Habit as Switchpoint

How might we write a genealogy of ‘habit’ in terms of the philosophy and practice of liberalism? Mary Poovey’s meditation provides at least two points of departure. One relates to the meaning of the word. In Britain, as Poovey suggests, the word ‘habit’ had acquired two principal meanings by the 18th century. Crudely, one was outward, in terms of a person’s ‘dress, accoutrement’, as Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language(1755) had it. The other was inward, in terms of a person’s behaviour and actions: ‘a power or ability in man of doing any thing, when it has been acquired by frequent doing the same thing’, to quote Johnson’s again (which in fact attributed this particular meaning to John Locke) (Johnson, 1755: ‘Hab’). The former meaning predominated during the early modern period, when people’s dress was still used as a guide to their social station (Sennett, 1977); but it was the latter meaning that would become the subject of recurrent reflection during the 19th century, the period when liberalism flourished as a theory of government and, arguably, as a form of governmentality (Joyce, 2003; Wallerstein, 2011).

What was habit made of? The most common answer in the 19th century was the repetitive actions of the body and mind. In this sense habit was closely related to the term ‘custom’ (which, not incidentally, is also etymologically related to the term ‘costume’). Johnson’s Dictionary had earlier defined ‘custom’ as ‘habit, habitual practice’; but also, in legal terms, as ‘a law or right, not written, which, being established by long use, and the consent of our ancestors, has been, and is daily, practised’ (Johnson, 1755: ‘Cus’). The Victorians maintained this connection, even if ultimately they abandoned this legal connotation, as unwritten (collective) customs became (individual, involuntary) bodily and mental habits. ‘Custom is the frequent repetition of an act; habit the effect of such repetition’, explained one dictionary of synonyms in 1846, adding:

Custom supposes an act of the will; habit implies an involuntary movement: a custom is followed; a habit is acquired.… Custom is applicable to bodies of men; habit is confined to the individual: every nation has customs peculiar to itself; and every individual has habits peculiar to his age, station and circumstances. (Crabb, 1846: 265)

Similarly, in 1853, one lecturer, speaking before the Young Men’s Christian Association, offered the following definition: ‘Habit is that disposition of the mind or body acquired by the frequent repetition of an act. We hold or retain the effect of custom, and this is called habit’ (Gough, 1853: 4). Habit thus came to mean a subjective tendency, acquired through practice or repetition, and rooted in the mind and the body, rather than in customary common law.

The other point of departure provided by Poovey – closely related to the former but decidedly more complex – is how ‘habit’ functioned in terms of managing the tensions that animated liberalism. These tensions are many, of course, among others between rational self-interest and public duty, and between rights and responsibilities. Another, as Poovey insists, is that between the individual and the social; and it is here, she suggests, that habit functioned as a ‘switchpoint’, mediating between isolated actions on the one hand, and those collective laws and regularities which were thought to govern society and the economy on the other. The origins of this tension seem to lie in the 18th century, amid ongoing debates regarding ‘liberty and necessity’, when liberalism was only beginning to emerge (Harris, 2005); but they continued into the 19th century, when the term itself – ‘liberalism’ – became current (Koselleck, 2004: 248–54). A new dimension was added during the 1820s and 1830s, for instance, when an ‘avalanche of printed numbers’ began, revealing law-like regularities in all manner of phenomena: the exchange of goods and services; births, deaths and marriages; and crimes and suicides (Hacking, 1990). Similarly, it was at this point that the genre of social investigation began specifying all kinds of causal connections between the insanitary, overcrowded condition of city centres and the immoral habits of slum dwellers. ‘Barbarous habits’ of drunkenness, illiteracy and idleness, in particular, featured in accounts which sought to depict the ‘moral and physical condition’ of the working classes (Dyos, 1967).

The debates that ensued have been documented at length, culminating in the controversy surrounding H.T. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857), which suggested that statistical regularities rendered the notion of free will nothing but a ‘metaphysical dogma’ (Porter, 1986: 41–70; Wiener, 1990: 159–84). These anxieties extended across the political spectrum, and were partly resolved by a reappraisal of what was meant by a statistical law (as specifying probabilistic tendencies rather than uniform relations of cause and effect) (Kern, 2004). But they registered strongly in liberal currents of thought, including in that of J.S. Mill, where notions of character and habit were crucial in terms of complicating the ‘doctrine of necessity’, as he dubbed it (Collini, 1985). In Book VI of his System of Logic (1843), entitled ‘On the logic of the moral sciences’, Mill pondered whether the actions of men, ‘like all other natural events’, were subject to ‘invariable laws’ of cause and effect (Mill, 1843: 478). Whereas those of ‘inveterate habits’ might indeed be governed by their ‘circumstances’ in this deterministic fashion, argued Mill, those of character were free to do otherwise; and character partly inhered in the ability to master one’s habits: ‘A person feels morally free who feels that his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs; who, even in yielding to them, knows that he could resist them’ (Mill, 1843: 486).

Poovey’s suggestive metaphor of habit as ‘switchpoint’ can be usefully deployed elsewhere. The relative fixity of habits described by Mill, for instance, opens up the question of time: or rather, the passage of time and the role of habit in terms of mediating between past and future actions. Habit was invoked in precisely this context. ‘It [habit] is that which enables us to calculate upon our fellow-men’, wrote one Scottish doctor and domestic missionary in 1864:

Were it not for this, which links the present to the past, whatever we may be now, we could have no conception of what we might be tomorrow. Habit may be regarded as holding the place, in the mental and the moral, which gravitation holds in the physical world; to this extent, we can, in virtue of those laws, with considerable certainty, predict the future. (Thomson, 1864: 2)

Whether this was a good or a bad thing depended, of course, on whether the habits themselves were good or bad. Habitual predictability per se was not necessarily a good personal quality; and liberalism certainly privileged some habits over others, most of all perhaps habits of industry and rational, self-interested calculation. But to the extent that they were good, habits provided a kind of useful ballast to the liberal subject, ensuring that the exercise of his will maintained a steady course: ‘Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit,’ wrote Mill again, this time in his Utilitarianism (1863: 59–60). He went on:

the influence of the pleasurable and painful associations which prompt virtue is not to be depended on for unerring constancy until it has acquired the support of habit. Both in feeling and in conduct, habit is the only thing which imparts certainty. (Mill, 1863: 60)

That good habits underpinned society as a cohesive, autonomous whole suggests a final point of mediation: namely, between state and society, and the role of habit in terms of probing the limits of the former. Certainly during the 19th century the individualization of habit noted above – as something related to but distinct from collective custom – enabled the notion to function as a means of rationalizing the role of government, at least with respect to self-government. The habits of the poor especially were a common point of reference. The Whigs and liberals who championed the new poor law regime begun in 1834 did so because they thought it would encourage habits of thrift and industry among the poor (Mandler, 1990). The same was true of public health initiatives, such as the sewering of towns, which were partly justified on the grounds that they would promote habits of domesticity and sobriety on the part of the labouring classes (Hamlin, 1998). Equally, the primacy of habit could be used to restrict the extent of government to affording only legal protections. Popular exponents of political economy and liberalism such as Harriet Martineau and Samuel Smiles offered arguments of this sort. Smiles’ Self-Help (1859), for instance, which sold over 200,000 copies in subsequent decades, began by declaring that ‘the function of Government is negative and restrictive, rather than positive and active; being resolvable principally into protection – protection of life, liberty, and property’. Individual habits were what really mattered, Smiles contended, not legal rights: ‘But no laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights’ (Smiles, 1859: 2).

The history of liberalism is not the only context in which the role of habit as a switchpoint or mediator might be explored. Another, as Poovey suggests, is the history of associationist philosophy and how this developed during the 19th century into a kind of associationist physiology and later associationist psychology (Jacyna, 1981, 1983). In this particular domain, as elaborated by the likes of George Combe, Alexander Bain and William Carpenter, habit mediated between the body, mind and environment. While it united all three, habit also divided them, to the extent that the subject was capable of reflecting on – and so reforming – his or her habitual behaviour and the bodily and environmental conditions in which it was causally located. Equally, there were other political philosophies, most notably conservatism and socialism, as well as other national contexts aside from the British. Nonetheless, as a word and concept, habit was certainly problematic, helping to pose and explore problems, yet hardly solving them, as Poovey suggests. And herein no doubt, in its problematic, problematizing character, lies the capacity of habit to function as a protean variable of political thought, liberalism among them.