Chapter 2: Accommodations

Abstract

If some advocates for the forms of knowledge that were soon to become known as the humanities in their modern institutional form pushed back against their marginalization within the reform movement by inverting the hierarchical relation between so-called useful knowledge (or information) and the more “creative” world of the arts (to use deliberately loaded terms, whose severe limitations were a major part of their argument) in terms that favoured the ultimate power of a vision of the imagination that refused to subordinate itself to the world of “applied” tasks, another intellectual tradition was gaining momentum during these same years that responded to this challenge by emphasizing their mutually enhancing nature. By stressing the proximity of these supposedly very different forms of knowledge, critics such as Leigh Hunt and John Stuart Mill foregrounded questions about their relative strengths, limits, and sometimes, surprising areas of convergence. If Hunt’s writing in the 1830s was energized by his attempt to forge an “anti-sectarian philosophy” whose respect for the worth of “every species of liberal knowledge” including the doctrine of Utilitarianism, which many literary enthusiasts regarded as their antithesis, it is no small irony that one of utilitarianism’s greatest champions, Mill, spent these same years forging an explicitly anti-sectarian philosophy from the opposite direction, rethinking the very nature of utilitarianism in ways that aligned it with those creative and critical preoccupations that constituted the domain of liberal knowledge. In doing so, Mill was also converging with Thomas Arnold’s insights about the ways that the social cleavages produced by industrial capitalism required new forms of public discourse that embraced the importance of affective and intellectual modes of understanding. If Arnold figured the controversy surrounding the 1832 Reform Bill as a political crisis that would need to be settled, at least in part, on a personal (or interpersonal) level by rebuilding the forms of sympathy and community that would enable economic and democratic changes to overcome entrenched forms of class alienation, Mill was arriving at a similar position from the opposite direction.