'Prodigious and Portentous and Immeasurable Affair'

“What makes for freedom is not the extent of government or its lack of national boundaries but the way in which government is exercised. If there were a world government, why wouldn’t it simply end up as a world tyranny?” 

Humans crave power over other humans. It’s in our fallen nature to control, to impose our will on others, often in the name of some fashionable form of benevolence. War, slavery and rape are rooted in the same impulse. Quoted above is Jeremy Rabkin in his essay “Liberty and the Nation State,” collected in Liberty and Civilization: The Western Heritage (ed. Roger Scruton, 2010). He notes that even men as brilliant as Kant and Einstein touted various schemes of world government. Supporters of such intrigues tend to fall into one of two vast, overlapping camps: the naïve and the thuggish, idealists and criminals. Rabkin puts it rather nicely: “So the U.N. has contributed almost nothing to the advancement of freedom in the world.” And we have learned nothing from the twentieth century.

 

My thoughts turned in this grim direction while reading, of all people, Henry James, who befriended late in life the Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen (1872-1940). Andersen was a naïve utopian who promoted the idea of a “World City” and published a pamphlet titled “A World Center of Communication.” James writes to Andersen in a letter dated September 4, 1913:

 

“I simply loathe such pretensious [sic] forms of words as ‘World’ anything—they are to me mere monstrous sound without sense. The World is a prodigious and portentous and immeasurable affair, and I can’t for a moment pretend to sit in my little corner here and ‘sympathise with’ proposals for dealing with it. It is so far vaster in its appalling complexity than you or me, or than anything we can pretend without the imputation of absurdity and insanity to do to it, that I content myself, and inevitably must (so far as I can do anything at all now), with living in the realities of things, with ‘cultivating my garden’ (morally and intellectually speaking), and with referring my questions to a Conscience (my own poor little personal), less inconceivable than that of the globe.”

 

A recurring theme in James’ fiction is personal freedom and those who threaten it. Recall Isabel Archer and the monstrous Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady. Theodora Bosanquet served as James’ secretary and, as he called her, his amanuensis, from 1907 until his death in 1916. In Henry James at Work, her memoir originally published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1924, Bosanquet proved herself more than a glorified taker of dictation. She possessed a first-rate literary sensibility:

 

“The essential fact is that wherever he looked Henry James saw fineness apparently sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth to a bold front. He realized how constantly the tenderness of growing life is at the mercy of personal tyranny and he hated the tyranny of persons over each other. His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.”