VERNON LUSHINGTON'S “THE STATE”: AN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT ON THE POSITIVIST METROPOLIS

Extract

Over the past few decades, intellectual historians and political theorists have begun to uncover the immense influence Auguste Comte's Positivist ideology exerted on Victorian culture, which attracted sympathisers such as John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Beatrice Webb, and William Morris (Bevir 57; Varouxakis 100–18; Wright 135, 175–220). Until recently, scholars believed that, within Comte's prolific society of British followers, Vernon Lushington was merely a sympathiser of the movement's aesthetic and literary culture. While many will appreciate that recent accounts of Lushington's life have revealed that he was a “complete” Positivist, or adherent to the Religion of Humanity, few have had an opportunity to examine his position in relation to Comte's prototype for civic reconstruction (Taylor 339–40; Vogeler 163–69). In his four-volume System of Positive Polity (1848–1854), Comte referred to this scheme for pan-European peace as the “Republic of the West.” The extent to which Lushington's work may be read as disseminating this republican city-state system as an inevitable, if not realisable, edifice has remained less clear than others within the circles of British Positivism.