Patrick Joyce The Politics of The Liberal Archive

History of the Human Sciences
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The politics of the liberal archive

Patrick Joyce
History of the Human Sciences 1999; 12; 35
DOI: 10.1177/09526959922120234
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03 Joyce (jl/d) 16/3/99 2:21 pm Page 35
H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SC IENCE S Vol . 12 No. 2

© 1999 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 35–49
[0952-6951(199905)12:2;35–49;008653]
The politics of the liberal

archive
PATRICK JO YCE
ABSTRACT
The idea of considering the archive as a political technology of liberal
governmentality is developed in this article, questions of the uses of
archives (important as these are) taking second place here to the politics
apparent in the design and idea of one particular form of the archive.
This form is the public archive as it became apparent in the 19th-century
institution of the public library, the two chief examples being in Man-
chester and at the British Museum in London. The public archive can be
seen to constitute a liberal public which was itself increasingly a demo-
cratic one. This constitution turned upon ideas such as the ‘free library’,
‘self-help’ and the active constitution of new readings of social life and
social conditions. These readings involved the management of class
relations at the time, and parallels are drawn between a sort of ‘anthro-
pologizing’ of the archive evident in India and its ‘sociologizing’ in
Britain at the same time. The constitution of democratic, liberal citizen-
ship through the archive also turned upon particular readings of the
centre–locality relationship and upon notions of urban community.
Library catalogues are considered, and the design of libraries, so that the
importance of spatial dimensions of the archive is evident.
Key words archive, governmentality, liberal, library
While historians have recently been led to question the truth of their disci-
pline (Joyce, 1995; Joyce, 1998), this questioning has not in general extended
to the archive, except, as the historical anthropologist Nicholas Dirks has
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36 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)
recently put it, ‘inside the very historical footnotes that summon the greatest
respect for the archive as a repository of cultural value’ (Dirks, n.d.). There
has been limited reflection on the truth that the archive which produces
history is also the product of history. In the same way, the discipline of
history has been seen to be closely related to the rise and progress of the
nation-state1 but there has been relatively little recognition in Britain of the
archive as a political expression of the nation-state itself.
However, in France there has been a greater awareness, particularly in the
recent, and monumental, series orchestrated by Pierre Nora under the title
Realms of Memory (Nora, 1994–8).2 The France of the second republic saw
after 1870 the most marked relationship between history and the archive,
when, in a positivist mode, the history of the French nation was systematic-
ally tested against the archive. At this time professional history helped con-
stitute what Nora calls the ‘memory nation’. Nora provides one particular
narrative of the relationship between the nation-state and the archive, and of
course different narratives are possible, especially in relation to different
national experiences, but also within the French case itself. It is not my
present purpose to give an account of these different narratives, however, but
to indicate that while the individual nation-state and the archive always share
a history, there are aspects of the political relationship between history and
the archive that cross national boundaries.
Here the relationship between the national and the social is particularly
important. Nora gives an account of the emergence of the social as it impacted
on history-writing in inter-war France, an impact registered in the emergence
of Annales and the influence of Braudel. However, the relationship of the
national and the social has always been a close one, extending beyond 1870 to
the emergence of the idea and practice of the social from the early 19th century,
and continuing up to the present (though a contemporary re-constitution, or
death, of the social now calls into question this linking, as is evident in argu-
ments about social history, particularly in Britain).3 For present purposes I
should like to consider the relationship between the national and the social in
terms of liberal governmentality (Barry et al., 1996). I am writing a book, to
be called The Rule of Freedom: the City and the Modern Liberal Subject, which
deals with liberalism in this way. It is a book about British and Irish cities that
uses the great civic libraries of these cities to describe them, and to account for
the liberalism evident in them. Thus the archive that I use is the instrument of
the liberalism I wish to describe. The libraries, and the librarians, that I
encounter therefore present me with the politics of the archive in a particularly
immediate way. I write the history of liberalism by means of the liberal archive,
and indeed within a scholarly dispensation that can be called liberal.
An understanding of the political nature of the archive, therefore, might
profitably consider it as a political technology designed to effect a particular
political rationality, namely a liberal mode of governmentality. Such a mode
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THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 37
concerned the constitution of political subjectivities designed to be self-

observing and self-governing. In this light, ‘the social’ was an end produced
by liberalism which served as an object or rationale of political rule (as in
‘society’, ‘the people’, the ‘working class’ as a social group, or ‘the social
problem’, and so on). The political rule involved was that of the nation-state.
Understood in these ways, liberalism, the nation and the social formed ele-
ments that crossed national boundaries, though nonetheless taking particu-
lar national forms which were importantly distinctive. I wish to talk about
the British case, attending chiefly to the 19th century, when liberalism can be
said to have emerged in its modern, ‘democratic’ forms, forms that still shape
the present.
Just as a text exists because there is a reader to give it meaning (Chartier,
1994: Ch. 1), so an archive exists because there is a user to give it meaning. I
shall talk about use, but I am only too well aware that I have very inadequately
unearthed the real, hidden history of use, a history of use which would con-
trast, say, the conservative and fixed nature of writing (that which is in the
archive) with reading (the use of that which is in the archive), which is always
of the order of the ephemeral (Chartier). The history that would comprise an
ethnography of the archive, a history of the practice of the archive, would
neglect neither the user in the past nor the user who writes these words, the
ostensible ‘historian’. Dirks’ words come to mind, summoning up as they do
the pleasures and pains of the archive for the historian, an archive character-
ized as ‘pushing us by its recurrent recalcitrance, limiting us by its aggravat-
ing absences, fascinating us by its own patterns of intertextuality, seducing us
by its appearances of the real’ (Dirks).
The history of use that I embark on is determined by a set of questions about
liberalism. These questions involved the constitution of political rationalities
and technologies. Such questions, it seems to me, are fully interesting only in
terms of use and the practice. However, there is no use or reception without a
context formed by the sort of political interventions I speak of here. In
accounting for use, these interventions give us significant indications of how
to proceed: the freedom that liberalism encouraged extended to questioning
the limits of rule themselves, and therefore to questioning itself as an instru-
ment of rule. There was therefore a certain agonistic quality to liberalism.
Accordingly, along with the disciplinary potential of liberalism went a certain
instability, a certain tendency towards conflict and self-destabilization. This
could not but be reflected in the archive, in the questioning brought there in
terms of different accounts of the archive’s nature and projects for its use.
Beyond this, and beyond liberalism, was what called liberalism up in the first
place, namely the medium of that we might call freedom, that which power
always operates with, through and against, so that the history of the practice
of the archive is always transactional, even though at this stage my account is
mainly about the archive’s (inevitable) disciplinary potential.
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Derrida reflects on the archive as follows:

Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at
the word ‘archive’ – and with the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhe,
we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. The
name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle accord-
ing to nature or history, there where things commence – physical, his-
torical, or ontological principle – but also the principle according to the
law, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from
which order is given – nomological principle. (Derrida, 1996: 1)
The archive is always a place where authority resides. However, my concern
is with the modern archive in a particular form. The ways by which the
archive became a public archive are my chief object of inquiry. For what
interest me here are the ways in which liberalism took democratic form in the
19th century, and the ways in which the archive was central to these demo-
cratic forms, in the process constituting new meanings for the ‘public’. It is
indeed the public library that is so central to these developments.
The Public Record Office was founded in 1838, and still proclaims itself as
‘the treasure house of the nation’s memory’.4 The British Museum, with its
Reading Room, preceded the Public Record Office in 1753 (Esdaile, 1946;
Harris, 1979). They were theoretically ‘public’ archives, but access to both was
limited. It was the public library that truly constituted the democratic public
in this sphere. The library involved the formation of a political subject in
whose name liberal rule could go forward, and an object of that rule, some-
thing to be known and operated upon. Although there was much activity
before 1850, the Library Act 1850 instituted this democratic archive. It first
took form in those laboratories of British liberal democracy, the great provin-
cial cities, particularly Manchester, where the Manchester Free Library was set
up in 1850. Edward Edwards, who was its first librarian, is widely regarded as
one of the co-founders of the library movement (Black, 1996: Ch. 4). His was
the new ‘science’ of the library. The other great figure in the formation of the
public library, William Ewart, was its political arm. Between the two men one
can see a clear instance of a political technology in the making.
Ewart worked assiduously to develop the requisite machinery in Parlia-
ment, liaising closely with the Select Committee structure of the House,
thereby involving the formation of an ‘expert’ opinion which would then find
its logical expression in parliamentary legislation. Edwards provided that
expert opinion, writing extensively on the social benefits of the library, as well
as on technical aspects of library use and formation. Both men were steeped
in that combination of utilitarianism and idealism that characterized both
19th- and also 20th-century liberalism. This idealism, developing particularly
out of Coleridge and Carlyle, represented certain contradictions within
liberalism, but nonetheless in combination with utilitarianism defined much
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of 19th-century liberal thought and practice: in John Stuart Mill the utilitarian
was re-worked in a definitive form, one which was highly influential upon
figures such as Edwards and Ewart, and those who followed them (Black,
1996: 50–8). The notion of ‘culture’, grafted onto utilitarian precepts, was
reflected in the public library movement in the form of the central role that
self-culture had.
The idea of the free library was central to the new vocabulary of the social
that the archive engineered, especially the meanings of ‘public’. Prior to 1850
existing libraries were not funded from the public purse and had an attach-
ment to different groups, communities and organizations.5 New meanings of
‘public’, which were developed through the idea of the free institution, meant
not only public funding (however limited at first) but above all the idea of a
subject that was not attached to different bodies, or to the market, which was
a domain in which earlier notions of the public were rooted. This subject was
constituted by the institution of the archive itself, and called into being legally
through the 1850 Act. That subject was demos, the library being opened to
one and all. Edward Edwards and his like often evinced ultra-liberal sympa-
thies that might be at odds with other versions of liberalism, and which indi-
cate how liberalism might be at war within itself. Edwards was a utilitarian
but also a sympathizer with Chartism. He was the son of an East End brick-
layer, keenly aware of what education had done for him. There was a marked
anti-authoritarian character to him. Edwards was concerned to reach out to
the people, by means of an accessible catalogue, and by the use of assistants
who would go among the new library users. W. E. A. Axon, of the Man-
chester library, and a major publicist for the library movement, in fact spoke
of this new reaching out as the creation of a ‘public domain’, which would
include all classes.6 Axon also was of ‘humble’ birth and a sympathizer with
Chartism. Demos at the time was in practice very often seen as the ‘working
class’. The public library was to civilize the working class by giving this class
access to the public realm, and so constituting it as demotic.
The archive created the liberal citizen in large measure through the foster-
ing of self-help (Black, 1996: 236–8). As will be evident, the principles in the
legislation behind the library involved the use of voluntary action. The newly
formed municipal authorities, themselves a key expression of this new meaning
of the public, embodied self-help in setting up the new public libraries.
However, this aspect of the cultivation of the self is fairly well documented.
What is perhaps less known is the constant interplay between the self and the
social. Knowing one’s society was a prerequisite to knowing one’s self.
Knowing one’s society involved knowing the statistics that enabled one to
know its form. Those involved in the library movement were keen compilers
of and advocates for statistics. For instance, Axon and Edwards were members
of the Manchester Statistical Society, and were adept at deploying statistics in
furthering the cause of the library. But knowing one’s society involved
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knowing its habits and its mores, and the public archive was intimately con-
cerned with collecting information about the condition of ‘the people’. This
information was closely related to the idea that the library should be a rep-
resentation of some sense of community. As will be seen, the actual collections
of the libraries, and the interests of their archivists and librarians, had a
strongly local bent. Local history and an interest in the dialect and customs of
the people were characteristic. In some respects therefore, there was a parallel
‘anthropologizing’ of the metropolitan and the colonial archive, and the sub-
jects they sought to define, as will be apparent. The strong cultural emphasis
on the provincial in liberalism was also important here.
At the same time, the centre was always an important model for the
organization of the archive: the British Museum library was always regarded
as the ideal type for other libraries, and there was a good deal of commerce
between the centre and the provinces (as in the case of Edwards). Liberal-
ism indeed taught independence, but it also called for knowing and practis-
ing the common good. Knowing the people also involved knowing about
the ‘condition’ of the people, a condition that was increasingly ‘social’ in
character as the century developed. The ‘social condition’ of the people
involved knowledge that extended beyond culture to the history and
progress of capital and labour. Later 19th-century religious currents, such as
the gospel of civic duty evident in Birmingham, involved the fusion of Evan-
gelical religion and the civic. The concern there was to link the social con-
dition of the people with works for their cultural improvement, as these
were developed in all the institutions of education, especially the library
(Hennock, 1973; Dale, 1898).
Given the intimate link between the library and the town, the community
that liberalism most shaped itself around in this respect was the urban one.
The voluntary action that law made possible took an inevitably local and
municipal form. The institution that actually formed the library was the
municipal corporation, through the means of levying a public rate. This
emphasis on the local was central to another dimension of liberal govern-
mentality, namely the idea that liberalism is a political rationality that ‘rules
from a distance’ (Barry et al., 1996). The voluntary action that expressed self-
help had to be local in character. Thus, the character of the archive strongly
reflected the institutional formation, and the ideological thrust, of the liberal
archive. However, while the local was important, it was always in relation to
the national, just as liberalism was itself about the balance of the local and the
national state. The municipal library again echoed the British Museum: local
collections were balanced by the universality of the national collection. The
inclusiveness made possible by the copyright privileges of the British
Museum enshrined the universality of knowledge, an aspiration of course
which was an age-old one, though one to which liberalism gave a new twist
in the 19th century. The belief in a universal human nature was expressed
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nonetheless, in the peculiarities of the local. Local libraries attempted to copy

this universal coverage, though always with the characteristic sense of their
mission to represent the local. These aspects serve to delineate some central
aspects of the liberal archive. I shall now show something of how this was
expressed in the practice of the archive.
How did the liberal archive teach people to teach themselves, and help people
to help themselves? As well as being passionate advocates of open access, the
early librarians were equally passionate supporters of library catalogues that
would make information accessible to all. The old catalogues were of use only
to those versed in their arcane ways. Whether Panizzi at the British Museum
or someone in charge of a municipal library, all librarians were concerned to
make knowledge transparent. Thus, with knowledge transparent, there might
be equal access, and with this a truly open public sphere of a democratic sort
(Baker, 1994). Practice was always somewhat different: despite the efforts of
the early pioneers, it was not until the last two decades of the 19th century
that books were put on open access for readers with any regularity (Black,
1996: 247). By then the Dewey System had begun to be adopted quite widely.
Manchester was in fact the first library of any size in the United Kingdom to
use the Dewey System, in 1894. The system itself enshrined a certain tradition
of liberal learning. It was based in its broadest dimensions on Bacon’s chart
of human learning, and at the middle level on 19th-century concepts of how
knowledge should be organized.7 Thus, the catalogue fostered self-help, as
did direct access to library materials themselves. William Ewart commented
on this public use as creating ‘a kind of public police by their presence, which
safeguards the collection’. Through the second half of the 19th century a
system was worked out; it differed radically from the one that went before.
This can be summarized in terms of the rules governing admission to the
British Museum library in the 1850s, a library which was then ostensibly a
public one. These stated that
admission is at present to be obtained by addressing a written appli-
cation . . . stating the name, rank in life, and residence of the applicant.
The request must be accompanied by a recommendation from some
gentleman, whose position in society, reputation, or public appoint-
ment, may serve as a guarantee for the respectability of the applicant.
(Sims, 1854: 8)
By contrast, the true public library was open to all, regardless of patronage.
The idea of a ‘public police’ was fostered by the design of libraries. The social
psychology of the library owed much to that of the 18th-century Enlighten-
ment, as this was developed in utilitarianism. This involved the view that the
physical environment had a direct impact on perception and behaviour. There
was therefore a direct premium on organizing space so as to affect behaviour.
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The 1850 Act in fact provided money for buildings and not for books; the latter
were often assembled from earlier collections, or donated by the well-to-do
(Black, 1996: 232–3). The internal decoration of the library often figured busts
and pictures of the heroes of self-help, among them those of liberal learning
and literature; for instance, Milton. This amounted to a commemoration of the
glorious tradition of English learning and liberty, and the indissoluble link
between the two. The liberty of the press was part of this tradition, a tradition
evident in the design of the newsrooms which were such an important part of
the early libraries, and which are still sometimes evident today. These rooms
were of palatial design, and each newspaper had its own stand, table space, or
reading slope. Space was generously provided, such spaces being in effect indi-
viduated, in terms of the person who read and the newspaper that was read.
The aim was to give maximum expression to each view. In this way, through
the production of a ‘debate’, the truth would emerge (Black, 1996: 239–40, 245;
Axon, 1911; Edwards, 1865).
The panoptic character of the new libraries was apparent, not surprisingly
given their utilitarian lineage. The British Museum Reading Room of 1857 is
evidence of this, with its raised central structure housing the staff and the
supervisor of the reading room (who literally had vision over the whole room).
Other libraries followed this ideal type, but more humble ones had a long issue
desk at right angles to the book stacks so that vision was possible along them.
After 1850 some libraries dispersed their news-stands around the walls of
newsrooms, so better to facilitate central viewing. Again, the contrast between
the old and the new British Museum reading rooms is interesting (Esdaile,
1946: Part 1; Edwards, 1870: Part 3, Chs 2–3). The old reading rooms were
located in Montague House, first built in 1674, and then rebuilt, both times in
the manner of the aristocratic house. At one time Montague House was said
to be the only structure in London able to rival the great aristocratic houses of
Paris. The model for the library itself was in fact the library as found in the
aristocratic house. The museum’s collections themselves were assembled from
the great collections of the wealthy, royalty and the aristocracy. In these rooms
readers sat face-to-face with one other across reading tables. After the build-
ing of the British Museum itself, the reading rooms within the new structure
echoed the old, but the really new departure was the magnificent, domed
Reading Room opened in 1857. This was designed by the man who was in fact
the Principal Librarian of the Museum: Antonio Panizzi. It is striking that this
custodian of the book took a direct role in the building of the new Reading
Room (Wemerskirch, 1981). The contrast between the new ‘democratic’ struc-
ture and the ‘aristocratic’ library was marked (even though there were prece-
dents for domed libraries). In the new room readers sat separated from one
another and not face-to-face, though with other readers to either side.
The library was designed therefore to facilitate privacy, as well as surveil-
lance. Obviously, this worked by creating self-surveillance, but there was
always a tension between being seen and being private. The creation of the
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Interior view of the new Reading Room at the British Museum, London, 1857, from
Edward Edwards’ book Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (1870)
liberal subject in its democratic forms involved the many viewing the many,
rather than the one viewing the many. But again, there were tensions and con-
tradictions between the public and the private, just as there were between
being seen and being private. As well as facilitating supervisory views, 19th-
century libraries often had alcoves, though there seems to have been a general
attempt to remove these. There was also considerable attachment to the idea
of all the books being on open display, even though they were not available
to public access until later in the century (Black, 1996: Ch. 2). Eventually,
many books were put in store. However, as in the British Museum library (in
its new British Library manifestation too), there were numerous instances of
books being deliberately put on display. This involved the books themselves
returning the gaze of the reader in all the majesty and colour of their massed
ranks. The book was therefore a form of ornament, but one with a didactic
purpose, impressing the reader with the power of learning, and indeed acting
as an eye which overlooked the reader, the eye of learning, but in fact the
reader’s own eye, a reader who was now an essential part of the ‘democratic’
library.
Provision such as that made by Panizzi at the British Museum fostered
privacy, but of course the act of reading had for long been one conducted
silently and privately, at least in libraries. As Corbin has shown, reading was
part of the long history of the individuation of the self (Corbin, 1990). This
was especially so as regards reading in silence, which was one of the arts of
the library that had to be mastered by its users in the early days. Lest the
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democratic art of silent reading be taken lightly, it should be emphasized that

silent reading in the elementary schoolroom was frowned upon as late as the
1870s (Page, 1938; Vincent, 1989: 79–91). The individuation of the user pro-
ceeded also by means of personal responsibility for the borrowing of books,
the observance of rules, the paying of fines, the use of gates to ensure indi-
vidual access to libraries, and so on. However, all this has to be set beside the
many viewing the many; for example, in the British Museum Reading Room.
Here the radial formation of the seating, while involving privacy, meant also
the chance to view the giant structure of knowledge as a whole when using
the room, and to walk around its vast, galleried spaces, the many viewing this
particular community of the many going about its business in silence, order
and diligence. The reader viewed and was viewed, and the self was re-created
in terms of the social of this great library’s everyday commerce.
The local dimensions of liberalism were most apparent in the municipal
library. This was to be a library in the centre of the town. Hence the use, to
this day, of the term ‘Central Library’. This central library was the show
place for all the other libraries of the town or city. In terms of library design
it was felt that such libraries should be placed so as to be accessible to all in
the town. They were to be separate and specially designed buildings, which
were sometimes called ‘landmark’ buildings (Black, 1996: 238–9). Such
buildings were shaped by the interests of civic leaders, rather than the active
proponents of the library, and were designed to exemplify civic identity and
proper civic behaviour. In terms of their archival character the local was
exemplified in their collections. These collections were heavily marked by
interest in the history, institutions and current concerns of the cities in which
they were situated. Therefore, the city or town was a major ordering prin-
ciple of these collections. However, it was not the only one. Figures like
Edwards and Axon were inspired by a kind of demotic antiquarianism,
which drew upon the late 18th-century discovery of ‘folk’ traditions and
‘popular’ culture, a discovery that fed directly into the collections (Joyce,
1991: Chs 7–8).
Dirks describes a parallel anthropologizing of the archive, the colonial
archive rather than the metropolitan one. After 1857, and what was described
on the British side as the Indian Mutiny, anthropology supplanted history as
the principal colonial modality of knowledge. It identified as a subject a ‘native’
population that was to be ruled. Colonial history conceded to anthropology
the study of a historical subject that had not yet become modern. Anthro-
pology became the history of those without history. It was caste above all that
articulated this legacy of tradition, standing in place of the historical-minded-
ness that was seen to be absent from Indian sensibilities (Dirks, n.d.). The
public which the metropolitan archive addressed was in its early days the
‘working class’. This working class had to enter civilization also. The parallel
with India is of course not exact, nonetheless the working class, domesticated
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as a demotic public, had to be brought within history. However, this history

was now felt to be theirs, they were its heirs, unlike the Indian.
It was all the more urgently theirs in part because those who most urgently
wanted to give it to them were members of this ‘working class’ themselves,
men like Axon and Edwards. They were aided by such men as Panizzi and
Andrea Crestadaro, who was the third Principal Librarian at Manchester
(Firby, 1973–4). Both were ultra-liberals, cast in the mould of early 19th-
century romantic nationalism, with its own idealizations of the people (they
were émigrés from continental Europe, Panizzi having had to flee for his life
when sentenced to death for his activities in the movement to liberate Italy).
What such men helped put together, and this is particularly clear in the case
of Axon in Manchester, are collections which gave ‘popular’ culture a tra-
dition which reached back into the past of the nation, but a national past con-
ceived in terms of the specific identities of a local and regional culture (one
with its own customs, folk ways, dialect and economic traditions). This con-
joined local, regional and national culture was elaborated alongside concep-
tions of the nation’s inevitable development towards the traditions of a liberal
parliamentary system, a system that would grow from precedent to prece-
dent towards a democratic outcome (of course, there was always conflict
about what form this outcome would take). Just as the nation’s political
development was seen as the outcome of natural and evolutionary develop-
ments, so too was the culture of the people seen as the outcome of progres-
sive and evolutionary patterns of change which led from lower to higher
states of civilization, the lower states of course being evident in examples such
as the Indian one. For instance, in Axon’s case, and in widely accepted under-
standings of language at the time, the origins of language, and the origins of
culture, were to be found in the East, from which they spread outwards, and
upwards, to the present condition of civilization (Aarsleff, 1967). Again one
sees the characteristic liberal belief in the universal condition of mankind,
with the idea of progress nonetheless marking out profound differences
within this universal condition.
Although Axon was never chief librarian at Manchester, as a leading publi-
cist of the new libraries his influence was great. He wrote extensively on the
management of libraries. His lectures described the contents of libraries and
indicated, in the case of industrial Lancashire, which were the best books for
different classes of readers. He was a conduit of information to the ‘working
class’, writing for the cooperative movement, as well as being active in all sorts
of causes for the improvement of the social and moral condition of the people.8
As well as this, he wrote on all manner of subjects himself. Indeed, his writ-
ings, allied with the collection of the library material his example encouraged,
formed in themselves a massive bulk of information about the customs of the
people. He wrote on subjects such as dialect, ‘popular customs’, ballads and
local antiquities, as well as his own interests of vegetarianism and temperance.
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03 Joyce (jl/d) 16/3/99 2:21 pm Page 46
He also wrote about city history, compiled annals of Manchester and produced
commercial guides to the city, as well as writing extensively about the city’s
great symbols of civic identity, such as the town hall of 1877 (Axon, 1878). He
became eventually a strong Cobdenite liberal. Axon therefore constructed, at
the same time, an identity for the culture that had preceded the city, and for
the city itself, both in a liberal mode.
The growing collections of Manchester Free Library were described by
Axon in 1877. By then what has in the 20th century become a major national
resource, was already well begun. This was the massive pamphlet and tract
collection, one which illustrated many aspects of the political and social con-
dition of the nation and the region. As Axon reported, these materials gave
‘remarkable evidence regarding the course of events which in this country
have gradually freed the workman from the injurious restrictions to which
his forefathers were subjected’ (Axon, 1877: Ch. 17). This collection illus-
trated the advance of the ‘working-class’, indicating in the process the history
of manufactures, the development of the factory system, and the arrival in
history of a ‘working class’ organized around the gospel and the institutions
of self-help. Axon conceived this new library to be ‘modern’, by virtue of this
sort of interest, unlike the traditional library. As well as this collection, the
library was very strong in history and English literature: the sense of an
English national historical tradition was everywhere apparent in this and
similar collections. History itself was presented in the usual teleological form.
Indeed, history was explicitly linked to the formation of a mode of judgment
which concerned the freely acting individual. It was about the possibility of
the reader forming an ‘independent judgment for himself upon any point of
our history’ (Axon, 1877: Ch. 16). In this manner the ideology of history,
then as now, was very closely related to the constitution of liberal subjec-
tivities. Similarly, the archive was involved in this too, as the means by which
independent judgment became possible.
In conclusion, one question suggested by this brief account concerns the con-
sequences of writing a history of liberalism by means of the liberal archive and
within a scholarly dispensation that may be termed liberal. These conse-
quences project the writer into a recognition that, given that the archive is not
neutral, our engagement with it is political. This politics of the archive I have
not fully encountered. My simple aim in this article is to indicate how a history
of the archive might enable a better consideration of this politics, the politics
of the contemporary encounter with the archive. Nonetheless, some com-
ments may be made. Earlier relationships between history, the nation and the
social are now changing, though perhaps slowly in Britain. We move into what
Nora calls ‘the historiographical age’ of history, one in which the archive has
been transformed. The ‘memory nation’ has given way to ‘historicized
memory’, and to an entirely new function for the historian, and an entirely
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03 Joyce (jl/d) 16/3/99 2:21 pm Page 47
new archive, now massively expanded and opened to democratic view (Nora,
1994–: I, 8–10). As the pace of change accelerates, and as new temporalities are
experienced, the final vestiges of the ‘memory nation’ disappear. As the nation
and the social are transformed, so too is the nature of the archive. In the
process, the historians, who were once objective guides and spokespersons,
become in the transition from ‘memory history’ to ‘historicized memory’
exemplifications or sites of memory themselves (Nora, 1994–: I, 14–20). The
close ties of historians to their subjects are now a tool and not an obstacle. His-
torians depend now on their subjectivity. Indeed, the archive in this new phase
becomes the object and not merely the tool of history, and the historian him-
or herself, a realm or site of memory, a place where the archive can be seen,
actively and openly now, to be at work, a place where the archive is now recon-
stituted.
But what is the archive? The work from which I draw these reflections on
the archive concerns the city as the arena of liberalism. It is about the city,
and the meanings and uses of space. Therefore the street is my archive, the
built environment is my archive. However, I walk now in the city that I wish
to describe then. The person who walks in this city now is also the boy who
once walked in that city then, in this case London. The archive, in my case
the library, and especially the public library, certainly archives the street and
the built environment, but of course it does not exhaust their meaning, which
is produced out of the experience of these things, an experience refracted
through memory, not least memories of class. Memories of class then are
indissolubly part of the present, not least when the ex-autodidact of now con-
fronts the ex-autodidacts who constructed the liberal archive, figures such as
Edward Edwards and W. E. A. Axon. Similarly, the story of liberalism then
is made of the story of liberalism now. There are many stories to tell, just as
there are many archives to use, and many constructions of what an archive
is. The stories might be better told when the historian is understood as a lieu
or a site of memory. As such, as an instance of the archive in use, the his-
torian’s employment of the archive in a liberal political dispensation can be
seen as involving the transaction of the archive in such a way as to show its
politics in action, in the construction of historical texts themselves as well as
in writing about the archive.
University of Manchester, UK
NOTES
1 For instance Chakrabarty (1990); Chatterjee (1993); Orr (1998); Soffer (1994).
2 See especially ‘General Introduction’ (Vol. 1) and ‘Introduction’ to Vol. 1, by Nora
(1994–).
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03 Joyce (jl/d) 16/3/99 2:21 pm Page 48
3 For some of the arguments see Jenkins (1997: Part 4).

4 Public Record Office WebSite, May 1998. See also Cox (1993).
5 For an account of earlier library provision see Axon (1877).
6 On Axon see Manchester Faces and Places 3 (1891–2): 109–11.
7 Encyclopaedia of Library Information and Science, Vol. 7 (1972).
8 Axon (1883) and ‘Testimonials for Axon’ in Manchester Central Reference Library.
The best way to approach Axon is through the catalogue of this reference library.
B I B L I OG RA P HY
Aarsleff, H. (1967) The Study of Language in England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.
Axon, W. E. A. (1877) Handbook of the Public Libraries of Manchester and Salford.
Manchester.
Axon, W. E. A. (1878) An Architectural and General Description of the Town Hall,
Manchester. Manchester.
Axon, W. E. A. (1883) How to Succeed in the World: A Manual for Young Men.
London.
Axon, W. E. A. (1911) The Ideal Library. London.
Baker, Keith (1994) ‘A Foucauldian French Revolution’, in Jan Goldstein (ed.)
Foucault and the Writing of History. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barry, Andrew, Osborne, Thomas and Rose, Nikolas, eds (1996) Foucault and
Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government.
London: UCL Press.
Black, Alistair (1996) A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intel-
lectual Contexts, 1850–1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1990) ‘The Death of History? Historical Consciousness and the
Culture of Late Capitalism’, Public Culture 4(2): 46–57.
Chartier, Roger (1994) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe
between the 14th and 18th Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity.
Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Corbin, Alain (1990) ‘Backstage’, in Michelle Perrot (ed.) A History of Private Life,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press.
Cox, Jane, ed. (1993) The Nation’s Memory: a Pictorial Guide to the Public Record
Office. London: HMSO.
Dale, A. W. (1898) The Life of D. W. Dale of Birmingham by his son. London: Hodder
& Stoughton.
Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Dirks, Nicholas (n.d.) ‘Annales of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources
of History’. Unpublished paper.
Edwards, Edward (1865) Free Town Libraries. London.
Edwards, Edward (1870) Lives of the Founders of the British Museum. London.
Encyclopaedia of Library Information and Science (1972), Vol. 7. New York.
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Esdaile, Arundell (1946) The British Museum Library: A Short History and Survey.
London.
Firby, F. K. (1973–4), ‘Andrea Crestadoro’, Manchester Review: 12–13.
Harris, F. R. (1979) The Reading Room. London: British Library.
Hennock, E. P. (1973) Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in 19th-century
Urban Government. London: Edward Arnold.
Jenkins, Keith, ed. (1997) The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge.
Joyce, Patrick (1991) Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of
Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Joyce, Patrick (1995) ‘The End of Social History?’, Social History 20(1): 73–91.
Joyce, Patrick (1998) ‘The Return of History: Postmodernism and Politics of
Academic History in Britain’, Past and Present 158: 207–35.
Nora, Pierre, ed. (1994–8) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Orr, Linda (1998) Headless History: 19th-Century French Historiography of the
Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Page, F. H. (1938) An Inspector’s Testament. London: English Universities Press.
Sims, Richard (1854) Handbook to the Library of the British Museum. London.
Soffer, Reba (1994) Discipline and Power: The University, History, and Making of an
English Elite, 1870–1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Vincent, David (1989) Literacy and Popular Culture in England, 1750–1914.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wemerskirch, Philip John (1981) Antonio Panizzi and the British Museum Library.
Clifton, NJ: Bookman’s Weekly.
WEBSITES
Public Record Office WebSite, May 1998. http: //www.pro.gov.uk
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
PATRICK JOYCE is Professor of History at Manchester University and has pub-

lished extensively in the history of work, class and politics. Among his books
are Democratic Subjects: the Self and the Social in 19th-century England
(1994); Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class
(1991); The Oxford Reader on Class (1995). He is preparing a book to be
called The Rule of Freedom: the City and the Modern Liberal Subject. He has
also made several interventions in current debates on postmodernism and the
politics of academic history in Britain (Past and Present, 1998) and the future
of social history (Social History, 1995).
Address: Department of History, University of Manchester, Oxford Road,

Manchester M13 9PL, UK. [email: patrick.joyce@man.ac.uk]
2008

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The politics of the liberal archive

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H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SC IENCE S Vol . 12 No. 2

The politics of the liberal

36 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)

THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 37

concerned the constitution of political subjectivities designed to be self-

38 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)

Derrida reflects on the archive as follows:

THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 39

40 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)

THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 41

nonetheless, in the peculiarities of the local. Local libraries attempted to copy

42 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)

THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 43

44 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)

democratic art of silent reading be taken lightly, it should be emphasized that

THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 45

as a demotic public, had to be brought within history. However, this history

46 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)

THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 47

48 H I S T O RY OF THE HUMA N SCIE NCE S 12(2)

3 For some of the arguments see Jenkins (1997: Part 4).

Aarsleff, H. (1967) The Study of Language in England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

THE POLITIC S OF T HE L IB E RAL ARCHIVE 49

Public Record Office WebSite, May 1998. http: //www.pro.gov.uk

PATRICK JOYCE is Professor of History at Manchester University and has pub-

Address: Department of History, University of Manchester, Oxford Road,

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