Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism

Front matter

pero Ca

Pam Morris

EDINBURGH

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Worldly Realism

Part I: Systems and Things 1. Sense and Sensibility: Wishing is Believing 2. Mrs Dalloway: The Spirit of Religion was Abroad

Part II: Nation and Universe 3. Emma: A Prospect of England 4. The Waves: Blasphemy of Laughter and Criticism

Conclusion

Bibliography Index

29 55

83 107

139 167 198

203 213

Acknowledgements

Material from earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 4 appeared in Virginia Woolf in Context ©, Cambridge University Press, 2012. I am grateful for permission to use this material. Material from an earlier version of Chapter 2 also appeared in New Directions in the History of the Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. I am grateful for permission to use this material.

I have been fortunate in having opportunity to discuss ideas on realism in the stimulating and congenial contexts of seminars, lectures and conferences at the universities of Freiberg, Zurich and Kent. I am much indebted to the challenging and wide-ranging discussions with staff and students at those institutions.

As always, a great many friends and colleagues contributed their wisdom and encouragement to the process of writing this book. In particular, I thank Jane Goldman for providing the initial impetus and encouragement to explore ideas on Woolf and realism. Martin Milheim has generously shared with me his wide reading on realism. I also thank Angela Thirlwell who helped me think afresh about structure and has been unstinting in her enthusiasm. To Nancy Armstrong, I am indebted for many years of generous support, for late night talk over a convivial malt and for her inspirational insistence upon the limits of individualism. Elizabeth Allen and Jeannette King have, as always, sustained the long process of writing with their intellectual clarity, unceasing creativity of thought and unfailing warmth of friendship. My daughter Vicky’s love of Jane Austen has been a source of certainty in moments of doubt about the project and Colin and Topes, together, have ensured, with love and solidarity, that the whole enterprise stayed afloat.

Introduction

Worldly Realism

He ... was driven by intellectual fervour, a burning belief in abstract nouns such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘freedom’. Those ideas are noble in themselves, of course they are. But not when they are peeled away from the rough texture of the real world. For when doctrine is kept distilled, pure and fervently uncontaminated by reality, it turns into zealotry.

Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 2 July 2016

Jacob Flanders’ room in Cambridge contains the works of only one woman writer among all the many male-authored texts scattered about; that writer is Jane Austen. Even so, her presence is there by default, in ‘deference, perhaps, to someone else’s standard’.! It is as if Woolf pays a quietly humorous tribute here, across the space of a hundred years, to her most important literary progenitor. Yet had Jacob availed himself of the pleasure of reading Northanger Abbey (1st drafts c.1798-9; pub. 1816), he might well have been struck by the similarities between its narrative, initiating Austen’s mature style, and his own, in which Woolf, too, establishes her mature artistic form. In those two works, respectively, Northanger Abbey and Jacob’s Room, both writers find the means and the voice to articulate the sceptical irreverence which constitutes the distinctive force of their artistic sensibilities and vision, a scepticism that is their shared inheritance from the tradition of Scottish Enlightenment.

In these early novels, both writers are consciously challenging the authority of previous representational modes. Jacob’s Room, appearing in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, has, not surprisingly, been largely considered as part of the modernist rejection of traditional literary forms. Yet, Alex Zwerdling is surely right when he suggests that critical commentary on the novel can only illuminate if it moves beyond a mere inventory of innovative techniques. Also required is consideration of why Woolf felt the need for a new kind of narrative.” Slotting writers into their generic pigeon hole can close off wider recognition of their artistic aims and achievements. Discussion of Northanger Abbey tends also to focus upon generic convention, especially Austen’s debunking of the gothic novel. For some critics, like Alistair Duckworth, the novel ultimately fails because, while it makes fun of gothic form, the narrative remains too indebted to it to achieve its proposed moral vision.? By contrast, Claudia Johnson, among others, sees Austen’s complex ironies as ultimately reinstating the value of the gothic imagination as a means of illuminating ‘the ambiguous distresses, dangers, and betrayals of ordinary life’.* As with discussion of Jacob’s Room, there is perhaps need to read the novel in broader terms than the generic, asking why Austen is challenging popular novelistic forms and what is the social perspective that informs her need to find a new mode of representation.

Despite the hundred odd years that separate them, both novels are centrally concerned to overturn concepts of heroic exceptionalism as portrayed in the protagonists of traditional literature. Both Catherine Morland and Jacob Flanders defy artistic convention in being resolutely ordinary. Despite her romantic response to gothic tales, Catherine lacks sensibility or even complicated interiority. Like most children she had enjoyed physical movement and games more than sentiment. Austen has been criticised for failing to provide convincing and sustained presentation of Catherine’s growth in moral self-awareness. Yet, perhaps this is part of a deliberate, sceptical refusal of the heroic, a radical writerly commitment to people and things so normal as to remain beneath aesthetic notice. Jacob Flanders also lacks interiority. As has been recognised, Woolf writes not only against the form of the Bildungsroman but also against the traditional conventions of biography.’ The narrative remains wholly external to Jacob’s consciousness and lacks linear coherence. Given Jacob’s death in the First World War, Woolf’s totally unsentimental treatment sets itself provocatively against the prevailing reverence accorded the heroic dead. Before going up to Cambridge, Jacob accepts a present of Byron’s writing and in his study he has the work of Thomas Carlyle (pp. 24, 49). The implication is that young men should be wary of the spurious attraction to heroes and hero-worship.

The title of the essay Jacob is writing, ‘Does History Consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’, with its obvious reference to

Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, is darkly ironic given the premature, pointless deaths of so many young men in trench warfare. The title of the essay also forms part of Woolf’s pervasive attack upon gender hierarchy throughout the text. Women are treated contemptuously by Jacob and his friends, regarded as lesser beings, lacking spirituality and necessary mainly for sexual pleasure. This presumption of masculine superiority is fostered by the cult of Hellenism that young men of Jacob’s generation were immersed in at the public schools and Cambridge as part of a more general enthusiasm, in the early part of the century, for idealist philosophy. The effect was the elevation of the mind (invariably masculine) above the body (usually female). Woolf starkly ironises this idealising of disembodied rationality in her chilling account of death dehumanised by distance: ‘Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops [.. .] and falls flat, save that, through field glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick’ (p. 216). A hundred years earlier, Henry Tilney would find much common ground with Jacob as to women’s lack of rationality and capacity for serious knowledge. Catherine’s view of the history of great men as written by great men, however, is as sceptical as Woolf’s: women are absent from their accounts and the male heroes all ‘good for nothing’ (p. 79). Henry Tilney’s confidence in his capacity to educate and correct the female mind is ironically demoted by his serious failure of insight into his father’s motives and conduct.

It is surprising to recognise how easily Woolf’s representation of Betty Flanders, Captain Barfoot, Mr Floyd and most others in that circle of Jacob’s childhood could be slipped unnoticed into Austen’s village of Fullerton along with Mrs Morland and the Allens. There is a sense, moreover, that these rather complacent but respectable folk all belong to a way of life becoming outmoded and share a perspective that is no longer adequate, and this is so despite the hundred years between the two publications. The sceptical mockery of heroic endeavour, of individualist exceptionalism, and of gender hierarchy along with the ironic rejection of established literary forms are part of a larger agenda that Austen and Woolf share. Both writers are situated, at different historical points, within a continuing struggle of representation that constitutes the realms of art and of politics.

They both sense that a different possible world is struggling for perceptibility, a process engaging a new language and new forms. This is most obviously so for Woolf, writing in the aftermath of the

A Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism

First World War that had thrown into disarray all the traditional certainties structuring social and political life: class and gender subordination, reverence for religion, national honour and law. It is the crisis of this ordered and authorised hierarchical perception of social reality that Woolf’s narrative techniques aim to convey. Similarly, in Northanger Abbey, Austen interrogates and finds inadequate the available conventions of language and form. Failures of expression and understanding are characterised by a conflict between gothic and rational perceptions of realities. The occasions, moreover, involve reference to the forces of radical social change characterising the era of the French Revolution. When Catherine speaks enthusiastically of fresh horrors issuing from London, Eleanor Tilney mistakenly takes her to have news of political violence in the capital. Henry Tilney uses the opportunity to mock both women, informing his sister that any rational creature would relate Catherine’s words to the circulating library not to ‘a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields [. . .] the streets of London flowing with blood’ (p. 82). But the unspoken challenge of the passage is that neither gothic melodrama nor pure rationality is adequate means to represent such actual social horror and turmoil as had indeed been recently experienced in London. Austen is in line, here, with British sceptical Enlightenment: pure rationality cannot fully comprehend the complexity of embodied experience.

The same irresolvable question of representation arises with Henry’s lecture to Catherine as to the ungothic, law-abiding, Christian nature of England where atrocity would never be connived at or tolerated. Yet his moral and rational vision of English normality is overturned by the vicious brutality of his own father, General Tilney, whom he had rebuked Catherine for depicting as a gothic villain. Henry’s rational picture of England leaves too much unnoticed and unspoken for. Yet to see the General’s behaviour as vindication of the gothic mode is equally limiting. The General is not the exceptionalist villain of gothic horror. In his pursuit of greed and petty dictatorship he is all too ordinary; he represents the mundanity of secular evil. His competitive consumerism, his greed and concern with social status, moreover, typifies the powerful emergent force of aggressive individualism in British society and politics from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. As with Woolf, Austen’s was a world in which the consensus was fracturing. The scepticism and lack of reverence that typify both writers facilitated a dissensual way of perceiving their changing worlds and forging the representational means adequate to their vision. I am terming that representational mode worldly realism, as distinct from psychological and social realism. As the words suggest, worldly realism conveys a materialist, non-hierarchical and encompassing perception of existence, a horizontal continuity of self, social world and physical universe.

It may seem surprising to suggest an artistic continuity between Austen, often seen as the originator of the British tradition of realism, and Woolf, who is generally understood to herald its end. Both, however, are the direct literary heirs of the sceptical tradition of British empiricism, and both are writing at moments of public debate as to the conflicting claims of materialism versus idealism. Derek Ryan, one of the few critics to recognise that ‘throughout her writing Woolf theorises the materiality of human and non-human life’ associates this artistic perspective with her wariness of the ‘philosophical, ethical and political pitfalls of individualism’. Austen similarly stresses the materiality of the self and regards with suspicion the consensual consolidation of an ideology of individualism.

In considering the work of both writers as constituted by a shared, dissensual perspective, albeit mediated by their very different worlds, the work of Jacques Ranciére offers an insightful conceptual framework. Ranciére challenges the poststructuralist orthodoxy, espoused by critics like Roland Barthes, that modernism marks a radical break with the foundational belief of realism that words can provide an account of the world. Modernism, such anti-realists assert, initiates an aesthetic practice of conscious self-referentiality, a disengaging of word from world. In opposing this view, Ranciére argues that the radical break occurs around the end of the eighteenth century, when a new dissensual aesthetic regime came into conflict with the existing consensual regime of classical verisimilitude.’ It is perhaps not coincidental that this is the moment at which Austen inaugurates her experimental novelistic practice, even though the British context of her work is different from that of the continental writers whom Ranciére discusses.

The terms ‘consensus’ and ‘dissensus’ are central to Ranciére’s thinking both on art and on politics, which he sees as two facets of the same site of struggle, the struggle of representation. Consensus, for Ranciére, is an order regulated by the logic of the proper. It constitutes a naturalised artistic and political hierarchy in which everyone has a proper place which defines the terms and domain of their speech and action. This classical order of representation systematises a facade of verisimilitude into a hierarchical totality comprising ‘an affinity between characters, situations and forms of expression’ (Politics of Literature, p. 153). Within this vertical hierarchy only certain people’s speech is deemed significant and noteworthy and their actions rationally understandable in terms of values like honour, trust, ambition. These classical conventions constitute universal man as ‘realistic’ in the rational verisimilitude of congruous, meaningful speech, action and interpretation. This congruity of what is said, done and meant is held in place by the implicit guarantee of interiority, of the presence of capacity for mental willing. What is other to this proper realm of the classical regime is rendered unnoticed, unheard, without sense.

Politics and art, Ranciére suggests, comprise a struggle over what is deemed deliberative, meaningful speech and what can be dismissed as mere expression of sensation, non-sense: ‘Politics, before all else, is an intervention upon the visible and sayable.’* The cracking apart of the naturalised facade of the proper requires a writing practice as dissensus. This is the destructive/productive egalitarianism of the new aesthetic regime of representation that arises around the end of the eighteenth century. It produces a redistribution of the perceptible, bringing into visibility and audibility all that had been excluded as unworthy, improper and of no account. As opposed to the static, vertical hierarchy regulating the regime of the proper, the aesthetic regime is driven by the horizontal force of democratic energy. It is the ‘tide of beings and things, a tide of superfluous bodies’ that surges through the text of Madame Bovary (Politics of Literature, p. 39).

It is not the separation of the word from the world that typifies the aesthetic regime but its inclusivity. It redistributes ‘space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible’ (Politics of Literature, p. 4). Literary language is not a special elevated mode of poetics defining modernist writing, therefore, it is a new horizontal ‘way of linking the sayable and the visible, word and things’ (Politics of Literature, p. 9). It creates an egalitarian representational space in which anyone can say anything in any style of language whatsoever. Rather than textuality, the aesthetic regime replaces the idealism underpinning the classical regime by bringing into perceptibility the material continuity of ‘the world-at-large that anyone can grab hold of? (Politics of Literature, p. 13). The usefulness of Ranciére’s concept of the perceptible lies equally in its materialism and its inclusivity. What is perceptible is that which is afforded by impressions gained through both the senses and the intellect but with a reversal of idealist emphasis from mind to what is physically present to ear, eye and hand. All the stuff of the world in which we have existence is thus comprehended within the struggle of representation that constitutes the political and aesthetic regimes.

Ranciére sets out three relations of equality operating within the new dissensual regime of the perceptible. The first is that of ‘the equality of subjects and the availability of any word and phrase to build the fabric of any life whatever’ (Politics of Literature, p. 26). The second is the equality of mute things that are more eloquent than the most heroic orator. Finally, there is the ‘molecular democracy of the states of things with no rhyme or reason’ (Politics of Literature, p. 26). To illustrate this third equality he refers to Flaubert’s claim that he was less interested in an individual beggar than in the mass of undifferentiated lice that lived off him (Politics of Literature, p. 25). Ranciére claims that within the new aesthetic regime these three politics of equality are in tension, even conflict. Yet, what needs affirming as positive and productive in his account is the insistence upon things, upon the egalitarian tide of materiality that constitutes physical existence and the concomitant dethroning of human exceptionalism this necessarily entails. In a new regime of the perceptible, subjects and things and molecules are all equally noteworthy. It is this equality and inclusive horizontality that characterises the mode of writing I am terming worldly realism.

The conflict between a classical, vertical regime of the perceptible and the redistribution of what is visible and sayable within a new horizontal, egalitarian regime of representation has significant parallels with the central debate within Enlightenment thinking between the rational universalism of continental idealism and the material particularism of British empiricism. Classical verisimilitude underwrites the timeless values of universal man and erases from notice the embodied existence that renders humanity part of the changing physical world rather than the rational exception to it. British empiricism is sceptical of universal systems of knowledge, divorced from empirical particularity, and recognises the limitations of reason under the impress of habit and desires. It is, indeed, the promise of transcendence from an inconclusive, contingent everyday reality that constitutes the persuasive power of idealism as much as the rationality of its systems of thought.

The Hellenism flourishing among the young men of Jacob’s generation in Woolf’s text and in her actual world beyond fiction was part of a larger idealist reaction against what was seen as the spiritual aridity of nineteenth-century materialism. The smallness, ignoble detail and conventionalism of this way of thinking is the cause of Jacob’s passionate rejection of H. G. Wells whose novels are exemplary, for him, of this narrow, provincial realism. Woolf, too, was critical of the writing of Wells, along with that of Arnold Bennett whom she accuses of aiming at such factual, empirical particularity that there is a stifling ‘air of probability embalming the whole’, so that there seems no possible alternative to the familiarity within which we live.’

This is the criticism still brought against realism by anti-realist critics from Roland Barthes to, more recently, Gabriel Josipovici. Realism as a genre, anti-realists claim, functions ideologically to consolidate the status quo; the seamless verisimilitude, in form and content, that insists there is no alternative, that this is just, naturally, how things are. In Whatever Happened to Modernism, Josipovici makes the same accusation as Woolf arguing that realist novels ‘create a world and characters to inhabit that world that do not flout the laws of probability [. . .] Such narratives are easy to read [. . .] the smooth chain of sentences gives us a sense of security, of comfort even.’!° Novels like this, Josipovici claims, make the world seem smaller and meaner. We could say that their consensual regime of the perceptible constitutes a meticulous facade that regulates too narrowly what and who can be seen and heard. It operates comfortingly rather like Henry Tilney’s view of England.

Nevertheless, in a recent review article on J. Hillis Miller in the London Review of Books, Rachel Bowlby complains that in this kind of critique, as made by Hillis Miller and Josipovici, among others, ‘realism tends to get identified with a demoted, simplified theory of language — a word for everything and everything consistently called by its name’.'! As this suggests, underlying the attacks upon realism there is frequently a positivist correspondence theory of truth, a belief that words can offer a one-to-one match with things in the world. Anti-realists, like Josipovici and Hillis Miller, disdain such an over-simple view but, they imply, realist writers do not, or, at least, realists sell that reassuring belief to their readers. Realism, according to this view, perpetrates a naive sense of language of which Wittgenstein says, ‘a picture held us captive’. This comforting sense of identity between word and world is at odds with the epistemological scepticism that underpins David Hume’s empiricism and equally with a view of language as inherently dialogic and communicative.’ Such a narrowly referential view of representation, valorising accuracy and facts, is more usefully understood as actualist, as distinct from realist.

Georg Lukács makes a very clear distinction between realism and the reassuring consensual convention of actualism. ‘But the more closely Balzacian method approaches objective reality,’ he argues, ‘the more it diverges from the accustomed, the average [...] Balzac’s method transcends the narrow, habitual, accepted limits of this immediacy and because it thus runs counter to the comfortable, familiar, usual way of looking at things, it is regarded by many as “exaggerated”’."* Balzac’s art, Lukács continues, moves completely beyond ‘photographic reproduction’ (p. 60). What Lukacs is describing here seems very similar to what Ranciére advocates as writing as dissensus, a shattering of consensual verisimilitude. Lukács’ subsequent over-partisan defence of realism and attack upon modernism belongs to the Stalinist era, but the polarised controversies of that time initiated an unproductive, often misleading, binary opposition between realism and modernism that can too easily lead to an oversimplified, even caricatured version of one or the other, of which Josipovici’s account of realism is an unfortunate example.

Modernism and realism are, in fact, far from incompatible; both are experimental and both can offer an open sense of the possibilities, as opposed to the factual probabilities, of human life. In his argument with Lukacs, Bertold Brecht refuses to accept the polarisation of modernist experimentalism versus realist conventionalism: ‘Formalism on the one side — contentism on the other. That is surely too primitive.’ ™ Realism cannot be embalmed in any one form or style, he argues,

Were we to copy the style of these [nineteenth-century] realists, we would no longer be realists. For time flows on [. ..] Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new. (p. 82)

Conventional histories of the novel, such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), have certainly associated its development closely with the influence of eighteenth-century empiricism.'® Yet, anti-realists would be on firmer ground in recognising realist fiction’s affiliation with and constitution of idealist conceptions of reality. It is in their underpinning of idealist values that many nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novels are most open to criticism as serving a conservative consensus. Psychological realism has undoubtedly contributed in no small measure to the ideology of individualism, especially the elitist individualism that privileges interiority, intelligence and sensibility as indexes of moral, even human worth. Within this ideology, the acquirements resulting from cultural capital are taken as naturally endowed spiritual superiority. Literary criticism, too, has tended to prize fictions depicting the sustained and complex inner struggles, the conflicts of hope, doubt and suffering experienced by intensely individualised characters. Narrative trajectories, frequently tragic, show heroic protagonists crushed by the crass forces of materialism or their own failures of moral sensibility or by some combination of the two." This common narrative pattern works against the democratic impulse that Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, associated with the development of realism as a genre.'* The main protagonists undeniably come from lower down the social scale than did earlier heroes and heroines, but novelists compensate by endowing them with exceptional inner nobility. The distinctive sensibility of a Dorothea Brooke, for example, elevates her as much above the mass of human kind as wealth and power separated earlier high-born protagonists. It is salutary to note that in all of Austen’s fiction there is no Dorothea. Austen is always sceptical of exceptionalism.

Social realism, in addition, with its representations of detailed, particularised social worlds, frequently functions as the powerful, material ‘other’, against which the privileged interiority or ‘soul’ of the individual main character is defined. In this respect, it could be argued, realist fiction, in both its social and psychological forms, has frequently been inherently idealist rather than materialist, with plot structures maintaining the absolutism of the mind-matter hierarchical division. Moreover, plot structure, in conjunction with narrative technique, also functions as a model of universal knowledge in which mastery of particularity is brought intellectually into a unified systematised whole. Readers are interpellated into this fictitious position of panoptic omniscience and rewarded by the plenitude of certainty, justice and transcendence at the conclusion of even the most harrowing of stories.

It is not surprising this should be so. The modern novel takes its shape during the Enlightenment era. The struggles of representation that constitute that historical moment inevitably form part of the novel’s generic DNA. From Austen through to Woolf and beyond novels play a major role in the ideological conflict between materialism and idealism. The consensual perception that came to dominate by the end of the nineteenth century was idealist, elevating mind over gross matter; bodily life retained visibility largely as the troublesome otherness of labouring people or alien races. A notable exception to this literary regime of the proper is Thomas Hardy’s worldly realist fiction which explicitly thematises the continuity of human life with the physical world.

In 1918, just after Hardy gave up novel writing and before Woolf began writing Jacob’s Room, in which young men aspire to Hellenistic ideals, scorning the materialism represented by writers such as H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell published Mysticism and Logic. In this work, he argues that the greatest achievements in human creative thinking have been the result of a fusion of two contrary impulses driving a pursuit of knowledge, namely idealism and empiricism. The ‘true union’ of these, he says, produces the ‘highest eminence’ possible in the world of thought.” This understanding of two, often conflicting, forces shaping the comprehension of reality plays a key role in Woolf’s view of the ‘highest eminence’ in literary art. She sets this out most explicitly in her essay on Ivan Turgenev where she claims the greatest novelistic achievement is to hold in balance the contrary truths of vision and fact, allowing neither to subordinate the other (Essays, 6.11). In the political worlds of her novels, however, those pursuing visions are frequently practitioners of a coercive will to dominate. In Austen’s fiction, characters have to learn that their vision or wishes need to be subjected to empirical facts.

Russell was writing at a time when idealism was coming to dominate the teaching of philosophy in the universities. He and G. E. Moore, both members of the Bloomsbury group, wrote rigorous refutations of the foundational tenet of idealism that the only reality available was that of the mind.” Idealist modes of thought, however, were increasingly influential across wide sections of policy-making on public welfare, education and class legislation. Idealism was also shaping notions of national identity and the role of the state. Russell was highly critical of this political dimension of idealist thinking. For this reason, although he pays tribute, in Mysticism and Logic, to the power of the metaphoric mode of language he associates with visionary thinking, he is most severe upon systems of thought that elevate the mental or spiritual at the expense of the empirical. Even the meanest things, such as hair, mud and dirt are part of material existence, he insists, and the tendency to ignore such everyday reality, the thingness of the world, constitutes a failure of perception that renders so much of idealist thought ‘thin, lifeless and insubstantial’ (p. 14). Russell recognises the imaginative attraction of exorcising all that is mundane and messy in physical existence as unreal and to locate reality, instead, in the coherence and totality of rational systems of belief. But he warns that identification with the self-sufficiency of ideal mental worlds leads ethically and politically to ‘absence of indignation or protest’ (pp. 16-17).

Idealist philosophy no longer dominates the discipline within universities, in part due to Moore’s and Russell’s critiques. Nevertheless, idealist modes of thought are arguably more powerful and pervasive today across the globe than they were in Russell’s time. Idealist assumptions underpin the consensus that regulates current regimes of the perceptible. The abstract mental and spiritual totalities of nationalism, religion and free-market neo-liberalism dominate much of human existence with coercive assertions that there is no alternative, rejecting any appeal to evidence and experience beyond the enclosure of system. According to David Harvey, in Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, for instance, neo-liberalism has become a universalistic mode of discourse, increasingly defining ‘the common sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world’.*' In Critical Realism, the philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar, claims that during his training as a mathematician and economist, it was ‘totally taboo to talk about the real world’ existing beyond the realm of mathematical models and macro systems.” In fact, as Katrine Marçal points out, there was remarkably little resistance to idealist economics. The abstract models were ‘quite simply too elegant. Sexy [. . .] From Wall Street to university campuses: people wanted to believe in this dream. And so they did.’ We live now, it is claimed, in the era of post-factual debate.