Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881

Highly influential Scottish essayist, historian and social critic, Thomas Carlyle was a gloomy romantic sage and a passionate denouncer of bourgeois liberalism and the industrial era.  

Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Scotland, to a modest but strongly Puritanical family.  In 1809, Carlyle managed to enroll at the University of Edinburgh. With undistinguished performance, he finished his coursework in 1814.  Thereafter, Carlyle taught mathematics at schools in Annan and then Kirkcaldy.   In 1818, he moved to Edinburgh, where he worked as a private tutor and did some hack work for an encyclopedia..   Carlyle studied law half-heartedly for a while, but literature continued to pull at him.  

All the while he was still thinking of a career in the Church of Scotland.  However, Carlyle was swept up by the literature of German Romanticism -- particularly, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  In a famous incident on Leith Walk in June 1821, Carlyle converted himself from a Puritanical Christian (the "Everlasting No") to a Puritanical Pagan (the "Everlasting Yea").   Carlyle gave up on the Church definitively  .  

In 1824, Carlyle published a biography of Friedrich Schiller, translated Goethe's great novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Legendre's Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry.  This provided a modicum of the financial wherewithal to support himself as a writer.    In 1827, he produced a series of translations of German Romantics.  In 1827-1833, Carlyle threw himself into the journal world by publishing essays on German literature in the Edinburgh Review, the Foreign Review and Fraser's Magazine.  It was largely through Carlyle that the two great streams of European Romanticism -- English and German --  were finally introduced to each other.  Carlyle was also quite attracted to "scientific" romanticism of Saint-Simonism. 

In 1826, after an unconventional courtship, Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh and, soon afterwards, moved to Craigenputtock in rural Scotland.  The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson made a pilgrimage to the remote Carlyle home.   On an 1831 jaunt to London, Carlyle made the acquaintance of John Stuart Mill.   Carlyle soon tired of rusticism, and hankering for a return to urban civilization, the Carlyles moved to London in 1834 and set themselves up on Cheyne Row in Chelsea.  

In 1833-4, Carlyle published his Sartor Resartus, a medley of satire, philosophy and autobiography.  It turned out to be a distinctively Romanticist manifesto -- albeit not in the sense of wide-eyed utopianism, but rather in the more subtle (and mystical) German sense of individual freedom combined with external order.  For the Romanticists, the end of human activity was activity itself.  The social context in which activity is pursued does not matter.  Socialists may rail against society's restrictions on individual freedom, but society has always been and always will be restrictive. Reversing the famous Rosseauvian dictum, Schiller had asserted "Man is free, even though he is born in chains".   For the Romanticists, it was not "natural" to up-end society to match the individual's aspirations; the individual should find his "place" in society and work happily within that.  For Carlyle, this sounded like the old Puritan ethic of his youth, secularly enhanced.   This was the message he believed German Romanticism had tried to export. Carlyle was merely translating it to the British public in his inimitable style.

However, there was one social feature that, in Carlyle's view, went dead-against this vision -- namely, the market system.  For the bourgeois capitalist society, the end of human activity is selling, including the selling of labor.  The market system does not reward hard work itself but rather it only rewards salesmanship.  For Carlyle, the Capitalist "commercial" ethic and the Puritan "work" ethic are incompatible. 

Carlyle's opposition to bourgeois capitalism was not a socialist opposition, but rather a "neo-feudal" opposition (if such a term can be allowed).  But Carlyle is not hankering for some rural utopia or pastoral romance.  Rather, for Carlyle, the feudal system's sole value is that it is much better at assigning a man "his" activity -- and thereafter granting him the freedom to pursue it in any manner he pleases.  In contrast, a market system assigns him no activity whatsoever.  But the market simultaneously becomes the hardest taskmaster of all because it forces individuals to chase the wage, chase the profit and serve it.   In Carlyle's view, it is "unnatural" for people to pursue consumption and accumulation  instead of activity itself.   Thus, for Carlyle, the feudal system may be harsh in limiting social mobility, but it offers freedom of activity at the individual level and the joy of craftsmanship.  In contrast, the market system is socially much more progressive, but at the individual level, it forces everybody into the unnatural activities of selling, gaining and acquiring.   

The 1830s, of course, were the height of bourgeois agitation in favor of market capitalism.   The 1832 Parliament Reform Act had, in effect, transferred political power in Britain from the landed aristocracy to the commercial bourgeoisie.  A couple of years later, the Poor Laws were repealed, creating a nationwide labor market.  Slavery was abolished in 1833.  The free trade movement movement was at its height around this time and the last bastion of the old landed interests, the Corn Laws, would be repealed by 1846.  

Carlyle threw his weight behind the opposition to all these steps.  In his 1839 Chartism, Carlyle threw his weight behind the Chartists not because he was a friend of democracy, but rather because he saw rule by the working masses as the only way to prevent "rule by the shopkeepers".     Carlyle passionate opposition to bourgeois capitalism is captured in his Chartism (1840) and, especially, Past and Present (1843), a book much admired by  Frederick Engels. Carlyle condemns economists and their laissez-faire doctrines with the fury of an Old Testament prophet.  In his view, economics is pure apologism for the bourgeois capitalist ethos, the ideological and religious buttress of the industrial revolution.     At one point, he even recommended that economists ought to be "popularly elected" as a way to make them accountable to the population that their theories were helping ruin.  It was Carlyle who later characterized economics as "the dismal science".  Nonetheless, throughout all this, he remained a good friend of that most bourgeois of economists -- John Stuart Mill.  

Carlyle's darkest moment was perhaps the publication of his infamous defense of slavery (in his 1849 Fraser's Magazine) and his venomous Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850).  His attack on economics was most explicit here:

"Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall [evangelical abolitionist] Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—not a “gay science,” but a rueful — which finds the secret of this universe in “supply-and-demand,” and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science. These two, Exeter Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal Science, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it,—will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!"

 (Thomas Carlyle, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question", 1849, Fraser's Magazine)

The shamelessly racist tone of his diatribe were not well-received even in his day.  But it was his attacks on the Evangelical Christian abolitionism which were the main sore point with Victorian society.  He lost most of his friends and admirers over this -- including John Stuart Mill (who responded with his own article in Fraser's Magazine).  Mill and Carlyle clashed again in the late 1860s when Carlyle took actively took up the defense of Governor Edward John Eyre's brutal suppression of an uprising by blacks in Jamaica.  (See our special page on the the Carlyle-Mill "Negro Question" debate).

Needless to say, his arguments in defense of slavery were not logically inconsistent with his general social philosophy, they were just taking it to an extreme degree and expressed in an extreme tone.  Theoretically, Carlyle saw little difference between a black slave in a slave society and a joyous yeoman in a feudal society-- except that one is loyally bound to his task by chains and whips, and the other by tradition and custom.  In either case, the "joy of work" is (eventually) achieved.  Add to this the "happy slaves" propaganda of the American southerners and their "Gone with the Wind" feudal mimicry, add to this his own personal racism and gloominess, add his always exaggerated writing style, add the urgency of his message and the need to "turn up the volume", and, finally, add the pleasure he took in offending the pious and sanctimonious evangelical Christians he despised (with a provocative glee), and the extremity of his 1849-50 writings may be contextually clearer.

But neither a feudal society nor a slave society are being "recommended" by Carlyle.  His early flirtation with Saint-Simonism, which embraced industrial society (but tried to rationalize it) proves that he was not a traditionalist, much less a master-and-slave feudalist.  The main issue, the only issue, was the "man-must-work" principle.  How this can be achieved in an industrial society, he did not know nor did he have practical policy suggestions for.  He was a man of letters.  He wrote to shock. 

Carlyle is most often compared and paired with his friend and Victorian critic John Ruskin, who had a similar romantic indisposition to market society and industrialism.  Charles Dickens dedicated his novel, Hard Times to Carlyle.   

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