Coda

A brief Coda wrestles with the scope of the claims made for a strategic cynicism. It begins with the uncomfortable play between sceptical cynicism and much more impoverished cynicisms in Dinaw Mengestu’s novel How to Read the Air (2010). It then turns to Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness, a book that sought to clarify the virtues of truthfulness as our main resource against cynicism. It takes Williams’s reworking of the Nietzschean genealogy as a prompt to think critically about the strengths and limitations of cynicism’s corrective or recalibrating role for today.

Cosmopolitan Cynicisms

This chapter turns to one of the most flexible and complex political effects of cynicism: its taking of distance on the politics of the nation state. It starts by re-reading the old story of cosmopolitanism’s point of origin in the claim of Diogenes of Sinope to be ‘not a citizen’ of Athens, or any other city state, but kosmopolites, a citizen of the world. It examines the difference between the classical historical literature, in the main, wary of giving Diogenes credit for advocating universal humanitarianism, and the more-and-less critical uses made of classical history by twentieth- and twenty-first-century political theorists. On that basis, the chapter traces the lines of a specifically ‘cynic cosmopolitanism’ as it finds expression within two literary writers looking to challenge the role, and the rights, of Englishness in an international frame: George Eliot (as she turns away from ‘moral realism’, at the end of her writing career, towards more experimental engagement with the form of the character sketch), and Ford Madox Ford, as he develops and revises his literary ‘Impressionism’ during and immediately after the First World War. For both, cosmopolitanism was less a moral matter than one of psychology, requiring an internal balance to be found, in one’s own mind, between idealism and a bracingly cynical realism.

In Praise of Idleness?

This chapter turns to the university, deepening the critical-historical focus on the institutional settings within which cynicism (for all its anti-institutionalism) resides as a modern critical practice. The primary concern here is with the university as a forum in which debate about the importance of, and the constraints on, free speech has in recent years generated unhappy and (in the USA) occasionally violent levels of conflict. Attending closely to advocacy for professional freedom of expression in the work of Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Laura Kipnis (the latter operating in the context of Title IX legal disputes and the #MeToo movement), the chapter examines the ways in which each of them has deployed cynicism in the course of advocacy for an ideal of the university as a place of free expression, while also anticipating and controlling charges of ‘mere’ cynicism.

The Freedom of Criticism

This chapter turns to the terrain of cultural criticism, with a predominantly literary focus. It develops an account of the attraction of Arnoldian criticism (with its ‘free play of ideas’) to the strong ironies, comic flair, and ‘sarcastic turns’ of cynicism—modes of argument that challenge and assist Arnold’s critical authority, and that become the subject of his most explicit critical reflection when he writes about a German literary cynic, of the generation before him, for whom he had a keen affection: Heinrich Heine. The chapter traces the process by which the kinds of cynicism that Arnold admired and (finally) found wanting in Heine became components of the style and content of his own public moralism, increasingly targeted to the work of describing and attacking the opponents of ‘culture’. The final section of the chapter considers a late reanimation of Arnold’s cynicisms in the context of his encounters with American democratic culture.

Speech Beyond Toleration

This chapter treats one of the great confrontations in the history of British public moralism between cynical provocation and a more ‘responsible’ approach to freedom of expression: Thomas Carlyle’s deliberate offences against progressive sentiment in his ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849) and John Stuart Mill’s swift and uncharacteristically angry response. Nietzsche (in pursuit of higher values and still freer speech) thought that Carlyle did not go nearly deep enough in the challenges he posed to conventional political morality—but the ‘Occasional Discourse’ went far enough to make Carlyle’s own name a byword, still, for moral and political provocateurship. The chapter argues that his cynicisms and Mill’s astringent reply provide a helpful historical basis from which to consider similar challenges today to normative views of public argument and styles of expression.

On Nietzsche and Doing Less with Cynicism

This chapter looks to provide a more thorough account than has yet been offered of how far, and to what ends, Friedrich Nietzsche’s sceptical ‘realism’ was fashioned with an eye on Cynic styles of argument. Starting with the reappearance of Diogenes of Sinope in The Gay Science, it explores the histrionic characterization of der tolle Mensche and his ‘untimeliness’ in ways that open up Nietzsche’s sense of the typology and stylistic gambits of Cynicism as helpful but inadequate models for the lived practice of philosophy. The focus then moves to how Cynicism helps to drive Nietzsche’s thinking in two main respects: first, his attempts to articulate what may be required to be ‘free-spirited’ in one’s philosophizing and fashion a philosophical style in the assumption of that freedom; and, second, the important role of Cynicism in the articulation of the genealogy of morality.

Introduction

The introductory chapter delivers the core critical-theoretical arguments of the book. It starts with a broad characterization of modern cynicism and a critical account of the main features of early philosophical Cynicism from which it derives and departs. (In English, the capital C conventionally distinguishes the ancient from the modern form.) The focus then moves to the ‘present time’ of the title (1840 till now) and to the terms on which the book looks to describe a function for cynicism as a set of linguistic practices aimed at calibrating a plausible, sufficiently robust articulation of ideals. A substantial section of the argument deals with the variety of psychological models for defining and interpreting cynicism, identifying what they have in common and the basis they offer collectively for a ‘normative’ view of psychology.