Professor Emerita Nicole Pohl
‘… The love of his country’: Patriotism, democracy and utopianism in the eighteenth century
Throughout political history, different ideologies, ideologues, and political parties have hijacked the concept of patriotism. These ideologies set patriotism against the idea of cosmopolitanism and ‘Weltbürgertum’, denouncing cosmopolitanism as a dangerous utopia. More recently, populists promote patriotism in terms of protectionism, isolationism, and nativism. Yet, this kind of populism also challenges the dominance of the ruling parties, aristocracies and/or state institutions – it fashions itself as the nation’s ‘true people’ against the governing elite. The political tension is thus a tension between patriotism and ethno-nationalism, between the utopian vision of ‘Weltbürger’ and a seemingly inclusive (people-centred), yet exclusive will of the people within distinct national boundaries.
My paper seeks to unpack the many (historical) layers of patriotism as relevant to different ideas of democracy, and remind us that the populist and fascist understanding of patriotism is, in the words of Samuel Johnson, nothing more than ‘the refuge of a scoundrel’. Yet, as I will show, there are historical tensions between patriotism as moral and political utopianism, and ideology.
I will return to the pre-nationalistic, eighteenth-century understanding of patriotism as a form of political utopianism. Eighteenth-century European Enlightenment ideas on cosmopolitanism and patriotism complement each on the premise that they are expressions of ‘public spiritedness’ and commitment to the common good of the country and the inhabitants. Thus, patriotism (particularly moral patriotism) and cosmopolitanism represent discourses of belonging and collective identity underpinned by a moral codex that respects human rights and local/regional/national differences. The German Enlightenment writer, Wieland, underscores this ‘public spiritedness’ in the designation of everyone being a citizen of one’s own community and the world. This focus on public spiritedness was different to the Romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century, which, certainly in Central Europe, was a clear reaction and challenge to imperialism.
The promise of the nation state to be a ‘step towards a shared humanity’ (Mosse 1982), was not kept by the nationalism of the nineteenth century and furthermore, prepared the ground for populist discourses in the twentieth-century – the will of the ‘true’ people became somewhat defined by ethno-nationalist and totalitarian parameters. In line with Steven B. Smith, I will argue that a return to the eighteenth-century idea of moral patriotism would underscore values such as equality, democracy and humanity.
Nicole Pohl is professor emerita in Early Modern Literature and Critical Theory at Oxford Brookes University. She has published and edited books on women’s utopian writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, European salons and epistolarity, and the Bluestockings. She was the Editor-in-Chief of Utopian Studies for 13 years. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO) project. She is the Academic Editor of Electronic Enlightenment, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
Professor Nathalie Vanfasse (LERMA, Aix-Marseille Université, France)
Dickensian Embodied Economics and the Challenges of/to Democracy
We realise today, more than ever, that democracy is not a given but a complex process and a never-ending apprenticeship, both of which can be undermined in many ways. In her latest book, And Then What: Despatches from the Heart of Twenty-First Century Diplomacy, from Kosovo to Kyiv, former European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, stresses how much of a challenge building and maintaining democracy is. It involves what Ashton calls “deep democracy”, in the form of strong and balanced institutions, free press and many other key structural elements. One way of supporting democracy involves reflecting about the economy and wondering “if and how it can work for democracy” – to paraphrase the title of a recent conference organised by the Columbia Center for Political Economy.
Victorian writer Charles Dickens became very much aware of these questions, when he first went to America to discover its young republic – which he at first considered as a utopia come true, before growing disillusioned about it. In fact, Dickens addresses economic issues in relation to democracy not just in his American Notes but also in many of his other works. He achieved this by developing an ’embodied economics’. This idiosyncratic perspective upon the economy and democracy enabled Dickens to consider problematic monetary questions; to tackle issues related to corporate governance and care; and, last but not least, to delineate the possibility of an economics of hope, in the face of uncertainty.This lecture is part of a wider project conducted with Georges Letissier (Nantes Université) and Emmanuel Petit (Bordeaux Sciences Economiques).
Nathalie Vanfasse is Professor of English at Aix-Marseille Université, France. She graduated from the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and the Paris School of Political Science (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris) and holds a PhD from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. From 1996 to 1998 she taught at Harvard University where she was awarded two certificates for excellence in teaching. Nathalie Vanfasse’s first monograph entitled Dickens entre normes et déviance (Publications de l’Université de Provence) was short-listed for the 2008 prize of the SAES/AFEA (French Society for British and American Academic Studies). She is the author of articles and chapters on Dickens’s work and on nineteenth-century travel writing. She has co-edited special issues on Dickens Matters, Dickens His/story (Dickens Quarterly, 2012); Dickens in the New Millennium (Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 2012); and two volumes on Charles Dickens, Modernism, Modernity: colloque de Cerisy (Editions du Sagittaire, 2014). Her monograph entitled La Plume et la route: Charles Dickens écrivain-voyageur (Presses de l’Université de Provence, 2017) was awarded the 2018 prize of the SELVA (Société D’Etude de la Littérature de Voyage Anglophone). She is currently working on a book on Dickens and economics with Georges Letissier and economist Emmanuel Petit.
Professor György Majtényi (Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary)
Communist Utopia and Luxury Communism: Ruling Elite in the State Socialist Hungary
The presentation examines the lifestyle of the state socialist ruling elite in the context of the social and political changes of the 20th century in Hungarian history. (The term ruling elite as used in the presentation is reserved for a relatively small group, which enjoyed privileged status and a specific lifestyle). György Majtényi analyses the differences and the similarities, the resumption and the continuity, between the habits of the new elite which came to power after World War II, and those of the traditional elite groups that held power prior to the war. A position in the hierarchy of the new socialist regime meant a particular, distinguished way of life under state socialism.
György Majtényi systematically investigates the most significant elements of their lifestyle (housing conditions, material culture, cars, leisure time, hobbies, the use of the public sphere as well as their cults, public images, and personal and collective identities). He emphasizes that within this realm there were interactions between the old and new elites. This meeting (co-incidence) of lifestyles must be viewed though through the lens of social and cultural change: new elements hit against the old, shaping, changing, incorporating and dissolving old behavioural patterns. Lifestyles changed slowly: the habits and mentality of people could not be transformed overnight. Not only did certain customs continue during the building of the state socialist regime, but so did the lifestyles of social groups. While representatives of the old social groups preserved their traditions, new individuals and groups adopted these old habits of consumption and of lifestyle. The lifestyle of the ruling elite in this period did not correspond in the least to the communist utopia, and played an intermediary role: it absorbed all that it could from old traditions, thereby safeguarding the traditions of the prewar period. In spite of the communist ideology of the regime, they functioned as social “gatekeepers” as they distributed opportunities and positions and established the patterns for their dominant positions. The state socialist era ruling elite can be imagined as a group situated in a buffer zone between different and potentially hostile cultures and lifestyles, and by its sheer existence it could prevent conflicts between them.
György Majtényi is a social historian and professor at Károly Eszterházy University in Eger (Hungary). Between 2000 and 2011, he was department head of the National Archives of Hungary. His recent research interests include social history of East Central Europe in the twentieth century, Roma social history, social history of football, intellectual history, and historiography. Besides being the author of many articles on these issues, he has published six monographs dealing with post-1945 social history of Hungary. His latest English language volume deals with the social history of Hungarian ruling elite during state socialism (Villas, Hunts, and Soccer Games: Luxury and the Ruling Elite in Socialist Hungary. Indiana University Press, 2021).