Robert Appelbaum. Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi + 256 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-81082-1.
Reviewed by Ted Vallance (University of Manchester)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2003)
Wishful Thinking in Seventeenth-Century England
Wishful Thinking in Seventeenth-Century England
The subject of utopian thought and writing in early modern England has received a good deal of scholarly attention (surveyed in Robert Appelbaum's introduction). However, though Appelbaum's book is titled Literature and Utopian Politics it is not strictly concerned with a "utopianism" narrowly defined by the paradigmatic work of St. Thomas More. Rather, it offers a novel analysis of writing on the "ideal society" in general, including millenarian works and those concerned with establishing a "perfect moral commonwealth" (to borrow J. C. Davis's terminology). Specifically, Appelbaum states that his work is a study of "ideal politics" (meaning "discourse in any number of forms which generates the image of an ideal society") and "utopian mastery" (meaning the "power a subject may exert over an ideal society whether as the author or as the imaginary founder or ruler of an ideal political world" [p. 1]). So, although the reader encounters a number of works and authors that he or she might expect to find in a study of seventeenth-century utopian writing (such as James Harrington, Gerrard Winstanley, Sir Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton), the works of Fifth Monarchists like Peter Chamberlen, New England colonists like John Winthrop, and post-Restoration works by Margaret Cavendish and John Dryden are also included.
The first chapter of the book, entitled "The Look of Power," deals with the discourse of ideal politics in the Jacobean period. The claim of this chapter, as I understand it, is that in order to gloss over the legal shortcomings of James's claim to the throne, the Stuart court developed a myth of the king's power over the world (James as a sort of absolutist Prospero) which effectively appropriated the discourse of ideal politics and stifled other, perhaps critical, expressions of what Appelbaum terms "political hope." This assumption about the inherently critical, anti-establishment nature of the discourse of "ideal politics" seems to underwrite the rest of the book.
In the following chapter, Ben Jonson's court masque, The Fortunate Isles, represents the last gasp of this Jacobean attempt to monopolize ideal politics. Whilst the masque attempts to bat away non-court-sponsored notions of the ideal society, its acknowledgment of a burgeoning news culture in the 1620s included a recognition that the monarch was losing the ability to control the speculative energies of his subjects. However, the growth of the news also threatened a Babel-like confusion which challenged the ability of the individual to stand apart and exert authorial mastery over the world. The emptiness of North America provided a mental as well as physical escape from England and an arena where utopian imaginings (again in Appelbaum's broad interpretation of the term) could be given freer reign. Other authors escaped the constrictions of the world by turning their gaze inward on the body and its anatomy (Robert Burton) or outward to space (Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone), providing them both with the necessary vantage point to exert mastery over their ideal worlds. The 1620s and 1630s then are periods in which methods of utopian experimentation are explored, but the full fruits of this labor are not yet harvested.
The 1640s, with the breakdown of censorship and the overt challenge to the authority of the Stuart monarchy, allowed ideal politics to become far more activist, as writers like Milton in his Areopagitica encouraged magistrates and the public alike to engage in the work of constructing an ideal society. In the mid-1640s, the discourse was radicalized further by locating the main agency for the realization of the ideal society, not in the Parliament but with the people (and Appelbaum argues that the construction of "the people" as an entity was an important part of the radicalization of "ideal politics"). Leveller rhetoric is seen as central to this shift. Despite the attempts of figures like Cromwell and Ireton to place constraints on this discourse, Appelbaum argues that ideal politics reached its zenith in the years 1649-53 as millenarian expectation and constitutional innovation combined to produce an unprecedented "window of opportunity" for utopian schemes. Utopian theorizing continued after 1653, but under the Protectorate, in the hands of Vane and Harrington it became concerned with settling and stabilizing politics rather than grasping for a lofty ideal. The revival of theocratic utopianism in the brief radical "Indian summer" of 1659 provoked, according to Appelbaum, an opposing "anti-utopian" discourse developed by monarchists and Presbyterians. Finally, the Restoration period saw the "aestheticization" of utopianism and its effective separation from political speculation, a development which the author sees as a result of the success of earlier utopian writers in challenging the absolutist dogma of the Stuarts.
I should stress that this is only my interpretation of Appelbaum's argument. One of my main misgivings concerning this book was that I found it very difficult to read. For instance, we are told that Bacon's New Atlantis operates "by way of a system of fractured but motile subjectivities" (p. 52), elsewhere that it "entails an emotional appeal to Bacon's readers summoning them toward the oneness of the One" (p. 56). I confess that I do not know what either of these sentences means. Appelbaum also has the habit of introducing a bewildering number of intellectual concepts of his own construction: "Columbus topos," "utopian witnessing," "Puritan ameliorism," and "the aetheticization of the ideal political imagination," to name a few.
Aside from these stylistic points, I have some interpretative criticisms of the book. I am not sure that the legality of James's succession was something that greatly concerned either the king or the public in 1603 (although it became a subject of debate during the Glorious Revolution due to the political benefit accruing to Williamites in questioning the Stuarts' claim to the throne). Yes, he was compared to mythical and Biblical figures, but so were other English monarchs who claimed "absolute" (but not arbitrary) power. The treatment of the fast sermons of the 1640s follows Trevor-Roper's anachronistic interpretation of them as effectively Parliamentarian propaganda, overlooking their essentially spiritual message. I do not think that the Putney Debates reveal "the heart of the problems of ideal politics and utopian mastery" (p. 134). What Cromwell and Ireton object to concerning the Agreement of the People is not "the act of imagination" that is involved in introducing it, but the breaking of former engagements that might be involved in accepting it. They are not objecting to the idea that one can imagine or even seek to implement a new society but that one can do so regardless of any former obligations. As Appelbaum himself states, the Levellers resolved this conundrum in the final Agreement by making any subsequent laws contrary to it null and void.
This last criticism gets to my overall objection to Appelbaum's thesis. Admittedly, in the introduction, Appelbaum does position himself against recent "revisionist" scholarship on the seventeenth century. However, his book still seems reliant on a rather Whiggish interpretation of English history: early Stuart absolutism constrains utopian discourse, discussion of the ideal society is emancipated in the 1640s but stalled by the Cromwellian Protectorate, and finally it is divorced from its political context in the Restoration period. It is not clear to me why utopian discourse necessarily has these radical connotations. There are bits of even radical utopias, like Winstanley's Law of Freedom, which incorporate distinctly repressive elements. The "ideal society" is surely in the eye of the beholder. The breadth of this work and the unfamiliar nature of some of its source material (Davenant and Dryden's revival of The Tempest in 1667) make it an appealing, if at times difficult to follow, analysis of "ideal politics." However, I am not totally convinced by the central argument of the book concerning the rise and fall of "ideal politics."
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Citation:
Ted Vallance. Review of Appelbaum, Robert, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7650
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