Syllabus--Apes, Angels, Victorians
	1. Introduction. 2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. We’ll concentrate on the following major ideas: empiricism, rationalism, laissez-faire, the relationship between the State and the Individual, “common sense,” humanism, the origin of ideas, pleasure as the sole good, and human equality. 3. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. We’ll read this novel as a dramatization of the emergence of homo economicus and modern capitalism. We’ll also explore the relationship of the individual to capitalism and of Protestantism to rationalism and empiricism. 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract. Major ideas: democratic political theory; a new view of nature, of humankind, of the child; the “Golden Age”—a communal state; the innate goodness of man, egalitarianism, civilization versus nature; the nature of society. 5. The impact of Locke, Defoe, and Rousseau on the Victorian world. 6. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present. We’ll use Past and Present as an opening into the question of the relationship of empiricism, rationalism, science, and religion as it specifically relates to the “Condition of England Question.” We’ll ask ourselves whether Carlyle’s use of the medieval monastery as a template for his historical understanding of the social ills of the early Victorian period could work. This formulation by Carlyle of a basic social question—that of man’s social obligations—will prepare us for Marx’s analysis and raise questions about the role of science, reason, and the empirical butting up against the human issues of poverty and class, especially within the context of the newly industrialized technological society of England of the 1830s and ‘40s. (Carlyle, unlike Marx, for example, bases his answer on a religious but not Christian model. [He gave up his Christianity after reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.] Does Carlyle imply in his religious choices a return to the paganism of the society the British most wanted to emulate, the Roman?) 7. Karl Marx, vol. one of Capital; the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as well as various shorter works. Major ideas: Marx’s romantic and rationalistic basis for his philosophy; his dialectical materialism (unlike Carlyle’s medieval romanticism); his economic determinism (hence his development of a scientific (rational) religion (romantic); his idea of work and of surplus value; his critique of capitalism. . 8. John Ruskin, Unto This Last. The focus here will be on Ruskin as a “sacramental humanist,” attempting in his social writing to address the same problems as Marx but basing his answer on humanism, socialism, and an increasingly pagan religious point of view. (Born into a conservative evangelical Protestant family, he gave up his belief in orthodox Christianity after a “conversion” in a chapel in Turin, Italy in 1858.) Ruskin and Carlyle share a similar world view. 9. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Major ideas: the emergence of biology as a science; his theory of natural selection and its implied rejection of a teleology; his emphasis on the empirical, the objective, the phenomenal, on, in short, the inductive method; Darwin not a metaphysician but an epistemologist. Darwin’s world: amoral, relativistic, emphasizing process and change. 10. John Henry, Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The antithesis to Darwin, Newman presents the absolutist, dogmatic Catholic Christian position, arguing from faith rather than reason, from tradition rather than experience, from revelation rather than phenomena. Views science as an adjunct to other and greater sources of truth. 11. William Morris, News from Nowhere—a socialist romance. Morris presents a practical acceptance of science and technology, and of socialistic ideas, but weaves them together with pagan religious ideas. In many ways, then, the utopian News attempts to reconcile the many forces and conflicts we’ll have been looking at in the course. 12. Finally, we’ll attempt to bring all of this together with the implications for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.