An interesting review of a new biography of Walter Bagehot, the great Victorian polymath and social thinker.  I have not read everything he's done--only THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION and some of his essays, esp some written for THE ECONOMIST, which he edited (and very much set on its stylistic path)--but I think I side with those who see, as the review puts it,

his most enduring contribution to be the creation of a new prose style — cool, ironic, epigrammatic, allusive, balanced, sometimes slangy — that remains part of the mental furniture of Oxbridge, Britain’s Civil Service and what used to be called Britain’s 'higher journalism.'

Now, this is not to deny Bagehot's political acumen.  But some of his writing, especially the stuff on the science of politics, is pretty warped by racist thinking plated in the fool's gold of a pseudo-evolutionary idiom.  (That particular fool's gold is still operative today--not in real evolutionary theory, but in the many "just-so stories" people tell, using a highly teleologized pseudo-evolutionary theodicy.  But that's another post.)  That racist warping really hampers a lot of his thinking; he was terrifically clueless about the US Civil War, for example, seemingly incapable of believing that a political power not built on a herrenvolk mentality of racial purity could ever best a passle of Southern "Gentlemen".  But then again, the work of THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION, seen as a kind of ethnography of the familiar, which is a not-too-bad definition of a certain kind of excellent journalism, is quite insightful, and not without its useful prescriptive edge, as well.

Nonetheless, I think there is something to be said for the tone and attitude he took in his writing as being the most useful aspect of his inheritance, for those who could receive it.  As a man of banking, he knew intimately the psychology of financial markets, from the perspective of the greatest center of finance, when it was much less regulated than it is even today (when it is not nearly enough regulated at all), and he knew that the central vice is a certain kind of hyperbole that the speaker is invited to believe in.  In this hyperbole, prose bleeds into psychology; whether in terms of inflationary booms or calamitous panics, the tone of much of the modern age is unmoored from any sense of limits or finite realities.  Things are going to be ever better!  No, things are about to collapse!  Bagehot's "cool" tone (something people always mention about it), his ironic detatchment, innoculates his reasoning from being infected by hysteria or panic or hyperventilating exultation or endlessly abyssal despair.

In a way, the tone is related to the freedom felt by modern people from the constraints of nature.  This is perhaps first, or most especially palpably felt, in finance, where the market is itself an abstraction--the abstraction of buying or selling money, or abstractions from money.  So it stands to reason that a person who came to maturity in that moment might be the first to learn to resist it.

He had antecedents, of course, though I don't know if he thought consciously of them.  La Rochefoucauld, perhaps Gibbon and Hume, definitely de Tocqueville, all these I think contributed to his ironic and self-aware style.  I even see descendants of his form of thinking, in writers like Orwell, maybe Milosz, perhaps Trilling, even Susan Sontag.  (Definitely not Christopher Hitchens, despite his adulation of Orwell; he never doubted a cause so long as he found himself believing in it, including his own adulation of Orwell, which seems to me alarmingly tone-deaf to Orwell's own ironism.  Hitchens was always a Trotskyite, even when he was supporting the George W Bush administration; vehemence was his oxygen.)

Bagehot's style of writing, rainbowed through the prism of his various inheritors, reflects a style of thinking, of relating intelligently to the world, as I said above, that is perhaps especially useful in the modern age.  Many people can't gain sufficient detachment from the immanent to imagine a more mature, more fully metabolized relationship to it.  When James Wood complained in 2000 against "hysterical realism," he was inveighing against all those who remained in some fundamental way adolescent.  (I'd put David Foster Wallace alongside Zadie Smith in that category.  Definitely not Wood's own wife, Clare Messud, whose The Emperor's Children is nothing if not ironic; nor a thinker like Colson Whitehead, whose The Intuitionist is almost a parody of a noir thriller written by someone attempting to recover the African-American tradition of social criticism through ironic self-critique, Ralph Ellison written as Dashell Hammett.)  (Sorry, I'm getting excited.)

I think about this question of tone, of style, a lot.  I think part of our problem is that we don't have enough people trying to figure out how to represent the world to us.  We could use more Orwells.  Maybe we always could; but especially today, especially because of the increased mediation of our lives, through "social media," memes, advertisement, etc..  We barely have a chance to experience the world before it begins to be processed for us by some corporate overlord or other.

There's a whole other region of phenomena in modernity that runs against this, of course--not the challenge of hyperbole, but the challenge of trying to put the enormity of human monstrosity into language at all.  This is sometimes framed, not inaptly, in terms of trauma.  Think genocide, think mass slavery, think mass war, think horrific violence against whole segments of society.  The radically apophatic style of Hemingway and others--is Toni Morrison a figure in this tradition?--represents a wholly different idiom, responding to a wholly different set of challenges.  This is in some ways a more commonly recognized challenge, the challenge of "the crisis of representation" in literary terms.  I'm sure I'll talk about that.

And I'll surely come back to style again.  But for now, a last point about Bagehot: for all the ways in which his thought, his tone, is characterized as "ironic," "cool," "detached," in fact the "detachment" was fundamentally, integrally, vehemently in the purpose of putting the author, and the reader, back in touch with a reality that their psychology, and their prose, had lured them away from.