SOURCE: Klein, Lawrence E. “The Culture of Liberty.” In Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 195-212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Klein discusses the concepts of discursive, cultural, and political liberty in Shaftesbury's later essays, arguing that, for Shaftesbury, conditions of freedom were necessary in order for the public to be able to make sound judgments.]

“POLITENESS”

Shaftesbury may have had qualms about the links between Whiggism and the Court after 1688, but polemics in Queen Anne's reign demanded simplicity. Thus, in his published writings, the Whigs were, simply, the party of liberty, the party that made the 1688 Revolution and opposed the French, the Stuart tyrants, and the High Churchmen. While Shaftesbury identified political liberty with post-1688 political arrangements, he was largely concerned with what we can identify, variously, as cultural, intellectual and, especially, discursive liberty. Thus, for Shaftesbury, liberty was the condition for full human development: “Tis Liberty indeed that can only polish & refine the Spirit & Soul as well as Witt of Man.” Such liberty operated in the related fields of discourse and politics, “Freedome of Reason in the learnd world, & Good Government & Liberty in the civil world.”¹ Since the Church and the Court dominated discourse in unhealthy ways, assuming magisterial or awing postures that promoted their political authority at the expense of individual autonomy, Shaftesbury urgently and repetitively asserted the importance of discursive liberty. Having examined how Shaftesbury mounted a critique of the Church and the Court in psychosocial and discursive terms, we can turn to the positive side of the argument, the promise of Whig political hegemony to initiate a distinctive and flourishing age in British culture.

Shaftesbury sketched his program in a letter of 1706, anticipating that the ultimate victory of Britain over France would lead to a great advance in “Letters and Knowledge.” He acknowledged that, like “all good Things,” “Liberty of Thought and Writing” had their “Inconveniences,” specifically, “a sort of Libertinisme in Philosophy.” Nonetheless, the price was worth paying since liberty had the tendency to correct its own excesses. He noted, for example, that, though the early Protestant reformers had been guilty of excess, “Blasphemouse Enthousiasts and reall Phanaticks” no longer posed a danger because excess had diminished naturally. Indeed, he wrote: “I am farr from thinking that the Cause of Theisme will lose any thing by fair Dispute. I can never … wish better for it than when I wish the Establishment of an intire Philosophical Liberty.”² Here, in summary, were Shaftesbury's basic themes: the circumstances were propitious for a great leap forward in British culture; those circumstances centered on liberty, the only felicitous context for cultural and intellectual development; while liberty referred, conventionally, to political arrangements, it also meant specifically discursive liberty, freedom of expression and criticism.

Shaftesbury developed these themes in later essays, especially A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm and Sensus Communis, first published in 1708 and 1709 respectively.³ In the Letter, Shaftesbury offered the dynamics of discursive liberty as a solution to the topical problem of handling enthusiasm. As a natural and inevitable component of human character and social relations, enthusiasm had to have its vent. Since suppression bred what it sought to eliminate, freedom for enthusiasts was preferable to attempts at magisterial control. Shaftesbury believed society could afford such toleration because discursive liberty meant not only freedom to express but also freedom to examine and criticize. A liberty of reason was the best means to puncture false claims, to reduce imposture, and to drain enthusiasms of their tumescence. Indeed, one form of critical liberty was the liberty to mock and make fun, the freedom of raillery that Shaftesbury investigated further in Sensus Communis, subtitled An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and humour.

Sensus Communis used the defence of raillery to frame a discussion of the moral principles stated in Shaftesbury's earlier Inquiry Concerning Virtue. As a discussion of discursive liberty, Sensus Communis elaborated points made in the Letter and broadened the range of the discussion beyond the Letter 's topical concerns. In particular, Sensus Communis proposed rational and sociable conversation as a model for intellectual activity and cultural habits. The critical enterprise, he argued, was essential for moral and cultural health.

Shaftesbury's concern in these two essays with discursive freedom led to explicit and classic formulations of the cultural dimensions of liberty. According to the Letter:

Justness of Thought and Stile, Refinement in Manners, good Breeding, and Politeness of every kind, can come only from the Trial and Experience of what is best. Let but the Search go freely on, and the right Measure of every thing will soon be found. Whatever Humour has got the start, if it be unnatural, it cannot hold; and the Ridicule, if ill plac'd at first, will certainly fall at last where it deserves.⁴

Intellectual and discursive freedom had the negative capacity to dissolve unnatural humors (including all pernicious enthusiasms) and, beyond that, to curtail all manner of excess. Hence, truth, civility, and all expressive refinement depended on the freedom of the intellectual and discursive search, what we might call the ‘essayistic’ ventures of a community of inquiring intellects.

In Sensus Communis, the same idea was expressed with greater attention to the specific processes of liberty:

Wit will mend upon our hands, and Humour will refine it-self; if we take care not to tamper with it, and bring it under Constraint, by severe Usage and rigorous Prescriptions. All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Mens Understandings. 'Tis a destroying of Civility, Good Breeding, and even Charity itself, under pretence of maintaining it.⁵

The passage brought into direct conjunction the two key terms, politeness and liberty: politeness summed up the proper state of wit, humor, understanding, and manners, in individuals and in society at large, while liberty referred to the condition of unlimited interaction and unlimited criticism. Since the essence of freedom was friendly interaction, the passage lays before us, as the setting for moral and cultural development, a scene of polite conversation, the decorous freedom of discussion among gentlemen. Liberty was thus figured in terms of a healthy interactive situation. At the same time, refined sociability was being constituted as an open-ended and unconstrained ideal, free from authoritarian interference. As we saw in chapter 5, this conversational scene was the paradigmatically apt discursive situation, most likely to eliminate the psychosocial postures that inhibited reason and autonomy. Just as the Church and the Court were associated with interactive models, so too was liberty.

All politeness was owing to liberty because free discussion and interaction tended to eliminate the excessive and the false. However, the relation between liberty and politeness was also based on the fact that the interactions that comprised politeness did themselves constitute a form of liberty. In a sense, conversation itself here became a paradigmatic mode of liberty, and, thus, liberty was assimilated into the notion of culture itself.

In such passages, Shaftesbury gave a significant twist to the notion of liberty. Although he clearly saw his discussion in a Whiggish political light, “liberty” did not refer in these passages to a patently political condition, neither to the establishment of rights nor to independence nor to self-government. Rather, it referred to a social and cultural condition, a condition of unlimited interpersonal interaction. Liberty in the modern world was thus associated with a lively public culture, a public engaged in a culture of examination, criticism, and exchange. This was a significant expansion on the cultural politics of the civic tradition since here the eloquence of senators was transformed into an all-embracing medium for society. The conventional civic point was that cultural achievements had a specifically political foundation: Letters or Arts were based on Liberty, which was a condition of civic existence. Here, however, Shaftesbury was emphasizing liberty's character as a condition of social and cultural life, a condition of discourse and cultural production in society. This was a less civic standpoint. Certainly, the second sense of liberty can be seen as an extension of the first: that is, one can assert—and this no doubt was Shaftesbury's intention—that an aspect of civic liberty is discursive and cultural liberty. At the same time, however, one cannot help but regard Shaftesbury's concern with discursive and cultural liberty as a significant shift of emphasis, one that distanced liberty from its specifically civic setting.

Shaftesbury's advocacy of such a public culture was intended to have a Whiggish force: he was defining what we take as a characteristic feature of eighteenth-century culture as a partisan achievement. However, Shaftesbury's cultural politics also mitigated the stressful relations between virtue and culture in writers of the civic tradition. A truly polite people was no longer in danger of losing its liberty since that liberty was secured in the very fact of the people's being polite. Politeness was so thoroughly enmeshed in discursive and cultural liberty that politeness was not conceivable without such liberty. Shaftesbury had reached a point at which he could dispense with the fear that cultural development in itself threatened liberty or with the conviction that liberty required the utmost cultural simplicity. Thus, he rejected explicitly the nostalgic propensity of the civic tradition, not only in its specifically political respects but in its longing for manners of a by-gone day. Moreover, as we will see, this transvaluation of the cultural put the improvement of taste and the elaboration of criticism at the center of the moral and political endeavor.⁶

GREECE

Abandoning nostalgia did not necessarily mean giving up the search for one's bearings through an examination of the past; and, as Shaftesbury deployed cultural history in his critiques of Church and Court, so he deployed it to elucidate the character and impact of liberty. A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm offered a taste of this in its brief evocation of “ancient policy” toward religious and philosophical opinion:

Not only the Visionarys and Enthusiasts of all kinds were tolerated, your Lordship knows, by the Antients; but on the other side, Philosophy had as free a course, and was permitted as a Ballance against Superstition. And whilst some Sects, such as the Pythagorean and latter Platonick, join'd in with the Superstition and Enthusiasm of the Times; the Epicurean, the Academick, and others, were allow'd to use all the Force of Wit and Raillery against it. And thus matters were happily balanc'd; Reason had fair Play; Learning and Science flourish'd. Wonderful was the Harmony and Temper which arose from all these Contrarietys. Thus Superstition and Enthusiasm were mildly treated; and being let alone, they never rag'd to that degree as to occasion Bloodshed, Wars, Persecutions, and Devastations in the World.⁷

This passage provided a pedigree to Shaftesbury's faith in the refining power of liberty as a discursive condition. Ancient discursive freedom was contrasted to the policy of modern governments, which interfered forcefully in matters of religious and other belief in order to guard uniformity of opinion.

Elsewhere in his writings, Shaftesbury elaborated the historical picture adumbrated here, fixing on ancient Greece as the classical locus of politeness. That Shaftesbury regarded the ancient Greeks as supremely polite was patent. Jean LeClerc remembered Shaftesbury asserting that “the Grecians were more civilized and more polite than we ourselves, notwithstanding we boasted so much of our improved wit and more refind Manners.”⁸ In Shaftesbury's own words, ancient Greece was the fountain of all divinity, philosophy, and “polite learning”; it was the “politest of all Nations,” the “sole polite, most civiliz'd, and accomplish'd Nation.”⁹ The politeness of the Greeks was then a cultural condition, signifying both their achievements in society, intellect, expression, and art and also the congruence of all these with (what Shaftesbury designated) natural standards and a just taste. Shaftesbury's Hellenism was aggressive and reductive. His dismissal of alternative claims eliminated complicated and multiple explanations. “The Greek Nation, as it is Original to us, in respect to these polite Arts and Sciences, so it was in reality original to it-self.” Greek accomplishment towered over all innovations of its predecessors. Politeness was an absolutely pure and unitary stream, of which Greece was the spring.¹⁰

The thrust of Shaftesbury's cultural-historical investigation was significantly non-Roman. Indeed, cultural Hellenism was the complement to Shaftesbury's anti-Augustanism. One reason for this shift of emphasis was the fact that the history of ancient Greece was not yet as predetermined by paradigmatic formulations as the history of ancient Rome. We have already seen how, according to the classical republican version of Roman history, republic and liberty passed into empire and tyranny. Since civic decline was accompanied by the refinement in manners and arts in ancient Rome, republican formulations insisted that liberty was unpolished while politeness was slavish. The model was too thoroughly vested with the presumptions of the Country critique of the Court, leaving no room for Shaftesbury's particular needs to honor both Country and courtly traditions, both civic virtue and politeness.

Of course, the civic humanists had not ignored Greece, but their interest and affection had always fallen on Sparta. For all its cultural achievements, Athens had an unstable political history, which rarely commended itself to civic writers. However, when Shaftesbury wrote of Greek politeness, he was thinking of Athens. The manner in which polite Athens could serve as a model of liberty and virtue is revealed in the sorts of liberty that Shaftesbury thought were actualized there. Shaftesbury used the Athenian experience to elaborate on the relations of liberty and cultural development. In his discussion, discourse was the exemplary arena in which politics and culture interacted. Moreover, Greek instances put Shaftesbury in a position to specify further the parameters of polite and impolite forms of expression. At the same time, Shaftesbury's discussion helps us to understand the extent to which he had developed a sophisticated cultural discourse, in which both liberty and culture submitted to the discipline of sociability.

Shaftesbury began with a very general genealogy of human culture. The primitive state of humans was acultural: social life was rudimentary, and language was just sufficient for conferring about wants and necessities. Man's linguistic condition was at zero degree, without self-consciousness, speculation or art. As society became less rudimentary and more secure, discursive opportunities expanded. Discussion of important matters evolved into debate, and speechmaking became common, with a double result. The orators themselves, in order to enhance their powers of persuasion, developed the arts of expression. Meanwhile, the auditors developed a sensitivity to distinctions in the realm of expression, learning what they found agreeable and what not.¹¹ In short, the exigencies of persuasion and the comparison of oratory were the foundations of linguistic self-consciousness and expressive refinement.

From the start, Shaftesbury's natural history adumbrated a politics of eloquence, since the polishing of expression arose in the public arena, in the competition for the assent of something like a primeval public. The existence of this public implied a popular or consensual politics of some sort. Shaftesbury was quick to make this implication explicit. In those of these early societies that gravitated towards the rule of one or of a few and where the power of force, awe or terror replaced that of assent, rhetorical arts atrophied. The very opposite occurred where government remained popular, for there persuasion remained important in the public realm and the rhetorical arts had to be elaborated as a basic element in governance.¹² The progress of oratory depended on liberty, and the liberty in which oratory flourished was the civic liberty of “Free Nations.”

However, another kind of liberty is evident in Shaftesbury's version of the polishing process. The career of eloquence was launched and propelled by a dialectic between rhetorical practice and rhetorical receptivity. While a sophisticated audience put pressure on the orator to be his best, the orator himself had an interest in training the audience, promoting “that Taste and Relish to which they ow'd their personal Distinction and Pre-eminence.”¹³ The growth of eloquence occurred, in Shaftesbury's account, because of the mutual interactions of orator and audience, the orators seeking to please and the audience learning its desires. (It was into this orator-audience relation that Shaftesbury inserted the critics, who “taught the public to discover what was just and excellent in each performance” of oratory.) Thus, the progress of oratory depended on latitude of interaction as well as civic liberty. Even in this most generalized of accounts, Shaftesbury specified two related but non-identical conditions for the refinement of expression: a politics of popular assent and also a condition of free interaction.

Since this genealogy of culture was itself of directly Hellenic inspiration, Shaftesbury had put himself in a position to develop these ideas further with specific regard to the ancient Greeks, who were, as we have seen, the fundamental datum in the history of politeness. He summarized the polishing of the Greeks in “Miscellaneous Reflections,” asserting that it was they who first “brought their beautiful and comprehensive Language to a just Standard.” Politeness, having established itself in the domain of their oratory, spread to every aspect of Greek culture. The refinement of the tongue became paradigmatic for all manner of expression in society, “from Musick, Poetry, Rhetorick, down to the simple Prose of History, thro all the plastick Arts of Sculpture, Statuary, Painting, Architecture, and the rest.”¹⁴ Politeness operated as a standard for all formal expression. Moreover, the refinement of all the arts was implied in the refinement of the central linguistic one.

In “Miscellaneous Reflections,” Shaftesbury traced this development not to specifically political but to more general associative factors. Despite geographical dispersal and political disunity, the Greeks shared a common “Extract” and a common language. More important, “animated by that social, publick and free Spirit, which notwithstanding the Animosity of their several warring States, induc'd them to erect such Heroick Congresses and Powers as those which constituted the Amphictonian Councils, the Olympick, Isthmian, and other Games; they cou'd not but naturally polish and refine each other.” Politeness here was traced not to political liberty nor to a political condition but rather to sociability, a drive to associate in public, that answered the needs both of cooperation and competition. Greek cultural evolution depended on associating in a public arena devoted to ritual cooperation (the amphictyonies) and to physical agonistics (the games), an arena from which civic politics was absent. On the other hand, a concern with the civic was never far from Shaftesbury's mind, and he appears to have been willing to slide from one sort of liberty to the other. So, shortly after this discussion, he mentioned that the polished Greeks, having attained “Simplicity and Nature,” were able to preserve it “till the Ruin of all things, under a Universal Monarchy,” Alexander's.¹⁵

Shaftesbury's discussion in Soliloquy did much to indicate the further specifications of politeness. Generally, the refining process involved moving from showy aspirations, affectation, and falseness to easiness, naturalness, and honesty. The discipline to which cultural artifacts were to submit was a discipline of sociability: modes of cultural expression had to avoid the sorts of postures that were condemned in social life itself.

The labor of the early critics was to banish discursive affectation, by identifying “what was specious and pretending,” allowing “no false Wit, or jingling Eloquence,” and exposing “the weak Sides, false Ornaments, and affected Graces of mere Pretenders.” The aspirations to effect, to which these features corresponded, were found notably in “the Miraculous, the Pompous, or what we generally call the Sublime.” That the sublime characterized the earliest writing is fitting, according to Shaftesbury.

Astonishment is of all other Passions the easiest rais'd in raw and unexperienc'd Mankind. Children in their earliest Infancy are entertain'd in this manner: And the known way of pleasing such as these, is to make 'em wonder, and lead the way for 'em in this Passion, by a feign'd Surprise at the miraculous Objects we set before 'em. The best Musick of Barbarians is hideous and astonishing Sounds. And the fine Sights of Indians are enormous Figures, various odd and glaring Colours, and whatever of that sort is amazingly beheld, with a kind of Horrour and Consternation.¹⁶

Shaftesbury here set going several devices to signal the complex unpoliteness of the sublime. Developmentally, it was infantile. Culturally, it was primitive. The passage put together a vocabulary of wonderment and wonderfulness (“astonishment,” “wonder,” “miraculous,” “hideous and astonishing,” “enormous,” “odd and glaring,” “amazingly,” “horror and consternation”) that demarcated the terrain of enthusiasm and superstition. Moreover, sublime writing partook formally of the traits of “Awefulness” and “dazzle,” with which our discussion attempted to summarize Shaftesbury's formal sense of the Church and Court. Thus, Shaftesbury could see the sublime as eliciting a sort of responsiveness which was not that of thoroughly morally realized individuals, but rather that of passive and irresponsible subjects. That the sublime constituted, in its way, an unsociable style, Shaftesbury made explicit when he wrote: “In Poetry, and study'd Prose, the astonishing Part, or what commonly passes for Sublime, is form'd by the variety of Figures, the multiplicity of Metaphors, and by quitting as much as possible the natural and easy way of Expression, for that which is most unlike to Humanity, or ordinary Use.”¹⁷

Shaftesbury assembled this account out of loose and imaginative use of Aristotle. From there, too, he derived the notion that Homer arrived on the scene as a reformer of style who removed the infelicities of the sublime. Homer was described in the vocabulary of discursive preference: the decent, the natural, the simple, beauty of composition, unity of design, truth of characters, imitation of nature.¹⁸ In turn, the Homeric move became paradigmatic for Greek literature generally.

In the rise of politeness, nature was the signature of the polite artifact. When Shaftesbury wrote that “the real Lineage and Succession of Wit, is indeed plainly founded in Nature,” he referred back to one of his founding premises, that of a designed cosmos in which principles of form and sociability both inhered.¹⁹ Nature was not opposed to the human world, since the normative principles of the human world were already, in Shaftesbury's view, pre-inscribed in the cosmos. Because nature provided the criterion of taste and, one might say, politeness, the lineage of wit—cultural history, we might say—was founded in nature. The vicissitudes of politeness could only be traced using the standard of nature.

In the case of Greece, nothing underlay the formation of culture but nature itself. The first rise of politeness was the Greek self-formation, “wrought out of Nature, and drawn from the necessary Operation and Course of things, working, as it were, of their own accord, and proper inclination.”²⁰ What precisely did this mean for the polite artifact? “In the Days of Attick Elegance,” Shaftesbury wrote,

Workmen … were glad to insinuate how laboriously, and with what expence of Time, they had brought the smallest Work of theirs (as perhaps a single Ode or Satir, an Oration or Panegyrick) to its perfection. When they had so polish'd their Piece, and render'd it so natural and easy, that it seem'd only a lucky Flight, a Hit of Thought, or flowing Vein of Humour; they were then chiefly concern'd lest it shou'd in reality pass for such, and their Artifice remain undiscover'd.²¹

Attic elegance was the art of the natural: at the limit of its perfection, it risked being mistaken for the natural itself; its artifice was at risk of oblivion. We see here how polished cultural artifacts had the qualities of polished social action. Polite expression in the arts submitted to the same standards as polite behavior in society. The standard was striving through real effort to create effects of ease and naturalness. The standard aimed to create pleasure through benign unaffectedness.

This passage suggests the general applicability to cultural artifacts of Shaftesbury's aspirations to sociability and politeness in the creation of the philosophical text (observed in part I). The passage generalized Shaftesbury's laudatory description of the simple style of Xenophon, which “being the strictest Imitation of Nature, shou'd of right be the compleatest [style], in the Distribution of its Parts, and Symmetry of its Whole, [and] is yet so far from making any ostentation of Method, that it conceals the Artifice as much as possible: endeavouring only to express the effect of Art, under the appearance of the greatest Ease and Negligence.”²² The simple was the ultimately polite style, for it brought into precise focus both nature and art, ease and order, negligence and control. In such a passage, one sees the natural affinity between the classical vocabulary and the vocabulary of politeness. The classical aesthetic criteria approximated those of good fellowship in polite society. The politeness of polite artifacts was a matter of having been polished but also a matter of having been made pleasing in a social way. And as the supposition of the polishing process was a certain sort of liberty, so the result of the process was an artifact understood in terms of the regime of polite sociability in which liberty had a place.

Of the various movements toward refinement in the history of Greek culture, the evolution of comedy, as described by Shaftesbury, was particularly illustrative not only of the dynamics of refinement but of the specific connections between politics and politeness.²³

To begin with, the Greek Old Comedy, arising out of earlier farce and phallic festivals and assuming some formal coherence at the time of Aristophanes, was the enemy of all affectation and pomposity. Its dialectical operations, directed at “every thing which might be imposing, by a false Gravity or Solemnity,” were precisely, according to Shaftesbury, acts of unmasking. The Old Comedy was thus a step toward politeness insofar as politeness eschewed the sorts of pretensions that could not stand up to the Old Comedy's laughter. The Old Comedy exercised the refining power of raillery, and, therefore, like the operations of raillery in modern conversation, depended on freedom of expression.²⁴

However, the freedom of the Old Comedy writers was liable to degenerate into license, and their progress toward politeness was limited. Even Aristophanes' achievement was stunted. The progress of politeness could only proceed through a further dialectical move with the appearance of the New Comedy. All that was lacking in the Old Comedy was made up in the New, for Menander represented the perfection of comedy.

Relying on Horace's Ars poetica, Shaftesbury proposed that the transition from Old to New Comedy was the product of a legal intervention, new laws that effected the cultural change.²⁵ However, his understanding of this development was highly significant, since it assumed the coherence of political and cultural sophistication. The new laws arose from a “real Reform of Taste and Humour in the Commonwealth or Government it-self”: “Instead of any Abridgment, 'twas in reality an Increase of Liberty, an Enlargement of the Security of Property, and an Advancement of private Ease and personal Safety, to provide against what was injurious to the good Name and Reputation of every Citizen.” Thus, the curtailment of the excesses of the Old Comedy expressed not the limiting of freedom but, rather, a new and more sophisticated appreciation of it. A more secure grasp on the nature of liberty, a grasp that itself derived from the experience of political liberty, led to cultural change. Moreover, the laws reforming comedy were reflections of the desires of the Athenian public. Refinement in political sensibility was conjoined to refinement in other areas, so that the legislative reform of drama was merely one expression of the polishing process.

As this Intelligence in Life and Manners grew greater in that experienc'd People, so the Relish of Wit and Humour wou'd naturally in proportion be more refin'd. Thus Greece in general grew more and more polite; and as it advanc'd in this respect, was more averse to the obscene buffooning manner. The Athenians still went before the rest, and led the way in Elegance of every kind.²⁶

This polishing of the expressive modes was merely the outward manifestation of a profound and inner transformation, the refinement of sensibility.

Shaftesbury's admiration for the ancients did not constitute a rejection of modernity since the ancient had a clarifying, not a disparaging, relation to the modern. Though he ascribed the greatest achievements in art and literature to the Greeks, Shaftesbury was progressive in his views of history. The point of looking back to the Greeks was not to mourn a loss but to celebrate a possibility. While politeness had been realized among the ancients, it also was the end of modern life. To embrace antiquity was to foster a particular sort of modernity.

BRITAIN

Shaftesbury's account of culture and politics in ancient Greece was, obviously, a way of pursuing more immediate and, even, programmatic ends. The Greek past suggested patterns for British cultural history and possibilities for the British cultural future. The Greek model implied an alternative to the Tory interpretation of British cultural history, since it insisted on the relation between politeness and liberty, dissociating politeness from the courtly environment. Shaftesbury's hopes for the present also put him at a distance from the propensities associated with the Country. In the same way that he rejected Country nostalgia for a virtuous polity in the British past, so he had little use for the British cultural past. As British political history was a history of the growth of liberty, so British cultural history was a history of the growth of politeness.

The opportunities for a new British culture were set against the background of the international political conflict between Britain and France in the post-Revolution period. If barbarism was the accompaniment of universal monarchy, the progress of France threatened to replicate that of Rome. Britain was thus allowed to champion liberty against universal monarchy and politeness against ignorance and superstition. Elsewhere, Shaftesbury found it convenient to cast France not as Rome but as another historical incarnation of empire, namely, Persia. This, of course, allowed Britain to retrace the steps of ancient Greece, and most particularly those of Athens, as the champion of liberty. That Britain was also in a position to repeat the Hellenic cultural performance was evident in Shaftesbury's anxiety to exploit, in his own words, “some kind of Comparison between this antient Growth of Taste, and that which we have experienc'd in modern days, and within our own Nation.”²⁷

In Shaftesbury's view, his own era was an auspicious moment for British cultural improvement, and the opportunity was offered not only by the international situation, but also by the recent rebirth of freedom in Britain itself. The affirmation of British liberty in 1688 had brought new opportunities for British culture: “For in our Nation, upon the foot Things stand, and as they are likely to continue; 'tis not difficult to foresee that Improvements will be made in every Art and Science.” The Revolution had set the seal on liberty and law, assuring the progress of politeness. The only impediment remaining, said Shaftesbury, was the preoccupation with the Continental wars.²⁸

There were tensions within the view that Shaftesbury was sketching. On the one hand, he was arguing for British cultural superiority on the basis of British genius and British politics. At the same time, however, he recognized the deficiencies of British culture. The British culture that would serve as a counterweight to the force of Continental culture had yet to be created. While “our natural Genius shines above that airy neighbouring Nation,” it had to be admitted “that with truer Pains and Industry, they have sought Politeness.” Nonetheless, he maintained that French politics stunted French culture whereas it was easy to see “what effect [Britain's] establish'd Liberty will produce in every thing which relates to Art; when Peace returns to us on these happy Conditions.”²⁹ Still, the argument for British cultural superiority was proleptic. Shaftesbury was dissatisfied with much that he found of British culture. His writings, thus, involved a simultaneous effort to remove the locus of politeness from France to Britain and to create a British culture worthy of the ascription “polite.”

British impoliteness was patent, and Shaftesbury pointed to several impediments to British cultural growth: Britain was insular, xenophobic, and resistant to positive influences from outside; it was also remote from the breeding grounds both of ancient and modern culture and always came by its culture late.³⁰ All of this stood in contrast to the associative character of the Greeks who not only interacted among themselves in various athletic and ritual occasions but also (and notwithstanding their originality) traveled widely and tasted cosmopolitanly in their Levantine world. Of course, we have already examined the greatest impediments to British politeness, namely, the domination of politics and culture by courtly and ecclesiastical institutions.

On the other hand, Britain evinced the potential for refinement. Complaint about “the Genius of our People” was commonplace among writers, he said, but “we are not altogether so Barbarous or Gothick as they pretend.” Indeed, “we are naturally no ill Soil; and have musical Parts which might be cultivated with great Advantage, if these Gentlemen wou'd use the Art of Masters in their Composition.” Thus, the British were disposed to become more polite: they were ready for cultivation.³¹

In fact, Shaftesbury found reason to believe that the British had already begun to imitate ancient Hellenic experience. The history of the English language paralleled the evolution of the Greek examined earlier. While, to judge by “the Speeches of our Ancestors in Parliament,” the discourse of the Middle Ages was “very short and plain, but coarse, and what we properly call home-spun,” the Renaissance brought in a new sophistication, which Shaftesbury characterized, suspiciously, as “scholastic” and “pedantic”: “the Fashion of speaking, and the Turn of Wit, was after the figurative and florid Manner. Nothing was so acceptable as the high-sounding Phrase, the far-fetch'd Comparison, the capricious Point, and Play of Words; and nothing so despicable as what was merely of the plain or natural kind.” As in the sublime phase of Greek writing, the writers of English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affected artfulness, seeking astonishing effects and dramatizing their creations and themselves. They called attention to themselves, seeking to be admired. By contrast, the improvements that Shaftesbury observed in recent years bespoke a different principle, that “the natural and simple Manner which conceals and covers Art, is the most truly artful, and of the genteelest, truest, and best study'd Taste.”³² Here again was the ideal of self-effacing self-expression, which we have observed shaping Shaftesbury's estimate of cultural products generally and also his notion of philosophic behavior and writing.

The model of evolution from sublimity and other distortions of form towards politeness informed many of Shaftesbury's judgments about literature. He summed up his view of British literature in these very terms when writing of the infantile state of the British muses:

They have hitherto scarce arriv'd to any-thing of Shapeliness or Person. They lisp as in their Cradles: and their stammering Tongues, which nothing besides their Youth and Rawness can excuse, have hitherto spoken in wretched Pun and Quibble. Our Dramatick Shakespeare, our Fletcher, Jonson, and our Epick Milton preserve this Stile. And even a latter Race, scarce free of this Infirmity, and aiming at a false Sublime, with crouded Simile and mix'd Metaphor, (the Hobby-Horse, and Rattle of the Muses), entertain our raw Fancy, and unpractis'd Ear; which has not as yet had leisure to form it-self and, become truly musical.³³

This passage offered a complex characterization of literary impoliteness. To begin with, it was a picture of impoliteness because the literature under discussion did not, in Shaftesbury's view, correspond to certain formal criteria. However, impoliteness in the passage was an indication of the unsociability of this literary discourse, an unsociability that was cast on two levels of characterization. In the first place, the writers were cast as infants and children, obviously not thoroughly socialized and not capable of mature expression. However, in addition, the stylistic devices with which Shaftesbury associated them are parts of an unsociable literary equipment. “Pun and Quibble,” “crouded Simile and mix'd Metaphor,” were devices of literary artifice striving self-consciously for effect, seeking either in the most blatant way for our attention, in the manner of children, or “aiming at a false Sublime,” more in the manner of adolescents.

The growth of politeness in Britain meant the maturation of the various modes of expression, what, in keeping with the themes of this study, we can think of as their full socialization. The concept of politeness referred not just to refinement, but to the specific cast of this refinement. Politeness was refinement that had submitted to the disciplines of sociability: the combination of self-confidence and unpretentiousness, the naturalness and ease, the honesty and elegance, of the fully autonomous being.

IN SUM

At the end of his life, retired in Naples, Shaftesbury wrote A Letter Concerning the Art, or Science of Design to My Lord****. Completed by March 1712, it was included in some copies of the second edition of Characteristicks in 1714 but only became a standard feature of the eighteenth-century printings of Characteristicks in the fifth edition of 1732.³⁴ The Letter Concerning Design was originally a cover letter to John Somers, the “Lord” of the title, accompanying Shaftesbury's Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules, which Shaftesbury also wrote in Naples. The Letter Concerning Design described the contents of the other essay, but what gave the Letter Concerning Design enduring value were the many connections it made between culture and politics: indeed, it was, practically, a broadside encapsulation of the cultural-political themes of Characteristicks.

The central point of the Letter Concerning Design was that Britain was approaching a new cultural age. Though reiterating several times the excellence of British genius, Shaftesbury focussed on the new circumstances that would allow British genius to flower. Those circumstances were construed in a political and specifically Whiggish way. Shaftesbury congratulated the Whig policy of war with France, assuring the reader, “in a kind of spirit of Prophecy,” that victory in war would mean the victory of liberty and the constitution. In turn, this political outcome would have cultural consequences: the development of the national personality in the form of increased knowledge, industry, sense, and, indeed, politeness.³⁵ Shaftesbury also based his hopes for cultural efflorescence on Britain's domestic political nature: “As her Constitution has grown, and been establish'd, she has in proportion fitted her-self for other Improvements.”³⁶ The opposite side of this coin was the criticism of the dire cultural consequences of Stuart rule in passages of the Letter Concerning Design.

Yet, more important than the bald assertion of the connection between liberty and culture was the process by which these two domains were related. In a dense but significant statement, Shaftesbury wrote:

When the free spirit of a Nation turns it-self this way [that is, toward the arts]; Judgments are form'd; Criticks arise; the publick Eye and Ear improves; a right Taste prevails, and in a manner forces its way. Nothing is so improving, nothing so natural, so con-genial to the liberal Arts, as that reigning Liberty and high spirit of a People, which from the Habit of judging in the highest Matters for themselves, makes 'em freely judge of other subjects, and enter thorowly into the Characters as well of Men and Manners, as of the Products or Works of Men, in Art and Science. So much, my Lord, are we owing to the Excellence of our national Constitution, and legal Monarchy; happily fitted for Us; and which alone cou'd hold together so mighty a People; all sharers (tho' at so far a distance from each other) in the Government of themselves.³⁷

Explaining why the reign of liberty improved the arts, this passage draws together themes we have been examining throughout this book. Liberty was, in its essence, autonomy, judging for oneself “the Characters … of Men and Manners.” As moral autonomy consisted in having a character, moral judgment consisted in understanding others' characters. However, if moral liberty was ultimately individual in its frame of reference, political liberty was the collective version—each person sharing, though at a distance from others, in the government of himself. Thus, the passage returns us to the problem of part I: how it was possible for humans to attain some autonomy given their status as sociable beings. A free polity was the political form most likely to encourage the autonomy of human beings. Given the extent to which humans were discursive beings, it was the discursive freedom of a free polity that could best nurture the possibility of human autonomy. Unfree polities (and, of course, Shaftesbury was thinking of polities in which Church and Court were domineering entities) created discursive conditions tending to quash the autonomy on which humanity entirely depended.

The next step in the argument was that only the sort of autonomy which was present only in a free polity conduced to autonomous judgment in other matters. Judgment in moral and political characters correlated with judgment in cultural matters. If autonomy was required to grasp character in moral and political forms, then it was required to grasp expressive forms as well. In short, liberty was required for taste.

The beginning of the passage offered another way of putting this. There Shaftesbury suggested that a true public was found only under conditions of liberty. It was impossible for those who were not free to form judgments of any legitimacy since, if they were not free, their judgment had to be a reflection of some authority outside themselves. Moreover, under conditions of unfreedom, it was impossible for judgments to interact in a way that allowed the winnowing of true from false, good from bad, polite from impolite.

Concomitantly, under conditions of freedom, the progress of taste and politeness was irresistible. Once there was a public, people felt a vested interest not only in political matters but in artistic ones. As he said in another passage: “In reality the People are no small Partys in this Cause. Nothing moves successfully without 'em. There can be no Publick, but where they are included.”³⁸ Thus, the notion of a public only made sense in the context of liberty, and only free polities would have a public. The public was that entity that occupied the cultural zone. The training of the public in morals and taste became a central task. Characteristicks and Shaftesbury's other writings were attempts first to define that task and second to carry it out.

Notes

1. P.R.O. 30/24/20/91, Shaftesbury to Arent Furely, February 18, 1705; 30/24/20/143, Shaftesbury to Michael Ainsworth, May 10, 1707.

2. P.R.O. 30/24/22/2, ff.175-176, Shaftesbury to Jean LeClerc, March 6, 1706. The next sentence set the limits of freedom and the conditions for calling in the magistrate: “prophane, mocking, and scurrilouse Language that gives the just offence, makes fatall Impressions on the Vulgar, and corrupts Men in another manner than by their Reason.”

3. Another extensive “defence of that freedom of thought” appeared, fittingly, as a conclusion to the “Miscellaneous Reflections” and so to Characteristicks itself: “Miscellany” V.iii, III, 297ff. (Robertson, II, 341ff.).

4. “Letter” ii, I, 10 (Robertson, I, 10).

5. “Sensus Communis” I.ii, I, 64-65 (Robertson, I, 46).

6. For criticism's centrality, see “Miscellany” V.i, III, 251-252 (Robertson, II, 312-313).

7. “Letter” ii, I, 18 (Robertson, I, 14-15).

8. P.R.O. 30/24/22/7, ff.487-488, a MS. translation of Jean LeClerc's dedication of his edition of Menander and Philemon (Amsterdam, 1709) to Shaftesbury.

9. P.R.O. 30/24/20/143, Shaftesbury to Michael Ainsworth, December 3, 1709; “Miscellany” III.i and V.i, III, 138, 152, 231 (Robertson, II, 241, 250, 298).

10. “Miscellany” III.i, III, 137 (Robertson, II, 241). Shaftesbury's assertiveness fits with Martin Bernal's account of how the European scholarly tradition denied ancient Near Eastern, especially Egyptian, influences on ancient Greece: see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), I, 1-2, 23-27, 165-167, 174-175. This assertiveness also illustrates the distance between Shaftesbury and John Toland, whose hermetic interests led him to see a positive model of civic religion in ancient Egypt. Viewing Egypt as the model of a priest-ridden society, Shaftesbury was in no position to accept its claims as a source of prisca sapientia. For Shaftesbury, sapientia was Greek. See Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), pp.36, 153.

11. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 236-237 (Robertson, I, 153-154).

12. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 238-239 (Robertson, I, 155).

13. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 239 (Robertson, I, 155).

14. “Miscellany” III.i, III, 138-139 (Robertson, II, 242).

15. “Miscellany” III.i, III, 138, 141 (Robertson, II, 241-242, 243).

16. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 241-242 (Robertson, I, 156-157).

17. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 242-243 (Robertson, I, 157-158).

18. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 243 (Robertson, I, 158). Another version of the transition from sublime to natural appears in “Miscellany” III.i, III, 140-141 (Robertson, II, 243).

19. “Miscellany” III.i, III, 137 (Robertson, II, 241). On cosmic design, see chapter 2, pp.54-55.

20. “Miscellany” III.i, III, 140 (Robertson, II, 242).

21. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 233 (Robertson, I, 151-152).

22. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 258 (Robertson, I, 168-169).

23. Shaftesbury's discussion of the evolution of Greek tragedy was brief, culminating with Euripides, who recapitulated the Homeric movement from sublimity to nature and simplicity: “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 244-245 (Robertson, I, 158-159).

24. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 245-247 (Robertson, I, 160-161).

25. The relevant lines from Horace are 282-284. There is no evidence that such edicts had any effect. See the comment, s.v. “Comedy (Greek), Old,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp.269-270.

26. “Soliloquy” II.ii, I, 250 (Robertson, I, 163).

27. “Soliloquy” II.i, I, 216-217, 222-223 (Robertson, I, 141, 145); “Miscellany” III.i, III, 141 (Robertson, II, 243). Shaftesbury reckoned neither with the imperial career of Athens nor with the Augustan aspect of Periclean Athens, though he once indicated that Pericles' virtue had been compromised, which might attest to some diffidence on the issue: P.R.O. 30/24/27/10, p.192 [f.97v]. On the language of “universal monarchy,” see chapter 9, note 39.

28. “Soliloquy” III.i, I, 215-216, 223 (Robertson, I, 141, 145).

29. “Soliloquy” II.i, I, 218-219 (Robertson, I, 142-143).

30. “Miscellany” III.i, III, 151-152, 153-154 (Robertson, II, 249-250, 250-251).

31. “Soliloquy” II.iii, I, 274-275 (Robertson, I, 179). A related passage is found among Shaftesbury's jottings in a 1712 Italian almanac (P.R.O. 30/24/24/14, f.5), in which he noted his belief in design's primacy over color in painting: “Pleasure of Colours, the Debauch-Pleasant Painting!—The Shop. … Must be quitted for a true Taste & consequent Enjoymt. English Temper. Hope from It. Affecion of Hardship. Severity in Style, Sense, etc. This may run too far. … But easily temper'd. This the right Side. Mark of a good Genius.” The passage related the tension between design and color to that between stoicism and Epicureanism and identified the English with the stoic/design pole of the tension. Thus, the English were disposed to actuate Shaftesbury's moral and aesthetic programs.

32. “Miscellany” III.i, III, 141-142 (Robertson, II, 243-244).

33. “Soliloquy” II.i, I, 217 (Robertson, I, 141-142).

34. On the peculiar printing history of A Letter Concerning Design, see Kerry Downes, “The Publication of Shaftesbury's ‘Letter Concerning Design,’” Architectural History, 27 (1984), 519-523.

35. “Letter Concerning Design”, p.398 (Rand, pp.19-20).

36. “Letter Concerning Design”, p.405 (Rand, p.23).

37. “Letter Concerning Design”, p.404 (Rand, pp.22-23).

38. “Letter Concerning Design”, p.403 (Rand, p.22).

Works Cited

References to the works comprising Shaftesbury's Characteristicks (with the exception of “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue”) are to the three-volume 1714 edition, which was published after the third earl's death but included his corrections and revisions of the first edition of 1711. The short title of the work is followed by the part and section and citation of the volume and page. References are also given in parentheses to the widely accessible modern edition, by John Robertson (London: Grant Richards, 1900; reprinted in the Library of the Liberal Arts by Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). Short titles are as follows:

“Letter”: “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”

“Sensus Communis”: “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour”

“Soliloquy”: “Soliloquy: Or Advice to an Author”

“The Moralists”: “The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody”

“Miscellany”: “Miscellaneous Reflections on the Preceding Treatises, Etc.”

“A Letter Concerning Design” was included in some copies of the 1714 Characteristicks, to which all citations refer, though it only became a standard feature of the text in the fifth edition of 1732. (For the complicated history of its publication, see Kerry Downes, “The Publication of Shaftesbury's ‘Letter Concerning Design,’” Architectural History, 27 (1984), 519-523.) References to “A Letter Concerning Design” are also given in parentheses to Benjamin Rand's edition of Shaftesbury's writings on art, Second Characters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914).

The Shaftesbury Papers in the Public Record Office (P.R.O.) include a large correspondence, many notebooks, and other written records of the third earl. In cases where Shaftesbury numbered pages of notebooks, these have been provided in citations as well as folio numbers. Aside from correspondence, the most frequently cited Shaftesbury manuscripts are these:

P.R.O. 30/24/27/10 two notebooks with the head, Askēmata, dating primarily from 1698 to 1704, written in England and in Holland

P.R.O. 30/24/27/14 a notebook containing “Design of a Socratick History”

P.R.O. 30/24/27/15 a notebook containing material on the arts and art history and forming part of Shaftesbury's project called “Second Characters”