Latter-Day Pamphlets by Thomas Carlyle

Latter-Day Pamphlets Reviews

• 
  Thomas Ray

  Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. I, The Present Time (Feb. 1, 1850)
  
  Writing in 1850, at a time when monarchs throughout Europe had recently been deposed as worthless parasites; the Irish potato famine left millions starving while Irish food was shipped to England; London was full of poor people, dying from starvation and overwork; wages were below subsistence level; the air and water were being fouled. Carlyle’s solution in Pamphlet I is to enslave the unfortunates who had been incarcerated in “workhouses:” he would force them to hard labor, and flog or kill them if they didn’t work. In Carlyle’s opinion, the “captains of industry” were the people who should be in charge of society. Carlyle blames the poor for their poverty, and would deny the vote to all but the well-off. Carlyle would enshrine the very “consecration of cupidity” he purports to decry.
  
  Unfortunately, “captains of industry” are now indeed in charge of society, these 164 years later. They are increasingly the worthless parasites their monarchial predecessors were. They still live for greed, eagerly enslaving workers, destroying the environment, corrupting the political process.
• 
  Edward

  From the first of Carlyle’s brilliant Latter-Day Pamphlets:
  
  What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it? A meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be possible!
  
  The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of the European populations, which calls itself Democracy, and decides to continue permanent, may be.
  
  Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come.
  
  Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty — O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody, from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same.
  
  Moldbug wrote:
  
  To join the Froude Society - actually, to become a deacon of the Froude Society - all you need to do is read three works of High Victorian political and historical criticism. I recommend this order: The Bow of Ulysses, by James Anthony Froude; Popular Government, by Henry Sumner Maine; and Latter-Day Pamphlets, by Thomas Carlyle. These books will change your life, or at least your mind.
  
  There are more books, more authors, where these came from. Without blinking we could add Lecky, Stephen and Austin to this pantheon, for instance; nor are Ruskin, Arnold, and Kingsley to be sneered at. And the remaining oeuvre of Froude, Maine and Carlyle is no less vast. And this is not a random sample of Victorian thought, but the cream of a coherent tradition. And anyone can read it. It's free - thanks to Google. Now and for the foreseeable future, Froude is more accessible than Stephen King.
  
  The task of the Froude Society is to restore High Victorian thought in the 21st century. And when I say restore, I mean restore to life - not study. The Society traffics not in critical formaldehyde.
• 
  Vladivostok

  "If you could not get it spoken, if you could still constrain it into silence, so much the richer are you. Better keep your idea while you can: let it still circulate in your blood, and there fructify; inarticulately inciting you to good activities; giving to your whole spiritual life a ruddier health. When the time does come for speaking it, you will speak it all the more concisely, the more expressively, appropriately; and if such a time should never come, have you not already acted it, and uttered it as no words can? Think of this, my young friend; for there is nothing truer, nothing more forgotten in these shabby gold-laced days. Incontinence is half of all the sins of man. And among the many kinds of that base vice, I know none baser, or at present half so fell and fatal, as that same Incontinence of Tongue. 'Public speaking,' 'parliamentary eloquence:' it is a Moloch, before whom young souls are made to pass through the fire. They enter, weeping or rejoicing, fond parents consecrating them to the red-hot Idol, as to the Highest God: and they come out spiritually dead. Dead enough; to live thenceforth a galvanic life of mere Stump-Oratory; screeching and gibbering, words without wisdom, without veracity, without conviction more than skin-deep. A divine gift, that? It is a thing admired by the vulgar, and rewarded with seats in the Cabinet and other preciosities; but to the wise, it is a thing not admirable, not adorable; unmelodious rather, and ghastly and bodeful, as the speech of sheeted spectres in the streets at midnight!"
• 
  Jared Tobin

  This was the best Carlyle that I've yet read, handily beating out Chartism in particular amongst the longer works.
  
  The first 'pamphlet', The Present Time, is probably the most enjoyable of the bunch. It is full of prescient insight and literary flourish (Stump-Orator stands out in my memory as well). But I enjoyed the entire text, throughout which Carlyle rails against the central problem of 'these latter days' in Victorian England: what is democracy, and why in the world should one want it?
  
  Going on two centuries after its initial publication, much of Carlyle's thought around the failings of democracy and the principles of good governance now seems obviously correct. And even the parts that seem obviously false reflect a worldview that one would be remiss to ignore. Highly recommended.
• 
  Brian

  This is a prostigiously entertaining work of pamphlets by Thomas Carlyle, famous as the historian of the great man theory of history. Although this might make you expect something turgid or heady, this is exactly like Shakespeare would write if he wrote pamphlets. There are enough rhetorical figures and neologisms to make your head spin, and when Carlyle gets worked up boy can he rhapsodize.
  
  These the points of his eight pamphlets:
  1. Democracy is a bad idea.
  2. Don't try to reform murders: execute them because they deserve it.
  3. The only way to get the empire in order is to have someone at the top pick wise men as magistrates.
  4. The anarchy of the world can only be solved by appointing wise men.
  5. The parliamentary system incentivizes sophistry, not capability.
  6. The parliamentary system does not work because too many chefs spoil the stew, especially with a newspaper telling them what to do.
  7. Let’s not become worshippers of mammon and mediocrity, but worship heroes and the great men.
  8. Jesuitism is the source of all modern mediocrity and evil.
  
  He is full of lots of insights and has a ball tearing democracy to pieces, because as he puts it some men must tell the others what to do. And it would be best if those men were wise men. Obviously, our current elites are not those wise men, but still I see no reason to think that at any time in history the few will not rule over the many. The questions is the process of selection.
  
  Carlyle's best insighs come when he observes how democracies work. Democracy selects, inevitably for eloquence, not wisdom:
  "Can it be doubtful that this is still the rule of human education; that the human creature needs first of all to be educated not that he may speak, but that he may have something weighty and valuable to say! If speech is the bank-note of an inward capital of culture, of insight and noble human worth, then speech is precious, and the art of speech shall be honored. But if there is no inward capital; if speech represent no real culture of the mind, but an imaginary culture; no bullion, but the fatal and now almost hopeless deficit of such? Alas, alas, said bank-note is then a forged one; passing freely current in the market; but bringing damages to the receiver, to the payer, and to all the world."
  
  Or this: "In short: "Truly, it is little known at present, and ought forthwith to become better known, what ruin to all nobleness and fruitfulness and blessedness in the genius of a poor mortal you generally bring about, by ordering him to speak, to do all things with a view to their being seen!" Social media does this all the time.
  
  This is one of the most insightful lines, which applies to what we might call consent-of-the-governed libertarianism:
  "To rectify the relation that exists between two men, is there no method, then, but that of ending it? The old relation has become unsuitable, obsolete, perhaps unjust; it imperatively requires to be amended; and the remedy is, Abolish it, let there henceforth be no relation at all. From the "Sacrament of Marriage" downwards, human beings used to be manifoldly related, one to another, and each to all; and there was no relation among human beings, just or unjust, that had not its grievances and difficulties, its necessities on both sides to bear and forbear. But henceforth, be it known, we have changed all that, by favor of Heaven: "the voluntary principle" has come up, which will itself do the business for us; and now let a new Sacrament, that of Divorce, which we call emancipation, and spout of on our platforms, be universally the order of the day!—Have men considered whither all this is tending, and what it certainly enough betokens? Cut every human relation which has anywhere grown uneasy sheer asunder; reduce whatsoever was compulsory to voluntary, whatsoever was permanent among us to the condition of nomadic:—in other words, loosen by assiduous wedges in every joint, the whole fabric of social existence, stone from stone: till at last, all now being loose enough, it can, as we already see in most countries, be overset by sudden outburst of revolutionary rage; and, lying as mere mountains of anarchic rubbish, solicit you to sing Fraternity, &c., over it, and to rejoice in the new remarkable era of human progress we have arrived at."
  
  Now Carlyle does have one gap in his argument, one which I need to hear a good argument about: what about when your elites are wrong and your governors corrupt? Carlyle observes that parliaments almost never work because the men cannot lead the country in a concerted fashion, and when you add the free press to the mix, basically the members of parliament do what the press tells them to do and merely repeat its opinions in their speeches. This means that nobody gets anything done, and Carlyle hates not getting anything done.
  
  But still, it leaves questions unanswered. This is not because Carlyle disagrees with the principle of subsidiarity: at one point in the sixth pamphlet he says that parliaments are a legitimate representative government when they serve as advisors to the king: however, sometimes people are wrong and no matter how many people vote for it, Carlyle says, it's still wrong and doesn't change the law: “My friend, do you think, had the united Posterity of Adam voted, and since the Creation done nothing but vote, that three and three were seven—would this have altered the laws of Arithmetic?”
  
  Interestingly, Carlyle says that voting could be good in performing the function of letting the king know his subject's opinions, especially compared to riots. He warns that the common people often have very good instincts, but if asked to give an explanation for their instinct will give a stupid answer. That definitely resonates with me.
  
  Two other issues that Carlyle discusses are capital punishment and great men.
  
  Carlyle's essay on capital punishment is one of the most politically incorrect things I have ever read. But still quite fun. For instance, this is a great put down of liberalism:
  "O Heavens, from the Christianity of Oliver Cromwell, wrestling in grim fight with Satan and his incarnate Blackguardisms, Hypocrisies, Injustices, and legion of human and infernal angels, to that of eloquent Mr. Hesperus Fiddlestring denouncing capital punishments, and inculcating the benevolence on platforms, what a road have we travelled!"
  
  Carlyle even says capital punishment is great for society:
  "Alas, alas, to see once the 'prince of scoundrels,' the Supreme Scoundrel, him whom of all men the gods liked worst, solemnly laid hold of, and hung upon the gallows in sight of the people; what a lesson to all the people! Sermons might be preached; the Son of Thunder and the Mouth of Gold might turn their periods now with some hope; for here, in the most impressive way, is a divine sermon acted. Didactic as no spoken sermon could be. Didactic, devotional too;—in awed solemnity, a recognition that Eternal Justice rules the world; that at the call of this, human pity shall fall silent, and man be stern as his Master and Mandatory is!"
  
  What becomes clear in the last two pamphlets is that the reason Carlyle is Mr. Law-and-Order is because what he loves is greatness and he hates the mediocrity that a society of buyers and sellers was creating. It was really weird, because right now this dovetails neatly with what people are saying was Nietzsche's great critique of the modern world: it incentivized bugmen and got rid of the great men. From this comes Carlyle's hatred of liberal sentiment and his love of order, rule, and concerted action. As he puts it, “England once was a Hierarchy.”
  
  I really cannot get behind Carlyle's adoration of the great man. I do think that we need to have a greater value of it than we do now (whether in Christian or secular contexts), but Carlyle basically worships it.
  
  Carlyle, for some reason that his final pamphlet did not really make clear to me, attributed the rise of mediocrity and money-grubbing to the Jesuits, perhaps because it infiltrated the English crown in the Restoration. But still, I am not sure about the connection between the two. He says that the true religion of our day is money and eloquence and so this destroys the fine arts: he wishes for the blood and screams of Homer and the Hebrew Bible.
  
  So in short, this was a thoughtful read, and definitely applicable. I wish that it had somehow grappled with the questions of evil in governments and how to restrain errant governments (though maybe there is an answer out there), but still lots of things got destroyed. Well worth one's time.
• 
  Samuel

  A collection of a handful of grand thoughts, some of them prophetic, some provocative, some wrong, expressed verbosely in the most beautiful polemic prose the English-speaking world has likely ever produced. I highly recommend reading it for that alone, but for those short on time the main points of this collection of essays are quickly summarized: Doing is better than talking; Democracy manages only to bring the most eloquent people into power, not the most fit for office; the most important trait for a politician is intelligence, which should be cultivated in society; public money should be reserved for those who deserve it, not criminals, who should be executed instead of being housed; capitalism leads to societal and moral decline; Jesuits are bad; liberalism is bad; history is made by great men.
• 
  Thomas

  So friggin' good. No one writes like this anymore - no one! Read if you want a fresh perspective on history and want to wrangle with dangerous ideas.
• 
  Cordelia Patterson

  literally the most boring thing ive ever read
• 
  Simon Stegall

  Bracing stuff.
• 
  Didier "Dirac Ghost" Gaulin

  The greatest shit-post of all times. The Stump-Orator chapter alone is worth the price of admission.
• 
  anon anonimi

  Carlyle is massively overrated. He is best viewed as a shitposter, not a polemicist. He makes a fleetingly small number of arguments over the course of the pamphlets, and all of them are drawn by analogy. From a political and societal analysis perspective, I believe he fails to be a Schmitt/true autíst. That said, he does succeed as a shitposter – he is very funny to read, and is guaranteed to bring a few chuckles out from you in each pamphlet. Worth reading, but if you want true, incisive analytical content, it is best found elsewhere.
• 
  Abu Dhabi

  Lots of verbiage, relatively low on content. Some insights were OK. Hard to read, overall.