Common Sense and the Condition of England: Critical Reflections on Anti-Dialectical Thought

Abstract

This dissertation reads British common sense, understood as a kind of knowledge or practical know-how supposedly held in common by all members of a social body, as a form of anti-dialectical thought that seeks to do away with abstraction by submerging thought itself immediately in daily life. Common sense has had opposite trajectories in the German dialectical tradition that culminated in Critical Theory, and British philosophy and letters, respectively. From Kant to Adorno, Critical Theorists and their forebears critiqued common sense’s vulgar empiricism, atemporality, and social conservatism. Conversely, common sense became wildly popular in British culture starting in the eighteenth century. British appeals to common sense posited an opposition between a “common life” defined by uniform social practices—eating and drinking; buying and selling—and a socially deleterious tendency toward abstraction that they attributed to specialized thought. By identifying the kind of thinking that common sense supposedly was with the practices of “common life,” British thinkers effectively conflated thought with practice, attempting to circumvent the mediation on which dialectical thought insists. The twin trajectories of common sense converge in the mid-nineteenth century, when Marx and Engels begin to observe and theorize English industrial capitalism. Alongside the development of a mode of dialectical materialism that identifies British common sense as paradigmatic of bourgeois ideology, the mid-nineteenth century sees the transfer of British common sense from philosophy and literary criticism to the novel. There, common-sense orientations to facts, relations, and practices infuse new social-realist sensibilities. I analyze how several of what Raymond Williams called the “industrial novels” imagine a common British epistemological life that would naturalize the mid-nineteenth century’s heightened rates of inequality and exploitation. Common sense in these novels opposes history’s unfolding in the form of workers’ movements, and thought’s abstraction from life in the form of social critique. I show, however, that their narrative forms invariably register the contradiction inherent in the attempt to institute social stability at the level of mutual understanding. These forms, I suggest, record the same dialectical interplay between the categories of the political, the social, and the cultural that critical-theoretical observers of industrial-era struggle confronted.