David Sugarman veyed.'^^ Vogeler’s recent study of Frederic Harrison, the lawyer, pupil of Maine, Professor at the Inns of Court and intellectual leader and pastor of the Church of Comtean positivism sheds much light on the secular religions of Victorian Englandd^"^ A not insignificant number of distinguished Victorians courted Harrison’s church. Perhaps this testifies to the inseparability of spirituality fromordinary life, fromour conscious and, more acutely, our unconscious thoughts about identity, families, sexual desire etc.'^^ jf correct, then those theories that conflate modernity with a simple shift from belief (irrationality) to unbelief (rationality) require careful handling. One might also point to the distrust of theory that permeates so much of English intellectual life.^^^ Even that pioneer of the sociological perspective in England, and one of the great intellectuals of late Victorian era, Leslie Stephen, based his creed on Dr Johnson’s aphorism, “Stick to the facts, don’t whine, resist anarchy.” Hegel, the epitome of high theory, was “little more than an ass”.Asimilar perspective is discerned, for example, in Burrow’s brilliant study of Stubbs. Whether this exemplifies a deeper, more wide-ranging, intellectual and cultural malaise - namely, the failure to sustain a fully-fledged social sciences and, therefore, the development of general theories of society - is somewhat controversial.'^^ Certainly, Anderson and others have characterised the tenacity of indigenous empiricism, reformist social science and the very belated development of academic sociology (relative to Continental Europe and America) as crucial aspects of a wider bourgeois failure and British parochialism. Acomparison between Britain and America highlights, “...the sheer élan of the social sciences in the policy arena in America. Oxfordpolitical scientist Jim Sharpe has suggested that the nearest analogy to a British social scientist visiting America is an English chef visiting Paris ... [The] range and variety of ‘think tanks’ drawing on social science expertise is far greater in Washington 248 138 S. Budd, Varieties of Unbelief, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). See M. S. Vogeler. Frederic Harrison, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). See J. Obelkevich, L. Rober and R. Samuel, (eds.). Disciplines of Faith: Studies to Religion, Politics and Patriarchy, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); L. Barrow, “Socialism in Eternity: Plebeian Spiritualists, 1853-1913”, History Workshop Journal, No. 9, 1980, pp. 37-69; S. Yeo, “A NewLife: The Religion of Socialismin Britain, 1883-96”, History Workshop Journal, No. 4, pp. 41—60. See Anderson, op. cit., passim; Weiner op. cit., passim; Johnson, op. cit., pp. 60-1; P Anderson. Arguments Within English Marxism(London: NewLeft Books, 1980), chap. 2. ’^7 N. Annan, Leslie Stephen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). J. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Contrast Anderson op. cit., passim, with Burrow, ibid.; J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); S. Collini, D Winch and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), L. Goldman, “The Origins of British ‘Social Science’”, Historical Journal, 26, 1983, pp. 587-616; and E. P. Thompson, op. cit., passim. 138
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