Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. 1833; New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1991.
In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle seeks to show, by means of an elaborated ironic conceit, that the society of mankind can find a way, in its very humanness, to express its highest moral aspirations. To do this, he makes use of an extended metaphor that equates the origin of the use of clothing with the origin of civilization itself:
Man is a Spirit, and bound by invisible bonds to All Men; . . . he wears Clothes, which are the visible emblems of that fact. Has not your Red, hanging individual, a horsehair wig, squirrel skins, and a plush gown; whereby all mortals know that he is a Judge?--Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth (48).
The argument is a rather subtle one, for it is encased by the presentation of the narrative as the edited memoirs of one Professor Teufelsdrockh. But contained within it is a case for the morality of life lived with moral and public decorum, and an implicit criticism of the society as Carlyle experienced it. A connection is made between the soul or spirit of a human being and the highest and best use of physical human potentialities. The fact that of all the animal kingdom man clothes himself deliberately is put forward as an index of the special place of human beings in nature.
This argument made, Carlyle proceeds to a discussion of various social details of early Victorian England, in particular the philosophical impoverishment, as he sees it, of Utilitarianism. Indeed, the book as a whole may be read as a critique of the overarching principle of Utilitarianism, which is the achievement of the greatest good or happiness for the greatest number. Implicit in the critique is a philosophy of social morality that insists on the claim of objective principles. We have the example of clothing to mark civilized society, Carlyle seems to be saying. Now let us proceed to produce that s...