Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914

In this book, layered with anecdotes and biographical vignettes, William Lubenow traces the reorientation of public culture in nineteenth-century Britain: from a confessional state in which public office was tied to adherence to the Thirty-nine Articles to a new culture in which liberal values dominated. These liberal values formed ‘a moral mindset’ (p. 2), ‘a multivalent sensibility’ (p. 7) that was characterised by scepticism and tolerance, and that stretched beyond a particular party. The first chapter examines changes in religious sensibility from the repeal of the Tests and Corporation Acts (1828) and the enactment of Catholic Emancipation (1829) up to the early twentieth century. The author argues that the personal struggles between faith and scepticism of these generations shaped liberal values. As religion became more fluid, and more personal, imaginative explorations of religious belief led intellectuals towards a new liberal sensibility. Lubenow’s argument that religious sensibilities were critical to the articulation of liberal values reinforces recent scholarship which has postponed the advent of secularisation until well into the twentieth century. This first chapter captures effectively the impact of religious culture on the ways in which sceptical liberals imagined their moral space in the world; Lubenow quotes Virginia Woolf recalling Keynes’s regret that new generations would not experience the religious world which he had rejected. One of the virtues of the book is its wide reading of personal papers; Lubenow’s sensitivity to the fluidity and personal quality of these generations’ preoccupation with religious belief and unbelief owes much to these sources

Aesthetics · Faith · Political science · Sensibility · Skepticism · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies · Religious Studies