In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha Nussbaum presents a compelling reading of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854). Bringing together a philosopher’s concern for conceptual clarity and a novel reader’s love of character, language, and plot, Nussbaum details Dickens’ method of satirizing utilitarian political and economic views—views, she argues, that still deeply influence contemporary political science and public policy today. [2] Reading Dickens, according to Nussbaum, illuminates the limitations of utilitarian economic science, and leads to the insight “that economic science should seek a more complicated and philosophically adequate set of foundations.” [3] Nussbaum convincingly shows that Dickens’ novel is a “deep attack” on utilitarianism, going to the heart of its assumptions about the human good. In my remarks today, I’ll review Nussbaum’s reading of the novel, and then return to the novel to read it through a lens shaped by the work of Eric Voegelin. Voegelin’s thought leads us to see another dimension to Dickens’ critique of utilitarianism, reflected in Dickens’ awareness of the spiritual and cultural struggle underlying the movement toward utilitarian thought. The insights into the novel that I offer today give rise to further questions concerning the relationship of Nussbaum’s own thought to the Christian traditions that are so prominent in Dickens’ critique of utilitarianism.
Hard Times announces its central theme immediately, in the opening speech by Thomas Gradgrind to the students of the Gradgrind School in Coketown:
“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children; and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” [4]
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