Benjamin Kohlmann: British Literature and the Life of Institutions. Speculative States. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021. 268 pp.

Benjamin Kohlmann began his academic career with a book about radical intellectuals in 1930 s Britain; he has since edited numerous books about literature and politics, and a monograph subtitled “A Radical History of the Bildungsroman” is on the way. The 1930 s was a decade of conflict and anxiety leading toward war; Kohlmann’s first book, Committed Styles, calls attention to the variety of responses on the political and cultural fronts in an era when “anxieties about art’s inadequacy as a political weapon were especially intense.”^[1]British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States was published late in 2021, at the climax of Operation Warp Speed, President Trump’s war against Covid-19, and I read it in 2024, the current year in which the whole world is enveloped in dispiriting, multi-sited turmoil and conflict. But according to the acknowledgments, it was conceived in 2012, immediately following the earlier book and as a seeming respite. As if nostalgically, Kohlmann here looks back to the late Victorian and Edwardian decades as a time when philosophers guided public discourse toward a faith in social transformation arising not from Marxist revolution but from gradual progress. Like its predecessor, the new book is organized as a set of awesomely researched case studies, but here the emphasis is on their commonalities despite apparently divergent positions. Surveying British social discourse during what the subtitle of the first chapter calls “Britain’s Long Hegelian Moment,” stretching “from roughly 1870 to the beginning of World War I” (35), the book consolidates a vision of a calmer and more stable time that encouraged literature to “imagine new institutional arrangements [...] as an experientially concrete reality” (109). As problematic in its premise as it is dazzling in its command of detail, the book might have carried an epigraph from John Keats: The speculative states hark back, albeit with some ambivalence, to a “slow time” (166) when beauty was truth and truth beauty. My review discusses systematic problems before turning to substantive accomplishments.

By reporting in great depth on a series of social debates before and after 1900, Kohlmann aims to demonstrate their important contributions, as well as the additional spur provided by literary works. “Literary texts [...] present us with a mode of thought – with a type of conceptual poesis – that is ‘concrete’ not because it represents or describes what is empirically given but because it engages in acts of theoretical speculation that give abstract concepts a degree of experiential concreteness unattainable to philosophical thought alone” (4–5). The evident circularity – literature is concrete because it gives concreteness – is underscored by the hesitancy of “a degree of.” A prior reviewer has written that, “This is as much a work of intellectual history and reclamation as of literary scholarship.”^[2] On my reading, it is in fact more social history than either intellectual or literary history.

Indeed, both the historical and the theoretical frames are problematic. Of the former, while some of the so-called British Hegelians did carefully study G. W. F. Hegel, including Ernest Belford Bax, who is discussed in Chapter 1, and John McTaggart, who receives a passing mention in Chapter 5, the label is approximate at best. Thus, Thomas Hill Green, who is prominent in the first two chapters, “show[s] fairly little direct influence by Hegel.”^[3] And the dean of the British Hegelians, F. H. Bradley, mentions Hegel rarely in his most influential treatise, and then in a spirit that is essentializing rather than dialectical.^[4] Kohlmann’s Hegel is prone to a similar rigidity, as in the following sentence: “To talk about the aesthetic work of [Mary Augusta Ward’s] Robert Elsmere in terms of a quasi-Hegelian ‘new synthesis’ could be taken to suggest that Ward imagines the settlement movement as the imposition of socio-cultural hegemony on an inert working class – as the consolidation of a homogeneous consensus that shuts down the space for further conversation.” (75–76) Even in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s most conservative text and the most prominent in Kohlmann’s book, dialectic is a process of continual transformation, without imposed hegemonies and shutting nothing down. As one of the most authoritative current students of Hegel has written, quoting Hegel’s notes for these lectures, “he was not defending any type of view that authorized people to do what they wished with those whom they regarded as ‘lesser’ people... The religious feeling even of a lowly shepherd or peasant had ‘infinite worth’ and was ‘just as valuable’ as the feelings of those more educated or advanced.”^[5] A lot was being debated in Kohlmann’s seemingly static ‘long moment,’ but not much that was genuinely Hegelian.

As for the theoretical framing, the chief inspiration is Jürgen Habermas’s theory of discourse ethics.^[6] Reasonable people, reasoning together, can converge on moral principles that will improve society. Kohlmann repeatedly invokes a mantra drawn from Habermas: “entgegenkommende Lebensformen.” This phrase is widespread among Habermas’s commentators, yet so far as I can discover, it appears only once in his own writings.^[7] The phrase is difficult to translate, but “entgegenkommend” has no temporal meaning, and Habermas’s essay is concerned only with the establishment of general moral norms and repeatedly disavows addressing the problems of their practical application to emerging situations. Kohlmann misleadingly paraphrases the formula as “‘anticipatory’ or ‘emergent’ forms of social life” (17), though a more suitable translation, accommodating, is embedded in a footnote to this very sentence, and elsewhere Kohlmann translates it with “enabling condition” (112). The enterprise of making Hegel rigid and Habermas fluidly progressive is misguided. In any event, the philosophical framing dissolves as the book progresses. “The specific Hegelian inflection [...] will slowly fade into the background” (71), the first chapter concludes, but it is already tottering by the next chapter, where the material is only “broadly Hegelian” (96), and subsequently shadowy at best: “the literary works which I explore in subsequent chapters do not involve a similarly sustained awareness of these philosophical conversations” (110).

Kohlmann’s skewed perspective has consequences for his reading. Speculation is introduced from Hegel, but only as “a capacious heuristic” (3).^[8] “Literature’s capacity for speculative thought” then means that “novels [...] must insert into their aesthetic procedures an aspirational sense of the emerging forms of life that make it possible to imagine new institutional arrangements not merely in the abstract but as an experientially concrete reality” (109). I find it hard to reconcile “aspirational,” “emerging,” “possible,” and “imagine” with “experientially concrete.” Novels here appear to be merely a conjectural application of moral principles, exploratory rather than transformational, reflecting a certain timidity in his Victorian writers’ “deep commitment to Britain’s established liberal system” (59). When Robert Elsmere “echoes” a theorist’s (Green’s) “reluctance to prescribe a particular content for his notion of the common good” (108), fiction is playing a merely ancillary role.

The expository complications come to a head in the final chapter, which focuses on E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Like all readers of the novel, Kohlmann confronts its epigraph, “Only connect!” which he celebrates as “the progressive mantra of Edwardian reformers” (211). For Habermas, however, only connecting is only the precondition for the rational discussions producing ethical betterment. As he writes in the essay that proposes the term “entgegenkommende Lebensformen,”

The more differentiated particular interests and value orientations become in modern society, the more general and abstract are the morally justified norms governing the terrain for individual action in the general interest. Modern societies display an increasing breadth of materials in need of regulation that only touch particular interests and therefore must rely on negotiated compromises rather than consensus growing out of discussion. (333, my translation)

“Only connect” in fact does not offer Forster’s characters any real hope of concrete progress. The motto resurfaces at the midpoint of the novel (Chapter 22 of 44), in the thoughts of the misguided idealist, Margaret Schlegel, about the misogynistic Henry Wilcox: “Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.”^[9] At the end, Margaret does prod Henry into a final, unexpected act of generosity. But the utopian tone persists, with “laughter,” “a smile,” and “shouts of infectious joy” triumphing on the last page.^[10] Whether meant hopefully or sarcastically – and either reading is possible – nothing about the comic ending is consonant with the gradual progress of liberal reformers.^[11] Recognizing that his reading is a stretch, Kohlmann turns for support to a rejected manuscript ending and then to Forster’s next fiction, Arctic Summer. But that work remained an inchoate fragment. It may show that Forster wanted to try to sustain a liberal optimism, but if so, he gave up.

Throughout his book, and despite his intentions, Kohlmann strains to discern an autonomy for literature that would turn its utopian leanings into concrete social advances. The strain is evident in the characteristically hesitant sentence introducing Arctic Summer: “This aspirational mobilization of the genre of romance, I suggest in what follows, calls for an interpretive hermeneutic that does not aim at demystifying particular generic choices by pointing to their latent political content but that restores to these very generic choices their immanent political force.” (217) The presumed contrast between latent content and immanent force is one problem, another is the question of how mobilized an aspirational mobilization is. And when Kohlmann turns to articulate the value of his study, the rhetoric abruptly changes character. So it is in the last three sentences of Chapter 3, where the shadow of Margaret Thatcher looms: “It is indicative of our contemporary ‘discursive disability’ that we have so long lacked the political vocabulary to describe these processes and drive home their existential urgency.” (146) “The urgent and necessary revolutionary projects of the 1920 s and 1930s” – the topic and manner of Kohlmann’s first book – that “temporarily eclipsed” the reformist paradigm (28) suddenly are now invoked to rescue that very paradigm, so that “periods of post-war reconstruction can build on a collective sense of urgency by seizing on opportunities for reform at a time when the extreme socio-economic strain of war has created institutional openings for progressive change” (226). Perhaps others can make better sense than I of the politics of all this.

But now let me turn the other cheek. While I think that Kohlmann has severe limitations as a philosophical or ideological thinker and consequently recommend skipping his introduction, first chapter, and coda, his social history is thoroughly impressive. The core of his book opens with, “‘The Hope of Pessimism.’ George Gissing, Mary Ward, and the Idea of an Institution.” Actually, it opens with the idea of an institution, namely the settlement houses of the 1880 s and 1890 s. But it quickly turns to the novelists. After discussing Gissing’s first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), in the context of Gissing’s readings of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Kohlmann turns to Thyrza (1887), which diagnoses “an overly abstract idealism” (83) and “paint[s] philanthropy as a psychological pathology” (86). “The Hope of Pessimism” is the title of an 1882 essay by Gissing that criticizes Auguste Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” and that formed a background for Gissing’s eventual endorsement of settlement philanthropy in the 1890 s. Fueled by Kohlmann’s thorough knowledge of both the settlement debates and Gissing’s vast output, these twenty pages typify the complex weave of Kohlmann’s research. And then eighteen more pages do the same for Robert Elsmere (1885), imagining “a new and shared ethos of social responsibility” (108).

The time frame edges forward and the information grows richer with each succeeding chapter. “‘True Ownership.’ Edward Carpenter and the Nationalization of Land” focuses on a sentimental nature poet turned queer activist and advocate for enabling small farmers with “a more intimate and responsible relationship to the land” (124). Walt Whitman, the American “single tax” advocate Henry George, and his British follower (and friend of Carpenter’s) Alfred Russel Wallace are the interlocutors here, to whom Carpenter reacts in essays and in a book-length prose poem Towards Democracy, published in stages from 1883 to 1905 and gravitating away from social questions toward “universal love” and “eastern religion” (145). But the core of Carpenter’s insight, Kohlmann persuasively insists, lies in the social vision that he shared with Wallace and the political reformers.

The two final chapters are even richer accounts of social backgrounds, enhanced by significant archival research in the writings of novelists and essayists alike. “‘Kinetic’ Reform. H. G. Wells and Redistributive Taxation” covers a large swath of Wells’s fiction and essay writing (27 titles are cited in the bibliography, plus unpublished archival material) and is also full of economic thinkers and scholars, including Henry George again, Wells’s friend Leo Chiozza Money, historians of tax debates, and Charles Piketty and other present-day economists. The information is abundant, the summaries of Wells’s writings illuminating about their contexts and about Wells’s development, and the plea for reformist thinking consequently particularly eloquent. What makes this chapter so impressive, in my view, is that the fiction is not really accorded a special place. “This new economic language [...] taken up in Wells’s social criticism of the period, and it also left its mark on the forms of his fiction” (149, my emphasis on what sounds uncomfortably like an afterthought). Likewise, Tono-Bungay “complements the economic analyses” of Wells’s non-fiction “by providing [...] a symptomology of market-mediated forms of social life – a literary diagnosis of the psychological and emotional toll of capitalism” (163). Wells’s novels are, variously, “deeply embedded in reformist debates about taxation” (152), with a “problematic” that is “br[ought] into focus” by “the emerging field of welfare economics that had begun to emerge towards the end of the nineteenth century” (154), and a “critical and exploratory [surely a weaker term than “anticipatory”] function [...] vis-à-vis the book’s Edwardian present” (167), “centrally influenced by the work of the economist Leo Chiozza Money,” whose importance for Wells would be “hard to overestimate” (170) and who was part of “debates about taxation [that] also resonate with another key aspect of Wells’s kinetic utopia” (176, my italics again), while a later novel “is best read as a complex record of what Wells came to regard as the Achilles’ heel of slow politics” (182). Kohlmann’s discussions beautifully elucidate the complexities and the development of Wells’s thinking, as expressed in essays and novels alike; the approach records their role in the social policy debates of the era. Kohlmann most often treats literature as reflectively echoing rather than speculatively advancing the period’s debates about social policy; far from a weakness, that is the core of his great strength as a historian.

The same is true of the last chapter, “Welfare State Romance. E. M. Forster and Unemployment Insurance.” I found this the most surprising of all, since insurance is a subtler component of policy debates. I would not have suspected its importance to Howards End, or to its era, without Kohlmann’s insights. Even here, though, the relationship between fiction and non-fiction is not what the book’s introduction claims. For, Kohlmann writes, “Forster’s thinking about the speculative reformist mode comes into focus in a draft essay on which he was working between 1905 and 1907” (217). The novels must be read in their historical contexts in order to come into focus. Other approaches are certainly possible and are indeed strongly exemplified by the work of Fredric Jameson (whom Kohlmann cites frequently and to good effect) and Raymond Williams (whom he celebrates, especially in his “Coda: Reformist Legacies”). But Kohlmann is his own person. In this review I have been working to sort out who he really is from who he thinks he is because he deserves to be recognized as an original thinker in his own right and not just a follower of Habermas or anyone else. His book makes a distinctive contribution to the study of social thought in the decades before World War I, and it deserves a lasting readership among scholars wanting to immerse themselves in its materials.