Between Herder and Mill

In The Powers of Distance Amanda Anderson has produced perhaps the most forceful and certainly the most influential attempt to distance Daniel Deronda from the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism. As she writes, “rather than simply offering up Judaism as a mystified organic ideal, Eliot seeks to elaborate through her ideal of cosmopolitan Judaism a critical and nondogmatic way of relating to one's cultural heritage” (120). Faced with the demands of Mordecai Cohen and with his own newly discovered Jewishness, Daniel Deronda espouses the project of Jewish national revival without fully interiorizing Mordecai's organicist view of nation. Whereas Mordecai embodies a Herderian organic nationalism, Daniel seems committed to a dialogic relationship with other nations and with his own cultural heritage (124, 132). Consequently, Daniel's position can be seen either a highly qualified nationalism, or as a qualified cosmopolitanism which reconciles the demands of national belonging and global citizenship (121–22). In the final instance, Anderson's argument is that both the political position Daniel takes and the process by which he comes to embrace his Jewish identity exhibit some exemplary traits of political liberalism: “Deronda's nationalism persistently moves toward the universalist civic model of nationality often associated with John Stuart Mill and built on the principles of critical reason and democratic debate, while Mordecai's follows the collectivist-romantic model issuing out of German idealism, and built on the more troubling model of a unified national will and a projected national destiny” (122–23). Anderson is, of course, right in positing Herder and Mill as natural points of reference in her attempt to place Daniel Deronda's political project. However, a closer look at these two thinkers and at the history of nineteenth-century European nationalism leads to a conclusion vastly different from what she suggests: Daniel's ideological development leads him towards a position diametrically opposed to Mill's understanding of national identity.Footnote ⁷

Much in Anderson's attempt to construct a liberal Deronda is staked on the hero's famous commitment to “separateness with communication” (620; ch. 60). On his way back to England after the decisive interview with his mother, Deronda stops in Mainz to find out more about his Jewish grandfather, Daniel Charisi. Deronda's interlocutor, Joseph Kalonymos, portrays Charisi as a man of considerable education and worldly experience. “What he used to insist on,” reports Kalonymos, “was that the strength and wealth of mankind depended on the balance of separateness and communication, and he was bitterly against our people losing themselves among the Gentiles; ‘It's no better,’ said he, ‘than the many sorts of grain going back from their variety into sameness.’ He mingled all sorts of learning; and in that he was like our Arabic writers in the golden time” (619; ch. 60) Deronda seems struck by this description and immediately articulates a political stance derived from his grandfather's legacy:

The understanding of national identity which Daniel inherits from his grandfather does appear to include a modernizing impulse coupled with the willingness to engage other cultures. However, while separateness with communication may be more appealing than separateness without communication, Deronda's rejection of the most traditional forms of Jewish belief and of the accompanying cultural isolationism is hardly sufficient to qualify his nationalist program as liberal.

The difficulty with even very rigid ethnic nationalisms lies not in the fact that they categorically prohibit interaction with other cultures — they generally do not — but in how they define the terms of such interaction. In fact, as the history of nationalist doctrines from Herder onward clearly shows, different nationalisms tend to validate each other: because the nationalist's guiding assumption is that a culture is always a national culture, the expression of the unique being and history of the nation, he is happy to accept every other nation's right to assert its own unique character. F. D. Maurice offered an iconic formulation of this view:

Despite lofty references to “the common treasure of humanity,” Maurice articulates a deeply apprehensive view of cross-cultural communication. The prospect of exchange between different nations is radically circumscribed by the imperative of protecting national purity. This is also apparent from his treatment of German nationalism later in the same text. “These Germans,” he writes, “realised their progress by their lively memory of their ancestors” (114), therefore offering a powerful example to others: “nothing is truer than that these principles made themselves manifest in the awakening of Germany, make themselves manifest in the awakening of every people to national consciousness” (115). This, presumably, is what nations can learn from each other: we can all follow the German example and be more nationally conscious. Engagement with others is only permissible if it is self-serving, as both sides are required to keep their guard up and take every precaution not to compromise their unique characteristics: as long as the Frenchman and the German talk to each other as a Frenchman and a German, all is well. What this kind of discourse fears are forms of cultural exchange which bypass and transcend the nation. Maurice therefore goes to condemn “the man of the world” as one who “may fall into any Society and feel no embarrassment in it, but who entirely refuses to be tied by the maxims, customs, beliefs of one or another,” a man who “floats at large” and is “entangled by no strong sympathies or antipathies” (211).

This is familiar Herderian rhetoric. For Herder, too, cultural exchange was welcome only as long as the elements of a foreign culture could be safely assimilated. As he writes in Another Philosophy of History, “Greek appropriated as much from the Egyptian, and the Roman from the Greek, as he needed for himself: once he is satiated, the remains fall to the floor, and he pursues them no further!” (29). And for Herder, too, the impulse to circumscribe cultural exchange to conscious acts of selective appropriation arises from a deep distrust in supranational formations. As he writes in a characteristically mocking tone: “thank God that all our national characters have been erased! We all love each other, or rather, none of us needs to love any other. We interact with each other, completely indifferent to each other, mannered, courteous, blissful! We may not have a fatherland none who are dear to us and for whom we live; but we are friends to all men and citizens of the world” (65). Writing a century after Herder and a decade after Maurice, George Eliot herself offered an important example of this type of reasoning. “It is admirable,” she writes in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” (1879), “in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but it would not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in the original more than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue” (147). Once again, the interaction with an alien culture is welcome as long as the consequences of such interaction remain limited. And once again, the virtues of national purity are exalted against the alienating effects of cosmopolitanism: “the affectation of undervaluing everything native, and being too fine for one's own country, belongs only to a few minds of no dangerous leverage. What is wanting is, that we should recognize a corresponding attachment to nationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that its absence is a privation of the greatest good” (147).

I will discuss the operations of this anti-cosmopolitan discourse in Eliot and elsewhere in more detail in a moment, but for the time being I would like to stress two points. The first is that the approaches to national culture I have been discussing in the preceding paragraphs could very well be described as “separateness with communication,” to use Deronda's phrase. In Herder, Maurice, and Eliot's late essay, national identity is protected not by way of extreme cultural isolationism, but by upholding the unassimilable otherness of other cultures: it is perhaps useful to familiarize oneself with these others, but it is equally important to keep them at bay so as not to disturb what Herder calls “the center of gravity” that every nation finds within itself (29). My second point is that despite the conciliatory resonance of the phrase attributed to Daniel's grandfather — “the balance of separateness and communication” — Charisi's view of “communication” develops from the same defensive posture towards cross-cultural exchange. When Charisi says that Jewish assimilation with the Gentiles would be “no better than the many sorts of grain going back from their variety into sameness” (619; ch. 60), he is expressing the same concern as the voice of “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” when discussing the consequences of foreign immigration to England — by blending with foreigners the English are bound to lose their “distinctive national characteristics” (158). In both cases the fusion of different identities can be conceptualized only in terms of loss: what lies beyond national identification is a world of bland indifference.

This is a point at which it is important to turn directly to John Stuart Mill. In chapter sixteen of his Considerations on Representative Government which contains Mill's most sustained reflections on the political significance of national identity, he writes that “the admixture of nationalities, and the blending of their attributes and peculiarities in a common union, is a benefit to the human race” (432). Whereas Charisi, following the Herderian tradition, imagines the merging of nationalities in terms of regression which results in the loss of all specificity, Mill envisions a productive form of cultural hybridity: “the united people, like a crossed breed of animals (but in a still greater degree, because the influences in operation are moral as well as physical), inherits the special aptitudes and excellences of all its progenitors” (432). This may appear to contradict some of Mill's better-known arguments from the same text, most notably his claims that (a) the existence of a powerful national sentiment constitutes a “prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government” and that (b) “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities” (428). It is, however, vital to note that these are practical rather than principled considerations. Mill approaches national sentiment pragmatically, as a real force that must be taken into account when considering possible forms of political organization, but not as a value to be defended at all cost: given the reality of “common sympathies” shared by members of an ethnic group, the nation-state is in most cases the obvious political arrangement. It is for the same practical reasons that multi-ethnic states are unlikely to endure. From Mill's perspective, in countries with diverse populations who speak different languages it is exceedingly difficult to establish a unified public sphere necessary for a functioning democracy: “among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. . . . The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another” (428–29). Such considerations, however, have little to do with the fear of debilitating effects of the mixing of different nationalities, and Mill is perfectly happy to allow that in certain cases a nation-state is not an optimal solution.Footnote ⁸ As Georgios Varouxakis has demonstrated in his recent work of Mill's nationalism, “preserving a nation's ‘authenticity’ and ‘national’ culture (major concerns of most nationalists) were far from being his concerns” (101). Whereas for Eliot national “separateness” constitutes a value that must be vigorously defended, for Mill it is simply a fact of life that political theory must take into account.Footnote ⁹

As most theorists of nationalism would agree, the core difference between ethnic and liberal nationalism lies in the way in which they value authenticity: modern ethnolinguistic nationalism imagines a nation as an already given, natural community whose unique essence is reflected in its cultural products, particularly its language. As Joshua Fishman writes, “this essence exists over and above dynasties and centuries and boundaries; this essence is that which constitutes the heart of the nationality and which leads to its greatness; the essence of a nationality is its spirit, its individuality, its soul” (46). Consequently, a commitment to this collective essence — in other words, a strong sense of national identity — must constitute a decisive moral force. In the words of Stuart Woolf, what distinguishes modern nationalism is precisely “the claim that national patriotism is a primordial instinct, like the family, inherently superior to other loyalties, and that the ‘nation’ is a ‘natural’ unit that has always existed, albeit for long in a passive and dormant state” (2). Because the national spirit is the primary source of moral orientation, and because the sense of belonging to the nation constitutes such a fundamental instinct, it follows that cosmopolitanism, understood in strictly negative terms as the absence of the sense of national belonging, is a debilitating force leading to moral indifference. We have seen this type of reasoning in Herder and Maurice and we find it again in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” where Eliot's narrator argues that “it is impossible to arrest this tendency [toward the fusion of different races]: all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius — the deep suckers of healthy sentiment” (160). Because a strong sense of national identity determines the full scope of our ethical life, and because the moral integrity of both the nation as a whole and of its individual members depends on it, the political project of ethnic nationalism largely consists in protecting national consciousness from the threat of assimilation and cosmopolitan indifference. From Herder to the Gaelic League in late nineteenth-century Ireland, and further to late twentieth-century Balkan wars, such nationalisms see “the essence of nationality” — to borrow Fishman's term — as the sole source of both cultural identity and political sovereignty, and hence regard both cultural forms and forms of political organization which are not rooted in the nation with deep suspicion.

Significantly, the doctrine of “separateness with communication,” advocated by Daniel Charisi and adopted by his grandson Daniel Deronda, emanates from precisely such concerns. Because Charisi is above all committed to safeguarding the national essence and because he can conceptualize the blending of nationalities solely as a debilitating development, the two key terms of his doctrine are not on equal footing: his commitment to “communication” is inevitably circumscribed by the imperative of maintaining “separateness.” Of course, given the overall direction of Daniel Deronda, and given the overall direction of Eliot's thought in the final years of her life, none of this should come as a surprise. By endorsing the doctrine of Daniel Charisi, Daniel Deronda is really interiorizing the governing ideological assumptions of the novel as a whole: as I demonstrate in the next section, the text of the novel establishes a firm structural opposition between a strong sense of belonging, vitality, and moral integrity on the one side, and cosmopolitanism and moral disorientation on the other.

Rootless Cosmopolitans

Figuratively and literally the starting point of Daniel Deronda is a place of cosmopolitan detachment where common ties are dissolved and unlikely couplings abound. Leubronn, the imagined German spa where Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth first meet, is a decadent playground for fashionable Europeans from every corner of the Continent, “Livonian and Spanish, Græco-Italian and miscellaneous German, English aristocratic and English plebeian” (4; ch. 1). Diversity, however, quickly collapses into dullness: “while every single player differed markedly from every other, there was a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask — as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action” (5; ch. 1). Eliot fails to tell us explicitly what is wrong with these fashionable immigrants, but the scene establishes a firm association between internationalism and indifferent if not meaningless existence: the Leubronn casino seems to be inhabited exclusively by soulless automatons. Once again, Eliot is closely following Herder. As he writes, “the age of dreamy wanderings and hopeful journeys abroad is already sickness, flatulence, bloatedness, premonition of death!” (30). In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Eliot will offer a more explicit reflection on the dangers of cosmopolitanism:

In both of her late works Eliot follows a very clear pattern of nationalist thinking about cosmopolitanism. Because, as we have seen, ethnic nationalism posits national attachment as a “primordial instinct” and a key condition of ethical reasoning, it can, conversely, equate the indifference towards one's origins with an overall sense of moral indifference: in the final instance, anational is barely distinguishable from amoral. This is why in Daniel Deronda Eliot congratulates her hero for “exchanging that bird's eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality, for the generous reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance” (638; ch. 63). In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” she repeats the same gesture, once again bemoaning the dangers of “cosmopolitan indifference” (155) while celebrating “the spirit of separateness” (160). What is remarkable, however, is not the continuity of rhetoric between the two late texts, but rather the fact that in the key assumptions of its plot, in the treatment of the protagonists, and in the narrative's outcomes, Daniel Deronda persistently enacts the nationalist condemnation of cosmopolitanism.Footnote ¹⁰

The novel posits the sense of belonging as a condition of meaningful existence and then examines the fate of its protagonists when this key condition is removed. Both Daniel and Gwendolen are, above all, rootless creatures. Because of her cosmopolitan upbringing, Gwendolen lacks any point of moral orientation beyond her own desires. She must be a selfish and self-absorbed “spoiled child” because, as the narrator famously laments at the beginning of chapter three, she was never properly rooted “in some spot of a native land” (16; ch. 3). Because he doesn't know who he is, Daniel lacks a strong sense of attachment and is therefore condemned to linger in a state of “many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action” (307; ch. 32). In different ways they both lead purposeless lives: Gwendolen cannot see beyond her own desires and aspirations — a grave defect from the perspective of Victorian ethics — whereas Daniel is unable to direct his altruistic impulses and is hence condemned to “a state of social neutrality” (153; ch. 16).

The firm association between rootlessness and moral paralysis on the one hand and between a sense of belonging and moral resolve on the other determines the fate of both protagonists. In unearthing his lost heritage, Daniel also discovers a sense of purpose, embracing a “new state of decision” (638; ch. 63): his rediscovered Jewish identity has provided a refuge from the debilitating effects of cosmopolitan detachment, offering structure and meaning to an otherwise aimless existence (cf. Gallagher 57).

That purposeless existence was the disease Eliot wanted to treat was, of course, nothing new. After all, in Middlemarch Will Ladislaw suffers from many of the same ailments that plague Daniel Deronda. In the earlier novel, Will drifts as “a sort of gipsy, rather enjoying the sense of belonging to no class” (441; ch. 46), slipping, finally, into a state of “motiveless levity” (745; ch. 79). In Daniel Deronda, Eliot attributes the same set of symptoms to Daniel: he too exists in “a state of social neutrality” (153; ch. 16), he stumbles through life “like a yearning disembodied spirit” (308; ch. 32), all the while suffering from “a meditative numbness” (308; ch. 32). But if the two men suffer from the same disease, the remedy which Eliot prescribes is very different. Will appears to have been cured solely by virtue of marrying Dorothea Brooke. He finds meaning in taking over some of her “fanatical sympathy” and goes on to pursue a career as a member of Parliament committed to social reform: “Dorothea could have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband should be in the thick of struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help” (793). Although Eliot was somewhat uncomfortable circumscribing Dorothea's role and allowing her life to be “absorbed into the life of another” (793) she did use the marriage plot to balance personal desires and public obligations, offering thus an integrative ideal in which responsiveness to larger duties is conveniently incorporated into the promise of marital happiness. In Daniel Deronda, however, the opposition between personal and collective has been intensified to a point at which such a solution is no longer possible. Nationalism is the sole remedy for Daniel's illness: in order to stop drifting aimlessly through life he will have to discover his true origin, embrace Mordecai's teachings about national unity, abandon a more predictable path towards socialization, and take up the role of a national savior. He will also have to leave Gwendolen behind.

In fact, the same association between rootlessness and paralysis and between attachment and vitality which enables Daniel to move on will prove fatal for Gwendolen. In this novel at least, the ability to see beyond one's narrow desires and aspirations is predicated on a sense of rootedness which she has no way of recovering: because, as Leavis noted, “poor Gwendolen is not in a position to discover herself a Jewess” (84), her rootlessness is a terminal illness, and she cannot perform the ethical leap which the novel attributes to Daniel and find meaning in a higher cause. Gwendolen, however, does not fail because she is a flawed heroine; rather, she is a flawed heroine because within the ideological coordinates of Daniel Deronda a rootless cosmopolitan like her can only lead an irredeemably flawed existence. Ironically, she is at the same time a victim of her own debilitating rootlessness and of Daniel's success in overcoming this condition: while in the first part of the novel Daniel cannot effectively help her because he drifts in a state of “a meditative numbness” (308; ch. 32), in the later parts of the book, although reinvigorated by his newly found nationalist mission, he cannot help her because he has other business to attend to. While Daniel, the restless cosmopolitan cannot save anyone, Daniel, the determined nationalist can save only those with whom he shares a sense of belonging, and therefore not Gwendolen.

A Very, Very Qualified Cosmopolitanism

Daniel Deronda endorses a nationalist condemnation of cosmopolitan detachment both through the explicit politics of its hero and through its overall narrative logic, and as long as we are committed to conventional definitions of civic and ethnic nationalism, it is very difficult to deny that the novel prioritizes the latter. However, the task of mapping Daniel Deronda’s (and Daniel Deronda's) ideological commitments becomes more daunting when traditional binaries of political theory — the distinctions between different types of nationalism and between nationalism and cosmopolitanism — are disrupted. As Thomas Albrecht argues in an attempt to portray Daniel's political project as consistent with a particular brand of cosmopolitan ethics, “Daniel's trajectory must rather be read as a movement from a simpler, impartial cosmopolitanism, one that regards all human beings as equal and as equally deserving of care, to a more nuanced, partial cosmopolitanism, one that remains sensitive to the suffering and needs of all human beings even while focusing its primary attention and care upon a select few” (391). Of course, in order to accept such a reading we must first accept the underlying theoretical intervention — the construction of a cosmopolitanism which refuses to renounce all local loyalties and instead works to balance broad obligations towards humanity as a whole and obligations towards narrower communities. As I demonstrate in the following pages, such balancing act is exceptionally difficult to sustain.

Albrecht's reading of Daniel Deronda comes on the heels of nearly two decades of theoretical debates in which the concept of cosmopolitanism has been systematically redefined. This need to rethink cosmopolitanism has largely developed from the deep mistrust towards Kantian ethical universalism in which the concept has been traditionally rooted (Robbins 2). The universalist claims of the Enlightenment are now routinely seen not only as imperfectly applied, but as complicit in the project of European imperialism. Moreover, the very notion of universality has been described as always already exclusionary and hegemonic.Footnote ¹¹ With the normative grounds of universalist cosmopolitanism thus problematized, its emancipatory potential must also appear dubious. One common way of circumventing the problematic implications of the traditional cosmopolitan stance is to try to reconcile cosmopolitanism and particularism, constructing a cosmopolitanism responsive to the value of local and narrow loyalties. While this is perhaps an understandable development, it is also ridden with difficulties. For how partial is too partial? Under what conditions and in what form can cosmopolitanism accommodate narrower loyalties and how far can a cosmopolitan go in acknowledging nationalist sentiments before the distinction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism collapses? In other words, how far can we go in stretching the meaning of the word cosmopolitanism before we render it utterly meaningless? These are significant theoretical questions with far-reaching implications for the reading of Daniel Deronda.

The claim that a cosmopolitan position can be reconciled with giving priority to narrower attachments — to one's family, friends, city, or nation, for instance — is not in itself particularly problematic. Even the proponents of what might be called the strong concept of cosmopolitanism — Martha Nussbaum, for instance — will acknowledge the value of such narrower commitments:

Given that Nussbaum is likely the most vocal contemporary advocate of the “old” — Kantian, universalist — cosmopolitanism, it seems safe to assume that cosmopolitan ethics can involve a reconciliation of particular and universal responsibilities. The question is, however, under what conditions is this reconciliation achieved. When Nussbaum claims that “compassion begins with the local” (“Introduction” xiii), she is stating a practical rather than a principled priority. For her, our primary duty is to humanity as a whole:

Our local context — our family or our country — is simply the most immediate arena in which this global obligation is exercised: helping a friend or a relative is the most natural way to exercise our obligation to other human beings. In fact, the care which we exercise towards our local surroundings is both derived from and circumscribed by this global obligation.Footnote ¹² As Nussbaum further argues, “in making choices in both political and economic matters we should most seriously consider the right of other human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that we should work to acquire the knowledge that will enable us to deliberate well about those rights” (“Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” 13–14). It is important to note that this is not a “live and let live” kind of argument. What Nussbaum demands is something much more than not to deliberately harm others. She demands that in caring about ourselves and those immediately around us we must actively pursue the well-being of those unknown others that make up humanity. It is not surprising, then, that Nussbaum is extremely wary of the excessive power of local commitments: such commitments are perhaps inevitable, but they are admissible only as long as we understand that they are not the primary source of our moral obligations.

Quite to the contrary, Appiah's theorization of cosmopolitanism is primarily an attempt to overcome what he sees as the troubling universalizing tendencies inherent in more traditional versions of the concept. As he writes, “because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life” (Cosmopolitanism xv). But even as he tries to elaborate a version of cosmopolitanism which celebrates local attachments, Appiah can't quite escape the acknowledgement that from a cosmopolitan perspective, no matter how qualified, such attachments must be circumscribed. While he seeks to define the middle ground between a nationalism which forsakes the wider human community and an extreme cosmopolitanism which fully devalues local loyalties, he nonetheless admits that “the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other” (Cosmopolitanism xvi). In other words, he is not able to escape the implicit ethical priority of the obligations that we have towards humanity as a whole: local loyalties are justified only as long as they don't violate the principle of universal responsibility to all humans. This is particularly apparent in Appiah's original response to Nussbaum:

In other words, local attachments are permissible only as long as they are not in violation of the universal principle of human rights. And while in his subsequent argument about “partial cosmopolitanism” Appiah attempts to secure a greater significance for narrower identities within a cosmopolitan worldview, he doesn't really articulate a plausible theoretical alternative to Nussbaum's views. He offers many practical examples of why narrower commitments may be reconcilable with (and even conducive to) a cosmopolitan ethics, but he fails to undermine the central theoretical tenet of the strong version of cosmopolitanism which Nussbaum advocates, namely, that any genuinely cosmopolitan position must give priority, in theory at least, to universal over particular obligations.Footnote ¹³

I will return in a moment to the important question of whether we can go beyond Appiah's relatively modest demands in the attempt to “qualify” cosmopolitanism. For the time being, however, I wish to reconsider Daniel Deronda in the light of theoretical deliberations I have just offered. Albrecht has argued that “Daniel's sense of obligation to Gwendolen represents the universal responsibility he continues to feel, while his obligation to Ezra and Mirah represents the particular allegiance to which he has given priority” (412). As we have seen, there is nothing particularly controversial in the claim that a cosmopolitan ethics allows us to confine our actions to those closest to us. As Nussbaum argues, “to give one's own sphere special care is justifiable in universalist terms” (“Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” 13). From this perspective, Albrecht's reading seems unproblematic: Deronda reserves the right to prioritize his loyalty to those closest to him over his loyalty to Gwendolen.

The difficulty, however, lies in Daniel's (and the novel's) understanding of what constitutes “one's own sphere” and in the terms in which he defines proximity. Theorists of cosmopolitanism generally acknowledge that “one's own sphere” includes various local contexts and various kinds of connections: “local allegiances and partialities,” to use Appiah's phrase (Cosmopolitanism xvi), can take many forms, including a particular sense of loyalty towards family, towards neighbors and fellow citizens, towards friends.Footnote ¹⁴ It is precisely if we accept this multifaceted understanding of what constitutes local that Daniel's prioritizing of Mirah and Mordecai over Gwendolen becomes troublesome.

The difficulty is not that Daniel gives precedence to his own sphere. The difficulty is that Gwendolen is a part of his own sphere. If local allegiances are meant to include those with whom we have crossed paths and developed relationships, whose struggles we witnessed, whose lives have affected ours, in other words, those concrete human beings in our immediate surroundings whose wellbeing concerns us deeply, as opposed to mere abstract strangers of whom we know nothing, then surely Gwendolen must be a part of such inner circle. To quote an exemplary Victorian definition of duty, offered by a different Eliot heroine, Maggie Tulliver, “it seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us –– the ties that have made others dependent on us –– and would cut them in two” (Mill on the Floss 449; ch. 11). In forsaking Gwendolen, Daniel is cutting those ties. Throughout the novel Gwendolen figures simultaneously as an object of attraction and of moral interest for him: after all, he has witnessed and understood her capriciousness and her errors, he has observed the devastating effects of the marriage to Grandcourt, he was there to console her after Grandcourt's death, and was repeatedly approached by Gwendolen in her darkest hours. Indeed, he is fully aware that Gwendolen needs to be rescued more than Mirah: “she too needed a rescue, and one much more difficult than that of the wanderer by the river — a rescue for which he felt himself helpless. The silent question — ‘But is it not cowardly to make that a reason for turning away?’ was the form in which he framed his resolve to go near her on the first opportunity . . . ” (478; ch. 45). Given the extraordinary degree to which he was involved in her life and concerned with her wellbeing, one would assume that Daniel's connection to Gwendolen implies something much more concrete than the universal responsibility towards a fellow human being. In fact, Daniel himself admits as much:

Gwendolen, like Mirah and Mordecai, belongs to that local, concrete community which commands special concern. The novel, therefore, does not enact a conflict between particular and universal loyalties. It enacts a conflict between opposing understandings of what constitutes local, partial, and particular loyalties, in other words, a conflict about what constitutes “one's own sphere.” In choosing Mirah and Mordecai over Gwendolen, Daniel redefines “local” so as to privilege ethnic over other bonds. He moves from a place where “his own sphere” includes all those with whom his life is intertwined to a place where such a sphere privileges those of appropriate origin.

Not only by the standards of the strong version of cosmopolitanism advocated by the likes of Nussbaum, but also by the significantly lower standards of Appiah's “partial cosmopolitanism,” Deronda falls well short of anything resembling a cosmopolitan stance, not least because he privileges not just any narrow loyalty, but a distinctly nationalist commitment to the community of blood over other commitments. To call such a position “cosmopolitan” would require us not only to qualify the concept of cosmopolitanism, but to qualify it out of existence. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that perhaps the most cited modern definition of nationalism is little more than a paraphrase of Daniel Deronda's claim that “my first duty is towards my own people” (620; ch. 60).Footnote ¹⁵ Daniel Deronda is therefore not a novel in which “Eliot wishes to steer a middle course,” as Anderson argues (129): in its deep and explicit mistrust of the forms of identity which transcend the principle of national belonging, in its extensive rumination on the devastating effects of rootlessness, and in the way in which it finally validates Daniel's prioritizing of ethnic loyalty by leaving Gwendolen behind, the novel firmly upholds the central tenets of modern ethnic nationalism.

The Ethics of Duty and the Ethics of Alterity

Corollary to the unhelpful blurring of lines between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is an equally problematic attempt, typical of many recent readings of Daniel Deronda, to obscure the distinction between an ethics of alterity and a nationalist ethics of belonging. Albrecht argues that “Eliot's purpose in refining Daniel's cosmopolitanism is not only practical but is also to establish an ethics that would be more responsible to what can most broadly be called the other, which is to say an ethics attentive to heterogeneities, to differences, to the separateness of other people” (391).Footnote ¹⁶ There is certainly something to be said for the argument that the novel shows an interest in the ethical significance of acknowledging the otherness of others. When in Totality and Infinity Emmanuel Levinas speaks of “the strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to I, to my thoughts and my possessions” (43), it is difficult not to think of Gwendolen's inability to conceptualize Daniel's separateness from herself. As he tries to explain to her the significance of his newly discovered Jewish origin, all she can muster in response is a rather tactless “you are just the same as if you were not a Jew” (687; ch. 69). What Gwendolen fails to realize is that their selves are not contiguous and that she cannot just appropriate him and interpret his identity for him. However, to assimilate the problem of “separateness of other people” in Daniel Deronda to the Levinasian ethics of alterity and to represent it simply as a generalized plea for the recognition of difference, that too is a problematic gesture which imposes sameness where there is a fundamental difference. What we must be attentive to is the specific ideological context in which the problem of “the separateness of other people” is articulated in this novel.

The very word “separateness” appears exactly once in the six novels Eliot published prior to Daniel Deronda. Its usage then rises exponentially in direct proportion to her interest in the significance of national identity. In Daniel Deronda it is a part of Mordecai's prophetic vocabulary and of Daniel Charisi's nationalist program which Daniel adopts, and it is only at the very end of the novel that the narrator uses the word to describe the relationship between Daniel and Gwendolen, bemoaning the heroine's inability to come to terms with “the separateness of his [Deronda's] life” (682; ch. 69). This slippage in the use of “separateness” in the novel — from a word for a relationship between nations, to a word describing the relationship between the protagonists — demonstrates that what is at stake is not the ethical imperative of acknowledging the alterity of the other, but rather that Eliot posits ethnic differences as a wall which naturally separates Daniel from Gwendolen. What Gwendolen is therefore expected to do is a great deal more specific than to simply acknowledge the otherness of the other and accept Daniel's right to choose his own path. She (and the reader, for that matter) is expected to accept that blood is destiny, that ethnic origin is the primary and decisive marker of identity which easily overrides other commitments, and, finally, that the man in whom she confided has become a stranger simply by virtue of discovering that he is an ethnic Jew. She is not asked to embrace an ethics of alterity but to come to terms with what the novel posits as the natural priority of ethnic bonds. The imperative of separateness in Daniel Deronda is inseparable from the logic of nationalism.Footnote ¹⁷

But if recent critics have worked — implausibly, as I suggested throughout this essay — to pass the nationalist logic of Daniel Deronda as an ethics of alterity, they were, in a way, invited to do so by the novel itself: in Daniel Deronda Eliot has in fact engaged in a kind of ethical mimicry, though of a slightly different kind. Particularly in the novel's final chapters, she was trying to represent Daniel's privileging of ethnic bonds and his consequent abandonment of Gwendolen as consistent with a more conventional understanding of the ethics of duty. And, as I argue at the beginning of this essay, her efforts have managed to seduce many of the novel's early readers. However, it is precisely the conscious effort to establish a sense of ethical continuity between Daniel Deronda and Eliot's earlier fictions that reveals the full implications of the shift in Eliot's ethical reasoning.

In part, she has tried to impose this sense of continuity by emulating the kind of conciliatory rhetoric she has offered at the end of Middlemarch where Will and Dorothea stand united not only in mutual affection, but also in a shared commitment to a greater good: “they were bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it. . . . Dorothea could have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help” (792–93; Finale). In Daniel Deronda, Eliot similarly describes Daniel's attachment to Mirah as “the blending of a complete personal love in one current with a larger duty” (534; ch. 50), but behind the shared rhetoric one finds radically different terms on which personal affections and public responsibilities are brought together in the two novels. As we have seen, in Middlemarch a commitment to public good functions as a natural extension of Dorothea's and Will's union; in Daniel Deronda, Daniel's love for Mirah Lapidoth has no reality outside of his attachment to the Jewish nation. The novel repeatedly articulates an opposition between Gwendolen and Judaism, or Gwendolen and Mordecai, not between her and Mirah. Moreover, Daniel's desire to be close to Mirah functions an extension of his desire to be close to Mordecai: “he wanted now to be again with Mordecai, to pour forth instead of restraining his feeling, to admit agreement and maintain dissent, and all the while to find Mirah's presence without the embarrassment of obviously seeking it” (638; ch. 63). Ironically, in a novel so invested in exposing the moral deficiencies of abstract universalism and cosmopolitan detachment, Eliot's hero leaves behind a deeply troubled creature that is Gwendolen Harleth in order to marry a woman who is barely more than a physical embodiment of his newly found commitment to Judaism.

As she marries off Daniel, Eliot is left with a heroine condemned to linger in a state of confusion: with its focus on the benefits of national attachment, Daniel Deronda can negotiate a meaningful (though perhaps uncertain) outcome for Daniel, but the novel struggles to accommodate a heroine who cannot find meaning in such an attachment. Eliot therefore attempted to limit the obvious exclusionary implications of the novel's outcome: Gwendolen, the final pages suggest, might be rehabilitated after all, and Deronda might nonetheless maintain a presence in her life. After telling her about the plans to marry Mirah and depart to the East, he promises that he will write: “I shall be more with you than I used to be. . . . Now we can perhaps never see each other again. But our minds may get nearer” (691; ch. 69). And in her final words in the novel, Gwendolen has no other recourse but to assent to this curious doublespeak in which distance somehow becomes proximity: “I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better — it shall be better with me because I have known you” (695; ch. 70). To the reader familiar with Gwendolen's agony these words should come as no surprise. She has uttered them once before, after a previous conversation with Deronda: “It may be — it shall be better with me because I have known you” (389; ch. 36). But these are feeble assurances, and given Gwendolen's inability to break out of the cycle of despair, the novel gives us very few reasons to believe that she will be better.

But if Eliot could not persuasively rehabilitate Gwendolen, she could at least try to marginalize the question of her fate. As the novel draws to a close, her “small” personal struggles are diminished in the face of immense responsibility towards “the larger destinies of mankind” (689; ch. 69) which now command all of Daniel's attention: “she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving” (689; ch. 69). This passage constitutes the central venue of what I termed the novel's ethical mimicry: by opposing “small” and personal to “large” and collective destinies, Eliot has worked to represent Gwendolen's defeat as both natural and just, as yet another instance of the familiar conflict between egotism and duty (resolved decisively in favor of the latter). As George Saintsbury suggested, the novel once again reasserts “the excellence of obeying the instigations of kinship and duty rather than the opposing instinct” (375).Footnote ¹⁸ And yet, one only needs to look at the description of these “larger destinies of mankind” to realize that Eliot's insistence on this familiar opposition serves to disguise a subtle slippage from a broadly conceived ethics of duty towards a nationalist ethics of belonging: “the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands” (689; ch. 69). The image to which Eliot here resorts — the symbolically charged image of collective sacrifice in the face of foreign threat or internal unrest — embodies the defining nationalist myth. As Ernest Renan suggested in his seminal 1882 lecture, “we love [the nation] in proportion to the sacrifices to which we have consented and the evils we have suffered” (58). At the end of Daniel Deronda, the duty towards the “larger destinies of mankind” has come to mean the commitment to shared origin and shared sacrifices.Footnote ¹⁹ This commitment is accentuated once more when in the novel's final chapter, from which Gwendolen is fittingly excluded, Eliot mobilizes one final nationalist trope. The novel ends with Daniel embracing his bride and the dying prophet whose mission he prepares to continue. In its final scene, with Gwendolen nowhere in sight, Daniel Deronda can safely integrate familial and ethnic loyalty in a single symbolic image: within the confines of nationalist imagination, the nation is, after all, essentially an extended family.

But there are further and less obvious implications to this rejection of Gwendolen's allegedly “small” concerns: Gwendolen Harleth may very well be “the spoiled child,” a heroine more flawed than most courtship plots would allow, but her drama is nonetheless the central drama of Victorian fiction and, significantly, of George Eliot's fiction. It is the drama of complicated courtships, unreasonable marital expectations, and of moral and legal obstacles that render marriage impossible or insufferable. It is the kind of drama, in other words, that was the central venue of ethical, social, and — as Nancy Armstrong forcefully reminded us — political exploration in the English novel at least since Jane Austen.Footnote ²⁰ If a dramatic loss of social status, an unnerving and morally impossibly difficult decision to marry Grandcourt, the reality of an abusive marriage, and the overwhelming sense of guilt and self-loathing following the death of the detested husband all constitute a “small drama” then it must follow that many of the central plots of Victorian fiction are small indeed.

By dismissing Gwendolen's concerns as trivial, Eliot is not simply rejecting a self-centered heroine. Rather, she seems to announce that the courtship plot and its domestic concerns no longer matter. If in Middlemarch she still worked to negotiate a delicate balance between personal fulfillment and larger obligations, in her final novel such negotiation between the private and the communal is neither possible nor desirable: private concerns simply pale in comparison with the grand questions of collective destiny embodied in Daniel's mission. What is diminished and rejected at the end of Daniel Deronda is not Gwendolen Harleth's egotism but the private space of the realist novel.