Debating disenchantment: The Victorians and modern ethics (Jeremy Bentham, Alfred Tennyson, Baron Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle)

Appeals to virtue and the good life dominated premodern discussions of ethics, but with the rise of modern science, capitalism, and liberalism, those enchanted conceptions of ethics underwent a profound transformation. The poststructuralist theories which have set the agenda for literary studies in recent decades have remained so skeptical of positive norms, however, that they have proven ill-equipped to conceptualize that transformation. "Debating Disenchantment" contends that Aristotelian and hermeneutic approaches to ethics, which acknowledge the inevitability of moral meanings, offer a more promising framework for analyzing the ethical dynamics of modern culture. Reexamining some major figures in Victorian debates about modernity---Jeremy Bentham, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, and, especially, Thomas Carlyle---I argue that modern culture has only appeared to dispense with virtue. While the modern ideals of equality, tolerance, and physical well-being do indeed bracket questions of character in unprecedented ways, they remain anchored by substantive ethical commitments and tacit characterological ideals---in short, by interpretations of reality that remain enchanted. Anticipating central themes of contemporary philosophy, Carlyle's defense of enchantment associates it with the linguistic turn and with the egalitarianism of the modern public sphere. Unlike Richard Rorty and Friedrich Nietzsche, moreover, Carlyle never wavers in his commitment to realism. Similarly, Arnold's careful critique of modern liberalism's philosophical and sociological premises avoids the libertarianism of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.