Beyond the Panopticon: Victorian Britain and the Critical Imagination Author(s): Lauren M. E. Goodlad Source: PMLA, Vol.

118, No. 3, Special Topic: Imagining History (May, 2003), pp. 539-556 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261525 . Accessed: 21/03/2011 02:45
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8 3

Beyond
and the

the

Panopticon: Victorian Critical Imagination

Britain

LAUREN

M. E. GOODLAD

M. LAUREN E. GOODLAD teaches Victo-

rian literature and cultural studies at the University Illinois,Urbana.She is of the author of VictorianLiteratureand the Victorian State:Character and Governancein a Liberal (Johns HopSociety kins UP,forthcoming2003).

S CHARACTERIZED REPRESENTATIVE IN WORKSSUCH AS The New Historicism(1989 [Veseer]),critics workingunderthat rubricproposedan innovativeapproachto the study of literature and its contexts. Michel Foucault's genealogical methods, boldly exemplified in Discipline and Punish, were centralto this enterprise.Rigorously antiessentialist, genealogical criticism would historicize the multifacetedoperationsof power,concentrated neitherpotentindividin uals, hegemonic classes, dominantideologies, nor institutionalapparatuses.1Since the appearance Foucault'sbook, scholarshave creatively of Britishliterature appliedthis mandateto the study of nineteenth-century and culture, producing a far-reachingreimagining of their history. Yet the focus on Discipline and Punish, including Foucault'sinfluentialaccount of "panopticism," sometimes skewed criticalwork on the Vichas torian past and, as a result, inhibited our understandingof present-day questionsof governance.In this essay, I hope to stimulatethinkingabout Foucault's complex legacy and to demonstrate the need to move, as Foucaultdid, beyond the groundbreaking work of the 1970s. VictorianBritainwas, by and large, a self-consciously "liberal" culcommitted to fostering moral and spiritualgrowth (espeture,2loudly cially among the educated elite), but, at the same time, suspicious of governmentinterferencewith individualsand theirproperty.So ambivalent a creed could not but engendercontradictionand debate, for in liberal thought,freedomparadoxically signifies "theantonym,the limit and the objective"of governance(Barry,Osborne,and Rose 2). Therewasand thereremains-a tension in liberalismbetween negative liberty(the doctrineof nonintervention) positive liberty(the contraryimperative and to empower,which slowly gained groundduringthe nineteenthcentury). A
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Samuel Smiles's best-selling Self-Help (1859) opened by affirming the first principle. The "functionof Government," Smiles declared,"is negative and restrictive": to protect property ratherthanto promotevirtueamongcitizens (2). Yet the positive impulse to develop individuals and encourage social betterment by collective means of some kind permeateda variety of reformist discourses, including Victorian literature. Self-consciously progressive authorssuch as CharlesDickens, ElizabethGaskell,and H. G. Wells turnedimaginativewritinginto the site of a distinctiveliberalquandary. Theirparadoxical task-like that of theirphilosophicalcontemporary John StuartMill-was to envision a modern governing agency that would be rational, and all-embracing, effective but also antibureaucratic,personalized,and liberatory. For these reasons,Foucault'slaterworks on govermentality, which were writtenin response to the resurgenceof liberaleconomic ideologies in the 1980s, providea more fruitfulbasis for visualizing Britain's idiosyncratic modernization than does Discipline and Punish. In particular, the concept ofpastorship, which describesinnovations in governance both inside and outside a centralized state bureaucracy, is helpful in evoking the disciplinaryformationsof a society imagined in expressly liberal terms. Indeed, now that the modern welfare state has become an object of sustainedneoliberalcritique,a more nuancedanalysis of the Victorianpast may benefit present-day debates. Nineteenth-Century British Governance It is a commonplaceof many social historiesthat British governance differed from that of most Continentalcountries:Britain'scentralizedstate was smaller,less intrusive,andmorerelianton local and voluntary supports but-for all thathighly effective in maintainingsocial stabilityat home and exploiting colonial interests abroad.3 TheVictorians this governingstructure the saw as hallmarkof an exceptional liberal heritage en-

dissent,theLockeannotionof compassingPuritan the sovereignindividual,the mythof pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon liberty, the politico-economic doctrine of laissez-faire, and, in the nineteenth century,aspects of the Romanticmovement, including German philosophical influences. Invoking this legacy, the Victorians imagined themselves as citizens of a self-governingnation and heirs to ancient constitutional liberties. By custom,by nature-even by divinewill-Britons were, it was believed, a vanguardpeople, able to contrasttheirfreedomsto the noxious stateinterferenceendured Continental Oriental and by peoples (Colley;Goodlad,"'MiddleClass'"). It is, therefore,also a commonplacethatthe Victorian state expanded in response to the urgent social pressuresof urbanizationand industrialization-its piecemealdevelopmentunaided by popularconsensusor a consistentphilosophical agenda. Centralizing measures such as the 1834 New Poor Law and the 1848 Public Health Act were widely disliked. "Self-government"as contemporaries liked to style theirpreference for local control,civic voluntarism, personalized and philanthropy, individualself-help-was seen as "a quintessential feature of British national character" (Harris,PrivateLives 18).Directgovernmentinterference"wassomething[theVictorians] hardlyknew and did not like the idea of" (Best 251). In the early 1850s,EdwinChadwick's Bentham-influenced sanitary ideas so antagonized mainstreamopinion thatthey precipitated a lastingbacklash.Not until the fin de siecle collectivism of the Fabians did Jeremy Bentham's legacy enjoy a significantresurgence.4 In Constitutional (1969), Henry Bureaucracy Parrisattributed muchgreaterrole to Bentham, a arguingthathis influentialthoughttriggeredthe so-called nineteenth-centuryrevolutionin government.On the whole, however,Parris'sthesis has had less sway among historians than Oliver model. ForMacDonMacDonagh's"pragmatic" the gradualcentralization,rationalization, agh, and expansion of the Victorian state began as a response to social crisis and continued through

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the self-generatedmomentumof administrators themselves.Withthe mid-century declineof Benthamism,Chartism,andotherradicalchallenges to the statusquo, liberalideas flourished the fain bled equipoiseof the mid-Victorian constitutional consensus.The ideal of disinterested governance, first articulated by civic-republican-minded Whigs,efflorescedin the vintageliberalismof the Gladstoneera. An all-embracingmoralphilosophy as well as a political agenda, mid-Victorian liberalismtrumpetedthe progressivebenefitsof free tradeandlow taxation,individualandcommunity self-reliance, parliamentary representation for the propertied,and a civil service staffed by well-bred gentlemen. Liberal governance in this conservative British form withstood many pressures, including the adult male franchise, holding its grounduntil the unprecedentedexigencies of theFirstWorldWar. There is, to be sure, much evidence to support Mary Poovey's claim that the Benthamiteinfluenced reforms of the 1830s constitutedthe epistemological foundationsof "theprofessionof alized, bureaucratized apparatuses inspection, regulation, and enforcement that we call the modern state" (115-16). Yet even the cornerstone of those reforms-the landmark1834 New Poor Law-was, for all its centralizingfeatures, an attemptto strengthen local government,abolish the largesse of the Old Poor Law, and institute laissez-faire.In the wordsof its framers,the act was "intended to produce rather negative thanpositive effects":to deter pauperismrather than to treat it (qtd. in Loch 238-39). In the 1890s, as Britain's global preeminence began visibly to decline, a vocal minoritydemandeda shift from "laissez faire" to "savoirfaire" (qtd. in Searle 97). Reforming the poor laws became the primaryobject of the Fabians,who soughtto improve national efficiency by establishing a multiprongedstate that would preventand cure. Wells, the author of numerous Fabianesque works of fiction, lamented the ignorant "distrust"that kept the British from permitting"the State"to govern "in a business-like way" (17).

From such a view, late Victorianand Edwardian Britainprofoundlylacked the modernstatistrationalitydescribedin Poovey's account. Victorianliberalswere also zealous enthusiasts of parliamentarycommissions of inquiry. Such putatively objective fact-gatheringbodies were invaluable to a governmentthat promised firmbut constitutionalresponsesto a wide range of problems.Yet while Blue Books and the legislativeredressthatsometimesfollowed themexemplified a recognizablybureaucratic approach to governingthe new social domain,it is important to distinguish between these developments and the intrusivestate apparatuses describedby Foucault in Discipline and Punish. In Britain of statutoryinnovationssuch as the introduction the century, ridden policing were, throughout with "delay, compromise and half measure" (Gatrell 257). Centralizedinspection was hampered-as in the case of the New Poor Law-by the insufficiency of resources and the lack of meaningful coercive power. Diminutive staffs (between ten and twenty officials to inspect the nation's multifarious workhouses) necessarily meant that much was left to "local discretion" (Fraser53; cf. Wood 79-83). Enterprisingofficials like Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, pioneer a in working-class education, had "limited freedom of action" with which to implement their grand designs (Paz 168-69).5 These and many similar accounts supportDerek Fraser's claim thatany historyof the nineteenthcentury"which does not emphasise the practical, pragmatic, unplanned,ad hoc response of the state is in a majorrespectdeficient"(117). It is also importantto recognize that many Victoriancivil servantswere themselves staunch liberals who used their official positions to forwardlaissez-fairesocial policies.The upper-class members of the 1858-61 Newcastle Commission, for example, sought to delimit workingclass education in the interests of self-help and economy. Therewas, in their words, "a material difference... betweenthe politicalandsocial circumstancesof [Britain]... andthose of countries

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where the central administration wields great to power over a people ... habituated the control of a searchingpolice, and subjectedto the direct action of the government"(qtd. in Best 251). To RobertLowe, difference," preservethat"material vice president of the Education Department, sought to reverse the gains of reformers such as Kay-Shuttleworth.In 1842 Samuel Laing, a middle-class radical,had arguedthatthe Continental man was an "educated slave," "his personal bodily andmentalactions ... fittedon him by his master,the state, like clothing on a convict"(495-96). It is surelysignificantthatalmost libertwentyyearslater,the conservative-leaning als on the NewcastleCommissioninvokeda similar rhetoricto justify a policy of retrenchment. The adoption of marketforces, Lowe believed, wouldensurethatsuchschoolingas was provided at government expense wouldbe, if not necessarily efficient, then at least "cheap"(Fraser 85). Since so-called disinterested government was less loath to punish crime than to foster educathan tion, "itwas ... in its policemanguise rather in its paternalisticguise thatthe Victorianstate" first demonstrated "its power and purposes" (Gatrell259). The other side of the limited scope of the Victorianstate was the formidablevoluntarism of the Victorians themselves. Throughout the centuryand beyond, "mostof the functionsperformed by government in other societies were ... performedby coteries of citizens governing themselves." The multiplicity of charities and self-help organizations created a "dense network of self-governing social institutions that encircled the citizen at every level." As late as 1911, the receipts of registered philanthropies exceeded the state's expenditures on the poor law (Harris, "Society" 68; cf. Prochaska 38485 and Behlmer 34). Proponents of organized charity sought to annex the state's negative functions to a permanentcorps of well-trained volunteers.In so doing, they pioneered modern social work. Fromthis view, Mrs. Pardiggle,the infamous busybody of Dickens's Bleak House,

was in actualitya harbingerof the future,representative of an increasingly authoritative and professionalizedsocial practice. Britain's idiosyncratic modernization has been noticed by critics as diverse as Alexis de Tocqueville, KarlMarx, G. M. Young, Antonio Gramsci,Max Weber,CharlesTaylor,and, as we shall see, Michel Foucault.6Weber,in particular, referredcontinually to the interesting sociological fact that England, the first nation to develop moderncapitalism,was also "the slowest of all countriesto succumbto bureaucratization."Indeed,Englandwas still, to Weber'smind (c. 1914), "onlypartlyin the processof doing so" (From Max Weber228). For all these reasons, Disciplineand Punish,writtenfroma 1970spresentistperspective,with Frenchcontextsforemost in mind, is a distorting lens through which to peer at the disciplinarization of Britain's idiosyncratic,self-consciously liberal,relativelydecentralized,and "self-governing" society. Whose Panopticon? According to the authorof Discipline and Punish, Bentham "laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable."The particular genius of Bentham's design is that power can be both at once, for the inmate of the Panopticon"mustneverknow whetherhe is being looked at at any one moment; but ... must be sure that he may always be so." In this way the Panopticon"automatizesand disindividualizes" power (201-02): panopticalpower inheres in the machine,regardlessof who operatesit. The implication is that Bentham, having imaginedthe perfect machineryfor power's exercise, soughtto invest power wholly in machinery. Who would run the Panopticon? Foucault rightly emphasizes that the question is irrelevant to the technical functioning of Bentham's machine: but he misleadingly suggests that the question was also irrelevant to Bentham. WhereasFoucaultimagines the Panopticonas a model of society as a whole, Benthamdefinedit

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as a "principle of construction"-integral but subordinate society at large. Indeed, society's to most critical function was to superintendthose to whom it delegated panoptical power: for Benthamrecognizedin his inventionnot only "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example," but also a device that must be "equally ... secured ... againstabuse"(40; cf. Blake 3-4). Thus, from Bentham's utilitarianperspective-unlike Foucault's genealogical perspective-the exercise of power was itself secondary to the substantiveindividualand social aims on behalf of which power was exercised.Crucialto Bentham'spolitical economy, for example, was thatthe machinebe remunerative well as disas In fact, Benthamenvisioned the Panciplinary. not opticon as a privatelyrunenterprise, a public institution:"I would farmout the profits,the noprofits, or if you please the losses, to him who, being in otherrespectsunexceptionable,offered the best terms"(47). Because the genealogist is indifferentto such contexts,he risks overlooking the effects they impose on the inspectionprinciple. Hence, Foucaultnotices Bentham'sstipulation that "the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection," but he virtuallyignores its supplement: "Whatis also of importanceis, that for the greatest proportionof time possible, each man should actually be under inspection" so that "the inspector may have the satisfaction of knowing, that the discipline actually has the effect which it is designed to have" and so that he can supervise "suchtransientand incidentaldirectionsas will require to be given and enforced, at the commencementat least of every course of industry" (44). Clearly,such "design[s]"and "directions" as are necessaryto runninga profitablebusiness mitigate the automatizationand disindividualization of disciplinarypower-neither of which was itself a priorityfor Bentham.Tellingly,Bentham envisioned himself as the governor of the first panoptical prison (Himmelfarb 58-63). his Throughout text he stressedthe need to exer-

cise cautionin the vesting of power.Such admonitions cast doubt on the depersonalization so centralto Foucault'sgenealogicalanalysis. Bentham'splan also included machineryto protect the panoptical institution against the "abuse"of the governor:superintendents whose functionswould be both abettedand monitoring superintendedby the public-"the great open committee the tribunal the world"(46). Fouof of cault acknowledges that the Panopticon itself is thus "subjectedto ... inspections"and "democratically controlled"-that it is, in effect, a "transparent building in which the exercise of be supervisedby society as a whole" power may (207). Inexplicably, however, Foucault notices these importantstipulationsonly to conflate the subjectposition of the unseen observerwith that of the sightless observed.The prototypeof Foucault's "disciplinary individual" always the inis mate-the object of panopticism's "faceless gaze"-never the observer in the central tower (227, 214). FollowingJulius,the nineteenth-century penologist who providedthe "birthcertificate" for modern French discipline, Foucault arguesthatthe Panopticon replacedancientspectacle with modern surveillance (216-17). It be to would,perhaps, moreaccurate say thatBentham'sinspection house sought to open surveillance to the spectatorship the modem world. of ForBentham,then, at least two subjectpositions characterize post-Panopticon a society: not the inmate in the cell but also the vigilant only citizen-observer the tower.Such preconceived in asymmetriesare difficultto historicizein the absence of materialist concepts (e.g., class) that help to explain why certain populations appear destinedto taketheirplaces as citizens andothers as delinquents.Indeed,fromthis perspective,the Panopticonis the epitome of class society in the for making,not a suitablestructure an antiessentialist analysis of power. As Jenny Sharpe has argued,the notion of "anomnifunctional, freefloating power breaks down any distinction between relationsof dominationand subordination" (9). If the invention of the profit-making

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Panopticonteaches us anything,it is thatpower, howeverubiquitous, does not circulateequally. Bentham'slate-eighteenth-century "ideain architecture" but a preludeto a far more amwas bitious design: the massive ConstitutionalCode (1830). In this little-remembered opus, Bentham a for produced blueprint a totalizingraisond'etat. WhatBenthamcalled the Pannomionwas a complete code of directive laws to be enacted and overseen by an "omnicompetent" legislature of who, in turn,were the elected representatives a Mill saw the genius JohnStuart sovereignpeople. of the Code in its "devisingmeansfor preventing rulersfrom escaping from the controlof the ma165).ForMill, whose distincjority"("Bentham" tive liberal instinct was to hallow individuality, the majoritywas itself the most likely abuserof disciplinarypowerin a modem society.This crucial insight was alien to Bentham's rigorously formalistmentality. Still, it is worthclarifying that the thrustof Bentham'sdreamwas not, as readersof Foucault might imagine, to subjectsociety to the faceless surveillance of the state. Like his Fabian heirs, Bentham endowed government with a strong positive function, a "tutelary" purpose harking back to the Hobbesianidea thathumaninterests must be artificially harmonized. Yet Bentham envisioned the Code as an open-ended system throughwhich to secure simultaneouslythe deployment,legitimization,and oversightof disciplinarypower (Hume, "JeremyBentham"36570 and Bentham5-6). In Bentham'sscheme the citizen (however implausibly) was empowered both to enact and to inspect the instrumentsof his own tutelage.Isolatedsubjection,like thatof the inmateof the Panopticon,was reservedfor a small minorityof incurabledelinquents. In spirit,then, Bentham'swas not precisely the dreamof a bureaucratic utopiapresidedover benevolentadministrators-not the dream,in by otherwords,of Chadwickand, decades later,the Fabians. Bentham's vision, a reaction to the abuses of the ancien regime, is perhapsbest understoodas a call for accountability: functionally

democratic and profoundly skeptical about the humancapacityto exercise power withoutabusnot Benthamwrote, ing it. "Jealousy, confidence," with the potentialmismanagement the Panopof ticon in mind, "is the characteristic wise laws" of 42). (qtd.in Himmelfarb Hence, the "visib[ility]" of powerwas crucialto Bentham'sphilosophyof government, but its "unverifiab[ility]"related only to one subordinate componentof the master machine.Foucault'sgenealogy recognizes Bentham's invention as a mechanism of power but sets asidethe substantive aims on behalfof which thatpowerwas-in theory-to be mobilized.7 In a famous passage in Discipline and PunFoucaultdescribes the plague-strickencity ish, of seventeenth-century France: an "enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which . . . power is exercised without division" (197-98). Clearly,Foucaultsaw Bentham'sPanopticon as a "generalizablemodel" of this hitherto "exceptional" mobilization of power for (205)-a "formula" the efficient and continuous deploymentof discipline (209). Crucialto his antiessentialist premise, however, is the move away from the Panopticon-the material prison-and towardpanopticism,a "movement" wherein disciplinary technologies exceed their institutionalboundariesand "stretch" "an into definitely generalizable mechanism" (216; cf. 209). Indeed, without this generalizing motion, Foucault's account of the Panopticonbecomes, in effect, the kind of flawed Marxistanalysis he seeks to avoid: an Althusserian-like theory in which reified "Ideological State Apparatuses" (such as the Panopticon) directly dominate through subject constitution (Althusser, esp. 162-74). Thus, the shift from "exceptionaldiscipline" to "generalizedsurveillance"(209) enables Foucault to specify that discipline should not be identified with institutionsbut should be understoodinstead as "a type of power"and "a modalityfor [power's] exercise"(215). For the post-Foucauldian critic, at least one searchingquestion arises: how can the genealoof gist account for "a historical transformation"

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this kind when his analysisfocuses on the effects Governmentality of alreadyexisting powerrelations(209)? By exFoucaulthimself providesimportant Fortunately, cluding substantiveand linguistic concepts such resourcesfor the criticalimaginingof the Victoas culture,ideology, values, andnorms,Foucault rian past. His late thinking on governmentality is unableto explainhow (muchless why) certain to clearly aims to offer alternatives the objectifystruggles and their outcomes become consoliing domination and statist emphases of Discidatedandinstitutionalized (Habermas 287). Foupline and Punish, therebyilluminatingthe study cault defuses this problemonly by invoking the of disciplinein a self-consciouslyliberalsociety.9 materialdetails of Frenchhistory.Earlymodern First,Foucaultdramatically improveson genealFrancesaw the "swarming" both exceptional of modelof humansubjectivity. ogy's impoverished institutions and their generalized offshoots, In contrastto the dominatedbodies of Discipline while the "state-control of the mechanisms of and Punish, governmentality presumes active discipline" increasedundersuccessive absolutsubjectswho arebothconscious and "free."0 By and ist, revolutionary, Napoleonic regimes (211, excepting relations of physical force, Foucault 213). Withthe exceptionof the Panopticon,Fouredefines power as that which is exercised over cault draws largely on these Continentaldevelagents for whom choice is possible: "subjects opments. He is far less interested in Britain, who are faced with a field of possibilities in where a self-consciously liberaland vehemently which severalways of behaving... may be realProtestantnationalculturehelped to ensure that ized" ("Subject" 221). Foucault'srevisedsubject the growthof centralized,modem institutions reis thereforetheoretically compatiblewith materimainedsubjectto deep-seatedpopularhostility. alist conceptssuch as PierreBourdieu'snotionof That is not to deny the formidableachievethe habitus. For Bourdieu, subject constitution ments of British administrative pioneers such as entails the profound acculturationof mind and Chadwick and Kay-Shuttleworth.Nor is it to body, a process through which conscious indiminimize the effects of bureaucratic experimenviduals become unconsciously complicit in pertation in the colonies.8 Nor is it to overlook the works petuatingculturalnorms.Normativization fact thatoverthe courseof the nineteenth century throughthe deploymentof "symbolicpower"-a (and especially after 1870) the rationalization, powerthat,like Foucault's,is distinctfromphysicentralization,and expansion of Victoriangovcal force. While the notionof subjectivities habiternmentproceededapace. It is, however,to suguatedthroughthe circulationof symbolic power gest that inasmuchas so astute a civil servantas is hardly liberatory,it does, like Foucault's reMatthew Arnold was prompted to declare, in vised position,endow individualswith the poten1869,thatthe Britishpeople "havenot the notion, tial to resistnorms. so familiar on the Continent ..., of the State" Accordingto Foucault'slateressays, power (83-84), the applicationof Foucault'sgenealogy operates indirectly, through the mediation of to Victorian Britainappears presentat least one to human actors engaged in diverse relations with logical problem.Can a model in which panoptione another ("Subject" 225). Power relations cism is both"generalized" fromandconcentrated thus consist in modes of action upon the actions in exemplary modern institutions be applied of others.Freedomand power agonisticallyprosuccessfully to the study of a society in which voke each other, each representingthe preconsuch institutionswere only beginningto evolve? dition of the other's possibility. To be free is Clearly,Victorianistscholarsseeking to account not-as in crude liberal thought-to escape to for the generalization panopticismmusteither of some autonomous realm outside power but, modify Foucault'sanalysis or conflate Britain's rather,to exercise one's own power to influence material historywith thatof France. and be influencedby others.Foucault'srevisions

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thus constitute a relational theory of power, predicatedon perpetualcontest and on the possibility of change.1' Foucault's revisions further demand a reimagining of the state. WhereasDiscipline and to Punish persistentlyreturned the importance of asks us to state apparatuses, "Governmentality" reconsider precisely this tendency. The state, Foucaultargues,is but"amythicizedabstraction" of power. Rather than reify state domination, scholars must discover the extent to which the stateitself dependson externalrelationsof power (103). In thus locating power largely outside of the state's aegis, governmentality anticipates Foucault'svividarticulation liberalismas a criof tique of raison d'e'tat:as the "momentit became apparentthatif one governedtoo much, one did not governat all"("Space" 242; cf. Gordon15). It would be hardto overstate the relevance of such thinking to the critical imagining of Britain.Throughoutthe cennineteenth-century tury,Britain'srulingclasses stroveto govern indirectly: to implement parliamentarypower in ways that encouraged self-help, philanthropy, civic voluntarism,and local government.In the 1830s the British electorate cautiously affirmed the state's mandateto maintainsocial stability. The parliamentary reformsof this era authorized the state to promotebrutallydeterrent poor laws andefficientpolicing but not to administer inor, deed, to compel such measures.In this process, the purpose of the nation's legendarily "free" constitution was reimagined: emphasis shifted away from the historicalprotectionof "natural" rights (i.e., the rights of the landed elite to curb the state'spotentialtyranny)and towardthe protection of property(towardwhich end the state might play a useful role).'2 This was a foundational moment in what Weberhas described as the intimaterelationbetween capitalismand the rationalization of the social order (Law 350; Economy and Society 1465n14). Nevertheless, in securing the stability on which capitalist development depended,Britain'sleaders-as Weber recognized-resisted or curtailedunpopular

statistmeasures.Theirgoal was not "regular bureaucraticintervention" the liberalideal of a but "moralisticbut pluralisticself-governingorder" (Parry 127). As a mentality of rule, explains Nikolas Rose, liberalism abandonedthe "megalomaniac and obsessive fantasy of a totally administered society"(43). Whig artsof government perfectly illustrateliberalismin this form: their aim was precisely to regulate "the general conduct of individuals ... without the need for intervention" (Foucault,"Space"241). Indeed, according to Whig-Liberal ideology, intervention was invariably counterproductive. As George CornewallLewis, a leading Whig, asserted in 1832, "All the praiseworthy endeavoursof rulers to make men good by law have utterly failed" (qtd. in Mandler 90). Addressing Parliament in 1840, Henry Howick epitomizedthe Whig philosophyof governance. In additionto protectingpersonand property, he argued,governmentmay "promote,""diffuse," and "encourage"the "virtue"of citizens. But it cannot attemptto enforce or-as in Benthamto mechanically generate such virtue (qtd. in Parry 114). Harriet Martineau, the celebrated the popularizerof political economy, articulated same idea in her 1837 study Society in America: "laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourageand help to preserveit; but they cannot originate it." Laws, in other words, may operate negatively (by punishing crime) and indirectly (by "encouraging"virtue). But social improvementultimatelyderives from the personal efforts of individuals: by "each one being as good as he can make himself" (244). Victorian Whigs and their allies thus assumed that governmentcould play only a limited role in shapinghumancharacter. Foucault'slate workshelp us to analyzeliberalism in this form by calling attention to the coverteffects of a laissez-faireideology thatproclaimed its own inactivity. Like Marx and Engels before him, Foucaultalertsus to the tension between government's purposely unobtrusive form and its potentially powerful effects.13Al-

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thoughWhigs such as Howick insisted thatindividual virtue "alone" creates prosperity, they called on the state to protectproperty,"assuring to exertion its true reward"(qtd. in Parry 114). In so doing, the state undertook to steady Adam Smith's invisible hand. Whig-Liberal governance was thus demonstrably unlike the disciplinary society of Foucault's genealogy. Nonetheless, the power to exercise force curtailedpoliticalandcriminaldissidence,while exthe ploiting colonial resources, thus warranting "consensus" which liberalsocieties depend.14 on Yet what interestedFoucaultmore than the state's power to repress were the more subtle, diffuse, and productive processes of "governIn mentalization." these essays, he evoked an intricate play of indirect power relations, both inside and outside the state, that "incite,""seduce,""makeeasier or more difficult"-a power that,unlike statistrepression,is "a way of acting upon ... acting subjectsby virtueof theiracting or being capable of action" ("Subject" 220). Foucault'snotion of empoweredactors provoking one anotherthrougha dense web of indirect relations provides a fitting model for what the Victorians saw as a dynamic public sphere. A "free intellectual community," wrote Walter Bagehot in 1856, "is a complicated network of ramifiedrelations,interlacingand passing hither and thither,old and new."For Bagehot, the relation between civil society and the state was, like Foucault'srelationbetween freedomand power, agonistic ratherthan antithetical,each constituting the conditions of the other's possibility (254-57). Bagehot thus articulateda characteristically mid-Victorian equipoise between the energy of "free" individuals and the duty of statesmento providerationalizing influence. From Disciplinary Individualism to Pastorship
The hardest lesson for Government or urchin to learn is, what it ought not do .... [I]t is not the province of the Governmentto train the mind of the

people. [Government should protect person and property, but it] is not the duty of Government to feed the people, to clothe them, to build houses for them, to direct their industry or their commerce, to superintend theirfamilies, to cultivate their minds, to shape their opinions, or to supply them with religious teachers, physicians, schoolmasters, books, or newspapers. -Edward Baines, Letters . .. on State Education

(1846 [qtd.in DigbyandSearby 88])

I could shape for you other plans, for art-galleries, and for natural history galleries, andfor many precious, many,it seems to me, needful things.... [O]ur British constitution . . wants healthierfeeding. You have got its corn laws repealed for it; try if you cannot get corn laws established for it, dealing in a better bread;-bread made of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors;doors, not of robbers',but of Kings' Treasuries. -John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1864 [47]) In Discipline and Punish, "disciplinary indi-

vidualism" described the central paradox of the modern condition. According to Foucault, the more one was monitored and assessed, the one's "individuality" became (193). "stronger" The chief problem with this importantconcept was its inabilityto distinguishbetweenthe dominatorypower of state apparatusesand the kind of everydaysocializing processes emphasizedin Bourdieu's theory of the habitus. As Edward Said has argued,Foucault confused "thepower of institutionsto subjugateindividuals"with the simple fact "thatindividualbehaviourin society is frequently a matter of following rules and conventions" (151). Theorized in this way, the disciplinary individual "lacks any kind of autonomous identity"and, therefore,any capacity to treatof "substantive ethical or socio-political questions"(Norris54, 60; cf. Walzer64 and Eagleton 7-8). Critics influenced by Foucault's analysis of power thus problematizethe historicization of self-reflective or critically detached subjectivities (A. Anderson). Genealogy privi"at leges discursive "manipulation" the expense of psychic understanding" (Lane4).

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As though in reply, Foucault's essays on reconceptualizethe paradoxof governmentality individualism introducing human by disciplinary and (in theory) deemphasizingthe state. agency Foucaulthere identifiesthe power to individualize with pastorship, the ancient Christianconintensivecarefor his flock. cept of the shepherd's Fromthe seventeenthcenturyon, he argues,secularizedformsof pastorshipsoughtto strengthen society by maximizing the productivepotential of individuals ("Politics" 82, 60). Here is the paradoxrefigured:the same processes through which modern societies promote well-being entangle the individual in a normativizingweb. A prime manifestation of this paradox is the present-daysocial securitysystem, which, while beneficial to individual welfare, has the "perverse effect" of encouraging dependence on a rule-bound ("SocialSecurity"160). bureaucracy so Pastorship definedlends itself to an analysis of variousBritishdevelopments. the turnof At the twentieth century, the "New Liberals" attemptedto elude the paradoxof state welfare by introducingnationalinsurancefinancedthrough workers'contributions.But for most of the Victorianera a more apt articulationof the paradox was the self-reliant individual "encircled ... at every level" by an elaborate network of "selfgoverning" social practices (Harris, "Society" 68). At the same time, Britain's leading social critics-including celebratedwriters-were convincedthatthe nation'smost seriousproblemwas the lack of pastorship. Pastorshipthusprovidesa tool for the criticalimaginingof Victopowerful riangovernance:sufficientlyflexible to describe the aims and achievements of both voluntarists and statists, philanthropists and bureaucrats, staunch individualists like EdwardBaines and humanitarian criticslike JohnRuskin. That said, Foucault'selaborationof pastorship significantly diverges from British contexts. His focus on the Continentleads him back to the multifarious activitiesof centralizedstates in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries. As notion of exhaustiveand individuChristianity's

alizing pastoralguidancebecame secularizedin postfeudalEurope,it developedthrougha broad notion of "police":"a governmentaltechnology peculiar to the state; domains, techniques, targets where the state intervenes"("Politics"77). Such a statetechnology,moreover,was continuous with an epistemologicalshift of sorts:a shift from the model of the family (seen as a microcosm of feudal rule) to the model of population of (an abstraction the masses reifiedthroughstatistical analyses). These aspects of Foucault's study of governmentality arguably compromise his determination to avoid overemphasizing the state. Nevertheless, that is of far less consequence in the case of Britain.Indeed,Foucaulthimself remarkedon the differencebetween early moder French and British governmentalization:"The English,"he wrote, "didnot develop a comparable ["police"] system, mainly because of the parliamentarytradition on the one hand, and the tradition of local, communal autonomy on the other, not to mention the religious system" ("Space" 241; cf. Discipline 213). As Nancy Armstronghas argued,Puritantreatises "represented the family as a self-enclosed social unit in whose affairs the state could not intervene" (18). Hence, while Parliamentwas, in many respects, a formidable site of centralized power, the development of pastorshipin early modern Britain was unlike "the rathertypically French effort of policing"(Foucault,"Space"241). Inthenineteenth the century, through groundefforts of self-appointed middle-class breaking statisticians such as Nassau Senior and James Kay-Shuttleworth, a modern notion of population-the idea, in Poovey's term, of a "social body"-impressed itself indeliblyon theVictorian imagination.The mid-nineteenth centurysaw a of proliferation royalcommissionsof inquiryand a zealous "faithin information" social statisand tics (0. Anderson283). Butthe idea of an abstract population,along with the objectifyingmaterialist stance on which it depends, was relentlessly challengedby powerfulrivalsfor epistemological

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authority.Kay-Shuttleworthhimself embodied both sides of these conflicting allegiances: a stabut tistician and protobureaucrat also a disciple of the power of personalized bonds to revivify a Christian and civic community. Such ambivalence was even more strikingin the great social like novelsof the era.Writers GaskellandDickens the dramatized ills of a pastorlessnationbut,in so doing, recoiled from statist solutions. Hence, a critical practicethat aims to imagine the pathof in Britgovernmentalization nineteenth-century ain mustdistanceitself fromFoucault'sanalyses of Franceandfocus on the "specificrationalities" familiarto liberalVictorians.15 In early modern France, Foucault alleges, the family "disappear[ed]as the model of government,exceptfor a certain numberof residual themesof a religiousor moralnature"("Govern99; mentality" emphasisadded).These "themes," as readersof Martineau, Gaskell, Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, and a host of others will recognize, were-so far from being "residual"-the source of Victorian literature's characteristic frisson. Ruskin's call for "healthierfeeding" is but one example from a literature teeming with demands for committedpastorshipin a nationof allegedly self-reliant individuals and communities. Such demandstook preciselythe formof moralandreligious imperatives. These were not calls for a moreefficientpopulation(althoughsuchcalls existed and would reach a crescendo at the turnof the century)but pleas on behalf of the shepherdless poorfor the reinvigoration communityand of ties between upperand lower character-building ranks.Describingthe persistenceof religiousbelief in nineteenth-century Britain,CharlesTaylor has contrastedthe modernizationof Frenchand Anglo-Saxon societies. It "wouldbe a mistake," he argues,to regardBritain'sliberalreforms"as move partof a smooth,continuing,unidirectional towards 'secularization,'" since the "initialimpulse underlyingreform was a deeply religious one" (Sources 399, 401). Thus, British governmentalization differed from French for at least two reasons:first,because a moral,familial, and

religious concept of pastorshippersistedin Britain and, second, because, from the view of many influentialcontemporaries, Britishpastorshipleft to the discretion of voluntary and local efforts-was woefully insufficient. Hence, for Victorian and EdwardianBritons, pastorship was a vexing contemporary moralangst,poissue: a sourceof breast-beating litical controversy,and conflicted social desire. Novels such as Dickens's Bleak House represent a distinctivelyBritishparadox:on the one hand, figuring the hapless victims of laissez-faire (Jo and the inhabitantsof Tom-all-Alone's);on the other hand, rejecting modern pastoral alternatives (Tulkinghorn'sominous professional expertise, Bucket's compromised police power, Mrs. Pardiggle's organized philanthropic endeavors). This is not the Foucauldian paradox of the individual's dependence on external and normalizing forms of authority (a point to which I will return) but the uniquely British paradox of the middle- and upper-class Victorians who demandedeffective governanceonly to be confounded by their own ingrained liberal predilections.AlthoughBleak House vehemently exposes the evils of laissez-faire, it simultaneously rejects Chadwickian technocracy and professionalized social work, instead favoringthe personaland familial pastoralrelations associated with Esther and Allan Woodcourt. Similarly, Gaskell's North and South (1854-55) portrays the ills of unregulated industrialcapitalismyet strivesto imagine redress in terms of sustained "personal contact" between proprietors proletarians and (421). In this way, Victorian literaturerepresents nothing so persistently as the desire for a catachresticpastoral authority: one that would be rational but unbureaucratic,personal but omnipresent, authoritative liberatory, but efficientbut English.16 Mill, Foucault, and the Imagination of Power in a Liberal Society [W]e can demandof those who govern us a certaintruthas to theirultimate aims .... [T]hisis the

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-Foucault, "Aesthetics" (51) Like Michel Foucault,John StuartMill devoted his life's work to the problemof individualityin modern societies. Although he was raised by James Mill to be Bentham's scion, Mill's careful reading of romantic thinkers such as Tocqueville, Coleridge,and Wilhelmvon Humboldt persuadedhim thathumanindividualitywas the highest social good. Mill became the archexponent of a principledliberal middle ground.Just as he sought a synthesis between Benthamite and Coleridgeanphilosophies, so he attempted to cultivate an "artof government"that would simultaneously centralize and diffuse knowledge, producing "the greatest dissemination of power consistentwith efficiency"(Liberty164). That said, Mill was as loath as Foucault to believe that liberty could be guaranteedby laws and institutions.His lifelong exhortationto civic participationanticipatedFoucault's insight that "liberty is what must be exercised" ("Space" 245). Mill's prescient critique of mass society helps us to imaginehow a calculablemodem rationality developed within a culturethat was, to a very large extent, politically, intellectually, and philosophicallyopposed to thatend. The thesis of Mill's remarkable1836 essay "Civilization"is that materialprogress deterioratescharacter diminishesindividualpower. and Mill begins by stipulatingthatmodem society is civilized "inthe narrowsense":its achievements chiefly materialratherthan broadly human. Indeed, in point of cultivation(a Coleridgeanconcept), civilization is arguably "stationary"or "retrograde"(119). The reason is simple. Because civilization consists in rudimentary forms of cooperation-division of labor,protectionof property,and dependence on other "generalarrangements"-individuals need no longer exert their "strength or courage" to survive (129). Thus,in a civilized society,character atrophiesas "powerpasses from individualsto masses,"and

"theweight andimportance" individuals"sink of into greaterandgreaterinsignificance" (126). Mill's thesis not only belies the ubiquitous myth of Britain's stalwartnational character,it also derails the searching political and philosophical debates of the day. Mill himself urged a liberal balance between civil and state authority and between local and centralized governance. He also supported a progressive social agenda,includingpopulareducationand administrative and democratic reform.17Yet, as Mill tells it, these liberalizing measures do not in themselves provide safeguards against the further decline of individuality.Rather,civilization advances througha self-perpetuatingdynamic: as the scale and complexity of the "general on arrangements" which individualsdependbecome ever greater,power passes from individuals to masses. Political forms-for example, local as opposed to centralized governmentreverse that dynamic only insofar as they succeed in fortifyingindividuality.18 For Mill, the moral and intellectual conseare quences of individualdisempowerment devIt is in this respect that Mill's thought, astating. for all its gradualism, most closely approximates that of his revolutionary contemporary Karl Marx.19 With so few "inducementsto call forth Mill writes, the great maenergy of character," jority of people are motivatedby nothingbut the desire of wealth (129). Such embourgeoisement is vastly amplifiedby the influence of mass culture.Urbananonymityreduces the significance, even the possibility, of individualrepute.Newspapers speak "in the same voice at once," disseminating ideas with the speed of a telegraph and facilitating an all-but-"irresistible" popular will (125). Representation begins visibly to dominate reality: success "depends not upon what a person is, but what he seems" (133). Depersonalization advances-regardless of entrenchedresistanceto bureaucratic forms-as a function of the sheer scale, pace, and multiplicity of civilized social relations.For Mill modem civilization thus entails what Marx and Engels

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call a systematic "suppressionof individuality" (GermanIdeology 464). Whereas eighteenth-centurythinkers such as Bentham had touted the virtues of public opinion, Mill shows that opinion itself has become both a product and an agent of specious value: "The individual becomes so lost in the crowd, that though he depends more and more uponopinion,he is aptto dependless andless on well-groundedopinion"(132). Mill is but a step away from the homogenized masses he drew in On Liberty more than twenty years later: ruled by the "despotism of custom," tyrannized by norms,leveled by conformityin education,politics, commerce, and the arts. For Mill civilization thus foments "so great a mass of influences hostile to Individuality,that it is not easy to see how it can standits ground"(Liberty117, 121). Mill's ideas for combating these trends illustrate his drift from his father's Benthamite stance. In a general (and important)sense, Mill articulatesthe germ of positive liberty:the antilaissez-faireist notion that progress will not develop so long as societies "slumber,and leave things to themselves"("Civilization"136). SigMill's main nificantly,however,in "Civilization" vision of positive action is to strengthen"theinfluence of superior minds over the multitude" (135). Mill's Coleridgeaninterestin producinga tier of intellectualpastorsthus anticipatesGladstone's mid-Victoriancivil service agenda and Arnold's idea of "Culture":in each of these cases, the elevation of the many depends on authorizingand diffusingthe cultivationof the few. Such explicit appeals to social hierarchy have earned Mill the reputationof being an "aristocraticliberal"(Kahan). Seen from this perspective, Mill occupies the vanguardrole he enjoys in Raymond Williams's account of English social thought (49). Williams has rightly emphasized the danger of Mill's reflexive recoil from the popular:"There are in fact no masses," he urges, "only ways of seeing people as masses" (300). From this view, Mill is at the forefront of an earnest but elitist

line of liberal thinking, the counterproductive effect of which is to reify the classed, gendered, and racialized boundariesbetween high culture and low. But, as the parallelswith Foucault suggest, Mill's legacy is not reducible to that elitist tendency. Rather,in "Civilization"Mill articulated what is, in effect, one of the first postmodernist analyses of society. As Regenia Gagnierhas argued, the 1890s, which saw the burgeoningof a mass consumerculture,"initiated ideology of an choice dependenton the proliferation images" of (54; cf. Richards 5). Mill's "postmodernist" move was not only to foresee the reign of representationin a commodity culturebut also to describe its impacton the individualas a "massof influences." Like Foucault in his late works, Mill evokes a society in which individuals are free to choose the termsof theirown subjugating dependence. It is because power is, for Mill as for Foucault, imagined as a mode of action on the action of others that societies retain a glimmeringpotentialfor liberation.Both thinkersvisualize this as the potential for strengthening individualityand enhancingthe exercise of individual power. Yet for Mill and Foucault this emancipatory project-the projectof promoting "new forms of subjectivity"-is, paradoxically, a veritableminefieldof potentially"perverse effect[s]" (Foucault, "Subject"216 and "Social Security"160). For Mill, as for Foucault,pastorship-the means by which to build individuality without homogenizing individuals-is the centralproblematic a modem liberalsociety. of Hence, Mill can in many respects enhance the criticalimaginingof Victorian govermentalization as much as Foucault himself. Although Mill's works demonstrate that nineteenthcenturyBritainwas, for all its liberalallegiances, subject to perverse effects, Britain's history remains distinct from the Continental examples studiedby Foucault.Mill's contemporaries jealously withheldpastoralpowerfromthe state.The state they built was envisioned as the guarantor of privatepropertyand, to a certain extent, as a

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neutralseat from which the civilized character of be gradually difenlightened gentlemen might fused. It was not until after the First WorldWar thatthe statewas viewed as a bureaucratic structurethroughwhich to implementthe policies of Mill's conprofessionalexperts.To the contrary, temporaries fought zealously to reserve that functionfor themselves,to safeguard personthe alized quality of pastoral power or-from anotherview-to neglectpastorship altogether. Hence, in the British context, the critical imagining of governmentalizationconcerns, in Mill's terms,the questionof how so-called selfgovernment failed to be the government of "eachby himself" and became instead the government "of each by all the rest"-a "social tyranny"that "enslavesthe soul itself" in penetratingthe very "detailsof life" (Liberty46). Or, to put the same problem in Gagnier's terms, governmentalization concerns the question of how the individual's power to choose devolved into "an ideology of choice"-as powerless to emancipateindividualsas is an uninformedpublic opinionto warrant integrityof a representhe tative democracy.Such issues demanda critical practice sensitive to the distinctive textures of Britain's liberal past: to its material history, to the social relationsfacilitatedby that history,to the epistemological frame that gave those relations subjective meaning, and to the literary texts throughwhich thatframewas represented. Such a critical imagining of Victorian history may, in turn, illuminate the resurgentneoliberalismof our own day. Victorianwriterssuch as Dickens, Gaskell,and Ruskinwere poised between the individualistic morality of the nineteenth century and the collective needs of the emerging welfare state. Today,by contrast, the welfare state has itself become an object of attack. WhatNikolas Rose calls "advanced liberal rule"has thus sought "to degovernmentalize the State and to de-statizepracticesof government," relocating the pastoral mission to a market "governed by the rationalities of competition, accountability and consumer demand" (41).20

Post-Foucauldian critics on the left have offered powerful critiquesof social controlbut have yet to develop alternativesto the market'sallegedly liberating approachto producing capable citizens. In the prominent liberal theory of John Rawls, political subjects are simply assumed to possess the qualities necessary for citizenship. EmbracingatomistassumptionsthatMill fought hard to contest, Rawlsian liberals set aside the and character-building communityconcernsthat Victorian literature. Mill's latter-day ignited heirs thus neglect the aspect of his thoughtthat, while prizing liberty and individuality "very highly," recognizes the "social embedding of human agents" (Taylor,"Cross-Purposes"185; cf. Benhabib 157 and Ryan). In so doing, they enable conservativesto dismiss the pastoralcredentialsof the left. Foucault's discernment of these political challenges, I believe, catalyzed the revision of his own Nietzschean project. Whereas the genealogical analysis of power was developed in response to the Marxistdilemmas of the 1970s, his essays on governmentalityoffer a fitting rejoinder to the ever-more-grandiose claims of free-market neoliberals.To move beyond raison d'etat and beyond the new liberal orthodoxy, pastorshipmust involve ways of strengthening individuals without, simultaneously, engineering their conformity. Victorian literature's intense reflectionson characterand governancein a liberal society cannot but provide a valuable resourcefor this most timely critical enterprise, as well as the opportunity imagine the history to of a differentkind of present.

NOTES
The writing of this essay was supportedby the President's JuniorFaculty Developmentfellowship at the Universityof Washington.For helpful comments I am indebted to Marshall Brown, as well as to George Behlmer,KathleenBlake, Jed Esty, Elaine Hadley, Gary Handwerk,Andrew Miller, TilottamaRajan,Adam Sutcliffe, and LindaWoodbridge.

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See also the recent reevaluationof new historicism in Gallagherand Greenblatt, esp. 49-74. 2 The term liberalism is, of course, riddledwith contradiction:it can denote diversepolitical agendas,a set of capitalist economic ideologies, and/ora culturalcommitmentto the idea of freedom. My discussion of Victorianliberalism refers to a broad social movement and cultural mythology that culminatedin the mid-Victorianyears. One centralfeature was the perceived importanceof limiting the power of centralizedgovernment.Space does not permitme to offer a detailed critique of competing strains of thought, a discussion of liberalism's relation to empire, or a thoroughgoing contrastbetween Victorianliberalismand the neoliberalism of our own day. These topics are explored more fully in Literature. Goodlad, Victorian 3 British According to Pat Thane,the eighteenth-century state "hadthe will and the capacity to influence the lives of citizens" but "did so by methods markedlyless visible than those of its Europeancounterparts." Britain's "amateuraddrawnfrom the local gentry and magistracy, ministration," "evadedthe resentment aroused" Frenchofficialsandtheir by "moreopenly severelegal powers"(5, 4). See also Brewer. 4 Here and throughout, my discussion of Bentham's legacy focuses on his recommendations for a centralized, bureaucratic, tutelarystate. On the tension betweenthis "unEnglish" dimension of Bentham'sthought and his contrary laissez-faireistallegiances, see Conway. 5 For comparableassessments of the Lunacy Commission, mines inspection,and prisonssee McCandless90, Bartrip 79, and DeLacy 182-208. 6 For a discussion of Tocqueville's contrast between France'srelianceon "la tutelle"and Britain's"freemoeurs," see Siedentop 164-71; Marx's belief that Britain lacked a state machinery"was noted by Lenin (33-34); "ready-made Youngarguedthatthe English bourgeoisieimitatedthe institutions of the upper classes (75); Gramsci pointed out that Britain'smiddleclasses gained economic supremacyyet left "theold land-owningclass [to] preserveits positionof virtual monopoly"(18); Weber'sworksarepepperedwith illuminating referencesto Britain'sdistinctivestatus,some of which I cite below; I also noteTaylor'sandFoucault'sremarks below. 7 On genealogy's nonsubstantiveapproachto analyzing power,a Nietzscheaninnovation,see Schrift 187-88. 8 On the importanceof critical practices that recognize the nineteenth-century"dialectic of empire and home," see Viswanathan 62. 9 In additionto Foucault's "Subject," views on govmy ernmentalityare drawnespecially from his "Governmentaland ity,""Space,""Social Security," "Politics." 10 Genealogicalanalysis tends to emphasizeobjectifying domination,reducing humansubjectivityto the application of power on docile bodies, to "theeffect and instrumentof a political anatomy"(Discipline 30). In his later works, Foucault stressedsubjectivizingprocesses, or "theway a human being turnshim-or herself-into a subject" ("Subject" 208).

" Gramsci's notion of a dynamic, always contested "hegemony" thus provides a useful equivalence for Foucault's revisedview of the underpinnings truth. of 12I allude to such early reforms as the 1834 New Poor Law, the introduction of the Metropolitan Police in 1828, and the Police Act of 1839. On the uneven implementation of police reforms,see Emsley,esp. 41-61. 13Laissez-faire is critiquedin Marx and Engels's Manifesto, where bourgeoisfreedomis seen to consist in the freedom of capitalrather thanof people (485-86). In his trenchant G. reply to present-daylibertarians, A. Cohenarguesthatthe state's protection of property,so far from being negative, constitutesa positive curbon the freedom of nonproprietors (56-57). 14 On the use of blasphemylaws to represspolitical dissidence, see Marsh 78-126. Colonialism was, of course, a crucial aspect of state force. Under British rule, India devolved from a competitive producerinto a deindustrialized consumer of British goods, becoming "the key to Britain's emergence as the workshop of the mid-nineteenth-century world"(Moore 76). British statesmenproclaimedthe merits of free trade, even while the British economy depended on colonial force and domestic tarriffs(Radhakamal Mukerjee, qtd. in Chomsky362-63). 15Foucaulthimself arguesthatthe "wordrationalization is dangerous";critics must analyze "specific rationalities ratherthan always invoking the progress of rationalization in general" ("Subject"210). On Kay-Shuttleworth'sconflicting allegiances, see Goodlad,"'Making.'" 16These points are developed at length in Goodlad, VictorianLiterature. 17A crucial exception was Mill's readinessto accept native "childishness"as a justification for empire. For a thoroughgoingcritique,see Mehta. 18 Carlyle had lamented the same modernphenomenon in "Signs of the Times"(1829): "No individualnow hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprisesingle-handed and without mechanical aids . . ." (467). His subsequent quest for "heroes"representeda more romantic and less democratic versionof Mill's call for character-building individuality. 19Marx and Mill had compatible commitmentsto individuality but differed markedly over means (Duncan). In The GermanIdeology, Marx and Engels describedcommunism as a mode of organization that would liberate"individuality"from "thedominationof materialconditions"(464). 20 On the appropriation Victoriandiscourse in recent of critiquesof the welfare state, see Hadley;Joyce.

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