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.
