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Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders
Conservatism was born as an anguished attack on democracy. So argues Don Herzog in this arrestingly detailed exploration of England's responses to the French Revolution. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders ushers the reader into the politically lurid world of Regency England.
Deftly weaving social and intellectual history, Herzog brings to life the social practices of the Enlightenment. In circulating libraries and Sunday schools, deferential subjects developed an avid taste for reading; in coffeehouses, alehouses, and debating societies, they boldly dared to argue about politics. Such conservatives as Edmund Burke gaped with horror, fearing that what radicals applauded as the rise of rationality was really popular stupidity or worse. Subjects, insisted conservatives, ought to defer to tradition--and be comforted by illusions.
Urging that abstract political theories are manifest in everyday life, Herzog unflinchingly explores the unsavory emotions that maintained and threatened social hierarchy. Conservatives dished out an unrelenting diet of contempt. But Herzog refuses to pretend that the day's radicals were saints. Radicals, he shows, invested in contempt as enthusiastically as did conservatives. Hairdressers became newly contemptible, even a cultural obsession. Women, workers, Jews, and blacks were all abused by their presumed superiors. Yet some of the lowly subjects Burke had the temerity to brand a swinish multitude fought back.
How were England's humble subjects transformed into proud citizens? And just how successful was the transformation? At once history and political theory, absorbing and disquieting, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders challenges our own commitments to and anxieties about democracy.
Deftly weaving social and intellectual history, Herzog brings to life the social practices of the Enlightenment. In circulating libraries and Sunday schools, deferential subjects developed an avid taste for reading; in coffeehouses, alehouses, and debating societies, they boldly dared to argue about politics. Such conservatives as Edmund Burke gaped with horror, fearing that what radicals applauded as the rise of rationality was really popular stupidity or worse. Subjects, insisted conservatives, ought to defer to tradition--and be comforted by illusions.
Urging that abstract political theories are manifest in everyday life, Herzog unflinchingly explores the unsavory emotions that maintained and threatened social hierarchy. Conservatives dished out an unrelenting diet of contempt. But Herzog refuses to pretend that the day's radicals were saints. Radicals, he shows, invested in contempt as enthusiastically as did conservatives. Hairdressers became newly contemptible, even a cultural obsession. Women, workers, Jews, and blacks were all abused by their presumed superiors. Yet some of the lowly subjects Burke had the temerity to brand a swinish multitude fought back.
How were England's humble subjects transformed into proud citizens? And just how successful was the transformation? At once history and political theory, absorbing and disquieting, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders challenges our own commitments to and anxieties about democracy.
560 pages, Paperback
First published September 4, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 6, 2013
The only way to enjoy this book is to accept right off the bat that it differs quite a bit from standard academic works. It does so in at least three ways. First, the writing style itself is, for lack of a better word, nimble. Second, the structure of many of the arguments end up being less than forthright. Third, it's not always clear that there is an argument - at times it looks and feels like a general discussion, the kind of thing that someone would write after spending some time obsessed with a topic and who just wanted to excitedly tell you about it.
What this amounts to is that if you demand that the book take the format of a normal academic text, you'll end up thinking that Herzog is flighty, annoying, and full of himself. There is something very unfair about the style and structure of the book... I know that my occasional moments of frustration were best articulated by the thought that "Hey, if I wrote like this I'd get shot out of a cannon. So why does Professor Big-Shot get to do it?"
That said, there is a tremendous amount of material in this book, and unlike many books, the material is really impressive both for its depth and breadth. Herzog is a really smart dude, and this book can be useful to a broad range of social scientists. It can also be a very fun book to read. Reading this is basically like hanging out with your hyper, good-natured, flakey cousin: as long as you remember that this is a temporary thing and that it's okay to let go, you're likely to have a fun time.
What this amounts to is that if you demand that the book take the format of a normal academic text, you'll end up thinking that Herzog is flighty, annoying, and full of himself. There is something very unfair about the style and structure of the book... I know that my occasional moments of frustration were best articulated by the thought that "Hey, if I wrote like this I'd get shot out of a cannon. So why does Professor Big-Shot get to do it?"
That said, there is a tremendous amount of material in this book, and unlike many books, the material is really impressive both for its depth and breadth. Herzog is a really smart dude, and this book can be useful to a broad range of social scientists. It can also be a very fun book to read. Reading this is basically like hanging out with your hyper, good-natured, flakey cousin: as long as you remember that this is a temporary thing and that it's okay to let go, you're likely to have a fun time.
May 21, 2021
I can't improve on the review written by Sergei Moska. The tone of this book is energetic but I also found it distracting; I thought the author flitted from point to point, and his argument is peppered with so many anecdotes and quotes that I couldn't follow the thread. Mr. Herzog disagrees with Edmund Burke and does not refrain from being sarcastic about him. But on the plus side, Herzog brings in so many fascinating quotes and facts from the period. Basically I couldn't read a page without reading an arresting quote. And I mean it literally stopped me and sent me to Google Books to follow up and read the quote in context or learn more about it. The breadth of the author's reading and the information he brings is quite impressive.
Sometimes, when I followed up on a quote, I found myself disagreeing with the author's representation of its context. He misinterprets a passage from Jane Austen's The Watsons, for example, and he misrepresents an exchange in the early play, The Quaker.
Therefore for me the value of the book lies as much in the many quotes and footnotes Mr. Herzog has assembled as in what he says about them. There is a wealth of material here. There are very sobering chapters on Regency attitudes about blacks, women, and Jews. Mr. Herzog spends a lot of time on the use of the word "race" to describe any group other than a race of people and he provides many examples. In the past, people used the word "race" to describe tribes, professions and smaller groups. Austen (here's an example Herzog missed) uses it twice to describe the Morland family in Northanger Abbey. There's also a chapter on hairdressers so there's a lot of glimpses of social history, too.
I wanted to learn more about prosecutions for seditious libel and I wish there had been more information about that in this book. I wanted to get a feel for how severely the government suppressed free speech during this period. But I can't blame a book for being what it is not. This book is more generally about the vigorous war of ideas between conservatives reacting to the dangers of the French Revolution and the radicals who were trying to create a more democratic, less class-ridden Britain. The way that Edmund Burke's enemies seized on his term "the swinish multitude" and used it against him is very similar to our modern political warfare as waged on social media.
If you are interested in this period and the war of ideas, this lively history is worthwhile and it might send you, like me, down a lot of new rabbit holes.
Sometimes, when I followed up on a quote, I found myself disagreeing with the author's representation of its context. He misinterprets a passage from Jane Austen's The Watsons, for example, and he misrepresents an exchange in the early play, The Quaker.
Therefore for me the value of the book lies as much in the many quotes and footnotes Mr. Herzog has assembled as in what he says about them. There is a wealth of material here. There are very sobering chapters on Regency attitudes about blacks, women, and Jews. Mr. Herzog spends a lot of time on the use of the word "race" to describe any group other than a race of people and he provides many examples. In the past, people used the word "race" to describe tribes, professions and smaller groups. Austen (here's an example Herzog missed) uses it twice to describe the Morland family in Northanger Abbey. There's also a chapter on hairdressers so there's a lot of glimpses of social history, too.
I wanted to learn more about prosecutions for seditious libel and I wish there had been more information about that in this book. I wanted to get a feel for how severely the government suppressed free speech during this period. But I can't blame a book for being what it is not. This book is more generally about the vigorous war of ideas between conservatives reacting to the dangers of the French Revolution and the radicals who were trying to create a more democratic, less class-ridden Britain. The way that Edmund Burke's enemies seized on his term "the swinish multitude" and used it against him is very similar to our modern political warfare as waged on social media.
If you are interested in this period and the war of ideas, this lively history is worthwhile and it might send you, like me, down a lot of new rabbit holes.
February 12, 2021
To misquote a famous comic book villain, "fun isn't something one considers when studying British conservatism. But this... does put a smile on my face."
This then is a study of British conservatism between 1789 and 1834, a tradition already in peril when it was being created, a system of beliefs and social practices born "as an anguished attack on democracy."
One might be tempted to think this would be a dry, scholarly tome (it's 550 pages long, after all). One would be wrong, for this is a book unlike any other I have ever read. As stated elsewhere, "an air of carnival infects his book. His subject may seem dry, but he handles it with almost mischievous élan." The prose is vibrant and there is constant recourse to what was being said, then and there, not on soporific and tedious abstractions. There is actually no overarching theory here, as far as I could discern, but a wealth of fascinating insights and topics.
"Prejudice and ignorance, veils and illusions: these are the ingredients of tradition. Tradition isn't exhumed by innocent empiricist sleuths, out to furnish as accurate description as they can; it's constructed by cunning poets ever attentive to the political exigencies of the day."
"To cast a social contingency as an unalterable natural fact is deftly to eliminate the possibility of criticism."
A lot of ground is covered: Burke appears throughout, with his veils and prejudices for the lower orders, and his 'swinish multitude' in all its porcine glory; Malthusian ideas, and - oh yes! - moral emotions underpinning social hierarchies - deference, condescension, impudence and insolence and contempt in its interminable variety, simmering rage at inferiors not knowing their place, dismissive contempt, disdain fueling one's own self-esteem, emotions growing angrier with social structure coming under attack. There are splendid chapters on blacks, and Jews, and women, and indeed the Other, "a quizzical amusement at the silliness of the socially remote inferior, a relaxed fascination with the inferior's exotic ways of very being."
"There's finally no possibility if equality at a distance, no living in a world where the lower orders are enlightened but don't appear at one's dining table. It's a vision of the unspeakably low inexorably on the march, infiltrating the prestigious and powerful preserves of the once superior."
And racism is there too, a concept in flux, and anxieties about miscegenation and purity and pollution ("there were samboes, mulattoes, quadroos or quarterons, demi-quarterons or metis"), fascinating insights on racists and their infuriations with white men who fraternize with blacks, and on why tough guys sneer at less masculine males as wimps and fags, there are discussions on Christian concepts of equality, and dignity (or lack thereof) of labor, and expectations of status, and the happy slave and contented housewife tropes, yes and hairdressers!
"At stake here are public standing and epistemic authority: who counts as a participant in public dialogue, or more generally, whom ought we listen to - and believe - and why?"
This then is a study of British conservatism between 1789 and 1834, a tradition already in peril when it was being created, a system of beliefs and social practices born "as an anguished attack on democracy."
One might be tempted to think this would be a dry, scholarly tome (it's 550 pages long, after all). One would be wrong, for this is a book unlike any other I have ever read. As stated elsewhere, "an air of carnival infects his book. His subject may seem dry, but he handles it with almost mischievous élan." The prose is vibrant and there is constant recourse to what was being said, then and there, not on soporific and tedious abstractions. There is actually no overarching theory here, as far as I could discern, but a wealth of fascinating insights and topics.
"Prejudice and ignorance, veils and illusions: these are the ingredients of tradition. Tradition isn't exhumed by innocent empiricist sleuths, out to furnish as accurate description as they can; it's constructed by cunning poets ever attentive to the political exigencies of the day."
"To cast a social contingency as an unalterable natural fact is deftly to eliminate the possibility of criticism."
A lot of ground is covered: Burke appears throughout, with his veils and prejudices for the lower orders, and his 'swinish multitude' in all its porcine glory; Malthusian ideas, and - oh yes! - moral emotions underpinning social hierarchies - deference, condescension, impudence and insolence and contempt in its interminable variety, simmering rage at inferiors not knowing their place, dismissive contempt, disdain fueling one's own self-esteem, emotions growing angrier with social structure coming under attack. There are splendid chapters on blacks, and Jews, and women, and indeed the Other, "a quizzical amusement at the silliness of the socially remote inferior, a relaxed fascination with the inferior's exotic ways of very being."
"There's finally no possibility if equality at a distance, no living in a world where the lower orders are enlightened but don't appear at one's dining table. It's a vision of the unspeakably low inexorably on the march, infiltrating the prestigious and powerful preserves of the once superior."
And racism is there too, a concept in flux, and anxieties about miscegenation and purity and pollution ("there were samboes, mulattoes, quadroos or quarterons, demi-quarterons or metis"), fascinating insights on racists and their infuriations with white men who fraternize with blacks, and on why tough guys sneer at less masculine males as wimps and fags, there are discussions on Christian concepts of equality, and dignity (or lack thereof) of labor, and expectations of status, and the happy slave and contented housewife tropes, yes and hairdressers!
"At stake here are public standing and epistemic authority: who counts as a participant in public dialogue, or more generally, whom ought we listen to - and believe - and why?"
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews