the anarchists and revolutionaries were more numerous. Many people, he suggested, could not conceive opposing governmental abuse without an insurrection against the government and without a rejection of reasonable discipline. In 1894, in a letter to Bouglé, he lamented, “Is it not more and more evident that this country [France] is incapable of governing itself? . . . The absence of government and decadence, are they synonymous?”Footnote 84
Halévy's concerns about French culture and French political stability were even more in evidence during the Dreyfus affair, when he worried about the eruption of crowds driven by passions stirred up by charismatic demagogues. Halévy was appalled, for example, by what he termed the “band of screaming actors” that stirred up the crowds with hysterical anti-Semitism.Footnote 85 He was thankful that there were institutions and laws in France that protected the minority, but he lamented that the inclination of the majority of French “men of letters” was towards a rigid conservatism that undermined the laws protecting basic civil liberties. He noted that the future of France was in play during the affair, even as the general movement of Europe was towards democracy.Footnote 86
It was popular passions unguided by reason that Halévy most worried about. He was impressed by the “logical” arguments of Fernand Labori, the lawyer who defended Emile Zola and Alfred Dreyfus, because he pursued “truth” and was not swayed by the passions of the moment. But he worried that the conflict between reason and passion often undermined balanced action, and in France often resulted in the triumph of passion unqualified by reason:
He [Labori] represents the force of truth against the force of passions. These two points of view are absolutely distinct and irreducible. For one who responds to a passion, the consideration of truth is equivalent to zero. For one who believes to hold the truth, contrary passions become unintelligible, and subsequently equal zero. The conflict can be terrible.Footnote 87
The implicit comparison, of course, was with the “moderate individualism” of the British, where reason and emotion were more balanced, where freedom did not lead to anarchy, and where there was “voluntary obedience” and “spontaneous organization.”
In September 1905, Halévy confessed to Bouglé his growing Anglophilia. “The true peril that one encounters in studying England too exclusively,” he wrote,
is to become Anglophile. But what can one do? It is inevitable that intelligence falls under the influence of the object to which it has become attached; moreover it is certain that, during the past two centuries, it is England which has given Europe lessons in politics. I am losing, by studying the history of England, the sentiment of the beauty of revolutions. What good is the attractive enthusiasm of Jaurès, if it is necessarily overwhelmed by the fanaticism of Hervé?Footnote 88
As this quotation indicates, Halévy had an ambivalent relation to French socialism, especially the strains that were dominant during his historical era. He was critical of the antipolitical stance of the revolutionary syndicalists, and argued that the state was the only institution that could protect individuals against powerful interest groups. And he rejected the revolutionary stance of Marxists like Jules Guesde and the rhetorical embrace of revolution by socialists like Jean Jaurès. He was sympathetic, however, to the liberationist side of the socialist tradition in France, and expressed this in his semiannual lectures on the history of European socialism at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques.Footnote 89 As François Bédarida has put it, socialism always exerted on Halévy “a double action: an attraction; a repulsion.”Footnote 90 Halévy's complex relation to European socialism is too large a topic to address here. But it is relevant that his view of French instability was related to his assessment that late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century French socialism was dominated by syndicalists and revolutionaries. Had there existed a powerful strain of reform socialism—of what we would label social democracy—working for the peaceful implementation of a more equitable distribution of wealth, then, I believe, Halévy's relation to French socialism would have been different.Footnote 91
Like other French activists, according to Halévy, French socialists were too often driven by passions of the moment, and/or by an impatient expectation that a totally rational society was a realizable possibility. They were not predisposed—because of their own cultural heritage—to accept the legitimacy of divergent points of view; that is, their rationalism and impatience made them less tolerant than the British, and less willing to organize spontaneously and embrace a “voluntary obedience.” “The French are good at only two things,” Halévy wrote in 1904,
to be governed and to quarrel about doctrines. It was true at the time of Abélard and of Guillaume de Champeaux; it was true at the time of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon; it was true at the time of Proudhon, of the Saint-Simonians, of the Fouriérists; it will be true again tomorrow.Footnote 92
HALÉVY AND THE FRENCH TRADITION
Elie Halévy continued a long French tradition of thought that insisted that human nature was unstable and variable, and that social peace and political order were difficult to achieve.Footnote 93 Like many of his French predecessors, Halévy's reflections about human nature and social interrelationships proceeded comparatively, and like them he turned to England for a comparison with France. During the eighteenth century, the French writers who made such comparisons often were motivated by patriotism and nationalism. Aggressive and denigrating depictions of England and the English were especially common in periods of war between the two nation states—during the Seven Years War, for example, and during the upheavals surrounding the American and French Revolutions.Footnote 94 At other times, positive views of England and its moeurs were intimately connected with critical views of French national character, and of the institutions that surrounded and nurtured this distinctive character. Eighteenth-century Anglophiles like Voltaire gave high marks to the English for their respect for private property, habeas corpus, public jury trials, and the political institutions that separated and balanced power.Footnote 95 Nineteenth-century Anglophiles like Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and François Guizot carefully studied English institutions for hints of how to avoid the political instability that plagued France after 1789.Footnote 96 Alexis de Tocqueville studied the patterns of aristocratic landholding, local institutions, associational activity, juridical traditions, and commercial growth to divine the positive manner in which England had dealt with the growth of equality.Footnote 97 Anglophobes, on the other hand, noted the turbulent but melancholic character of the English, the disorderly political behavior of English “factions,” the national tendency to aggressive imperialism, and the seeming indifference to the plight of the underclass.Footnote 98 It should come as no surprise that the alleged vices of the English, and the perceived shortcomings of their political institutions, were commonly recorded by Old Regime defenders of the absolute monarchy in France. Perhaps less commonly noted is the frequency with which English foibles were noted by writers like Rousseau who wished to emphasize the shortcomings of all extant political institutions,Footnote 99 and by Physiocrats who preferred agrarian France to commercial England.Footnote 100 On the other hand, the alleged virtues of England and the English were recorded by those wishing to highlight the deficiencies of France and the French. These latter comparisons often carried the implication that the author, unlike his/her trapped compatriots, had transcended the national stereotype and enjoyed a broader cosmopolitan perspective.
Both positive and negative comparisons frequently dealt in hasty generalizations about both countries, and commonly they contained glosses that ignored regional or class differences. They often included stereotypes about the causative weight of climate, of the environment, of the legal framework, and of political institutions and traditions, and (especially in French depictions of England during the nineteenth century) clichés about the stability provided by tradition, religious toleration, and “mixed” government. The reductive nature of many of these can be viewed as the occupational hazard of simplistic comparative analyses.
Halévy's writings reflected this broader cultural movement. He was influenced, as his reading notes indicate, by the masters of French thought: Pascal, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Constant, Tocqueville, etc.Footnote 101 He was equally influenced by prominent intellectuals of his era: by authors like Hippolyte Taine and Emile Boutmy who wrote positively about English mores, religion, and culture;Footnote 102 by sociologists like Alfred Fouillée, Gabriel Tarde, and Emile Durkheim. And he was influenced by the contemporaneous theories that focused on what Ernst Renan termed the “national spirit” of different populations, and on what Théodule-Armand Ribot termed the “ethnological psychology” of a people.Footnote 103 Halévy's writings about England were distinctive, however, because imbedded in his dense histories of nineteenth-century England and its thought. They are expressive of his tenacious fascination with detail, and of his resistance to simplistic generalizations. And, I wish to suggest, they were informed by a comparative agenda that looked to England as a society not troubled by the distinctive peculiarities of French culture and politics, a society that had not had to endure what Halévy termed “the long years of political anarchy” in his own country.Footnote 104 Halévy looked for ways that this history could provide his own countrymen with salutary comparative lessons.
French intellectuals during the eighteenth century who wished to distinguish France from England—Voltaire is perhaps the most famous—emphasized the civil freedoms enjoyed in England but lacking in France. Thinkers during the nineteenth century, like Constant and Guizot, looked to representative politics as the distinguishing characteristic of England, again highlighting elements lacking in France. By the late nineteenth century, of course, France enjoyed these advances: the Third Republic had given France civil guarantees and representative politics. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Halévy, in attempting to explain why England remained distinctive, focused on those elements that remained markedly different from those in France. Perhaps it is not surprising, that is, that he focused on England's intellectual tradition of utilitarianism, its moeurs, and its religious culture.
