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Two Cheers for Tolerance: E. M. Forster's Ironic Liberalism and the

Indirections of Style

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Two Cheers for Tolerance:
E. M. Forster’s Ironic Liberalism
and the Indirections of Style

Paul B. Armstrong

modernism / modernity
Tolerance is a defining value of liberalism, but it is also a nag- volume sixteen, number

ging vulnerability and an embarrassment, as critics and defenders two, pp 281–299.

of liberalism both recognize. Liberals call tolerance “elusive,” © 2009 the johns hopkins
“difficult,” “unstable,” “contradictory,” and even “impossible,” university press

but they nevertheless regard toleration as an indispensable

practice not only for believers in the values of self-creation and
pluralism but also for citizens of whatever persuasion in a world
of cultural, moral, and ideological variety.1 Many of its advocates
acknowledge its flaws—for example, that tolerance can be con-
descending, hypocritical, and insufficiently ambitious in pursuit
of justice and equality—but the only thing worse, they agree, is
intolerance. As John Horton observes, “Generally, to be the ob-
ject of tolerance is a welcome improvement on being the object
of intolerance, but typically people do not wish themselves or
their actions to be the object of either.”2 Tolerance involves ac-
ceptance, sometimes grudging, of beliefs, values, and practices
Paul B. Armstrong
with which one disagrees or of which one disapproves, and that is Professor of English
may understandably be felt as something less than the full rec- at Brown University.
ognition and equal treatment that dignity and respect require. His most recent books
David Heyd notes that tolerance is “‘compressed’ between two are Play and the Politics
spheres: phenomena that by no means should be tolerated (like of Reading: The Social
Uses of Modernist Form
cruelty and murder) and phenomena that should not be objected
(2005) and the Norton
to in the first place (like gender or racial identity).”3 Both poles
Critical Edition of Heart
here are variable and contestable, however. What counts as of Darkness (2006). He
intolerable “cruelty” is historically and culturally contingent, as is at work on a book
are the practices and identities to which a liberal society thinks about Bloomsbury and
it unjust and unfair to deny full, equal recognition. Part of the the Thirties.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

282 difficulty here, as Michael Walzer points out, is that “justice is a human construction,
and it is doubtful that it can be made in only one way.”4 As what Judith Shklar calls “the
sense of injustice” is contested and a liberal society changes its understanding of the
claims of justice, so too will it redefine where tolerance is called for and where mere
toleration is not tolerable.5
A deeper problem, however, as many liberals acknowledge, is that tolerance may
pretend to a neutrality that it does not have. Horton notes that “tolerance is not a
virtue that stands altogether outside the moral and political conflicts it often seeks to
mediate.”6 The values that guide it—for example, respect for individual self-direction,
appreciation of variety, or skepticism about absolutes—may not be shared (and probably
aren’t) by the groups one may decide to tolerate (or not, if its values are sufficiently
illiberal). Building on the criticism that tolerance is not neutral, foes of liberalism argue
that tolerance is not benign, benevolent, and apolitical but is a ruse of power. Wendy
Brown argues, for example, that “tolerance as a political practice is always conferred
by the dominant” and is a way of containing and regulating those it marginalizes.7 By
adopting a posture of open-minded acceptance of different viewpoints, according to
this line of criticism, democratic tolerance seeks to disguise that it is an ideology allied
to particular interests. Taking the position that it is beyond political disagreements is a
strategy for protecting the prevailing order of things. Hence Herbert Marcuse’s call to
“fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conserva-
tion of the status quo of inequality and discrimination.”8 According to this critique, the
seeming neutrality of tolerance, by attempting to defuse conflict and deflect challenges
to the dominant order, thereby blocks changes needed to remedy injustices and to bring
about conditions of greater equality and more fulfilling community.9
Despite all of these problems and contradictions, tolerance still has defenders
because it seems at the very least a practical necessity for living side by side. As Isaiah
Berlin observes: “In a world in which human rights were never trampled on, and men
[and women] did not persecute each other for what they believed or what they were, the
cause of toleration would not need to be defended. This, however, is not our world.”10
Brown herself acknowledges that “to remove the scales from our eyes about the in-
nocence of tolerance in relation to power is not thereby to reject tolerance as useless
or worse.”11 What Brown and other critics of tolerance want, no less than its liberal
defenders, is a way of practicing toleration that avoids its self-defeating difficulties and
advances ideals of justice, fairness, and equality instead of thwarting them.
It is not enough to concede that tolerance is an imperfect virtue in an imperfect
world and simply get on with it. The contradictions of tolerance suggest that practicing
it unthinkingly runs the risk of undermining the aims of egalitarian democracy and
inadvertently veering into intolerance, and so the reservations of its critics, whether
friendly or hostile, must not simply be acknowledged and then ignored. Their criticisms
point out serious problems which, if unaddressed, will subvert the claim of toleration
to be a practice that supports justice and fairness.
The perhaps unlikely figure of E. M. Forster can provide assistance in constructing
a practice of toleration that is mindful of its potentially self-defeating contradictions.
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
Although Forster has long been regarded as an emblematic figure in the liberal tradi- 283
tion, his name has been oddly absent from recent liberal analyses of tolerance.12 This is
especially curious and unfortunate because a renewed interest among political theorists
in the values and vulnerabilities of tolerance has been spurred by the debates about
multiculturalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. The author of A Passage to India
has much to say about these matters.13 Forster’s experiences in Egypt during World
War I and later in India as a secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas gave him an acute
sense of the uses and potential abuses of such liberal values as individual autonomy,
self-creation, and respect for the dignity and worth of different ways of being as a
response to a world of permeable boundaries and shifting affiliations.
Forster’s sexual identity also made him aware of and wary about the contradictions
of tolerance. His position as a closeted homosexual whose sexual preferences were
widely known among his friends but could still have landed him in prison if publicly
disclosed gave him a revealing double-perspective not only on the need for tolerance
but also on its shortcomings as an attitude short of full equality, dignity, and respect.
Although he was widely regarded as the leading English novelist of his day, Forster
felt himself an outsider to dominant institutions and attitudes, a contradictory position
that expressed itself in his persistent, unremitting, if often coyly ironic challenges to
prevailing views, especially when they seemed to solidify into ideologies that threat-
ened the private sphere, the realm of individual self-direction and personal relations
where he felt most himself. His liberalism and his cosmopolitanism flow from a deep
sense of the primacy of the person given his understanding of himself as someone out
of place in his society whose possibilities for self-creation and intimacy depended on
protecting and enhancing room for difference. Forster’s abiding doubleness, feeling
proudly and defiantly but also defensively other, despite (or all the more because of)
his prominence as a cultural authority, is at least part of why he famously declares that
“if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I
should have the guts to betray my country.”14 His position as an “insider-outsider” gave
Forster a unique appreciation of the power-dynamics of tolerance—how the conde-
scending acceptance of the marginalized by the dominant may reinforce norms that
are the problem in the first place—but also of its usefulness nevertheless because of
the suffering he and his fellow outsiders endured from intolerance.
The twin foundations of Forster’s liberalism are a pluralistic appreciation of the
variety of defensible versions of the true and the good that might guide rewarding lives
and an abiding suspicion of power and the powerful as threats to vulnerable individu-
als and their relations with one another. Forster’s belief in the value of difference and
his consequent skepticism about the incompleteness and inadequacy of any culture’s
defining norms are evident in his 1926 essay “Notes on the English Character,” which
offers a cross-cultural analysis of the necessary provincialism of national types. “No
national character is complete,” he writes; “We have to look for some qualities in one
part of the world and others in another.”15 Long before Anthony Appiah and James
Clifford, Forster saw and personally experienced how those with the means and mo-
bility to cross cultural boundaries might enjoy increased possibilities for self-creation,
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

284 even as he worried that more frequent and closer contact between people who looked,
thought, and acted differently from one another would increase the likelihood of
conflicts, misunderstanding, demonization, and various forms of intolerance and op-
pression. As he observes in this same essay, if the incompleteness of national types is
an invitation to cosmopolitan self-creation, it can also be an incitement to violence:
“The nations must understand one another, and quickly; and without the interposi-
tion of their governments, for the shrinkage of the globe is throwing them into one
another’s arms” (15). The need to figure out how to get along in a world without the
self-protective comforts of homogeneity and with fewer barriers to prevent collisions
between potentially disruptive differences is a concern to which he returns repeatedly
in the 1930s and 40s. As he explains in his preface to Two Cheers for Democracy, his
collected essays from these difficult decades, “We cannot expect to love one another,”
but “we must learn to put up with one another. Otherwise we shall all of us perish.”16
Forster’s advocacy of tolerance is based on a pragmatic recognition that it is a necessary
but less than ideal response to the volatile contingencies of difference.
His pragmatism does not let liberalism off the hook, however. Forster saw the
shrinking globe as a challenge to liberal complacency about injustices its values should
condemn: “I know very well how limited, and how open to criticism, English freedom
is,” he told a Paris “Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Culture” in his address
“Liberty in England” in 1935. While Gide, Malraux, and other French intellectuals
were vying for the limelight and Stalin’s agents were trying to steer the Congress
behind the scenes, Forster, perhaps naïvely but with disarming candor and humility,
defended English liberty by calling on it to admit and address its flaws: “It is race-
bound and it’s class-bound. It means freedom for the Englishman, but not for the
subject-races of his Empire . . . Freedom in England is only enjoyed by people who
are fairly well off . . . The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more
than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do is cant.”17 As he wrote
ten years later, just as the Second World War had ended, “The poor have kicked. The
backward races are kicking—and more power to their boots.”18 Forster’s appreciation
of difference made him aware that justice is a contestable value, and his suspicion of
power and his identification with the vulnerability of the marginalized allowed him to
recognize, with a skeptical clarity equal to any of liberalism’s critics, that a defense of
liberty could stand in the way of necessary social change unless it recognized that it
was not a universal ideal but a contingent social practice and an ideology that could
be exclusionary and oppressive.
Forster’s resistance to bullying of various kinds goes hand in hand with his pluralism
because both oppose the dominance of majority attitudes and prevailing norms, even
when these may seem benevolent and benign. “I have no mystic faith in the people,” he
writes; “I have in the individual. He seems to me a divine achievement and I mistrust
any view which belittles him” (“Believe” 57). Forster’s liberalism is based on a funda-
mental faith in the value of difference (the contingent variability of the “individual”
versus the oppressive homogeneity of “the people”) and on the consequent need to
fight for the little person against the power of the great, whether the bully is a leader
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
or an institution or an authoritative way of thinking. As he wrote in his great essay, 285
“What I Believe,” composed in the difficult, anxiety-ridden summer before Munich:
“I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a
pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper”
(73). The violence of the powerful, the vulnerability of little people, and the threat of
uniformity are profoundly linked in Forster’s political imagination.
Forster traces the variety and the vulnerability of difference to the contingencies of
our mortality, as evidenced in birth and death: “The dictator-hero can grind down his
citizens till they are all alike, but he cannot melt them into a single man . . . they are
obliged to be born separately, and to die separately, and, owing to these unavoidable
termini, will always be running off the totalitarian rails. The memory of birth and the
expectation of death always lurk within the human being, making him separate from
his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with them” (“Believe” 76). It is
perhaps understandable wishful thinking on Forster’s part to regard our mortality as an
all-powerful reminder of our differences that will always escape totalitarian control.19
The opposite is also almost self-evidently the case. Forster is elsewhere painfully aware
that the contingent existence of individuals who are all too easily stamped out is proof
of their weakness and evidence of their need for vigilant protection. This vulnerability
is a reason for advocating tolerance in order to protect the “little person” even while
recognizing that toleration is insufficient to provide the dignity and respect to which
different lives are entitled.
Ironically self-critical but assertive toleration is an inherently contradictory practice,
and guidance about how to act in a coherently self-contradictory manner is perhaps
best conveyed indirectly, through the form of one’s arguments and not merely their
content. The lessons of Forster’s ironic liberalism are most effectively communicated
through his characteristically oblique style. Forster’s coy, elusive manner as an essayist
stages the contradictions of liberalism in order to educate the reader through its twists
and turns not only about the pragmatic necessity of liberal values like tolerance but also
about how these values can go wrong, fall short, and undermine themselves. Forster’s
indirection is also a way of acknowledging that his discourse is necessarily entangled
in the workings of power it criticizes. The very precariousness of the little person who
takes on the great and powerful is a reason for using oblique, ironic means rather than
a frontal attack. Catching the reader off-guard and disarming defenses in advance is a
kind of rhetorical guerilla warfare. Ironic indirection is David’s best hope for beating
Goliath even if, despite Forster’s wishful optimism, David does not always win.
For Forster, the moral and political significance of art is linked to the vulnerability
of contingent individuals that liberalism should protect and nourish. “To make us feel
small in the right way,” he writes, “is a function of art.”20 Forster wants people to “feel
small” so that they might acknowledge and appreciate their contingency, with all the
splendor and vulnerability that their capacity for difference entails. This is not only a
psychological strategy but also a political tactic for fighting power with rhetorical power.
Part of what is at stake here is suggested by Isaiah Berlin’s point that “It is terrible and
dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right.”21 For Forster as for Berlin,
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

286 epistemological certainty is dangerous because of its will-to-power and its refusal to
give difference its due. Making readers “feel small” opposes epistemological arrogance
and attempts to inculcate humility about the contestability of their views. Shaming
them out of their certainties may then make readers feel the contingency they share
with their fellow mortals, and this in turn might be a first step toward reconsidering
firmly entrenched habits and beliefs that would otherwise be resistant to dislodging
by logical arguments.
One of the best examples of Forster’s provocative indirectness is his essay “Jew-
Consciousness,” published in January 1939, two months after the destruction of
synagogues and Jewish property by Hitler’s goons during “Kristallnacht.” Forster
characteristically takes up the topic of anti-Semitism not by directly condemning the
atrocities in Germany but by examining an English institution that had been a source
of national pride. If English patriots anxious about impending war in the months after
Munich might like to remember that the playing fields of Eton had produced heroic
victories in the past, Forster recalls his school-days differently:

Long, long ago, while Queen Victoria reigned, I attended two preparatory schools. At the
first of these, it was held to be a disgrace to have a sister. Any little boy who possessed one
was liable to get teased . . . Public opinion was not bitter on the point, but it was quite
definite. Sisters were disgraceful. I got through all right myself, because my conscience
was clear, and though charges were brought against me from time to time they always
fell through.
It was a very different story at my second school. Here, sisters were negligible, but it
was a disgrace to have a mother. Crabbe’s mother, Gob’s mother, eeugh! No words were
too strong, no sounds too shrill. And since mothers at that time of life are commoner than
sisters, and also less biddable, the atmosphere of this school was less pleasant, and the
sense of guilt stronger. Nearly every little boy had a mother in a cupboard, and dreadful
revelations occurred.22

The point of the analogy between these instances of seemingly trivial adolescent
stupidity and the ugliness and brutality of the Nazi persecution of Jews is not only to
unsettle his reader’s complacency that only the barbaric Germans could be guilty of
such nonsense; it is also to induce humility in the reader about the contingency of the
differential positions that racial prejudice naturalizes:

Those preparatory schools prepared me for life better than I realised, for having passed
through two imbecile societies, a sister-conscious and a mother-conscious, I am now
invited to enter a third. I am asked to consider whether the people I meet and talk about
are or are not Jews, and to form no opinion on them until this fundamental point has been
settled. What revolting tosh! . . . Jew-consciousness is in the air, and it remains to be seen
how far it will succeed in poisoning it . . . Today, the average man suspects the people he
dislikes of being Jews, and is surprised when the people he likes are Jews. Having been a
Gentile at my first preparatory school and a Jew at my second, I know what I am talking
about. I know how the poison works, and I know too that if the average man is anyone in
particular he is a preparatory school boy. (13)
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
Instead of appealing to universal moral values to condemn the cruelty and inhumanity 287
of anti-Semitism, Forster takes the more indirect route of dramatizing for his readers
their own vulnerability to shifting categories of social exclusion. Tolerance is not an
apolitical ethical attitude but a pragmatic response to contingencies of classification that
define the powerful and the powerless—and that can change, so that today’s Gentile
may become tomorrow’s Jew (the obvious but unspoken analogy here is the variable
contingency of Forster’s own doubleness as a cultural authority and a sexual outlaw).23
Forster’s anecdote implicates the reader uncomfortably in mechanisms of social solidi-
fication that cannot simply be dismissed as a foreign aberration because they represent
a society’s use of the contingencies of classification for political purposes that threaten
the vulnerable (i.e., potentially everyone, or at least anyone with a mother).
The surprise of the analogy and the obliqueness of the approach are typical of For-
ster’s style. The rationale for this indirectness, he explains, is that “the only effective
check to silliness is silliness of a cleverer type” (14). W. H. Auden made a similar point
more directly: “The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in
a Fascist state.”24 Forster would agree, but he prefers to say so obliquely and ironically.
As he explains elsewhere, “I have the sort of mind that likes to be taken unawares. The
frontal full-dress presentation of an opinion often repels me, but if it be insidiously
slipped in sidewise I may receive it” (“Book” 222). If the surprise induced by a “sidewise”
approach may feel “insidious,” Forster’s mischievousness suggests that deviousness
may be necessary to fight power with rhetorical power. Although he stopped writing
novels after A Passage to India appeared in 1924, his manner as an essayist is that of
a ruminative narrator whose seeming casualness sets the reader up for the rhetorical
turn that will take us off guard, disorienting in order to reorient.25 Rather than come
at the reader straight-on in a way that might prompt objections or resistance, Forster
welcomes our confidence in order to prepare us to accept a point about the pervasive-
ness of the behavior he derides that is more sweeping and unsettling than Auden’s
indictment of public school tyranny and that the reader might have dismissed without
the set-up. Not merely the civility of a liberal British gentleman, these are the tactics
of a David who takes on Goliath by pretending not to be combative while preparing a
blow that is all the more effective because it is unexpected.
Forster is not saying that all Englishmen are Nazis at heart, but he is calling for can-
dor, humility, and self-criticism in a hostile environment where the anxieties of the time
were a temptation to defensive oversimplification and a rejection of the uncomfortable
contradictions of a vulnerable, contingent existence. He realizes that he is writing in
what he called in another essay of the period a “post-Munich world,” where the general
relief about the peace Chamberlain seemed to have achieved by his concessions to
Hitler the previous September was as great as the anxiety that it wouldn’t last and that
a war for which Britain was ill-prepared was inevitable very soon. “The state of being
half-frightened and half-thinking about something else at the same time is the state of
many English people today,” Forster writes, and such “worry is terribly insidious; besides
taking the joy out of life, it prevents the victim from being detached and from observing
the human experiment. It tempts him to simplify, since through simplification he may
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

288 find peace.” For Forster, however, “the only satisfactory release is to be found in the
direction of complexity.”26 Rhetorical strategies emphasizing complexity and resisting
simplification—reminding readers of the contingency and contestability of their beliefs
and exposing the contradictions bedevilling seemingly self-evident positions—are for
him ways of using power to resist and oppose epistemological power.
Combating the temptations of simplicity and holding one’s mind open to the contradic-
tions of contingency are necessary for the defense of freedom, self-creation, and difference
at a time when those are under threat, not just from the Fascists in Germany, Italy, and
Spain, but from the patriots and the authorities and the psychological pressures at home.
“All is lost if the totalitarians destroy us. But all is equally lost if we have nothing left to
lose,” he writes; the dilemma, he feels, is “that if Fascism wins we are done for, and that
we must become Fascist to win” (“Post-Munich” 23). His strategy of ironic indirection is
not only a way of resisting the simplifications of accepted ideas and authoritative opinion.
It is also a strategy for using power, as one must to fight the bully at home or abroad,
without replicating the tyranny and intolerance one is resisting. This is a necessarily
contradictory practice, and the indirections of style are an attempt to enact it coherently
and self-critically, without lapsing into paralysis or becoming a bully oneself.
Forster’s essay “Jew-Consciousness” reflects his concern about the temptations
of simplification and his belief that ironic indirection is the best way to defend and
teach critical, coherently self-contradictory complexity: “I don’t think we shall ever
reintroduce ghettos into England; I wouldn’t say for certain, since no one knows what
wickedness may not develop in his country or in himself if circumstances change. I
don’t think we shall go savage. But I do think we shall go silly. Many people have done
so already” (13). Anti-Semitism is an example of such silliness, and that makes it all the
more dangerous because easier to fall into than blatantly brutal savagery. If prejudices
that build community by demonizing others are a defense against anxieties, whether
those of adolescence or of a nation facing the threat of war, then this shows how weak
reason is as an antidote to superstition, violence, and the vulnerabilities of contingency:
“To me, anti-Semitism is now the most shocking of all things. It is destroying much
more than the Jews; it is assailing the human mind at its source, and inviting it to create
false categories before exercising judgment” (14). The weakness of reason is, however,
why Forster tries to sneak up on the reader through ironic indirectness rather than
delivering a straightforward, step-by-step argument. “Cool reasonableness would be
best of all, of course, but it does not work in the world of today any better than in my
preparatory schools” (14). Making people ashamed of themselves is more effective:
“The best way of confuting it is to say sneeringly, ‘That’s propaganda.’ When ‘That’s
propaganda’ has been repeated several times, the sniggering stops, for no goose likes
to think that he has been got at” (14).
Fighting fire with fire, if the susceptibility to prejudice shows how vulnerable people
are to blindly accepting what others think, then embarrassing them into behaving rea-
sonably (lest others think them foolish) may be more effective than providing logical
arguments for doing so. If Forster imagines that reasons might nevertheless work, it
is not because of a Habermasian faith in the unforced force of the better argument
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
but because their rhetorical power may compel rethinking by catching the reader 289
off-guard: “There is another reply which is more intellectual but which requires more
courage. It is to say, ‘Are you sure you’re not a Jew yourself? Do you know who your
eight great-grandparents were? Can you swear that all the eight are Aryan?’” (14). Are
you sure you don’t have a sister or, horror of horrors, a mother?
Forster follows his own advice about fighting silliness with strategic counter-silliness
in “Racial Exercise,” first published in March 1939, two months after his essay on
anti-Semitism. He begins disarmingly and ironically: “Let us do some easy exercises in
Racial Purity. And let me offer myself for dissection-purposes.”27 Taking up his ques-
tion about the necessary ambiguities of genealogy, he asks again: “Can you give the
names of your eight great-grandparents? The betting is eight to one that you cannot”
(18). In his own case, he says, “If I go the right way about it, I come of an old English
family”—“right back to a certain Richard of Sykes Dyke who flourished somewhere
about the year 1400”—“and am proud of it” (17):

Unfortunately in other directions the prospect is less extensive. If I take a wrong turn-
ing and miss the Sykes’, darkness descends on my origins almost at once. Mrs. James
is a case in point, and a very mortifying one. Mrs. James was a widow who not so very
long ago married one of my great-grandfathers. I am directly descended from her, know
nothing whatever about her, and should like at all events to discover her maiden name.
Vain quest. She disappears in the mists of ambiguity . . . She might be anyone, she may
not even have been Aryan. When her shadow crosses my mind, I do not feel to belong
to an old family at all. (17–18)

Silent sympathy with Hitler’s assertions of Nordic pride certainly existed in England,
and not only among Sir Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts. The point of this little “exercise”
is not just to combat the stupid arrogance of racial superiority, however; it is also to
question the whole idea of “purity” and the purposes it serves.
Forster is not trying to knock down a straw man but, rather, to dislodge through irony
and indirectness—combating “silliness” with “silliness of a cleverer type”—a powerful
habit of mind that he understands full well because it is a defense against the human,
all too human sense of vulnerability and contingency:

Community of race is an illusion. Yet belief in race is a growing psychological force, and
we must reckon with it. People like to feel that they are all of a piece, and one of the ways
of inducing that feeling is to tell them that they come of pure stock. That explains the
ease with which the dictators are putting their pseudo-science across. No doubt they are
not cynical about it, and take themselves in by what they say. But they have very cleverly
hit on a weak spot in the human equipment—the desire to feel a hundred per cent, no
matter what the percentage is in. (19)

If our mortality is evidence of our precious individuality, this littleness can also make
us feel anxious, weak, and alone, and feeling at one with something larger and more
complete than oneself can seem to provide a refuge against contingency. The tempta-
tions of purity—the desire to feel homogeneous, whole, and harmonious rather than
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

290 different, deficient, and incomplete—are especially troublesome to Forster because

they are integral to the psychological landscape of individualism and to the political
challenges of contingency. Forster’s belief in the value of the individual is not a naïvely
self-confident ontological universal but is deeply informed by a sense of how precarious
and uncomfortable difference can be because it is historical, variable, and contingent
through and through.
Instead of trying to make cosmopolitan heterogeneity seem chic or exotic, Forster
calls it a “mongrel” condition, a deliberately unattractive metaphor that turns racial
thinking against itself in order to provoke reflection about the dangerous, all-too-easy
temptations of purity. “Whether there ever was such an entity as a ‘pure race’ is debat-
able,” he writes, “but there certainly is not one in Europe today—the internationalisms
of the Roman Empire and of the Middle Ages have seen to that. Consequently there
never can be a pure race in the future. Europe is mongrel forever, and so is America”
(19). Earlier cosmopolitanisms of imperial conquest have made mixture and difference
inescapable. Against simplistic biological essentialism, impurity is a stubborn histori-
cal fact. Although Forster understands heterogeneity as an opportunity for personal
self-creation, he warns against underestimating the cruelty and barbarity that mixed
breeds are capable of: “We only know that we are all of us mongrels, dark haired and
light haired, who must learn not to bite one another” (20). As incomplete, deficient,
and vulnerable individuals, we are prone to violence and susceptible to temptations
that seem to offer an escape from contingency. Recognizing and coming to terms with
the psychological appeal of homogeneity in a “mongrel” world is, for Forster, politically
necessary to preserve the possibility that differential self-creation and non-conforming
personal relations might stand a chance.
Typically turning the rhetorical weapons of his opponents against themselves, Forster
uses a biological analogy to counter racial essentialism. At a time before eugenics had
been discredited by the atrocities of the Holocaust and other forms of ethnic cleans-
ing, Forster finds in evolutionary thinking not an invitation to genetic engineering in
pursuit of racial purity but a resource for liberal individualism and a defense of the
value of aberration. He makes this turn by offering for contemplation what he calls
“the civilising figure of Mendel”:

He embodies a salutary principle, and even when we are superficial about him, he helps to
impress it in our minds. He suggests that no stock is pure, and that it may at any moment
throw up forms which are unexpected, and which it inherits from the past. His best-known
experiments were with the seeds of the pea. It is impossible that human beings can be
studied as precisely as peas—too many factors are involved. But they too keep throwing
up recessive characteristics, and cause us to question the creed of racial purity. (20)

Instead of refusing biological thinking as a temptation to essentialism, Forster uses

Mendel to turn the race-based genetic argument upside down and, in the process, sug-
gests a more accurate interpretation of the political implications of the mechanisms of
Darwinian evolution.28 The example of Mendel recalls that for Darwin the production
of variants is a crucial driving force in evolution by providing ever-new possibilities
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
of adaptation for species to test in their struggle for survival. It turns out to be a good 291
thing for evolution and the survival of species that they are impure, that DNA does not
replicate itself perfectly, but that the ever-changing heterogeneity of a species provides
a variety of adaptations that can respond to environmental conditions that also do not
stand still. For Forster, of course, it is less the scientific accuracy of the analogy that
matters than its rhetorical force: “Thanks to Mendel and to a few simple exercises
we can see comparatively clearly into the problem of race, if we choose to look, and
can do a little to combat the pompous and pernicious rubbish that is at present being
prescribed in the high places of the earth” (20). Toppling the high and mighty by the
power of the recessive pea exemplifies Forster’s strategy of taking the great by surprise
and demonstrating the unexpected resources of the small.
The case Forster makes for the core liberal value of “tolerance” is based on an ironic
recognition of the dangers of purity. In his essay “Tolerance,” which was first delivered
as a BBC broadcast in early July 1941 and then published a few weeks later, Forster
imagines what will be needed to rebuild civilization after the war. His contrarian think-
ing not only opposes the Nazi dream of “a new order in Europe” but also questions the
patriotic visions of “reconstructing London beautifully” proposed by English politicians
who were trying to lift spirits shaken by the long winter of the Blitz and pessimism
about the war’s outcome (a few months earlier Forster had broadcast a talk entitled
“What Would Germany Do to Us?” if she won, which was not an idle question at the
time). Concerned to counter what he calls a “perilous and vague sentimentalism” that
was in the air, Forster writes: “Most people, when asked what spiritual quality is needed
to rebuild civilisation, will reply ‘Love.’ . . . Respectfully but firmly, I disagree. Love
is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things: but love in public
affairs does not work.”29
Part of his argument is tough-minded pragmatism: “The fact is we can only love
what we know personally. And we cannot know much” (45). But his deeper concern
is that simple-minded talk about how “Love is what is needed” not only ignores hard
truths about the imperfections of social relations but would itself be a dangerous force
for purification and homogeneity:

The world is very full of people—appallingly full; it has never been so full before, and they
are all tumbling over each other. Most of these people one doesn’t know and some of them
one doesn’t like; doesn’t like the colour of their skins, say, or the shapes of their noses, or
the way they blow them or don’t blow them, or the way they talk, or their smell, or their
clothes, or their fondness for jazz or their dislike of jazz, and so on. Well, what is one to
do? There are two solutions. One of them is the Nazi solution. If you don’t like people,
kill them, banish them, segregate them, and then strut up and down proclaiming that you
are the salt of the earth. The other way is much less thrilling, but it is on the whole the
way of the democracies, and I prefer it. If you don’t like people, put up with them as well
as you can. Don’t try to love them: you can’t, you’ll only strain yourself. But try to tolerate
them. On the basis of that tolerance a civilised future may be built. (45–46)

Although Forster does not say so directly, the uncomfortable implication is that “Love”
has more in common with “the Nazi solution” than with the tolerance he prefers. For-
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

292 ster worries that “Love” is not simply a sentimental illusion but potentially a fascistic
force in public life because it would run roughshod over differences. In Forster’s view,
human relations are rife with negativity—full of deficiencies, unpleasantness, disagree-
ments large and small—and the homogenizing force of “Love” is not only dangerously
unrealistic but also potentially oppressive in its embrace.
Ever vigilant to preserve and protect the sphere of personal self-creation and the
possibility of individual differences, Forster is not only more modest in his demands and
expectations but is also deeply suspicious of the will-to-power of idealism: “I have lost
all faith in positive militant ideals; they can so seldom be carried out without thousands
of human beings getting maimed or imprisoned” (46). Forster consequently rejects
the idealism of “Love.” Instead of the “three cheers” that he says “Love the Beloved
Republic” would deserve, he offers only “Two Cheers for Democracy,” and, he says,
“Two cheers are quite enough” (“Believe” 70). The contingencies and contradictions
of social relations call instead for “tolerance” which, he concedes, “is a very dull virtue.
It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means
putting up with people, being able to stand things” (“Tolerance” 45). But the very
“negativity” of tolerance is what he values because it leaves room for difference and
resists homogenizing forces of various kinds.
Although Forster describes tolerance as essentially “negative” (it includes “not be-
ing huffy, touchy, irritable, revengeful” [46]), it is not for him a weak or easy virtue.
For one thing, “it entails imagination. For you have all the time to be putting yourself
in someone else’s place. Which is a desirable spiritual exercise” (47). If a liability of
individualism is its potential for apolitical, asocial isolation, then the practice of tolera-
tion that Forster urges counters the self-centeredness of the private sphere with an
imagination for how others are feeling, whether (to cite Forster’s ever-widening circle
of examples) in a queue or the Tube, “in the street, in the office, at the factory,” or
even “between classes, races, and nations” (47). Nor is tolerance, as Forster envisions
it, an invitation to indifference and disengagement. Forster’s notion of tolerance is
informed by a deep skepticism about the easy arrogance of self-righteousness and a
vigilant appreciation for injustice. For example, as he writes with characteristically
disarming self-criticism: “it is very easy to see fanaticism in other people, but difficult
to spot in oneself. Take the evil of racial prejudice. We can easily detect it in the Nazis
. . . But we ourselves—are we guiltless? We are far less guilty than they are. Yet is
there no racial prejudice in the British Empire? Is there no colour question?” (47–48).
Ever wary of smugness and complacency, Forster recognizes that the refusal to ask
hard questions and to confront unpleasant contradictions and complexities is not
benign. His conception of tolerance is consequently not a way of turning a blind eye
to prejudice and injustice but a call to turn the spotlight on them. Not simply passive
and accepting, it necessitates a tough-minded suspicion of prevailing ideologies and
institutions. Requiring both imagination and criticism, “tolerance” as Forster conceives
it is anything but the easy way of deflecting opposition and suppressing difference its
critics rightly worry it can be.
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
Forster’s suspicion of “militant ideals” and “fanaticism” also responds to two other 293
frequent criticisms of liberalism—that it is too weak to fight for itself against illiberal
opponents or that, if it does, it reveals its fundamental hypocrisy because it is not
all-accepting and value-free. “Tolerance is not the same as weakness,” he writes;
“Putting up with people does not mean giving in to them” (48). Forster unabashedly
admits, for example, that he is intolerant of intolerance, and necessarily so. Militantly
anti-militant, he would have no difficulty joining contemporary liberals who accept
all modes of self-creation except for “authoritarian identities” that do not accept the
rule of mutual toleration (the Taliban is an often cited example). Forster would also
agree on the need to set limits on the demands of so-called “greedy communities” that
seek to impose their values and beliefs not only on their own members (refusing them
the right of exit) but also on others in the community of communities that a liberal
democracy aims to foster.30
When Forster states his articles of faith, he famously declares: “I do not believe in
Belief” (“Believe” 67). This negative formulation recognizes the need to oppose the
will-to-power of illiberal creeds with an equal and opposite force—not only the power
of skeptical criticism but also the values this negative creed is intent on preserving,
including individual self-creation, the privacy of personal relations, and the possibility
of non-normative ways of being. Forster did not agree with fellow Bloomsbury-ite Clive
Bell, who took the pacifism of many 30s liberal intellectuals to its logical extreme in a
1938 pamphlet entitled War Mongers: “A Nazi Europe would be, to my mind, heaven
on earth compared with Europe at war . . . the worst tyranny is better than the best
war . . . War is the worst of all evils.”31 Forster can imagine worse evils than war, even
if he understands the Tolstoyan argument that one resists evil only by becoming what
one opposes. Hence his worry about becoming fascist as one fights fascism but his
recognition that this is a risk one must take.
Forster acknowledges that his liberal values constitute a “faith,” worth fighting and
dying for, and he states his reasons with typical irony that deflects and disarms the criti-
cisms to which it is open by acknowledging their validity in advance. He notes, first of all,
that he is in the same contradictory position as all believers: “Since to ignore evidence
is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal
relationships” (“Believe” 68), not only because they fail more often than not to justify
one’s confidence in them, but also because they can only succeed if one continues to
believe despite the abundance of contrary indicators. Secondly, he notes that

there lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worship-
per may one day be required to suffer, and there is even a terror and a hardness in this
creed of personal relationships, urbane and mild though it sounds. Love and loyalty to
an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do—down with the
State, say I, which means that the State would down me. (“Believe” 69)

Given his awareness of the pervasiveness of bullying even in a democracy, coupled with
his wariness of how democratic institutions may become instruments of oppression,
Forster is not as sanguine as some contemporary liberal philosophers that conflicts can
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

294 be mediated, resolved, or defused when the interests of a democratic society clash with
the variety of projects of self-creation its pluralism should foster.32
Forster can imagine an irreconcilable conflict between the political demands of
a well-ordered democratic society and the defining moral values of his liberalism,
and his belief in those beliefs, despite their small “b,” trumps his duties as a citizen,
with consequences he acknowledges and accepts. Forster’s allegiance to democracy
as a political conception is secondary to his belief in individual differences and the
entitlement of the little person to his or her own view of a good life. The possibilities
of self-creation and non-normative personal relations that pluralism should enable
are more fundamental to Forster than the democratic institutions whose purpose, in
his view, is to preserve and protect them. His allegiance to those political structures is
consequently conditional on their effectiveness in doing so.
These concerns inform the “two cheers” that Forster thinks democracy deserves:
“one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism” (“Believe” 70). As
these “two cheers” suggest, the value of democracy in Forster’s view is that it allows
practices (“criticism”) and states of affairs (“variety”) that counteract the tendency of
the political conception to become coercive. The usefulness of criticism for Forster is
that it resists the state’s imposition of control and conformity. The value of “variety” is
that it encourages a flourishing of differences against the tendency of political consensus
to uniformity and homogeneity.
Militant in its anti-militancy even where his own values are concerned, Forster’s faith
in self-creation and relations between individuals is a deliberately self-contradictory
creed that calls for suspicion even as he continues to believe. The fact that “there is
a terror and even a hardness” in his creed is something that he is proud of but also
troubled by because of his suspicion of fanaticism and militancy of all kinds. As an
ideology skeptical of self-righteous, intolerant ideologies, Forster’s liberalism is also
mindful of the liability of its own constitutive beliefs to fall into the rigidity, absolut-
ism, and sentimental oversimplification he criticizes. Recognizing these contradictions
without allowing them to become paralyzing is a difficult trick, and this is another reason
why irony and indirectness are Forster’s preferred modes. The fragility of Forster’s
contradictory stance is, however, also a reason why the bully oblivious to irony and
indirectness is in a stronger position and can all too easily prevail. (This is not something
Forster was always clear about. After the war, he wrote in defense of his liberalism’s
“softness”: “I have seen plenty of hardness” and “I know it does not even pay,” citing
as proof Mussolini “hanging upside-down like a turkey, with his dead mistress swing-
ing beside him” [“Challenge” 56]. Well, the Mussolinis don’t always lose, and often it’s
the “soft” who hang.)
Forster shares the concern of liberalism’s critics that it itself may become a coercive
regime. As he writes in his reflections on “Liberty in England” in 1935: “Our danger
from Fascism—unless a war starts when anything may happen—is negligible. We’re
menaced by something much more insidious—by what I call ‘Fabio-Fascism,’ by the
dictator-spirit working quietly away behind the facade of constitutional forms” (65–66).
Administrative regulation and efficiency worry Forster not only because even socially
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
progressive bureaucrats can be domineering and condescending (the expert’s claim to 295
know best what a citizen needs is a particularly noxious version of epistemological ar-
rogance). More fundamentally, Forster fears that bureaucracy as such is defined by a
“dictator-spirit” because of the oppressive force of administrative rationality. If bureau-
cracy is tyrannical, that is because its insistence on conformity and regulation can become
yet another form of bullying that threatens individual differences and non-normative
behavior. Worse, the coercive tendencies of administrative rule may be less visible in a
liberal regime than they might be in an actual dictatorship because they are disguised
by the defensive coloration of democratic consensus. The machine of administrative
instrumentalism may itself endanger individual liberty, he fears, and the justification of
“constitutional forms” may make this all the harder to recognize and resist.
Forster finds it a merit of democracy that “it permits criticism” because dissent,
disagreement, and even quiet questioning can be used to fight back against the bully.
Hence his praise for the back-bencher in Parliament, “the Private Member who makes
himself a nuisance. He gets snubbed and is told that he is cranky or ill-informed, but he
does expose abuses which would otherwise never have been mentioned, and very often
an abuse gets put right just by being mentioned” (“Believe” 69, 70). The back-bencher
who evades the controlling structures of government or party and makes his voice heard
even (or especially) when this is not welcome is an example of the little person whom
Forster cheers on against the dominance of the great and mighty. Forster is not naïve,
however, about the capacity of bureaucrats and politicians to deflect resistance and stifle
dissent. His 1939 essay “Our Deputation” is an amusing if sobering depiction of how
a government official defuses a protest: “Was the interview going to be an unfriendly
one? No, no, nothing as definite as that. Civilities were re-exchanged, time was up, we
thanked and were counter-thanked, our opinions were to be given their full weight, and
performing a final can-can, the Minister slipped from the room. He had performed his
duty, and we ours”—and presumably nothing will change.33 Nevertheless, democracy
does have the advantage in Forster’s view of allowing the little person room to maneuver
by making possible strategies of evasion, protest, and resistance.
As Forster notes, “the fact that our rulers have to pretend to like freedom is an
advantage” (“Liberty” 65; original emphasis). The cynicism of this comment acknowl-
edges that democracy is a regime of power, like all political structures. What the little
person consequently needs is not ideal sentiments but tactics and strategies that will be
effective in defending and advancing his or her interests. Canny use of the rhetorical
powers that democratic values make available is a non-idealistic way of defending the
ideal. Shaming leaders to do the right thing even if for the wrong reasons—to avoid
embarrassment rather than because they recognize the logical and moral force of an
argument—is a way for the small to turn the tables on the great in the never-ending
battle against the bully. The fact that shaming tactics rather than rational argument
may be necessary acknowledges the vulnerability of democratic values to abuse and
hypocrisy, but the fact that liberal values can be used as political instruments to preserve
and enhance liberty is for Forster a reason for preferring democracy to more coercive
regimes where such strategies would not work.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

296 Forster’s suspicion of administrative rationality and his willingness to fight back
are evident in an entertaining BBC broadcast on “The Police versus the Public” that
he did in 1932 with his lifelong intimate friend, the unfortunately named policeman
Bob Buckingham. Meeting in a train, Forster thinks Buckingham’s suitcase belongs to
someone else and (bizarrely) attempts to heave it out a window. Buckingham rescues
his case, and the two strangers strike up a conversation, in which Bob complains about
various popular prejudices toward the police and brags about the training they receive.
Forster asks: “This excellent education they give you, . . . does it make you human?”
Buckingham replies: “I should hope not . . . The public doesn’t want us to be human
beings, with human faults. It wants us to be a machine on which it can rely . . . If I may
say so, isn’t it rather a pity to keep on grumbling against the Police and everything the
way you do?” Bob is then taken aback by sharpness of Forster’s reply:

It is not a pity and I shall continue to grumble. And I’ll tell you why. This bickering ungen-
erous attitude of the general public whom I represent; this endless uninformed ungracious
criticism of the Police and their ways; I suggest to you it’s much more valuable than you
think. It keeps you up to the mark [Buckingham interjects: “Well I’m blessed,” but Forster
continues]. . . Our mark, not yours. It counteracts your officialism. It helps you to be hu-
man beings and at the bottom of your hearts you should be grateful for it.34

The vehemence of Forster’s riposte is yet further evidence that his liberalism is not
quietistic. This soft, mild-mannered intellectual could be tough and forceful, and ap-
pearances to the contrary only work to his advantage because they allow him to catch
his interlocutor off guard, as he does here with poor Bob.
Reflecting his concern with the “dictator-spirit” lurking behind administrative ratio-
nality, Forster worries in this exchange that “officialism” is a danger to the individual
human being and needs to be held in check. A bureaucrat, even an educated one, may
easily forget that he or she is human rather than an instrument in a well-regulated,
smoothly functioning machine (Bob’s ideal impersonal police force). Reminding ad-
ministrators that they too are mortal is an important form of resistance to the bullying
tendencies of bureaucratic anonymity. A democracy is not necessarily a police-state,
however, as long as “grumbling” of the sort Forster defends and enacts can counter the
“dictator-spirit” of “officialism.” Once again the point is not that liberal democracy is a
regime outside of force and power (Forster knows it isn’t) but, rather, that it provides the
small with weapons and tactical resources with which to defend their differences.
As a public intellectual, Forster sees his role as teaching readers how to fight the
bully wherever they may find him, including in themselves. Forster’s answer to the
question of why anyone should pay attention to the thoughts of a novelist and a literary
critic about contemporary political developments has less to do with his authority as
a commentator on the events of the day than with his capacity as a writer to use the
resources of a novelist to give rise to thought. His essays are memorable not because
he seeks to compete with his Bloomsbury friends Leonard Woolf or John Maynard
Keynes in analyzing specific political questions or economic issues in order to make
statements about social policy. The content of his essays taken as a guide to policy-
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
makers is thin to non-existent, and Forster would not have been taken seriously if he 297
had pretended to an expertise he did not have. The value of his political writings comes
not only from the moral authority of a novelist who is attuned to the personal implica-
tions of social problems but also, and perhaps even more, from their narrative style.
It is the surprises, the ironic twists and turns, and the tonic challenges to smugness,
self-certainty, and oversimplification that make his essays effective as criticism and as
social commentary. Forster the public intellectual is a writer whose power comes not
from his expertise as a social scientist but from his narrative skill as a teacher of the
art of ironic criticism in his very manner as an essayist.
The strengths and weaknesses of Forster’s posture as a public intellectual are a reflec-
tion of the powers and vulnerabilities of his ironic style. Like all styles, his indirectness
has its advantages and disadvantages. It is arguably less effective than a direct approach,
although it is not clear that a Malraux or an Orwell (say) accomplished more. To his
credit, Forster never succumbed to the intellectual’s illusion that he could change the
world by the power of his thought and writing alone. The strength of Forster’s style is
its combination of clarity and complexity. Unswerving in his advocacy of a creed that
he simultaneously questions, Forster straightforwardly asserts a simple set of values
even as he does so with a wry indirectness that encourages contrary thinking and an
all-encompassing skepticism. He delights in bold gestures of provocation even as he
is ever humbly alert to the dangers of oversimplification and the temptations of self-
certainty. Forster describes his political writings as “the reflections of an individualist
and a liberal who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him and at first felt ashamed.
Then, looking around, he decided there was no special reason for shame, since other
people, whatever they felt, were equally insecure” (“Challenge” 76). What they need
to address these insecurities, he thinks, is not reassurance but the courage of ironic
self-examination that a novelist can teach by example and (most of all) by the contra-
dictions of his indirect style.

Notes
1. See David Heyd, ed., Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), where
these terms are used by Heyd, “Introduction,” 3; Bernard Williams, “Tolerance: An Impossible Vir-
tue?,” 18–27; George P. Fletcher, “The Instability of Tolerance,” 158–72; and T. M. Scanlon, “The
Difficulty of Tolerance,” 226–39.
2. John Horton, “Toleration as a Virtue” in Heyd, 35.
3. Heyd, “Introduction,” 10–11.
4. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic
Books, 1983), 5. Because of the contingency and variability of justice, Walzer consequently notes that
“tolerance (the attitude) takes many different forms, and toleration (the practice) can be arranged in
different ways” (On Toleration [New Haven: Yale UP, 1997], xi).
5. Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990).
6. “Toleration as a Virtue,” 40. Bernard Williams similarly notes that “the practice of toleration
cannot be based on a value such as individual autonomy and also hope to escape from substantive
disagreements about the good” (“An Impossible Virtue,” 25). Whether “autonomy” or any other value
is chosen on which to base “tolerance,” the problem (as Hans Oberdiek observes) is that “liberalism
has an ‘agenda,’ if by that one means a body of doctrines, values, and political recommendations. It
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

298 would not be a political philosophy if it did not” (Tolerance: Between Forbearance and Acceptance
[Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001], 154).
7. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2006), 178.
8. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and
Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon P, 1969), 123.
9. Also see Robert Paul Wolff, “Beyond Tolerance,” A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 3–52.
10. Isaiah Berlin, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2005), 218.
11. Brown, Regulating Aversion, 11. Barrington Moore similarly observes: “Liberal rhetoric can
be as full of nauseating hypocrisy as any other. Even so, it is a disastrous error to junk the whole of
liberalism” (“Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook,” A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 74–75).
12. Forster’s name is missing from Heyd’s volume, for example, and he is not mentioned by any of
the other political theorists I cite in this essay. This oversight is not accidental but is evidence of the
unfortunate disconnection between Anglo-American political philosophy and contemporary literary
theory, despite the invocation of literature and literary concepts by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha
Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and others (often without an adequate understanding of the issues at stake;
for example, see my critique of Rorty’s notions of irony and reading in Play and the Politics of Reading:
The Social Uses of Modernist Form [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005], 10–15).
Politically minded literary critics have contributed to this disconnection by tending to over-
simplify liberalism, routinely dismissing it as epistemologically naïve and politically reactionary. As my
summary of the debate about “tolerance” should suggest, liberal political theorists tend to be acutely
aware of dilemmas about which literary critics think them clueless. A recent example of this animus
toward liberalism is Lauren M. E. Goodland’s revealingly titled essay about Forster’s advocacy of the
value of “care,” a liberal value she wrongly but understandably (given the current climate) feels she
can defend only by distancing him from liberal politics and caricaturing liberals as lacking intellectual
courage (see “Where Liberals Fear to Tread: E. M. Forster’s Queer Internationalism and the Ethics
of Care,” Novel 39, no. 3 [Summer 2006]: 307–36). Important studies of Forster’s liberalism by liter-
ary critics begin with Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (New York: New Directions, 1943) and include
Frederick Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962); Michael
Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to
Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 78–93; and Brian May, The Modernist as Pragmatist: E. M.
Forster and the Fate of Liberalism (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997). My essay tries to connect liter-
ary and philosophical concerns by reading Forster’s political essays through the lens of contemporary
liberal political theory—but with an attention to the workings of style that it typically overlooks.
13. Although my attention in what follows will be primarily directed at Forster’s essays on freedom,
democracy, and culture, also see my analysis of this great novel and the critical controversies it has
generated in “Reading India: The Double Turns of Forster’s Pragmatism,” Play and the Politics of
Reading, 127–43.
14. Forster, “What I Believe” (1939), Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1951), 68. Appiah ignores Forster while making his point in a less pithy way: “No liberal should say,
‘My country, right or wrong,’ because liberalism involves a set of political principles that a state can
fail to realize; and a liberal will have no special loyalty to an illiberal state, not least because liberals
value people over collectivities” (“Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Be-
yond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998], 93).
Rorty makes a similar argument, but also fails to mention Forster, in “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,”
Cosmopolitics, 45–58.
15. “Notes on the English Character” (1926), Abinger Harvest (1936; rpt. New York: Harvest,
1964), 14.
16. “Prefatory Note,” Two Cheers for Democracy, xi.
17. “Liberty in England” (1935), Abinger Harvest, 63–64. On the political machinations and
ideological conflicts at the Congress, see Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and
Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), and Roger Shattuck,
 Armstrong / e. m. forster’s ironic liberalism and the indirections of style
“Having Congress: The Shame of the Thirties,” André Gide’s Politics: Rebellion and Ambivalence, ed. 299
Tom Conner (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 139–60.
18. “The Challenge of Our Time” (1946), Two Cheers for Democracy, 56.
19. For a thoughtful criticism of this error, see Wilfred Stone, “E. M. Forster’s Subversive Indi-
vidualism,” E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations, ed. Judith Scherer Herz and Robert K. Martin
(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982), 15–29.
20. “A Book That Influenced Me” (1944), Two Cheers for Democracy, 219.
21. Berlin, “Notes on Prejudice,” Liberty, 345.
22. “Jew-Consciousness” (1939), Two Cheers for Democracy, 12.
23. The case Forster’s anecdote makes for tolerance, based on the historical contingency and
variability of power-relations, calls into question Wendy Brown’s claim that liberal tolerance always
universalizes and essentializes: “In [liberalism’s] reduction of political conflicts to individuals with
attitude, conflict itself is ontologized. History and power analytically vanish as constitutive of the at-
tributes and positioning of those subjects considered to be in need of tolerance . . . This disappearance
of power and history obscures not only the sources of conflict, violence, or subordination but also their
subject-making capacity” (Regulating Aversion, 142–43). The historically contingent “subject-making
capacity” of scapegoating is, of course, precisely what Forster’s anecdote holds up for scrutiny.
24. Quoted in Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (New York: Viking, 1981), 24.
25. On how the “double turns” of Forster’s narrators in Howards End and A Passage to India induct
the reader into the contradictions of contingency and express stylistically the ironies of his liberalism,
see Play and the Politics of Reading, 109–43.
26. “Post-Munich” (1939), Two Cheers for Democracy, 22, 24–25.
27. “Racial Exercise” (1939), Two Cheers for Democracy, 17.
28. For an informative history of Darwinism and race-theory, see Joseph L. Graves, The Em-
peror’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
UP, 2001).
29. “Tolerance” (1941), Two Cheers for Democracy, 44, 45.
30. For a review of the debate among recent liberal theorists about the limits of toleration to which
intolerant identities are entitled, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2005), especially 62–113. On the claims of “greedy communities,” see Michael Walzer,
Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 53, 60–61.
A classic reference point in this debate is John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1971), who argues that “an intolerant sect has no title to complain when it is denied an equal liberty”
because “a person’s right to complain is limited to principles he acknowledges himself” (217). Also
see Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1992); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights
(Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995); and Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Wayne
Norman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).
31. Quoted in Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the
Spanish Civil War (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966), 396.
32. The classic statement of this position is John Rawls’s view that “reasonable pluralism” entails
an allegiance to a “political conception” of a “well-ordered society” that makes a citizen’s “compre-
hensive moral doctrine” secondary to a notion of “justice as fairness” that is “neutral” to different
value-systems (see Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly [Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2001], especially 3–12, 187–93). Forster recognizes, as Rawls does not, that the very claim to “com-
prehensiveness” of the differing views of the good life that a pluralistic society welcomes can conflict
with the similarly all-encompassing demand of liberalism for acceptance of its founding assumptions.
For a useful summary of the controversy surrounding Rawls’s position among liberal philosophers,
see Appiah, Ethics of Identity, 79–83.
33. “Our Deputation” (1939), Two Cheers for Democracy, 16.
34. Quoted in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1977),
2:172–73.

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