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Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, edited by Peter Mandler; pp. viii + 254. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, £55.00, $99.00.
Political liberty and religious freedom depend upon the power of the state, inspired, controlled, and guided by the mind of the community.
So wrote the historian A. F. Pollard in 1911, in closing his popular History of England, 55 B.C. 1911 A.D. Despite a sustained presentist approach to history, the book was consciously anti Whig, emphasising the state, rather than the individual, as the hero of the Liberal times in which Britain now lived. The organs of the state had been subjected to a cumulative process of "common control," compelling-after the medieval fashion of peine forte et dure-the "obstinate individualist" to "surrender his ancient immunity and submit to the common law." The confidence with which Pollard expressed his faith in the state as the salvation of the individual, "who can do little by himself," is striking. How could liberty have come to be so intertwined with authority within the space of half a century, when Liberals had been preoccupied with "peace, retrenchment and reform"? (246, 243-44, 247)
Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain-the product of a 2001 symposium to mark the centenary of the death of Queen Victoria and the 150th anniversary of the Great Exhibition-supplies many possible answers to this question. Not least, it emphasises the close interrelationship in the nineteenth century between conceptions of liberty and the imperatives of authority in a densely populated urban society where traditional methods of regulating behaviour were breaking down. The editor, Peter Mandler, cautions against assumptions of the discontinuity between (Old) Liberalism conceived in Foucauldian terms and the (New) Liberalism of Pollard's time rooted in ideals of social justice (16?17). He maintains that the shift was within-not outside-a complex and often messy system of relations between state and civil society in which the overall libertarian climate of Britain was...