There has been no systematic study of the eminent Victorian historian E. A. Freeman (1823–92) since the publication of W. R. W. Stephens's official two-volume biography in 1895.Footnote 1 A prolific scholar, Freeman's contemporary reputation rested on his magisterial History of the Norman Conquest (six volumes, 1865–76), together with thirty works on European and Oriental history.Footnote 2 Occupying a central place in the intellectual and public life of the nineteenth century, Freeman maintained a considerable personal correspondence with leading figures, including Gladstone, William Stubbs, J. R. Green and James Bryce; he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1884; and was an active political campaigner – most notably on the questions of field sports and the Bulgarian atrocities. Despite his achievements Freeman is today remembered, if at all, as a somewhat eccentric dabbler in virulent racial theory.
The conventional portrait of Freeman as an arch-racist is not without foundation. Scattered throughout Freeman's works are comments on the innate capacity of the Aryan race for liberty and denunciations of all those whom he considered to fall outside the Aryan pale, including the despotic Jews, blacks, Turks and Chinese. The best recent studies of Freeman, those of John Burrow and Peter Mandler, have focused on the Norman Conquest and the attempt to combine a traditional Whig narrative on English freedom with new ideas about Western racial characteristics. In this analysis Freeman appears as “the most Whiggish” of all the mid-Victorian historians and “the greatest nationalist historian of the nineteenth century”.Footnote 3 Hugh MacDougall and Christopher Parker, by comparison, have dissected Freeman's volumes for evidence of his “intemperate” distaste for non-Aryans and have concluded that he stands on the “extreme limits of racism” and expounds a “race-hate” akin to that of Gobineau and Hitler.Footnote 4 Finally, Rosemary Jann and Susan Walton have explored the difficulties Freeman faced as a scholar who allowed his racial prejudices to influence his writing at a time when the discipline of history was becoming self-consciously “scientific” and professional.Footnote 5 While it is understandable that modern scholars have focused on Freeman's racial views, the tendency has been to isolate the relevant aspects of his work from the detail of the texts themselves and to overlook the complex intellectual frameworks which informed them.
This essay analyses the relatively obscure Comparative Politics (1873) as the only work to contain a systematic exposition of Freeman's racial theory and to reveal the centrality of the Aryan concept to a universal scheme of history. Far from being idiosyncratic or subjective it will be demonstrated, first, that Freeman's researches into race represented a contribution to the comparative sciences pioneered by Friedrich Max Müller and Sir Henry Maine, and anticipated by the Liberal Anglican philosophy of Thomas Arnold. While Müller and Maine identified similarities in the languages and legal institutions of European nations as evidence of a civilization originating in India, Freeman followed Arnold in focusing on political analogies and defined the Aryan race as a community of democratic culture. It will be argued, second, that Freeman's apparent confidence in Aryan superiority was not unequivocal as the practitioners of the Comparative Method rejected physiological explanations of race and connected their own belief in the existence of an unstable community of culture with cyclical accounts of Western development. Finally, it will be seen that Freeman's Aryan concept, denoting a precarious democratic lineage, did not merely influence his writing of history but was central to his interpretation of both past and current affairs. Preoccupied with the cyclical nature of progress and overwhelmed by the force of historical precedent, Freeman believed that the fates of ancient Aryan civilizations offered a threatening portent against contemporary political expansionism, while his Aryan typology led to a universalism based on the classification of two permanently coexisting and mutually hostile political cultures. A close reading of Comparative Politics will therefore reveal the contours of a complex racial world view which lends coherence, depth and subtlety to Freeman's seemingly uncomplicated celebrations of Aryan liberty and castigations of the despotism of the non-Aryan nations.
I. THE COMPARATIVE METHOD, THE LIBERAL ANGLICAN PHILOSOPHY AND FREEMAN'S CULTURAL CONCEPT OF RACE
Victorian attitudes towards race are notoriously difficult to interpret, as the term was used with a seemingly endless variety of meanings. As the president of the London Anthropological Society, James Hunt, complained in 1863, “hardly two persons use such an important word as ‘race’ in the same sense”.Footnote 6 Amidst all the uncertainties concerning race in the Victorian period, however, most scholars agree that a fundamental hardening of attitudes took place in the later nineteenth century. Catherine Hall is amongst those who have characterized this development as a displacement from the belief, prevalent until around mid-century, that the different races had originated from one family to an emphasis on the “fundamental heterogeneity of mankind, the natural differences between men, based on fixed immutable biological laws”.Footnote 7 Explanations of this shift have focused on a complex of developments, including the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), encounters with British colonial subjects in the response to the Governor Eyre controversy (1865), the death of General Gordon (1885) and the Boer Wars (1880–81 and 1899–1902), and the debate surrounding the question of the “condition of the working class” in England.Footnote 8 As Ivan Hannaford writes, there seems to have been a growing consensus around the conclusion that, “If evolution and natural selection were the principles of natural existence and therefore applicable to social life, it must be true that the poor and the Negro were in their natural condition because of some deficiency in their physical and intellectual capacity”.Footnote 9 Emblematic of this growing trend, which ordered nations in a permanent hierarchy with Europeans at the top and negroes at the bottom, were works such as Robert Knox's The Races of Men, Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution and A. H. Keane's Man Past and Present.Footnote 10
While there is convincing evidence to suggest that racial attitudes did harden from the 1860s onwards, it is important to note with Mandler and Bernard Porter that many Victorians continued to resist stronger theories of national differentiation and that the British attitude remained more liberal than that of France and Germany.Footnote 11 Amongst the scholars who rejected the idea of fixed biological characteristics and rearticulated the traditional conception of “universal man” progressing more or less quickly towards perfection were the practitioners of the Comparative Method.Footnote 12 Shaped by the German historical impulse of the age of Romanticism and popularized in Britain by the émigré scholar Müller, the Comparative Method “took the new body of evidence gleaned from physiology, philology, archaeology, anthropology, and historical scholarship, and used it to reconstruct the ladder of civilization”.Footnote 13 The Comparative Method was largely an Oxbridge pursuit, cultivated by men who held chairs in law and history there such as Maine, Bryce, J. R. Seeley and Freeman himself.Footnote 14 Their world was one of learned languages, critical historical methods and documentary analysis, and this distanced them from the conjectural social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer, and even the anthropology, that Oxford and Cambridge resisted.Footnote 15 Focusing on linguistic, legal and historical evolution, adherents of the Comparative Method emphasized the similarity of Western nations, as the identities in the cultural institutions of European nations seemed to suggest that each must have descended in common from an original Aryan homeland. Maintaining that primitive peoples living both in the nineteenth century and in the distant past represented the equivalents of earlier stages in the development of more advanced societies, practitioners of the Comparative Method studied primitive societies to reconstruct the stages through which advanced peoples had already passed, and focused their attention on modern India as a living repository of primitive Aryan institutions and cultures.
For Freeman, and many of his contemporaries in the 1860s and 1870s, the potential of the Comparative Method to comprehensively redraw the map of learning was exhilarating.Footnote 16 “The establishment of the Comparative Method of study”, Freeman wrote in the preface of Comparative Politics,
has been the greatest intellectual achievement of our time. It has carried light and order into whole branches of human knowledge which before were shrouded in darkness and confusion. It has brought a line of argument which reaches moral certainty into a region which before was given over to random guess-work. Into matters which are for the most part incapable of strictly external proof it has brought a form of strictly internal proof which is more convincing, more unerring.Footnote 17
Freeman fully acknowledged his debt to the pioneers of the Comparative Method, writing that how much “I have learned from the writings of Professor Max Müller, E. B. Tylor and Sir Henry Maine, may be seen throughout the book”.Footnote 18 While the reference to the anthropology of Tylor is indicative of the overlapping boundaries in disciplines which studied the progress of civilization, it was for Freeman, as for many of his contemporaries, philology that provided evidence for the existence of an Aryan race and set the restriction for the scope of the Comparative Method.Footnote 19 Freeman had first become convinced of the merits of the Comparative Method when he had read Müller's Languages of the Seat of War in the East.Footnote 20 In this early work Müller had combined Johann Herder's teaching that language revealed the evolution of human thought over time with an enthusiasm for India first gleaned from F. Schlegel, and attempted to develop the research of Jacob Grimm into the shared grammatical structures of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.Footnote 21 Arguing that the linguistic evidence proved the existence of an original Aryan family in Asia, Müller had emphatically declared that
though the historian may shake his head, though the physiologist may doubt, and the poet scorn the idea, all must yield before the facts furnished by language. There was a time when the ancestors of the Celts, the Germans, the Slaves, the Greeks and Italians, the Persians and Hindus, were living together beneath the same roof, separate from the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races.Footnote 22
Freeman was captivated by the evidence that comparative philology seemed to provide for the existence of an Aryan race based on a community of language and soon struck up a personal correspondence with Müller, seeking expert technical advice over a number of years from the man he described as “ingenious”.Footnote 23 A letter of December 1875 indicates the depth of admiration Freeman felt for Müller, and the significant role played by the German scholar in disseminating the teachings of his countrymen in England:
My Dear Müller,
I was quite taken aback about what I saw in the papers that you were going to leave England altogether. You gave me no such hint when you last wrote . . . I wish you would leave it alone, and stay here till you have made every Englishman know his Grimm's Law. There are crowds of them who don't . . . But if you must stick to Veda, can't you do it in England? In a Chip you say that you can do it better in Oxford than anywhere else. Anyhow it will be a sin, if you leave England altogether without ever coming under the shadow of my roof. If you don't go till April, you will have plenty of time.Footnote 24
Despite the somewhat desperate tone, Freeman's enthusiasm for Müller was shared by many in the 1870s. Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language (1861) had proved enormously popular and he attracted such interested intellectuals as F. D. Maurice, John Stuart Mill and Connop Thirlwall, and important figures including Queen Victoria herself.Footnote 25 In these lectures Müller had pushed beyond detailed genealogical classifications to make the romantic and idealist lines of his argument explicit, maintaining that language was a gift from God which reflected the progress of human reason.Footnote 26 “The history of words”, Müller had asserted, “is the reflection of the history of the human mind”, and as such he concluded that “every Aryan word has a long tale to tell, if we had time to listen to it. How they wandered from one country to another; how they changed in form and meaning, according to the times in which they lived and grew up”.Footnote 27 Müller's lectures, his subsequent stream of publications and high-profile attacks on Darwin's account of the brute origins of speech served to establish comparative philology in England and helped him to become the first “celebrity academician” of the age.Footnote 28
In Comparative Politics Freeman described the successes of comparative philology, writing, “The Science of Language has been placed on a firm basis, from which it is impossible to believe that it can ever be dislodged”.Footnote 29 Freeman felt that the evidences advanced by comparative philology were self-convincing because they appealed to human intuition. “To many”, he wrote,
it will come, not as something new, but as the fuller revelation of something towards which they have been feeling their way of their own heads . . . We see what kinds of words the various Aryan languages have in common . . . The inference as to the affinity of those languages to one another, and as to the condition of those who spoke them at the various stages of the great Aryan migration, is one which it is impossible to withstand.Footnote 30
Freeman also accepted Müller's historicist argument that comparative philology had provided “evidences” about the origin and development of human knowledge, the successive stages through which the various Indo-European peoples had passed, and the ideas which had been common to each stage. He demonstrated the point by paraphrasing Müller's argument with reference to the word “mill”:
It would be hard to believe, that by sheer chance, without any other connexion of any kind with each other, a large number of isolated nations separately made up their minds to call a mill a mill . . . With such facts before us, there is no withstanding the inference that all those languages were once one language, that the nations which speak those languages were once one nation, and that those nations did not part asunder till they were so far civilised as to have found out the use of mills, and of all other objects the names of which are common to the whole group of languages.Footnote 31
For Freeman, comparative philology—“the absolutely universal solvent”—had revealed “the most important steps in the march of human culture that were taken while the Aryan nations were still a single people” and illuminated the other steps that “were taken independently by different branches of the common stock, after they had parted off from one another”.Footnote 32
It is clear that it was philology rather than physiology that provided the broad theoretical base for Freeman's concept of an Aryan race. In fact, it was Müller who directly encouraged Freeman to establish the Aryan concept on philological, not physiological, evidences. Increasingly anxious to avoid any ambiguity in his own statements concerning race, Müller made it clear that he viewed language as being in a domain of its own, not to be mixed up with other arguments. “Aryan, in scientific language”, he wrote, “is utterly inapplicable to race. It means language and nothing but language; and if we speak of Aryan race at all, we should know that it means no more than Aryan speech”.Footnote 33 Maintaining that the linguistic proofs for a community of Aryan nations remained “independent of those physical elements, the blood, the skull, or the hair, on which ethnologists have attempted to found their classification of the human race”, Müller deprecated the confusion that existed in the popular mind on the subject.Footnote 34 In a letter dated 1 January 1870, Müller wrote to Freeman, “Let people classify blood as much as they like only let them use their own bottles for that, and not the bottles that were labelled for the purpose of bottling languages. I confess that to my mind blood is an irrational and ungraspable quantity, but if people like to dabble in it, let them have their sanguinary amusement”.Footnote 35
In his definitive statement on the subject of race, an essay entitled “Race and Language”, Freeman dutifully followed Müller and drew a distinction between the philological and ethnological sciences.Footnote 36 “The science of the ethnologer”, he explained,
is strictly a physical science. He has to deal with purely physical phenomena; his business lies with the different varieties of the human body, and specially, to take that branch of his inquiries which most impress the unlearned, with the various conformations of the human skull . . . The science of the philologer, on the other hand, is strictly historical . . . Its primary business, like the primary business of any other historical science, is to deal with phenomena that do not depend on physical laws, but which do depend on the human will. The science of language is, in this respect, like the science of human institutions or of human beliefs. Its subject-matter is not, like that of pure ethnology, what man is, but, like that of any other historical science, what man does.Footnote 37
Freeman cautioned against confusing philological and physiological concepts because, while he accepted that mankind's natural instinct may be to connect language with race, he admitted that it would never be possible to definitively “prove” the existence of such a relationship. He concluded that the furthest one could go is to “say that, though language is not an accurately scientific test of race, yet it is a rough and ready test which does for many purposes. To make something more of an exact definition, one might say that, though language is not a test of race, it is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, a presumption of race”.Footnote 38 Similarly, Freeman acknowledged that there was no proof that the Aryan family of nations was based on blood, writing that “we cannot be absolutely certain that there was any real community of blood in the whole story . . . We may make a thousand ingenious guesses; but we cannot prove any of them”.Footnote 39 Freeman allowed that the logical conclusion of such a line of thought was that there was “no such thing as race at all”, and reminded the reader that “the doctrine of race is essentially an artificial doctrine, a learned doctrine”.Footnote 40 In an essay entitled “The Physical and Political Bases of National Unity”, Freeman similarly prioritized linguistic categorizations of peoples and avoided a discussion of blood. He described his ideal nation as one “where a continuous territory is inhabited by a people united under one government, and all of them speaking the same language”, and underlined the fact that he was “satisfied with unity of language, and I say nothing about unity of race”.Footnote 41
Although Freeman was deeply indebted to the pioneering work of Müller, he did not connect his own area of study in Comparative Politics primarily with investigations into language, but saw his project as advancing another branch of enquiry in which “the Comparative Method is directly applied to the growth of culture itself”.Footnote 42 In this context Freeman looked, above all, to Maine.Footnote 43 Maine had taken the idea that Sanskrit formed the root of all European languages and argued, by analogy, that there existed in India an ancient primitive form of Aryan law out of which the modern civilized form of Aryan law found in contemporary Europe had developed. The type of law which Maine had identified as prevalent in India favoured communal over individual rights, and he argued that it was reflective of a primitive society in which the relationship between individuals was based on status. The type of law which Maine had identified as prevalent in Europe favoured individual over communal rights, and he argued that it was reflective of a civilized society in which the relationship between individuals was based on contract. Consequently, in Ancient Law (1861), Maine famously observed that the external legal institutions of the Aryan race suggested that the overall shape of societal transformation had been a progression from status to contract.Footnote 44 In identifying a progressive Aryan race based on legal institutions Maine was, like Müller, reluctant to speak in terms of physiology.Footnote 45 For Maine, the excellence of Aryan institutions was primarily an indication of their common cultural inheritance from ancient Greece. According to Maine, “a ferment spreading from that source has vitalised all the great progressive races of mankind, penetrating from one to another, and producing results accordant with its hidden and latent genius, and results of course often far greater than any exhibited in Greece itself”.Footnote 46
Maine's studies served to reinforce Freeman's belief in the existence of an original Aryan family of nations based on culture.Footnote 47 Maine had proceeded, like Müller, “by comparing together the analogous customs of various, often remote, ages and countries”, and had consequently been “led up to the root; he is led up to the original idea of which particular customs, ceremonies, and beliefs are but the offshoots”.Footnote 48 While Freeman was increasingly convinced that there existed an Aryan community of language and culture, he nevertheless remained reluctant to offer an explanation, biological or otherwise, as to why or how this community had emerged. “We must content ourselves with saying”, Freeman concluded, “that certain groups have a common history, that they have languages, creeds, and institutions in common. We cannot say for certain what was the tie which brought the members of the original group together, any more than we can name the exact time and the exact place when and where they came together”.Footnote 49 The discovery of the Comparative Method, while it was based on linguistic, legal and historical evidences and could never yield scientific proof, was, in Freeman's view, “the great contribution of the nineteenth century to the advance of human knowledge”.Footnote 50
The idea that it was possible to classify the external institutions of a people and so determine the existence of a unique cultural community and the level of its internal development over time was one, however, that Freeman first learnt not from Müller or Maine, but from Thomas Arnold. Deeply indebted to the ideas of Giambattista Vico and the German historical school, Arnold was foremost amongst a group of Liberal Anglican theologians who articulated a Romantic philosophy of history and produced works which, in challenging the rationalist suppositions of the eighteenth century, contributed to a revolution in historical writing.Footnote 51 Arnold had initially conceived a radically new approach to the past under the influence of B. G. Niebuhr, whose History of Rome (1828–42) analysed the political institutions of the Commonwealth as evidence of the changing dynamic between the social classes as the nation passed from “childhood” to “manhood”.Footnote 52 According to Niebuhr, in the youthful phase of the nation's history the constitution was aristocratic, as the noble elite which founded the state exercised rightful control over the ignorant and impoverished multitudes who settled on their estates. As the nation approached maturity, however, it became necessary to prepare a place within the state for the commons, who had outgrown their minority and, in increasing their wealth and level of intelligence, demanded a corresponding share in political power. While Niebuhr's analogy between the life cycles of nations and individuals was crucial to the development of the Liberal Anglican philosophy, Arnold moved beyond the study of Rome and worked out general laws of historical development by drawing on the insights of Vico.Footnote 53 Vico's New Science sought to demonstrate that all nations followed a common course—albeit not simultaneously—through “birth, growth, maturity, decline, and fall”, and had common laws, codes and institutions which were more or less civilized according to the stage of development.Footnote 54 In emphasizing the decline and resurgence of nations, the consequent recurrence of different types of human institutions, and the possibility of establishing meaningful parallels between nations in the same stage of development regardless of their chronology, Vico pointed towards the possibility of an all-embracing comparative science of history.
Following Niebuhr and Vico, Arnold believed that an analysis of political institutions could determine the inner stage a nation had reached in the universal process of progress from “childhood” to “manhood”. If the institutions of a nation are such, Arnold asserted, that the mass of the people abide in social and political “bondage”, it is likely that the nation is in the “childhood” stage of its development.Footnote 55 If the social and political institutions of a nation secure the political liberty of the mass of the people, it is likely that the nation has entered “manhood”. Arnold cited Homeric Greece, ancient Gaul, and the feudal nations of Europe in the Middle Ages as historical examples of Western nations in their childhood, and offered examples of nations in their manhood which included the period of Thucydides in Greece, the period of the Roman Commonwealth, and England since 1688.Footnote 56 Based on the assumption that a comparative study of political institutions revealed that both ancient and modern nations contained primitive and advanced elements, Arnold rejected the tendency to emphasize “certain artificial divisions, such as the accession of the different lines of kings, or an event like the restoration, which is rather a subdivision of one particular period, than the beginning or termination of a period in itself”.Footnote 57 “In this manner”, he argued, “we get no distinct notions of the beginning, middle, and the end of the history of a people, and often appeal to examples which are nothing to the purpose, because they are taken from a different stage of a nation's existence from that to which they are applied”.Footnote 58 Like the later practitioners of the Comparative Method such as Maine, then, Arnold believed that it was necessary to “discover the particular stage of development of the state under review, and then relate the circumstances of that stage to the features of other nations at the same stage, and thus the whole of the past”.Footnote 59
For Arnold, once nations were classified as ancient or modern according to the maturity of their political institutions rather than their chronology, the true outlines of the unified process by which civilization had progressed could be discerned. Maintaining that Western history down to 476 ad represented a complete cycle in the progression of nations from childhood to manhood, and that Western history after 476 ad represented an incomplete second cycle, Arnold drew analogies between the institutions of nations separated by space and time as evidence for the existence of a community of culture which had been transmitted by the conduit of race. Denouncing theories of race based on “supposed different extraction, and on the high purity and excellence of some particular races contrasted with the degraded state of others” as “little better than monstrous”, Arnold was emphatic in concluding that “no beings exist in the world who enjoy a natural superiority over mankind”.Footnote 60 In Arnold's analysis, the progress of the Western nations was understood to be shared, not because they had inherent characteristics that guaranteed their development, but because the Germanic tribes had inherited all the achievements of the ancient world and passed them on to modern Europe, to be built upon by future generations.
It was Arnold's comparative study of political institutions and his attempt to reveal the inner development of Western nations and races that prepared Freeman for an intuitive acceptance of the later Comparative Method and determined the scope of his own area of study. Arnold was the “great master” whose “wide grasp” and “majestic eloquence” meant that he far surpassed all his rivals in the field of history, including Niebuhr, for whom Freeman expressed a somewhat qualified respect.Footnote 61 It was under Arnold's influence that Freeman, like Maine, would move beyond the study of language and into the realm of culture, into “Comparative Politics”, as he named the new subject.Footnote 62 Seemingly unaware of the researches of Vico, Freeman's stated aim in Comparative Politics was to “claim for political institutions a right to a scientific treatment of exactly the same kind as that which has been so successfully applied to language, to mythology and the progress of culture”.Footnote 63 Freeman would use the teachings of Arnold to develop the scholarship of Müller and Maine and to demonstrate “that the Greeks, Italians and Teutons have a large common stock of institutions, institutions whose likeness cannot be otherwise accounted for than by the supposition of their common primitive origin”.Footnote 64 This attempt to demonstrate the existence of an Aryan race based not on a community of blood, but on the shared political institutions of European nations, was, in the words of Maine, “such a novelty” and it demonstrates the extent to which the principles of the Comparative Method and the Liberal Anglican philosophy of Arnold coincided and could be neatly integrated into a novel account of Western civilization.Footnote 65
II. Cultural Concepts of Race and the Cyclical Pattern of History
Freeman's conception of an Aryan race based on a community of languages and institutions, rather than on biological characteristics, was developed under the influence of the leading practitioners of the Comparative Method and the universal Historismus of Arnold. It will be seen that Freeman's emphasis on culture and reluctance to assign fixed characteristics to the Aryans meant that his emphasis on the constant struggle of that race to develop its civilization contradicted an apparent faith in inevitable progress. While scholars such as Christine Bolt have assumed that the conceptual frameworks provided by evolutionism led to a confidence in British supremacy, Peter Bowler has rightly noted that progressionist and cyclical views of development continued to persist in tension throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 66 It is clear that Freeman's account of Western development was not unidirectional and Burrow has noted his “delight in restorations, his pleasure in cycles and recapitulations”.Footnote 67 The fact that these cycles were interdependent with a cultural conception of race and were therefore also features in the work of Müller and Maine has not, however, been fully acknowledged.Footnote 68 Similarly, while Burrow has suggested that Freeman's obsession with cycles was inherited from the Liberal Anglican philosophy, he fails to appreciate the depth of that traditional typological inheritance when he writes, “what excited [Freeman] was not transcendence but the cycle itself, eternal recurrence . . . History seems constantly engaged in an almost liturgical recreation or resurrection of itself”.Footnote 69 In Comparative Politics Freeman fused the insights of the Comparative Method and the Arnoldian philosophy of history to demonstrate that the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, and of modern Europe, constituted two historical successions in a unified process of progress towards the achievement of modern democracy.
In the writings of the two men amongst Freeman's contemporaries who exerted the most direct influence on Comparative Politics, Müller and Maine, it is possible to discern a connection between the cultural conception of race and accounts of civilization in which the development of Aryan nations is represented as cyclical on one level whilst remaining progressive on another. Müller emphasized the contingent nature of Aryan linguistic development and asserted that the Indo-European language had grown both by “phonetic degeneration” and “dialectic regeneration”.Footnote 70 He believed that phonetic corruption was inevitable, and could be resisted only if words were kept alive by being spoken by many dialectical groups, and if the tyranny of classical idioms was avoided. Müller was quick to assert, however, that corruption and decay were central to linguistic growth. The historic decay of Latin, for example, had issued in the birth of modern dialects such as French and Italian and, while new languages transcended the old, they inherited certain elements from their predecessors. For this reason, Müller resisted drawing a distinction between modern and ancient languages and asserted that the process of growth was unified. “If you attempt to read in history the biography of the human race”, Müller explained, “the ancient world forms but the prelude and has interesting scenes of childhood and youth, while each successive century brings us nearer to what may be called manhood or the old age of our own race . . . Truly then, it may be said, there is ancient history in modern language”.Footnote 71
Müller's understanding of the degeneration or “disease” of language was closely associated with his conviction that the decay and growth of language over time would reveal the development of the human mind, by which man would be reconciled with the “Beyond” in history. Müller believed that, in the “infantine” ages of Aryan language, common “root” words could only express general concepts and originated in the realm of man's everyday experiences.Footnote 72 Such words were inadequate when applied to natural phenomena, and the mind had recourse to metaphors referring to human activity. In Aryan nature poetry, for example, the root *vash, “to light”, is applied to the natural phenomenon of dawn. This application implied agents and resulted in the idea of a goddess of dawn, Ushas—“she who lights”.Footnote 73 When man no longer understood these metaphors they became petrified expressions and formed a degenerate kind of mythology. For Müller, however, such Aryan myths were not an abortive end in themselves but a necessary stage through which the intellect had to pass in the universal human quest, the hyponoia, to understand one's place in the universe.Footnote 74
In the writings of Maine, too, the emphasis on the cultural characteristics of the Aryan race dovetails with a narrative in which cycles subsist within a uniform process of progress. In Ancient Law, Maine had identified three distinct cycles in the internal development of Aryan nations which, as in the writings of Müller, was indicated by external institutions. Focusing on legal institutions, Maine argued that, in its most primitive form, law is merely the pronouncement of a king whose authority is perceived to be sanctioned by the gods, and it reflects an immature stage of society in which relationships between individuals are based on status. As the system of law develops, the assumed divinity of the king declines and the aristocracy emerge as the administrators of law. The final stage of this cycle sees the aristocracy shaping the customary law into a code which is published to the people. The code offers protection from aristocratic abuses, but once the people are given a permanent record of law, they feel no desire to improve it and obey only from tradition. Consequently society reverts to the stagnation that typified the beginning of the cyclical phase. If the second cyclical stage is reached, the codified law is gradually adapted to suit a society in which relationships between individuals have progressed and are based on contract. With the spread of rational ideas and improvement in the laws there are two dangers: first, the law might develop too rapidly and become unstable; second, changes may be carried out to all their consequences, and the system becomes as rigid and unexpansive as the sternest and most primitive code of rules. The final cyclical phase of society is marked by the establishment of legislation which makes open changes to the law in a manner consistent with the rational, capitalist, contractual society. However, the inherent danger is that democratic legislation will assign rights and duties on the basis of factors other than free agreement between men. Because popular legislation is inimical to the maintenance of a contractual order, the result will be an end to progress and civilization, and a regression to status. If, then, Maine's status-to-contract dictum claims to be a law, it is one based on the imagery of a life cycle and historical successions, and it predicts the decay and death of Aryan society. As Burrow notes, it is possible to detect a degree of pessimism in Maine's dictum that “the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract”.Footnote 75
Basing his conception of race on culture rather than biology, Freeman, too, could accept that European historical development could be cyclical on a certain level while ultimately reflecting the uniform process by which Aryan civilization had developed. In an essay entitled Historical Cycles, Freeman bemoaned how “hard [it is] to make people understand how many things go in cycles, how often history repeats itself, how much that seems to be innovation is really restoration”.Footnote 76 Freeman identified two kinds of cyclical repetition: the repetition of events and of institutions. Throughout all of Freeman's works there is an obsession with the recurrence of historical events and situations.Footnote 77 As Burrow remarks, Freeman's emphasis on the cyclical repetition of events served to impart to history a unity in the same way as figural interpretation acted as “the binding agent of history, bringing together Old and New Testaments, classical and Christian, religious and secular histories, into one eschatological story”.Footnote 78 And yet it is in Comparative Politics, where institutional cycles emerge most prominently and the focus is on an Aryan race whose progress was indicated by their common political culture, that there emerges a narrative of cycles subsisting within an overall process of progress, in a shape that is not patristic or medieval, but strictly Arnoldian.
As we have seen, Arnold had taught that nations follow an internal life cycle from “childhood” to “manhood” which is indicated by their external political institutions. According to Arnold, following Niebuhr, nations faced particular dangers at the various points in their progression which always arose from the difficulty of reconciling a numerous population with political representation.Footnote 79 In the “childhood” period of the nation's existence, when the parental aristocracy ruled over and protected the infantile subjects, the danger arose when a portion of the commons had accumulated wealth, increased the level of their intelligence and consequently demanded a share in the rights of citizenship. If a nation emerges from the dominion of the old aristocracy, it enters the “manhood” stage and becomes “exposed to a somewhat different succession of struggles”.Footnote 80 The political battle which now begins is the consequence of the nation's unwillingness or inability to make every subject a citizen, and it is more ferocious than that between nobility and wealth which characterized the period of childhood. The earlier struggle between the nobility and the richer commons had begun only when a level of equality had been achieved; it was a contest between men really equal, to do away with a fictitious distinction. The conflict between the rich and the mass of the community, on the other hand, takes place only when real differences have reached the widest point of separation and the state is divided into the extremes of luxury and beggary.Footnote 81 This struggle is one to establish equality within the body politic in its entirety and it is one from which, Arnold observed ominously, no nation had yet emerged successfully.Footnote 82 While Arnold's analogy between states and individuals implies that the death of the nation is natural, he avoided this materialist and fatalist conclusion by pointing to the individual mind as the ultimate reality of history. This idea allows for progress because it asserts that the things of the mind are the “experience of ages” and are not lost forever with the death of the nation but live on, re-created in the mind in future ages. For Arnold the civilizations of Greece and Rome and modern Europe represented two distinct steps forward. In modern history, the German race was key in transmitting to Europe the riches of the preceding period of civilization, bringing together the intellect of Greece and the laws of Rome, and the moral and spiritual perfection of Christianity.
In Comparative Politics Freeman followed Arnold in articulating the idea that the inner stage of development reached by a nation was indicated by its external political institutions, that the struggle of history is to reconcile numbers with equality and political representation, and that the ancient Greek and Roman, and the modern Teutonic, ages were distinct cycles in the movement towards the achievement of democratic maturity. Freeman began his comparative study of ancient and modern political institutions with a discussion of the ancient form of the city commonwealth. The unique achievement of the Greeks, the epitome of ancient maturity, was the fullest realization of the idea of the state as a city which allowed every subject to become a citizen. In Freeman's account, the Greek city state remained small because it kept that original life of the tribe from which it had grown, being an assemblage of natural or artificial families who enjoyed citizenship by virtue of hereditary descent. The form of direct democracy developed by the Greeks was a system which, in Freeman's view, “works up the faculties of man to a higher pitch than any other; it is the form of government which gives the freest scope to the inborn genius of the whole community and every member of it”.Footnote 83 However, such a form of government which accords equal rights and opportunities to every citizen is not likely to last because it is only viable on a small scale. According to Freeman, “a people whose idea of political life does not go beyond the separate and independent city never can become a nation; it never can endure when the forces of a nation are brought against it”.Footnote 84 Completing the cycle, Freeman observes that the “Greek commonwealth grew, flourished, and decayed as a city, amazing the world perhaps alike by the splendour of the days of its greatness and by the long wretchedness of the days of its decay”.Footnote 85
Rome conquered Greece but in so doing became her disciple. Rome propagated the language and political creed of Greece throughout the world and built upon the political achievements of Greece by expanding the state beyond the city and adopting federalism. As Freeman relates, in Rome the towns were smaller and were more willing to join themselves together by a federal tie. Because the Romans had never developed the city state to the same perfection to which it was carried in Greece, the Roman Empire, by its federal arrangement, retained the older ideas of the clan and the tribe down to its latest days and made a closer approach to the idea of the nation. Because the Roman system extended beyond the single city, Freeman viewed the political history of the far-flung empire as an illustration of the law that the democratic system, which works well within a single city, becomes despotic and oligarchic when applied to too great a territory. As the Roman Empire took in more and more allies and extended its franchise still further, popular government became impossible. If the moral of Grecian history had been that an independent city state cannot defend itself against a kingdom or a commonwealth, the moral of Roman history, according to Freeman, is that “if a single city aspires to universal domination, it may indeed become the seat of a power which deserves to be called eternal but it can become mistress of the world only by the sacrifice of its own freedom”.Footnote 86
Neither Greece nor Rome had, in the long term, been successful in reconciling numbers with equality and political property—a problem which had been central to Arnold's analysis of history. However, while the city of Rome had decayed, Freeman believes that the cumulative achievements of the ancient Aryan world were not lost but were handed on to the modern age. The spell, Freeman wrote, “which she [Rome] once threw over those whom she conquered she now knew how to throw over those who conquered her . . . Wherever men speak her tongue, wherever men revere her law, wherever men profess the faith which Europe and European colonies have learned of her, there is Rome still”.Footnote 87 It was the Germanic Teutons who conquered Rome and who “were proud to continue her dominion in their own persons; they were proud to bear titles of her ancient rule, and step by step to adopt her speech and to forget the land and the race from which they sprang”.Footnote 88 In a paragraph which reverberates with echoes of Arnold, Freeman writes,
never were the three races which have been foremost in European history brought more closely together—never did the magic power of Rome stand forth more clearly—never did she show herself more proudly as the historic centre, binding together the times before her and the times after her—than in the days when Greek and German, Byzantion and Aachen, disputed the heritage and the titles of the dominion which the local Rome had lost, but which was Roman still, into whatever hands it fell. Out of the union of Roman and Teutonic elements arose the modern world of Europe.Footnote 89
Further, “Those days were the true middle ages, the days when the Roman and Teutonic elements of modern European life stood side by side.”Footnote 90 It is clear, from the narrative of Comparative Politics, that Freeman believed that the ancient constitution lived on, despite the cyclical decline of Greece and Rome, in the superior institutions of modern Europe.
Examining the Teutonic conception of the state, Freeman argued that, while it was markedly different to the city states or commonwealths of the ancient world, yet it retained certain important elements of the earlier system. Applying the principles of the Comparative Method, Freeman reiterated Arnold's idea that the traditional divisions of historical study obscured the true nature of the past, writing,
If we read history as chronology requires us to read it, beginning with Greece, thence going on to the Roman conquerors of Greece, and thence to the Teutonic conquerors of Rome, we are, for many purposes of this enquiry, reading history backwards. We find the primitive conception of the State in an earlier form among the Italians than we find it among the Greeks, at all events than we find it in those Greek states of which we have most knowledge. And we find it in a still earlier form among the Teutonic nations than we find it among the Italians.Footnote 91
In terms of the political conception of the state, Freeman understood the notion of the state as a city to be a later notion than that of the state as a tribe. Freeman believed that the Teutonic state retained its original basis in the tribe to a far greater extent than had Rome, and that the Roman state had retained its basis in the tribe to a greater extent than had Greece. Teutonic political development had thus most certainly been slower than in Rome or Greece; still, Freeman argued, “by never reaching to the highest civilization of one age, we have been able to reach to a yet higher civilization in another age. By never passing through the exclusive city stage, we have been better able to reach the national stage”.Footnote 92 In the Teutonic lands, by a gradual and obscure process, “shires were melting together into kingdoms and tribes into nations. Thus were formed those nations of Teutonic blood which settled within the Continental provinces of the [Roman] Empire”.Footnote 93 Further,
All the events of our history, election, commendation, conquest, all help in the work of fusion; till, instead of a system of isolated cities, instead of a single city bearing rule over subject cities and provinces, we have a political work more lasting than the other, more just and free than the other, the nation which knows no distinction among its members, and which gives equal rights to the dwellers in every corner of its territory.Footnote 94
It was the fusing together of original ties into a higher political unit that led to the establishment of nations in the modern period which were so different to the Grecian and Roman states. Yet modern European nations, in retaining the most primitive, tribal element of political life, everywhere incorporated elements of the ancient Aryan civilization.Footnote 95
Having discussed the conception of the state, Freeman turns to examine the Teutonic experience of the “Assembly of the People”. The Teutonic primary assemblies, like the Roman primary assemblies, died out naturally through the mere working of the law of distance. However, the unique achievement of modern Europe, the single most important step that it took in the advancement of civilization and that distinguished it absolutely from ancient Greece or Rome, was the invention of “the happy device of representation”.Footnote 96 Freeman describes the process by which the old assemblies were replaced by representative assemblies in which each estate or class of men in the body politic (typically the clergy, the nobility, and the commons) is accorded a voice. In England, however, Freeman observes that the process was somewhat different as the primitive assembly never died but merely shrank up into a narrow body. The old democratic assembly, he argued, lived on to become the aristocratic element, the House of Lords, in the new form of the constitution. Freeman believed that the Lords are simply those among the members of the old assembly—that is, those among all free Englishmen—who never lost the right of personal attendance. Alongside the body so formed another body gradually arose, in which those who had failed to keep the right of personal attendance made their appearance by representation. In most parts of modern Europe, then, “the old primary assemblies have gradually died out or have lingered on only in the form of survivals. The representative assembly is as much the natural form of free government for the greater society as the primary assembly is for the smaller”.Footnote 97 It is consequently that “the life of a nation is less brilliant than the life of a city, but, for that very reason, the nation outlives the city”.Footnote 98
Rearticulating the Arnoldian philosophy, Freeman pushed beyond the comparative philology of Müller and the comparative jurisprudence of Maine to establish analogies between the political institutions of the Greeks, Romans and Teutons and to demonstrate the existence of an Aryan race based on democratic culture. While a connection between cultural conceptions of race and a view of cycles subsisting within an overall process of progress can be discerned in the writings of both Müller and Maine, Freeman's conception of the shape of Western development was ultimately informed by the teachings of Arnold. In Comparative Politics Freeman presented European history as a process by which the political heritage of the Greeks and Romans had been transmitted to the Teutonic tribes who had finally succeeded in accommodating a large population within the body politic through the happy invention of representative government.
III. THE ARYAN CONCEPT, THE UNITY OF HISTORY AND THE FUTURE WORLD ORDER
While attitudes towards race were hardening in the late nineteenth century, it is clear that Freeman combined the insights of the Comparative Method and the Liberal Anglican philosophy, and used the term “Aryan” to refer to a community of political culture. As we have seen, in rejecting explanations of human development that depended on physical laws, Freeman emphasized historical contingency and saw the achievement of representative government as the culmination of a cyclical process of Aryan progress. In asserting that the historic problem of reconciling numbers with political representation had been fortuitously resolved, Freeman held that modern Europe transcended the world of Greece and Rome while retaining elements of the ancient constitution. Freeman's cultural theory of race, based on a precarious democratic lineage, thus enabled him to breach the divide between ancient and modern and bolster the Arnoldian doctrine of the unity of history. In collapsing the past into the present, however, Freeman's Aryan concept prioritized historical precedent in a way which restricted the scope for political innovation and offered a threatening portent for the future of modern democratic culture. Having observed, in Comparative Politics, that the Grecian city state had allowed for direct democracy but had been too small to resist larger nations, while the Roman Empire had grown too large and degenerated into despotism, Freeman was convinced that the future stability of the Aryan race would be secured only if a balance were struck between strong independent nation states and overexpansion.
Freeman's cultural theory of race underpinned a universal scheme of Aryan history that is neatly captured in his favorite dictum “history is past politics, politics is present history”. Establishing direct lines of continuity between the past and the present, Freeman's Aryan concept had specific implications for his assessment of contemporary affairs and is central to an understanding of his highly idiosyncratic commentaries on political expansionism. It is commonly assumed that there was a neat reciprocity in discourses on race and empire. Scholars such as Hannaford emphasize the confluence of physiological accounts of human differentiation and justifications of subjugation, while Hall, John MacKenzie and Jeffrey Richards argue that the empire, in turn, served to reinforce a sense of racial superiority.Footnote 99 This picture has been complicated by Duncan Bell, Mandler and Porter, who have shown that ideas of a freedom-loving Aryan race produced a shift away from the idea of a military empire focused on India and towards the establishment of Greater Britain, an “empire of liberty” capable of defending the democratic heritage in a dangerous world.Footnote 100 Indeed, debates on imperial federation and Irish Home Rule were often framed in terms not of force and subjugation, but of racial affinity and effective constitutional union between the white settler colonies and their “mother” country. Freeman's writings do not fit neatly into either of these trends. Preoccupied with the cyclical nature of Western progress and overwhelmed by the force of historical precedent, Freeman dreamt of the emergence of a loose “brotherhood” of Aryan nations which would retain their modern representative governments while providing a bulwark against the non-Aryan world. Attacking plans for imperial federation, supporting Home Rule, and insisting that contact with the East posed a threat to Western stability, Freeman rejected all forms of expansionist innovation. “I am no lover of empire”, he declared, “I am not anxious for my country to exercise lordship over other lands, English-speaking or otherwise”.Footnote 101
For Freeman, as for many of his contemporaries, the concept of an Aryan race and concern for the future stability of democratic civilization in an unstable world were central to the question of imperial federation. As Bell points out, the term “Greater Britain” was ambiguous, as while virtually all federalists employed the language of Greater Britain, not all proponents of Greater Britain were federalists. Charles Dilke, Goldwin Smith and Gladstone all argued that federation was an inappropriate mechanism for forging closer imperial bonds, as the colonists displayed little enthusiasm for it and the moral and cultural foundations of Greater Britain were already secure enough.Footnote 102 For advocates of imperial federation, however, the idea of a formal union between Britain and the settler colonies held the potential to establish a unique racial polity which could act as a motor for the democratic transformation of the entire world. Seeley, Froude, Bryce and W. T. Stead were amongst those who advanced schemes for federation that ranged from the relatively straightforward idea of “extra-parliamentary representation”, whereby high-ranking individuals offered non-binding advice on imperial affairs, through more complex schemes for “parliamentary federalism”, by which colonies were to send elected representatives to London, to the most controversial demand for “supraparliamentary federalism”, which would create a sovereign federal chamber operating above the individual political assemblies of the empire, including Westminster. Because classical examples were understood to demonstrate that all empires were self-dissolving, imperial federalists such as Seeley made a conscious effort to break from the past and emphasize the novelty of their proposals.Footnote 103 While earlier empires had been motivated by economic exploitation and controlled vast territories by force, it was argued that Greater Britain would be “a global federal polity underpinned by a single nationality (or race) and governed by elective parliamentary institutions”.Footnote 104
One of the most vehement critics of imperial federation, Freeman drew upon ancient history to express anxiety about the nature of the proposed union. However, Freeman did not use the examples of Greece and Rome to prove that federation would inevitably lead to overextension and disaster, nor did he employ the argument that the cultural unity of the Aryan nations was alone sufficient to secure stability in the West. Rather, Freeman held that a closer union between Aryan nations was necessary and expedient, if it was effected in the correct way. For Freeman, as for Arnold, the difficulty of reconciling numbers with political equality was central to the unity of history. The failure of Greece and Rome to find an adequate solution to the problem had led to their decline, while the invention of representative government had enabled the moderns to transcend the world of the ancients while retaining elements of the primitive constitution. In embracing the idea of closer Aryan unity, Freeman nevertheless maintained that a new balance had to be struck between bringing greater numbers into the proposed polity and ensuring that the modern achievement of political representation for all was protected. For Freeman, the danger of political imbalance and consequent cyclical decline could only be prevented if the precedents offered by the ancient world were carefully adapted, and if the new Commonwealth proved capable of resisting the encroachments of the non-Aryan world.
While Freeman had articulated a traditional exposition of the fate of Rome in Comparative Politics, the empire played a uniquely significant historical role in his vision of the unity of history. Emphasizing the relevance to the modern world of the “eternal” empire which had far from self-imploded and dissolved in 476 ad, Freeman asserted that Rome was much more than a classical model to be either imitated or repudiated; it was something still living, it was the guardian of Aryan culture and Western civilization. In his Rede Lecture on the subject of the “Unity of History” Freeman reverted to the language of the Comparative Method and the Liberal Anglican philosophy to assert that “Rome still lives in the life of every modern European state. Two abiding signs of her rule stand out on the very surface of the modern world, and need no thought, no searching into records, to bring them before the eyes of every man. Three of the foremost nations of Europe still speak the tongue of Rome”.Footnote 105 Further, “The true glory of the Latin tongue is to have become the eternal speech of law and dominion. It is the tongue of Rome's twofold sovereignty and of her twofold legislation, the tongue of the Church and the Empire, the tongue of the successors of Augustus and the successors of St. Peter”.Footnote 106 The importance of Rome, the “temporal and spiritual mistress of the Western world”, did not lie in a crumbling and decaying portent for the future of British expansionism. Rather, in truth, “the history of Rome is the history of the European world. It is in Rome that all the states of the earlier European world lose themselves; it is out of Rome that all the states of the later European world take their being”.Footnote 107 It was Rome which, in spreading her laws, language and culture throughout Europe, fostered a degree of homogeneity in the West which ought to be maintained and cautiously built upon by modern Aryan nations.
If Rome had provided the cultural basis which made closer integration possible, it was in the later days of ancient Greece that Freeman found a practical template which, if replicated properly, could make a truly democratic Aryan union actual. In his History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy Freeman attempted to demonstrate that the federal form of government which was brought to perfection in the Achaian League held enormous significance for modern politics.Footnote 108 Indeed, Freeman went so far as to say that the history of the Grecian Commonwealth, while it was not as glorious as the history of Athens, was a source of unparalleled instruction. “A Greece united in a federal bond”, Freeman explained,
could never have become the Greece which has challenged the love and admiration of all succeeding ages. The brilliant development of Hellenic greatness, alike in war, in politics, in art, in eloquence, and in poetry, was inseparably linked to the system of independent city commonwealths. It was well that Greece was disunited; it was well that Greece was conquered; but it was well also that she should revive, if only for a moment, to give the world the first great example of a political teaching of yet another kind. Greece had already done her work as the land of autonomous cities; she was now to give to mankind a less brilliant, but more practical, lesson in the way of free government on a more extended scale.Footnote 109
Greece had given succeeding ages a perfect example of the federal system, operating as a “union of component members, where the degree of union between the members surpasses that of mere alliance, however intimate, and where the degree of independence possessed by each member surpasses anything which can fairly come under the head of merely municipal freedom”.Footnote 110 Where, in Comparative Politics, Freeman had demonstrated that Athenian liberty was doomed as the small city state could not resist the might of larger nations, while Roman overextension led to despotism, in Federal Government Freeman presented the ultimate example of a constitutional “compromise”. Freeman concluded that it was possible to protect the precarious democracy of modern Europe, which was so central to the Aryan heritage, if the right kind of federalism were adopted; that is, if ancient precedent were respected by establishing a loose “brotherhood” of nation states that maintained their representative governments in a manner consistent with democratic maturity.
Freeman's attack on contemporary proposals for imperial federation was underpinned by his appraisal of past politics. Observing that the British colony resembled the Athenian ally in many ways, Freeman nevertheless pointed to the “one all-important difference: British colonies were not independent”.Footnote 111 “The sway of Athens”, wrote Freeman, “did not necessarily involve either actual oppression or any loss of purely local freedom . . . the metropolis claimed at most a filial respect, a kind of religious reverence, which was for the most part freely given”.Footnote 112 In contrast, while “most of the British colonies enjoy, in all ordinary times, each one within its bounds, very nearly as full an amount of freedom as if it were an independent state . . . in any wider relations it has no voice”.Footnote 113 “All these lands”, Freeman argued, “whether remaining as separate colonies or united into the shape of a Confederation, are simply Dependencies of the United Kingdom, enjoying such privileges as the United Kingdom may think good to grant to them. That supreme power can at any moment override even internal independence; it can legislate at pleasure for the dependency even against its will”.Footnote 114 For Freeman, the very term “imperial federation” was illogical. “On the principle that language was given man to conceal his thoughts”, Freeman wrote, “‘Imperial Federation’ is surely the wisest name ever thought of. On any other principle it is surely the most foolish. For it is absolutely without meaning; it is a contradiction in terms. ‘Empire’ implies the rule of some person or power over some other; ‘federal’ implies the union of certain powers or communities, on presumably equal terms”.Footnote 115 Because the British colonies would not enjoy the independence and equality typical of the Greek system, and instead would exist in a state of subjugation that might return the Aryan community back to the stage of despotism and immaturity, the project of imperial federation was condemned as dangerously unprecedented. “Let us at least remember”, Freeman argued, “that what is proposed is unlike anything that ever happened in the world before”.Footnote 116 Freeman used the same reasoning when advancing arguments in support of Home Rule. In a series of articles published between 1885 and 1890, he defined Home Rule as being the relationship of a dependency to a superior power when the dependency had the management of its own internal affairs, but had to follow the lead of the superior power in all other matters.Footnote 117 Because Freeman felt that true instances of Home Rule, as opposed to federal union or complete subjugation, could be found in ancient times—in the relation between Athens and Chios, for example—he consistently supported Home Rule for Ireland.Footnote 118
While many political theorists hoped that closer union within a strong Greater Britain would protect English interests from the competition of global challengers and secure a future of world peace and freedom, Freeman's concept of an Aryan race in which the past collapsed into the present did not allow for optimism. While the establishment of a strong Aryan commonwealth which drew together larger numbers and safeguarded the principle of democratic representation might secure the stability of Western civilization momentarily, Freeman's Arnoldian vision of the unity of history was one which depended on repetition and cyclical recapitulation. In placing the idea of an insular Aryan race based on culture at the centre of the unity of history, Freeman's writings typify a transformation in the writing of universal history which has been elucidated by Arnaldo Momigliano.Footnote 119 “The Universal historian”, Momigliano writes, always “isolates and defines certain types of events and tries to make their appearance or disappearance meaningful. By giving more importance and therefore more attention to certain types of events than to others he will provide his own universal history with a characteristic line of development”.Footnote 120 Traditionally such lines of development could include the succession of a golden age by a silver age, of polytheism by monotheism, of one empire by another empire. In the nineteenth century, however, universal historians began to breach the conventions of their genre and “recognized the possibility that their typology, rather than providing criteria for the description and classification of successive ages of mankind, would lead to the partition of mankind into several co-existing groups or races, each with its own permanent features”.Footnote 121 Freeman consistently, and seemingly unconsciously, identified the unity of history with the unity of the history of the Aryan race. In his Rede Lecture, Freeman reiterated the achievements of the Comparative Method which had served to underline the teachings of Arnold, describing once again how the discovery had
opened to its votaries a new world, and that not an isolated world, a world shut up within itself, but a world in which times and tongues and nations which before seemed parted poles asunder, now find each one its own place, its own relation to every other, as members of one common primeval brotherhood . . . it has broken down the middle wall of partition between kindred races and kindred studies; it has swept away barriers which fenced off certain times and languages as “dead” and “ancient”; it has taught us that there is no such thing as “dead” and “living” languages, and “ancient” and “modern” history.Footnote 122
But, almost immediately, the concept of historical unity is transformed into the concept of Aryan, or Western, unity: “Let us come to history more strictly so-called”, wrote Freeman,
to the history of our own quarter of the globe and our family of nations. The history of the Aryan nations of Europe, their languages, their institutions, their dealings with one another, all form one long series of cause and effect, no part of which can be rightly understood if it be dealt with as something wholly cut off from, and alien to, any other part.Footnote 123
Freeman makes the transition easily and, in equating the unity of history with the unity of Aryan history, he articulated a vision of competing civilizations engaged in continuous and dangerous political power struggles. Freeman's cultural view of race and emphasis on the instability of democratic customs produced a fear of contact with the East which emerges most prominently in his diatribes against the Turks and the Jews in works such as The History and Conquests of the Saracens and The Ottoman Power in Europe. Footnote 124 In these volumes, Freeman presents history as the record of an “old internecine war between the East and the West, between despotism and freedom, between a progressive and stationary social state”.Footnote 125
IV. CONCLUSION
The understanding of Freeman as an arch-racist and confident proponent of Aryan superiority stands to be revised in light of an analysis of his relatively neglected Comparative Politics. It has been demonstrated that it was under the influence of the contemporary practitioners of the Comparative Method and the universal Historismus of Arnold that Freeman pursued an original classification of the political institutions of European nations in order to prove the existence of a superior Aryan race whose unity consisted in, and was indicated by, their common democratic culture. While the concept of an Aryan race enabled Freeman to breach the distinction between ancient and modern and to trace out the unbroken development of Western civilization, the focus on cultural identity led to an inability to assign fixed characteristics to the Aryans and meant that his emphasis on the constant struggle of that race to develop its civilization contradicted his faith in inevitable progress. Fusing the perspective of the Comparative Method with a systematic exposition of Arnold's philosophy of history, Freeman consequently represented the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, and the civilization of modern Europe, as two discrete historical cycles or successions in a unified movement towards the ultimate achievement of modern liberty. It was Freeman's appreciation of the successes and failures of Grecian and Roman imperialism, and preoccupation with the precarious process by which the Aryan nations had developed, that fostered a fear of contact with non-Aryans and informed his critique of British expansionism.
