thinking in public || culture and democracy in ireland

Culture and Democracy in IrelandAuthor(s): David DwanSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 32, Thinking in Public (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 23-38Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736243 .

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Culture ^rjjckuernocracy iff Ireland

DAVID DWAN

In

the thick of debate about the constitution of the new Irish National

Theatre Society in 1903,Yeats made it clear that he 'certainly disapproved of a democracy in artistic matters'.1 If this left the viability of democracy in

other areas of life an open question, Yeats would subsequently emerge as one

of the most passionate opponents in twentieth-century Ireland of demo?

cratic government. Today it is, perhaps, difficult to understand fully the

conceptual or ethical basis of Yeats s anti-democratic views. This may be

due, in part, to the fact that Yeats was not a notably systematic political thinker and his objections to democracy are neither uniform nor necessarily coherent. But it is also due, one suspects, to the unprecedented dominance of

democratic values in our own time. The term 'democracy' has become so

basic to our language of value that it is perhaps difficult to determine what

values are being contested when it is challenged, other than the political embodiment of the good itself. Ironically, democracy, so often championed as a guarantor of value-pluralism, is not necessarily equipped to appreciate the relative nature of its own merits or to accede to the priority of other

goods over its own procedural logic.2 Consequently, it may be difficult to

understand why many figures in the nineteenth century regarded culture

and democracy as incompatible goods or why Yeats ultimately deemed

democracy to be an intrinsically corrupting force. The rationale behind

these anti-democratic convictions may also be hard to appreciate, not simply because we fail to recognize the relative nature of our own values but

because we may lack an understanding of their proper content. Democracy

may be the political mantra of the modern world, but the grounds for this

advocacy and even its basic terms of reference often remain elusive.3 It is

perhaps unnecessary to suggest that our current practice of delegating

DWAN, 'Culture and Democracy in Ireland', Irish Review 32 (2004) 23



authority to a putatively skilled oligarchy on a periodic basis would not be

considered a democracy by the ancient Greek inventors of the concept. We

may have made peace with representative democracy as the only viable

system whereby the ideal of popular self-rule can be adequately harmonized

with the historical reality and technical merits of the modern state. Even

here, however, it is not clear whether democracy is championed as a means

to an end, or as an end in itself, or as a political system best equipped to

resist the institutionalization of a unitary end to human life.

Discussion of the civic significance of culture in nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century Ireland revolved around many of these competing assessments of democracy. The aim of this article is to outline some of the

key features of this debate in an effort to lend historical determination to

values which we continue to cherish. Words such as 'culture' and 'democracy'

possess a complex history and are extremely difficult to define ? or, as

Nietzsche put it,'only something which has no history can be defined'.4 My

objective, nevertheless, is to shed some light on the values these terms have

incorporated and the problems their promotion has posed. Young Ireland

and Yeats occupy a dominant position in this discussion not least because

they stand at opposite ends of a period of political transformation that

culminated in the institution of mass democracy across Europe, but also

because they arrived at instructively dissonant interpretations of the viability of'culture' within a democratic setting. Young Ireland were contemporaries of Daniel O'Connell, whom Yeats would hold responsible for the institution

of democratic mores in Ireland. O'Connell was the father of Catholic

Emancipation ?

an event which, according to a recent historian, 'inaugurat?

ed the liberal democratic era'.5 If this is a somewhat overenthusiastic

assessment, many contemporary commentators regarded O'Connell's extraor?

dinary experiment in the political mobilization of the masses as the advent

of democracy in Ireland. Tocqueville's friend and collaborator, Gustave de

Beaumont, spoke of the Catholic Association in rapturous terms, noting'the

deep democratic character in this government of a people by one central

power emanating from the universal will, expressed or understood; collect?

ing within itself all the national elements; omnipotent by popular assent;

absolute in every one of its actions, though constantly subjected to the

control of all'.6 Here a fantasy of popular sovereignty ? which even its pro?

genitor Rousseau eyed with deep suspicion -

may have entirely supplanted the concrete realities of O'Connellite politics, but it was not easy for

contemporaries to discover terms for this new form of political organization. Outside of these innovations, O'Connell also did much to help the passage of the 1832 Reform Act and continued to advocate manhood suffrage, shorter parliaments and ballot reform in Britain throughout his career.

24 DWAN, 'Culture and Democracy in Ireland', Irish Review 32 (2004)



Young Ireland was generally supportive of O'Connell's democratic reform.

Moreover, key members of the movement such as Charles Gavan Duffy and

Thomas Davis believed that democracy was the imminent political future

awaiting Europe. For W. B.Yeats, writing in the wake of the crucial Reform

Acts of 1867 and 1884, this democratic future seemed to have already arrived and he would soon be in search of a suitable political alternative to

its disastrous 'levelling frenzy'. It was within this dynamic political setting that contemporary debates

about culture developed their ideological substance and particular passion. In the midst of debates surrounding the 1867 franchise reforms, for

instance, Matthew Arnold provided his famous defence of culture and

emphasized its centrality to a meaningful political community. Arnold did

not explicitly argue in Culture and Anarchy (1869) that democratic govern? ment would check cultural flourishing, but he had already voiced anxieties

of this kind. 'The difficulty for democracy,' he had declared, 'is, how to find

and keep high ideals.'7 Here Arnold was expressing a common nineteenth

century concern: how would democratic societies sustain those cultural and

political activities that had traditionally depended upon the existence of a

wealthy and leisured aristocracy? As far as the Irish historian and political thinker W. E. H. Lecky was concerned,'modern democracy is not favourable

to the higher forms of intellectual life'.8 The issue was not simply a practical concern about the absence of a leisured class in a democratic setting; Lecky believed that the very ethos of democracy was antithetical to the idea of

cultural excellence. The principle of equality overruled the very procedures of intellectual practice and eliminated the basic norms of better and worse

upon which any meaningful form of inquiry relied. Democracy was, thus,

incapable of producing or even recognizng intellectual authority. Lecky would not accept that democracy allowed for an authority based on merit

alone instead of established privilege. If merit was assessed democratically, then ideas of value remained indistinguishable from the procedural logic of

democratic decision-making. An authority putatively based on merit would

merely reflect the 'omnipotence of numbers'. And when it came to

numbers, Lecky was convinced that his sums were correct: 'In every field of

human enterprise, in all the competitions of life, by the inexorable law of

Nature, superiority lies with the few, and not with the many, and success can

only be attained by placing the guiding and controlling power mainly in

their hands.'9 Culture and democracy, in Lecky's eyes, were implacably

opposed forces.

Yeats ultimately came to share a very similar view. He gradually felt that

the logic that underpinned his critique of'democracy in artistic matters'

pertained to life in general. He stressed the necessity, therefore, of a




dominant ?lite in politics as well as the realm of culture. Enthusiasts left or

right of the political spectrum, he suggested, implicitly conceded this point in their commitment to the administrative structures and the skilled

oligarchies of the modern state: whatever one's ideological orientation, the

practical reality of governance necessitated that it was the few who ruled.10

But if ideology did mean anything, Yeats remained implacably opposed to a

democratic ethos. 'What's equality?' he asked. His answer was uncompro?

mising:'Muck in the yard.'11 Not only did the principle of equality overlook

qualitative differences between human beings and led to a dangerous

disregard for the practical importance of human excellence, it was also, he

believed, despotic. Indeed, Yeats was adamant that 'intellectual freedom and

social equality are incompatible'.12 Since, in Yeats s eyes, there was no such

thing as equality in everyday social relations, this principle had to be artificially enforced through the erasure of the real differences and the distinguishing

merits of individuals.

The prospects here for individual liberty ? let alone cultural achieve?

ment ? were not good. Contemporaries like Max Weber also noted how

the enforcement of egalitarian principles under democracy came at a

certain price. 'Bureaucracy inevitably accompanies modern mass democracy',

he maintained, because the principle of democratic equality demands the

institution of administrative procedures that guarantee equal treatment of

all.13 The irony, for Weber, is that bureaucracy develops its own internal

logic which stands at odds with the democratic principles it is supposed to

guarantee. The requirements of bureaucratic expertise and efficiency, for

instance, often undermine basic elements of a democratic credo, such as the

need for transparency and universal accessibility in public affairs. Weber was

fairly unsentimental about these costs, but Yeats deplored the way democracies both manufactured and enforced equality through bureaucratic

management or 'mechanism'.14 His anti-democratic disposition duly

converged with a nostalgic commitment to an aristocratic order. 'Ireland

has suffered more than England from democracy', he maintained, because

the erosion of its aristocratic influence began so much earlier.15 The loss of

Ireland's native aristocracy after the Jacobite wars of the seventeenth century had had, he believed, damaging consequences for the nation's cultural well

being. And the decline of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy under the agrarian revolution had contributed further to the rise of democratic vulgarity. In

'Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation' Yeats lamented the loss of

those noble virtues 'Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease' ? the

beautiful issue of 'the best knit to the best'.16 A democratic culture

organized around the moral cant of equality afforded no space to such

superlatives. Yeats's later Coole poems or his account of'Ancestral Houses'




in 'Meditations in a Time of Civil War' are also paeans to 'the inherited

glory of the rich'17 and robust criticisms of the levelling tendencies of

modern democracy. Cultural excellence, he maintained, could only thrive

among 'a leisured class' and in his unwavering commitment to this belief, he gladly declared himself'a crusted Tory'.18

These robust views placed Yeats at a considerable remove from the ideals

of Young Ireland. The group was by no means oblivious to the dangers of

democracy, and its cultural pursuits were, in many respects, based upon a

sense of its shortcomings. Indeed, figures like Francis Meagher explicitly

rejected democracy and promoted instead the benefits of a mixed constitu?

tion. However, the major players in the movement believed - like their

contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, whom they read and esteemed ? that

the march of democracy was irreversible. The Nation duly proclaimed

democracy to be 'the destiny of the world'.19 Like many of their contempo?

raries, however, Young Ireland worried that democracy would lead to a

dangerous prioritization of equality over basic political freedoms such as the

security of property and of persons. It was precisely for this reason that

Lecky deemed democracy and liberty to be largely antithetical terms.20 He

considered it politically imprudent ? if not immoral ? to base property

rights in the final instance on the political will of the country's less wealthy

majority. Even to more sympathetic commentators, democratic rule could

all too easily present itself as a ruthless confiscatory force. The history of

Jacobin France provided ample evidence of the real prospect and brutal

nature of this kind of outcome. The Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy was genuinely terrified of the potentially Jacobin quality of democratic rule

in Ireland and he repeatedly criticized the factious nature of a politics that

set one class against another.21 These chidings generally disregarded the

prospect that class hostility - as Marx would argue

- was not simply a moral

attitude adopted or abandoned at will, but was a structural feature of a

community organized along capitalist lines. Nor did Duffy concede much

to Rousseau's view that substantial inequalities of wealth made meaningful

political equality impossible. Other Young Irelanders were less alarmed than

Duffy about the security of property, or were more sympathetic to the idea

of its equitable distribution, but they still worried about the potentially

tyrannical nature of democratic rule in Ireland. For if democracy is

organized around majoritarian lines, it is not difficult to see how majorities

might override the basic rights of minorities. Thomas Davis was acutely worried that tolerance would not be extended to religious minorities within

an Irish democratic setting. The fact that this presented itself to O'Connell

as the exemplification of'Protestant monomania' did little to neutralize such

concerns.22




It was on the basis of anxieties about the damaging effects of class conflict

and religious sectarianism in a democratic setting that Young Ireland

promoted a redemptive ideal of culture. Cultural institutions, in their eyes, constituted a secular forum which allowed for the collective articulation of

shared values that transcended differences of class and creed. This was also an

ideology of culture which Yeats enthusiastically entertained, then bitterly dismissed as a vague dream. The historian E S. L. Lyons famously concurred

with Yeats s assessment and showed how culture did as much to foment as to

assuage conflict in Ireland.23 It is important to remember, however, that

Young Ireland's promotion of culture was not simply a response to class

strife and religious sectarianism in Ireland, but was also a reaction to a more

subtle and pervasive danger that Tocqueville had recently detected at the

heart of democracy. Tocqueville's concern was not simply that democratic

equality would erode political liberty but also that a reductive view of this

liberty would take precedence over a more substantial interpretation of free?

dom and citizenship. He feared, in other words, that freedom would be

construed as the untrammelled pursuit of private interests at the expense of

a more positive conception of liberty and citizenship. This danger seemed to

apply in particular, to modern democracies. Aristocracies, for instance, were

not simply organized around what was perceived to be a neo-feudal sense of

paternal responsibility or noblesse oblige, but aristocrats enjoyed the necessary

independence allowing for a patriotic dedication to public interests.

Democracies, on the other hand, delegated power to those who lacked this

independence and the political virtues it fostered. The sovereign body in a

democracy were potentially so consumed by the satisfaction of private needs that de facto sovereignty would be in the hands of administrative

?lites presiding over an increasingly centralized state. Both Tocqueville and

his contemporary J. S. Mill entertained a dystopian vision whereby a

entralized administration enjoyed unchallenged rule over large aggregates of

isolated individuals. Young Ireland's sense of its own political vocation was

grounded upon a similar fear. As Thomas Davis put it in 1842:

... on the shore of democracy is a monstrous danger; no

phantasm is it,

but alas! too real ?

the violence and forwardness of selfish men, regardful

only of physical comfort, ready to sacrifice to it all sentiments -

the gen?

erous, the pious, the just (victims in their order), till general corruption,

anarchy, despotism, and moral darkness shall re-barbarise the earth.

Democratic individualism could all too easily culminate in either a

bureaucratic tyranny or in simple anarchy. In the face of this awful possibility, Davis explicitly drew on Tocqueville's advice:'if you would qualify Democ?

racy for power, you must "purify their morals and warm their faith, if that




be possible".'24 Religious sentiment in America, according to Tocqueville, laid the basis for a shared moral framework upon which civic unity relied,

while religious association provided Americans with a form of collective

experience that curbed the latent individualism of their democratic values.

But in Ireland religion was a source of civic strife and not a solution to a

divided society. It was in this context that culture ? understood both as a

vision of the human good and as a practical forum for civic association -

acquired its true significance. According to this extremely hopeful vision, culture would provide individuals with a more expansive sense of

themselves and a more developed awareness of the common good; culture

would generate the institutional contexts and discursive resources for the

articulation of core values that transcended individual interests. Democracies, as Arnold suggested, may have difficulties generating high ideals, but this

made their active promotion within a democratic setting even more imper? ative. The pursuit of culture, for Young Ireland, would not simply ease the

sectarian strife that was the bane of Ireland's past but it would also curb the

individualism that stalked its democratic future.

Young Ireland's sense of the civic significance of culture also reflects ?

just as it does for Arnold ? their attachment to a classical conception of

political life. Basic to the movement's outlook was the classical conviction

that the purpose of a political community was not simply to produce material well-being or to guarantee basic securities but also to promote a

collective vision of the good life. It was on the basis of this view of politics that Socrates could declare himself, in Gorgias, the only true politician of

Athens.25 For his life, he maintained, was dedicated to improving the souls

of Athenians and not to the more material concerns of adding new

buildings or new riches to the city. In their celebrated efforts to bring a

soul to Ireland, the Young Irelanders possessed a similar understanding of

the moral substance of politics. Modern political thought had generally conducted itself in a more sceptical vein. Figures such as Hobbes, Smith

and Bentham had each acknowledged in different ways the ubiquity of

human selfishness and had built their models of politics on these regret?

tably certain foundations. When they argued that the public good did not

necessarily require private virtue, but might issue from its very opposite,

they repudiated an entire tradition of classical thought which insisted on

the identity between individual and collective virtue.26 Young Ireland

believed in such an identity and it helps to explain the moralizing zeal and

high-minded rhetoric of the movement. It can be argued that the Young Ire?

landers used the largely modern notion of culture to revive the classical idea

of a political community's ethical vocation. Culture, understood both as the

vision of the good life and as a practical communicative context in which




this life found expression, was in this schema the ultimate goal of political endeavour.

Many modern commentators on politics would resist such an ascription of a moral telos to public affairs, because it seems at odds with the value

pluralism that it is the role of liberal democracies both to foster and to

defend.27 Here the state's legitimate function, it would seem, is not to

endorse a univocal concept of the good but to remain neutral in the face of

competing interpretations of the proper ends of human life. A particular, market-based expression of this position promotes the economy as the

most neutral arbiter of values and the best insurance that the good will be

interpreted in a plurality of ways and pursued through the widest variety of

means. Young Ireland's cultural nationalism arose in opposition to a

nineteenth-century version of this outlook on politics. They invariably associated the doctrine ?

admittedly with little respect for nuance ? with

Benthamite utilitarianism and the relatively new science of political

economy. In their polemic attacks on the 'selfish creed' of Benthamism,

Young Ireland helped to develop a tradition of interpretation ? to which

Arnold and Yeats would also make significant contributions ? in which

Irish virtue stood opposed to English materialism. Although Yeats and

many twentieth-century scholars have tended to regard this as the expres? sion of a distinctly romantic nationalism, the basis for Young Ireland's

opposition to an 'English' ideology of commerce was, in fact, classical.

When Young Ireland declared that 'there are higher things than money, and

there are benefits which political economy prates not about and touching which Utilitarianism is dumb', it was providing a modern articulation of

Aristotle's conviction that 'a state's purpose is not to merely to provide a

living but to make a life that is good'.28 From Young Ireland's neo-classical perspective political economy limited

the moral scope of politics and reduced it to a simple technical exercise

involving the regulation of the economy. This only served to exacerbate the

individualism which Young Ireland deemed an endemic feature of modern

political life. By reducing politics to a technical exercise over which a body of experts preside, individuals were no longer encouraged to participate in

the broader concerns of the polity and fell back on the exclusive pursuit of

their own private interests. Young Ireland hoped, on the other hand, to

reintegrate individuals with their own social basis in the life of the polity. At

the heart of their political vision was a strong commitment to civic activism

organized around a largely positive interpretation of human freedom. Liberty, for Young Ireland, was not simply a negative affair denoting an absence of

external impediments which afforded us a wholly abstract sense of oppor?

tunity for action, but was an altogether more substantive matter. To put it in




the terms of one modern theorist, freedom in Young Ireland's eyes was less

an opportunity-concept than an exercise-concept which required a life of

active citizenship as its condition of realization.29 'No man should be idle ?

no man should be silent', they maintained, for these were 'startling indications of corruption'.30 In their repeated endorsement of a vita activa,

the Young Irelanders promoted ? as we shall see ? a largely classical under?

standing of citizenship. They believed with Aristotle that human beings were

political animals through and through and could only arrive at a proper sense of themselves through full participation in public life.

Aristotle, of course, was no advocate of democracy, but it was a version of

his ideological concept of citizenship ? mediated by a civic republican

tradition ? that underpinned Young Ireland's commitment to a democratic

government. This was a system of rule which both necessitated and encour?

aged a life of civic activism and the latter was the best guarantor of human

flourishing. Such views, of course, were by no means unique to Young Ireland. Their contemporary J. S. Mill applauded Athenian democracy

precisely because he regarded a life of active citizenship as an intrinsically

civilizing force.31 His deep admiration for Athens outlined in Considerations

on Representative Government (1861) is worth quoting at length, because it is

an eloquent appraisal of a civic ethos that was fundamental to Young Ireland's conception of politics:

It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men's

Ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions or to their

sentiments . . . Giving him something to do for the public, supplies, in a

measure, all these deficiencies. If circumstances allow the amount of

public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated

man. Notwithstanding the defects of the social system and moral ideas

of antiquity, the practice of the dicastery and the ecclesia raised the

intellectual standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which there is yet an

example in any other mass of men, ancient or

modern . . . He is called upon, while so engaged,

to weigh interests not

his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than

his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims

which have for their reason of existence the common good; and he

usually finds associated with him in the same work minds more familiar?

ized than his own with these ideas and operations, whose study it will be

to supply

reasons to his understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for

the general interest.32

From Mill's perspective, civic education ? or what we might also term

culture ? was internal to the practice of democratic rule in Athens. Young Ireland regularly extolled the achievements of the Athenian democracy for




many of the same reasons and maintained that its democratic constitution

and civic pride were the enabling conditions for its cultural excellence. As

The Nation put it in its distinctive idiom,'the liberty of Greece, the "nation?

ality fever" of Athens, created its pattern-deeds, its art, its oratory, its deep,

pure, unrivalled literature'.33 One may conclude, therefore, that Young Ire?

land possessed two distinct assessments of the relationship between culture

and democracy. One interpretation rested, as we have seen, on a sceptical assessment of democratic government: culture would help to 'civilize'

democracy and redeem it from the individualism and the dangerous class

and religious factionalism that it was structurally disposed to foment. Here

culture was something extrinsic to a system of rule and possessed its political

utility for precisely this reason. However, Young Ireland also expressed a

more optimistic vision of democracy, in which culture featured as a good internal to the practice of popular self-rule. Ancient Athens, as we have seen,

was deemed the historical embodiment of this virtuous polity. It was not immediately apparent how the spirit of democratic Athens

could be revived in the nineteenth century. No one had spelt out this issue

in a more compelling way than the liberal thinker Benjamin Constant.

Constant admired what he called 'ancient liberty', but he regarded any

attempt to restore it to a modern social setting as a naive and potentially

dangerous kind of political fantasy. The small size of ancient political institutions, he conceded, allowed for 'active and constant participation in

collective power'. But modern states were generally larger structures and the

individual's political influence was proportionally smaller within this setting. 'Lost in the multitude,' Constant explained, 'the individual can almost never

perceive the influence he exercises. Never does his will impress itself upon the whole; nothing confirms in his eyes his own cooperation.'34 This may be

an unhappy condition but it is not removed by abstract incitements to civic

activism. Moreover, ancient liberty, as Constant pointed out, was predicated on the institution of slavery. Moderns could not in all good conscience

abandon their menial concerns to a slave class and dedicate themselves

exclusively to the practice of poli tics. The exigencies of making a living in a

modern commercial society meant that the time we can dedicate to political affairs is necessarily limited. But even if our time was not so circumscribed

we may still demur from committing our lives to politics. For commerce,

Constant suggested, generates its own set of goods and interests that are not

necessarily available to us in a life of political service and we may

legitimately decide to commit ourselves to these private ends. Human

beings ? however Young Ireland might wish it otherwise ? were economic

animals as much as they were political creatures. Such views posed a

considerable challenge to Young Ireland's vision of citizenship. If in




Constant's eyes the exigencies of living meant that few had the time to

dedicate themselves to politics, the famine that ravaged Ireland in the late

1840s made this fact brutally apparent. Against this background, Young Ireland's incitements to a life of civic virtue seemed not simply abstract but

also deeply insensitive. Even outside this context of extreme scarcity and

utter demoralization, Young Ireland were attacked ? particularly by hard

nosed pol?ticos of the O'Connellite movement - as obtuse fantasists.

While there was considerable justice in these attacks, Young Ireland did

attempt to harmonize their ideals with the realities of modern politics. They

advocated, for instance, a policy of decentralization as a means of restoring a

small but active citizenship to a modern political setting. True democracy,

according to Young Ireland, presupposed local government, which The

Nation extolled as 'the creed of Greece and of nature'.35 They also believed ?

naively ? that modern nationalism in general was wholly consonant with this

attachment to local government. Finally, they hoped that advances in

cornmunication technology would provide greater opportunities for civic

education and political participation. The modern newspaper was in this

respect the guarantor of ancient liberty and made the resurrection of a

classical participatory politics a viable hope. Their contemporary J. S. Mill

also argued as much: 'The newspapers and the railroads,' he maintained, 'are

solving the problem of bringing the democracy of England to vote, like that

of Athens, simultaneously in one agora, and the same agencies are rapidly

effacing those local distinctions which rendered one part of our population

strangers to another, and are making

us more than ever ... a homogeneous

people.'36 Mill increasingly worried about the fate of individuals within this

homogenizing process, but he continued to regard the modern press as a

civilizing force. Political philosophers from Montesquieu to Rousseau to

Constant had always assumed that a popular participatory politics was impos? sible in large states, because spatial distances and large populations meant that

collective deliberation through face-to-face interaction was not sustainable in

these contexts. But the emergence of modern systems of mass communication

seemed to remove some of these spatial and numerical barriers and to afford

new opportunities for popular participation in political affairs. James Bryce was in little doubt that it was 'the newspaper press that has made democracy

possible in large countries'.37 Tocqueville had also stressed the crucial politi? cal significance of newspapers, and Duffy was fond of quoting his

observation that 'nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a

thousand minds at the same moment'.38 Convinced that 'a newspaper is the

only conductor to the mind of Ireland',39 the Young Irelanders created The

Nation in October 1842. The journal turned out to be a huge success.40

Young Ireland had helped to constitute, it appeared, a virtual agora in Ireland,




in which a mass public could gather and debate. It seemed to Duffy and to

countless figures after him that 'a new soul' had come into Ireland.

The kind of assessment of newspapers produced by Mill or by Young Ireland is an extraordinarily optimistic one. Such optimism, however, would

appear increasingly naive in the face of subsequent developments in the

newspaper industry. After all, a journal such as The Nation preceded the

repeal of the taxes on newspapers, which paved the way for the massive

expansion of the industry in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In an

era of a highly commercialized press, run primarily if not exclusively on

profit lines, it was difficult to share the enthusiasm of Thomas Davis and his

cohort for the purely educative role of newspapers. Mill may have promoted the press as a new agora for public debate, but rational-critical discussion was

not necessarily a dominant form of interaction in the new marketplace.

Tocqueville may have celebrated the way the newspaper dropped the same

thought into the minds of thousands, but this may worryingly occur

without the rational assent or even basic recognition of its readers. And

while Young Ireland may have seen the press as a communicative forum for

an active citizenry, newspapers in many people's eyes encouraged not active

engagement but intellectual frivolousness and passive consumption. Accord?

ing to Joseph Schumpeter these realities ? wherein 'mere assertion, often

repeated, counts more than rational argument and so does the attack upon the subconscious' ? must be factored into our assessment of modern

democracy.41 Schumpeter dismissed the idea that democracies reflect the

will of the people. If it is possible to speak of such a thing at all in modern

politics, it 'is largely not a genuine but a manufactured will'.42 This was by no means to indict modern democratic practices, but to attack impossible doctrines such as the volont? gen?rale which had been traditionally used

either to sanction or to explain their basic operation. Schumpeter's account

of democracy is, perhaps, excessively cynical and relies for some of its

fundamental assessments on a social psychology that has little empirical value. But it does emphasize the often distressing rupture between classical

democratic theory and the basic functioning of modern politics. In the face

of such realities, the political credo ofYoung Ireland could appear hopelessly

abstract, while their faith in institutions like the press could seem funda?

mentally misplaced.

This, at least, was the assessment of Yeats when divested of his youthful nationalist convictions. Yeats's complicated response to Young Ireland

reflects the group's great appeal as well as the extremely problematic nature

of its political ideology. Young Ireland had given birth to an inclusive

model of culture which proved attractive to a young Protestant poet

brought up on the margins of Irish life and searching for greater




integration within it. Yeats's own commitment to a 'unity of culture' was

partly an extension ofYoung Ireland's attempts to provide a non-sectarian

basis for civic interaction. It also marked a continuation ofYoung Ireland's

efforts to curb the individualism that it deemed already endemic in

modern societies.Yeats was extremely disturbed by the atomistic nature and

alienated character of modern life and was prepared to promote the

remedial properties of culture in the face of such fragmentation. He initially

emphasized, therefore, the essentially public character of art and rejected the view that cultural activity was simply a matter of private satisfaction.

The proper role of art, he maintained, was to expound 'the ideal hope not

of individual life, but of the race, its vision of itself made perfect'.43 By

underlining the ethical significance of a political community, Young Ireland

had successfully emphasized the importance of culture in the life of the

nation. Yeats s enthusiasm for this nationalism lay precisely in the way it

promoted a sense of art's public import. 'The fascination of the national

movement for me in my youth,' he later admitted, 'was that it seemed to be

an image of a social ideal which could give fine life and fine art authority.'44 This is an ambiguous remark, in which nationalism appears to possess a

purely instrumental value. Moreover, it is uncertain whether 'fine life and

fine art' is the 'social ideal' of which Yeats speaks, or whether their relation

is purely contingent or accidental. The poet is certain, however, that com?

munities possess a moral vocation from which art acquires its public

import. In this regard he is in fundamental accord with Young Ireland who

derived their teleological conception of communal life from the classics.

Of course it was precisely because states were supposed to pursue the

good that Plato dismissed democracy as an intrinsically corrupt form of

government. Yeats came to hold a remarkably similar outlook and it lent a

strong authoritarian dimension to his thought. If this led him to break with

the populism ofYoung Ireland, he did so because he seems to have taken

seriously their conviction that states should foster the good. But there was

also a less authoritarian - indeed a distinctly liberal -Yeats, who took issue

with Young Ireland on precisely this point. How, he wondered, was a shared

concept of the good possible in a complex world? Modern life, after all, was

an incorrigibly plural affair: huge aggregates of people could be found

engaged in an enormous range of specialized activities which featured

different and largely incommensurate goods. To insist upon a unitary con?

ception of the good in such a differentiated world seemed either unrealistic

or potentially authoritarian. As we have seen, an authoritarian system of rule

was not something Yeats necessarily deemed illegitimate; indeed, when his

admiration for Mussolini was at its highest, he pointed to the highly

complex and specialized nature of modernity as evidence of the need for




authoritarian rule: in such a complicated world, decisions, he felt, could not

be entrusted to the unskilled many.45 But in other situations he invoked this

social complexity to reject the existence of a unitary end to communal life - indeed he developed a ?orra o? lebensphilosophie in which 'life' appeared as

an 'always individualising' force.46 It was on this basis that he attacked Young Ireland and chose to do so on distinctly liberal grounds. The attempt to

organize a community around a shared conception of the good culminated, he felt, in either 'simplification' or 'tyranny'.47 If this good is to properly accommodate large numbers of people, it will be, at best, necessarily

anaemic; it would say everything in general and nothing very specific. If a

more substantial interpretation of the good is offered, it risks being

exclusionary or coercive. Either way,Yeats was convinced that the social and

moral coherence demanded by Young Ireland's nationalist vision overlooked

the complexity of modern social organization as well as the phenomenal richness of life itself.

It is easy to see how the movement's own poetic practice lent itself to this

impression: a tone of moral unanimity was often arranged around an

extremely vague notion of the good, culminating in a form of advocacy without content; alternatively, a poetry of shrill conviction precluded from

the start any possibility of legitimate dissent. In its first issue the Nation

boldly promised 'Reasoners as cool as the coolest cucumber'48, but neither

reason nor coolness ? not to mention a particularly discriminating eye for

metaphor ?

were always apparent in its verse. Yeats

? as well as a range of

contemporary figures from D. P. Moran to John Eglinton - believed that

Young Ireland had produced a form of symbolic bondage from which it was

imperative to escape. The movement, moreover, exemplified in Yeats s eyes the dangerous dominance of newspapers in Irish public life. He duly con?

demned the 'ignoble power of journalism' and queried 'its right to govern the world'. Like Schumpeter, he seemed to believe that the popular will ? at

least as it appeared in journalism ? was 'wholly artificial'.49 Our assessment

of Young Ireland today may be considerably less damning. The movement,

after all, advocated values which we continue to hold in high regard. As I

have tried to suggest, however, the relationship between culture and democ?

racy is a complicated and potentially dissonant one. Moreover, these values

may have depressingly little in common with the actual realities of modern

political and social life. For this reason the ideals ofYoung Ireland may come

across as naive, but it is we, it seems, who are condemned to live in bad faith.

Notes

1 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume 3: ?901-?904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 258.




2 For the links between democracy and pluralism see Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its

Critics (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

3 For a perceptive analysis of this problem ? to which this discussion is indebted

? see

John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1979 [1993]) pp. 1-28. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol

Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 57.

5 Fergus O'Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation and the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin: Gill and

Macmillan, 1985), p. 273.

6 Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland Political Social and Religious, ed. W. C. Taylor, 2 vols.

(London: R. Bentley, 1839), II, pp. 67-8.

7 Matthew Arnold, 'Democracy' in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan

Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14.

8 W. E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981), I, p.

112.

9 ibid., p. 22.

10 W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 357.

11 W. B. Yeats, TJie Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell

K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 457.

12 W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 348.

13 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berke?

ley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978), II, p. 983.

14 In A Vision, for instance, he grouped democracy with among other things 'mechanism',

'science' and 'abstraction' and contrasted this with a set of values that included 'kindred',

'art', 'aristocracy' and 'particularity' (Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937 [1981]),

p. 52).

15 Yeats, Explorations, p. 257.

16 Yeats, Poems, p. 264.

17 ibid., p. 418.

18 ibid.; W. B. Yeats, The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (London:

Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 38-9.

19 The Nation, 29 April 1848. 20 As he put it, 'a tendency to democracy does not mean a tendency to parliamentary gov?

ernment, or even a tendency towards greater liberty. On the contrary, strong arguments

may be adduced, both from history and from the nature of things, to show that democra?

cy may often prove the direct opposite of liberty' (Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, I, p. 217).

21 See for instance his assertion that 'The Nation is an Irish, not a Jacobin journal' in the

Nation, 29 April 1848.

22 Mary Buckley, 'Thomas Davis: A Study in Nationalist Philosophy' (Ph.D. thesis, UCC,

1980), p. 31. See also D. George Boyce, Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Search for Stabil?

ity (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990), pp. 78-80.

23 F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

24 Thomas Davis, Essays Literary and Historical, ed. D. J. O'Donoghue (Dundalk: Dundal

gan Press, 1914), p. 45.

25 See Plato, Gorgias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.

127.

26 See for instance Plato's extended analogy between the soul of the city and the individual

soul in Book 8 of The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffin (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 252-84.




27 See for instance, F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944 [2001]),

pp. 59?74. See also Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford and Cambridge:

Blackwell, 1974). 28 The Nation, 23 September 1843; Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair, revised and

re-presented by Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 196.

29 Charles Taylor, 'What's Wrong with Negative Liberty', in Philosophy and the Human Sci?

ences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 213.

30 The Nation, 25 January 1845.

31 For a perceptive account of the classical background to Mill's political convictions see

Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government

(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Eugenio F. Biagini, 'Liberalism and Direct Democracy: John Stuart Mill and the Model of Ancient Athens'

in Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles,

?865-?93?, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),

pp. 305-24.

32 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government in The Collected Works of John Stuart

Mill Volume XIX, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press,

1977), pp. 411-12.

33 The Nation, 16 December 1843.

34 Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 316.

35 The Nation, 23 December 1843.

36 Mill, 'De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II]', in Collected Works, volume xviii,

p. 165.

37 James Bryce, Modern Democracies, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1921), I, p. 104.

38 See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Everyman,

1994), p. 111.

39 The Nation, 15 October 1843.

40 By 1845 10,000 copies of The Nation were being produced each week and were circu?

lated around an estimated readership of 250,000.

41 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1943

[2000]), pp. 257-8. 42 ibid., p. 263.

43 W. B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. Volume 2, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton

Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 200.

44 W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. and transcribed by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan,

1972), p. 180.

45 'Authoritative government,' he explained, 'is certainly coming, if for no other reason

than that the modern State is so complex that it must find some kind of expert govern?

ment, a government firm enough, tyrannical enough, if you will, to spend years in

carrying out its plans' (Yeats, Uncollected Prose. Volume 2, p. 433). 46 Yeats, Explorations, p. 120.

47 Yeats, Memoirs, p. 251.

48 The Nation, 15 October 1842.

49 W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan 1965), p. 312.




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