Though London’s Evening Mail [GK9]declared that “‘The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny’” (August 22, 1862), prominent British writers avoided the topic. The sole canonical poet to represent the US Civil War in Britain was American Walt Whitman in W. M. Rossetti’s British edition (1868). Though this chapter considers working-class and feminist writers’ depiction of the war, its principal focus is the underlying causes of major writers’ persistent silence. These causes included President Lincoln’s reluctance to name slavery as the war’s fundamental issue in hopes of bringing the South back, which led many Britons to suspect economic self-interest as the North’s principal motivation; declining abolitionist sympathy based on moral complacency; Conservatives’ sympathy for the Confederacy based on shared commitment to social hierarchies; and increased racism fueled by anthropology and stereotypes of Black Americans circulated in popular minstrel shows.

Since antiquity, poets have described their experience of versification as one of constraint. The introduction examines examples of this trope, and introduces the book’s central claim: that voluntary submission to formal constraints effaces the poetries and experiences of those who are actually in bondage. It discusses the way poets and critics have aligned the imposition or radical overthrow of formal constraints with conservative or revolutionary politics, and offers some working definitions of lyric. Close readings of a sonnet by Keats, and a discussion of J. S. Mill’s essay ‘What is Poetry’, establish the book’s historicist perspective on the ‘liberal lyric’ in relation to the histories of slavery. The introduction also explains the methodology, and situates my own critical practice in relation to whiteness as a kind of enclosure.

Barrell concludes by arguing that the utilitarians’ conscription into an ahistorical Enlightenment is doubly misconceived, first, because they opposed only the crudest forms of historical enquiry, and, second, because the eighteenth-century Enlightenments were neither systematically ahistorical nor neatly superseded by Romantic, organic, and historicist ideas. If, therefore, these new historical perspectives were both products and unruly offshoots of Enlightenment, then the utilitarians’ intellectual history assumes a more fluid shape. This new shape, Barrell suggests, may force us to rethink the utilitarians’ place within the intellectual history of the nineteenth century; the history of historical writing; and the history of philosophy.

The opening chapter revolves around the questions: What does liberalism purport to include within the defence of neutrality? What scope is available for conceptions of the good to meet, to mingle and to rival each other? In order to answer these questions, we need to understand what liberal democracy is about, what its ground rules are and how we can distinguish liberal democracies from illiberal societies. To address these important questions, the chapter avails itself of the Rawlsian justice as fairness theory which greatly influenced the liberal discourse during the past century. The Rawlsian theory of justice is supplemented with Kantian and Millian ethics. The chapter elucidates two important concepts without which it is impossible to imagine any liberal democracy: respect for others, inspired by Kantian and Rawlsian philosophies, and the Harm Principle derived from J. S. Mill’s ethics. It is the Harm Principle that guides us in prescribing boundaries to conduct. The necessity in introducing boundaries is further explained by the concept of the ‘democratic catch’.

Wicksell’s 1896 essay on just taxation approved of Mill’s endorsement of Hare’s system of proportional representation. The distinction between democracy, identified as government by discussion, and majority rule is central. When Buchanan laid out the role of the economist, he worried about a temptation to propose policies that garnered only majority support rather than policies with unanimous appeal. Buchanan’s development of Wicksell’s principle that expenditures and the taxes to finance them ought to be voted on simultaneously shows in his opposition to deficit financing: those who benefit from deficit-financed expenditures need not be the same as those who bear the costs. The link to an older Chicago tradition of Simons, who was concerned with the monetary instability generated by a fractional reserve monetary system, shows in the 1962 In Search of a Monetary Constitution. Tullock’s initial paper on rent seeking targeted the Chicago result that the economy was close to allocative efficiency. The question of the status quo comes into focus when we ask whether Wicksell’s simultaneity principle is appropriate under dictatorial rule where government by discussion does not exist.