ABSTRACT
The Positivists and George Eliot were agreed, in fact, that politics necessarily involved men in morally dubious choices, and they felt anyway that the desire for power was itself corrupting. George Eliot and Trollope share a number of similar attitudes to politics. They find them morally distasteful, they distrust the whole business of appealing to people's self-interest, especially at elections, and they have no faith in political programmes. They keywords are 'theoretic belief': for George Eliot it was theory which gave politics their real dignity; they were not so much matters of practice as of belief. Personality is the central political fact in both Positivist theory and George Eliot's novels. At the centre, of George Eliot's activity as a novelist is a theoretical exploration of human experience, since it is above all in visions and theories that historical realities are forged. George Eliot's thinking on history and politics, at its best, then, is both original and magnificently precise.
