Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Liberalism, says Chadwick, dominated the nineteenth century.¹⁰ But it was a protean word, he admits, one that in origin simply meant free, free from restraint. In the later Reformation it came to mean too free, licentious or anarchic. This is how men such as John Henry Newman understood it, in the mid-1800s. But liberalism, like it or not, owed much to Christianity. In dividing Europe by religion, the Reformation invited – eventually – a toleration, but Christianity at one level had always sought for a religion of the heart, rather than the mere celebration of rites, a reverence for individual conscience which, in the end, and fatally, says Chadwick, weakened the desire for sheer conformity. ‘Christian conscience was [thus] the force which began to make Europe “secular”; that is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state.’¹¹

What had begun in the liberty of toleration turned into the love of liberty for its own sake, liberty as a right

(this, it will be remembered, was John Locke’s contribution, and was one of the ostensible reasons for the French Revolution). And this was not really achieved, in the leading countries of western Europe, until the years between 1860 and 1890.¹² It owed a lot, Chadwick says, to John Stuart Mill, who published his essay On Liberty in the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 1859. Mill’s investigation of liberty, however, involved what he saw as a new problem. Much influenced by Comte, he was less bothered by the liberties that might be threatened by a tyrannical state, for that was an old and familiar problem. Instead, he was more concerned, in new democracies, with the tyranny of the majority over the individual or the minority, with intellectual coercion

. He could see all around him that ‘the people’ were coming to power, and he anticipated that those ‘people’, too often the mob of past ages, would deny others the right to a difference of opinion.¹³ He thus set about defining the new liberty. ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.’¹⁴ This was more important than it looked because it implied that a free man ‘has the right to be persuaded and convinced’, which is just as important an implication of democracy as ‘one man, one vote’. And it was this

which linked liberalism and secularisation. Mill’s essay was the first argument for the full implications of the secular state. The total lack of passion in the text was the way Mill set an example as to how affairs are to be conducted.¹⁵

Judging by the way ordinary people spoke and behaved, Chadwick observes that it was during the years 1860–1880 that English society, at least, became ‘secular’.¹⁶ One can see this, he says, from the memoirs and novels of the time, which report the reading habits and conversations of the average individual, and show the increased willingness of devout men, say, to form friendships with men who were not devout, ‘to honour them for their sincerity instead of condemning them for their lack of faith’.¹⁷

It can be seen too in the role played by the new mass-circulation press.¹⁸ The press in fact played a number of roles, one of which was to enflame, to impassion, to polarise the battle of ideas and in so doing turn many citizens – for the first time – into political beings (because they were now informed). This too was a secularising influence, replacing religion with politics as the main intellectual preoccupation of ordinary people. The new profession of journalist became established at much the same time as teachers became distinct from the clergy.¹⁹