This chapter provides an exegetical and critical survey of the reception of Mill’s proof of the principle of utility in the scholarly community. The point is to take stock of all the relevant objections, most notably the longstanding charges of fallacious reasoning, thus identifying exactly what is at stake without attempting to clear the proof of any errors, which is a task reserved for subsequent chapters. The general agreement among the critics consulted here is that Mill commits the logical fallacies of equivocation and composition in addition to exhibiting signs of a conceptual confusion later classified as the naturalistic fallacy, the supposed mistake of identifying the good with natural phenomena and explaining goodness in naturalistic terms. These charges emerge from a cluster of seminal reactions by highly influential scholars shaping the secondary literature on the subject, including, in chronological order, John Grote in An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (1870), Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics (1874–1907), Francis Herbert Bradley in Ethical Studies (1876/1927), William Ritchie Sorley in The Ethics of Naturalism (1885/1904), John Dewey in Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891), John Dewey and James Hayden Tufts in Ethics (1908/1932), John Stuart Mackenzie in A Manual of Ethics (1893–1929), and George Edward Moore in Principia Ethica (1903).
The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine's key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book's pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book's appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published.Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine's study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twenty-five years about cultural hierarchy in America? What perspectives might be useful for the future? I want to consider those questions by bringing to bear both the insights of other scholars who have written since 1988 and the results of my own research.The first third of Highbrow/Lowbrow directly concerns students of reception because it is about the changing position of Shakespeare in American culture. Levine begins by documenting not only the frequent performance of Shakespeare on the nineteenth-century American stage but also the travesties, soliloquies, afterpieces, and other theatrical presentations that often juxtaposed adaptations of Shakespearean drama and poetry to “magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics.”1 Because “people cannot parody what is not familiar,” Levine concludes, Shakespeare was an integral part of popular culture during the early years of American history (4). For Levine, “popular” referred to “those creations of expressive culture that actually had a large audience” (31) rather than to the traditions produced by ordinary people, as historians such as Peter Burke and David Vincent have used the word.Filled with exuberant spectators unconstrained by genteel decorum, the theater itself was thoroughly democratic, housing under one roof, as Levine puts it, “a microcosm of American society” (25). But the situation was in flux. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, separate theaters had emerged to serve more refined audiences as part of a growing “bifurcation” of “serious” and “popular” culture (68, 81). Eventually, Shakespearean drama as a popular possession was a casualty of this process, which Levine labels the “sacralization” of culture; Shakespeare became an “elite” author separated from ordinary people by an “unbridgeable gulf,” and his work receded to the rarefied realm of high art (79).The middle section of Highbrow/Lowbrow traces other forms of this process of sacralization under way at roughly the same time. Champions of symphonic music such as John Sullivan Dwight and Henry Lee Higginson articulated a vision of the classical concert as a vehicle for the transmission of art, as distinct from lighter fare, which was often segregated in separate “pops” performances. The opera house and the art museum furnish further examples wherein audiences learned, in Levine's words, to “approach the masters and their works with proper respect and proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment” (146).In the last third of Highbrow/Lowbrow, Levine attempts to explain those developments, situating what he calls the fragmentation of culture into “high” and “low” in the context of the massive societal changes of the late nineteenth century, as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization proceeded apace. In a phrase that I have always found particularly resonant, he ascribes to figures such as Henry James and other white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants the perception that America had become a “new universe of strangers.” Their way of navigating this “unstable,” threatening environment was to insist on the value of discipline, self-control, and order (177). In consequence, Levine notes with dismay, the opportunity for democratically composed audiences to act “naturally” and to participate actively in cultural experiences gave way to passivity and stultifying propriety (179). Works of art and the institutions that supported them acquired the function of taming democracy, of diffusing “culture” to foster “civilization” (204). But more Americans, Levine observes, sought not to “proselytize among the people” but, rather, to make culture “an oasis of refuge from and a barrier against them” (207). Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as “the best that has been thought and known [or thought and said] in the world” became a widespread ideal, and along with it came hierarchies (best, worst, higher, lower, elite, popular) that Arnold's formulation buttressed (224). Although Levine is careful to state that the sacralization of culture was not “primarily a mechanism for social control,” he does not hesitate to single out “an elite group with a vested interest” in maintaining its authority as the party responsible for an increasingly hierarchical, fragmented culture (206, 227). From the late nineteenth century forward, theater and concert audiences had no choice but to encounter art on the terms that those elite individuals prescribed.In an epilogue, Levine indicates the extent to which recent developments had eradicated some of the distance between highbrow and lowbrow, citing, among other examples, the crossover repertoire of the Kronos Quartet and the efforts of Joseph Papp to bring Shakespeare to a large public. But, writing twenty-five years ago, he still finds the “sense that culture is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy” remains both powerful and pervasive (252).There is much that is right about the picture Levine painted. It is undeniable that spectators grew quieter over the course of the nineteenth century, and that less raucousness was accompanied by less diversity, as when “wealthy elites banded together to build their own opera houses.”2 Whether or not the religious overtones of the term are helpful, it is likewise undeniable that a kind of sacralization took place, whereby the entr'acte jugglers, parodists, and minstrels became dissociated from an ostensibly pure Shakespeare, the opera grew isolated from other musical events, and classical European “masterpieces” came to occupy a status higher than the works of popular composers. It is equally true that the agents of sacralization—the founders of museums, orchestras, and concert halls—were members of the privileged classes, with the resources and social connections to launch such institutions.It is hard not to be captivated by Levine's democratic sympathies and even by the sense of loss that, he acknowledged, suffuses his book. Americans have a penchant for narratives of declension, after all, and Levine's depiction of unity giving way to fragmentation, of egalitarianism undermined, is squarely in that tradition. But can we set aside our attraction to Levine's politics and sensibility and dispassionately interrogate his premises?Let us start with the beginning of his story: the assumption that a shared public culture characterized American life in the early republic. If widespread familiarity with Shakespeare is the proof of this shared culture, it is worth noting, as Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan point out in Shakespeare in America, that the Shakespearean texts Americans read “often differed markedly” from the scripts that actors used in theaters, even when the actors were not engaged in performing excerpts or parodies.3 Moreover, printed texts adhered closely to British versions up to the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, to speak of Shakespeare as a popular possession ignores that not everyone owned the same thing, nor was that possession necessarily distinctively American.As for the theater audience as a microcosm of American society, the persistence of religious objections to theatrical performances meant that, at various times and places, a significant segment of the population did not participate in watching Shakespeare. An older work of local history records, for example, that Rochester, New York, was known as a poor theater town well into the 1840s as a result of the antipathy to the stage generated by adherents of the revivalist Charles Finney.4 Furthermore, although Levine was surely right that the theater gathered heterogeneous groups under a single roof (as in New York's Bowery Theater in the Jacksonian period), this was not a case of a diverse population bonded by common responses or shared values. As Richard Butsch has revealed, the rowdy Bowery b'hoys who occupied the pit and the gallery provoked antagonism from wealthier individuals seated in the boxes. In Butsch's words, “Audiences were neither homogeneous nor unanimous, but often divided along class lines…. The middle and upper classes demanded more restraint, and young workers seemed intent on refusing to cooperate.”5More generally, the premise that a unified American culture gave way to fragmentation does not hold up if we turn to the lessons furnished by scholars working in book history. The title of the second volume of A History of the Book in America, An Extensive Republic, signals the argument that Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, the volume's editors, have posited throughout. In contrast to the idea that the years between 1790 and 1840 marked the rise of a national print culture, they emphasize that in that period the United States was “a decentralized polity,” a and and in no single and a of and the one print culture was and to the of British on the other it was in the case of the the Gross a century of of the and of were in “the and of took at the United Although print had the to audiences social it also to and party and no of and as the to from no single of a because of the of people in Extensive also us to the of cultural hierarchy the by the of a elite to “the of as David the of learned culture sought to foster a of for the of this democratic with the that on the of a group of to the of what was as “the higher likewise to which as as the century and the century. the key is Richard The of America. which was a shared to of such as and became integral to the of a middle For to the exuberant that Levine were of this recent the idea of a democratic, unified culture in the early nineteenth century is us turn to the other of the the between highbrow and that Levine was in by Shakespeare in American of members of more than Shakespeare that in the late nineteenth and early that Shakespeare to ordinary that in large and America the idea that Shakespeare was for not just cultural elites in a of Shakespeare in that became a for and for a of the and work an to a of unity giving way to sacralization and sacralization was to the for Shakespeare as Shakespeare as a work them the opportunity to their for higher But a of Shakespeare as high culture as because of its to and aesthetic not with democratic if it is to of at art who from “the growing of in printed and who often in areas on that a process of in the of high to own into the history of the Shakespeare in and by for Americans, a further The British had created Shakespeare in with an to their of they were to be but and with “a which at a act and and no the were to to the the of as well as the 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