By Philip
Tsang, Colorado State University
Benjamin
Kohlmann. British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative
States. Oxford UP, 2022. 268 pp. $100.00 hardcover; $87.99 e-book.
Benjamin
Kohlmann’s new book British Literature and the Life of Institutions enriches
the bourgeoning scholarship on the welfare state in two distinct ways. First,
it reassesses British literature from 1880 to 1910. For Kohlmann, this period
is not one of crisis or decadence, a mere prelude to the high modernism of the
20s and 30s. Rather, the literature of this period evinces a sustained
reformist aesthetic that imagines the state as a vital force in social life. Questioning
the critical fixation on revolutionary rupture in modernist studies, Kohlmann
attends instead to the “slow politics of reform” (2), a shared effort among
late Victorian and Edwardian writers to rework and improve state institutions.
As such, “the reformist literary mode is Hegelian rather than Marxist insofar
as it imagines the gradual transformation of existing social conditions” (5).
This is no casual observation, for Kohlmann proceeds to investigate the British
reception of Hegel around 1900. His account of how British writers adapted
Hegel’s speculative philosophy to reformist ends is his book’s second major
contribution. His goal is not simply to trace Hegel’s influence on British
literature; rather, he shows how literary texts take Hegel’s philosophy one
step further by giving “abstract concepts a degree of experiential concreteness
unattainable to philosophical thought alone” (5). For Kohlmann, speculation is
no mere conjecture, but an effort of concretization.
British
Hegelianism provides the theoretical groundwork for Kohlmann’s book. While
previous studies of this loosely formed movement, such as those by Robert Stern
and Peter Robbins, have explored British writers’ engagement with Hegel’s
metaphysics, what distinguishes Kohlmann’s account is his focus on late Hegel.
For Victorian readers, Hegel’s most influential work was neither the
Phenomenology of Spirit nor the Science of Logic, but the Philosophy
of Right, a book concerned with the role of state institutions. Kohlmann
sees the selective reception of Hegel among British intellectuals as an
advantage rather than a drawback because it allowed them to articulate a
concrete vision of the state without the burden of metaphysics. The Philosophy
of Right led those intellectuals, most notably Thomas Hill Green, David
George Ritchie, Bernard Bosanquet, and Ernest Belfort Bax, to regard state
institutions not as externally imposed structures but as shared forms of life that
facilitate the thriving of individuals. Green, for instance, disputes Locke’s
theory of individual freedom and instead argues for active citizenship and the
common good to counter capitalist fragmentation. Similarly, Ritchie calls for
the redistribution of property rights and for more state regulations of the
economy. Kohlmann thus offers an important corrective to scholarly accounts of
Hegelian philosophy as teleological and totalitarian. Those accounts are
reductive because they have ignored how “Hegelianism attracted a wide range of
ideological positions to itself, and that it managed to transform these
positions in its turn” (36). This variety also characterizes Kohlmann’s
literary case studies. In the remainder of his book, he explores how novelists
and poets from a broad ideological continuum enfold Hegelian speculation into
their responses to such diverse issues as the settlement movement, land
ownership, taxation, and national insurance.
Given his
investment in speculative thinking, it comes as no surprise that one of the key
writers in the book is H. G. Wells. Kohlmann focuses, however, less on Wells’s
early works of science fiction than on his lesser-known Edwardian novels, in
which the author scales back his futuristic imagination to explore more local,
gradualist possibilities of change. In particular, Kohlmann highlights Wells’s
engagement with the tax reforms in the 1900s. His 1905 novel A Modern Utopia
envisions a distant planet that shares many similarities with Edwardian Britain.
The continuity between the two worlds allows for a critique and reimagination
of existing governmental systems. Through this Hegelian style of
“non-revolutionary reformist thinking,” Wells defends private property but also
sees it as fluid and kinetic, amenable to public use through progressive
taxation (168). The novel thus redefines utopia as a reformist rather than
revolutionary genre: “Wells’s future-directed legislative utopianism entails
the aspirational repurposing of the resources of the present, rather than a
projection of radical revolutionary alterity” (165). Contrary to his earlier
works, A Modern Utopia represents Wells’s “aspirational realism,” which
entails a reworking rather than rejection of the status quo (176).
A more
surprising choice for Kohlmann’s study is E. M. Forster, who seems to favor the
spontaneity of interpersonal connection over any kind of state-level
supervision. His 1909 tale “The Machine Stops” attests to his deep skepticism
about centralized governance. Yet his 1910 novel Howards End, written in
the midst of public debates that would eventually lead to the passing of the
National Insurance Act in 1911, is more receptive to the benefits of institutional
reform. For Kohlmann, the fact that Leonard Bast initially works as an
insurance clerk and later becomes unemployed is not accidental; rather, it “raises
broader questions about the social allocation of economic vulnerability and
about the promise of publicly funded mechanisms of institutionalized care” (200).
Howards End presents a world full of risk and uncertainty, epitomized by
the novel’s pivotal event: Mrs. Wilcox’s sudden death. That misfortune teaches
Margaret Schlegel that one cannot prepare for every danger and should instead
embrace risk in order to live life to the full. Kohlmann, however, detects an
irony in Margaret’s warning about the “tragedy of preparedness”—namely, that to
live life unplanned and unprepared requires a safety net that provides material
assistance during hard times. The Wilcoxes can lead an exciting and reckless
life only because they have private insurance. Contrary to Margaret’s
suggestion, the real tragedy here is the “tragedy of unpreparedness,” which
“shows that life cannot be fully enjoyed unless it is cushioned against the
worst kinds of socio-economic risk” (216). This reading exemplifies Kohlmann’s
central argument: personal freedom and well-being are not threatened but rather
protected and enriched by institutional mediation. Or, to drive home the
Hegelian point, individual potential can be actualized only through the state. Kohlmann
goes so far as to call Howards End a “welfare state novel” (191), reading
its famous epigraph “Only connect…” not as some abstract ideal of interpersonal
or interclass connection, but as a concrete reformist proposal for
institutionalized care and economic redistribution.
Throughout
Kohlmann’s book, speculation is an ethos, a perspective, and a style that
describes not only the literary works in question but also Kohlmann’s reading
method. This style, as he puts it succinctly in relation to Ernest Belfort Bax,
discloses “how substantive contradictions unfold from within—how they are
‘opened up’ for us by—a given situation” (55). Kohlmann’s speculative style
allows for a wide interpretative latitude. In his reading of George Gissing’s 1887
novel Thyrza, he concludes that the protagonist’s uncompromising
idealism prevents him from recognizing the possibility of institutional reform.
That failure, however, becomes in turn “the very medium through which reformist
hopes must be realized” (83). Kohlmann’s speculative reading recasts Gissing’s uneven
novel as a polyphonic work in which a wide range of political positions are
tested and negated. In a distinctly Hegelian fashion, he patiently shows how
contradictions and instabilities within a text can lead to positive and
generative outcomes. In the end, it does not matter what positions the authors
take regarding taxation or insurance. Whether by supporting, critiquing, or
decrying efforts at institutional reform, those writers engage in an act of
speculation that is at once diagnostic, aspirational, and reparative. Kohlmann
shows us that literary reading, too, can be a speculative act in itself.
I want to
close with two questions. One is simply why British literature’s reformist
imagination was so short-lived. According to Kohlmann, Edward Carpenter’s
preoccupation with land reform in the 1880s gave way to an immersion in Hindu
philosophy in the next decade; Wells’s ambitious agenda for redistributive
taxation in A Modern Utopia gave way to a “claustrophobic vision of
parliamentary infighting” in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli (187);
Forster followed Howards End with Arctic Summer, his “most
sustained attempt to enter imaginatively into the reformist literary mode,” but
he eventually abandoned the project (217). Like Wells’s A Modern Utopia,
the reformist aesthetic’s all-too-short trajectory seems to be a narrative of
“undeveloped possibilities” cut short by the advent of modernism. In Kohlmann’s
account, interwar modernism signals a decisive break with the reformist
aesthetic (69). Yet, in light of his speculative method, one wonders whether
high modernism, despite its longstanding association with rupture and novelty,
might share more continuity with the reformist imagination than Kohlmann
presents here. Might war, revolution, and imperial decline have invigorated new
styles of speculative institutionalism from Bloomsbury to Bengal?
My second
question concerns the role of literature in state institutions. If, as Kohlmann
powerfully shows, literature was the medium through which to cultivate the
ethos of sharing and caring, might one make a stronger case for literature as a
fundamental aspect of the state on par with taxation and insurance? One might
recall that Leonard Bast is not just an insurance clerk but also an avid
reader, though his primary goal is self-improvement. Yet if the Wilcoxes’
private insurance can buttress Howards End’s advocacy for national
insurance, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to regard the ostensibly private
act of reading as serving an institutional function toward the common good.
What modes, practices, and pedagogies of reading are best suited to that end?
This might be Kohlmann’s biggest provocation yet.
Philip
Tsang teaches modernist and postcolonial literature at Colorado State
University. He is the author of The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in
Twentieth-Century British Literature, which traces an aesthetic of
frustrated attachment in the context of imperial decline.
