Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Rudyard Kipling, in his poem Recessional (1897) famously prophesied a time in which the British Empire would be no more, hard though this may have been to imagine in 1897, the diamond anniversary of the reign of Victoria.  The poem consists of five stanzas of six lines each, and each stanza has a straightforward ABABCC rhyme scheme. The third sticks to my mind right now.  Far-called, our navies melt away;   On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Of course, the British Empire did in fact melt away, under the pressure of two world wars in the first half of the following century and then of the sweeping anti-imperial mood in the non-industrialized parts of the world that followed the end of the second of them. Fortunately, as it melted away it was replaced in near-hegemony by a more-or-less friendly successor power where people ...

In a lecture delivered in 1880, William James asked rhetorically, " Would England ... be the drifting raft she is now in European affairs if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of a Victoria, and if Messrs Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all been born in Prussia?" Beneath that, in a collection of such lectures later published under James' direction, was placed the footnote, "The reader will remember when this was written." The suggestion of the bit about Bentham, Mill, etc. is that the utilitarians as a school helped render England ineffective as a European power, a drifting raft. The footnote was added in 1897. So either James is suggesting that the baleful influence of Bentham, Mill etc wore off in the meantime or that he had over-estimated it. Let's unpack this a bit.  What was happening in the period before 1880 that made England seem a drifting raft in European affairs, to a friendly though foreign observer (to the olde...