Culture, Structure, or Choice

CULTURE, STRUCTURE, OR CHOICE? Essays in the Interpretation of the British Experience

CULTURE, STRUCTURE, OR CHOICE? Essays in the Interpretation of the British Experience

Paul V. Warwick Department of Political Science Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C., Canada

AGATHON PRESS New York

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Table of Contents Foreword by Harry Eckstein

vii

Preface

xi

Part A. Problems and Perspectives 1. The Dilemma of Culturalism 2. The Alternatives to Culturalism

Part B. Issues and Answers

1 3

25 57

3. Was Britain Different? Protestantism, Property Rights, and State Power in the Rise of Modern Capitalism

59

4. Did Britain Change? An Inquiry into the Causes of Economic Decline

96

5. Why Has Britain Persisted? The Uncertain Bases of Political Support in the British Polity

Part C. Reprise 6 . Some Lessons from the Issues

134 171 173

Bibliography

207

Author Index

243

Subject Index

247

Dedicated to the memory of Linda Brideau

Foreword Harry Eckstein University of California, Irvine

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n this foreword I want to explain why I consider this book an important contribution to contemporary political science. I will say little about the book’s contents, because in his preface, the author outlines very well exactly what he is up to, so that there is no need to summarize again-except to the extent necessary to show why what the author attempts is important. In essence, Warwick’s study is something to which much lip service, but lip service only, is paid in political science: an exercise in cumulativeness. Political science is at present overrun with basic concepts, hypotheses of the middle range, proposed bases for building theories, and would-be paradigms for the field. If ever there was time for consolidation, for sorting things out in the field’s blooming, buzzing confusion, it is now. That could have been said just as well ten or fifteen years ago. But very little has been done to do so. There have been few, if any, follow-ups of proposed ideas-except to criticize others’ work, usually because it does not fit one’s own preferred research perspective, or elaborations of such perspectives. The latter often are admirably clever, and, of course, the literature grows and grows. But growth is accumulation, not “cumulativeness” in the scholarly sense. Accumulation, as it now occurs, threatens to split political science into rigid, warring “schools”-if it has not irreversibly done so already. Cumulativeness proceeds gradually toward shared and surer understanding. Paul Warwick’s book, in this sense, is exceptional, and thus exceptionally useful. Warwick wrestles with what seem to me to be the two chief alternative perspectives on building theory in macropolitical science, that is, study on the level of overall political systems (in this case linked to microlevel assumptions about motivations in individual political behavior). The perspectives are the “culturalist” and “rationalist” modes of theorizing. He confronts these perspectives with problems concerning changes in British economic and political hisvii

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tory-past, present, and probable future. Throughout, he compares Britain with France, to deepen and add plausibility to his exercise and its conclusions. He also goes into “structural” (essentially Marxist) ways of interpreting the same data. Marxism, in one or another form, also has become a basis of constructing theory for a sizable number of political scientists, and it is a mode of theorizing that does not link the macrolevel with the microlevel (as may be done without violating any epistemological canons). Warwick’s study could stand very well even without its theoretical thrust. To be sure, he summarizes others’ relevant, special work on Britain and France, rather than working with self-generated data. But such summaries are hard to do, except perhaps for a handful of country and period specialists. They are also, in a particular sense, cumulative-or at least labor-saving devices. They do for us what we would not do ourselves, in the great majority of cases. More important, I read Warwick’s study as a kind of “strong-inference” study. Studies of that type are particularly suitable for cumulativeness and consolidation. Hence, some remarks about them follow, which, I hope, will make clearer the usefulness of what Warwick does, and others neglect. The ability to show that a well-selected case, or a matched pair or other limited set of such cases, predictively fits a general theoretical model creates a strong presumption in favor of the theory expressed by the model. The ability to show, further, that the case does not fit any major alternative model creates a still stronger presumption of the model if it fits. The essence of strong-inference procedure is simply that one simultaneously tests alternative theories, in fair competition with the same data. In The Step to Man, John Rader Platt raises the question of what distinguishes the rapidly advancing sciences, like (at the time he wrote) high-energy physics and molecular biology, from less progressive ones. * His answer is that the former consciously employ the method of strong inference, “strong” simply because it is so effective. To quote him: Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: 1. devising alternative hypotheses; 2. devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative *John Rader Platt (1961). The Step to Man. New York: Wiley, pp. 19-36.

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possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly as possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; 3. carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; and 4. recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain; and so on. It is like climbing a tree. . . . On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps (1) and (2) require intellectual inventions which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism. . . . What the formal scheme reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork. . . . It is clear why this makes for rapid and powerful progress. For exploring the unknown there is no faster method. Any conclusion that is not an exclusion is insecure. . . . Any delay in recycling to the next set of hypotheses is only a delay. Strong inference, and the logical tree it generates, are to inductive reasoning what the syllogism is to deductive reasoning. [Emphasis mine.] Platt notes the “common-sense’’ nature of the procedure but argues that it is in fact not widely used, even in the natural sciences. What is chiefly lacking is the exclusion of ideas. The main causes of that lack are researchers’ preference for working only with pet theories, defensiveness and rationalization, mindless data gathering, and merely hopeful experimenting. S trong-inference procedure cannot be mindless and, properly done, is bound to exclude something-although it may conceivably exclude everything considered and, perhaps, nothing definitively. It must, however, be used if one is willing to put favored plausibilities to risk in stark tests. Ideally, the models used in strong-inference study should be antithetical, should predict mutually exclusive findings, and should exhaust all likely possibilities. But even if the ideal is not fully satisfied, the explicit use of competing models has many advantages over investigations of single ones. The procedure will certainly help to keep the researcher honest. It reduces the possibility of misleading confirmation, so to speak. (A model may “fit,” but a different one might fit better.) In case of falsification of one model, it affords the possibility of validating another. In case of imperfect results, it is likely to indicate better lines to be pursued in subsequent work. And if results are poor for all hypotheses, it excludes more, and thus at least zeroes in more on what is valid. At best, we get a winner and victim(s). At worst, we get a “recycled” theory: improved theoretical statements and better clues to probably valid theory. The use of strong inference in social-science research will probably

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not yield results as striking as in the physical sciences. But that might be said of any procedure. Be that as it may, emphasis here is on the word probably; one can hardly take a view favorable toward one and invidious toward another theory unless equivalent procedures are used. No doubt, strong inference has liabilities as an empirical method for the initial discovery of candidate theories (when a large universe of variables ought to be considered and reflection on bodies of data, plus hunches or just thinking, must play a large role). However, it remains a particularly powerful method for progress beyond mere persuasion to plausibility: for testing theories, or, at the very least, for choosing rigorously among more or less equally plausible alternatives. Without the procedure, or something akin to it, one is likely to achieve only accretion without progress-a piling up of hypotheses without subtraction. Scientific advance is both a matter of working out new and eliminating old ideas. For this, strong inference is ideally suited. The idea of strong-inference tests carries Karl Popper on scientific progress an important step farther. Popper also emphasizes the crucial role of subtraction (falsification by stiff tests) as the key to advancement in positive theory. Platt goes two steps further, in explaining, upon experience and logic, the nature of useful stiff tests and how subtraction may have positive outcomes-may advance the progress of knowledge and reveal more than invalidity. By design or not, Platt builds on Popper. It would be useful to show here that the issue Warwick seeks to illuminate is indeed the critical branchpoint we should address in macropolitics at this stage. But that matter calls for a lengthy essay, for which this foreword is not the place. However, readers of this fine work might usefully consult my article on the exact nature of culturalist theory and how it may and may not account for the sort of changes Warwick discusses: “A Culturalist Theory of Political Change,’’ American Political Science Review, September 1988. The sort of theoretical effort made in that article, coupled with theoretically pertinent studies like Warwick’s, might actually lead to progress in building sound macropolitical theory, instead of pointless, even if massive, accretion. Political science, after all, is a collective field. We are not a large group of hyperoriginal soloists. Paul Warwick’s work illustrates well how someone who takes that point seriously might sensibly proceed. His work pits culturalist , rationalist, and structuralist theories against one another in competition. Political scientists who take theoretical understanding seriously should be interested in the nature of the competition and its outcome, and should be open-minded about the latter.

Preface and Acknowledgments

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his study takes aim at a burgeoning dissensus in the social sciences, a dissensus over nothing less than the manner in which social, economic, and political phenomena are to be explained. Until about the mid-l970s, there was broad acceptance in Western sociology and political science of a perspective that may be termed “culturalist”; without ignoring the importance of structures or institutions, it highlighted the role of shared cultural norms and values in determining behavior in given societies. The proliferation of area studies programs was but one manifestation of the great popularity of this trend. Marxist interpretations existed, of course, but they tended to be relegated to the lunatic fringe of social science: they were regarded as overly simplified, highly dogmatic, and fundamentally biased toward the political cause of socialism or communism. Some rational-choice theory had been developed by that time, but it, too, was seen as fringe material in most fields except economics. In any case, the more realistic of its conclusions could be readily absorbed by exploiting the underlying elasticity of the culturalist paradigm. A great deal has changed since that time. Marxist theories have become ever more provocative, stimulating and politically acceptable; rational-choice theory is now a major growth area in several of the social sciences, not the least of which is my own field, political science. In contrast, the culturalist perspective, far from absorbing the valid points of the other two paradigms, has come increasingly under attack for the vapidity of its concepts, the untestability of its hypotheses, and the lack of generality of its theoretical formulations. As one rational-choice theorist put it, culture is simply too “squishy” to be of use in causal analysis. My own initiation into the squishiness of culturalist interpretation began with the study of France. In the English-speaking world, France has usually been portrayed as a nation riddled with ideological divisions, a manifestation, so it was said, of the pervasive ideologism of the French temperament. The most frequently cited consequences of this disease were the ineffectiveness and instability of governments in the Third and Fourth Republics, traits that condemned those regimes to failure and ridicule, both at home and abroad. Given the high degree xi

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of Anglo-American consensus on this stereotype, I was surprised to discover that Frenchmen living under the Fourth Republic tended to trace responsibility for the regime’s problems to precisely the opposite fault: the politicians were insufficiently principled, in their view-too prone to compromise, to prefer office for its own sake (Williams 1957, p. 321). The first chapter of this study explores the dilemma of culturalism by examining the validity of the fundamental distinction between pragmatic and ideological cultures and its utility in explaining political behavior and political outcomes. The cases of both France and Britain are employed in this exploration. It might be argued that the comparative analysis of these particular ccuntries is overworked and incapable of yielding any new insights. And perhaps it is, if by it we mean the examination of France in the light of the British experience. My approach has been the reverse; I came to the subject of political culture with a stronger background in French politics, and the more I investigated, the more I realized that the case so often taken for granted, Britain, was every bit as ‘‘paradoxical,” to use a favorite culturalist label, as France had ever been. Chapter 1 sets the context for what follows by developing, through this comparison, not only the problematic nature of culturalism but also the surprisingly problematic nature of the British experience. In the second chapter, the theoretical debate, which hitherto had contrasted culturalist with structuralist perspectives, is expanded to incorporate the rational-choice mode of explanation. The characterization I place on the three-way confrontation of paradigms is one in which the culturalist and rational-choice approaches are the most sharply contrasted, with structuralism of the Marxist sort, grounded as it is in the materialism of classical economics but concerned with the role of values and ideas in social life, occupying to some extent the middle ground. The controversy is then given substance through the introduction of three issues central to the development and present-day functioning of Britain, issues for which specific culturalist, rationalchoice, and Marxist alternative explanations can be identified and evaluated. These issues are not unrelated to the pragmatic/ideological distinction; as will be seen, the answers they ultimately suggest will take us back to that distinction and enable us to place it, and political culture in general, in a clearer and more acceptable focus. But the issues are ones for which a most formidable array of rational-choice and Marxist theories have been developed, and the credibility of culturalist interpretations of the sort that used to prevail in political sci-

Preface

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ence and the other social sciences will be severely challenged in the confrontations that ensue. Part B contains separate analyses of each of the issues. The first issue, which concerns the rise of modern capitalism in the West And the fact, or rather impression, that Britain was relatively more successful in that process than was France, has been a prime example of culturalist explanation ever since Weber first published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904-5. In recent years it has come under strong attack from exponents of the “new economic history,” who have sought to explain economic development in terms of favorable property rights, and from a Marxist school of “worldsystem” theorists which prefers to place capitalist development within a global context and, not incidentally, to deny that Britain and France differed significantly in this regard. The discussion of Britain’s rise to economic supremacy or “hegemony” in the Western world naturally begs the intriguing question of that nation’s relative decline. This issue, too, is graced with a profusion of explanations, including two major variants from the rationalchoice perspective, a highly influential Marxist interpretation and a fascinating array of culturalist perspectives focusing on the loss of the industrial spirit in Britain. Ultimately, the debate boils down to a matter of whether Britain changed in some fundamental respect in the nineteenth century or whether the seeds of decline were sown in the very soil that sprouted her dazzling economic successes. For the third issue, attention is turned more directly on the political, and in particular on an issue that has bedeviled culturalists: the apparent rapid decline in recent years of many of the central norms and values that were believed to have sustained Britain’s remarkable POlitical stability. Rapid cultural change poses a dilemma for culturalists because basic orientations acquired during childhood should be enduring if they are to be of any explanatory value; nowhere is this more true than in the area of political support or legitimacy. The “decline of deference” throws this whole issue up in the air and, as with the other issues, opens the way for rival interpretations that deny the significance for behavior of values and attitudes not adopted as means to an end (rational-choice theory) or imposed by the structure of class domination (Marxism). It is worth pointing out that each of these issues is analyzed in its own terms, that is to say, independently of the others. This strategy is quite deliberate. I sought three different arenas in which to debate the relative strengths of the rival schools of interpretation; that is, three

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different tests of their merits. For this reason the issues are separated both in discipline and in time period. In principle, all that unites them are the facts that they concern Britain and that they draw on the experience of France, on occasion, as a relevant and important focus of comparison and contrast. It would be disingenuous of me not to mention, however, that certain strong lines of interpretation emerge and reemerge in the three chapters. Indeed, one of the principal reasons that I focused on these particular issues, apart from their centrality to the British experience and the clear juxtaposition of competing explanations that they exhibit, is that the solutions I arrived at converge to a substantial degree. These points of convergence are taken up in the final chapter, which attempts to elaborate and integrate some of the lessons that emerge from the confrontations among interpretations and paradigms. As one would expect, many of those lessons have to do with the ways in which the British experience and, to a lesser extent, the French experience have been interpreted; the reader is warned that quite distinctive lines of interpretation are proposed in this study. But of broader importance is the lesson that, despite the rational-choice and Marxist onslaughts, there is a place for culture in the explanation of social, economic, and political phenomena-perhaps not as grandiose a place as was once claimed, but substantial nonetheless. It is to the identification of this place that the concluding chapter, and indeed the entire study, is dedicated.

Acknowledgments Research on this study was funded in its initial stages by Grant No. 410-83-0670 of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The work has benefited at various stages from comments by Joel Krieger, Kristen Monroe, and David Paul, and from the efforts of research assistants Anna-Marie Oliverio, Robert Maxwell, and Margot Beaton. All statements in the book, including any errors, are, of course, my responsibility. I am also grateful to the Journal ofModern History for allowing me to use parts of an article published in 1978 in Chapter 1 and to the Journal of Contemporary History for allowing me to use, as Chapter 4, a heavily modified form of an article that appeared in its pages in 1985.

Part A PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES

Chapter 1

The Dilemma of Culturalism

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he study of politics has been profoundly influenced in the postwar era by the introduction of concepts and explanations that highlight the role of culturally determined norms and values in shaping the political process. However the culturalist approach is defined, most or all applications involve the (usually implicit) assumptions that shared values, norms, and orientations are widespread and relatively enduring features of human collectivities, and at least partially independent causes of human behavior. The second assumption depends upon the first, for unless it can be shown that dispositions to behave in certain ways involve more than short-term responses to structural constraints or situational incentives, the causal connection from culture to behavior dissolves. An interesting case in point is the fundamental culturalist distinction between pragmatic and ideological political cultures. If the alleged adverse consequences of ideologism-which in liberal democracies may include party-system fragmentation, coalition cabinet instability, and governmental immobilism-do indeed follow from that cultural disposition, then politicians in polities exhibiting those characteristics should be generally and consistently more ideologically minded than politicians in polities that have managed to avoid them. Presumably, their publics should also follow suit. This point may seem so obvious as to scarcely merit mention, but in practice the apparent failure to meet the standard it sets constitutes a dilemma of considerable proportions for political culturalists. Consider the notorious case of the French Fourth Republic (1946-1958). To many observers, the weak and short-lived coalition governments characteristic of that regime can be traced, in part at least, to the propensity of its politicians to prefer the cultivation of ideological purity above all else, coupled with the multiplicity of ideologies whose purity was cultivated; as Jacques Fauvet (1960, p. 50) noted, “There is hardly a discussion which does not, among Christian Democrats, sooner or later become a conflict between liberty and justice; among the Radicals, a 3

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choice between the individual and the State; among the Socialists, between reform and revolution.” Yet, to other observers, the very opposite has seemed more characteristic of the era. Nathan Leites (1959, p. 7), in his analysis of Fourth Republic parliaments, found that ‘‘doctrines are extremely hard to find in French politics” and emphasized instead the pragmatic, gamelike quality of French parliamentary politics. Eric Nordlinger (1965, p. 143) forcefully elaborated this mirror image a few years later: Almost all those writers who point to the political parties’ ideological rigidity as the impediment to the development of a pragmatic politics based on compromise have conveniently overlooked the way in which the game of politics is actually played in France. Although ideologism pervades the parties’ electoral and propaganda efforts, this public ideological posturing of French politicians does not prevent them from playing out their games of compromise in the Assembly and its couloirs. In fact the political class thinks of compromise as a positive principle of action, with parliamentary activity largely revolving around nonideological squabbles in which porkbarrel legislation, private gain, political advantage for the individual deputy and his party, and personal vendetta take pride of place. There is at least a touch of irony in the fact that the preceding comment appeared in an article praising Michel Crozier’s The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1964), in which Crozier (p. 257) had argued that “the French political class has fought and debated endlessly-but on abstract principles and not bargaining realities. It has consented to compromise only at the last minute, when the force of circumstances could be invoked.” In any case, nothing in the argumentation presented by Nordlinger or Leites prevented Duncan MacRae (1967, p. 326) from concluding in a later study of the Fourth Republic that ‘‘multiple parties with irreconcilable programs have constituted a major source of cabinet instability. ” Inconsistencies of the sort just cited are commonly written off as manifestations of the “paradoxical” nature of French political culture consequent upon its fragmented or heterogeneous character. Consider, however, the following series of observations concerning Britain’s more homogeneous cultural background. According to the standard interpretation as enunciated by Almond, Britain has a political culture characterized by a “bargaining, instrumental rationality” rather than the ‘‘apocalyptic” or “absolute-value” rationality of the French (Almond 1960, p. 37). Because the culture tends to be homogeneous and pragmatic, the political system is ‘‘saturated with the atmosphere of the market,” even with “some of the atmosphere of a game” (Almond

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1956, p. 398). Christoph (1965) concurred that British political culture rejects ideological modes of political thought; instead, the British make an ideology of pragmatism. There is, to be sure, a certain dogmatism with respect to procedure, but this reflects less an ideological mentality, presumably, than a widespread endorsement of the rules governing the political game. Searing (1982) has found, however, that the rules of the game are not a matter of consensus among British parliamentarians; to the contrary, he detected two distinct sets of principles corresponding to two quite different interpretations of the constitution, one preferred by Conservatives, the other by Labourites. As for the political issues that fuel this division over the rules, Kavanaugh (1978, p. 8) suggested that their articulation reflects a “more fundamentalist, ideological approach to party politics’ ’ that has appeared in Britain since 1970. Some would maintain that dissensus over rules and ideologically inspired opposition have had a much longer history. Yet even if the sharpened ideological tone reflects no more than a recent shift toward a more doctrinaire politics, one must wonder how it could have appeared so quickly in a political culture as fundamentally pragmatic and adverse to ideologism as British political culture is held to be. It is evident even from these few isolated observations that the substantial differences which exist between the politics of Britain and France cannot be related to a distinction between pragmatic and ideological culture types-or at least not without a good deal of refinement. Both cultural dispositions, it would seem, have been characteristic of each country, perhaps even of most or all countries. This does not necessarily mean that the political cultures of the two countries (or all countries) are equivalent in some sense or that cultural traits are unreliable guides to the understanding and explanation of other political phenomena. But it does represent a very serious problem for the culturalist approach. In this chapter I explore the dilemma of culturalism by means of an extended analysis of the ambiguities and inconsistencies exhibited in the ideologism/pragmatism distinction as applied to Britain and France. My purpose is to discover whether there is any sensible way in which this fundamental culturalist distinction may be employed in the comparative analysis of political systems. The basic conclusion that will emerge from the analysis is that, although it is possible to sort out the conflicting evidence of ideologism and pragmatism in both France and Britain, the result is most readily achieved at the expense of sacrificing any autonomous role for those cultural traits in the explanation of political phenomena. The dilemma of culturalism thus appears doubly serious: not only have these cultural traits been utilized in

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ways that are imprecise and inconsistent, but the attempt to straighten out the conceptual confusion appears to void those traits of any independent causal role. The case against the culturalist approach is not watertight, however, for one or two indications do emerge to suggest that the cultural traits in question do not fit completely into this straitjacket of causal epiphenomenality. In fact, the hint of a reprieve for culturalism and the desire to determine what form the reprieve should take largely motivate this study.

I The usual method in political sociology for resolving difficulties involving the propensity for ambiguity or contradiction in culturalist analyses is to take recourse in considerations of political or social structure. Although we are not primarily concerned with France in this study, it is useful to begin with the example of French parliamentary behavior, because it illustrates the strategy to good advantage and, in so doing, highlights the more problematic nature of the British case. The interpretation of French parliamentary life in terms of a highly pragmatic or unprincipled game first emerged into prominence through a short work by Robert de Jouvenel (1914), written in the twilight of the golden days of the Third Republic. At first glance, the politics of the era afford evidence for and against the thesis. On the positive side, the opportunity for an individualistic or nonprogrammatic political style was provided by the much-noted weakness in French party organization and discipline, which was especially pronounced in the pre-1914 republic. Indeed, although the regime came into existence in 1875, the first political party as such, the Radical Socialist party, was founded only in 1901. The Radicals, moreover, remained thereafter a prime target of criticism for their looseness of party organization and absence of political doctrine. On the obverse side, the regime had just emerged victorious from the greatest political confrontation since the French Revolution. This struggle, touched off by the Dreyfus affair, involved an assault on the legitimacy of the democratic regime and the liberal ideals it embodied by those sectors of French society which still owed allegiance to the principles of authority, church, and monarchy. It, at least, was more than a game. Despite the importance of this struggle, Jouvenel attributed little credence to the political doctrines of French political parties or “groups,” as they were known in the parliament. For the new deputy arriving at the French parliament, the choice of group affiliation was, according to Jouvenel (1914, pp. 26-27), most often a question of

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personal relationships-of whom he happened to meet first in the corridors, to be exact. Otherwise, he might decide to join the group with the fewest ministrables, or potential cabinet ministers, in hopes of facilitating his own rapid succession to a cabinet post. He might even attach himself to the group of his predecessor in order to assume the vacated place. Of course, he would claim to espouse a political program, but he would rarely, if ever, attempt to do anything about it. After all, if he succeeded in legislating his current political aims, then he would have to find new ones. This process could be quite distressing. Why create such difficulties when what really mattered were the more personal bonds that linked deputies, not the ideological differences that supposedly divided them? Were they not all members of the same club? In Jouvenel’s (p. 17) classic pronouncement, “There is less difference between two deputies of whom one is a revolutionary and the other isn’t, than between two revolutionaries of whom one is a deputy and the other isn’t.”’ In the place of ideological squabbling, therefore, Jouvenel found in the French parliament a camaraderie that united deputies of all ilks. This entailed certain rules of conduct. Thus, although “it is not absolutely forbidden to have talent” (Jouvenel 1914, p. 29), the deputy had to be careful not to show it too much. Courteous and polite conduct was appreciated more. Between comrades, arguments were of course permitted, but not personal animosity; victory over an opponent could be sought, but one had to take care to do him no harm. One never knew when the opponent of today would become the vital ally of tomorrow. The real objective of the game was personal advancement; to advance, one needed friends. A doctrinaire approach could offend as much as it could attract. It is striking to find, two regimes and a half a century later, the same themes being noted by another acute observer of the scene, Nathan Leites (1959, p. 23): “In parliament the apparent cordiality of relations between the Right and the Left often goes beyond mere politeness. After all one is condemned to live together [sic].Parliamentary ‘arithmetic’ associates everyone with almost everyone else in the formation of this or that majority.’’ The fear that the assertion of political beliefs or doctrines may offend others was again a critical factor; it entailed the rather ominous implication that the wisest governmental policy might be no policy at all. Governments did have to act occasionally, but a minister could invoke the rapid turnover of governments to avoid ‘Translations from Jouvenel (1914) are mine.

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taking the blame for policies that may have offended followers or potential allies-without, of course, attributing the blame directly to his predecessors who might thereby be offended. Just as the politician should not be responsible for anything while in a government, he must not appear to be responsible for ending governments, even those he opposed. “When a government appears ‘condemned’ it is appropriate for him to support it” (Leites 1959, p. 58). Responsibility for decisions of any kind was to be avoided. There were other rules of equal significance. The adroit politician should not necessarily appear to advance policies that he favors; wisdom suggests it might be better to “lift the mortgage” first. This technique entailed advancing a policy that one did not prefer but that held a certain superficial appeal in order to reveal its defects and/or clarify the existing situation. The operation, if skillfully performed, might then open the way for one’s preferred policy or course of action (Leites 1959, p. 82). It will come as no surprise, however, that the more likely outcome was the preservation and vindication of the status quo, especially as others would have been pursuing similarly convoluted strategies of their own. Another rule conducive to inaction held that there exists a “unique propitious moment” for any proposed course of action; most often, wisdom dictated that “the moment has not yet come” (Leites 1959, pp. 23-24). In the meantime, it would be imprudent to express one’s views so directly that they offended those who held different positions. He who wished to rise to a position of power, in particular, should avoid taking stands on issues of importance. The ambitious deputy had to learn the art of equivocation, “the use of expression which everyone can interpret in his own fashion” (p. 128). Finally, since purposeful action was ill advised, the only reasonable course was to delay until one was forced by the existing state of affairs to act, hopefully in a way that this state of affairs also dictated. This was known as a situation of force mujeure; it permitted the actor to make the concessions needed for successful action and escape responsibility for it. Ignoring doctrinal matters that might offend others, cultivating personal relationships wherever possible, avoiding responsibility for any government actions-such were the rules of a parliamentary game that would seem to have had little bearing on the reality of an outside world of problems needing decisive and thoughtful governmental action. Yet between the lines of these accounts of the rituals of governmental inaction and personal ambition are indications that something more was involved than the silly games of self-centered individuals. If POlitical beliefs did not matter, why should Jouvenel (1914, P . 58) have

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declared that stagnation or inaction is “the only practical way of remaining faithful to one’s principles”? If political beliefs did not matter, why should Leites’s (1959, p. 113) politicians have been “obsessed by the fear of antagonizing those with whom they know they are ‘condemned to live together’ ”? Why “condemned” for this collection of polite, discrete, and totally pragmatic individuals? The truth is, of course, that ideology did matter; indeed, it was at the very source of this courteous game of avoidance. In order to demonstrate this thesis, it is necessary to consider briefly the way in which the external reality of the ideological fragmentation of the French nation impinged upon the internal politics of the parliamentary republics. According to Philip Williams (1964, p. 4), the Third and Fourth Republics were plagued by the fact that “three issues were fought out simultaneously: the eighteenth-century conflict between rationalism and Catholicism, the nineteenth-century struggle of democratic against authoritarian government, and the twentieth-century dispute between employer and employed.” In confronting these issues, the record of the parliamentary republics, in particular the Third Republic, is not entirely one of instability and immobilism. The one challenge that the Third Republic could not avoid was the amalgamation of the first two of Williams’s three conflicts in the form of a late-nineteenth-century clerical/authoritarian alliance in opposition to the regime itself. And, in fact, it did not. In defending the regime, instituting a separation of church and state, and establishing a secular, prorepublican school system, the parliamentary Left acted with a degree of unity and effectiveness worthy of any British government; as Williams (p. 9) noted, “There was for once a real political objective, capable of rallying a real majority. ” By implication, the instability and immobilism of Third Republic governments in other areas follow from the fact that, apart from republican defense, there was no other course of action that could command more than a fleeting majority. In most other societies at most other times, this situation would have been a source of discontent and unrest. But, as Stanley Hoffman (1963, pp. 3-18) observed, French society up till the 1930s was essentially a “stalemate society,” a society formed of groups and individuals more concerned with protecting situations acquises than attempting to enlarge their pieces of the pie. This society demanded a limited state, one in which a variety of political positions could be expressed, to be sure, but in which any serious attempt to implement any one of these positions was effectively checked. Clearly, this is what it got. It is important to realize, however, that this consensus on stalemate was not indicative of a positive satisfaction with the existing

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state of affairs, which might have served to dissolve ideological antagonisms,2 so much as it was a recognition that in a fragmented society the only consensus possible is a consensus on inaction. If Hoffmann is correct, it follows that it was this “republican synthesis” of social immobilism and limited representative government that allowed the parliament to become an arena of personal ambition and wide-ranging camaraderie. Ideology was not eliminated, because the parliament’s role as a platform from which the political divisions of the nation could be articulated was vital. But much of the ideological rhetoric must truly have had a hollow ring to it if, as Hoffmann suggested, no one expected governmental action to emerge from it. This situation, precarious as it was, dissolved in the interwar period. The successful resolution of the question of the regime’s viability had by this time reduced the political salience of Williams’s first two conflicts, but the continuing industrialization of the nation and the emergence of serious economic troubles in that era rapidly thrust the third conf lict-that between employer and employee-onto center stage. The stalemate society had been essentially a bourgeois/peasant consensus, and as such it had demanded and exacted a high price in terms of the neglect of working-class interests. With the advent of the Socialist party into the parliamentary arena in force after 1919, the question of class could no longer be so effectively ignored. The basis of the republican synthesis that had allowed the regime to survive and prosper, the consensus on stalemate, was thus increasingly challenged in these years, and the ensuing deadlock eventually cost the regime its hard-won support.3 *The one division that was tackled head on, that between republicans and antirepublicans, did result in a withering away of the antirepublican cause and the virtual liquidation of the issue (despite a brief revival in the 1930s). 3The evidence for this point is quite striking. The basic problem the regime faced was the economy was no longer taking care of itself as it had in the prewar belle kpoque. To meet the challenge of financial crisis in the 1920s and economic disaster in the 1930s, the prorepublic Left, whose alliance had defended the regime in earlier days, was thrice mobilized-in the elections of 1924, 1932, and 1936. After each election victory, cabinets formed from the left-wing parliamentary majority experienced extreme instability-falling in the Chamber of Deputies after, on average, just 3.5 months in officebefore the majority itself dissolved in midterm and was replaced by a Center-Right one. The fundamental source of these difficulties was quite simply that the definitions of “Left” and “Right” 110 longer matched the socialisthonsocialist cleavage over the stalemate society and the laissez-faire social and social economic policies it expected. In particular, the two largest parties of the old Left, the Socialists and the (more moderate) Radicals, were hopelessly divided on this issue. These points are discussed in more detail in Warwick (1978).

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If the ideological barriers to forming stable, effective governments were considerable in the Third Republic, they were well-nigh insuperable in the Fourth. Two new conditions largely accounted for this. First, the Fourth Republic had to contend with sizable antisystem parties on the Left (Communists) and the Right (first Gaullists, then Poujadists). Typically, one-third of the votes in the assembly were unavailable to any would-be government. This placed a great strain on the pro-system parties, which were obliged to form broad governmental coalitions that included partners with whom they disagreed on important questions of policy. Second, the task of putting together a diverse majority around the center was complicated by the fact that the center contained a party, the Christian Democrats (MRP), which differed profoundly with all of its available coalition partners. Socially and economically leaning to the left but committed to the proclerical goals usually associated with the Right, the MRP defied the logic that had guided political alignments since the Revolution. If no majority was possible without the MRP, it is perhaps not too much to suggest, as Siegfried (1956, pp. 163-64)did, that no majority was possible with the MRP. The structural constraints of this situation generated a vicious circle of governmental ineffectiveness and popular alienation. Given the number of parties and their respective strengths, no party could ever hope to win power and apply a program in the British sense; the basic electoral goal of the parties therefore was to maintain or perhaps slightly increase their size and hence their bargaining position in parliament. This entailed appealing ‘‘to a sectional outlook more forcibly and intransigently than their rivals who were tilling the same field” (Williams 1964, p. 69). The requirements of forming a majority from among the prosystem parties demanded, on the other hand, exactly the opposite behavior, for major differences in political beliefs had to be brought together under the same umbrella. The result was at worst prolonged governmental crisis and at best a mutual neutralization that pleased no one. Party leaders were often willing to make concessions for cabinet survival, but the predicament generated continual pressures from within the parties on their respective leaders to abandon compromise for opposition. To the extent that cabinets did survive, it was often due, as Siegfried (1956, p. 169) pointed out, to nothing more than the impossibility of replacing them. Yet the degree of compromise on political positions required of the government parties, the inevitability of immobilism, and the instability engendered when parties could no longer compromise, served only to contribute to the French voter’s alienation from the system and his willingness to support antisystem parties, which was a main cause of the predicament in the first place.

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Once one grasps the import of this reality faced by the parties of the Fourth Republic, it becomes relatively easy to understand the rules of the game as described by Leites. The belief prevalent among parliamentarians that “the policy to be followed in any given situation is commanded by ‘facts’ rather than by doctrine” (Leites, 1959, pp. 25-26) is not, as Leites felt, evidence that doctrines did not matter; it was the same attempt at deliberate depoliticization of issues that manifests itself in Norway, the Netherlands, and other countries where the divisions in the political arena present a serious threat to stable g ~ v e r n m e n tFor . ~ the same reason, when Leites (p. 115) noted that “it is often felt that the clear expression of a decided opinion, even though it be of a strictly political nature, may be ‘shocking’ to those against whom it is directed or who merely hold other opinions which are definitely rejected by one’s categoric statement,” the phrase “even though” is surely out of place. It is precisely because such categoric statements did touch on politics and political divisions that such “brutality” had to be suppressed in favor of an etiquette of courtesy that “may at any moment be interrupted by rude exchanges.” Is this not precisely what Leites (1959, p. 123) admitted when he said, “There is often also the desire not to introduce supplementary conflicts into a system already overloaded with unavoidable matters of contention. . . , For a ‘majority’ to be formed and to continue in being, it is usually necessary that its components remain silent on important problems on which there is disagreement”? When silence was impossible, the use of equivocation, especially by a prime minister, would seem to have been highly serviceable in achieving the same goal. Consider next the rules that contributed to immobilism-justifying inaction on the pretext that the moment was not ripe, waiting for a force mujeure to impose a course of action, undertaking the convolutions of lifting the mortgage on a policy or course of action. Surely these are all signs that serious doctrinal divisions inhibited the forthright pursuance of a clearly defined political goal. Again in Leites’s (1959, p. 144) own words, “One fears the unleashing of conflicting forces which might be provoked by an imprudent tampering with the delicate ‘equilibrium’ attained at the price of so many efforts and so many conflicts with a long past.” Finally, there is the avoidance of responsibility. The parties of the 4See H. Eckstein (1966, pp. 97-98) and A. Lijphart (1975, p. 129) for discussions of the methods of “neutralization” in those nations. An extreme, but often overlooked, example of the use of gamesmanship to manage ideological fragmentation is that of the prewar Czechoslovak republic (1919-1938).

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Fourth Republic were faced with two evils that they had to avoid. Contributing to instability and crisis by voting down or splitting cabinets was condemned both by parliamentarians and by the public. Yet the heavy compromises and the immobilism that cooperation produced equally displeased party politicians and their voters. What else could party leaders do in such a situation except to shun responsibility for their role in destroying governments, or else to compromise for the sake of the government and disclaim responsibility to their followers and supporters for that government’s actions or inactions? The conclusion is ineluctable that the rules of the game, however ridiculous they seem in the abstract, were in reality logical responses to a situation made impossible by the structure of ideological differences. This situation was not, however, the creation of the politicians. Rather, as MacRae (1967, p. 322) noted, the party divisions within the “house without windows” in reality mirrored the divisions of the society only too well, and the apparently unprincipled game played within its confines was dictated in large part by the difficulties inherent in attempting to provide governing majorities for a nation that expected the full gamut of its political differences to be faithfully reflected in its parliament. In a sense, one could say that the ideological cleavage structure within French society had made a form of pragmatism within its parliament a necessity of life. To see one trait without the other is, in these terms, to overlook an essential feature of the total picture and to misunderstand its basic nature.

In the parliamentary politics of the French Third and Fourth Republics, the existence of pragmatic norms and behavior was, in a sense, a red herring: it clearly functioned as a means of managing the underlying reality of serious ideological divisions. French political life provides evidence of other means by which ideological schisms are circumnavigated. A good example is the reliance on technocratic solutions. The French are renowned for the extent to which training for government employment is heavily oriented towards the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills; not surprisingly, the graduates of the elite grundes e‘coles tend to adopt the attitudinal correlate that all social problems are amenable to rational, technical solutions. The importance of such “neutralization” in the state administration relates, in turn, to an appreciation of the potential divisiveness inherent in state power. If, as Huntington (1968, p. 125) suggests, divided societies require centralized power, it is equally the case that divided societies are well

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advised to ensure that the centralized power of the state is not employed so as to advantage any one side of the societal division(s). Consequent upon this observation are a number of other arrangements. One is the emphasis on impartiality and impersonality within the state administration, operationalized in France by means of an extensive system of appointment and promotion through formal examination. A second is the development of an abstract conception of the state, in which that institution is seen as occupying a position “above” society, or even holding society and its various factions en tutelle.5 This involves a sense that the state embodies certain ideals of the national community that surmount its political divisions and, together with the technocratic emphasis, it can lead bureaucrats to scorn or belittle the role of popularly elected officials, as was characteristic of the Third and Fourth Republics. But it does have the advantage of encouraging a codification, in the form of administrative law, of the duties and obligations of the state vis-8-vis the citizen and, conversely, the rights of the citizen vis-8-vis the state. Thus, there exist or have existed in France a number of stratagems to aid a divided society in governing itself, of which a reliance on technocratic approaches to policymaking and administration, a conception of the state as aloof from society, and a stylized gamesmanship among politicians representing the different social forces are among the more prominent.6 Each can be interpreted as a device that encourages the appearance of pragmatic relations among individuals, or at least the removal of ideologically contentious items from the political agenda. But what of societies not rent by ideological cleavage? Do the attitudes and behaviors characteristic of those societies possess a similar interdependence of pragmatic and ideological elements, or are they just pragmatic? As it happens, both possibilities can be argued with some measure of plausibility. On the one hand, one can readily imagine that a pragmatic or practical-minded political culture could flourish in certain societies precisely because it is embodied within a broad ideological consensus. Since first principles are taken for granted, politics natu51t is significant in this regard that the administrative tutelle has been officially abandoned, now that ideological polarization has ebbed and social trust has grown under the Fifth Republic. % is quite possible that “groupusculation” (the tendency for groups to split into smaller, more homogeneous subgroups), which was particularly noticeable in the ideologically charged climate of the “events” of May 1968, also represents a means of managing ideological divisions (Warwick 1982).

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rally becomes concerned with “nuts-and-bolts” issues (Verba 1965, p. 548). This interpretation has often been applied to the United States, for instance, in accounts that derive from Louis Hartz’s (1955) famous thesis concerning the liberal tradition in America. It is possible, on the other hand, to conceive of pragmatism and ideologism as separate, even opposed, phenomena that cannot coexist easily in the same sphere of activity. This interpretation suggests that there are political cultures that are truly pragmatic, not because they assume ideological agreement, but because that is their basic nature. Sartori (1969) is perhaps the leading exponent of the second interpretation. He views ideologism as a mentality characterized by a closed-mindedness or “dogmatic impermeability both to evidence and to argument”; pragmatism, in contrast, is a state of open-mindedness or ‘‘mental permeability.’’ The two mentalities are related, respectively, to the “cultural matrixes” of rationalism and empiricism, where rationalism is characterized by the prevalence of doctrine over practice, principle over precedent, ends over means, deductive argumentation over evidence, and “doctrine-loaded” or indirect perception over direct perception; and empiricism the reverse (Sartori 1969, pp. 402-3). Clearly, Sartori places British political culture squarely in the pragmatic and empirical camp. If liberalism is seen as a characteristically British ideology (derived from the thought of Locke and his successors), it is no more than the “ideological apex attained by the empirical mind” and a “poor competitor, ideologically speaking, of socialism, communism, egalitarianism, and the like” (Sartori 1969, p. 402 fn.). Since the latter are generally associated with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, we may take it that French political culture is archetyTically ideological and rationalistic. In this interpretation, then, a clear separation is established between the political cultures of Britain and France, a separation that the seemingly pragmatic behavior of French parliamentary politicians does not blur. But does the occasionally ideological character of British politics blur it? This is a much more difficult question to answer with any degree of certitude. There is, as one might expect, plenty of evidence testifying to the pragmatic character of British political culture. Britain is conspicuous, for example, in the absence of any formal conception of the state. This is not to say that the state does not exist in Britain, or that its presence is less strongly felt than in France. Quite the contrary, some would argue (Ashford 1982; Johnson 1977). But it does mean that there is no theory of the state as an entity embodying ideals above those of service to the government of the day; there is, for

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instance, no separate corpus of public or administrative law defining relations between the citizen and the state. As Shonfield (1967, p. 7) put it, “Either the public authority is to be treated as an ordinary private person, on terms of equality with all private persons, or it is sovereign and escapes altogether from the control of the law. The great prize that is secured by this arrangement is that the effort of definition is avoided. ’’ It is also noteworthy that public administrators in Britain exhibit little sense of the desirability or necessity of seeking refuge in depersonalized arrangements or technocratic solutions, The emphasis has been, and still is (despite Fulton Committee recommendations), on the “generalist,” the manager of people rather than things. In line with that style of bureaucratic leadership, a heavy reliance is placed on the creation of consensus as a precursor to action. It has often been argued that the principal impediments to change or reform in Britain derive from the sense that nothing can or should be done unless all affected interests have given their consent. Indeed, the British style of administration has been compared unfavorably to the French in that it lacks the sense of mission and purpose of its own to override the opposition of particular interests and lead society in directions that do not, at least initially, have everyone’s approval (Hayward 1976). The state, in other words, is perceived as just another actor in the political process, not as the higher arbiter of society’s differences and the ultimate definer of its goals that a more ideologically divided and therefore rationalistic society would expect of it. The evidence for empiricism in British culture is equally persuasive. There is, for one thing, the long tradition in British philosophy emphasizing the importance of deriving knowledge from experimentation and experience; in the eighteenth century this tradition was reflected in the highly influential work of Edmund Burke, whose rejection of the rationalism of the revolutionaries in France was complemented by the advocacy of a measured empiricism with respect to political and social reform. The British constitution itself is a product of the pragmatic, empiricist spirit, for it has evolved (as Burke recommended) largely in response to the perceived needs of the times rather than in accordance with a rational blueprint. The legal system, with its heavy emphasis on precedent, is similarly based upon the idea that the law can and should be adjusted to the particular circumstances of individual cases; often it is left to (untrained) juries to take the path-breaking step. The British tend to take pride in these arrangements, although from a rationalist perspective they can seem quite objectionable: “The truth is that legal decisions without an explicit rational base are about as useful as the

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occasional generous impulse of a capricious tyrant" (Shonfield 1967, P. 7). Even the formation of administrators is tinged with the empiricist mentality. Rather than providing a highly focused training through state administration schools, the British have preferred to recruit individuals possessing an elite education of no particular relevance to politics or government, who then go on to receive what amounts to on-the-job training. The assumption is that any intelligent person can pick up the basics of administrative procedure and skill. The same idea affects the recruitment of politicians, for, unlike most other Europeans, the British positively discourage the migration of civil servants into elective office, again preferring those with no national governmental background who are prepared to learn the craft through a long apprenticeship on the back benches. It would seem that the essential skill to be learned (Thatcherites and some left-wingers apart) is the ability to adjust or harmonize the various demands and viewpoints through the application of common sense to the specific circumstances of the case at hand. The strong disdain for systematic thought that seems to permeate so much of British culture and politics should not, however, cause us to overlook or minimize the role of ideology in British political development. Ideologies tend to be formulated when social divisions and conflicts require them, and in this regard, England has"hadits moments of serious internal conflict. The most outstanding of these conflicts were the seventeenth-century clashes over the respective roles of the monarchy and Parliament in the exercise of political authority, and the much later struggle, extending from the late eighteenth to the midnineteenth century, over the weight that should be carried by industrial and urban interests in political representation and public policy. Few would deny the ideologically charged contexts of those disputes; some would also point to finer but more frequent oscillations of calm and turbulence by interposing the crisis periods of 1875-95, 191 1-22, and 1937-48 between the termination of ideologically colored hostilities in the late 1840s and their revival in the 1970s.' But do they make the British ideological? Historical evidence for the role of ideological conviction in British politics is usually reconciled with the apparent pragmatism of British political culture by noting the ability of ruling elites to absorb or co-opt 'This categorization of periods was presented by Johnson (1976, p. 23). Nairn (1970, p. 5) proffered three great periods of rebellion by inserting the period of the late-nineteenth/early twentieth century between 1850 and the present era.

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challenges to the status quo, thereby defusing opposition while preserving the basic contours of the system more or less intact. As far as it goes, this defense of British pragmatism has much to be said for it. Yet there is a line of interpretation that threads ideology into the fabric of British politics in a manner that is considerably more subtle. To pursue the example of public administration, it is often noted that the foundations of the modern civil service in Britain were laid in the 1830s and 1840s by reformers and royal commissions whose approach was highly rationalistic and doctrinaire; in Shonfield’s (1967, p. 10) view, “There was little pragmatism and even less of the spirit of compromise” among them. That episode, which forms part of the reforming drive of the early and mid-nineteenth century, illustrates fairly well that systematic, theoretical thought is not alien to the British character or the British form of government, which still bears the imprint of their efforts. A similar point can be made with respect to the field of economics: abstract theoretical work on the subject in Britain has been impressive over a very long period of time. When these facts are juxtaposed against the British propensity to improvise in government, even in the domain of economic policymaking, Shonfield (p. 12) saw not an aversion to the use of theory so much as an aversion to “the tedious business of sorting out and analyzing a mass of empirical data.” In other words, “public purpose in this country is muffled because of an antiempiricist bias in British thought. ”8 The implication of these remarks is that the apparent empiricism of Britain’s governors-their reliance on experience to train recruits and guide policies and procedures-masks a deeper reluctance to undertake serious empirical work. Shonfield (1967, p. 11) suggested that the basis for this rather surprising antiempiricism may lie in a “certain gentleness of manner which expresses itself in reluctance to press for full answers, in case the effort of spelling out complicated matters might cause inconvenience or tedium to another” or perhaps even “an excessive disposition to believe in the presence of the ineffable.” There is also, he suspected, an element of arrogance which he regards as an aristocratic residue still rooted in British democracy. Actually, all the reasons he gave sound rather too aristocratic not to suspect something afoot, and one is reminded in this regard of a key comprornise in the nineteenth-century civil service reforms whereby meritorious cri‘This observation is not uniquely Shonfield’s; the foremost American authority on Britain, Samuel Beer (1982, p. 114), also observed that “it was the British style of government to avoid any excess of systematic thought or empirical research in policymaking.”

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teria were introduced in recruitment, but the merit in question came to be defined in terms of the elite educational backgrounds of gentlemen rather than the performance criteria of businessmen. A gentlemanly ethos is not the same thing as an ideology, to be sure, but if that ethos is purposefully employed by those in power to inhibit sweeping assaults on the structure of government or the substance of government policy, it may suggest that what is at issue is an unspoken set of ideological considerations centering on the rightness of the prevailing arrangements in politics and government. In this respect, it is interesting that some observers (Goodin 1982, pp. 43-50; Hayward 1976, pp. 343-44) have detected a striking similarity between the guiding orientations of British government and the rules of thumb presented by F. M. Cornford (1908) for the young academic politician: Beware the “dangerous precedent,” do not appear to be a “young man in a hurry,” understand that change must await the “ripeness” or “fullness” of time, and so forth. We have met with these precepts before. They are the gamesmanship principles observed by Jouvenel and Leites in the French parliament, and one naturally suspects that they exist in Britain for the same purpose: to avoid conflict by maintaining an agreed-upon status quo. That status quo, needless to say, may be one that favors a certain group or groups in society over others; indeed, it may conceivably represent the ideological and political domination of the very class whose ethos so colors the higher civil service. I have no wish to engage at this point in what would necessarily be a long and complicated discussion of the alleged bourgeois/aristocratic domination of British society, the possibility of false or contradictory consciousness among the working class, and related issues that form elements of the Marxist analysis of British political development.9 For the purpose of this discussion, what is germane is the manner in which much of the evidence for British pragmatism and empiricism is reinterpreted as manifestations of ideological hegemony. According to Nairn (1970, p. 9), two historical factors underlie this interpretation: (1) the relative ease with which first agricultural and then industrial capitalism came to dominate English society, which obviated the need for a radical bourgeois attack on the old order; and (2) the association, beginning in the 1790s, of the Enlightenment with the threat from revolutionary France, which encouraged the bourgeoisie to cast its lot with the landed upper classes in order to weed out “Jacobin” influences that might have aggravated the problem of social control of the ’These issues are examined in Chapter 5.

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emerging industrial working class. In ideational terms, the consequence was that at a certain historical point the English bourgeoisie chose “non-philosophy ’ ’ ; specifically, it embraced a conservatism, delineated by Burke, that “turned away from Enlightenment logic and theoretical egalitarianism to foster social inequality and cultivate an insular pragmatism. ” Within the higher reaches of British government, this insular pragmatism can be detected in a resistance to systematic thought or rigorous empirical analysis, a preference for “muddling through” on the basis of previous practices and experience, that serves admirably as a camouflaged defense of the existing state of affairs and of the conservative principles embodied therein. Whether or not this Burkean conservatism itself qualifies as a true ideology is a matter of opinion. The essential characteristic that distinguishes an ideological from a pragmatic belief system, according to Sartori (1969, p. 401), is its closedness or reliance on absolute authority. Burke specifically allowed for the possibility of pragmatic tinkering with existing political arrangements, but it is not clear that conservatives would regard the basic tenets of the philosophy, which Eccleshall (1977, p. 62) narrows down to the inevitability and desirability of elite rule and the weakness of nonelites’ political judgement, as open to empirical refutation. Eccleshall (1977, p. 66) also argues that English conservatism, because it “cannot afford to submit the prevailing structure to rational evaluation and the claims of abstract justice by contrasting it with an ideally desirable state of affairs,” has had to rely on a very substantial measure of mystification, which hardly suggests a genuinely open minded approach to politics. It is even possible, according to Nairn (1970, p. 26), that “if the immense historical energy of British conservatism later appeared as inert possession of the field, as almost a state of nature (practically absent from most political thought except as myth), this is simply the measure of its success. ” At the very least, the aristocratic sense that administration is an uncommunicable art, which to Shonfield seemed characteristic of British higher civil servants, and the related tenacity with which they hide the very evidence from which informed evaluations of governmental decisions might be made by members of the public, would appear to be the very opposite of the open, empirical style that is supposed to be the hallmark of British government and of the pragmatic mentality in general.

I11 If one were to draw conclusions from the observations made in the preceding section concerning the roles of ideologism and pragmatism

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in French and British political cultures, the following might be a reasonable summation. Pragmatism in French politics seems to have functioned, together with such devices as the emphasis on technocracy and impersonality in the state administration, as a means of smoothing over potentially disruptive ideological divisions. In Britain, by contrast, pragmatism may be a predominant characteristic of the political style precisely because of the existence of an ideological consensus; alternatively, the pragmatic approach to political issues may be a tactic employed by those in power to divert attention from the repressive nature of a “consensus” imposed by one class on the other. The latter version certainly would account for the obsessive dogmatism over procedure that Christoph (1965) noted of British parliamentarians and the high valuation placed on the preservation of outmoded institutions that Hayward (1976, p. 355) observed of the British political class; any good Marxist knows that the nature of the system must place bounds on the nature of the decisions it produces. A class-hegemony interpretation could also be used to account for the several periods of serious opposition to the system in the last two centuries, although one does not have to subscribe to Marxism to acknowledge their ideological and largely class-based character. On this argument, the distinguishing criterion between France and Britain is not so much that one is ideological and the other pragmatic, but rather that, historically, the predominant societal dividing lines have been vertical in the former and horizontal in the latter. This fundamental contrast in social structure in turn implies quite different ideas concerning the role of the state. For much of French history, the state has been an object of dissensus, and sensitivity to the potential for bias in the exercise of state power is consequently quite pronounced. The result has been a degree of neutralization implicit in the conception of the state as occupying a realm above the divisions of society, with arrangements and implications as discussed above. Although English (British) history has had its moments of intense division and conflict over the nature of the state and the uses to which it should be put, the resolution, encouraged perhaps by France’s experiences with revolution, has been such as to unite most elite factions in a broad consensus. As a result, the potential for abuse of state power has been handled more by the understanding that political action requires the voluntary consent, or a least acquiescence, of all recognized interests (sometimes jarringly referred to as “voluntaryism”), than by the attempt to elevate the state above political controversy. It has also led to the appearance of greater political trust in Britain than in France, especially as the political formula facilitated the recognition of organized labor as a legitimate

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interest (although one may wonder how well founded the trust is in a system that postulates immobility unless agreement is general). Underlying the apparent flexibility and open-mindedness of Britain’s governors that consensus building requires, however, resides a conservative status quo that is stoutly, if often subtly and covertly, defended. For the purpose at hand, the key characteristic of this interpretation of the apparent coexistence of ideological and pragmatic elements in both French and British politics is that it was arrived at through the introduction of structural conditions affecting those societies. As noted earlier, this is the standard method of tackling the problem in political sociology, and it clearly yields results that bear a certain plausibility. The perceptive reader will have detected, however, a certain cautiousness with which the resolution has been presented. The reluctance to press the case, particularly with respect to the much more elusive trait of English ideologism, is partly a function of the evidence presented, which is far from being conclusive. Much of the remainder of this work is devoted to a more rigorously developed and documented examination of the themes just suggested and should therefore go some distance towards rectifying this deficiency. The more important cause for the cautiousness cannot be taken care of so easily, however, for it rests on a matter of interpretation rather than evidence. Despite the plausibility of the analysis, there nevertheless remains a suspicion that culture may have been explained away rather than explained, disposed of rather than accounted for, in a manner that does not sufficiently respect the strengths of the culturalist position. Let me illustrate with the case of France. The leading interpretation of French political culture (specifically, French attitudes toward authority) was presented by Crozier (1964, pp. 213-26, 251-62) more than two decades ago in his highly penetrating analysis of bureaucracy in France. In Crozier’s view, two fundamental cultural traits characterize French authority relationships: ( 1) face-to-face dependency relationships are avoided, and (2) authority is seen in absolutist terms. In bureaucratic settings, the apparent contradiction between these two principles is resolved in the following way. To the fullest extent possible, all behavior is controlled by impersonal rules. Discretionary leadership, which entails face-to-face dependence, is thereby circumvented. The power to set the all-important rules is relegated by the highly centralized organizational structure to the very top, that is, at a distance sufficient to make it bearable. The concentration of power at the highest levels appeals to the absolutist ideal of authority, but the rigidity of the structure, its very rule-boundedness, makes real leadership difficult to exercise even at that level. This appeals to the individual employee’s desire for autonomy. For him, the protection

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from interference provided by the rules affords the independence he cherishes, and he enters into a sort of negative solidarity with his peers to insure that their “stratum” is protected from above and below and that within the stratum all are treated with strict equality. The inevitable dysfunction of this clever reconciliation of inconsistent principles resides in the difficulty of introducing needed change. The extraordinary extent to which the whole structure is locked into rules and the consequent inability of the leadership to introduce piecemeal reform or even to benefit from an adequate flow of communications that would tip it off to the need for reform make crisis the necessary prerequisite for change. As de Gaulle once observed, France only reforms in the wake of revolution. Clearly, Crozier regarded the French bureaucratic pattern of organization as at least a partial success in its natural habitat-bureaucracies. By the same token, its greatest failure occurs in the one arena where change rather than routine is, or should be, the order of thingsparliament. The bureaucratic pattern denies the need for informal organization, because the rules protect everyone’s position. This is in keeping with French views on authority. Organization, which may have the goal of positive action to promote interests or positions, implies the acceptance of leadership, that is, submission to dependency relationships. It restricts the individual’s autonomy and violates his craving for equality. Accordingly, organizational activity is singularly deficient in France, as observers have noted since at least as far back as Tocqueville. A parliamentary system that works, however, requires the ability to form cohesive political organizations in which faceto-face authority is exercised and accepted over long periods of time. Since this fits so poorly with the French style of authority, France has experienced instead the notorious cabinet instability and immobilism of the Third and Fourth Republics. In this predominance of the demands of the French authority style over the imperatives of stable, effective government, the game that so fascinated Jouvenel and Leites was a highly serviceable tool: The distance created by the complexity of the game has been equivalent to the distance created by impersonality and centralization [in the bureaucratic setting]. It has helped to preserve the isolation of the parliamentary stratum and of the possible ministers’ stratum, preventing control by a higher authority, government, or elections, and insuring the fundamental autonomy and equality of each of its members. (Crozier 1964, p. 257) Crozier’s interpretation of the cultural bases of French bureaucratic and political behavior is very persuasive, and in fact has been extensively borrowed in works on French government. But if it is accurate,

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it creates a very sticky dilemma: Why is it that a form of pragmatic behavior, parliamentary gamesmanship, which appeared earlier to be no more than a logical response to the structure of ideological division within the French parliament, turns out to correspond so very closely to the fundamental elements of French political culture as described by Crozier, elements whose origin Crozier traced back to a period well before parliamentary government had made its appearance in France? A parallel concern can be raised with respect to Britain. It is one thing to peer beneath the veneer of British “muddling-through’’ to find a dogmatic adherence to precepts, rules, procedures, and even to the basic contours not just of a system but of the distribution of power and opportunity that underlies it. But what of the unavoidable facts that the pragmatic, bargaining quality of British life has had a very long history extending back several centuries; that the type of state that emerged in England distinguished itself from the French model in relevant ways just as early, if not earlier; that a genuinely empiricist strain is evident in British scientific and philosophic thought over a similar stretch of time; and that all of these characteristics predate the alleged consolidation of an aristocratic/bourgeois hegemonic control over a modernized state apparatus in the mid-nineteenth century, or even the embrace, under the threat of Jacobinism, of a Burkean “non-philosophy” a few decades earlier? These observations make it clear that the culturalist approach has not been totally laid to rest in these examples by the introduction of structuralist considerations. Although it is true that culturalist interpretations of politics have tended toward vagueness, tautology, or contradiction, the lesson would seem to be that a satisfactory solution is not to be found in merely attaching cultural traits to elements of social and political structure as dependent or concomitant features. If the culture/ structure axis is to be the principal focus of attention, a more complex relationship between the two factors presumably would have to be identified, one that allows each some degree of independence, yet is specific enough to establish their causal interconnections rather than merely allude to their coexistence. This is, of course, a rather tall order, one that may ultimately prove impossible to fill. Indeed, the inherent difficulties in following this well-traveled, but seldom mastered, course have led to a strong resurgence in recent years of a second alternative, the rational-choice approach, which establishes a very different axis upon which the issues at hand may be debated and resolved. It is to this less complex route that we turn next.

Chapter 2

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he dilemma of culturalist explanation, I have suggested, bears two faces. The first concerns the confusion and contradiction that characterize the ways in which cultural traits such as ideologism and pragmatism are attributed to particular polities; the second involves the task of determining the extent to which cultural variables may be deemed to be independent of social and political structure for the purposes of causal analysis. The preliminary analysis of ideologism and pragmatism in British and French political cultures undertaken in the previous chapter sought to effect some clarification of the dimensions of the problem, but it overlooked a great deal as well. For one thing, it left unexplored the possibility that the issue of the relative importance of cultural and structural factors in politics will prove to be an intractable one, capable of stimulating only sterile exchanges of emotion-tinged and largely nonfalsifiable claims and counterclaims between Marxist and “bourgeois” social scientists. For another, it failed to consider that casting the debate in terms of the nature and degree of autonomy of cultural traits from structural ones involves certain assumptions that may be neither valid nor necessary. Culturalists and structuralists, whatever the substance of their disagreements, tend to unite in the assumptions that the explanation of human behavior should be conducted mainly at a level of analysis above that of the individual, and that shared values and norms must figure in the explanatory picture in some significant fashion, even if only as intervening variables or elements of “superstructure. ” In fact, neither of these assumptions is obligatory. Besides perspectives that stress culture or structure, there is a third perspective that may be brought to bear upon the analysis of human societies, one that largely rejects the terms of the culturalist/structuralistdebate and the assumptions that underpin it. This explanatory type is the rational-choice one, and as this chapter documents, it offers a range of challenging and stimulating theories that can be used to account for societal phenomena 25

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otherwise handled in cultural or structural terms. To some extent it is a new challenger; at any rate, it serves to force the debate away from the vagueness and evanescence of such standard issues as the general character of a society’s political culture or the historical inheritance of its ideological divisions toward very specific questions that require specific answers. Although in this and other senses it stands in particularly sharp contrast to the culturalist position, it is, paradoxically, implicated in both British and French political cultures, thereby adding, apart from a certain continuity, a substantial layer of obfuscation from which the following section will attempt to offer some relief.

I The idea that a connection exists between types of explanation in social science and the natures of British and French political cultures plainly emerges in Sartori’s (1969) hypothesis relating the distinction between pragmatic and ideological cultures to an opposition between empirical and rational mentalities. In the literature, the latter polarity functions at two distinct levels: not only is it employed to characterize a central dimension of political culture distinguishing Britain from France; it is also seen as a fundamental defining criterion for approaches to social and political analysis in general. The intertwining of subject matter and method is most evident in certain formulations Sartori offered. Thus, the tendency to assume, as Sartori’s (p. 410) pragmatic actor does, that “interests and conflicts of interest . . . suffice to explain and to predict political behavior” is characteristic not just of certain political actors but of certain social scientists as well. Similarly, the impulse to add a “logic of principles’’ to the “logic of interest’’ is as well represented in the assumptions of political theorists as it is in the (professed) orientations of politicians. In Sartori’s terms, social scientists of the former type would be the empiricists; those of the latter school, the rationalists. The distinction between rationalism and empiricism as types of analysis is every bit as fundamental as it is for the types of societies being analyzed-perhaps more so. The element of confusion enters the scene, however, at the point where the two dichotomies are seen to be closely linked. Since the empirical mentality is associated with English culture, it might be supposed that English social scientific theory would bear that orientation (as does, to be sure, much of its scientific and philosophic traditions). Certainly, if empiricism is taken to mean the tendency to interpret political behavior in terms of conflicting interests, this must be the case. The competitive pursuit of self-interest

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is a powerful strand in English thought that joins the attempts of Locke and Hobbes to explain political society in terms of a contract among autonomous individuals in a state of nature, the efforts of Adam Smith and David Ricardo to delineate the forces of capitalistic wealth creation, and the utilitarian criterion employed by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill in the evaluation and reform of political institutions and arrangements. Now, if one were to take the further step of interpreting this tradition as a “poor competitor, ideologically speaking, ” easily co-opted by the dominant class in English society to divert social thought away from the possibility of developing a more fundamental analysis and critique of society-that is to say, to view it as useful to the hegemony of the ruling class-one would clearly arrive at a dilemma similar to the one outlined in the previous chapter. But there is no need to go to this length in order to achieve a state of perplexity; one simply has to recognize that a fundamental feature of this intellectual tradition is that it is thoroughly rationalistic. The point is this: Although this most influential tradition of English social scientific thought does revolve around the idea that societies are made up of individuals competitively pursuing their self-interest, these theories take the form of a priori reasoning and deductive argumentation that Sartori (1969, p. 403) correctly identifies with what he terms the “rationalistic Gestalt.” This is particularly evident in the social contract theories of Locke and Hobbes, for no account of the origins of political society could be less empirical, more contrived, than one premised on the existence of individuals living in a state of nature who voluntarily contract to enter into political organization for their mutual benefit. The same is true of what is perhaps an even more influential strand of British thought-classical political economy. In that tradition (and its heirs), certain human motivations, principally egoistic acquisitiveness, were taken as given in order to deduce behavioral implications; but the task of determining whether these assumptions are reasonably accurate for all individuals, all societies, all eras, was left largely unexplored. In the elaboration of this approach, empirical evidence naturally has been permitted a role to play, but the fundamental character of this school’s theorizing remains its abstract, armchair quality. Incidentally, this accounts for the highly rationalistic, even dogmatic, quality noted earlier of the nineteenth-century reformers of British public administration; their inspiration was, of course, utilitarian philosophy. Sartori’s application of the rational/empirical dichotomy to this particular tradition is thus on shaky ground. But it need not follow that types of societal analysis or even national intellectual traditions cannot be

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dichotomized meaningfully according to, or along lines that relate to, their degree of rationalism or a priori deductive argumentation, on the one hand, and empiricism or inductive argumentation, on the other. Indeed, such a distinction has a long tradition in social and political thought. One of the most influential systematizers of the distinction was Talcott Parsons (1968), who contrasted an Anglo-American tradition of individualistic, instrumentalist, rationalist, and conflict-oriented social theory with a continental European tradition, which has tended toward collectivism, idealism, historicism, and organic models of society. Brian Barry (1970, pp. 3-4) likewise pointed to the existence of two types of social theory: (1) the “economic,” which is axiomatic, mechanical, and mathematical; and the “sociological,” which is more discursive, organismic, and literary. More recently, Harry Eckstein (1979, pp. 6,30) has suggested that the explanation of human behavior is ultimately to be derived from the rationalist assumption that behavior is mainly concerned with maximizing “utility,” which in politics means maximizing influence, or else by the culturalist assumption that orientations or dispositions to act are guided by prior socialization. Although the contrast is cast by each of these authors in somewhat different terms, it is nevertheless the case that they all point, roughly speaking, to the same thing. Before we can see what that thing is, we must be clear on what it is not. In particular, we must dispose of a second very common error in the way in which the dichotomy is given historical-cultural specificity, the association of empiricism or culturalism with the nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment, viewed as a reaction to the rationalism of the earlier Enlightenment era. This linkage cuts across national boundaries and is therefore very different from the association of distinct traditions with particular nations; nevertheless, it encounters difficulties of its own. Its basic argument is that the “excesses” of the French Revolution led to the emergence of a (crossnational) body of social and political thought that rejected the revolutionary premise that societies can be remade according to rational blueprints in favor of the idea that tradition, custom, or “national character’ ’ impose necessary (and desirable) constraints on human possibilities. The consequence for contemporary social science was that social order became the ultimate explanandum in sociology, shared cultural values and norms its explanans, and political stability and political culture their conceptual translations in political science (Barry 1970, p. 9). ‘Burke, in this perspective, becomes the English voice of a Europe-wide intellectual movement.

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There undoubtedly were social thinkers in the nineteenth century who were antirevolutionary in their political convictions, who hankered after the organic unity and hierarchical authority which they believed was characteristic of the old regime, and who were resolutely opposed to the liberal and secular trends of the times; there was, in other words, a Counter-Enlightenment. But this was only one current forming the classic European sociological tradition, and by no means the most important. The questioning of the premises of British political economy began not with these thinkers, but rather with the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Often regarded as supreme rationalists, they were in fact just as concerned to wed an empirical dimension to the rationalism of liberal political and economic thought by locating man more firmly in his social setting, a step which, they felt, would entail the jettisoning of naive universalistic assumptions about man’s fundamental nature (Seidman 1983, pp. 21-37). The most familiar, although certainly not the only, example of this orientation is, of course, Montesquieu’s De L’Esprit des Lois. The Counter-Enlightenment contributed to this perspective by focusing attention on the themes of alienation and social order, but the essential point is that the founding fathers of “bourgeois” social science, Weber and Durkheim, did not share the ideological biases of that current (Giddens 1976, pp. 725-26; Seidman 1983, pp. 12-13). Instead, their effort was one of rescue: to salvage the inheritance of the liberal and even the revolutionary tradition by amending what they felt was an excessively atomistic view of man held by British social and political philosophers with a fuller appreciation of the role of social institutions, cultural value systems, and human interdependencies in molding the individual’s attitudes and behavior. In this, they were at one with Marx. The diachronic hypothesis identifying bourgeois sociology as an essentially negative culturalist reaction to a previous tradition of rationalism is therefore as misleading as is the unqualified association of empiricism with the English intellectual tradition and rationalism with Continental thought. Yet implicit in this discussion is a connection of a different sort between subject and method, between cultural type and intellectual tradition. In a sense, the connection is bound up in the popular Marxist theme that Britain never developed a classic sociology (Anderson 1968). The point here is not the Marxist one that bourgeois sociology developed in opposition to the specter of advancing socialism on the Continent, but rather that the one essential feature of the classic sociological tradition, equally true of the bourgeois Weber as of the revolutionary Marx, is that it rejected the analytic individualism of

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the British contribution to social thought. In its place, they and others of that tradition favored the Enlightenment’s perception that man is a profoundly social animal, that his existence is bound up in a web of social relations-in short, that his autonomy as an economic, social, and political actor cannot be taken as the starting point for social scientific analysis. This, I would argue, is the basic differentiating criterion between rationalist and empiricist premises in social and political analysis and between the British and Continental contributions to the development of the social sciences. The centerstone to the British tradition is that people are to be treated analytically as distinct beings, separable from society, whose behavior and attitudes are ultimately explicable in terms of their own individual needs, desires, and preferences. From this perspective, it makes sense to think of individuals, regardless of their particular cultural background, as oriented toward the pursuit of those things they value, frequently in competition with other individuals who value the same things. Since man can be detached analytically from society, it follows that one can theorize on the basis of what is common to all men at all times. Since this separation is analytic, not empirical, it follows that the theories emerging from these premises will tend to be of the rationalistic or armchair variety, relying on a priori assumptions, deductive reasoning, and so forth. There is also a simplicity to this approach, a down-to-earth practicality which I suspect is the sense of the term pragmatism that Sartori in fact is using when he belittles liberalism as the ideological limit to which the empirical mind can hope to accede. The Continental tradition is quite different. The issue is not one of rejecting the ideal of individual autonomy; the fathers of modern sociology shared a concern for the ability of people to achieve that state in complex industrialized and bureaucratized societies. Rather, the point is that the autonomy of the individual cannot be assumed; people had to be analyzed within the context of definite social, cultural and economic settings or, in other words, as they actually exist, which is as good a definition of empiricism as any. Institutions and structures often figure prominently in works of this tradition, especially those of more structurally oriented theorists like Durkheim and Marx, but they can be incorporated equally well into rational-choice theories as factors that shape the range of options open to purposeful action by the individual. The clearer contrast, therefore, is with theories that emphasize shared cultural values and norms in the explanation of human behavior: rational-choice theorists simply do not like to use cultural traits unless absolutely necessary. It is for this reason that the elaboration of the

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rational-choice approach in this chapter is effected with culturalism as its main foil. To sum up, there is a certain parallelism between rationalist and empiricist or, to use the more accurate term, culturalist assumptions about social reality, on the one hand, and the intellectual traditions of certain nations or groups of nations, on the other. Both the rationalist approach and the culturalist approach make claims to reflect accurately the realities of human existence, yet the realities they see seem curiously tied to particular contexts. To put the matter bluntly, from one cultural context, culture does not matter much; from the other, it does (structuralist approaches, as we shall see, stand somewhere in between). It would be easy to resolve the paradox by declaring that what is called “rationality” in human action by some is nothing more than the expression of one of many cultural types, but rationalists would balk at this, and with good reason. It could well be that English culture is such as to have allowed people to peel away the thick skin of cultural opacity to see human action for what it really is: the rational pursuit of utility under varying structures of incentives. This study therefore undertakes the much more laborious task of investigating the validity of rationalist and nonrationalist modes of explanation as applied to certain issues in British and, by implication, French politics and economics; these issues and their alternative explanations are introduced in a later section. But in so doing, one must always be aware that the modes of explanation largely had their origins in the particular cases under study, and that one must not just avoid the potential for confusion inherent in this fact, but, to the extent that culturalism turns out to be vindicated, one must be able to account for it as well.

I1 One obvious objection to the account just given of the basic character of the rationalist approach to social scientific explanation is that it seems to imply that rationalists see man as concerned solely with the pursuit of his own self-interest. Rational-choice theorists are quick to emphasize, if only in (very long) footnotes,* that this is not so: rationality refers only to the means by which goals are pursued, not the nature of the goals themselves (Olson 1982, pp. 19-20 fn.; Rogowski 1 ’ suspect that footnotes are used to underscore the “triviality” of the interpretation of rationality as self-interested behavior, a point that is undermined by the length of the footnotes required to make it.

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1974, p. 29 fn.) In Rogowski’s (1974, pp. 30-31) formulation, rationality consists in “the most efficient joining of means to ends in the light of the information available to the actor.”3 It is commonly assumed, to be sure, that each actor has ends or goals in mind and will attempt to realize them, often in competition with others. It is also assumed that each actor has a “preference ordering” of goals which guides his or her activities in this regard, subject to the constraint that he or she will also take into consideration the probability of attaining each of them. This is known as the principle of utility maximization. But nothing whatever is stipulated in any of these assumptions about the nature of the ends themselves, which may therefore be of a collective or altruistic sort. The lack of constraint in the nature of the goals being pursued by the rational actor, which is characteristic of most rational-choice theories, suggests a second way in which rationalist and culturalist perspectives could be reconciled. This method of reconciliation consists in arguing that the goals or ends of human activities are at least sometimes socially or culturally molded, but that the steps people take to realize them tend to be rational in the sense just noted. Obstacles lie in this path, however. Just as rationalists are reluctant to embrace the notion that rationality is merely one culturally determined orientation to action among many others, so culturalists are by no means willing to allow that the methods by which ends are pursued can be deduced from criteria of efficiency. Another obstacle is that, despite their declared openness with respect to the introduction of cultural or social norms and values as ends of human conduct, rationalists can easily encounter difficulties when they actually attempt to exercise that option. This point is important and merits some further attention. The issue of introducing values or norms as ends appeared in its classic form in the controversy over the “paradox of voting.” Anthony Downs (1957), the pioneer in this area, noted that it is difficult in purely utilitarian terms to explain why people vote: the costs incurred by an individual in exercising his franchise (i.e., the bother of getting to the polls as well as the bother of gathering and sorting out enough 3This is not the same thing as saying that rationality consists in following the course of action the actor believes is the most efficient, as is sometimes stated (Elster 1982, p. 464). Such a position would run the risk of tautological reasoning of the following sort: If an actor does X, he must believe that X is the most efficient course of action. Elster (1986, p. 68) has clarified his position by stipulating that the belief that the course of action chosen by the actor is the best way of achieving his goal must be justifiable on the basis of the available evidence.

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information to decide how to vote) would seem to outweigh the advantages a victory for his preferred candidate could bring, when discounted by the infinitesimal probability that his vote could decide the election. Downs’s (1957, p. 270) suggested solution to the paradoxwhich is that the individual votes because it is in his or her interest to help maintain the proper functioning of the democratic systemclearly runs afoul of the same objection, for it is even more difficult to see how a single vote could preserve democracy. It has therefore been proposed that a variety of social norms and values, which can be conveniently summarized by the expression ‘‘citizen duty, ” be introduced in order to account for the fact that, at least in national elections, most citizens do show up at the polls (Riker and Ordeshook 1968, p. 28).4 This broadening of the concept of rationality to incorporate what might be termed the psychic satisfactions inherent in conforming to social norms or realizing socially approved values has been widely criticized (Barry 1970, pp. 15, 31; Benn 1976, p. 256; Heath 1976, p. 58). The basic thrust of these criticisms is that it lends an aura of scientific explanation to what may in fact be less a testable proposition than a redescription of reality using the rational-choice vocabulary of costs, benefits, and so forth. This criticism is a particularly apt indictment of the “citizen duty” escape hatch in voting t h e ~ r y It. ~does not follow, however, that the approach need be valueless. If values or norms are considered not as absolutes binding upon the individual but rather as a type of preference like any others, it may be possible to generate preference orderings for individuals that combine normative and non-normative elements in ways that lead to accurate predictions concerning their behavior. This assumes, of course, that such orderings can be derived empirically, which may be quite unrealistic (Heath 1976, pp. 85-97). Another avenue would be to delimit the hypothesis somewhat by specifying in advance certain social norms or values as basic characteristics of human nature. Margolis (1982, pp. 28-36), for 4Strictly speaking, as Barry (1970, p. 15) pointed out, this type of argument was anticipated by Downs. Incidentally, the most favored solution today is simply to argue that the costs of voting are so low that it is not worth the citizen’s while to perform the cost-benefit calculation, so he votes anyway. This explanation in itself indicates a limit to the rationality model; moreover, its acceptability depends largely on one’s prior convictions, for it is often argued but seldom or never tested. 51n fairness, Riker and Ordeshook (1968) do attempt to operationalize the citizen duty factor and measure its effect on marginal turnout levels, but integrating it into empirically derived preference orderings that might possess some predictive capacity with respect to turnout itself is another matter.

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example, argues that the solution to the voting paradox and other dilemmas in political rationality lies in the recognition that there exists in man an inherent propensity toward group-oriented altruistic behavior. Specifically, he suggests a principle of “fair shares,’’ in which the individual is motivated to divide his or her resources fairly between selfish and group interests, taking into consideration the amount of benefit that can be achieved at the margin in either direction, A fundamental feature of attempts to integrate norms and values into rational-choice explanations as goals is that it generally cannot be done without recourse to considerations that fall outside the rational-choice paradigm. The inclusion in the preference orderings of individuals of psychic satisfaction derived from conformity to social norms and values, assuming it can be done empirically, surely begs the question of where these values and norms came from and why they are capable of giving satisfaction. The early utilitarians relied for an explanation to these questions on the theory of “associationism,” which held that things associated with pain tended to be disliked in themselves and vice versa (Barry 1970, p. 82). From this premise it can be deduced that children internalize socially acceptable standards and values through a process of conditioning, a view still held today. Whether pleasure and pain are central to the process or not, the important point is that the internalization of norms and values clearly takes us into the realm of psychological, rather than rational-choice, theory. This realm, not coincidentally, is perfectly compatible with culturalist approaches which posit basic, long-lasting value orientations as the wellsprings of human action. The same is true of the argument that when individuals interact on a fairly continuous basis, they become concerned with one another’s welfare and thus admit collective or altruistic ends into their individual preference orderings, Although the resulting situation has been referred to as an “Assurance Game,” the process by which it is achieved escapes the rational-choice framework. As Elster (1982, p. 480 fn.) notes, “The transformation of a Prisoner’s Dilemma into an Assurance Game . . . must be explained by social psychology, not game theory.” Margolis (1982, pp. 26-31) approaches the issue somewhat differently by locating the origin of the disposition toward altruism in a Darwinian process of natural selection that governed the evolution of human societies; here, too, we have moved outside the parameters of rational choice. Because the use of ends or goals that go beyond personal selfinterest tends to oblige the theorist to leave the rational-choice paradigm in order to provide nontrivial explanations for behavior (i.e.,

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explanations that involve more than the redescription of phenomena), rational-choice theorists are often unwilling to incorporate such goals in their own theories. This is as true of the one noneconomic rationalchoice theory considered in this study, Rogowski’s (1974), as it is of the works of the two economic theorists, North (1981) and Olson (1982). In his review of rational-choice explanations in politics, Laver (1981, pp. 13-14) even stipulated that he would consider only asocial assumptions about the ends of human actions, precisely in order to reduce the risk of triviality. This position has much merit, but one must recognize that, in excluding socially determined ends, it runs the risk of embracing a triviality of a different sort. As Benn (1976, p. 265) put it, “On this interpretation, what the ‘political economists’ study are but the ripples; the underlying political swell requires other concepts and other methods.’’ The truth-value of this assertion should become clearer in the course of this investigation, but in the meantime it is appropriate to note that, whether social ends are excluded in principle or in practice, the effect is to give most rational-choice models a distinctly individualistic cast, which (pace Rogowski and Olson) establishes a basic contrast with both culturalist and structuralist modes of explanation. The tendency of rational-choice theorists to avoid social ends does not mean that they exclude norms and values altogether; they are quite prepared to use them as means of achieving asocial ends. Indeed, this solution to the place of norms in social explanation is an especially popular one among rational-choice theorists because it appears to achieve what the previous one cannot, namely, the subsumption of the culturalist approach within the rational-choice paradigm. However, it too faces a major obstacle: although the personal advantage of each individual in a group may explain why a norm is considered desirable, it does not explain why it will be obeyed, for individuals may choose to “free ride” instead. Free riding means taking advantage of the benefits that may come from collective action without paying the costs. It is a problem generated by the egoistic orientation of rational-choice theory and is most forcefully illustrated in the classic situation of the “prisoner’s dilemma” in game theory. In this game, two suspects are arrested for a serious crime. If neither confesses, both will get off with convictions for a lesser crime due to lack of evidence; if both confess, they will receive somewhat reduced sentences because of their cooperation; but if only one confesses (throwing the blame onto his or her accomplice), then the confessor will go free and the other will receive the full punishment for the major offense. Since neither prisoner can

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trust the other, it is in the interest of each to confess, thereby producing a result that is worse for both of them than if they had remained silent. This is where norms come in. The dilemma would be solved if there existed a “moral entrepreneur” who promulgated an effective norm of honor among thieves (i.e., no squealing). This norm would involve sacrifices on the part of the individual criminals because the option of trading confession for freedom would be foreclosed, but it would also make them better off on the whole if it held fast. But would it hold fast? As Heath (1976, pp. 156-57) noted, unless the norm had become internalized, that is, valued as an end in itself (or else enforced through coercion), it is difficult to see how it could. After all, the threat of social sanctions such as loss of status or esteem within the fraternity of criminals hardly compares with the opportunity to get off scot-free. Indeed, to the extent that the norm is believed to be generally operative, the probability that squealing will work is enhanced, and with it the temptation to do so. There is, accordingly, very little incentive for a moral entrepreneur to create the norm, since he cannot be sure it will be respected when he himself is arrested, and a great deal of incentive for others to violate it if it does exist-which suggests that it probably will not. Many rational-choice theorists, including Hardin (1982) and Axelrod (1984), have suggested that the problem of defection or free riding be approached from a more dynamic perspective. If the cooperative situation is an ongoing one, they argue that a tit-for-tat norm will emerge in which it is understood that cooperative outcomes in future prisoner’s dilemma situations depend on cooperation in the current one. This would seem to provide a far stronger incentive for cooperation, but it runs into the same problems when the stakes get high. Clearly, there is no incentive to cooperate on the final play of an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game, because the possibility of future reprisals or noncooperation no longer exists. If the stake is something as important as avoiding a long prison term, it will advantage a player to make it the last play of the game by squealing and then leaving town. As before, the possibility of the withdrawal of future cooperation with that particular set of criminals, or others in the know, pales in comparison with the gains to be had from squealing. There are many situations, to be sure, in which there is no single payoff great enough to induce an individual to abandon an ongoing relationship by defecting. But the tit-for-tat solution has another, more serious limitation: it will only work if defectors or noncooperators can be identified and punished. In small groups where face-to-face relationships prevail, this may pose no insuperable problems, but it be-

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comes more difficult to imagine, say, class action emerging because of the efficient operation of tit-for-tat behavior.6 Thus, there are circumstances-fairly restrictive ones-under which the operation of norms as means to selfish ends might constitute a workable explanation. However, the use of this type of explanation in rational-choice models entails another risk: meaningless functionality. It is not unreasonable to expect that the belief that one has detected the existence of a social norm in a collective organization or group will often lead to the facile conclusion that it must be a social sanction invented to advance the members’ self-interest, such as by promoting solidarity and thereby curbing the free-rider problem. Functional theories have been widely criticized in the past, and have gone out of favor today in the social sciences, for precisely this kind of explanation, and we have the right to demand of rational-choice theorists what was demanded of functionalists and seldom delivered: that they meet reasonable standards of scientific testability .7 Ad hoc explanations for social norms and values, in other words, are always possible, but they also tend to be nonfalsifiable; and like the resort to unmeasured psychic satisfactions to account for otherwise “irrational” behavior, the appearance of face-saving haunts the whole exercise. This point proves particularly pertinent in the subsequent examinations of this approach.

I11 Three issues have been selected as the basis upon which the claims of rational-choice theory will be tested against those of its competitors. 6Hardin (1982, p. 198) disagrees with most rational-choice theorists on this point by arguing that broadly based norms or “conventions’ ’ could be built up from interactions among small numbers of individuals. It is unclear, however, under what circumstances this can be expected to occur; Hardin’s suggestion that it will occur when interactions are not overly anomic (e.g., normless) seems more tautological than helpful. Culturalists are fond of differentiating between cultures where social trust is common and those where distrust is the norm; perhaps free riding on conventions is more likely to occur in the latter. However, even in Britain, where social trust is generally held to prevail, the tendency for working-class solidarity to confine itself to the immediate neighborhood or workplace has been noted (Dahrendorf 1979). Przeworski (1985b, p. 97) suggests that segmented labor markets with different incentives for people with different individual endowments will generally produce this result. 7Using Rogowski’s definition of rationality-the most efficient linking of (known) means to ends-as a starting point, a rational-choice interpretation of social norms as means to asocial ends could be justified by showing (1) that the norm in question does indeed serve that end, and (2) that it is the most efficient of the available norms in this respect. This does not prove that the norm was deliberately adopted with that particular end in mind, but it makes the inference plausible.

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The reader is cautioned at the outset that the selection does not by any means exhaust the range of major questions in political economy; the choice is, to that extent, a personal one. Against this, it may reasonably be claimed that they are important issues-crucial, in fact, to an understanding of the development and present-day functioning of Britain, which is the main focus of the investigations that follow. The issues also convey the advantage of having provoked more precise culturalist formulations than the vague attribution of general traits such as pragmatism and ideologism; among other things, this will facilitate the highlighting of the distinctive characteristics of the rational-choice interpretations of the issues through specific contrasts with their culturalist alternatives. Finally, the issues are interrelated in a number of senses, and perhaps most significantly in the explanations I ultimately provide for them. But that point is a long way off; what matters for the moment is that we will be dealing with major issues in British history and politics for which alternative modes of explanation can be clearly identified, differentiated, and compared, and for which France provides, on occasion, a useful contrast. The first issue most clearly reveals this conjunction of features; it concerns the rise of modern capitalism in the Western world and, within that context, the fact that Britain was apparently more central to that process than was France. This issue is closely related to concerns that lay at the heart of classical political economy, and the inheritance of that tradition is evident in the work of the best-known exponent of the “new economic history,” Douglass C. North (1981). North’s starting point is what he terms the “individualistic maximizing postulate of economic theory,” which, succinctly put, is that “individuals in the absence of constraints maximize at any and all margins” (North 198I , p. 203). This assumption entails that people will invest in whatever part of the capital stock (physical and human capital, natural resources, technology, and knowledge) yields the highest rate of return. Since (1) technological change is a function of investment in innovation, and (2) the size of the capital stock, technology included, determines the total output of the economy, one might expect economic growth to be the norm in human history. This is not so, however, for the simple reason that in order for people to make investments, the private rate of return must equal or approach the social rate of return. What this means is that the profit from investment and innovation must accrue to the individual(s) who undertake it; otherwise it will not be undertaken, regardless of its potential advantages to others or to society as a whole. The key to economic growth is thus to avoid free riders, even if the free riders include most of society.

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The way to eliminate free riders is to specify and enforce a set of property rights that allows the profits of economic activity to come to those who create them. Patent laws, to cite an obvious example, allow innovators (and their backers, if any) to reap the profits from their innovations and hence are an important component of growth-conducive property rights. The state, which creates property rights and enforces them against would-be free riders, is therefore well placed to facilitate economic growth. But there is a problem. The state does not exist to promote the good of society; rulers are individualistic maximizers like everyone else. This does not mean that the state is necessarily exploitative. The state provides protection and justice in exchange for revenue; and since there are economies of scale in the provision of these services, rulers and ruled alike can benefit from the arrangement. Nevertheless, the ruler is assumed to be interested only in maximizing revenues to himself, and the set of property rights that the state upholds will be designed with this end in mind; this means that inefficient property rights such as monopoly rights may be preferred if they involve lower “transaction costs” (Le., the costs of assessing and collecting revenue). The only qualification to this statement is that the ruler must be wary of the possibility that his subjects will defect to (internal or external) rivals if the costs imposed upon them become uncompetitive; this often means that the property rights will favor the more powerful of the ruler’s constituents. Within that framework, the state will also arrange property rights so as to maximize the wealth of society and thereby enhance tax revenues. But because state revenue, not economic prosperity, is the prime objective, property rights may not be, and usually are not, the most favorable to economic growth (North 1981, pp. 22-27). If we apply this model to the early modern era, we can see, according to North, a clear differentiation in the structure of property rights that resulted in markedly different economic growth rates in England and France. Revenues to rulers were under severe pressure in this period. Changes in military technology (the invention of effective seige cannon) and technique (the substitution of masses of foot soldiers for smaller numbers of mounted knights) had raised the costs of waging war considerably. At the same time, however, the decline in population, which resulted from a subsistence crisis in the fourteenth century, had eroded the tax base upon which rulers depended. The consequence was a period of intense competition between rival states, leading, as in competition among firms, to the emergence of a smaller number of larger units. In France, one of the surviving units, the monarchy was able to exploit the widespread desire to expel the English and Burgun-

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dian invaders in order to wrest exclusive control of taxation from the Estates General. As French monarchs became powerful enough to remove local rivals and ensure property rights, they gradually acquired the exclusive right to grant or alter those rights as well. However, the acquiescence of the nobility and clergy in these arrangements had been facilitated by according them exemption from taxation, which augmented the fiscal burden on other sectors of French society. In addition, the fact that the different territories that came under the French crown required separate bureaucracies to collect taxes made bureaucratic expenses in the emerging French state relatively high. In the difficult financial circumstances in which it found itself, the monarchy took the most convenient route of raising revenues through the sale of exclusive rights or monopolies to practice trades in local areas. These found willing buyers among the guilds which had proliferated in that era as means of protecting incomes in the face of declining demand. Unfortunately, enforcing these rights also involved heavy bureaucratic expenses, and the net result of the market restrictions and the heavy tax burden, falling mostly upon the productive part of the population, was economic retardation (North 1981, pp. 149-50). The situation in England, in North’s view, was different in a number of important respects. There was no foreign invasion to repel and, as a result of the country’s geography, very little danger of one. Moreover, a relatively high degree of territorial integration had already taken place, the result, in part, of the Norman Conquest. Both factors militated against the monarchy’s drive to further enhance central power, as did the frequent existence of pretenders to the throne offering alternatives if the costs of the state became out of line. Although the outlays required of the state to perform its protection and justice services were considerably smaller than in France, the revenue picture was brighter. Henry VIII’s seizure of the church lands in the sixteenth century provided a large insurge of capital, but in the longer run what mattered more was that the foreign trade in wool provided a source of tax revenue that could be assessed and collected without resort to a large bureaucratic apparatus. The result was that the English Parliament never gave up control of taxation. Also, as the Parliament increasingly came under the control of individuals who had a vested interest in commercial expansion, property rights came to reflect that interest, and rapid economic growth leading ultimately to industrialization could ensue (North 1981, pp. 155-7). Against this version of the rise of modern capitalism may be placed one of the most sophisticated, and certainly the best known, of culturalist alternatives, Max Weber’s (1958b) thesis relating the rise of

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modern capitalism to a “Protestant ethic.” It must be made clear at the outset that Weber did not, as is sometimes supposed, argue that capitalism was caused by Calvinist asceticism. In his explanation for the rise of modern capitalism, Weber (1927, pp. 277-78) pointed to several preconditions, including the existence of private property rights, free markets, rational technology, and free labor, most or all of which would sit very comfortably with standard neoclassical economic explanations (Collins 1980, p. 928). In this regard, the only striking difference with North is that whereas North believes that population growth stimulated the creation of private property rights in some instances, Weber (1927, p. 352) expressly ruled out population growth as a factor in the rise of modern capitalism, primarily because it had occurred in other parts of the world without capitalistic consequences. What Weber sought to explain by means of the Protestant ethic was not capitalism itself but rather the “spirit” of capita1ism;g and it is the inclusion of a spirit or ethos as a necessary feature of modern capitalism that makes the thesis distinctive. What is the nature of this cultural dimension of capitalism? Clearly, it is not that Calvinist, Pietist, or Baptist doctrines extolled the virtues of making money (as some American fundamentalist leaders do today). Weber was fully aware that the evils of Mammon loomed large in their catalogues of dangers befalling mortal man. Yet, for Calvinists in particular, the risk was not that one would be damned for Mammonism, but that indulgence in it would demonstrate one’s (prior) damnation, for damnation is predestined. The ascetic life, in contrast, both increased the glory of God and indicated that one was of the elect or saved (although, strictly speaking, one could never know for sure). Indeed, the greater one’s wealth, the more powerful the temptations of Mammon, and the more convincing, therefore, must be the demonstration of one’s elect status in resisting those temptations. Proof involved more than merely avoiding temptation, however. To be of the elect is to be God’s instrument, to treat the world as God does. Given the Calvinist doctrine of God’s transcendence or aloof mastery of the world, this meant engaging in an unceasing quest, not to accept the world as it is, but to master that portion of it relevant to one’s calling (Poggi 1983, pp. 65-70). In Marshall’s (1982, p. 77) estimation, the powerful psychological sanction that Weber detected in the combina‘This distinction is often overlooked. Marshall (1982, pp. 54--60) suggested that this is because Weber focused in the 1920 introduction to the book on the explanation of capitalism itself and showed a disturbing tendency to define capitalism in terms of its spirit.

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tion of the rather fatalistic doctrine of predestination with the need for proof is his distinctive contribution to the explanation of the rise of Western capitalism. The central issue in the evaluation of this thesis must be whether this particular ethic is necessary to the explanation. North assumes that people have always coveted wealth, and Weber would agree. But Weber saw a critical difference between the modern capitalist mentality and that of, say, the merchant adventurer of the Renaissance, a difference now stripped of its religious overtones and assimilated into the secular business culture of capitalism. The essence of this difference is that, whereas the merchant adventurer was opportunistic, unscrupulous, and prone to consume lavishly the profits of his activities, the ethos of the modern capitalist is characterized by the rational, but relentless, pursuit of profit; personal asceticism or the preference for reinvestment over consumption; and the assumption of an ethical foundation for his business activities. Only on the basis of this ethos, according to Weber, could economic growth have become a self-generating process, ultimately leading to the industrial revolution, The Weber account largely follows the lines of the first strategy noted earlier for merging rational and culturalist considerations into a combined explanation: it portrays the individualistic maximizing postulate of the political economists as a cultural disposition that emerged at a certain historical point for mainly noneconomic reasons. In the universal pursuit of wealth, Calvinist man deviated from his Catholic counterparts and predecessors (as well as from non-European man) in two respects: (1) his pursuit was founded upon the rational calculation of means, and (2) it was untrammeled by notions of “enough” or by the desire to consume what he had accumulated. These are held to be traits specific to a certain culture at a certain place and time; they are not universal features of human nature. Just as a particular ethos was necessary, according to this culturalist perspective, to create the dynamic of modern capitalism, so, presumably, another ethos can turn it off. This is the essence of the culturalist interpretation of the second issue, which is the all-consuming one-for British academics-of the economic decline of the world’s first industrializer, (Protestant) Britain. The interpretation that attributes Britain’s loss of economic preeminence to a decline in industrial or entrepreneurial values has a very long track record. Its seeds can be found in countless comments like the following by Nevi1 Johnson (1977, p. 155): “It is remarkable how many echoes of the styles of life and thought associated with the landed

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gentry do survive in Britain-the industrialist going to his weekend retreat in a Sussex or Cotswold village, the successful politician dabbling in farming.” This impression of the absorption of aristocratic values by the middle classes is usually given substance by the proposition that their long rise to political influence in the nineteenth century was marked by a process of class merger or fusion with the landed upper classes, one consequence of which was the injection of an unhealthy measure of nonbourgeois attitudes into the resultant cultural brew. Central to this process were the reformed public schools and the elite universities, which inculcated in their charges an idealized and moralized version of the leisured gentlemanly ideal, and accordingly, deprecated orientations and values associated with the pursuit of material gain. As a consequence, the needs, viewpoints, and social standing of industrialists were minimized; financial institutions were given priority over industrial organizations in the career ambitions of educated gentlemen and the policies of governments; and, where possible, insulation from contact with market pressures or indeed with “money grubbing’’ itself was sought in rural isolation, government employment or the exercise of a (legally protected) liberal profession. Weiner (1981, p. I%), whose development of the thesis is the most extensive in the recent literature, expressed the nature of this cultural transformation in a dramatic but characteristic form: “The new society created by the later Victorians rested upon a domestication of the wilder traits of earlier British behaviour; the riotous populace, the aggressive and acquisitive capitalists, the hedonistic aristocrats of the Georgian world became an endangered, if not extinct, species of Englishman.” This interpretation, like Weber’s, may be seen as one that discounts the fundamental starting point of economic theories such as North’s: that people maximize at all margins. Whether one maximizes at the particular margin at issue here, it is maintained, really depends on a prior set of values that justifies such behavior, and those values may not always be present. Values, of course, are not sui generis; Weiner is willing to allow that other factors are involved in their creation or disappearance. He argues, for example, that it was the very success, and the shock, of Britain’s precocious industrialization that encouraged the turning away from industrial values. Similarly, a profoundly felt national failure could have encouraged their readoption at a later period: “In France, West Germany, and Japan, defeat in war seemed to provide a spur to industrial recovery and advance, and to the image of industry as a national cause that was lacking in victorious Britain’’ (Weiner 1981, p. 137). The introduction of a cultural basis for behav-

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ior is thus not intended to preclude other factors; culturalism may go hand in hand with much that is outside its province. Generous though Weiner is in his recognition of the effect on cultural values of noncultural factors, the notion that defeat in war may have a positive effect on economic growth has furnished a basis for the elaboration of a rational-choice theory that rejects entirely the culturalist approach to economic success or failure. The theory in question, developed by Mancur Olson (1982), begins as one might expect with the free-rider problem. The free-rider problem is, of course, simply another way of asking why collective action occurs if human motivation is individualistic. The answer-for those who do not question the premise-is usually that individuals will contribute to collective action through organizations when they stand to gain benefits that would not otherwise befall them. Benefits that can be limited to group members only, that is, that exclude free riders, are known as selective incentives, and they can be material or psychological (e.g., social approval). Either way, they will have more value or impact in smaller groups than in larger ones; and this factor, plus lower bargaining costs, tends to give smaller groups an organizational advantage in the pursuit of collective ends. Interest-group organization is, in Olson’s view, a difficult and timeconsuming process. Eventually, however, societies will accumulate a dense network of interest groups, and it is at this point that the process of economic growth can be thwarted. Since smaller groups can organize to pursue their interests more easily than can larger ones, the societal pattern of interest-group organization will tend to reflect that reality. Unfortunately, the smaller the group, the more it stands to gain from acting so as to encourage the redistribution of available wealth in its own favor rather than from acting to enhance the wealth of society as a whole. The incentives to produce in such a society will be reduced as groups become geared to seeking advantage through the exploitation, evasion, or manipulation of the complex network of regulations, bureaus, and officials whose proliferation their activities have fostered (Olson 1982, pp. 37-72). The overall effect of the activities of large numbers of such groups will be to inhibit the capacity to adopt new techniques or reallocate resources according to changing market conditions and thus to reduce the rate of economic growth. From this it follows that the longer the period of internal peace and stability in a (relatively free) society-that is to say, the longer the period in which special-interest organizations have been able to form without interference from foreign conquerors or totalitarian governments-the slower the growth rate of the economy. In this scenario, losing at war (Ger-

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many, France, Japan) does have its economic advantages and victory (Britain) its disadvantages, but the cost-benefit calculus is a strictly noncultural one. Olson’s thesis may be seen as a corrective to the optimism of the North argument in one respect: Olson maintains that although the free play of market forces, which assumes efficient property rights, can generate economic growth, there is an inherent tendency toward the formation of collusive organizations that undermines the likelihood of that process being sustained. Despite their differing emphases, however, there is a basic compatibility between the two theories, which may be attributable to the fact that the source both of North’s concern with property rights and of Olson’s fear of collusion among producers in the marketplace can be traced to Adam Smith.9 Is there, then, nothing new in these theories? Such a judgement would certainly be excessively harsh. However venerable their roots, these theories, taken together, paint a most challenging and intriguing interpretation of Britain’s earlier economic success in comparison with France and France’s postwar resurgence to surpass Britain. In addition, both North and Olson attempt to integrate culturalist perspectives as means to the attainment of the ends they posit of purposeful human activity. Olson achieves the latter objective by assimilating Weiner’s decline of industrial values in nineteenth-century Britain into his own framework. Olson’s analysis suggests that middle-class interests are more likely to succeed at organizing effectively and extracting benefits from government than are lower-class ones. Since successful group activity is facilitated when the membership is socially homogeneous, it is natural that a prejudice against the entry of mobile individuals from below will arise in such groups. These groups also have a material interest in restricting entry into their ranks, as in limiting the output or labor that their members provide. From these premises, the class-based, antientrepreneurial culture of late-Victorian Britain can be understood: As time goes on, custom and habit play a larger role. The special-interest organizations use their resources to argue that what they do is what in justice ought to be done. The more often pushy entrants and nonconforming innovators are repressed, the rarer they become, and what is not customary is “not done.” (Olson 1982, p. 86)

North is even more generous toward culturalist considerations. So important is the free-rider problem to him that he sees no possibility of ’North openly acknowledges the point in North and Thomas (1973, p. 157); Olson (1982, p. 168) does so much more obliquely.

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a viable society unless it is recognized that people obey laws and customs because of a strongly held conviction that they are legitimate-otherwise it would too often be in their interest to disobey (North 1981, pp. 11-12). The role of ideologies or belief systems, therefore, is to overcome the free-rider problem, that is, “to energize groups to behave contrary to a simple, hedonistic, individual calculus of costs and benefits’’ (p. 53). The logic of rational choice is not forgotten, however. The ruler’s goal in any society is to enforce a set of property rights that maximizes his income, and this task is rendered much less costly if people can be made to believe that the existing set of property rights is morally acceptable. As with Olson, then, norms and values are considered to exist because it is in the material interests of individuals or groups to propagate and maintain them-a view not all that dissimilar from the Marxist one. In both of the preceding attempts to incorporate norms and values into the rational-choice perspective, the possibility that a psychological process of internalization is involved must be considered. The issue is clearer in the case of North. In his theory of ideology, values that were conceived and spread by rulers strictly for purposes of personal material gain apparently become, for their subjects, orienting principles of human conduct that are valued in their own right; that is to say, they become ends whose realization in itself brings satisfaction. With 01son, the situation is more ambiguous: do “custom and habit” outlive the original utilitarian purposes that fostered their creation, or do they remain, in the minds of their adherents, linked to the material ends they promote? Olson does not state his position, but the issue is critical. In order to develop this point more adequately, it will be helpful if the culturalist approach, hitherto left undefined, is given some more precise meaning. Fortunately, the final two theorists whose opposing views establish the dimensions of a major controversy focus attention directly upon this matter. The theorists are Eckstein (1966, 1969, 1979) and Rogowski (1974); the issue, the bases of political support in the British polity. In Eckstein’s (1988, p. 790-91) formulation, the culturalist alternative rests essentially upon four basic postulates. The first is the postulate of oriented action: Actors respond to situations only through mediating orientations, Orientations, which are not attitudes but rather “general dispositions of actors to act in certain ways in sets of situations,” are not determined by situations or structures (the postulate of orientational variability) but by socialization (the postulate of cultural socialization), Finally, the postulate of cumulative socialization embodies the ideas that people seek consistency in their orientations and

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that early learning conditions later learning and is more difficult to alter. All four postulates imply a tendency toward inertia or continuity in behavior, even when structures or incentives change. The theory that Eckstein advances in accordance with these postulates is his well-known “congruence” theory of political stability (Eckstein 1966). In this theory, the legitimacy and effectiveness of any regime are a function of the degree to which the pattern of authority it embodies resembles the pattern(s) of authority that are characteristic of other organized components of society, particularly units such as political parties and pressure groups that are “close” to the governmental sphere. In Britain, for example, government, parties, and pressure groups all share the following authority pattern. At the top of the organization is a largely powerless ceremonial figurehead, beneath whom a council or executive committee exercises the major decisionmaking responsibility. Although decision making is formally collective and norms of collegiality are strong, the council is in fact often dominated by its leader and a few senior members. Subordinate to the council are a large number of functional committees which, together with the council, are responsible to a large annual convention (Parliament). This body, despite its formal authority, seldom challenges the leadership or its policies. Finally, there are the paid officials who administer the organization under the direction of the council and especially its leader; they usually “get their way” but know when to stay discreetly in the background to preserve the appearance of being mere executors of the organization’s will (Eckstein, pp. 242-43). Eckstein’s theory of political stability clearly places a great deal of emphasis on “forms” or structures, which may suggest that it is essentially structuralist in approach. Two features redeem its culturalist pedigree. First, for political stability to ensue, an authority pattern must include a set of norms consistent or “consonant” with the model organizational form; in the British case, norms of nonelite deference to elite control, collegiality and widespread consultation among elites, and administrative neutrality give the authority pattern its particular character. Second, the importance of the resemblance or congruence of authority patterns, which in Eckstein’s view extends in some degree throughout British society, lies in its socializing effect. The foundation of Eckstein’s theory is the idea that legitimacy or political support is to be understood in terms of the orientational consistency evoked by, and therefore the perceived rightness of, governmental institutions that function according to an authority pattern into which the individual has been previously socialized. There is little in North’s explanation of political support or legiti-

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macy that runs counter to Eckstein’s characterization of the culturalist approach (or, indeed, Eckstein’s theory itself). It is even consistent in large part with Rogowski’s more stringent definition of the fundamental propositions of culturalism. In Rogowski’s (1974, pp. 5-6) view, culturalism presumes that actions can be analyzed in terms of cognition, affect, and evaluation (which Eckstein regards as the components of orientations), and that the n o m s and values used in evaluation are the most fundamental elements of action, which in turn entails that they are deeply internalized, durable, and shared. He further argues for assumptions of inertia, preadult socialization, and a congruence between types of political structure and types of political culture as a necessary condition for stable government. The last stipulation is better interpreted as a hypothesis derived from the other assumptions; as for the assumptions themselves, it is difficult to believe that North would be uncomfortable with the idea that feelings of legitimacy are internalized, durable, acquired early in life, and important to the understanding of political stability. We have clearly reached the point at which the edges of the rationalist and culturalist approaches are not just blurred but blended. Nothing in the culturalist premises denies that the origins of cultural norms and values may have been at the behest of, and in the self-interest of, particular individuals or groups in society. Likewise, nothing in North’s interpretation of ideologies refutes the impression that they orient certain kinds of behavior, that they are learned in childhood and tend to stick with the individual, and that they may persist in a social unit far beyond the circumstances of their origin. Olson might have difficulty with the latter stipulation and perhaps also the emphasis on learning in childhood, but his position in these respects is unclear. Certainly with North, and possibly with Olson as well, it would appear that a slightly more complicated version of the second form of merger between the culturalist and rationalist paradigms has emerged: Norms and values are created as means to achieve certain ends; they become internalized as ends in themselves; people then orient their actions in accord with them. Fortunately for the purposes of analytic clarity, it appears that North may have given up the ship too easily, for the objective of Rogowski’s (1974) endeavor is precisely to develop a theory of what he terms “rational legitimacy.’’ This is the last theory to be sketched here and, as befits the difficulty of the task Rogowski has set for himself, probably the most complex. The basic idea, unsurprisingly, is that the form of government that is rationally legitimate for the individual will be the one that is most efficacious in achieving the ends that he seeks. The

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utility to the individual of the decisions governments take is therefore of great importance. As in voting theory, however, it is necessary to consider the individual’s likelihood of uniquely determining the decisions he or she considers important under various forms of government. Finally, the individual must also take into consideration the “workability” of different governmental forms. The workability of governments refers to two characteristics: (1) the ability of governments to make and enforce decisions, and (2) the ability of societies under their governance to provide a minimum of goods and services (Rogowski, pp. 42-43). A government, to be rationally legitimate, must also be workable, otherwise there can be no sensible reason to support it, Thus, an individual’s rationally legitimate government will be the one that, on the basis of the evidence available to him or her, maximizes the expected utility of the product of all three considerations. lo Workability is the crux of the argument. A society in which there is a general perception that all members of the society are capable of performing the socially necessary tasks will only achieve widespread legitimacy if the form of government is such as to provide each citizen with an equal probability of uniquely determining governmental decisions (Rogowski 1974, pp. 55-58). In other words, since no individual or group is more essential to societal functioning than any other, there is no incentive to support a government that allows anyone else a greater chance of influencing political decisions than one has oneself. Similarly, a society that is divided vertically into factions should attribute the probabilities of uniquely determining political decisions according to factional strengths (sizes). This assumes, however, that there is no possibility of secession on the part of smaller faction(s). If secession is possible, there would be no reason for a smaller faction to remain in the polity, since its probabilities of uniquely determining outcomes would be greater if it formed a political system of its own. Therefore, in such a situation, factions of unequal size would have to ‘’?his is, of course, a loose verbal formulation of a utility function Rogowski (1974, pp. 36-44) develops in technical form in the book. It is worth noting that Rogowski assumes that the low probability of uniquely affecting decisions will not overwhelm the other two considerations and make indifference the inevitable result. Rogowski (pp. 44-45) also assumes that in cases where legitimacy is sufficiently low and the importance of governmental decisions sufficiently high, individuals will take action against their government. Most other rational-choice theorists believe that the probability of any one individual’s actions leading to a change in regime is so low that no action will be forthcoming unless the free-rider problem can be overcome and collective action made feasible.

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be accorded equal influence in government for legitimacy to exist (Rogowski 1974, pp. 95-97). The final pure type is that of societies which are divided horizontally. A horizontally divided or stratified society is one in which different layers of the society specialize in different essential skills: certain strata may dominate the skills of industrial and agricultural labor; other strata, the skills of economic management, divine mediation; and so forth. Since all of these skills are deemed essential to the functioning of the society, a legitimate government in a stratified society will be one that allocates political influence according to the degree to which different strata can reasonably claim to monopolize an essential skill, as well as according to the number of skills so monopolized. The claim to monopoly of a skill reflects the extent to which a stratum has organized all of its members into a cohesive “segment. ” As with Olson, this (internal) ‘‘coalition credibility” is seen as a function of such factors as small size, social homogeneity, and moral incentives, which tends to give higher or elite strata the advantage over lower strata (pp. 155-58). The main argument, then, is that political support or legitimacy, in Britain as elsewhere, depends upon a correspondence between the allocation of political power and the distribution and control of skills and talents essential to social existence-a form of congruence theory, admittedly, but one very different from Eckstein’s.11 Rogowski’s rational legitimacy thesis provides a means of avoiding the complications implicit in having recourse to internalized values within the framework of the rational-choice paradigm. The existence of culturally induced sentiments of legitimacy has long been taken as an essential feature of stable societies other than despotisms, and Rogowski deserves full credit for tackling this issue head on. As for North and Olson, it would be wrong to conclude that their greater openness to norms and values in itself negates the rationalism of the theories they advance. What matters is whether their use of cultural and social traits presupposes either that those are ends in themselves or that they have become ends through a process of internalization; only if one of these conditions holds do we begin to brush against the culturalist paradigm. The integrity and value of North’s and Olson’s ‘I have not indicated how Rogowski applies his theory to contemporary Britain because Rogowski does not present any such application. He does, however, apply his theory to Britain in the nineteenth century. In Chapter 5 , the validity of the theory is assessed with respect to the latter period, which, as will be seen, is a particularly important one for understanding the development and consolidation of political support in Britain.

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contributions should be judged, therefore, not by whether their works provide complete explanations without resort to cultural traits, but by whether the rational-choice framework has been employed consistently to generate explanations, including ones for the existence of cultural traits, that accord with the evidence at our disposal. For if they do, cultural traits will have lost their autonomous causal role just as surely as when they seemed, for a time, to depend totally upon structural factors (see Chapter 1).

IV The mention of structural factors brings us to the third corner of the triangular debate over theoretical perspectives. There are many types of structuralism, but the ones most relevant for the issues delineated thus far (and social science in general) are undoubtedly those inspired by Marxist perspectives. l* A rich and rather diverse body of theoretical and empirical work goes under the heading of Marxism; it would be pointless to attempt to summarize it here. They have, however, one premise in common that alone justifies slotting them into a separate category: that social classes, defined in relation to the means of production, are essential to social, political, and economic explanation. The location of Marxist structuralism in a separate category will probably raise some eyebrows. Sartori (1969), for example, found no difficulty in locating Marxism within the rationalist camp, and albeit for different reasons, neither did Eckstein.13 Yet in the way in which the Continental tradition of social analysis has been defined here-that is, as an approach whose fundamental orientation is collectivist or societal rather than individualistic-it, and Marxism with it, stands very much in opposition to the rationalist school of thought. Classical political economy had a profound influence on Marx, it is true, but as Seidman (1983, pp. 96-100) noted, Marx chose to reject the assumption of acquisitive individualism as a universal basis of human behav”Not all Marxists are structuralists. E. P. Thompson and some other British Marxists, for example, have waged a determined skirmish against the French structuralist school of Marxism, in particular the work of Althusser. However, the British Marxists have not reformulated Marxist theories in nonstructuralist terms so much as ignored the theories in favor of exploring working-class culture and consciousness (Johnson 1978). l3Sartori saw Marxism as a typical product of the ideological mentality. For Eckstein (1979, p. 41), the key is that Marxism “is based on the tacit premise that political actors try to maximize power (or control, influence) within social constraints.” Heath (1976, p. 184) agreed that it is “only a variant of the rational-choice approach.”

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ior and attributed its emergence instead to particular forms of production and social relations inherent in capitalism. Even in the capitalist era, society for Marx is far from being atomistic; it is divided into clearly identifiable social classes whose actions and interactions constitute the motor of history. By the same token, it is in the realm of collective action that most rational-choice theorists distance themselves from Marxism. They have little quarrel with the emphasis on the role of economic factors in shaping the course of history; nor are they discomforted by the onedimensional image of humanity that historical materialism seems, to many, to represent. It is difficult to see how they could be, given their own roots in British political economy. To this extent, both traditions may be called rationalist. But beyond this point, they part company sharply, for the Marxist reliance on classes and class actions as the central dynamic of society is, for North and Olson, not merely empirically incorrect but logically invalid as well (North 1981, p. 61; Olson 1965, pp. 108-110). The point is by now a familiar one: it is to them simply not possible to go from the postulate of individualistic maximization to the conclusion of class action without stumbling on the free-rider problem. Without the possibility of imposing social or material sanctions-which is unlikely in groups the size of classesrational man will not contribute to actions of his class, even if he recognizes and favors them. l4 Ways of getting around this problem may be suggested. One might argue, for example, that people do not always behave rationally. Olson dismisses this circumvention, however, on the argument that it is hard to believe that irrational behavior could be the driving force of human history. Oliver and Marwell (1988) suggest that class action may result if there exists within the disadvantaged class a critical mass of welleducated, politically conscious individuals who value the goal sufficiently to act. The size of the critical mass necessary for the kinds of action envisaged by Marxists-general strikes, proletarian revolutions-would seem to be very large, however. Barry (1970, pp. 3637) proposed another alternative: in Marx’s writings class action is better understood as a matter of “solidarity” or the supplanting of self-interested motives in the individual through the identification with the fortunes of his or her class. This may indeed be what happens in ’‘Rogowski’s position on this issue is puzzling. He does see free riding as likely in social strata unless stigmata have been developed to make defection easily recognizable and punishable; but as noted in footnote 11, he is unconcerned with the issue as it affects the probability of rebellion against an illegitimate regime.

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many forms of collective action, but to accommodate it theoretically, one must be prepared to introduce social or altruistic goals which, as we have seen, Olson and North are reluctant to do.15 Marxism and the rational-choice theories under consideration here are thus very much at odds on the collectivisdindividualism dimension, which I have presented as the second major axis of analytic differentiation. What of Marxism and culturalism? The distinction between structuralist and culturalist orientations has been illustrated, but it would certainly be useful to present it in a more abstract form. We have seen that culturalism admits that other factors, including aspects of social structure such as class, may be the ultimate progenitors of cultural traits; after all, the latter would have to be caused by something. Conversely, Marxists are usually quite willing to acknowledge the importance of beliefs and values in human behavior. If, as Marx and Engels thought, the dominant ideas in any society are always the ideas of the dominant class, it was evident to them that this state of affairs must exist for some useful purpose (useful, that is, to the dominant class). This thesis, as noted earlier, is quite similar to North’s theory of ideology, if due allowance is made for the difference between a ruling class and a ruler (the individualismkollectivism distinction again). What differentiates it from culturalism essentially boils down to one word: inertia. From the Marxist perspective, cultural inertia is a questionable concept: the structuralist basis of Marxism entails not only that cultural and ideological traits exist mainly because it is in the interest of some class to create and propagate them, but also that their existence must be tied in some fashion to the continued existence of the particular social structure that produced them. 16 Admittedly, there is ”Even if one were willing to do so, there remains the problem of explaining how social goals come to enter individual preference orderings. The Assurance Game scenario noted by Elster (1982) and supported most recently by Sabia (1988) is probably the best bet, but doubts remain, even among those like Elster and Przeworski who are sympathetic to Marxism (see footnote 6). As Przeworski (1985b, p. 92) put it, “The relation between social relations and individual behavior is the Achilles heel of Marxism.” 16As Marx put it in The German Ideology (cited in Poggi 1972, p. 144), Morals, religion, metaphysics, and the rest of ideology, with the corresponding forms of consciousness, do not preserve, in our eyes, the appearance of autonomy. They possess no history, no development of their own; it is men, in the process of developing their material production and their material intercourse, who also modify . . . their own thought and the products of their thought. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. Incidentally, I prefer “inertia” to “autonomy” as the central differentiating feature

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some disagreement on this point. Of the three Marxist or Marxistinspired macrosociological interpretations of Western development that figure significantly in this study, Moore’s (1966) comes closest to this position. Anderson (1974) appears at times to allow almost a Weberian autonomy to cultural and ideational characteristics in influencing the course of Western history. Wallerstein (1974a, 1979’0, 1980b), in contrast, is almost totally structuralist and incorporates no cultural or ideational factors into his model. These differences are explored further as they crop up in the study; for now we can conclude that Marxist approaches, to the extent that they remain structuralist, give short shrift to the autonomy of culture or ideas-much shorter than culturalists, however open to structural considerations, would be prepared to countenance.

V The issue of Marxist interpretation recalls the quandary left at the end of the preceding chapter which, somewhat revised, might be summarized as follows. The British have long been noted for the pragmatic and empirical quality of their social philosophy and political conduct; the French, for the rationalistic and ideological quality of theirs. Yet the British tradition of utilitarianism and classical political economy are markedly rationalistic, and the possibility has been raised that the pragmatic nature of British political behavior, which has occupied so prominent a place (until very recently) in analyses of the British political system, may mask an ideological hegemony imposed by the ruling class in the wake of Britain’s economic and territorial expansion. The discussion of the profoundly individualistic bases of British social thought has attempted to resolve the apparent contradiction between its rationalistic nature and its conflict-of-interest orientation, which is sometimes seen as pragmatic or empirical. But it has not addressed the issue of whether ideologism has penetrated Britain in a more pervasive sense (as the Marxists maintain), nor has it addressed the even more basic issue of whether the nature of British political thought or culture matters very much in terms of explaining British political or economic behavior, past or present (as the culturalists maintain). Parenthetically, one may note that not much more has been resolved in the case of France. We have seen that French political elites do between the two approaches because it avoids the impression that culturalists believe cultural traits are spontaneously generated.

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exhibit pragmatic behavior; and although this is at least partially a response to structural constraints, it may also reflect quite independently an aspect of political culture. The focus on culture as a tool in understanding society is itself a feature of the collectivist and culturalist tradition of social thought to which the French Enlightenment, its heirs, and its opponents contributed greatly; but this does not in itself justify its use for this purpose. Most proponents of this tradition would agree that such a justification can only come through careful empirical work-if it is to come at all. This is where the rational-choice approach enters the picture. According to the rational-choice theories considered here, there is no need to worry about whether and in what sense British or French political culture can be considered more or less ideological, because cultural traits in general have little or no independent causal role to play in determining matters such as economic growth and stagnation, or even political legitimacy and stability. The fact that an idea or cultural trait had its origins in a certain society or type of society may mean that at some point it was useful in achieving a particular goal, but its standing as an independent causal force is essentially nil.” Rational-choice theorists have clearly posed the right question. It is interesting to discover that pragmatism and ideologism have been present in both Britain and France (although in different ways), and that rationalism as a method of societal analysis is associated more with the British than the French case, especially as both conclusions run counter to common assumptions. This suggests the complexity of culture; but unless it can be established that culturalism embodies a satisfactory set of premises for the analysis of behavior, it will not matter very much in the final analysis. In order to make this determination, however, there is little recourse but to test the claims made by the three rival analytic paradigms using the available historical and contemporary evidence; the aspects of reality chosen here and outlined above should do as well as any, and the next three chapters are devoted to that end. As noted earlier, the main focus of those investigations is on Britain, although France provides an implicit, and occasionally explicit, point of comparison. Generally speaking, the format is to focus on the rationalistkulturalist controversy, because it presents the clearest polarization of views, with Marxist perspectives introduced, 17As noted earlier, North’s theory of ideology is a possible exception here. However, it is Rogowski’s theory of legitimacy that is the focus of the investigation in Chapter 5.

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where appropriate, as a possible route to resolving the issue. The conclusions reached in the three-way confrontation of theory with the evidence at hand then provides the basis for the final chapter’s attempt to assemble a coherent picture from the variety of considerations discussed in this and the previous chapter. But first the pieces.

Part B ISSUES AND ANSWERS

Chapter 3

Was Britain Different? Protestantism, Property Rights, and State Power in the Rise of Modern Capitalism

T

he issue of the origins of modern capitalism has been with us for quite some time-ever since sociology first took form in the nineteenth century, in fact. To the extent that the invention of sociology was a response to the emergence of industrial society and its attendant problems, one can easily understand the sociological fascination with the issue. The character of that response is complicated, however, by its unwillingness to accept rational egoism as a universal and timeless principle of human nature from which all economic behavior may be deduced. It is over this very terrain-the nature of the alleged historicity of modern capitalism-that the rationalist-culturalist debate is most clearly joined. In the evolution of the controversy, Max Weber must undoubtedly be considered the pivotal figure. Not only did Weber’s thesis concerning the spirit of capitalism draw enormous attention to the issue, but his work marked both the culmination of the nineteenth-century repudiation of the abstract materialism of the classical political economists, to which Marx himself had contributed, and the stimulus to the development of newer interpretations from the followers of Adam Smith and of Marx in the twentieth century. Although these newer contributions have considerably supplemented, and occasionally altered, their respective legacies, they remain true to their roots in one very important respect: they reject Weber’s most prominent culturalist aspect, the attribution of an independent causal role for the worldly asceticism of certain Protestant sects. This seems an appropriate point upon which to enter the debate over Britain’s leading role in this epochal event.

I The Weberian thesis remains controversial largely because of the inconclusiveness of the evidence and the malleability of the causal 59

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relation linking Protestant attitudes with capitalist development. Concerning the evidence, there can be no doubt that the United Provinces of the Netherlands, a Protestant state with a dominant Calvinist presence, rose to economic preeminence in the seventeenth century and that England, also Protestant and with a significant, if less influential, Puritan (Calvinist) strain, had superceded the Dutch by the eighteenth century. Conversely, the Spanish birthplace of the Catholic CounterReformation clearly succumbed to severe economic decline during the period of Dutch ascendancy, as did the once prosperous city-states of northern Italy. France, torn between the two religions, fell somewhere in between in the seventeenth century (although perhaps not in the eighteenth, of which more later). The general congruence of religious affiliation and economic development in the early modern era is, however, somewhat less than perfect. The most obvious exception is Scotland, exceedingly poor, agrarian, and underdeveloped by the standards of the day yet overwhelmingly Calvinist (Burrell 1968). The strong appeal of Calvinism among the Hungarian nobility also seems to be anomalous (Fischoff 1968, p. 78). In Switzerland, where the economic pattern fits the religious breakdown better, the explanation is muddkd by the probability that it predates the Reformation (Luethy 1968, p. 93); in the United Provinces, by the fact that Arminian Amsterdam prospered far better than did Calvinist Gelderland (Trevor-Roper 1968, p. 7). In France, the Huguenots were an economically progressive group in the western parts of the country, as the thesis postdicts, but not in the backward south, where they also tended to concentrate (Luethy 1968, p. 94). Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would constitute an even more striking anomaly if one accepts that its economy was of the “modern capitalist” sort. Weber rooted his thesis in the argument that the merchant-adventurer capitalism of the Italian Renaissance was fundamentally different from that which succeeded it in Protestant lands, but it is less than clear that this position is defensible. Certainly, the vast majority of innovations in commerce and banking that ushered in the modern capitalist era were developed in Italy; England and the Netherlands added relatively little to that legacy. * Moreover, one may well ‘Cohen (1980) provides a useful inventory. In response to a defense of Weber’s position by Holton (1983), Cohen (1983, pp. 183-84) argues that Weber’s negative view of Italian capitalism can be explained by the fact that he was unaware that double-entry bookkeeping-which he believed was necessary in order for business decisions to be made according to a rational calculation of their profitability-was in extensive use in Renaissance Italy.

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wonder whether entrepreneurs in the latter two countries were in fact guided by an ethos that spurned consumption and favored productive reinvestment. There seems to be no shortage of examples of lavish life-styles among the most successful Calvinist entrepreneurs (TrevorRoper 1968, p. 15); and a “discomfortingly large” number of Protestants were apparently willing to involve themselves in activities that to Weber symbolized a more traditional ethos, such as tax farming, state lending, and merchant adventuring (Marshall 1982, p. 113). The limited availability of landed estates in the Netherlands was a major constraint in gentrification, but abroad wealthy Dutch capitalists reportedly felt free to “let themselves go” (Trevor-Roper 1968, p. 15). It may be possible, at least in a technical sense, to circumvent the difficulties concerning Scotland and Hungary simply by pointing to the larger context of Weber’s thesis: The Protestant ethic is only to be associated with the effervescence of modern capitalism in cases where a variety of other features-free markets, rational technology, private property rights, and the like-were also present. But what about the difficulties relating to the ethic itself? A number of authors (Baechler 1975; C. and K. George 1968; Luethy 1968) have suggested that the principal contribution of Calvinist doctrine to economic development may simply have been to legitimate capitalism as a vocation. On this argument, what Calvinism and kindred faiths achieved was the banishment of the Catholic doctrine of the greater moral and spiritual worth of the life of withdrawal from worldly activities. In Calvinism, moral worth was demonstrated through the proper exercise of one’s calling, whatever that might be. Even manual labor could be virtuous; all depended on the manner with which it was performed. By the same token, the acquisition of great wealth through trade or finance-if honestly achieved-was not to be regretted but rather embraced as a sign of divine favor. The moral outlook of the Middle Ages, which had exalted only the life of the manor or that of the monastery, was thereby expanded to encompass all socially useful pursuits, including those of urban bourgeois. This value reorientation allowed Calvin to dispose of the usury dilemma in Geneva by endorsing the charging of interest on capital that was productively invested, a decision that had the effect, Luethy (1968, p. 107) reported, of lowering interest rates below levels prevalent in Catholic lands. More generally, the propensity to atone for one’s success at making money through the donation or willing of large amounts of wealth to the church was undermined by Calvin’s teachings. A strong moral incentive to invest in land and titles no longer existed either. Indeed, there was some degree of disincentive, for as Charles and Katherine George (1968) found in their survey of English

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Puritan tracts, it was considered as sinful to change one’s calling as to become idle or nonproductive. It is reasonable to suppose that these ideas may well have held considerable appeal for nascent capitalist sectors in the expanding European economies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, Poggi (1983, p. 58) pointed out that Weber saw Calvinism’s worldly asceticism as stimulating the spirit of capitalism among groups already involved in business activities. This has led to suggestions that Weber’s position on the connection between the Protestant ethic and capitalism ought to be interpreted as one of simple congruence rather than causality: Calvinist beliefs provided justification for what capitalists were already doing (Baechler 1975, p. 70; Fischoff 1968, p. 81). Admittedly, there is little in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that lends itself to such an interpretation, although Weber’s method of proof-simply noting correspondences between worldly asceticism and the capitalist spirit-and his differentiation between the original Calvinist doctrine, which was hostile in certain ways to capitalist activity, and later versions of it that downplayed those features are suggestive in this regard. A stronger indication of this direction is given, however, in his later work on the sociology of religion, in which he explored the ways that different theologies were suited to the needs of different social strata and employed the concept of elective affinity to capture the phenomenon (Marshall 1982, p. 154). This interpretation of Weber in itself does not destroy the role of ideas in economic life-the utility-maximizing postulate of classical economics is still seen as culturally bounded-but it does open the door to a vastly different understanding of the connection between religion and the rise of capitalism, one which reorders the original causal relationship by making ideas the consequence rather than the cause or even the concomitant of structural change. Marxists, in particular, have tended not only to see Calvinism as an ideological justification for the activities of the emerging capitalist classes in early modern Europe but, more important, to interpret the transmutation of a doctrine hostile to the worship of the golden calf (identified with Rome) into a prop for the revolutionary dynamic of modern capitalism as clear evidence that class interests ultimately determine ideological beliefs.* The Marxist version, or rather inversion, of the Weber thesis ’The rootedness of ideas in the material conditions of life did not preclude, for Marx, a certain degree of autonomy in the development of ideas and thus some recursiveness in their relationship with material conditions (Giddens 1970, p. 300). Weber was aware of the subtleties in Marx’s handling of this issue in some of his

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provides an attractive solution to the problem of lavish consumption among Protestant capitalists while avoiding the causal agnosticism of the congruence interpretation. Nevertheless, it cannot escape so easily the empirical deficiencies in the Weberian approach. If Calvinism constituted an ideological by-product of capitalist activities, how could it have had so strong an appeal among groups such as Scottish landlords and peasants or Hungarian noblemen who were hardly touched by capitalism? Can the original doctrine have been so twisted that it could have suited the interests of both bourgeois capitalists and backward aristocrats? The more cynical exponents of the Marxist school might be willing to agree, but in that case a further dilemma arises. If it is true that religious ethics can be molded to this extent to fit the circumstances of an emerging capitalist class, why is it that a new religion was required at all; why, in other words, could not Catholicism, which had already shown itself to be compatible with a vigorous Renaissance capitalism, have been further modified to fit the agenda of full-fledged capitalist development? Barring some fancy footwork on this point, it would seem that we are still left with a less-than-perfect congruence between capitalistic activities and Reformation beliefs that refuses to be molded into a tighter, more ordered causal relationship. Since neither the Weber thesis nor the alternative versions of it survive analytical and empirical scrutiny unscathed, one is tempted to take the further step of abandoning it altogether. This need not involve jettisoning the entire Weberian legacy, but merely that part of it-the Protestant ethic-whose essentiality even scholars sympathetic to Weber have questioned. The writer whose work most clearly follows this tack is Perry Anderson (1974). Anderson’s approach is essentially Marxist, to be sure, but a consideration of the principal lines of his interpretation of the rise of capitalism reveals a rather more delicate touch than the standard Marxist approach to Weber. The starting point for Anderson is European feudalism, which he characterizes primarily in terms of its “parcellization” of sovereignty and its conditional, rather than absolute, property rights, particularly in land. The latter feature provided tenuous links between nobles and monarchs that were to constitute the basis for the growth of monarchical absolutism, but it was the former trait that made possible the earlier emergence of autonomous towns in the interstices of the territorial checkerboard. Free from aristocratic control, many of these towns were able to cultivate a writings, but he felt strongly that the Protestant ethic thesis sharply contradicted more deterministic versions of historical materialism (Poggi 1983, p. 84).

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lively commercial and intellectual life in the High Middle Ages that heralded the rise of modern capitalism. As with Weber, however, the transition from feudalism to capitalism is not seen as automatic; certainly, no structural conditions preordained that it would occur. The key impediment in this case was the conditionality of property rights, which was only overcome by means of a fortuitous circumstance, the existence of a suitable body of law from the Roman era which could be revived for this purpose. Roman law was a manifold blessing: it provided not only a conception of absolute private property upon which market-oriented activities could be based, but traditions of equity, rational assessment of evidence, and judicial professionalism as well. Moreover, Roman law was based on Rome’s highly developed conception of citizenship, and this, too, was embraced in the prosperous Italian city-states that led the way in this cultural revolution. Over the long term, the adoption of principles of Roman law and the assimilation throughout western Europe of the rest of the extant cultural inheritance of antiquity encouraged the growth of a highly analytical and secular culture that was to become the distinguishing feature of Western civilization’s unique trajectory. In Anderson’s (1974, p. 421) words, “What rendered the European passage to capitalism possible was the concatenation of antiquity and feudalism-i,e., a remanence of the legacy of one mode of production [slavery] with an epoch dominated by another [serfdom], and the reactivation of its spell in the passage to the third [capitalism]. ” The rediscovery of ancient ways made the rise of capitalism possible, but not inevitable. Although urban interests saw advantages in the adoption of Roman legal and citizenship precepts, these precepts triumphed throughout much of Europe primarily because they corresponded so well to the needs of royal governments seeking to enhance their own powers at the expense of their aristocracies. As one would expect, aristocrats tended to resist the ambitions of their suzerains, but certain factors favored the royal advance. First, changes in the scale and tactics of warfare put a premium on large standing armies, which only monarchs with substantial fiscal and administrative resources could maintain. Second, the very existence of autonomous towns that could serve as havens from feudal authority meant that lords needed the broader authority of the state to ensure their ability to live off exactions from the peasant or serf class. The result was that aristocrats gained access to the offices and resources of the expanding state machinery, sacrificed representation by estates and some measure of autonomous authority in exchange, but preserved or enhanced their social and economic positions through a

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much stronger state that now treated their property rights as absolute. Not a bad deal, all and all. Anderson’s explanation does not resort to the motivating force of worldly asceticism so familiar from Weber’s work; in other respects, however, Anderson’s interpretation is quite Weberian. In Collins’s (1980) reconstruction of Weber’s “final” explanation for the rise of capitalism, two intermediate conditions are identified: (1) a methodical, nondualistic economic ethos and (2) calculable law. The latter is seen as a consequence of the rise of the bureaucratic state and the spread of the idea of citizenship, both of which may be interpreted as legacies of antiquity. As for the economic ethos, it, too, owes something to the ancient world, for Weber linked it not only to the Reformation sects but also to the Greek civic cults and the Judeo-Christian hostility to magic which preceded and to some extent inspired their perspectives. Indeed, apart from the Protestant ethic, which is relegated to a fairly minor role in this reconstruction of Weber, the only clear sense in which Weber differs from Anderson is in his inclusion of Judaism and early Christianity as important components in the cultural legacy of the ancient world.3 Is Anderson successful in his enterprise of downplaying religion? Probably not. From the foregoing discussion one would be excused for surmising that Anderson would accept the Marx-Engels view of absolutism as a transitional formation founded upon a balancing off of bourgeois and aristocratic interests, but this is not the case. Anderson is adamant that absolutism, however favorable it may have been to limited capitalist development, must be considered as nothing other than a “redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination” (Anderson 1974, p. 18). How, then, did capitalism emerge in western Europe? The answer must be through a fundamental break with feudalism, a critical turning point that took place first in the Dutch Republic and England, short-circuiting any possible absolutist reaction and pointing them instead in the direction of modern capitalism. It would follow from Anderson’s analysis that what those states had in common to differentiate them from, say, France or Spain were more developed and autonomous towns and a stronger affinity for those elements of the classical inheritance that turned the tide for capitalism as a mode of production. Yet Anderson’s (pp. 113-42) explanation for the early development of capitalism in England centers not on these 3Weber (1927, pp. 318-21, 337-43) also emphasized the importance of the existence of free cities in the West, the rediscovery of Roman law, and the tacit alliance between the state and capitalists.

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factors but rather on the isolation of the British Isles, which negated the pressures or pretenses for the development of a powerful royal military apparatus that might have sustained an absolute monarchy and fostered the early demilitarization of the aristocracy and its drift toward commercial activities, beginning with wool farming. The orientation toward “navalism” furthered these processes in his view, for it encouraged the commercial orientation of the aristocracy and its close ties with mercantile capital. As a consequence, there was in England no need for the “political refortification of the feudal state” (Anderson 1974, p. 139) that absolutism represented, and when Stuart monarchs seemed to be moving in that direction, they were resisted by forces powerful enough to succeed. Although much can be said for this explanation, it does not accord well with Anderson’s overall framework. Autonomous towns, Roman law, and absolute monarchs4 to impose that law are conspicuous by their absence in England, and while one might pick up the other thread in Anderson’s thesis by arguing that absolutism inhibited the fruition of capitalist class relations through its defense of the feudal aristocracy’s social preeminence (this would also fit the Dutch example), there is no getting around the absence of the other two factors from the English scene. What the United Provinces and England did have in common, of course, was neither autonomous towns nor Roman law but Protestantism-Weber’s original point. This does not mean that we have to resuscitate the troubled debate that began this section, however; we can instead go to the other extreme of abandoning the attempt to incorporate a cultural component, be it Greco-Roman or Christian, into the explanation. Two possibilities may be suggested. One is to base the rise of modern capitalism on some other factor or factors that distinguished the Dutch Republic and England from the rest of Europe; the other is to deny that there was a significant distinction of that sort within northwestern Europe by grouping England and France together as two fairly equal rivals to the earlier and largely accidental preeminence of the Dutch. Both alternatives have been tried; in the next two sections we examine the results. 4The rule of the Tudors, particularly Henry VIII, is sometimes referred to as “Tudor absolutism.” This expression is used to indicate that England had achieved a higher degree of central control under the monarchy than had other states in the sixteenth century (due in part to Henry’s confiscation of church lands), not that English government resembled the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, this episode was very short-lived; Parliament survived throughout and even in Elizabeth 1’s reign proved itself to be a very powerful political force.

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I1 The factor that comes to mind most readily as an alternative to Protestantism is the structure of property rights, which North (198 1) has made pivotal in his account of the rise of the Western world. In a sense, there is nothing new in the emphasis on the conditioning effect of property rights on economic behavior; it was a building block of classical political economy, and it figured prominently in both Marx’s and Weber’s responses to the tenets of that school of thought. The issue is, are property rights sufficient in themselves to explain the phenomenon of sustained economic growth? The meaning of “sufficiency” must be clarified. North follows the rational-choice approach of neoclassical economics closely in his insistence that economic growth requires only the existence of property rights that permit the private and social rates of return to converge; after all, people invariably seek to maximize private advantage. But this position begs two further questions: What explains the establishment of efficient property rights in one society and not another, and what explains why people obey them once they are established? Concerning the first issue, North regards the key exogenous or external factor impelling the restructuring of property rights to be changes in population and their effect on the extent of the market, although changes in military technology, which affect the size, structure, and the financial requirements of the state, may also be exogenous (North 1981, pp. 132-42). These factors are mediated both by the concern of rulers, who provide property rights, with maximizing revenues to themselves and therefore with selecting the least costly forms of revenue assessment and collection, and by the limitations placed on their choices arising from the opportunity costs to subjects of defecting to other rulers. In the European context, these factors worked themselves out in the following manner. Before the modern era, the general lack of appropriate property rights to stimulate innovation left Europe victim to recurrent subsistence crises as population growth periodically outstripped the productive capabilities of available land resources at more or less fixed levels of technology. The expansion of population, output, and trade of the High Middle Ages, for example, yielded after 1300 to a period of decline and crisis before renewed expansion was once again possible in the period after 1475. The crisis era separating the two growth phases saw the beginning of the process of consolidation of state structures in response to the increasing scale of warfare, the widespread threat to order posed by starvation and banditry, and

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the advantages involved in providing protection adequate to the needs of longer-distance trading links. The costs of state building could be staggering, however, and everything turned on how those costs were met. England, as we have seen, was doubly blessed in these respects: its island position spared it some of the expense of having to defend against predators in the highly competitive state system that was , ~ the existence of a lucrative foreign trade in emerging in E ~ r o p e and wool provided an easily tapped revenue source for those needs the state did have. The existence of pretenders to the throne dampened the temptation to raise tax levels inordinately in any case. As a result, there was little justification for concentrating authority over taxation in the crown or for establishing a large governmental apparatus; and the crown, anxious to curry bourgeois favor in the face of aristocratic hostility to the state-building process, acquiesced in parliamentary control over tax levels. Reflecting the precocious development of foreign trade, the English Parliament tended to articulate the interests of landlords and merchants in efficient property rights and expanding markets. Consequently, when Stuart monarchs seeking greater revenues leaned too heavily on devices such as the sale of monopolies that threatened those interests, their actions could arouse resistance on the part of parliamentary and other forces, a resistance that ultimately became both violent and victorious. One virtue of this explanation is that it incorporates the components of Anderson’s explanation for England’s rise-the wool trade and the English Channel-much more successfully than did Anderson’s own theoretical framework. It achieves this task, moreover, without resort to cultural or ideological factors and in a manner that appears sufficient for its purpose. The neatly tied threads of the fabric begin to unravel, however, when attention is turned to the case of France. North’s account of France’s less happy fate, it will be recalled, turned on the absence of the very conditions that had facilitated the emergence of efficient property rights in England: there were few natural barriers to offer security from the threat of foreign invasion, and no prosperous 5North (1981) is somewhat ambiguous here, since he also argues (p. 154) that England “faced the same fiscal demands as did the other emerging nation-states in Europe.” Similarly, he argues both that the crown preserved Parliament because it required bourgeois allies to offset aristocratic hostility and that it relied heavily on industrial regulation through guild control and the sale of monopolies, which were harmful to bourgeois interests and were circumvented on a wide scale. These problems are potentially resolvable, however, and I concentrate in what follows on more pressing gaps in the theory.

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export industry to provide readily collected tax revenues from which military protection could be financed.6 At the low point in national integrity in the fifteenth century, when large tracts of French territory were occupied by English and Burgundian forces or terrorized by bands of unemployed mercenaries, the French king, Charles VII, was obliged on several occasions to seek special tax levies from the Estates General in order to redress the situation. These requests were honored by estates representatives who themselves were eager to bring an end to the chaos that plagued the kingdom. In fact, so strong was this desire that Charles was able to assume the right to levy taxes on a regular basis without the consent of the Estates General. This development, together with the crown’s eventual success at repelling the invaders, restoring order to the countryside, and neutralizing local rivals, gave it exclusive control over the creation and alteration of property rights. Nevertheless, the revenue problem persisted. The economy at that time was highly regionalized and even localized, and each region had to be taxed separately. This in itself entailed a large and costly bureaucracy; moreover, the pressures of a competitive states system had not disappeared. A common development of the period was the proliferation of guilds to preserve employment (for guild members) in the face of declining population and trade, and it was tempting in the circumstances to sell them property rights in the form of monopoly privileges to exercise their trades in local areas. A natural extension was to staff the growing state bureaucracy through the sale of offices, even to the extreme of creating functionless offices for the revenue their sale would bring. Although these measures were logical solutions to the problem of assessing and collecting revenues in a premodern state, the consequence of their fragmenting effect on the economy was the loss of potential gains from trade in a larger market. In addition, monopoly privileges curtailed innovation, and the fiscal exactions needed to support the over-large bureaucratidmilitary apparatus inhibited economic growth. “The benefits of improving the efficiency of markets,’’ North (1981, p. 150) concludes, “were in France sacrificed to the fiscal needs of the state.” North’s explanation holds only as long as one does not ask why revenues were not enhanced by taxing the two wealthiest estates of the 61n an earlier and more detailed historical account (North and Thomas 1973) from which North extracted the version presented in Structure and Change in Economic History,it is argued that the wine industry could not serve this function because 90 percent of production was consumed in France itself (North and Thomas 1973, p. 123). The reasons why more was not exported are unclear.

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realm, the nobility and the clergy (the latter dominated by nobles). North does comment that the potential for aristocratic resistance was neutralized by means of tax exemptions, but this point does not sit especially well with his earlier argument that the crown so totally controlled the power to grant or alter property rights that it no longer felt the need even to consult the Estates General on these issues.7 Nor is the matter resolvable simply by pointing to the well-known gap between the pretensions of monarchical absolutism and the reality of considerable powers of resistance by vested interests. Basically, two patterns could have been followed, each of‘ which involved some delegation of benefits to the aristocracy. The English pattern, roughly speaking, was to avoid special tax exemptions but allow political power to the rich and titled. The French pattern provided fiscal concessions but denied political influence. The opportunity costs to the aristocracy of defecting to another state if taxation levels became too high might possibly be educed to explain the difference; North, for example, argues that Charles VII was limited in the amount of tax revenues he could seek by the tax levels prevailing in those parts of his kingdom controlled by his foreign enemies. It is clear from North’s account, however, that this condition no longer obtained once the territorial integrity of the kingdom had been restored and the military power of the state became paramount. Moreover, the argument assumes that the aristocracy would rather have had lower taxes than political influence. There is nothing in the logic of North’s approach, or the basic assumptions of the rational-choice paradigm, to suggest that economic benefits are to be preferred to political ones; certainly, the English aristocracy was able to use its political leverage to great advantage. Why, then, was this particular package of costs and benefits adopted? A key consideration in the adoption of a set of property rights is the costs of compliance. Since the provision of property rights is a public good subject to the temptation of free riding (e.g., tax evasion), compliance costs will always be too high, in North’s view, unless there is some legitimating belief system or ideology that induces subjects to overcome their natural greed and comply voluntarily with the demands of the state. North’s approach, in other words, requires an ideological component that cannot be explained in rational terms, for although a ’The importance of this point is made even clearer in North and Thomas (1973, p. 122), where it is emphasized that the French crown held “undisputed sway over the tax structure” and that “royal control over taxation was absolute.” If such was the case, why was the system never able to surmount the obstacle of the nobility’s tax exemptions?

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ruler may propagate an ideology legitimating the existing constitutional and legal structure for his own selfish interests, subjects must violate theirs if they accept and obey it. In the preceding chapter, North’s recognition of the insufficiency of the rational-choice model in this area was noted; let us now see where it leads. If the crown had used its control over property rights to tax aristocrats in France, it is reasonable to suppose that compliance might not have been achieved because the decision could not be made to appear legitimate in their eyes. This contingency is provided for in North’s theory. Although North expects rulers to propagate their own legitimating ideologies, he also makes it clear that ideologies arise independently in the society at large on the basis of occupational and regional differences. Thus, a ruler seeking to maximize his own material benefit might find himself powerless to overcome the appeal of preexisting belief systems, such as, for example, one which stipulated that aristocrats fight and peasants pay. The point, although simple, carries a major implication: It may be impossible for a ruler to select rationally a property rights structure that maximizes his net revenue because he must take into account the costs of legitimating the various choices open to him in the face of extant social value systems, costs which are, then as now, largely incalculable. A strictly rational (revenue-maximizing) decision in this matter may thus not be possible. What, then, does the ruler do? The obvious course for a ruler would be to choose a property rights structure that combines sufficient income to himself with respect for prevailing cultural norms and values. In the case of early modern France, this apparently meant the denial of a political role for the aristocracy coupled with the recognition of substantial concessions on taxation. In England it meant something different. In each case, the conclusion is inescapable that the evolution of the institutional framework of property rights depended upon extant cultural values and the social structure that supported them.8 We are back where we began.

I11 Perhaps the solution lies with a different beginning. We have seen that the Protestant ethic may be interpreted as cause, concomitant, or effect ‘In Chapter 2, Rogowski’s rational-choice theory of legitimacy was introduced as an alternative to North’s use of ideology. Extensive consideration of that theory occurs in Chapter 5; suffice it to say here that Rogowski attempts to account for how much decision-making influence an aristocracy would have, not which kinds of benefits it would seek. Therefore, his theory cannot save us from the present dilemma.

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of the rise of capitalism, and that none of these options is without its problems. The attempt to circumvent beliefs by concentrating on institutions (property rights), although possessing a certain seductiveness, has culminated in the reintroduction of beliefs in the back door. The disadvantage of the back-door method is that it leaves entirely open the nature of the beliefs that are in question, as North (198 1, p. 168) seems to confess at one point. Since no obvious alternative causes beyond the two considered so far seem to exist, it remains only to reject the effect: the superiority of the English economic performance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This avenue has been explored by a large and influential school of Marxist-oriented “world-system’’ theorists led by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974b, 1979a, 1980b). North, although hardly a Marxist, is willing to acknowledge certain strengths in Marxist theory. One of its strengths, in his view, is its location of the source of ideological differences in occupational specialization (North 1981, p. 51). With respect to the advent of capitalism, however, he regards the Marxist approach as thoroughly hamstrung over the matter of timing. Feudalism was clearly dead by 1500, but Marxist theorists, concentrating too much on technology and not enough on property rights, seem unable to place the emergence of the capitalist mode of production before 1800-leaving a gap of three centuries.9 In light of North’s own difficulties with ideology, however, it is encouraging to find in Wallerstein’s approach a backing off from both of the characteristics just mentioned: it largely ignores beliefs, and it places the birth of the capitalist world squarely in the sixteenth century. Wallerstein achieves this feat by downplaying both technology and property rights in favor of a different aspect of capitalist development, the expansion of trade. Trade is hardly absent from North’s approach; the point about population growth, after all, is that it increases the potential gains to be made from trade. But for North, any economic growth that expanding population and trade engender must inevitably flounder on the finite limits to land and therefore food supply unless efficient property rights have been instituted to reward innovation in the domain of agricultural techniques and technology. Provided one bears in mind that efficient property rights include the right to dispose of one’s own labor freely, this appears to be Marx’s position as well. 10 Wallerstein nevertheless chooses to pursue an alternative in’This criticism is not true of Marx himself, who, in Capital at least, dated the origins of the capitalist era from the sixteenth century (Baechler 1975, p. 21). “As Marx put it, “The private property of the laborer in his means of production

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terpretation, one which he feels is closer “to the spirit of Marx if not his letter,” by arguing that the essential feature of the modern capitalist world economy is not the generalized freedom to market one’s labor and resources but rather the “production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit” (Wallerstein 1979a, pp. 9, 15). It is the attraction of profit making through the use of markets that accounts for economic development in this perspective; the issue of free labor is largely spurious. After all, is a capitalist any less a capitalist if the state assists him or her in paying low wages and denies workers the possibility of changing jobs? Late-medieval Europe, Wallerstein concurs, faced a severe crisis. North’s ‘‘Malthusian trap” of population growth outstripping food supply in the absence of innovative breakthroughs in agricultural production had been sprung. Despite falling population due to famine and plague, the amount of surplus extracted by the ruling classes showed a contrary tendency to increase. It was not that lords were managing to “squeeze” more out of their peasants; in fact, reduced peasant numbers had given those that survived a stronger bargaining position. Rather, it was that monarchs had begun the long process of augmenting their own revenues to meet the need for ever-larger standing armies, and nobles, less able to exploit the peasantry directly, leaned instead on the seemingly boundless munificence of their sovereigns. To the consequences of declining numbers of direct producers and a greater assault on the profits of their labor may be added a long-term adverse shift in climatic conditions, which compounded the problems of maintaining agricultural production at stable-population levels. Wallerstein’s contribution is to argue that the crisis of feudalism was vanquished by the creation of a capitalist “world-economy,” that is to say, an economic system operating over an area far larger than that controlled by any single state or empire. The transformation was comprised of three main components: (1) the geographical expansion of the economic system, (2) the correlative development of different methods of labor control for different products and regions, and (3) the emergence of strong state machineries in the core areas of the system. In is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of free individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself” (Marx 1909 [1887], pp. 834-35).

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summary form, these developments unfolded as follows. The impulse to overseas expansion first appeared in Portugal, a state whose shortage of land fostered an oceanic perspective on expansion and whose internal peace, advanced monetarization, and trading experience encouraged the search for new markets abroad. Spain quickly followed suit, opening up the Americas and introducing vast quantities of bullion into the European economy. Bullion provided the medium for a rapid growth in trade; it may also have stimulated production, and it certainly set off a sixteenth-century “price revolution. ” As wages lagged behind rapid price increases, the processes of capital accumulation and investment benefited. Best placed to take advantage of this situation were moderate-wage countries like the United Provinces and England, rather than older, more developed industrial centers like Flanders and northern Italy where better organized workers were able to maintain high wage rates, or countries like Spain and France where low wages depressed purchasing power. The price revolution is also important because it served to redistribute wealth from the peripheral regions of the emerging world economy to its northwest European core. The idea of surplus appropriation by the core is critical to the whole approach. It is associated in the first instance with the simultaneous and mutually reinforcing existence of free wage labor in the core, sharecropping in the semiperipheral areas of southern Europe, and forced labor (“coerced cash-crop labor” or slavery) in the East European, Latin American, and Caribbean peripheries. The commutation of serfdom into free wage labor had been a common accompaniment of declining population in Europe in the late Middle Ages, but free wage labor as a basis for production is really only suitable where population densities remain sufficiently high to keep wage rates down, yet necessitate intensive agricultural methods for which skilled labor is a prerequisite.” Where land is more abundant and labor less so, the incentive of a growing market for agricultural products is more likely to lead to extensive forms of agricultural production, requiring less skill but perhaps more coercion to prevent peasants from fleeing. Thus, when population growth finally resumed in the late fifteenth century, only the more densely populated northwestern corner of Europe was in a position to continue the evolution towards free wage labor and agricultural specialization. The northwest ”Wallerstein (1974b, p. 101) explains this in part by arguing that “more skilled labor can insist on less juridical coercion.” It is not clear, however, why the greater supply of men in the core areas of Western Europe did not undermine this bargaining position.

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European route facilitated the rise of a yeoman class, composed mainly of tenant farmers, that pursued wealth and upward mobility through efficient farming for the market and of a bourgeois class that controlled the expanding and highly profitable long-distance bulk trade between core and noncore regions. From their ranks would come the “industrialists” of the early modern era, but it must be remembered that the growth in population, trade, and industry in the core states depended in large part on the availability of cheap food and raw materials from the more coerced noncore regions, most of which were condemned to underdevelopment and exploitation. The third component of this transformation was the rise of strong states in the core. Wallerstein follows Anderson and North in emphasizing the contribution of changes in military technology, the decline in seigneurial revenues and the consequent increase in internecine warfare to the rise of absolute monarchies, but he adds the greater extractive potential implicit in the transfer of much of the world surplus to the core. The development of powerful core states became particularly important after the return of the “B-phase,” or downside of the economic cycle, in the seventeenth century, when disease and starvation once again ravaged European societies. Where necessary, the strong core states of England, France, and the Dutch Republic were able to use both military power and mercantilist policy effectively to assist their capitalist sectors in competing in the troubled world market. An important example was the exclusion from Britain and France of Indian cotton cloth, which threatened to eliminate their domestic textile industries, until such time as technological advance enabled European textiles to eliminate the Indian industry. More germane in this period of economic contraction, however, was the rivalry among core states. In order to challenge Dutch economic hegemony, the English and French adopted navigation acts to exclude Dutch ships from their ports and their commerce; the English also challenged the republic’s strong base in the Baltic grain trade by introducing a highly successful export subsidy on English grain. More directly still, the English engaged the Dutch in three naval wars in the seventeenth century, mainly over trade, while the French assaulted the republic by land. After Holland’s decline, England and France turned the same tactics of mercantilism and military confrontation upon each other. Although the struggle was much more protracted, Wallerstein concludes that it was ultimately the greater strength of the English state, resting on a successful aristocratic-bourgeois compact dedicated to capitalist expansion, that determined the issue. There are several avenues by which a critique of this theory might

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be pursued. One might focus, for example, on Wallerstein’s disturbing lurches towards the teleological, as in his suggestion that the geographic expansion of the division of labor in the sixteenth century occurred because it was the only way that the late-medieval crisis could be overcome (Wallerstein 1979a, p. 25). Alternatively, one might concern oneself with the lack of a clear explanation for the technological and organizational innovations that permitted sustained economic growth in the West, a difficulty in Wallerstein’s approach that is underscored by his erroneous assertion that North and Thomas (1973) handle the issue solely in terms of the exogenous factor of population growth (Wallerstein, p. 143).12 At a more empirical level, the arguments (1) that trade with Asia, Africa, and the Americas contributed significantly to European economic development; (2) that the differing modes of labor control throughout the world economy, such as the ‘‘second serfdom” of Eastern Europe, represented rational responses to profit incentives; (3) that ruling classes were free to choose the mode of production that was most advantageous to themselves; and (4)that the strengths and structures of states corresponded to their positions in the international division of labor can be, and have been, challenged from a variety of perspectives (Brenner 1977, 1982; Goldstone 1986; Gourevitch 1978; O’Brien 1982; Rapkin 1983; Ray 1983; Zolberg 1981). For our purposes, however, it is sufficient to explore just two questions: (1) Were France and Britain, as members of the core, essentially equal in productive systems and hence economic well-being, and (2) was it really the greater strength of the English state that accounted for its eventual economic supremacy? Concerning the first point, it must be admitted that Wallerstein’s position is less than clear-cut. In the first volume of The Modern World System (1974b), Wallerstein seems to endorse Bloch’s (1964) thesis that the earlier and greater spread of a money economy in medieval France and the dissimilar development of judicial institutions in the two kingdoms set them off on fundamentally different economic paths. The former circumstance meant that in France seigneurial estates had moved much further in the direction of morcellement (fragmentation into separate units) by the time that the market opportunities of a growing population in the sixteenth century had placed a premium on large demesnes. Less able to take advantage of large-scale commercialized demesne farming, French landowners were naturally tempted ‘*Wallerstein also errs in his citation of North and Thomas. The passage he cites (North and Thomas 1973, p. 26) concerns the economic expansion of the High Middle Ages, not the economic expansion of the sixteenth century.

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to exploit traditional levies and prerogatives more vigorously in order to increase their incomes in an inflationary era. Legal arrangements pointed them in the same direction, for the French crown, unlike its English counterpart, employed its judicial authority effectively to check lordly attempts to alter basic tenure arrangements. By these means the crown’s tax base in an independent peasantry was preserved, but at the price of inhibiting the growth of a market-oriented yeoman class of tenant farmers so crucial to the development of capitalism (Wallerstein 1974b, pp. 113-15). The denial of control over land tenure conditions heightened the political militancy of the French aristocracy. Wallerstein (pp. 181-82) apparently believes that this lay behind their exemptions from taxation. Since nobles carried this important privilege with them into whatever economic activity they chose to take up, it also led the monarchy to prohibit them from trade. This in turn meant that trading interests were weaker in France than in England, and as a consequence, relief from the pressures of fiscal shortfalls tended to be sought in territorial expansion. The rivalry with Spain also encouraged this policy option, although the lack of backing from northern Italian capital condemned it to a primarily European expression. The result was disastrous: France was bankrupt by 1557. The solution to the fiscal problem in France took the familiar forms of venality, monopoly, and heavy taxation of non-nobles. England, with its smaller state apparatus less vulnerable to regional rebellion, escaped much of that burden. Her emerging agrarian capitalist class of yeomen and gentry thereby prospered all the more, even to the point of winning over a large portion of the old aristocracy; industrial development also spurted forward in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When economic contraction once again struck Europe in the seventeenth century, England’s ‘‘accumulated edge” in capital and technology was to prove decisive (Wallerstein, p. 290). A reasonable conclusion from this analysis would be one that stressed the fundamental divergence in economic structure and development between France and England that facilitated the latter’s rise to a position of hegemony in the capitalist world system. This is not, however, the conclusion that Wallerstein intends. Despite England’s advantages in terms of the level of wages, the size of demesnes, the elasticity of rents, the conversion of the aristocracy to capitalism, and even the greater reliance on animal husbandry,13 Wallerstein’s (1980b, I3At one point Wallerstein (1980b, p. 85) presents England’s greater exploitation of animal husbandry as the primary cause of the differences in land tenure arrangements

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p. 81) “strong suspicion is that there was far less of a difference between the real agro-industrial efficiencies of England and France in this period than we tend to assume.” This proposition, essential to the core-periphery framework, is maintained primarily on the basis of two arguments. The first is that the overall comparison is misleading because it fails to exclude southern France, which was part of the semiperiphery. Thus, the observation that land holdings in England were more concentrated and therefore efficient loses much of its impact, in Wallerstein’s view, when one recognizes that small peasant holdings were especially pervasive in the south of France. The second and more significant argument attributes England’s successful quest for hegemony to her stronger oceanic orientation, a factor that Wallerstein attempts to dissociate from any differences in the structure or efficiency of the two economies. This dissociation is effected primarily by means of the factor of geography, as the case of France strikingly illustrates. France, according to Wallerstein (1974b, p. 263), was fundamentally hampered after 1557 by its ambiguous status as “neither fish nor fowl, no longer empire but not quite a nation-state. ” This dilemma was reflected in a conflict between interests that were mainly sea oriented and those that were land oriented, and in a struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism. What underlay both struggles was a tripartite economic division of the kingdom into ( I ) the west, heavily involved in the expanding Atlantic and Baltic trades and hostile to interference from Paris; (2) the south, a Mediterranean semiperipheral region producing primary crops for export largely by means of sharecropping; and (3) the northeastern heartland, oriented toward the continental landmass and linked economically to Antwerp. In Wallerstein’s (1974b, p. 264) opinion, “It is in order to counter this fractionation [sic] that the controllers of the state machinery move so strikingly to reinforce it, to create Europe’s strongest state. ” Unfortunately, the price of forging national unity in France was acquiescence in the seigneurial reaction of the aristocracy and the ‘‘feudalization” of the bourgeoisie through the sale of offices and the resultant disinvestment from trade and industry (p. 296). England, in contrast, was able to respond to the seventeenthcentury crisis by pursuing a policy of trade and colonial expansion, by developing the “new draperies” to revive the textile industry, and by ~

between England and France, which he sees as the principal distinction between the agricultural systems of the two countries. As we shall see, a more classic Marxist position, recently defended most emphatically by Brenner (1976, 1977, 1982), reverses this causal ordering.

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mounting a parliamentary challenge to monopolies and royal taxation that culminated in civil war, the outcome of which ensured the continued commercialization of agriculture, limitation on courtly extravagances, and preeminence for trading interests in state policy. Wallerstein (1980b, pp. 99-112) points to a variety of factors to explain the greater strength and success of England’s oceanic thrust. He observes, for example, that it was the relative lack of domestic sources of timber and iron for naval use in an era of intense core-power rivalry that provoked Britain’s more determined push into the Baltic and in America. The smaller size of the British domestic market not only forced attention on foreign trade but also induced a stronger emphasis on settler colonies, which eventually provided Britain with a vast entrepdt trade, guaranteed by the British Navigation Acts. Britain’s greater involvement in foreign trade may even explain why the nation was able to effect major improvements in credit facilities, particularly in the late seventeenth century; these changes resulted in cheaper private and public loans and a much stronger financial basis upon which British governments could wage war. Nevertheless, the basic precondition for these developments was a geography that held in check the territorial illusion and fostered instead a union of landed and mercantile classes behind a policy of aggressive commercial expansion-a unity of purpose that France, riddled by a lack of geographic coordination between capitalist enterprise in the west, the sharecropping economy of the southern semiperiphery, and the forces of centralization in the north, never could achieve. Wallerstein persuasively argues that greater attention to overseas trade and colonies accounts for Britain’s economic success; yet his thesis that its sources lie with the geographic factor per se is bound to elicit some degree of skepticism, especially when he appears so willing to acknowledge a variety of domestic economic advantages that differentiated England from France. Wallerstein insists that these differences did not significantly affect the relative economic productivities of the two countries; however, certain of his comments-for instance, that the agricultural backwardness thesis is “doubtfully true of northern France, at least up to 1750” (Wallerstein 1980b, p. 89)-prompt questions about the conviction with which he holds that view. In fairness to him, however, France’s economic retardation throughout the modern era has become a matter of some academic controversy.14 The issue is a detailed and complex one; the best course here is to take I4The leading statements of the more optimistic interpretation of France’s economic development are Roehl (1976) and O’Brien and Keyder (1978).

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refuge in the most thorough and up-to-date of quantitative investigations, those of N. F. R. Crafts (1976, 1981, 1983a, 1983b, 1984). Crafts is not alone in contending that the calculations supporting the optimistic view of France’s relative economic position in the eighteenth century are based on unreasonable assumptions, ‘ 5 especially concerning population growth in England. Using newer estimates of the key variables, Crafts (1983b, p. 389) found that French per capita income for 1830, the earliest year for which reasonably accurate estimates are possible, was the equivalent of 343 U.S. dollars of 1970. This figure is just slightly above the corresponding estimate of 333 U.S. dollars (1970) for England and Wales for the year 1700. By the end of the eighteenth century, British per capita income had apparently increased to 399 U. S . dollars (1970), and by 1830 to 498 U. S . dollars (1970). On the assumption that the French economy grew fairly rapidly during the eighteenth century (which is generally accepted), these figures put Britain’s economic performance substantially above that of France in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although a regional breakdown of these figures is unavailable, it seems unlikely that a gap of this magnitude could be accounted for solely by the backwardness of the southern part of France.16 How, then, is it to be acccunted for? In the opinion of North, the answer can only lie in the domain of property rights, as we have seen. Now, from this perspective one might be tempted to conclude that a rough equivalence should have existed between the economies of England and France, for both countries had entered the sixteenthcentury boom with free labor already established and private property rights well on the way. North counters this interpretation with the arguments (1) that property rights in France meant monopoly privileges for guild trades, and (2) that, for agriculture, the critical difference resided in the lesser extent of French markets (a view that Wallerstein also endorses). Given the preponderant position of agriculture in the economies of the time and the fact that the central tariff-free zone of the “Five Great Farms” in France represented as extensive an area as the whole of Great Britain, this defense is not 15Thisposition is strongly endorsed by Brenner (1982, p. 105), who points out that almost all students of French agriculture have concluded that it stagnated up to 1750. Cooper (1978, pp. 23-24), in his critical response to an earlier article of Brenner’s, accepts the point that French agriculture did fall significantly behind. 16Norcan it be accounted for by trade with the periphery, which was small and not especially profitable in this era. See O’Brien (1982), Wallerstein’s (1983~)less than convincing rejoinder on this point, and O’Brien’s (1983) reply.

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particularly convincing in itself.17 It follows, therefore, that something else must have been involved, but what? Brenner (1976, 1977, 1982) has developed an interesting answer by extending the property rights approach: he maintains that what was required to stimulate productivity gains was not just the freeing of peasant labor but also the detachment of the peasant from de facto or de jure ownership of the means of his subsistence, the land.'* In medieval France, the smaller demesnes and greater parceling of land, together with the crown's tendency to defend the nominal value of customary seigneurial dues (in order to better squeeze the peasantry itself), had left a rural landscape dominated by small producers in virtual ownership of their plots. After having provided for themselves and their families, these producers would presumably have been quite willing to market the remainder of their produce; they had to in any case to raise money for taxes.19 But, Brenner believes, their ability to respond to market incentives in appropriate ways was limited for two reasons, In the first place, their best strategy for survival, particularly in times of high vulnerability to crop failure and extreme food-price fluctuations, was to diversify their agricultural production in order to meet their own needs-precisely the opposite to what was required, according to North, to realize productivity gains. In the second place, it was very unlikely that much capital accumulation for land acquisition or improvement could occur in any case, given the state's fiscal "There is some other evidence on this point. Fox (1971, pp. 84-87) noted that when the French minister Turgot removed internal trade and tariff restrictions on grain in the eighteenth century, the result was not increased production but soaring prices, panic buying, and scarcities. Although this may have been no more than a short-term reaction, Fox reasoned that the system of subsistence farming and the undeveloped state of internal transportation were at fault. Transportation is important, of course, and England did have an edge through its river network and generally closer access to the sea. France, however, had a better road system. As will be argued, it was not transportation but the system of subsistence farming that lay at the root of France's ability to respond to market incentives. "This thesis is not uniquely Brenner's, since both Davis (1973, pp. 119-21) and de Vries (1976, pp. 68-78) have defended viewpoints that approach it, and Marx himself placed considerable emphasis on it. Brenner's views on the agrarian origins of capitalism have been attacked from various viewpoints (see Aston and Philpin [ 19851 for a useful collection of articles OF. the topic), but no critic denies the key points in the thesis: (1) the control English landlords had over their unfree villeins and (2) the relatively large amounts of land held in demesnes. I9I have altered Brenner's argument slightly. Brenner emphasizes the idea that peasant proprietors had no necessity to market their produce; he ignores, however, the need for tax money as well as people's natural eagerness to make money, even when not obliged to do so.

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voracity. The natural tendency of the system was therefore for population growth to produce, not specialization and innovation, but continued subdivision of plots until they fell below subsistence size and crisis set in. Medieval England, on the other hand, was characterized not only by larger demesnes that could be exploited for commercial purposes but also the legal right of lords to alter seigneurial levies from unfree peasants (villeins). The latter provision meant that lords had effective ownership rights over villein land in the sense that they could force unproductive villeins off their plots through increases in levies and replace them with more productive ones.2o Peasants who wanted to rent good lands therefore had to be efficient; conversely, lords who wanted to attract the better tenants might have to invest in capital improvements to their holdings. The result was an evolution toward a three-layered agrarian social structure of large landowners, tenant farmers, and landless laborers, functioning on the basis of a collaborative effort to maximize returns in the market. Even if investment and innovation had flagged, the tendency to limit the number of offspring in the absence of firm possession of the means of subsistence insured that the population would not outstrip the ability to feed it. As it happened, agricultural production rose rapidly enough to support the increasing urbanization of English society, essential to its emerging commercial and industrial prowess. Exactly how great a quarrel there is here is uncertain, for Wallerstein (1974b, p. 113)-at least in the first volume of The Modern World System-accepts not only the importance of tenant farming but also the conclusion that its development “seemed to stop short” in France. What concerns him in the second volume is that primary emphasis be given to the greater strength of the English state in the eighteenth century. It is on this very point, however, that he has drawn the most flak. One need hardly point out that the English state possessed neither a large standing army nor an extensive bureaucracy, and that it depended in very great measure on the often voluntary services of the ’90some extent, copyhold provisions, which gave tenants lifelong tenure of the land and were often inheritable upon payment of an entry fee, restricted the lord’s freedom in the early modern period. Croot and Parker (1978, p. 40) show that by the seventeenth century the courts were limiting the lord’s ability to alter entry fees, but Brenner (1982, p. 86) notes that this occurred after a century of rising rents and fees. More significantly, the tendency of the courts to interpret copyhold “beyond the memory of man” as freehold was effectively countered by various forms of landlord pressure (Davis 1973, p. 196). By the seventeenth century, the normal form of land tenure was no longer copyhold but leasehold, usually with short leases.

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landed and merchant classes to fulfill many of the functions of government-features that doomed the Stuarts’ attempts to create an absolute monarchy. France, in contrast, became the very model of absolutism. The source of the problem, as one might suspect, is largely definitional. For Wallerstein, the strength of a state in the world economy is related to its ability to advance the interests of its capitalist classes at home and abroad. At one point, he even asserts that the Dutch state during its period of hegemony was strong enough to need only minimal mercantilist policies (Wallerstein 1980b, p. 60). This approach seems particularly susceptible to tautology: Core states must be strong; therefore, expansive or delimited military efforts, large or small state bureaucracies, control of or dependence on the dominant classes, and aggressive or innocuous mercantilism may all be signs of state strength. It would be more sensible to recognize that strong state structures tend to be developed when there is a felt need for them, and that in Europe this usually occurred when the countries involved were at a disadvantage in economic or political competition with their rivals.21 Even from Wallerstein’s account it is clear that what determined England’s eventual victory over France was essentially its greater “global reach” (Modelski 1978).England did not have a stronger state, just a stronger navy. The state-strength thesis thus boils down to the notion that England was able to pursue the oceanic option in a particularly single-minded fashion. France, in contrast, was ‘‘neither fish nor fowl”; divided between the oceanic bias of its prosperous Atlantic ports (and their hinterlands) and the continentalism of its central landmass, the French state equivocated and lost the struggle for hegemony in the world *lGarst (1985, p. 476) believes that Wallerstein does recognize this point in the second volume of The Modern World System by associating the possession of “extensive and centralized state apparatuses that are highly insulated from civil society” with weaker core states. The weakness referred to, however, is economic weaknessthat is, weakness in competing in the world economy-and it is confusing (at best) to refer to these apparatuses as signifying weak states. Several others, including Hall (1985a), Mann (1986), and Ashworth and Dandeker (1986), have made the more germane point that highly centralized imperial or “capstone” governments often have limited abilities to penetrate and control their societies. It is important to bear in mind, however, that a stronger state is not necessarily the same thing as a more effective state. A state structure with greater powers and resources at its command to control or eradicate societal divisions and overcome economic backwardness may still be less effective than a smaller, less powerful state that governs with and through the united support of its major social groups and benefits from a successful private economy, as was the case with England.

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economy. But why? If, as Wallerstein believes, the agro-industrial productive system of the core area of France was as efficient as England’s, or nearly so, and if the Atlantic economy was as profitable, or potentially as profitable, for France as it was for England, would not France’s greater size have determined the issue in its favor? Indeed, since France had between three and four times the population of its principal rival, England, it is difficult to see why any choice between oceanic or continental orientations was necessary at all: against such smaller foes, France could have pursued them both and still won. At the very heart of Wallerstein’s account is the idea that France suffered from divided orientations; yet this is fundamentally at odds with his belabored insistence on the approximate equality between England and France in capitalist development, a stance made necessary by his theoretical framework. It is, as Wallerstein senses, a key to understanding the differences between the economic and political developments of Britain and France, but it escapes his logic. The perceptive reader will have noted that we have circled around to a position roughly paralleling that with which we left off the argument in the previous section. The discussion of North’s approach ran into an impasse over the issue of why the French monarchy exempted its nobility from taxation and the English monarchy did not; the current discussion has abutted on an apparent inability to incorporate successfully the differing emphases placed by England and France on overseas commercial expansion into the framework of the nascent capitalist world economy. The two issues are not separate-quite the contrary. Nor are we back at the beginning. We have, in fact, already surveyed the principal ingredients needed to put together an account that can circumvent these obstacles; it is simply a matter of not controverting the obvious.

IV One aspect of the obvious that ought to be acknowledged is the necessary existence of some sort of connection between the obstacles noted thus far and elements of societal structure. If the ideological contexts within which the medieval monarchies of England and France had to legitimate their positions differed substantially, it is only reasonable to suppose that differences in the social, economic and/or political construction of these societies must have been involved. Similarly, the choice by English governments in the early modern era to pursue an oceanic policy more aggressively and more wholeheartedly than the French were willing to do must have had some material basis.

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The alternative, which is to suppose that ideas take hold within societies or their ruling elites because of their aesthetic or moral appeal alone, is attractive for humanistic reasons, but is defended by none of the competing interpretative streams examined in this study. The question is, what was this structural basis? A clue to this dilemma may be contained in Wallerstein's (1974b, p. 258) comment that the desire on the part of royal governments for stability and deference left them uneasy about the successes of the new capitalist classes during the boom of the sixteenth century. In a rational-choice sense, an alliance between monarchs and emerging bourgeois classes based upon an exchange of taxes and loans for protection and private property rights would have been attractive to both sides. In addition, it would have offered monarchs the opportunity to balance off the power of their aristocracies with a potentially coequal social force, as many interpretations of absolutism have suggested they sought to do. What, then, could have been the source of their uneasiness? Clearly, monarchs would have been uneasy if the forces of capitalism in some way threatened the social structures of which they, the monarchs, were the pinnacles. As suggested, bourgeois classes had reasons to consort with monarchical governments, but perhaps the threat they represented lay at a deeper level. In order to pursue this suggestion, we need to have some idea of the types of social structure that existed in early modern Europe. E. W. Fox (1971) has developed the interesting, if less than nove1,*2 thesis that societies throughout most of recorded history can be sorted into two basic types: commercial and administrative. The former, which generally took the form of the city-state, was territorially small and depended for its livelihood on commerce, which encouraged an open, cosmopolitan, bargaining ethos. Its land-based military establishment also tended to be minimal and often mercenary; its political form was usually republican; and its government oligarchical, drawn from wealthier merchant families. The administrative type, on the other hand, was organized for the protection (and perhaps extension) of the larger landmass upon which it depended; as a result, its social structure was status ridden and hierarchical, its government authoritarian, its ethos militaristic and aristocratic: "Fox (1971) found intellectual antecedents for his thesis that the two societal types coexisted in France in the works of Bodin and Montesquieu. Hintze (1975b), writing in the early twentieth century, developed a very similar dichotomy and traced it back to Spencer in the nineteenth century. Other threads of this idea are explored in Chapter 6.

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Whereas the commergants turned instinctively to negotiation and compromise, the administrators resorted to decrees and, if need be, judicial arbitration. The monarchy was still essentially a military organization operating through a central chain of command. . . . The elite of the realm was composed of courtiers, not citizens, and society was far more hierarchical than that of any commercial city. (Fox 1971, p. 66) This dichotomy captures particularly well the essence of the fundamental bifurcation in Renaissance Europe between the ‘‘dorsal spine” of commercial city-states extending the length of the trade route from northern Italy along the Rhine to Antwerp, and the larger proto-states of France, Austria, and Spain that surrounded it. Anderson, following Weber, argues that it was the emergence, in the interstices of the feudal patchwork, of autonomous cities organized along different, nonfeudal lines that initiated the rise of modern capitalism in the West; the flourishing city-states of the Renaissance represented the culmination of that development. The era of city-states was short-lived, however, as military superiority and interstate rivalry encouraged larger political units to infringe increasingly upon the autonomy of these smaller, more prosperous prey. Needless to say, the larger states were not blind to the advantages to be had in cultivating and promoting the activities of capitalists that were within, or could be brought within, their boundaries; the entrepreneurial momentum that had ignited in the city-states was never deliberately put out. But it does not necessarily follow that the states of early modern Europe were distinguished in this respect solely by the extent of their exposure to the rising Atlantic economy, as Fox implied, for the effects of the other profound social transformations occurring at the time must be taken into account. The necessity of dealing in some satisfactory fashion with the Reformation constitutes, to my mind, a second brush with the obvious. The postulated role of Reformationary beliefs in the rise of modern capitalism has stimulated a long-standing debate whose inconclusiveness was outlined earlier in this chapter. Two points stand out from that discussion: (1) the general congruence of Protestantism with the centers of economic development in the seventeenth century, and (2) the fact that not all Protestant, or even Calvinist, lands partook of those developments (e.g., Scotland). To these observations, a third may now be added: Calvinist societies did not, in general, produce their own capitalist entrepreneurs. What the leading financiers and entrepreneurs of that century had in common, as Trevor-Roper (1968) demonstrated, was not that they came from Calvinist societies but rather that they came from one particular Calvinist society: the United Provinces. More importantly, they or their fathers had been immigrants to that

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society, A large number had come from Antwerp and Liege, but there were also south Germans, mainly from Augsburg, as well as northern Italians and Jews from Lisbon and Seville. There is nothing random in this mixture. The places of origin of these groups were none other than the leading centers of European capitalism in the previous century: Italy and its “northern depot,” Flanders, which dominated the cloth trade; Augsburg , center of the middle-EuroTean extractive industry (developed with the profits from the cloth industry); and Lisbon (later Seville), commanding the commerce with the new world (TrevorRoper 1968, pp. 20-21). Why did these groups emigrate? In Trevor-Roper’s view, religion was certainly involved, but not in the way Weber hypothesized. Weber’s emphasis on the key doctrine of the “calling” is a correct one, but what he failed to realize is that this concept, far from originating with Calvin, “occurs constantly in the works of Erasmus, who regularly extols the real inner piety of the native layman in his calling above the complacency of the indolent monks who assume a greater holiness because of the costume they wear or the ‘mechanical devotions’ which they practise” (Trevor-Roper 1968, p. 25). Erasmus was (and remained) a Catholic, and his more primitive, more personal approach to religion, critical of the costly external trappings of institutional religion, was tolerated for a very long time within the broad embrace of the church. It became, in fact, a spiritual sine qua non of the commercial city-states of the Renaissance era, where social standing depended more on performance than on station, and where capital and capitalists could be expected to react quickly if the financial and ethical burdens of church and state became uncompetitive. With the Lutheran revolt, however, the church could no longer afford such laxity: attitudes that had been permitted for generations suddenly became heretical. Nevertheless, capitalists did not leave the territories of Spanish control or influence for reasons of belief alone; they left because a new type of society and state had been imposed, one in which an expanding and therefore even more burdensome church had allied with a growing and similarly burdensome absolutist state to destroy the society of the Renaissance and, with it, the threat of defiance and rebellion it seemed to encourage. Together, in reaction or perhaps overreaction to the Protestant foe, the forces of church and state erected, whenever possible, a social order dominated and sapped by their own powerful, costly bureaucratic structures, a social order that drove the capitalist economic activity of the Renaissance era to freer, less taxed lands (mainly the United Provinces, but also England) and that repressed the creative, secular intellectual life of the Renaissance in favor of a

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mystical, intolerant, and dogmatic blend of religion and divine monarchy . 2 3 The dichotomies of Fox and Trevor-Roper were developed independently of each other on the basis of distinct explanatory mechanisms (the Atlantic trade versus the Counter-Reformation), yet it is remarkable how well they dovetail. It is surely no coincidence that the emerging Protestant powers were located on the sea and were heavily involved in overseas trade, a traditional orientation of city-states. Nor could it be coincidence that the period of unrest in the mid-seventeenth century enters into the two interpretations in highly similar fashions. For Fox (1971, p. 63), the series of revolts between 1640 and 1688 were protests by commercially oriented port towns (Barcelona, Naples, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and London) against the encroachment of the administrative state. For Trevor-Roper (1965, p. 58), the “general crisis” of the period consisted of a reaction against the costly waste of the royal courts and administrations and in favor of a return to “responsible mercantilist policies” to cope with the trade slump that began in 1620.24 Indeed, the switchover of European economic activity from the Rhine corridor to the Atlantic communities is at the heart of both interpretations. But, as Trevor-Roper showed, it was the emergt-.ice of the Counter-Reformation state and the emigration it induced that provided the dynamic ingredient in the first in23Trevor-Roper was a little ambiguous as to the causes for the emigration, at one point emphasizing that they were expelled, at another underlining the disincentives to remaining in Counter-Reformation states. The essential point, however, is the incompatibility between capitalist activities and the Counter-Reformation societal type. Mann (1986, p. 466) has recently reinforced this idea by arguing for a basic tension between (1) church authority and the decentralized decision making of markets, (2) fixed status orderings legitimated by the church and a status ordering based on property, and (3) the social duty to be “luxurious” and the need of capitalists to reinvest surplus. Incidentally, England was not always less taxed; although per capita taxation in England was only about one-quarter lo one-third that of France in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century, it had risen to twice that of France (Kiser 1986-87, p. 280). By that time, however, the British economy could support the relatively high levels of taxation without adverse effects. 24Goldstone (1983, 1986) has advanced the thesis that it was rapid population increase between 1540 and 1640 that ultimately set off these crises. This would explain why disturbances occurred not just in Fox’s port towns but also in the Ukraine and Bohemia. Nevertheless, as Goldstone (1986, p. 312) himself notes, this does not explain the nature of the conflicts, nor why they succeeded in some places and failed in others. As I argue later, the answer for the English case lies in the greater development of commercialized agriculture-Goldstone points out that it was extremely widespread in England before 1640-and in the landed elite’s consequent lesser dependence on the crown to maintain incomes.

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stance, one of the keys to understanding why certain coastal states, most notably Holland, were better able to exploit the opportunities of expanding overseas trade than were others. The strong resemblance between the Calvinistic ethos Weber identified in Holland and England and the Erasmian perspective that flourished in the city-states of the Renaissance was therefore more than a reflection of similar economic orientations; it was to a large extent a direct transplantation, as much so as were the commercial instruments and institutions that facilitated the rising economic prowess of the Protestant powers. The basis of this interpretation in the shift in economic activities from Italy and the dorsal spine to northern Europe and the Atlantic/ Baltic trades also produces several points of agreement with Wallerstein’s thesis. Both Trevor-Roper and Wallerstein allow that the Reformation represented a movement of independence on the part of the northern tier of Europe, which had chafed under the Hapsburg thrust for European domination in the sixteenth century. Both note that the capitalists of that period were essentially cosmopolitan, willing to transfer themselves, their workers, and their capital from one political jurisdiction to another as profit opportunities dictated (Trevor-Roper 1968, p. 31; Wallerstein 1974b, p. 146). Consequently, both concede that Protestantism became associated with the forces of capitalist expansion and opposed, for material as well as doctrinal reasons, the impositions of monarchs and popes. Where the divergence occurs is over the meaning of these points: For Wallerstein (1974b, p. 152), the association of Protestantism with capitalism was largely the result of ‘‘a series of intellectually accidental historical developments”; for Trevor-Roper, a fundamental issue of social structure-the very form of society itself-underlay the religious dimension. The essence of this difference is epitomized in Trevor-Roper’s (1968, p. SO) comment, “A capitalist society invests in capitalism, a bureaucratic society in bureaucracy. ” Where mercantile pursuits offer the prospect of social prestige, moral legitimacy and material wealth, capital and talent can be expected to stay with them. Where incentives are either diminished by burdensome tax and tithe structures or undermined by the higher status (and tax exemptions) accorded state offices, land ownership, and titles, capitalist,s will either emigrate to more conducive socioeconomic climates or adapt by transferring their resources and their energies to these more valued domains. After all, “under the pashalik of the prince, officers would never starve: merchants might’’ (p. 36). Adjustments in the structure of incentives and in socially approved preferences thus engendered profoundly different societal outcomes.

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One aspect of those different outcomes, the important one from the perspective of this chapter, lies in the domain of economic performance. This brings us to a third confrontation with the obvious: France and England differed fundamentally in terms of economic development. Admittedly, there is some room for ambiguity on this point. Trevor-Roper noted that France resisted, for political reasons, the Spanish-inspired Counter-Reformation for quite some time; certainly France did not share the striking economic decline of Spain and Italy in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, quite apart from the data on per capita incomes cited earlier, there were unmistakable signs of economic backwardness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France suffered repeatedly from famines and plagues, so much so that its population at the end of the seventeenth century was probably no greater than at the beginning. England, despite visitations of the plague, reportedly managed a quite respectable population increase of perhaps 25 percent during the same period (North and Thomas 1973, p. 105).25 The initiatives of Colbert did a great deal to build up France’s internal communications, industry, commerce, and naval forces in the mid-seventeenth century, but his strategy of reinforcing the guild regulation of economic activity (just as it was dying out in England) in order to shore up state finances must surely have limited the mobility of capital and labor and discouraged innovation. Guild regulations were relaxed in the latter eighteenth century and may not have been rigorously enforced for some time beforehand (Crouzet 1967, p. 157), the sale of offices tapered off, and economic growth did accelerate, but there are strong indications that the upper limits to growth within the framework of the Old Regime had been reached by the 1770s as population growth once again outstripped agricultural production increases and industry went into decline (Davis 1973, pp. 289, 304; Skocpol 1979, p. 56). Although it makes sense to distinguish between the economies of northern, southern, and western France, the north could not have been on the same economic footing as the Netherlands or England. As de Vries (1976, p. 251) pointed out, it experienced the most frequent and harshest subsistence crises and remained tied to a precapitalist form of agrarian organization throughout this period. Outside the western ports, France’s capitalism was preponderantly of the proprietory or rentier sort, with its ultimate reward the 25Wallerstein (1980b, p. 76), who does not cite North and Thomas on this point, is only willing to acknowledge that England’s population may have increased modestly in the seventeenth century. As for France, he sees consensus on the idea that population remained stable during the entire period from 1500 to 1750.

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establishment of a fixed income, secured by land, bonds, offices, or monopolies, upon which it would be possible to “vivre noblement” (Crouzet 1967, p. 158). Its leading figure was not the merchant banker or the entrepreneur but the tax farmer, who thrived because of the backward state of financial systems and the incomplete monetarization of rural economies (de Vries 1976, pp. 233-34). The lag of French financial institutions behind British ones of perhaps a hundred years, a gap not closed until the late nineteenth century, itself testifies to France’s inferior standard of living and level of development; so do the direction of technology transfer and the unanimous opinion of contemporary travelers (Kindleberger 1984). France did have the option and the example of a more successful economic structure; yet it remained, in Anderson’s (1974, p. 59) words, “basically fixated on the traditional contest for land to the end.” Certainly, one can point to the geographic factor as an explanation: France was a large territorial state dependent upon its land forces for protection from dangerous rivals and its agricultural base for subsistence. The cult of aristocracy, with its preference for well-defined status barriers and its aversion to upward social mobility, clearly survives better where military protection, the aristocracy’s traditional preserve, remains the dominant focus of state activities. Internal division becomes riskier in such settings, and if religious dissent is its primary expression, it is natural that the state should enlist the assistance of the church in imposing control on society, even if the price is some loss of economic vigor. The exemption of nobles from direct taxation and the inability to unite behind a policy of aggressive navalism and colonialism-the two fixed points upon which the search for an adequate explanation has been hinged-follow logically as continuations of feudal aristocratic principles.26 Indeed, the explanation would be totally satisfactory-were it not for the fact that England was not a city-state. I have avoided referring to this aspect of the obvious in order to pursue the present line of reasoning as far as it would go. In a negative sense it has gone quite far. It is now reasonably clear why capitalism could not flourish in societies that succumbed to the Counter-Reformation; moreover, the attraction of the Netherlands as a center for capitalist immigration can also be understood, since it consisted more of a loose confederation of city-states than a territorial state-albeit 26Tocqueville (1955 [1835], p. 99) pointed out that the exemption of aristocrats from the taille was originally justified as a fair exchange for the costs imposed on them of having to equip themselves for military service.

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one wealthy enough to establish and defend its own independence. But why England? The explanation cannot be reduced to the effects of the immigration of Flemish weavers or Huguenot merchants; even if it could, we would still want to know why they chose England. The wool trade and the stimulus it gave to the early commercialization of English society are often cited as the primum mobile, but these surely can be no more than an intermediate factor: virtually any territory in western Europe could have raised sheep. Moreover, the wool trade arose during a period when English society was intensely feudal and state policy heavily oriented toward overseas military exploits. Something more fundamental must have been involved. In order to see what that might be, let us return to first principles. There can be no doubt that, whatever England became in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its medieval existence was characterized overwhelmingly by the production of food on self-sufficient manors. The penetration of market forces was not significantly greater in England in the thirteenth century than in France or any other agriculturally based feudal kingdom. It is in the realm of agrarian relations, therefore, that we must look for any initial advantages that England may have had.27North and Thomas (1973, p. 64) argued that the early recognition that the King’s Court had jurisdiction over free men constituted a major development in property rights unique to England, but it is difficult to see their point, given the evidence that de facto ownership of land by peasants (that is, private property rights) was probably more advanced in France by the time that renewed population growth had expanded the market for agricultural commodities in the sixteenth century. Rrenner, as we have seen, turns North’s thesis on its head by arguing that the critical factor was the English crown’s failure to gain jurisdiction over the more numerous unfree peasants or villeins. This allowed rents to be raised, inefficient peasants to be forced off the land, and tenant farming for profit to become the dominant agrarian orientation. The objection advanced by Wallerstein (1980b, p. 90) and Croot and Parker (1978, p. 44) that large estates had also emerged in significant numbers in northern France by the seventeenth century does contain a certain validity, for high taxes and the efforts of landlords, especially bourgeois landlords, to revive feudal obligations that had 27The focus on the countryside rather than the towns constitutes an important break with the Weberian tradition, which sees urban life as the crucible of modern capitalism and therefore must search for some extra factor-in Weber’s case, worldly asceticism-to explain how the unmodern economic life of medieval towns could have given birth to modern capitalist societies.

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fallen into desuetude did cost many peasants their properties. However, the evidence also indicates that the tenant farmers who managed these large estates merely sublet them to peasants who continued the same methods of cultivation (de Vries 1976, p. 69). Given the population pressure on the available supply of land, this strategy represented the easiest and probably the most effective means of increasing revenues, at least in the short run. The essential point Wallerstein (1974b, p. 247) admits: For agriculture to become market responsive, not only must feudal land tenure systems be eliminated, but the peasant proprietor must go as well. The identification of the English crown’s failure to protect villeins from the predations of landlords as the central factor in the greater responsiveness of English agriculture to market incentives is a valuable contribution of the Marxist school of thought; from it follows the tacit alliance of aristocrat and bourgeois behind the fuller development of private property rights that almost all theorists identify as the distinguishing characteristic of England’s development. Nevertheless, it too must inevitably beg the question, why England? Here we necessarily tread on very slippery ground, but it is perhaps fitting that an exploration of so many explanations and considerations should coiiclude on a tentative note. Bois (1978, p. 65), following Bloch, has argued that England’s advantage lay in having a less advanced feudalism in which the breaking up of demesnes or the erosion of seigneurial levies had not proceeded as far in the late Middle Ages. Although large demesnes were more common in England, the point does not directly address the issue of peasant property itself. To deal with this issue, Brenner (1982, pp. 53-65) stresses England’s advances in the political realm. In sharp contrast to France, England inherited from her Norman conquerors a centralized political organization characterized by high aristocratic solidarity and considerable authority for the ruler. These traits were already present in Normandy before 1066, but the need to maintain control over an alien population upon whom higher levies had been imposed gave the Normans ample reason to perpetuate them in England after the Conquest. One necessary and important adjunct of this intra-aristocratic solidarity was the willingness to allow the crown to adjudicate disputes between free men; another was the exclusion of villeins from the king’s justice, which gave the lords the fruit of their victory, the freedom to exploit their villeins as they pleased, France was faced with the opposite circumstances: a proliferation of competing feudal jurisdictions, unchecked by ties of aristocratic solidarity, which provided peasants with a powerful bargaining weapon vis-8-vis their lords, namely, the possibility of flight if exactions be-

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came uncompetitive. For this reason, the French nobility needed a strong royal authority to fulfill the surplus-extraction function, a weakness that the crown exploited all the more by defending peasant tenures and undermining seigneurial courts. The inability of lords to extract peasant surpluses as effectively as in England also permitted higher population densities in France, making especially difficult the enclosure of common land, the introduction of agricultural specialization, or the development of animal husbandry (which Brenner, like Wallerstein, emphasizes). It made little sense in this situation to tax nobles in order to build up royal power, because the principal advantage of the absolute monarchy, from their point of view, lay in the incomes it could provide them; and their support, or at least acquiescence, was needed. The English aristocracy, in contrast, did not depend on the state for its livelihood; it preferred a cheap state, one that confined itself to assuring order and protecting private property. Significantly, when war with France necessitated higher taxes, it was the landowning class that imposed them on itself. From these various circumstances-ruling-class cohesion, aristocratic control of land use, and low population density-it seems reasonable to conclude that when the opportunities for profit through the production of agricultural commodities, including wool, for the market became apparent, English landowners would have been in a particularly good position to take full advantage of them. The English Parliament, a locus for consultation among the crown, the aristocracy, and the wool merchants, naturally reflected their complementary property rights interests, as North points out. Neither territorial integrity nor aristocratic privilege required a large standing army or the bureaucracy to support it, but a navy could bring benefits; it is, as Anderson observes, the normal instrument of commercial interests. The Reformation in England may have begun as a foreign policy matter, a reaction against Spanish influence in the church and in Europe, but England’s ruling class had no need for the machinery or the ideology of the Counter-Reformation state in any case; France, with as much or more hostility to Spain but a different property rights structure, less aristocratic cohesion, and a greater exposure to invasion, did. On all of these points the principal theorists discussed in this chapter are in agreement. Taken together, however, these facts shape the contours of the evolution of two profoundly different trajectories, an evolution for which neither the differences in economic ethos (Weber) or property rights (North), nor the imperatives of aristocratic defense (Anderson) or overseas mercantile expansion (Wallerstein), by themselves provide an adequate account.

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The divergent trajectories followed by England and France may be characterized in economic terms as commercial versus agrarian; in political terms, as pluralistic versus monolithic; in terms of social structure, as fluid or open versus stratified or closed. Culturally, a contrast in fundamental values may be drawn between an orientation toward material accumulation and an orientation toward distinction, military glory, and lavish consumption; from Chapter 1, a contrast between pragmatic and ideological modes of thought and behavior may also be suspected. The trajectories are, in other words, distinct configurations or societal types, involving essentially different arrangements in structures, values, and norms over most significant areas of social life. What has not been established, however, is that the cultural aspects of the configuration possess any degree of autonomy from the more concrete circumstances that gave birth to the trajectories or to the structural features that, for all we know, may sustain them. This point is crucial, for without it, the broader characterization outlined here of the different paths followed by England and France might still be fitted within a more encompassing Marxist or rational-choice interpretation. This issue comes to the fore in the next two chapters, which deal with Britain’s economic decline and the bases for political support in the British polity.

Chapter 4

Did Britain Change? An Inquiry into the Causes of Economic Decline

T

he debate over the causes of economic decline in Britain has been vigorous, protracted, and fascinating, and shows no sign of resolution. Although some factual matters do seem to be broadly accepted, others that might seem amenable to consensus, such as the approximate time at which the British economy ceased to perform well, continue to elicit controversy. At the level of explanations, the situation is even more confused. Economic, political, educational, and attitudinal considerations vie with one another in the marketplace of academic opinion, and views differ accordingly on what the decline ultimately consisted of and how it might be reversed. What is clear is that the most general consensus is a negative one; it holds that the causal factors favored among the general public and the world of popular journalism-the burdens of the welfare state, the recalcitrance of the trade unions, the high rates of taxation, the low levels of domestic investment-are erroneous or inadequate in themselves. But from this point the paths to truth are multitudinous and diverse. At the roots of this diversity, it seems to me, lie three fundamental issues. The first is the aforementioned issue of timing. Can the economic decline of Britain be treated essentially as a post-World War I1 phenomenon, or do its origins more properly lie in circumstances that occurred much earlier, say in the latter part of the nineteenth century? Those who place causal emphasis on the errors of government policy tend to favor the short-term option, whereas the longer view clearly necessitates a search for more profound and pervasive defects. In general these have been of two sorts, which raises the second issue: Did the British economy begin its decline because of a withering away of the “industrial spirit” or some kindred cultural or attitudinal deficiencies in late-Victorian Britain, or can a purely economic explanation, such as the nature of profitable business or investment opportunities in that era, alone or primarily account for it? Finally, and at a 96

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more fundamental level of causation suggested mainly by Marxist scholars, are the sources of decline traceable to the persistence of a preindustrial mercantile ethos and social structure unsuited to modern industrial capitalism, or on the contrary, is the root cause a fundamental change in the nature of British society during the nineteenth century that rendered it quite unlike the aggressive, open, and mercantile society of the eighteenth century? In short, did Britain change at some crucial point, or fail to do so when it needed to, and thereby engender its own decline? This listing of the issues follows an order of logical priority, but it differs from the order of importance they have been allotted in the literature. Without doubt, the second issue-whether the decline was caused by attitudinal or economic factors-has provoked the most enduring and extensive scholarly attention. In a sense this is regrettable, for the interpretation one gives to the surprisingly complicated first issue profoundly conditions the manner and extent to which one credits the alternative explanations offered in the second. In this chapter the imbalance is addressed by devoting as much consideration to the timing issue as to the other, but the discussion of both issues ultimately points to one basic conclusion: It is neither the first nor the second issue but the third-least debated of all in the literature-that holds the key to the entire matter.

I Let us begin where the matter is usually begun-with the loss of Britain’s mid-nineteenth-century economic supremacy. There is little dispute that Britain’s industrial and commercial domination had been considerably eroded by the first decade of the twentieth century. According to Kirby (1981, pp. 139-41), Britain’s industrial production between 1870 and 1914 was increasing at an annual rate half that of its principal rivals, the United States and Germany. Growth rates of industrial productivity declined markedly in the two decades before World War I, trailing those in Germany and the United States by even greater margins. The increasing trade imbalance after 1870 rendered the nation ever more dependent upon earnings from City of London financial services, shipping, and foreign investments, as Britain’s export growth also lagged behind that of its principal competitors. Britain’s share of the world market in manufactured goods fell dramatically from 41.4 percent to 32.5 percent between 1880 and 1899. Britain, which led the world in iron and steel production up to the 1890s, was producing not much mare than one-half as much as the

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United States in 1910. In the newer chemical and electrical industries, its relative position was far worse. Overall, Britain had fallen from first place among industrial powers to third, as first the United States and then Germany caught up and surpassed it. To some extent, it was inevitable that British industrial supremacy should suffer with the rise of new industrial powers in the late nineteenth century. It is not immediately clear, however, that the industrialization of these other nations needed to have left Britain behind. Previous capital investment in plants and equipment in Britain may have constituted an obstacle to the conversion to more productive methods and machinery, but as Hobsbawm (1969, p. 182) noted, this cannot explain the lack of success in industries in which Britain was not an early leader. Moreover, a mature industrial nation possesses advantages in terms of accumulated technical expertise and financial resources which could have offset any disadvantages in this domain (Kirby 1981, p. 6). It is also possible that certain characteristics of early industrialism-its creation by ‘‘practical men” lacking in scientific training (Allen 1976, pp. 47-48; Barnett 1972, p. 94), its fairly small capital requirements (Hall 1986, p. 38), its proliferation of small firms (Elbaum and Lazonick 1986, p. 15), its reliance on merchant firms to handle foreign sales (Aldcroft 1981, pp. 22-24; Hall 1986, p. 43), and, more controversially, its craft-based union structure2 (Elbaum and Lazonick 1986, p. 4; Hall 1986, p. 44; Kilpatrick and Lawson 1980, pp. 86-87)-did leave British industry and banking ill prepared to accommodate the greater research, investment, scientific management, and salesmanship requirements of the emerging chemical, electrical, and motor industries. Nevertheless, this does not explain why the pressures of competition did not stimulate the necessary adaptations. Great success at one level of technology does not invariably induce tardiness in developing and adopting the next level, as the Japanese are busy demonstrating today. Those who would argue for a purely economic explanation for Britain’s relative loss of economic position must, therefore, provide something more. One additional factor that has been proposed from time to ‘This thesis is most closely associated with Nicholas Kaldor (1966, 1977). For a strong critique, see A. Peacock (1980), as well as Kirby (1981, pp. 5-6). ’Aaronovitch (1983, p. 73) and Coates (1983, pp. 51-52) maintain that British unions were too weak in this period to have inhibited economic growth. Fine and Hams (1985, p. 34) argue that the fragmented, craft-based union structure should actually have been conducive to economic growth, because firms with stronger unions would have had a competitive disadvantage and eventually would have been forced out of business.

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time is the rising level of tariff protection adopted in the latter nineteenth century by Britain’s chief competitors (Chase-Dunn 1982; Eatwell 1982; Kaldor 1966, 1977). It now appears, however, that no significant increase in the level of protectionism occurred within the freer trade area established by the commercial treaties of the 1860s (Stein 1984, pp. 367-73). Although higher tariffs were introduced in France, Germany, and elsewhere in those years, they were intended mainly to induce competitors to make concessions in new trade agreements, which generally kept tariffs at or below former level^.^ A more promising suggestion is that British industry’s loss of innovating and expanding thrust can be related to the increasing orientation of economic activity away from industrial production and towards financial services and capital exportation. Opinions differ as to the nature of this phenomenon: Rosecrance (1979, pp. 215-17), for example, tends to regard the issue as one of the choice of bases upon which to maintain an international economic empire; Wallerstein (1980b, p. 39) sees instead a natural tendency for the structure of any hegemonic economy to evolve from productive supremacy to commercial dominance to eventual acquiescence in a rentier existence. What is clear, in any case, is that the effects on Britain of this course were in many ways quite reassuring. The rising industrial prowess of Germany and the United States in the late nineteenth century, far from threatening Britain’s economic security, fostered the establishment of a mutually beneficial triangular trade pattern in which Britain ran a visible trade deficit (mainly due to imports of advanced industrial products) with Germany and the United States, which increasingly found it necessary to import raw materials from the less developed world, including the British Empire, itself a prime importer of British manufactures. Britain provided the finance and shipping as well as the international currency for this trade pattern and, in addition, eagerly invested its earnings in underdeveloped countries and colonies, thereby generating an added source of income for itself and tying those markets to its exports. However much industrial leadership had been ceded to Germany and the United States in this period, Britain’s overall economic performance remained respectable. “As her industry sagged,” noted Hobsbawm (1969, p. 151), “her finance triumphed, her services as shipper, trader, and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable. ” Moreover, even for those sagging industries, it 3As for the United States, it was never part of the freer trade area and had been protected by high tariffs since the 1820s.

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still remained possible to make reasonable profits in the old ways by exploiting less developed markets. From a strict business point of view, it made sense to persist in doing so, for it “provided a cheaper and more convenient alternative to modernisation-for a while” (p. 191). Thus, Britain continued to rely heavily on the staple export industries of iron and steel, coal, and textiles long after Germany had risen to industrial prominence on the strength of its chemical and electrical industries and the United States had revolutionized transportation on land and in the air by means of the internal-combustion engine. The future belonged to these newer industries, however, and Britain’s success as a provider of financial and other services could not substitute for the relative decline in living standards that industrial backwardness ultimately entailed. Hobsbawn (1969, p. 187) defended this interpretation of Britain’s industrial decline with the comment that economic explanations of economic phenomena, where available, should be preferred to sociological ones, This perspective has not been universally welcomed, however. Weiner (1981, p. 170), for one, argues that “the question of the causes of British economic decline remains beyond the grasp of the economists.” In place of economic explanations, Weiner (p. 1) proposes the thesis that the decline is rooted in the emergence in the latter nineteenth century of ‘‘a cultural cordon sanitaire encircling the forces of economic development-technology, industry and commerce. ” The theme is, to be sure, neither original nor unexplored. Most authorities, even Hobsbawm (1969, pp. 168-70), admit that one can find ample evidence of the existence of attitudes among the middle and upper classes of that era that slighted the process of material enrichment. But, for Weiner, these values formed part of a pervasive culture that was both nonindustrial and anti-industrial, It was nonindustrial in the sense that it tended to uphold the outlook and life-style of the leisured gentleman, rather than that of the rugged entrepreneur, as worthy of emulation by the Victorian middle classes. Education or training was generally disparaged to the extent that it appeared not to have any practical or vocational relevance; and science and technology, with their connotations of‘ narrowness and utility, yielded under the impact of public school and university reforms to the broader, humanistic formation of the student nurtured in the classics. It was anti-industrial in the sense that it reflected an unease over the course that industrialism had taken and glorified occupational pursuits to the extent that they took one away from industrial and even materialistic concerns. The life of the countryside, the “England is a garden” myth, was held up as a counterideal to the industrial squalor and the

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gray, dehumanizing city life of this, the most urbanized and industrialized of societies. In contradistinction to the popular image of nineteenth-century Britain as a society where the industrial entrepreneur ruled supreme, industrialists were held in exceptionally low esteem and exhibited less self-confidence and pride in their activities than one would have expected from a supposedly dominant economic class. For themselves or their children, they dreamed of escape from involvement with industry as soon as the accumulation of wealth and the acceptance of their social superiors made it practicable to do so. In the meantime, stability rather than risk, effortless survival rather than fevered, ambition-soaked activity, and being the right sort of person rather than doing the exceptional thing were valued. ‘‘By modelling themselvesin varying proportions-upon civil servants, professional men, and men of landed leisure, industrialists found acceptance at the upper reaches of British society. Thus, the famed ‘Establishment’ and its consensus was [sic] created” (Weiner 1981, p. 159)-and economic decline begun. The reluctance to espouse the means necessary to compete successfully in industrialism’s second revolution may have reflected more than just a preference for the classical education of the gentleman or a feeling that certain aspects of industrialism were less than totally agreeable. At a more fundamental level, it has been suggested that a distaste for change in general may have been involved. A belief that industry needed to be controlled, not encouraged, was the underlying motivation for the introduction of limited liability in 1862, according to Perkin (1969, p. 443), and factory acts and other legislation designed to limit industrial abuses and business malpractices proliferated after midcentury . Among businessmen, defensiveness rather than adaptability became the central characteristic of economic activity; by 1914, noted Barnett (1972, p. 89), the industrial system presented “a positively medieval picture of complicated private and corporate customs and privileges hardened by time into absolute right legalistically defended.” Meanwhile, there were the fruits of the first industrial revolution to be enjoyed: The area of greatest opportunity for new men lay in catering to the needs of a long-enriched business class freed of the habit and necessity of abstinence, of a labor force enjoying for the first time an income above the minimum of decency, of a growing rentier class reposing on the returns from home and overseas investments. (Landes 1969, p. 339)

Social emulation, complacency, and the desire to enjoy the returns of past economic success thus blended with feelings of distaste for the

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effects of industrial transformation to produce an ethos distinctly hostile to industrialism and entrepreneurialism. As a consequence, the objective of making money for its own sake came to take on a decidedly negative connotation; it seemed to lack social purpose (Coleman 1973, p. 114; Mackintosh 1977, p. 20). It is not surprising in this light that business in Britain could have been effectively “colonized” by government, in particular by the permanent civil service. “Public interest, the sense of the community at large,” Nett1 (1965, p. 37) argued, “is their peculiar property, goes naturally with the job, but it does not go naturally with business-indeed the rugged entrepreneur is almost by definition barred from suffusion by it.” The result was the adoption by the socially inferior business community of civil service procedures and orientations characterized above all by restraint, moderation, consensus, and concern for the public interest that even today inhibit aggressive, innovative entrepreneurship.

There can be as little doubt of the existence and perhaps even the prevalence of this complex of antientrepreneurial attitudes among sections, at least, of the late-nineteenth-century British middle and upper classes as there is of the fact that industry on the whole was profitable in that era. But which factor-the economic conjuncture or the cultural value system-was the one that led to decline? Many observers have pointed out that Victorian gentlemen were just as content to make money as anyone else; could it really be that they simply backed the wrong horses for perfectly sensible reasons, just as Germans backed the right horses for what Landes (1969, p. 355) concluded were “wrong, or more exactly, irrelevant reasons”? If, on the other hand, one wishes to credit the attitudinal explanation, one has to wonder why a nation that had pioneered the agricultural and industrial revolutions and had been an economic forerunner for centuries should have come to adopt in the nineteenth century, at the very culmination of its economic success, a cultural complex so disdainful of that achievement and inimical to its furtherance. It is hardly satisfactory to conclude that both the cultural and the economic factors existed simultaneously through some sort of unfortunate coincidence. One possible way to establish priority between these two types of cause is by means of the time factor. It is clear that for the antientrepreneurial value system to have been at the source of economic decline, then evidence of that decline should be forthcoming in the period when those values allegedly assumed their ascendancy, that is, be-

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tween 1870 and 1914. For the economic conjuncture explanation, however, this need not be the case. The notion that economic decline resulted from reliance on industries doomed to eventual decay is consistent not only with the idea that it remained economically rational (i.e., profitable) in the short run for Britain to continue to depend on these industries before 1914 and concentrate her investments abroad but, more significantly, with the idea that the late Victorian economy was functioning as well as it could at the time. This position has been advanced most vigorously by McCloskey (1970, p. 459), who found in this period “an economy not stagnating but growing as rapidly as permitted by the growth of its resources and the effective exploitation of the available technology. ” Concerning resources, McCloskey found no evidence that the available labor supply was not fully exploited; unemployment was low in late-Victorian Britain and availability of excess labor from the land was by that time quite limited. As for capital, it is true that a great deal of it was invested abroad even when, as in 1911-13, the average return on capital at home was twice as great (10 percent versus 5 p e r ~ e n t ) . ~ The differential can be accounted for, however, by the fact that foreign investment was of a different kind, mainly highly secure bonds rather than equities. Moreover, the preference for foreign bonds offering security, rather than high returns, does not in itself establish that British investors were especially conservative and risk-adverse as a group, as many have suggested; rather it simply means that it was the more conservative among them who directed their capital abroad. In any case, McCloskey calculated that if all the capital invested abroad had been brought back to Britain, it would have raised the annual growth rate of income in those years only slightly from 2.4 percent to 2.58 percent. Finally, industrial productivity in Britain grew at about the U.S. rate during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, and ceased to grow (in fact, declined) only in the 1900s. This, McCloskey pointed out, was an Edwardian, not a Victorian, failure, and it took place when industrial production growth rates were improving and exports were increasing rapidly. These conclusions have been challenged from a number of perspectives. Kennedy (1974, 1976) argued that the propensity of British 4Whether foreign investment over the entire 1870-1914 period was more profitable than domestic investment is unclear; Edelstein (1976, 1982) found that it was, but Kennedy (1976, p. 175) questioned the representativeness of the sample of assets Edelstein studied, and Pollard (1987, pp. 497-98) challenged a number of assurnptions involved in the calculations.

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investors to prefer safe investments was so great that even in periods when overseas investment declined, domestic investment did not immediately pick up the slack and substantial depressions resulted. This reluctance to invest at home in turn raised the costs of domestic capital formation. To make matters worse, the exportation of capital encouraged the overconcentration of British industry on a limited range of rather “rudimentary” products that were in demand by the less developed economies that were absorbing British investment funds. Using what he believed was a more reasonable estimate of the capital-output ratio than McCloskey ’s and assuming both a saving rate equivalent to the U.S. one and higher population growth (due to greater economic opportunities), Kennedy (1974, pp. 418-20) calculated that the British growth rate could have been 3.54 percent per annum, considerably higher than the actual rate of 2.4 percent. If Britain had made the same commitment of resources to the new industries that the United States did, per capita incomes in 1913 would have been 55 percent higher than they were (Kennedy 1976, p. 183). Even using McCloskey’s own econometric model and assuming a domestic investment rate similar to Germany’s, Crafts (1979, p. 533) determined that Britain’s level of consumption could have been 25 percent higher by 1911. McCloskey apparently has little patience for these objections. In his view, “By keeping savings at home, the British people could have had two Forth Bridges, two Bakerloo lines, two London housing stocks, two Port Sunlights. The common sense of this piece of political economy is, of course, that the rate of return would have been driven down to nil” (McCloskey 1979, pp. 539-40). Pollard (1987, pp. 502-4) has pointed out, however, that this argument assumes a constant technology, ignoring the fact that investment often results in the adoption of new technology; Temin (1987, pp. 456-57) adds that the Geimans and the Americans invested far more in their domestic economies in this period without driving rates of return to zero or anything like it. Crafts (1985, pp. 159-60) finds “cold comfort” in the fact that industrial productivity fell behind most noticeably during Edward’s, not Victoria’s, reign. The important point is that developments in science and technology were enabling the United States, already ahead of Britain in productivity, to boost its productivity growth rate significantly. He concludes that the real failure of the pre-1914 economy was the failure to take advantage of the growth potential that investment in science and education held in this era of the “second industrial revolution.”5 ’McCloskey (1979, p . 541) made a second rejoinder, which is that for the foreign bondholder earning 5 percent to have become the domestic equity holder earning

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Although the thesis that the pre- 1914 British economy was living up to its full potential is questionable, the idea that there has been a persistent decline consistent with the thesis of a failure of values can also be challenged on the basis of the post-1914 record. The interwar period has the reputation of having been economically quite disastrous, with persistently high unemployment, declining staple industries, and large visible trade deficits. Yet Aldcroft (1966, p. 299) found that the 1920s were also years of “fairly rapid economic progress” in which rising industrial productivity and investment in new consumer industries laid the basis for future economic growth. Elsewhere, Aldcroft (1966, p. 313) pointed out that between 1929 and 1938, when serious depression afflicted most Western economies, British industrial output and productivity were growing much more rapidly than those of most other nations, a thesis also defended by Richardson (1962, 1967). In general, Aldcroft (p. 316) concluded, “the inter-war years saw a return to the high growth rates which characterised the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. ” A similar conclusion for a slightly later period has been expounded by Blank (1978, p. 93), who believes that the British economy was “substantially revitalized” in the period from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. If one adds the general impression that the 1950s were years of affluence, when Britons “never had it so good,” when total industrial output and especially productivity in industry were growing at rates substantially above those of the decades before 1914, and when gross fixed investment as a proportion of gross national product (GNP) was more than double the prewar levels, the overall impression gained is one of substantial economic development throughout the post-1914 period up to the 1960s. If Britain’s economic performance over the long term does not deserve the image of “constant decline, with occasional plateaus” considerably more, “he would have had to have been as well a landlord, manager, and risk-taker, selling tickets and doing the washing-up on the side. Had Victorians done more of these things Edwardians would have been richer . . . but nothing in the record suggests that the British Victorians were by international standards unusually neglectful of their duty to their children.” This statement is puzzling; it would seem both to concede the basic point of his critics and to indicate that Victorians were adverse to risk taking and reluctant to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Regrettably, McCloskey left hanging the more interesting defense that it was not because Victorians were conservative that they invested abroad but rather that it was mainly the more conservative among them who did so. It is evident that only cross-national data on the relative proportions of investors in Britain and other countries who preferred safe, low-yield investments to riskier, higher-yield ones could establish the point, but McCloskey did not provide such data.

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(Nairn 1977, p. 56) that some have given it, how can one account for the undeniable fact that, today, British levels of productivity, GNP per capita, and just about every other indicator of economic well-being compare so poorly with those of most other developed countries? Two major schools of thought have emerged in response to this dilemma. The first is rooted in the notion that blame must be attributed to the “excessive” wage demands made in recent years by trade unions, which have acted to generate inflation, reduce profit margins, and thereby discourage investment (Brown 1979, pp. 1-12). Apart from the facts that industrial wages in Britain have not been particularly high, that strikes have not been especially frequent, and that the union movement has acquiesced in wage restraint programs over much of the postwar era, this thesis ran afoul of the monetarist vogue, which holds that monetary expansion, not “wage-push,” is at the source of inflation.‘j The hypothesis was amended, therefore, into one of “pluralistic stagnation,” which holds that economic growth is retarded by the demands for protection and government favor by all manner of producer groups, whose potential for blackmail governments have found difficult to ignore (Beer 1982; Blank 1978; Brittan 1978; Wootton 1981). Pluralistic stagnation could in theory emerge at any time in any industrialized nation, but postwar Britain became especially susceptible because of (1) the breakdown during the 1960s of the restraint imposed by cultural norms such as deference and/or (2) the loss of patience on the part of employee groups with the sacrifices demanded of them for the sake of the balance of payments, compounded by the greater need of postwar governments to enlist the cooperation of all major producer groups in the running of a highly complex and interdependent economy and welfare state. The responsibility of government for the state of the economy in the post-World War I1 period is brought even more sharply to the fore by the second school of thought on this issue. This school sees postwar British governments as fixated on the idea that Britain’s status as a world power had to be preserved, even at the expense of domestic economic growth (Blank 1978, pp. 91-125; Strange 1971, pp. 30225). An essential component of this objective was the retention of sterling’s role in international transactions and as a reserve currency which, it was believed, required the maintenance of its 1949 exchange 6The restraint of the unions has been argued by Pollard (1982, p. 52), Wootton (1981, p. 107), and Beer (1982, p. 53). A demonstration that monetary expansion, not union wage increases, caused Britain’s postwar inflation problems is given in M. Parkin (1975, pp. 1-13).

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value. The support of the Sterling Area through the concentration within it of overseas investment, government lending and spending, and the maintenance of a defense presence, complemented this objective. A corollary was the domination of economic policymaking by the Treasury and the Bank of England, whose obsession with the exchange rate of sterling superceded and ultimately defeated all attempts to engineer sustained economic growth. One result was the well-known “stopgo” cycle, in which domestic economic expansion leading to higher imports and temporary and relatively slight balance of payments deficits was crushed by government-imposed deflation out of fear of the effect such deficits might have on the value of the pound, a currency that was particularly vulnerable to attack because of the size of independently held sterling reserves. Had Britain given up its international role and the overseas government expenditures it entailed, these problems would not have occurred; for until the late 1960s Britain enjoyed a surplus on its private account every bit as impressive as those of Germany and France. It is perhaps understandable that Britain’s political leadership would have fastened on to the preservation of world-power status in the immediate aftermath of the war, but for Blank it is far less excusable that the Wilson government of 1964-70, which was wedded to the propositions of technological advance and economic growth, should have resisted the inevitable consequence of this policy-devaluation as the balance of payments deteriorateduntil it was obliged both to devalue and deflate. By that time, business confidence had been undermined, and relations with the unions, by then the objects of proposed legislation diminishing their freedoms, were strained to the point where the radicalization of union leadership and loss of authority to shop stewards were becoming major problems. The net result was that Britain was never able to achieve the growth rates experienced by other developed countries after 1950 and fell increasingly behind in levels of per capita income, even though its postwar economic performance does compare favorably with its prewar record. One of the underlying curiosities of the multifaceted debate on the causes of Britain’s economic decline is that it contains odd points of convergence within divergent interpretations. With the “sterling-first” thesis we find a major case in point. The argument that the problem finds its source in postwar government policies is laid, logically enough, on a foundation of pre-1950 economic achievement. Yet many others, particularly from the Marxist school, fully endorse the sterling-policy analysis of Britain’s postwar problems while maintaining a long-term perspective on British decline. In part, the difference

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in interpretation is a matter of perspective: British economic performance after 1914 becomes the water glass that is either half full or half empty, depending on one’s point of view. The 1920s and 1930s did experience rising levels of industrial production and productivity, but the growth rates of the economy, on the most reasonable assumptions, were probably closer to those prevailing in the late, rather than the early and mid, nineteenth century (Alford 1972, p. 82; Dowie 1968, p. 97). Moreover, there was no rapid or profound transformation of the economy. The rate of transfer of productive factors from the staple to the “new” industries was slow, particularly in the depression years (Buxton 1975, p. 210), and exports remained just as heavily oriented toward the staples in the interwar period as they had been between 1900 and 1913. The consequence was a persistently severe unemployment problem, for the loss of jobs in the staple industries was not balanced by the growth in employment in the new industries. Although business concentration did proceed rapidly, opportunities for further rationalization or economies of scale were far from exhausted, and management generally remained behind German, French, or American standards (Alford 1972, p. 55; Hannah 1976, p. 141).7 Here, too, the new industries did not help much: most of them perpetuated the poor organization, restrictive labor practices, and contentious labor relations of the older industries (Kirby 1981, p. 75). The lack of competitiveness of British exports caused a severe decline in Britain’s share of world trade (Aldcroft 1970, p. 253). The net trade gap in the 1930s generally ran in the 40 percent to 45 percent range and was kept from being worse by the decrease in the price of commodity imports such as food. This factor in particular was responsible for the growth improvement in living standards and purchasing power that sustained the growth of consumer industries, although the Treasury’s cheap-money policy contributed to this end as well. As for Britain’s postwar recovery, which for Blank (1978, p. 94) was “Europe’s first economic miracle,” others have preferred to see it in a less rosy light. “It would have been rather surprising,” Marriss (1979, p. 93) argued, if the British economy “hadn’t done rather well after World War 11. What one has to explain is why it didn’t do a great deal better.” The explanation of why this was so is traced, as one would expect, to attitudes that have their origins in Victorian England. One version of ’In addition, the progress in terms of industrial concentration that was achieved in the interwar years should not necessarily be attributed to the desire by management to increase efficiency; the desires to curtail competition, enhance prestige, or avoid takeover were more probable motives (Evely and Little 1980, pp. 174-75).

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the theme is that of “managerial malaise,” which Marriss saw as the principal source of British decline. British industry, as many have pointed out, has never been able to attract a sufficiently high percentage of first-rate university graduates. British students, by and large, have preferred careers in the civil service, journalism, the arts, the liberal professions, or pure research, leaving Britain with the lowest proportion of university-educated managers in the developed world; these generally are recruited from among the less able students. Engineers, who enjoy high prestige in France and Germany, are held in especially low esteem in Britain (Cairncross 1981, p. 384). On a more concrete level, the weakness of British managers is suggested by the finding that British-managed firms, both at home and in the United States, are less profitable on average than American-managed ones (Brittan 1978, p. 249; Phelps Brown 1972, p. 201). Purdy (1976, p. 3 13) found that economic growth in Britain was held back not so much by a lack of investment but by the fact that investment has less of an effect on output in Britain than elsewhere. Although this is often attributed to the restrictive practices of unions, a study by Caves (1980) indicated that unionization affects productivity only in older industries (which he attributes to poor labor-management relations) and that productivity in general falls as the need for managerial sophistication increases. As for government, although it is much more involved in the management of the economy than before the war, the civil service still draws its recruits mainly from the humanities. The lead that a professionally trained and expert bureaucratic elite on the French model might give to private and public enterprise is thereby denied; indeed, it has been argued that the effect of government involvement in the nationalized industries has been, on the whole, negative (Allen 1976, p. 60). Even so, British management continues to be cursed by its own feelings of inferiority vis-8-vis government, which, it feels, has little appreciation of its needs and objectives: “In Britain it has seemed to businessmen that industrial progress has been assigned a low place in the official list of priorities, and that considerations of efficiency are held in scant regard by policy-makers” (Allen, p. 58). Management’s acceptance of restrictive labor practices and its willingness to acquiesce in overmanning have also been ascribed to its traditional lack of self-esteem. Managers, according to Mackintosh (1977, p. 20), “believe that they will lose any confrontations [with the unions] and indeed that this is not only inevitable but may also be almost correct.” There is little indication that attitudes towards careers in industry are changing. Rae (1977, p. 15) observed that the proportion of graduates going into industry actually fell from 59.2 percent in 1968 to 46.4

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percent in 1975; the proportion choosing the civil service increased correspondingly. This did not surprise Rae, who argued that under the guise of educational reform, academic competition has been deemphasized in state schools; greater subject choice has encouraged students to select “soft options” of no possible practical value; the social sciences in particular, with their built-in pro-public service and antiprivate business slant, have been promoted; and emphasis has been placed on the socializing role of schools as inculcators of the “right” social attitudes rather than on standards of academic achievement as such. For Rae, these are not reforms at all but rather attempts to recreate the Victorian public school ethos which set off Britain’s decline in the first place.8 There can be little doubt that the debate over whether the pre-1914 economy was functioning as well as it might have or, to a lesser extent, whether the interwar years were ones of reasonable economic progress has yet to see its last thrusts and sallies. But, surely, beyond the various opinions on these matters lie points of a more fundamental nature. McCloskey and Sandberg (1981, p. 64) based their case against the idea of a “failure” of Victorian Britain on the observation that “it is surely driving the theme of the irony of history too far to expect British entrepreneurs to have anticipated in 1913 the trick history was about to play on them.” But was it really a trick? The evidence is abundant that Victorians were well aware by the late nineteenth century that science and technology had become keys to future economic progress and that the Americans and the Germans, with their welldeveloped systems of technical and scientific education, were in vastly superior positions to exploit the opportunities that science was providing for industrial development (Roderick and Stephens 1978, pp. 4-1 1). Well-known scientists, distinguished educators, leading industrialists, and royal commissions all inveighed against the complacency of British industry and the inadequacy of Britain’s excessively humanistic and overly decentralized educational systems, but to little avail. British businessmen persisted in taking the short-term view ‘Much the same impetus seems to have motivated recent efforts by state school boards in England to abolish competitive athletics. The Manchesrer Guardian Weekly (July 21, 1986) reported that in Bristol, even egg-and-spoon races at an infants’ school were banned for being too competitive. The Guardian saw behind such efforts the “delusion that the schools exist to produce equality and an acceptance of the view that ability is only okay if it is undistinguishability .” Those banning competitive events are usually left-wing ideologues who are certainly not nostalgic for the Victorian public school ethos, but they share with that ethos a repugnance toward capitalist society, extending in this case to the competitiveness upon which they believe it is founded.

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of things, failing to take account of how technological advances in the future could affect their enterprises, linking investment to current rather than future expectations of profit (Landes 1969, p. 352); in short, displaying behavior consistent with the conviction that change was neither necessary nor particularly desirable. From their inaction, it is evident that governments were largely in agreement with this stance.9 Apparently, the British, who were the first to reap the benefits of industrialism, were content to assure their livelihoods with earnings from “invisibles” instead. But they were warned. It may, of course, have been too early to expect warnings to have had an effect: not only were there still profits to be made from exploiting the old ways, as Hobsbawm noted, but the prewar economy itself was not doing all that badly. But the same cannot be said of the post- 1918 economy, and here the sterling-first explanation of Britain’s economic decline raises another fundamental point. Whether less deflation and more (or sooner) devaluation would have increased growth rates in the 1950s and 1960s has been widely challenged,lO but even so, one cannot fail to be struck by the tendency of British governments to orient policy almost exclusively around exchange rate equilibrium ’Apart from reforming the educational system, Temin (1987, p. 458) points out that governments could have counteracted the British preference for foreign bonds over domestic equities by taxing foreign-bond income; Pollard (1987, p. 460) has suggested nontax remedies that could have been undertaken. Whether these steps would have overcome the problem of capital exportation is unclear. Cairncross (1953, p. 232), Landes (1969, p. 352), and Elbaum and Lazonick (1984, p. 570) have argued that the City did not invest more in domestic industry because domestic industry did not seek further investment; Ingham (1984, p. 149) believes that the revival of provincial stock exchanges in the late nineteenth century proves the contrary (adding that without “southern money” there were limits to what these exchanges could accomplish). Pollard (1987, p. 561) finds the evidence insufficient to determine whether British industry sought and was denied financing. 10 Purdy (1976, p. 32), Brittan (1978, p. 249), Cairncross (1981, p. 387), Stafford (1983, pp. 16-17), and P. Hall (1986, pp. 31-33, 51-59) have all argued that the s t o p g o cycles are irrelevant to the point at hand because cyclical fluctuations in U.K. output have been smaller than in most other countries. Pollard (1982, pp. 49-55) has countered that the detrimental impact of government policy during “stop” phases was in curtailing investment, thereby limiting the growth of production capacity, which in turn made it inevitable that future “go” phases would lead to huge increases in imports to meet home demand, and thus to balance of payments difficulties. Thus, the relative inelasticity of U.K. output, the result at least in part of government policy, although perhaps also of managerial weaknesses, is seen as a symptom of the problem rather than a point in refutation of it. However, he did not mention studies of the potential effects of alternative macroeconomic strategies, reported in Posner (1978), which concluded that British economic growth would not have been very much better no matter which macroeconomic policies had been pursued.

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and a foreign presence, not to mention industry’s willingness to acquiesce in such a course. Doubtless, Britain’s temporary situation as one of the victorious “Big Three” powers in 1945 was fertile ground for the cultivation of delusions of grandeur, but could not the desire to maintain national power and status have taken the form of a vigorous policy of government-directed economic expansion and export market penetration, as it did in France and Japan? With so many rival economies in ruins, the opportunity to regain lost ground could not have been better. Even if one credits the thesis recently advanced by Hall (1983, 1986) and Elbaum and Lazonick (1984, 1986) that the institutional legacy of the nineteenth century was an important impediment and that competitive pressures were insufficient to overcome it, this still does not explain why governments did not move energetically in this domain, especially in light of the unimpressive economic record of the interwar period. The institutional framework for an interventionist ekonomic policy was, after all, already in place-an “institutional legacy,” one could say, of World War 11. Fine and Harris (1985) argue that a more expansionary macroeconomic policy coupled with a policy of industrial restructuring would have provoked speculative attacks on the pound, but this, too, begs the question of why the preservation of the pound’s value ranked so high in priority-especially for Labour governments. West Germany, for example, did quite well with an undervalued currency in this period. All in all, it seems unlikely that a satisfactory account of the particular direction that British economic and fiscal policy assumed in the postwar era is possible unless reference is made to an underlying desire on the part of British elites to resurrect as much of Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial greatness as possible, a feeling that this could be best achieved by safeguarding those key symbols of past glory, the strength and international role of sterling and the importance of the City as a financial center, and a corresponding preference for leaving manufacturing to take care of itself-remnants, in other words, of that Victorian frame of mind associated with the beginnings of industrial decline in the nineteenth century. Finally there is the time factor. All of the attempts to locate the economic decline of Britain entirely within the post-1945 era stumble on the basic fact that the decline has been steady and long-term; as Phillips and Maddock (1973, p. 178) pointed out, the growth rate of the British economy has never departed by more than one percent in “P. Hall (1983, 1986) largely concurs with this assessment, without, however, exploring the question of why this “legacy of empire” should have been so important.

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any twenty-year period since 1873 from the overall average for the century.12 As a consequence, those who would insist on advancing a purely economic explanation have been obliged to resort to a sequence of ad hoc factors, such as the overcommitment to declining industries before World War I1 or the wage demands and restrictive labor practices of unions after the war that, whether accurate or not in themselves, do not amount to a comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon that is at all satisfying or convincing. For all these reasons, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that an anti-industrial orientation or ethos among the British middle and upper classes and their associated career and public policy outcomes must be held to account in some fashion or other for the long-term economic decline of Britain. Yet one cannot help but wonder how these values could have come to prevail in what would seem to have been a most unlikely site. Did British society and its dominant perspectives change in a fundamentally new and nonentrepreneurial direction, or on the contrary, are the sources of twentieth-century industrial decay and eighteenth-century commercial greatness one and the same? This is the last of the three questions I posed at the beginning of the chapter, and it must now be addressed.

I11 As the question implies, the search for ultimate causes can take two very different directions: one emphasizing discontinuity, the other continuity. There are two lacunae in the preceding discussion that point to the former alternative. The first is the observation that economic decline in Britain is related to a shift in the bases of the economy in the nineteenth century from manufacturing to reliance on foreign investments, shipping, insurance, and banking. As we have seen, it is not clear, from either an economic or an institutional perspective, why a decline in the industrial side of the economy should have occurred, given the pressures of competition and the option of government intervention to rectify any persistent legacies of Britain’s “early start. ” One possibility that may be suggested is that groups in society deliberately set out to inhibit innovation and intervention, particularly in the industrial sector. This suggestion bears an affinity to the theme of ‘*The time factor aiso disposes of the much-criticized Bacon and Eltis (1976) thesis, which links decline to the transfer of productive resources from manufacturing to service sectors (especially government). As Hall (1983, p. 14) pointed out, Bacon and Eltis are obliged to postdate the beginnings of decline by fifty years in order to show that the expansion of government was at fault.

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pluralistic stagnation, which bring us to the second lacuna. There is nothing in the idea of pluralistic stagnation that requires that it be applied just to the postwar era; only a sense that the problems of decline reside within a short time frame and concern interest-group/ government relations induced that focus. It follows, therefore, that the limitations imposed upon that interpretation by the premise that the British economy was performing well, or as well as it could, between 1870 and 1940 can be overcome by the expedients of expanding the process of pluralistic stagnation into a century-long phenomenon and extending its adverse effects to cover market relations. This, in essence, is what Mancur Olson has done. Olson’s thesis is an important contribution to the rational-choice school because it avoids much of the conjuncturalism that characterizes the economic interpretations hitherto considered. Britain did not go into economic decline because circumstances in the late nineteenth century were such as to lead rational men seeking profit to act in ways that ultimately hurt the nation’s long-term economic prospects; rather, Olson argues, what happened to Britain is merely one instance of a general process in which interests organize to advantage themselves by inhibiting competition, adaptability, and ultimately growth. Britain’s rise to world domination relates to this process only in the sense that it may have helped the country avoid the purgatives of foreign occupation or totalitarian rule. Nor is any “English disease” a factor of ultimate resort. Cultural values and orientations of the sort described earlier certainly played a role in the decline, but their role was much more subtle and indirect than culturalists generally assume. In Olson’s view, interest-group organization is more likely to succeed in groups where social interaction already exists or can be brought into being, because in such groups the desire for esteem or fear of being rejected will discourage free riding by individual members. Since groups with these characteristics also tend to be socially homogeneous and, moreover, find it easier to agree on collective goals if they remain so, a degree of class consciousness is likely to emerge. “This in turn helps to generate cultural caution about the incursions of the entrepreneur and the fluctuating status and profits of businessmen, and also helps to preserve and expand aristocratic and feudal prejudices against commerce and industry” (Olson 1982, p. 85).13 I3This statement indicts more than it should since, as we have seen, the business pursuits of the City were not stigmatized and, indeed, flourished in this era. The thesis can be saved, however, by specifying that anti-industrial prejudices were especially prevalent because industry was vulnerable to incursions from below to an extent that

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A crucial consideration in evaluating this explanation of British economic decline is whether these attitudes were unintended by-products of special-interest organization or deliberately intended as means to an end. The foregoing comment seems to suggest that these prejudices emerge spontaneously, but Olson goes on to suggest that The processes that have been described do not operate by themselves; they resonate with the fact that every distributional coalition must restrict entry. . , , Social barriers could not exist unless there were some groups capable of concerted action that had a special interest in erecting them. We can see now that the special-interest organizations or collusions seeking advantage in the market or the polity have precisely this interest. (Olson 1982, pp. 85-86)

Although the term “resonate with” suggests a desire to hedge the bet, it is difficult to interpret this passage other than as an argument for intentionality: antientrepreneurial values were accepted and even vaunted by middle-class groups in order to curtail mobility and enhance their members’ own material positions. Hypocrisy clearly abounds in this interpretation. Now, hypocrisy is not unknown in human affairs, and we have seen that both the rational-choice and Marxist schools are willing to place great reliance on it, particularly in their explanations of how ordinary people are deluded into serving the material interests of a ruler or ruling class. The question is, can hypocrisy do the job in this case? In order to uphold this interpretation, it is not enough merely to show that the values or norms in question served the interests of the British middle classes. As Elster (1983, p. 70) observed, “Although it is true that the way of life of the bourgeoisie is such that it is difficult for an outsider to pass for an insider, and equally true that this fact may be useful for the bourgeoisie, it takes an uncritical or hypersuperstitious mind to conclude that this is why the bourgeoisie behave as they do.” We saw in Chapter 2 that avoiding the danger of meaningless functionality in the rational-choice interpretation of norms and values requires, not so much evidence that they were adopted with this object in mind (which is fortunate since such evidence would probably be difficult to find), but rather some indication that they were the most efficient means of achieving that end, in comparison with others that might have been adopted. This condition would be difficult to satisfy in this instance. One of the more generally accepted findings in social the City activities, monopolized by a narrow and exclusive elite, were not. I will proceed on this basis.

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science-a finding that Olson explicitly acknowledges-is that opportunity in Western societies is not nearly as equally distributed as one might assume (or hope). Where inherited wealth is not a factor in facilitating the passing on of high occupational and social status from one generation to the next, it is generally the case that the cultural environment of middle- or upper-class family life is able to confer the decisive advantages. This tendency is especially likely to hold as education becomes increasingly the key determinant of occupational status. In fact, as Parkin (1979, pp. 54-60) has pointed out, one of the most effective ways of inhibiting working-class access to high-status occupations is to resort to “credentialism,” the establishment of formal educational credentials for the exercise of those occupations. To the extent that credentialism restricts competition for certain jobs, it is also likely to keep the salaries and benefits of those jobs high, particularly when it is linked to their professionalization, that is, turning them into monopolies. The great advantage of this strategy for maintaining or reinforcing acquired advantages is that it entails no violation of the precepts that led to their acquisition. Where competition within an occupation is restricted, as in medicine or law, it can be justified in terms of the need for high standards, the responsibility of government to rectify abuses, and the intense competition for places in the institutions that train individuals for those positions. Where monopoly status is less easy to justify, as in business, it is still possible to credentialize the higherstatus positions through the development of business schools that demand high educational achievement. The fact that competition for access to these schools is heavily stacked against working-class aspirants is no matter; the point is that the whole system appears to be guided by profoundly meritocratic principles. Merit or utility, after all, was the principal criterion by which the middle class had indicted the mores of the aristocracy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From this perspective, one would have to conclude that the English middle class behaved in a singularly irrational fashion in stigmatizing industrial values and avoiding or abandoning industrial pursuits to the extent possible. It would have been much better off, economically speaking, if it had touted industry and credentialized its higher positions (as it did other professions) so as to monopolize them more effectively. The experience of other nations indicates that this could have been a highly successful strategy; moreover, it carried with it the psychic comfort of being faithful to one’s root convictions. It is difficult to regard the hypocrisy of self-abnegation as a rational strategy

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when its effects were likely to be less advantageous than those of a much milder form, credentialism. Attempting to explain why a rising industrial bourgeoisie should have abandoned its raison d’8tt-e also constitutes a problem for Marxism; its theory of history predicts hegemonic status for this class and its values. To meet this challenge, an important school of British Marxist scholars (Anderson 1964, 1966, 1968; Gamble 1981; Nairn 1964a, 1964b, 1970, 1977, 1979) has turned to the opposite theme of continuity to formulate a rather striking solution: it maintains that in Britain, the world’s first industrial nation, no such hegemony was ever in the cards. The argument, with some variations, runs basically as follows. In the development of English capitalism, the critical juncture was the Revolution of 1640, which expressed, beyond its religious and constitutional elements, the opposition of a commercially minded landowning class in alliance with the town merchants to the Stuart monarchy’s attempts to create a royal absolutism of the Bourbon type and, more to the point, to Stuart restrictions on the free development of the economy in the form of commercial monopolies and Star Chamber protection for peasants against common land enclosures. The victory of the landowners, consolidated into rule by a Venetian-type oligarchy in the eighteenth century, opened the way for unfettered commercial expansion as the enclosure movement accelerated after mid-century and British governments proved remarkably willing to launch wars solely to gain commercial advantage over their Continental rivals. In this process, British capitalism was able to develop with “no fundamental, antagonistic contradiction between the old aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie” (Anderson 1964, p. 31). This fact is crucial, for it permitted the amalgamation of the two classes and the survival of a very limited, “old-bourgeois” form of capitalism into the industrial era and beyond. As a result, Britain experienced not the triumphal rise of an industrial bourgeoisie but “first the containment of industrialism, then its defeat by an older, more powerful, and more political bourgeoisie” (Nairn 1979, p. 244). The hegemonic domination of British society, politics, and economic life by an increasingly unified elite was facilitated by the impact of the French Revolution and the lower-class radicalism of the first half of the century, which persuaded many bourgeois that their interests lay in an alliance with the aristocracy against the working class, and by the existence and extension of the empire, which favored the foreign- and finance-oriented form of capitalism of the older strand of the bourgeoisie and provided both employment for the aristocracy and a reinvigoration of its values and standing in society.

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The apparent success of that society in the nineteenth century blinded people to its defects and to the possibility that a more positive interventionist state capable of long-term planning and leadership might be required in the future. Even if British capitalism had not been molded over the centuries toward short-term profit maximization, the victory in the Civil War of a limited and liberal conception of the state, which Gamble (1981, pp. 69-70) regards as the most important consequence of that conflict, would have ensured that no major modernizing transformation of British society could ever be imposed politically. As it was, the prevailing orientations seemed quite acceptable up to World War I. As long as the exploitation of underdeveloped markets, the demand for financial and shipping services, and the profits from overseas investments provided satisfactory substitutes for the loss of preeminence in developed markets, changes in the industrial, educational, and general value systems to accommodate the new industrial era dawning in the United States and Germany were not welcomed. After all, a successful, expansive industrial capitalism would have required a much greater commitment to the values of individualism, egalitarian openness, social mobility, meritocracy, and impatience with tradition than could have been assimilated into the patrician, hierarchic, and profoundly traditional society of imperial Britain (Nairn 1977, p. 33). Hence, the elite’s interest lay not just in avoiding a commitment to industrial progress but in stigmatizing its values and encouraging its practitioners to transfer their allegiances and resources away from this domain. The glorification of an essentially aristocratic ethos of traditionalism and anti-industrialism found in empire the legitimacy with which to defeat bourgeois values: In an imperial system, the iconography of power is necessarily aristocratic: it is pure presence. The aristocrat is defined not by acts which denote skills but by gestures which reveal quintessences: a specific training or aptitude would be a derogation of the impalpable essence of nobility, a finite qualification on the infinite. The famous amateurism of the English “upper class” has its direct source in this idea. (Anderson 1964, p. 41)

This did not represent a novel departure, however; the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century was but an ultimate manifestation of a society whose contours-an aristocratic/bourgeois alliance based on overseas mercantile expansion-were established two centuries earlier in the English Revolution. Even so, imperialism’s “high noon” was important for defusing and taming nascent democratic values and ambitions. According to Nairn (1977, p. 69), “Hierarchy and deference became the inner face of its outward adventure.”

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In this thesis can be detected a cogent incorporation of three major interpretative strands discussed in this chapter: (1) the existence of an anti-industrial value system among the elite, (2) certain variants of economic interpretation (neglect of domestic industry in favor of foreign investment; the continued prosperity of the late-Victorian economy), and (3) the postwar policy interpretation in which defense of the pound and maintenance of Britain’s international role as a great power “bear an ancient and unfashionable title: imperialism” (Nairn 1979, p. 243). But is the interpretation a correct one? It can, of course, be questioned at various points; for instance, the issue of whether the English Civil War can be interpreted in terms of a victory of a rising capitalist class of market-oriented landowners and their merchant allies has given rise to a major historical debate. More important for our purposes, however, is the interpretation presented of British development during the nineteenth century. At that time, according to the thesis, there was no fundamental challenge by the emerging industrial bourgeoisie to the control of the landowning aristocracy. As Anderson (1964, p. 39)‘put it, “Undisturbed by a feudal state, terrified of the French Revolution and its own proletariat, mesmerized by the prestige and authority of the landed class, the bourgeoisie won two modest victories [the Reform Act of 1832 and the abolition of the Corn Laws in 18461, lost its nerve and ended by losing its identity.” This interpretation raises a basic problem: How was it possible for an aristocracy-dominated nation with an acquiescent bourgeoisie to take major steps toward democracy in the nineteenth century? For Barrington Moore (1966, p. 37), who would endorse the interpretation up to this point, one can only account for the success of the democratic path in Britain and its failure in Germany by the fact that the British bourgeoisie, unlike its weaker German counterpart, was able to impose its habits and outlook on the aristocracy, and not vice versa. The “two modest victories” Anderson referred to were, in Moore’s (p. 33) view, instances when the bourgeoisie had “shown its teeth” and demonstrated to the landed upper classes the “limits of their power.” So vital is the greater power and independence of the British bourgeoisie in explaining the different routes to modernity taken by Britain and Germany that Moore (p. 431) ultimately made “the weakening of the landed aristocracy and the prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the peasants and workers” one of his essential conditions for the development of liberal democracy-precisely the opposite to what is supposed to have occurred in democratizing Britain according to Anderson and Nairn. A related problem concerns the rise to economic preeminence itself,

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If a centuries-old aristocratic social and cultural system precluded a vigorous and dynamic economy in the latter nineteenth century, why did it not have this effect in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Indeed, how could Britain have become the world’s premiere industrial power in the nineteenth century, given the unchallenged hegemony of an anti-industrial elite? Anderson and Nairn addressed the issue of capitalism’s success in Britain primarily by distinguishing between finance and commerce, “old-bourgeois” pursuits which were acceptable within the aristocratic context, and manufacturing industry, which was not. This distinction has recently been developed in significant ways by Ingham (1984) and Cain and Hopkins (1986, 1987). Like Anderson and Nairn, they attribute Britain’s eighteenth-century economic success to the alignment of the growing merchant and banking interests of the City with the landed aristocracy in a “gentlemanly capitalism” that successfully exploited the opportunities for profit created by the state’s aggressive mercantilism, its burgeoning public debt, and its extensive patronage. This form of capitalism was “gentlemanly” because, unlike manufacturing, it was compatible with aristocratic values: “The gentlemanly capitalist was not a paradox: on the contrary, his ethics assisted his enterprise, which was concerned with managing men rather than machines’’ (Cain and Hopkins 1986, p. 508). In contrast to Anderson and Nairn, however, they emphasize that gentlemanly capitalism continued to be successful and dominant in the nineteenth century because the system of mercantilism and “Old Corruption” (patronage) on which it depended had been fundamentally transformed-not as a result of pressure from a rising industrial bourgeoisie, but rather as a result of actions taken by the City/aristocratic elite itself. According to Ingham (1984, pp. 102-12), the establishment of free trade, the return to the gold standard, and the reform of the civil service were the work of the “new” City of commercial capitalists who wished to end the state’s debilitating indebtedness, avoid the politically destabilizing consequences of inflation (which in their view required a return to gold) and, most important, respond to the fact that Britain’s dominant economic position after 1815 had made financing commerce more profitable than financing the state’s debts. Even some aristocrats participated in the reform; they were “astute enough to see that a stable gold standard, as opposed to flexible paper and credit, might check the advance of both industrial classes” (Ingham, p. 109). These calculations proved correct. Not only was social order preserved, but the economic importance of the City grew dramatically under these policies; by the 1880s, for instance, foreign income from

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City activities, excluding investment income, nearly equaled earnings from the export of goods (p. 97). Since industry was also doing well by exploiting less developed markets (aided by the City’s heavy involvement in overseas lending and investing), there was little basis for challenging the system; from most perspectives, it continued to appear highly successful. It is true that industry’s increasing inability to keep up with major competitors, particularly in the newer industrial sectors, did stimulate a campaign by Joseph Chamberlain and others for an imperial tariff. However, industry as a whole was too divided on the issue of free trade to mount a serious challenge to prevailing policies, and public opinion concerned itself more with the effect that tariffs would have on food prices than with the longer-term prospects of industrial regeneration. In any case, It seems difficult to imagine that the southern rentiers and City merchants, enjoying their “Indian Summer,” would become excited by the ideas of a rather ungentlemanly ex-screw manufacturer from Birmingham [Chamberlain], or those eccentric members of the aristocracy who considered that English institutions were inferior to those of Germany or Japan! (Ingham 1984, p. 162)

In evaluating this interpretation, the first thing to note is that it does not directly address the issue of how industrialism could have been invented and prospered for so long within a disdainful climate of gentlemanly capitalism. The answer, presumably, is to be found in the fact that manufacturing was the creation of different social groups (provincial artisans and the like) with a different ethos. But where did that ethos come from? How could it have become so influential and so fruitful among these groups? No indications are given. In addition, it is doubtful whether one can reasonably argue that the eighteenthcentury aristocratic/old bourgeois elite reformed itself so as to maintain or enhance its position of economic dominance. The observation that there were more profits in commerce than state loans suggests that the elite had an incentive to do so, but both Ingham and Cain and Hopkins make it very clear that the reforms were imposed upon it. As Ingham (1984, pp. 111-12) notes, “The self regulating gold standard appealed to those who wished to destroy the manipulation and exploitation of the state for personal gain by the loan contractors and their aristocratic clients”; conversely, “most resistance appears to have come from . . . the ‘old’ City of speculative commercial capitalists, who attempted to profit from uncertainty. ” The aristocracy had more than a passing interest in this issue; many aristocrats profited not only from investing in the public debt (which the state paid for with tariff revenues), but

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also from involvement in the activities of the monopolistic trading companies and from the extensive patronage system, which provided its younger sons with “undemanding offices,” particularly in the Treasury (p. 116). Free trade and the gold standard meant that all of this had to go, along with the Corn Laws which protected the aristocracy’s agricultural base. l4 Ingham (p. 127) emphasizes that many aristocrats supported the reform movement, but their ranks were made up largely of Whig aristocrats who had been excluded from the benefits of patronage and who were more closely connected with the newer sections of the bourgeoisie, including the northern manufacturers (Rubinstein 1983, pp. 76-77). Moreover, as Ingham (p. 116) admits, the assault on mercantilism was spearheaded by the Board of Trade, which was (deliberately) staffed almost exclusively by middle-class reformers. Thus, there are difficulties in maintaining that Britain became a modern industrial democracy without ever presenting a serious challenge to the aristocratic/old bourgeois social order that had emerged and consolidated itself in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the circumstances, another answer seems more promising: that the ethos described by Anderson and Nairn was in certain important respects a novel creation, bearing an aristocratic imprint to be sure, but different nonetheless from that of the preceding century, and that this difference reflected the fact that the particular social system that emerged with the consolidation of the industrial revolution and the emergence of British world supremacy in the nineteenth century diverged significantly from that of “Venetian” England.15 In the remainder of this chapter, I trace the contours of an interpretation of British decline based upon this idea.

IV Let us begin with British society on the eve of the industrial revolution. In Chapter 3, we saw that British development is fundamentally distinguished by the early commercialization of agriculture and the 14Cain and Hopkins (1986, p. 516) reject the view occasionally advanced (Arnstein 1973, pp. 217-19; Kumar 1983, p. 37; D. Moore 1976, p. 328) that the abolition of the Corn Laws was anything less than a devastating blow to the aristocracy, one that eventually eroded its wealth and power, the alternative sources of wealth provided by the City notwithstanding. 15At points Anderson and Nairn came close to admitting this possibility. In Nairn’s (1970) discussion of the mid-nineteenth-century consolidation of aristocratic-bourgeois hegemony, expressions such as the “conservative counter-revolution” and “the massive congealment of the Victorian social equilibrium” are freely used. I discuss this point further in Chapter 5.

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emergence of a tacit alliance of landed and commercial interests dedicated to the pursuit of trade and profits. By the eighteenth century, as Stone and Stone (1984, p. 284) point out, “psychologically, the two groups had drawn closer together than ever before in a joint endeavor to conquer the markets of the world by the use of naval power.” Because the aristocracy and the gentry chose to see to the maintenance and enhancement of their wealth above all else, social barriers were far less inviolate than on the Continent. Arthur Young could marvel at the English lord who thought nothing of dining with his tenant farmers (Porter 1982, p. 79), but Dr. Johnson’s famous remark about the completeness of London life reflected, as Carswell (1973, p. 137) observed, the same approbation of a pervasive sociability that cut across status lines. The prevailing ethos was indeed mercantile. In Namier’s (1975, p. 230) view, “Every country and every age has dominant terms, which seem to obsess men’s thoughts. Those of eighteenth-century England were property, contract, trade, and profits.’’ To a certain extent, capitalism in this era did bear a “gentlemanly” aspect, but not to the extent of precluding antiaristocratic perspectives. As Perkin (1969, p. 72) pointed out, religious dissent was in part a manifestation of hostility toward the landed aristocracy, and its praise of hard work reflected a desire to win out at “the game of getting rich.” The City’s tendency to political opposition, according to Sutherland (1975, pp. 165-73), also expressed a resentment and suspicion of the landed classes that controlled national government and a pride in its own commercial virtues and accomplishments, upon which government finances very largely depended. By the nineteenth century, hostility toward the aristocratic way of life was receiving important intellectual support. Among the great political economists of the era, Ricardo stands out for his attacks on landowners as parasites who did not merit the wealth and position they held in society; the theme was, however, a common one among adherents to that school of thought. In utilitarianism, too, can be seen important strands of this sentiment, for it became axiomatic that it was the hardworking, frugal capitalist-creating, accumulating, and reinvesting his profits-rather than the idle, spendthrift aristocrat, who contributed most to the betterment of society in general. What is striking about the rise of bourgeois, antiaristocratic thought is that it should have flourished to the extent that it did when the task was so largely achieved. By Continental standards, the British landed classes at this time were neither extravagant nor unproductive. “Honour, bravery, elegance and largesse, the virtues of a feudal or court

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aristocracy, no longer dominated their lives, ’ ’ observed Hobsbawm (1969, p. 32). Instead, their interest was with business, which brought them into regular contact with non-noble society and encouraged a lively interest in science and new techniques. The industrial revolution, if anything, stimulated the fascination felt at all levels of society with the process of material enrichment. In the early nineteenth century, Britain did not lack that “acute, even irrational, joy in technical progress as such, which we think of as characteristically American’’ (Hobsbawm 1969, p. 186).16 Bentham and J. S . Mill promoted the idea that education should be scientific and useful to society, and technical education became widely available through a variety of publications as well as through the spread of technical and proprietary schools and colleges. A recognition of the force and impact of distinctly bourgeois thought does not sit well with Anderson and Nairn, for the crux of their argument is that, ideologically as well as in terms of wealth and power, the landed aristocracy continued to constitute a hegemonic class, in Gramsci’s sense, throughout this period. The doctrine of utilitarianism becomes, for them, no more than “a comic, dehydrated version of Enlightenment radicalism” (Nairn 1970, p. 20) and political economy fares little better. This controversial thesis is explored more fully in the next chapter; the important point to note here is that, however one evaluates the quality of bourgeois ideology in Britain, it was associated with a major, and largely successful, movement of reform. In this reforming drive, the aristocracy was identified as the enemy not because it embodied feudal or precapitalist orientations but because of its propensity to seek profit through the exploitation of state policies and positions. Old Corruption was, as Rubinstein (1983, p. 71) pointed out, “the system par excellence of outdoor relief for the aristocracy and its minions.” Some have been struck by the extent to which the Reform Act of 1832, the reformers’ most famous achievement, actually strengthened the aristocracy’s hold on parliamentary representation in the countryside by increasing the numbers of county seats and removing many suburban voters from them (Arnstein 1973, pp. 21520; Kumar 1983, pp. 26-30; D. Moore 1976, pp. 180-81). These steps, however, are more properly viewed as concessions to make the 16A similar observation, striking in light of what was to follow, was made of Birmingham and its inhabitants by Tocqueville in the early part of the century: “They work as if they must get rich by day and die by evening. They are generally very intelligent people, but intelligent in the American way” (cited in Drescher 1964, p. 63).

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bill more palatable in Parliament than as motivations for it (even so, it took the king’s threat to create fifty more peers to get the measure through the House of Lords). The real impetus for the reform came from middle-class radical pressure to end the rotten boroughs and extend participation; the prime minister, Lord Grey, reportedly told the king in 1831 that “it was the spirit of the age which was triumphing . . , to resist it was certain destruction” (Wood 1960, p. 81). The spirit of the age also generated a revolution in government policy, the replacement of mercantilism and protectionism (the Corn Laws) with free trade and laissez-faire, as well as a sustained effort to transform the civil service from a locus of patronage and idleness into a modern, merit-based bureaucracy-to curb, as Ingham (1984, p. 129) puts it, ‘‘the aristocracy’s parasitic expropriation of the state’s revenues. ” The reforms of the Church of England and municipal government in the 1830s were similarly designed to end or curtail aristocratic corruption, venality, and nepotism (Rubinstein 1983, p. 75). The overall outcome of this broad movement, in Rubinstein’s (p. 86) view, amounted to no less than “the imposition of rationality and ‘modernity’ upon the irrational and premodern-a gain for the ordinary man, not a loss-as well as individuality, the coincidence of merit and reward, and the extension of responsibility and of privacy”-no small achievement, all things considered. l7 Yet, clearly, the tables got turned at some point; the victory was never carried through. Nineteenth-century Britain seems less the triumphally “bourgeois” society that one would have expected than a society increasingly dedicated to the task of eradicating all traces of pecuniary concern from its inner consciousness and outer aspect. Among aristocrats, the interest in entrepreneurialism waned after 1820, and “they withdrew from active management to the passive role of rentiers and investors” (Stone and Stone 1984, pp. 285-86). For the middle classes, business came to constitute not so much the means to prosperity or even the manner of demonstrating moral righteousness but a way of providing for the life-style of the leisured gentleman. This concept bore, however, very little resemblance to the reality of eighteenth-century landed life: the ‘‘bullying squire” with his rather phi”Not every reform was a gain for the ordinary man. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 created a free market in labor by ending the role of local communities in providing “outdoor relief” for the needy, leaving them with the option of going to (deliberately) harsh workhouses instead. It shows that the movement was more than just an attack on Old Corruption. As Polanyi (1957 [1944], p. 137) observed, “Laissez-faire has been catalyzed into a drive of uncompromising ferocity. ”

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listine approach to book learning and his disdain of religion had yielded to the ideal of the Christian gentleman (Coleman 1973, p. 98), with his enthusiasm for sound moral education based on scripture and the classics of antiquity and his disdain of functional training or acquisitive pursuit. This new version of the gentlemanly ideal did not, of course, just emerge; it was devised and propagated to great effect in the nineteenth century. The reformed Victorian public schools and universities were instrumental in this regard. They helped to mold a single governing class, identifiable by a shared set of values and perspectives, whose concerns and manners contrasted sharply with those of its predecessors and which set a fundamentally different tone to the whole of British society. As Perkin (1969, p. 280) succinctly put it, “Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel, and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish, and hypocritical. ” Another curious inversion of the eighteenth-century pattern took place at this time: Britain not only democratized its parliamentary institutions; its rulers increasingly concerned themselves with the welfare and the fate of the working classes. But at the same time, the channels of communication between levels of the social hierarchy closed. The country estates and West End drawing rooms of the aristocracy were opened to the magnates of City finance and commerce, but that other bourgeoisie, the northern industrial one, was for the most part left out. More importantly, the redesigned educational system of the Victorians seemed deliberately constructed to create class barriers and inhibit mobility across them. The public schools, which traditionally had exercised an important function in educating poor, but gifted, local boys, took on instead the function of blending the prosperous middle class and gentry into a common mold that poor boys-no matter how successful they might eventually become-could never share. Although state education was expanded (at the primary level mostly), “the whole aim,” according to Perkin (1969, p. 301), “was to segregate the classes so as not to educate the lower above their station or embarrass the higher with lower company. ” The society that had amazed foreigners with its openness and fluidity in the eighteenth century had become a society renowned for its invidious class distinctions and hostilities by the twentieth. If the price for creating this new society was the loss of technological and industrial leadership to Germany and the United States, it was, apparently, a price influential Victorians thought worth paying.

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Could these anti-industrial and antientrepreneurial biases have prevailed over concerns about the country’s declining industrial position in the latter nineteenth century because they suited the ,interests of dominant institutions? Ingham (1984, pp. 128-34) has presented the most cogent case for such a view. He notes that the establishment of the gold standard and free trade, although intended by reformers to end the City’s influence over the state, actually fostered a renewed alliance between the two. This occurred not only because the new economic and monetary regime resulted in rapid growth in the City’s wealth and importance, but also because it allowed the Bank of England and the Treasury to assume preeminent roles in defending the pound and controlling government expenditures, respectively. Reflecting the inherent unpredictability of currency markets and the importance of experience as a guide in understanding them, the “Treasury view,’’ which came to dominate government policymaking, emphasized an empiricism18 and traditionalism that were fundamentally hostile to demands that government respond to declining industrial competitiveness by expanding scientific education and allowing a greater role for experts in government. We have seen that a Treasury view did come to dominate government policy, not only in the late nineteenth century but well into the post-World War I1 era-some would say, even to the present day. But it is not so clear that its dominance can be explained solely in terms of the interests of the City/Bank of England/Treasury nexus. As Ingham (1984, p. 160) acknowledges, there is no inherent reason why modernization need have threatened City interests; the establishment of the pound as the world’s major currency had been strongly aided by England’s industrial supremacy in the early part of the century. Nor is there any reason why demands for greater expertise in government need have threatened the Treasury’s dominant position in the civil service; the concern of a Treasury official about “who is to check the assertions of experts when the government has once undertaken a class of duties which none but such persons understand?” (cited in Ingham, p. 160) assumes that the Treasury had to remain a bastion of amateurs. Clearly, the victory of an anti-industrial ethos involved more than just the interests of these institutions. “The term empiricism is used here to mean a down-to-earth pragmatism, a propensity to “muddle through.” As noted in Chapter 1, Shonfield (1967, p. 12) labeled this orientation “anti-empiricism,” that is, opposed to rigorous empirical analysis. Whatever it is called, its essence is an antipositivist, antiscientific approach to government and society.

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What, then, is the extra element? It cannot be the continued domination of an aristocratic ethos of empiricism and traditionalism-Ingham’s answer-for that would be extremely difficult to reconcile with the importance he places on the reforms inspired by the highly rationalistic and totally untraditional philosophy of the utilitarians and the “economical reformers”-reforms which, as we have seen, were imposed on the aristocratic/old bourgeois elite from the outside. 19 Clearly, some new factor or factors must have been at play. Rae (1977, p. 10) has suggested that the Victorians discovered religion and responsibility; Weiner (1 98 l ) , that they felt revulsion at the success of materialistic values in nineteenth-century Britain. It is true that the moral climate of Britain had been revolutionized and that the new ethos, as propagated in the public schools, was consciously designed by the Anglican clergymen who ran those institutions to combat the new doctrines of utilitarianism and economic liberalism (Armstrong 1973, p. 144). Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that so fundamental a transformation in values and orientations can be explained as simply a reaction of sensibility, and it is here that the approach of Anderson and Nairn makes its most telling points. The attack on economic liberalism was clearly linked with a concern over lower-class unrest in the first half of the nineteenth century. Faced with the unsettling effects of profound societal transformation, liberal political economy came to be seen as deficient in one crucial respect: its model of society organized around the individual’s quest for personal advantage provided no convincing mechanism for social cohesion and control (Eccleshall 1979, pp. 7-9; Newby 1975, p. 158). The strategy of credentializing business management, however efficacious it might be in curtailing upward social mobility, had very little to offer in this domain. It was natural, therefore, that aristocratic conceptions of society and aristocratic skills of leadership should come to be seen in a more favorable light; social order seemed better assured when traditional values of organicism, ascription, deference to superiors, and paternalism held sway.20 This reappraisal of aristocratic values was stimulated by another factor, one that is considerably less clear-cut and requires some elaboration. By the 1880s, loyalty, team spirit, submission, conformism, ‘’Ingham’s position in this respect seems to be that not only did this elite reform itself using the new ideas of political economy, but that these ideas were not really incompatible with the ethos they attacked either. This is surely carrying the theme of continuity too far. ’?his theme, too, is explored more fully in Chapter 5 .

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patriotism, and “manliness” had become the common fare of public schools increasingly dominated by a profusion of rules, codes, privileges, customs, and traditions (Ward 1967, p. 47). None of this has much to do with sound academic or moral formation; some is positively hostile to intellectual inquiry. Clearly, the aim was elsewhere. But where? Barnett (1972, p. 27) made the point well: “The school playing-field was seen as a preparation for the battles of an everwidening empire. ’ ’ The British, it would seem, had acquired something of an imperial mentality and were undertaking in their reformed public schools to transmit to the offspring of their middle and upper classes the skills and values deemed appropriate for imperial governors, or “head prefects of the world” in Rae’s (1977, p. 10) felicitous phrase. In contrast to previous periods of imperial expansion, the motives for acquiring this empire were not, in the first instance, commercial. To Victorians, it would have been preferable to enjoy the benefits of trade and foreign investment without the burdens of formal control, and when that control did come, it was more likely to have been either provoked by the challenge posed by the expansion of other empires, necessitated by strategic considerations (especially concerning the route to India), or brought about by individuals acting on their own initiative in the territories in question. But acquisition of a huge empire, however effected, did have its impact on the British: “Some of them it gave jobs to, or honours, or their authority, or a mythology, or a sense of purpose, or a feeling of pride and superiority,” Porter (1975, p. 199) noted; and having created these needs, the continuance of the empire was required in order to satisfy them. For a generation and a class that aspired to worthier goals than those which preoccupied their forefathers, empire provided a suitably uplifting vision. The fact that their education equipped them for little else contributed in no small part to this sentiment. But it was easy to take a nobler view: “It seemed a marvel: so many millions, scattered so wide, ruled over by such a mere handful of Britons” (Porter, p. 201). Surely, many felt, the efforts of the nation’s best educated sons, those from its “finest” families, should be directed towards this awesome responsibility rather than towards the menial task of material production, which had always succeeded on its own and which, in any case, would certainly benefit from the trade and investment opportunities that empire created.21 'lit is important not to exaggerate the role of empire. Imperialistic thinking did not extend to the point of winning over the nation to Chamberlain’s grand scheme of an imperial preference. To that extent, it remained hostage to the liberal faith in free

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The nature and extent of this transformation can be made clearer if it is placed within an appropriate conceptual framework. I argued in the previous chapter that a particularly useful distinction can be made between societies in the early modern era that were primarily commercial in economic orientation and usually took the form of citystates, on the one hand, and larger, more authoritarian societies whose economic basis was agricultural, on the other. These two ideal types can be applied with considerable success to the contrast between oldregime France, striving towards Continental domination and absolute monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Holland and Venice, small, oligarchical but unaristocratic, and in their heydays, highly prosperous. Eighteenth-century England, on the other hand, contained important elements of both societal types. A powerful and expanding mercantile city-state had grown up in the City of London, to be sure; but as Carswell (1973, p. 3) pointed out, “The power that went with the possession of land was too great, the country was wider and more profitable than the marshes on which the Venetians and the Dutch had been compelled to make their livings by trade.” Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons elucidated in the previous chapter, the direction England ultimately took was unequivocal: ‘ ‘Ownership of the land might be the mark of power, but the current ethos was that of the city-state, with its emphases on accumulation and protection” (p. 27). The alternatives and the choice the English had made were well appreciated at the time. George 111 himself wrote that “commerce, the foundation of a marine, can never flourish in an absolute monarchy therefore that branch of grandeur ought to be left to England whilst the great army kept by France gives her a natural preeminence on the Continent” (Namier 1975, p. 233). To be sure, England’s situation as, in effect, a city-state attached to an agricultural society meant that there was always the danger that the pattern might be reversed. Unlike the situation in France, however, the aristocracy in Britain possessed no legal or fiscal privileges to make acquisition of aristocratic status materially advantageous, nor was there a stigmatization of commercial and financial pursuits to create a psychological sanction in favor of the landed life. In fact, as Stone and Stone’s (1984) extensive research has shown, there was no pronounced tendency for wealthy bourgeois to buy landed estates, much less seek titles.22 What the eighteenth centrade. Nevertheless, Liberal governments did not dismantle the empire, and there is no reason to doubt the empire’s popularity among all classes in this era. *’It is interesting to note that the purchase of landed estates by non-nobles did not increase in the nineteenth century. Rather than suggesting the continued vitality of the

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tury saw was not extensive mobility between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy but a reasonably harmonious blending based upon an extensive sociability among middle and upper classes and the constant attraction of large profits which kept economic activity and government policy firmly wedded to the city-state ideal. This changed considerably in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that empire played some role in the process. Empires in themselves are not inimical to the city-state; both the Venetians and the Dutch acquired them. But there is a world of difference between an empire taken on and managed in the interests of trade and commerce and a large land empire ruled by an aristocratic elite and replete with notions of grandeur, power, military prowess, and noblesse oblige.23 It is clear that Britain’s empire moved from the former category to the latter in the nineteenth century: “In the 1890’s she became an ‘imperialistic’ power in a self-conscious way,” noted Porter (1975, p. 119), “flaunting her empire like a cockbird blowing up his feathers to assert his dominance over rivals.” The nineteenth-century moral revolution undoubtedly contributed to breeding a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the non-Europeans under British control that transmuted itself, in moments of vainglory, into the belief that all peoples would benefit from British rule and the cherished ideals it embodied. But it is also clear that the acquisition and maintenance of a large empire helped to rekindle an aristocratic ethos that was increasingly appreciated in middle-class circles as the destabilizing and distasteful effects of the industrial revolution made themselves felt. The upshot is that a profound transformation in attitudes did take place and, aided by a continued prosperity that flowed from past economic conquests, implanted itself so firmly in British cultural soil that even the most extreme manifestations of football hooliganism or city-state ideal, however, this represented what F. Thompson (1984, p. 209) refers to as “the downgrading of the territorial stakes demanded by the landed elite for admission into the upper class”-one of the concessions the aristocracy made to retain its position. 23This distinction is important and easily misunderstood. Sked (1987, pp. 5-6), for example, misinterprets my argument to mean that any nation involved in late-nineteenth-century imperialism-including France, Germany, Japan, and the United States-should have experienced economic decline. What matters, of course, is not the territory acquired but the attitudes prevailing among the middle and upper classes. Britain’s early start, to which Sked gives much credence as a cause of economic decline, is less relevant in that regard than as an explanation for why those other nations, no matter how colony-hungry they may have become, maintained priority on industrial and entrepreneurial values-they wished to catch up with Britain.

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labor unrest fail to convince many that the “orderly, gentle, docile, safe and law-abiding” (Barnett 1972, p. 63) quality of British life has neither a centuries-old past nor, perhaps, very much of a future.

V The argument of this chapter, then, is that British society experienced a fundamental change in the nineteenth century. The change in question was not, however, the familiar transformation from a traditional, rural society into a modern, urban and industrial one. Rather, the change consisted of the adoption in Britain of many of the features of a type of society that had existed elsewhere in Europe in its basic outlines but that had hitherto distinguished England by its absence. By the late nineteenth century, the signs of this change were abundant: economically, the turning away, whenever possible, from entrepreneurial activity, the reliance on safe overseas investments, and the preference for small family firms rather than dynamic, expanding enterprises; socially, the connection between social status and remoteness from “trade,” the importance of class distinctions made obvious through cultured differences in education and accent, the prestige associated with public (especially imperial) service, and the proliferation of honors, military orders, and titles; culturally, the remaking of the gentlemanly ideal and the revival of Catholic and high Anglican religious thought; politically, the domination of democracy through the myth of government by those born to rule, the rise of an enormously popular cult of monarchy, and, as noted in Chapter 1, the identification of “merit” in the civil service with the classical formation of the leisured gentleman. This transformation in values had very little to do with rationalchoice calculations of the bourgeoisie’s self-interest. As we have seen, the material interest of the bourgeoisie would have been better secured by monopolizing business careers through credentialism than by deprecating industrial and entrepreneurial values and avoiding or seeking escape from industrial pursuits. The pervasive fear of social disorder might be incorporated into a broader interpretation of bourgeois selfinterest, but it is difficult to see how stigmatizing industry would have been an appropriate means to that end.24 The emphasis on socialization through the reformed educational system strongly suggests that the process involved the acquisition of different ends; in other words, that 2 4 S ~ an ~ hinterpretation would also run into free-rider problems, for it implies a classwide bourgeois compact whose enforcement would have to be accounted for.

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the values and life-style of the leisured gentleman became ends in themselves. This outcome is as unsettling to Marxists as it is to rational-choice theorists, for the triumph of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois values is part of Marxism’s standard liturgy. Anderson, Nairn, and their followers have sought refuge from this problem in the argument that the bourgeoisie remained subordinate in Britain, but at the cost of making Britain’s transformation into an industrial democracy problematic instead. The transformation of nineteenth-century Britain suggests that certain values may have an appeal that extends beyond their utility in maximizing personal material advantage. This does not mean that these values are uncaused, but it does imply that they cannot be treated soiely as epiphenomena determined by rational self-interest as mediated through a societal structure of incentives. The autonomy of cultural traits is also suggested by the extent to which the ethos of the late nineteenth century has survived in present-day Britain. It can be seen today in civil service recruitment patterns, university graduate occupational preferences, and engineering school enrollment figures; it forms the basis for the Conservative party’s continuing appeal (if no longer its stated program); and it assures British television of a large audience for melodramas with posh Victorian or Edwardian settings. Nevertheless, after a century of economic decline, the old pattern has lost much of its vitality and its validity-culturalism could not expect less. The question for the future is, Can Britain ever change enough through peaceful means to catch up with nations that have successfully institutionalized change as an essential aspect of contemporary life? Marxists such as Anderson and Nairn would have us believe that only a revolution could suffice to smash the old pattern; no ruling elite, after all, willingly signs its own death warrant. If the thesis of this chapter is correct that Britain has changed more in the last two centuries than they are willing to acknowledge, however, then perhaps Britain once again can transform itself to meet the needs of the age. But at the moment, with the various panaceas of the 1960s and 1970s-white-hot technological revolution, E.E.C. membership, trade union reformhaving seen their day, Margaret Thatcher’s experiment in reinstilling entrepreneurialism yet to prove its worth, and the newer panaceas of Labour’s ‘‘alternative economic strategy” or the Cambridge School’s protectionism-cum-industrial planning still outside the range of admissable options, it is not at all clear what kind of transformation it should be or how it could be effected. One can anticipate, however, that concerned and anxious Britons will continue to pursue it doggedly in the years to come.

Chapter 5

Why Has Britain Persisted? The Uncertain Bases of Political Support in the British Polity

T

he past twenty years have witnessed an increasing polarization of analytic orientations toward politics into two antithetical and occasionally antagonistic schools. Although lively of late, this opposition between rationalist and culturalist perspectives on human behavior boasts a very long and distinguished pedigree. The rationalist school has been associated with views of society and politics that formed the intellectual bedrocks of the Enlightenment, utilitarianism, classical political economy, and Marxism; the roots of modern culturalism have been traced to the reaction of Burke to Rousseau, of Coleridge to Bentham, of Arnold to Smith, and of Weber and Parsons to Marx. Cast in these terms, the controversy might be interpreted as one of progress versus reaction, of reliance on social engineering versus reliance on the prejudices of tradition, of optimism versus pessimism over the nature and course of human affairs. As indicated in Chapter 2, this interpretation is not totally justified. For one thing, culturalism cannot be reduced to an inheritance of the Counter-Enlightenment’s pessimism, a conclusion that is underscored by the fact that its most recent apogee of influence was reached during the buoyant optimism and prosperity of the 1960s (the rationalist school, conversely, made steady progress among social scientists in the post-Vietnam, postWatergate era of cynicism and recession). For another, the Marxist perspective differs sufficiently from the rational-choice perspective that grouping both under the same rubric is of limited value. Nevertheless, the Manicheanism of this interpretation does serve to emphasize the valid point that the interpretive debate touches upon fundamental beliefs concerning the nature of man in society; and it is perhaps for this reason that proponents of the different schools seldom 134

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directly address the arguments made by their counterparts except in ways best described as dismissive. In this chapter I attempt to redress this situation by examining rival interpretations of British politics, with particular emphasis on the key issue of Britain’s apparently high levels of political support or legitimacy. Britain, as we have seen, is a particularly appropriate case for the examination of opposing perspectives on society and politics. It was in Britain, on the one hand, that the Newtonian mechanical universe was born and divine-right mythology was buried in the seventeenth century; that economic rationality became a prime organizing principle in human affairs in the eighteenth century; and that the currents of industrialism, science, and reason flowed most strongly in the early nineteenth century (Chapters 2 and 3 ) . On the other hand, Britain was also the first industrial power to experience the development of a body of thought that questioned, criticized, and ultimately rejected the moral vapidity and social atomism of the pursuit of material advantage as a way of life and sought to place in its stead an ideal of human behavior that purposefully elevated the nurturing of cultural and communal values to a position of preeminence (Chapter 4). This combination of contradictory impulses can be seen in the ways in which the nature and legitimacy of British democracy have come to be described and explained in political science: judicious admixtures of modernity and tradition, dignity and efficiency, pragmatism and principle, deference and participation, individualism and collectivism have formed the axes of most analyses. To interpret British politics along these lines is, however, to tip one’s hat in favor of the culturalist approach: rationalism or instrumentalism in human conduct becomes, in effect, a cultural value like any other, modified and limited by the others. It is not surprising, therefore, that this approach has increasingly come under attack. Although many criticisms have been made of culturalist explanations of politics and political support in Britain, I concentrate in the next section on three main lines of assault: (1) the indeterminacy of the main explanatory or independent variables, the cultural values themselves; (2) the lack of true causal independence of these alleged independent variables; and, most significantly, ( 3 ) the fact that they may be changing all too quickly to be the fundamental foundations of politics, as has been claimed. I subsequently explore both a challenging alternative ‘A good example is Almond’s (1980, pp. 29-30) dismissal of Rogowski’s (1974) rational-choice explanation of legitimacy, although Rogowski’s (1974, pp. 4-13) own critique of political cultural approaches could be viewed in a similar light.

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from the rational-choice school, Rogowski’s theory of rational legitimacy, and various Marxist attempts to grapple with the issue, suggesting in the process that they, too, have their weaknesses. Finally, I put forward an interpretation of political support in Britain which attempts to reconcile the more valid points of this debate, and in so doing, allocates to political culture a role that is, if somewhat less all-encompassing, perhaps better founded.

I A basic premise of the culturalist perspective on politics is that political behavior is conditioned by norms and values acquired for the most part during childhood. Political support is one such value, but in an important respect it is not like the others. Although most culturalist interpretations do take note of the way in which political allegiance is taught to children, they also stipulate or assume that widespread political support will endure in a society only if a state of appropriateness or conduciveness exists between the political culture and the political system’s form or structure. Almond and Verba’s (1963) pioneering study of political culture in five democracies, for example, was essentially an attempt to delineate a “civic culture” appropriate to the continued survival of the liberal-democratic form of government. Eckstein (1966, 1969) subsequently incorporated both socialization and conduciveness themes into a single framework by hypothesizing that governments will be legitimate when (1) there is a sufficient degree of congruence between the authority pattern under which the government operates and the authority pattern(s) evident in other sections of social life, particularly those close to the governmental sphere (parties, interest groups, voluntary associations), and (2) there is a harmony or “consonance” between the norms, forms, and practices that comprise those authority patterns. In his analysis of British political stability, Eckstein (1966, pp. 234-37, 241-50) argued that there is a marked congruence of form among government, political parties, and voluntary associations and, moreover, that institutions deviating from that pattern, such as schools and businesses, mimic that form to a very considerable extent. This more structural side to his hypothesis has received little critical comment; what is much more controversial is the cultural side, in particular the idea Eckstein shares with other culturalists that there is consonance between norms in British society and the form of government. Much of this criticism has focused on the ways in which British political culture has been characterized and measured. Kavanagh, who may be

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taken as representative of these critics, has argued that there has been a lack of precision in defining the major cultural traits in British political culture, a lack of empirical evidence concerning their relative frequencies in the population at large and its various subgroups, and an inadequate amount of attention paid to the task of accumulating information through the replication of previous conceptualizations and hypotheses (Kavanagh 1980, pp. 162-63).2 To take the last-mentioned objection first, it is certainly true that different researchers have preferred their own formulations of the central cultural matrix to adopting and testing previous ones. Among the more notable accounts of British political culture, Lipset (1967) utilized the values of achievement, elitism, universalism, and diffuseness; Almond and Verba (1963) emphasized balances between the disparate qualities of activity and passivity, consensus and cleavage, system affect and instrumentalism, as well as the pervasiveness of social and political trust; and Nordlinger (1967) asserted the primacy of an equilibrium between acquiescence and directiveness .3 Other terms employed to characterize fundamental elements of British political culture have included secularism, pragmatism, civility, organicism, traditionalism, fusion, homogeneity, tolerance, deference, and a sense of community. Beneath the apparent diversity of interpretations, however, there lies a more fundamental consensus that, albeit imperfectly elaborated, must not be overlooked. All three studies just noted clearly emphasize the deferential quality of British political culture; so do the works of Eckstein (1962), Rose (1963, McKenzie and Silver (1968), and many others. As we shall see, the concept of deference has been used in a wide variety of ways, not all of them persuasive. Nevertheless, most authorities would regard as characteristic of the deferential nature of British political culture the widespread belief that government is there to govern according to the dictates of its own best judgement, that it may be presumed to be competent to do so (unless there is evidence to the contrary), and in any case that the normal role of the citizen is obedience to the rule of law and the authority of governmental decision makers. 'Rogowski (1974, pp. 11-13) has generalized this point into the view that there can never be agreement on which cultural variables are basic (durable and causative), and Eckstein (1979, pp. 26-29), a defender of culturalism, agrees that this is a weakness of most culturalist approaches. 3Nordlinger did, however, attempt to relate the traits he identified to those of Almond and Verba.

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If this were the only, or even the dominant, characteristic of British political culture, it would hardly qualify it as democratic or civic. But there is also general agreement that the tendency of the British to defer or acquiesce in a positive, trustful way to political authority is balanced by a second orientation variously characterized as pragmatic, instrumental, secular, participatory, or directive. The essence of this orientation is that nonelites have the acknowledged right to advance basically self-interested demands and to expect that elites will respond in ways consistent with the perception of the state as a set of institutions for the resolution of particular demands of various sectors of society rather than an instrument for the pursuit of consummatory ends. Although some authorities recognize an inherent tension between deference and directiveness (Rose 1965, pp. 104-6), the emphasis has been on the “fusion” of the traditional (deference) with the modern (directiveness) to produce a homogeneous culture that sharply differentiates Britain from certain Continental political cultures whose predominant characteristic is fragmentation or bifurcation. Kavanagh’s first two points cause more worry and can best be illustrated with the concept of deference itself. Although, as indicated, the sense of the term just given would be accepted fairly generally, the concept has not been defined or operationalized consistently along those lines. Jessop (1974, pp. 34-35), following on a point by Kavanagh, identified four distinct uses of the term in the literature: (1) ascriptive sociopolitical deference (the belief in the superior capabilities of the “high-born”), (2) ascriptive social deference (a more general deference to the high-born, including royalty), (3) sociocultural deference (acceptance of a traditional social and moral order), and (4) political deference (the usage I presented earlier). The evidence for the deferential quality of political orientations in Britain is also riddled with inconsistency and ambiguity. Studies of working-class Conservative voting have generally opted for the first-mentioned meaning of the term, but their survey data have shown repeatedly that only small proportions of the adult population (usually less than 20 percent) are deferential in that sense, and that just one-half of those who are deferential actually vote Conservative (Jessop 1974, pp. 86, 140; Kavanagh 1980, p. 166). Favorable views of the monarchy are much more prevalent, as is support for the continued existence of the House of Lords and the public schools, and for the role of the Anglican church in society (Jessop 1974, pp. 87-93). This symbolic endorsement of traditional elite institutions and presumably of the traditional order they represent is often accompanied, however, by fairly widespread criticism of particular aspects of the roles of these institutions in everyday

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life. As for the specifically political type of deference, the survey data indicate that it, too, is very widespread among the population, as even critics of the cultural approach acknowledge (p. 102). When one moves from a more abstract to a more concrete level, however, one finds considerable evidence of attitudes that suggest disaffection from the prevailing system: support for referenda and other constitutional innovations, feelings of inadequate popular influence in government, and so forth, are typical (Dennis et al. 1971, pp. 43-45; Jessop 1974, p. 103; Mann 1970, p. 432). Moreover, this disaffection, or at least inconsistency, in attitudes toward the political system is most likely to be found among lower-class respondents, a fact that tends to be downplayed or left unexplored in these ~ t u d i e s . ~ Thus, there are reasons for questioning the usage of the term deference in accounts of British political culture and the universality and consistency of deferential attitudes in Britain. To some extent, the latter point may be attributable to a possible decline of deference in Britain in recent years, but this will not resolve the problem entirely: the element of stratification in the distribution of deferential attitudes has been identified by critics of culturalist approaches even in the studies that first defined the contours of Britain’s allegedly deferential political culture. Moreover, there is the additional implication that British political culture may not be predominantly homogeneous either, especially as there is no reason to believe that directiveness is uniformly distributed in the population. A less-than-complete homogeneity with regard to those cultural traits that made British political culture seem so admirable in the 1950s and 1960s has not gone entirely unnoticed by proponents of culturalist interpretations; Eckstein (1966, p. 239), in fact, made specific allowance for it in his concept of “graduated resemblances” in authority patterns. The idea here is that as one moves away from the governmental sphere, deviations from the authority pattern characteristic of the government may be expected, particularly for reasons of functional effectiveness (as in business) or smallness of scale. Provided there is no sharp break at any one point, the dissimilarities will not be destabilizing for the polity. However, the principal class-related deviation that Eckstein (1966, p. 244-45; see also Eckstein and Gurr 1975, pp. 4Besides Jessop (1974, p. 102) and Mann (1970, p. 432), this point has been made by a number of authors, but especially C. Pateman (1971). Almond and Verba’s (1963) tendency to stratify responses to survey items by education rather than by social class as such is one way in which the class dimension in political culture was minimized.

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393-94) noted of Britain is not that members of the working class may be less deferential in some respects than are members of the middle class, but rather that relations between classes and within the working class itself tend to be quite authoritarian. This tendency to view the British working class as posing no threat to elite rule, a tendency Eckstein shares with most other culturalists, seems to derive in large part from a particular interpretation of British (or English) historical development. In this interpretation, the eradication of the moral, political, and financial claims of the Roman Catholic church on the vast bulk of the populace; the checking of Stuart pretensions towards absolute authority; and the challenges of gentry, industrial bourgeoisie, and eventually working class to aristocratic-cum-monarchicalrule left few irreconcilable opponents of the secular, parliamentary, and democratic constitutional order that ultimately evolved from those events (Eckstein 1962, pp. 80-96; also Rose 1965, pp. 28-38). Each measure of successful adaptation of the political system reinforced the pragmatic, bargaining nature of British political discourse and preserved the commitment of all social groups to the fundamental integrity of the system itself and to those who were in command of it. Neat though it certainly is, this version runs afoul not only of the evidence that the British lower classes may be less consistently deferential than the middle class but also of the evidence that, historically, the English have been more suspicious of government and the legal system than the interpretation would seem to allow for. The extent of the distortion inherent in this view of English history is conveyed in Kavanagh’s (1976, p. 60) observation that even Walter Bagehot, the father of deference, regarded the English as possessing a natural impulse to resist authority and to see state legislation as “alien action.” Now, one could argue that these traits concern more the directiveness side of the cultural balance, but this retort does not obviate the likelihood that the particular mix of the two traits varies according to class and, at a more fundamental level, it begs the whole question of just how and in what proportions the disparate qualities are combined. It is probably true that individuals and actions that are directive or pragmatic as well as individuals and actions that are primarily deferential to political authority can be found in most political systems. If these properties are to explain anything, some indication has to be given as to how much of each quality, possessed by which groups or strata in society, is required in order to expect a certain manifest result (Jessop 1974, pp. 53-54). In The Civic Culture study, for example, the British are made out to be deferential largely on the basis of a comparison with Americans; yet as Kavanagh noted, if deference is taken to mean a

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passive or “subject” political orientation (as Almond and Verba seem to have intended), the Germans, Italians, and Mexicans could be considered more deferential than the British. Moreover, their own data reveal the British to be nearly as participatory as the Americans and among manual workers, the locus of a great deal of deferential theorizing, even more participatory and subjectively competent than their American counterparts (Kavanagh 1976, p. 80; 1980, pp. 133-34). The uncertainty over what qualifies a culture to be labeled primarily deferential or homogeneous directly raises a second general area of criticism of cultural approaches: the issue of causal explanation. The concept of political culture was devised to serve as a tool to link up a political system’s history to its present-day functioning; culture, the product of centuries of historical development, is believed to sustain (or undermine) the system as it exists and functions today. Yet, the empirical evidence adduced in support of this model-mainly in the form of responses to survey questions-establishes at most that certain attitudes exist among much or most of the population. It is equally possible to maintain that the political system and the political culture are “mutually interactive” (Kavanagh 1976, p. 78), or even that the prime direction of causality is from the system to the culture; that is, that the system itself-or more specifically , the individuals’ experiences with and observations of the system-mold their political attitudes and valuesa5Indeed, both Kavanagh (p. 77) and Barry (1970, pp. 5 1-52) have made the point that political trust and support might better be seen as the result of the responsiveness of the system and its elites to demands and expectations arising from below than as consequences of the appropriateness of the political system to the political culture of the society.6 Moreover, the argument can be taken one step further by noting that the system may not be a neutral influence. Those who control the state and its tools of indoctrination and education may have a vested interest in propagating cultural values and beliefs that sustain the political system and uphold their dominant position in it. According to this interpretation, cultural traits lose any possibility of being considered other than as intervening variables derivative of more important forces. As Barrington Moore (1966, p. 335) put it, “In a 5The thesis that the use of values to explain behavior involves a tautology, since values constitute mere redescriptions of the behaviors being explained, has been criticized effectively by Barry (1970, pp. 90-92) and will not be pursued here. 6Lijphart (1980, p. 49) has pointed out that Almond and Verba’s cognitive dimension of political culture does allow for the impact of the political system on values, but it is clear that their prime concern was the influence of culture on the system.

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general way we know that human attitudes and beliefs fail to persist unless the situations and sanctions that reproduce them continue to persist or, more crassly, unless people get something out of them.” The preceding remark strikes at the very core of cultural explanation in the social sciences, for it both suggests the central dilemma of that approach and points to its two major alternatives, rational-choice theory and Marxist theory. The central dilemma of cultural explanation is, quite simply, the dilemma of change. Although one can hedge the issue in various ways, in the final analysis, as Eckstein (1979, pp. 18-19) persuasively argues, cultural explanations must incorporate the presumption that attitudes tend to be stable and adjust only gradually to outside changes; Moore’s comment suggests that the alternative approaches sit quite comfortably with the notion that popular attitudes and values can and do change rapidly in response to changes in the structure or behavior of the system.7 On this count, some observers have reached the conclusion that British political culture has undergone a process of substantial and rapid change over the past two or three decades.8 Survey evidence has indicated that deferential attitudes have become less common, as have many of the elements of the civic culture associated with them: pride and satisfaction with the political system and its outputs, trust in government, the sense of community, and the like. From these and other findings, Beer (1982, p. 118) concluded in his reassessment of British politics that a “sudden and radical change in British political culture’’ has occurred since the 1950s with the emergence of a new cultural mix much more disposed to demand greater participation and more open and responsive government. It would be unfair, however, to leave the impression that unanimity has been reached even on this conclusion. Hart (1978, pp. 34, 79), whom Beer inexplicably cited in support of his thesis, wondered whether the sudden appearance of substantial degrees of political distrust in Britain “was more than coincidentally simultaneous with the descent on Britain of squadrons of American academics with American preoccupations, ’ ’ and noted that opinion polls in the 1940s showed roughly similar levels of ’This point is particularly relevant with respect to Eckstein’s congruence hypothesis itself; it means that changing the forms or structures of an authority pattern is not expected to produce rapid changes in its norms. ‘Kavanagh (1980, pp. 140-60) and Beer (1982, pp. 114-20) provide summaries of the evidence on this point. Although both reached the conclusion that values have changed, Kavanagh was much more cautious than Beer concerning whether the evidence establishes the point.

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distrust as today. Norton (1984, p. 360), citing survey work reported in 1980 which shows an increase in trust in government since the late 1960s, concluded that the truly remarkable fact about Britain’s civic culture is the extent to which it has endured relatively intact, given the failures of successive governments to satisfy economic expectations since the 1950s. Perhaps the most that can be said is that distrust, although not new, is now exhibited more openly, and deference, although still present, is expressed less unreservedly than in former days. Just as it is difficult to gauge whether changes in political attitudes in Britain have occurred on a scale and with a speed sufficient to invalidate culturalist interpretations of British politics, so it is difficult to pin down the second part of the hypothesis: that changes in structural or situational factors account for the cultural changes that have been documented. Kavanagh (1980, p. 162), assuming a “system-performance-influences-culture” model, followed a popular line in emphasizing the effect on attitudes of the persistent failure of governments to manage the economy so as to achieve rates of growth and levels of affluence commensurate with the other advanced industrial nations. Beer (1982, p. 146), on the other hand, argued that the value change began in the late 1950s before economic performance had become an object of serious concern. After examining various other possibilities, Beer (p. 147) was ultimately led to the rather disquieting conclusion that the rise of the “new populism” contains “an essential autonomy which escapes structural explanation. ” There is another alternative for culturalists who are willing to acknowledge shbstantial change in British political culture in recent decades: the possibility that postwar generations have been socialized into new values. Both Rogowski (1974, pp. 5-6) and Eckstein (1979, p. 18), in their opposing contributions to the debate over the merits of cultural explanations, pinpointed the idea of preadult socialization as crucial to that type of approach. However, Rogowski concluded on the basis of data on West Germany that socialization cannot save the culturalist thesis. In his view, the Federal Republic must be counted among the stable democracies of the contemporary world; before the war, it is just as clear that Germany possessed a highly legitimate authoritarian government. If childhood socialization into cultural values constitutes a reasonably enduring feature of the human psyche, older Germans who were raised and educated under the Nazi regime should be less likely to exhibit civic cultural values supportive of democratic institutions than postwar generations of young Germans. In his opinion, significant generational differences in political values of

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the expected sort had not yet been found and, most likely, would not be found in the future (Rogowski 1974, pp. 7-10). This conclusion is not universally accepted. Conradt (1980, pp. 256-57), in his review of research on German political culture, asserted to the contrary that most of the work has revealed important differences across generations in political values, with postwar generations much more likely to support such values as political competition, freedom of speech, and democratic representation; to be more critical of nondemocratic regimes and Germany’s role in World War 11; and to exhibit stronger national identity for West Germany. As predicted by the related hypothesis that older generations should have more “dissonance” (prior socialization to live down), it has also been found that rates of change in the direction of support for democratic values are higher among postwar than prewar generations. Baker, Dalton, and Hildebrandt’s (1981) subsequent analysis of the available survey evidence also found an important generational effect in the growth of civic cultural attitudes among the German population. Confusion also exists over whether the purported evolution of British political culture in the last two or three decades can be attributed to a similar process. Marsh’s (1977, p. 69) study of political attitudes in Britain did reveal large and significant differences in the expected direction across generations in levels of what he termed “protest potential,” which may be taken roughly to represent the opposite of deference. Kavanagh (1980, p. 161) has argued, however, that other studies, in particular Inglehart’s 1971 article on the “silent revolution” in Western value systems, have failed to confirm the existence of sizable generational differences in Britain on this type of issue. This summation, too, can be questioned, at least with respect to the Inglehart study.9 In a later and more exhaustive presentation of his findings, Inglehart (1977, pp. 310-19) reported that younger cohorts had higher levels of “participant potential” in all countries he studied. He then cited as support Marsh’s findings on Britain and replicated Marsh’s protest potential scale across his entire sample without indicating in any way that his British respondents failed to show the generational effect that he found to exist across the nine nations in question. As for the “post-material” values with which Inglehart was more directly concerned, two points should be noted. First, the later study reported ’The only other studies Kavanagh (1980, p. 161) cited were an unpublished 1974 paper by Abrams and a single 1973 Gallup poll question. His (uncited) point about the absence of large differences across generations on economic and welfare issues does not seem to be directly relevant.

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generational differences in support for postmaterial values in Britain that were only slightly smaller than those in certain other European nations (pp. 36-37). 10 Second, the postmaterialism scales Inglehart employed in the 1971 article and in the book dealt with a trade-off between postmaterialist items, many of little immediate concern to Britons (maintaining order, protecting free speech), and materialist items such as rising prices and economic stagnation that had become highly salient issues in Britain during the economically troubled 1970s. The patterning across generations or cohorts of postmaterial values, so defined, in Britain may therefore not be directly relevant to the kind of cultural change at issue here. This is the conclusion reached by Beer (1982, p. 146), who argued that the cultural transformation of Britain he identified continued unabated in the 1970s, when declining economic fortunes should have dictated a turning away from postmaterialism toward more material concerns. To sum up, certain factors have come to the fore in recent years that have led to a questioning of the value of political culture in understanding the functioning of the British political system and its sources of political support. The first factor, the lack of agreement on what the main cultural variables are and how they should be measured or combined, is reflected in an absence of rigorous tests of hypotheses linking cultural traits to other features of the political system, counterpoised by a disturbing facileness with which a variety of such attributes have been proposed and apparently shown to exist with empirical (survey) data. The net result seems to be a vague understanding, at least until recently, that British political culture is characterized by a homogeneous mix of deference and directiveness consonant in some sense with the form of government but, despite some evidence to the contrary, little effort to push the matter further. This result leaves at issue the fundamental question of whether, to put it at its simplest, cultural values transmitted from generation to generation sustain and condition the political system, or the other way around. When British political culture seemed to possess the property of relative immutability, and the political system likewise, the issue could be safely ignored; but British political culture may well have entered an era of rapid transformation. Short-term changes in basic cultural values in themselves undermine the credibility of the culturalist stance, since culturalism must assume that value orientations are "Moreover, Inglehart expected Britain to show a smaller generational gap because postmaterialism is related to affluence, and older generations of Britons experienced greater affluence in the past than their Continental counterparts.

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enduring; but the blow is not fatal until it can be shown that other features of the political system are responsible. The most thorough discussion of the alleged transformation in British political culture (Beer) has suggested that the value changes in question predate the most frequently noted changes in the functioning of the system-its alleged immobility and its inability to deliver economic prosperityand some evidence exists pointing to differential socialization of younger age cohorts, which is compatible with culturalism, as a possible cause. But the dilemma is, at bottom, unresolved. We do not know for certain how the main values should be defined or measured, what causes them to change over time, and whether they have any autonomous causal role to play in the explanation of political performance or political support. In the next two sections I explore whether alternative approaches can offer any acceptable escape from this impasse.

I1 The two major alternatives to culturalism, rational-choice theory and Marxist theory, treat cultural variables in markedly different manners. Rational-choice models achieve parsimony by banishing cultural variables from the explanation of political phenomena to the fullest possible extent; Marxist approaches, on the other hand, acknowledge cultural traits more readily but relegate them to a dependent or subordinate role within a structural framework of explanation. This section is devoted to an examination of the more extreme premise that culture need not be considered at all in the explanation of political legitimacy. The most notable attempt to construct a theory of political support devoid of the resort to cultural values as independent variables has been developed by Rogowski in his aptly titled book, Rational Legitimacy (1974). Although his argument is richly nuanced and multifaceted, its essence can be conveyed for our purposes by the following points. The basic premise of the thesis is that the individual citizen accords support or legitimacy to a political system if it is rational from his standpoint to do so. As noted in Chapter 2, a rational citizen considers the importance of the decisions that governments make, the likelihood of his uniquely determining those decisions, and the workability of various governmental forms in reaching his decision. Thus, in a society in which it is believed that socially necessary tasks can be performed by anyone-that is, a ‘‘wholly interchangeable society”only a constitutional order, such as a direct democracy, that provides an equal probability to each citizen of affecting political decisions will

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be accorded legitimacy. In the (somewhat) more realistic situation of a society in which roles are allocated according to merit (“modified interchangeability”), representative democracy with greater freedom of action and longer terms of office for leaders will find acceptance (Rogowski 1974, pp. 67, 72-73), Societies that are stratified in the sense that particular subgroups monopolize certain essential social skills, however, can present a very different picture. For Rogowski, a “segment” exists whenever all members of one or more strata are organized into a single coalition. Segments are more easily formed from strata with fewer members and more easily maintained when the members have common distinguishing characteristics, or “stigmata,” that identify them as different from the rest of society. A segment’s influence in political decision making varies according to the degree to which it can credibly claim to have succeeded at internal cohesion or coalition, that is, to have monopolized an essential skill; here, obviously, elite strata have the advantage and could well dominate stratified systems (pp. 152-58). It might seem that the key role played in this theory by citizens’ perceptions of the nature of the social order could open the back door to culturalism, since values could have influenced those perceptions. Rogowski, however, rules out, or at least limits, this possibility. According to his second axiom, perceptions are based on experience, and beliefs contradicted by direct experience or readily available information will be altered to accord more closely with reality. Thus, interchangeability will be perceived when there is in fact a degree of occupational mobility that is high and harmless to efficiency, and it will be absent to the extent that particular skills come to be associated with groups possessing particular stigmata. Similarly, the power of a segment in a segmented society, which depends on its credibility or perceived probability of successful coalition, is conceived to be a function of its actual probability of success (Rogowski 1974, pp. 57, 69, 71).11 Rogowski says nothing about the state of political legitimacy in contemporary Britain, but it is a fair inference that Britain’s traditionally deferential civic culture should be associated with a general (and accurate) perception of a limited, but nevertheless substantial, occupational interchangeability, and that the increased populism of recent years should reflect an alteration in social reality in the direction of 11 Some exceptions to this axiom are permitted, however. For example, perceptions of the probabilities of (internal) coalition of different segments may not be uniform if the society is undergoing rapid change (Rogowski 1974, pp. 164-65).

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greater interchangeability. There exists, however, very little empirical evidence on these points because social mobility studies are usually more concerned with intergenerational than with intragenerational or occupational mobility and seldom attempt to correlate mobility with regime support or other political attitudes. Nevertheless, we can evaluate the thesis on the basis of the manner in which Rogowski explains the nature and legitimacy of the classic two-party parliamentary system of the late nineteenth century, From which most culturalists trace the corisolidation of the deferenceldirectiveness cultural package. Britain a century ago represents for Rogowski (1974, pp. 280-81) a near-perfect example of a society whose previous segmentation had eroded to the point where a legitimate democratic form of government had become possible. The picture he paints of Victorian society is one in which the “burghers” had penetrated the essential social skills of the nobles and gentry (administration of government, defense, divine mediation), the nobles and gentry had done likewise with respect to skills once unique to the burghers (trade and coordination of industry), the agricultural sector’s essentiality had been undermined by reliance on food imports, and only the industrial workers monopolized their own social function. In “mixed” societies such as this one, the essential criterion for political power is the ability of skill groups, singly or in coalition, to cover all essential skills. Two coalitions were in a position to achieve that happy state: workers plus burghers or workers plus aristocrats. This accounts for the highly legitimate pattern of two-party competition between Conservatives (workers and nobles) and Liberals (workers and burghers) which dominated the era. Rogowski’s interpretation of nineteenth-century British society and politics bears, without doubt, a certain degree of plausibility. Most authorities agree that the advent of industrialism in the nineteenth century produced an industrial bourgeoisie which challenged the aristocratic domination of political power and which ultimately succeeded in opening up the political system to greater middle-class influence. 12 It is also reasonable to suppose that the Liberal party articulated an ideology that reflected the interests of this group, and that aristocratic interests were better represented by the Conservatives; both parties, moreover, made appeals and granted concessions to working-class interests. Although the alignment of groups makes sense, their relative powers seem very much askew. By Rogowski’s method of reckoning, the worker segment was in a considerably more powerful political ”The principal exception is a group of Marxist scholars whose views are considered in the next section.

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position than either the burghers or the aristocracy, because it alone was essential to any possible governing coalition. It should therefore have been the dominant influence in government. Clearly this was not the case. According to the theory, the consequence of the workers’ relative lack of political influence should have been a loss of regime legitimacy among workers and efforts to transform or overthrow the system; what actually occurred was working-class acquiescence. One way to get around this problem would be to treat industrial workers as a stratum rather than as a segment; in other words, to excise the notion that workers constituted a solid bloc of voters available to either party. With this change, workers could be seen as internally divided: some, perhaps the larger group, organized behind first the Liberals, then the Labour party, and the rest constituting the group of working-class Tories that has kept the Conservative party afloat over the past century. l 3 This reinterpretation would greatly reduce the power allocated to workers under the theory, because they would no longer be in a position to withhold an essential skill from either of the other factions, and it would enhance the correspondence of theory and historical reality accordingly. Although it is possible to explain working-class acceptance of the political system in this fashion, it is not so easy to explain the burghers’ attitudes or behavior. To see this point, consider the explanation offered of the French Revolution. In prerevolutionary France, according to Rogowski (1974, pp. 277-78), the bourgeoisie had penetrated the skills of administration, religion, and defense that formerly were the preserve of the nobility; the latter, moreover, had abdicated its role in the coordination of agriculture to an independent peasantry. The nobility thus had ceased to monopolize any essential skill, and a revolutionary coalition of bourgeois and peasants, the only two groups to command essential functions, emerged in 1789 to eliminate it. Apart from a substitution of workers for peasants as the main lower-class stratum, the only essential difference between that social structure and Rogowski’s version of the social structure of Victorian Britain appears to be the fact that the British aristocracy and gentry (Rogowski treats them as a single faction) had penetrated the bourgeois skills of managing industry and trade. We are therefore asked to believe that a bourgeoisie that had partially displaced the landed elite in the performance of its traditional skills was inhibited from leading a revolution to unseat that group only because it in return had effected a certain 13

This may, of course, have been Rogowski’s intention. The problem is that he refers to workers as a segment, which entails the idea of cohesion.

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penetration into normally bourgeois skills. l4 It would be very difficult to argue that the landed classes’ involvement in industry, if not trade, in late-nineteenth-century Britain was anything other than minor and insignificant or that people alive at the time could have seen it as an essential element of the social and political structure, yet that factor alone apparently saved Britain from violent revolution. The reason Rogowski can make this argument is that he apparently believes that the size of the penetration by one group into the skills of another is irrelevant; no size criterion appears in his theory.l5 This position hardly seems reasonable. Given the small size of the landed elite, it would have taken a very considerable penetration of industry indeed to have sustained the impression that the services of the bourgeoisie in this area could have been dispensed with. The same is not true, however, of the bourgeoisie’s involvement in the traditionally noble skills of government and military command; here, I would suggest, the much greater penetration of these skills by the more numerous bourgeoisie could quite plausibly have led to the perception that the landed elite was dispensable. Even if one does not grant the point, there is another sense in which the landed classes’ role can be seen as nonessential. A vast literature suggests that the landed elite of that period, rather than equipping itself to the fullest possible extent with bourgeois skills to ensure its survival, viewed the acquisition of such skills as a matter of considerable repugnance. In terms of Rogowski’s theory, such a stance would be positively suicidal, yet this class survived; and although the political order ultimately evolved in a manner that gradually reduced its role, that process was far removed from the revolutionary scenario that Rogowski’s theory would lead one to expect. Rogowski’s approach is probably correct in one respect: the nobility in Victorian Britain was seen as indispensable. But this belief in its indispensability did not rest on anything like an accurate perception of social reality. Upon what, then, did it rest? If not upon the accurate perception of 14The fact that part of the workers’ stratum may have supported the aristocracy is not relevant here, since all that was required for a bourgeois-worker coalition to have dominated society was a monopoly of one skill-in this case, industrial management-and some penetration of the other essential skills (Rogowski 1974, p. 204). ”The only theoretical reference to the size of the skill penetration concerns factions capable of performing all essential skills; here, even a “miniscule” penetration of a skill is sufficient (Rogowski 1974, p. 205). Would this still apply if the group in question were not a faction of “interchangeables” but a coalition of two distinct skill groups, nobles and workers? Common sense would say not, but the issue is never addressed.

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reality, then presumably upon the inaccurate or distorted perception of reality, that is, upon ideology. The ideology in question may, moreover, have been deliberately propagated with the intention of maintaining as long as possible the control or influence of that particular ruling segment. Certain kinds of stigmata, such as the possession of a public school accent, may have been cultivated purposefully as a means of establishing perceived barriers to mobility into these skill areas. Even though these stigmata did not constitute objective qualifications for performing governmental, military, or divine mediation functions, so persuasive and compelling might they have seemed that mobile individuals who had in every other sense penetrated the skill area, rather than continuing to identify with their strata of origin or forming a new faction as Rogowski would expect (depending on the circumstances), might actually have sought to be incorporated into the ruling segment. For its part, the ruling segment might have accepted or even welcomed this development in hopes of perpetuating its domination of society through a practice of judicious co-optation. At least so believe the Marxists, to whose theories we now turn.16

I11 Recent Marxist interpretations of political legitimacy in Britainwhatever else may be thought of them-at least have the virtue of incorporating explicitly within their theoretical embrace the two problematic aspects of Rogowski’s rational-legitimacy model: the degree of objectivity in social perception and the possibility of co-optation by “higher” segments. In its boldest formulations, the lack of objective social perception explains why the working class was never able to form a cohesive segment that would have given it political dominance (or led it to revolution), and the co-optation of the bourgeoisie, a result not just of impaired social perception but also of the aristocracy’s usefulness as an ally against the working class, in turn explains the absence of objective perception among workers. Let us consider the perception issue first. Marx and Engels noted more than once that the ideas of the ruling class are, in general, the ruling ideas, but they never took the point so I6Not only Marxists believe this. Lipset (1967, pp. 274-83), for one, allocated considerable importance to the distinction between Britain’s open, or incorporative, aristocracy and Germany’s closed, or insulative, one. Incorporation is not allowed for in Rogowski’s theory; in fact, he argues that barriers to mobility will be defended, even when stigmata differentiating the groups have disappeared (Rogowski 1974, pp. 2 18-19).

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far as to assert that the control of ideas effected by the ruling classes could neutralize class conflict itself. This was the particular contribution of Antonio Gramsci. Indeed, Gramsci even provided for the possibility that a ruling class could achieve an active and enthusiastic commitment from the masses to its exercise of power by means of the control and manipulation of institutions that mold perceptions of social reality, such as schools, media, and organized religion (Femia 1975, p. 32). In bourgeois societies, however, it is much more likely that ruling classes maintain power on the basis of a more passive kind of consent. In such cases, members of the working class may sense the contradictions between many of the received ideas of bourgeois democracy (equal opportunity; one person, one vote) and everyday reality (class domination), but they lack the conceptual tools to locate their discontent within a systematic analysis of society as a whole. Only the exposure to a mass radical party with a developed and comprehensible critique of bourgeois society and a blueprint for a better socialist one can overcome this state of “contradictory consciousness” and generate a revolutionary thrust, even if the objective conditions for the profound transformation of society already exist. In the absence of this alternative, which is usually defined by elites as beyond the pale of acceptability, superficiality and confusion will characterize the political thinking of ordinary men and women. The guiding principles of the political and economic systems of the society will be endorsed by them in general terms, for example, but in more practical matters, beliefs and behaviors inconsistent with those ideals will often be accepted without further reflection. It is this phenomenon, apparently, that led American democratic theorists a generation ago to see elites as the bulwarks of liberal democracy and mass involvement in politics as its principal threat. Parkin (1971, pp. 81-102) has defined the three value systems implicit in this outline of social reality in Western societies as the dominant, the subordinate, and the radical. British workers’ deferential attitudes, as well as their apparently related tendency to vote Conservative, are interpreted under this schema as indicators of the extent to which the subordinate classes have accepted the dominant value system. 17 The contradictory consciousness of working-class individuals caught between practical experience and prevailing norms is the basis for the subordinate value system, in which a working-class solidarity of an “us-versus-them” sort coexists with a fundamentally accommo”Parkin (1971) also allowed for an “aspirational” interpretation of the dominant value system in which individual social mobility according to merit is a salient feature.

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dative approach to the status quo. This position is consistent with a trade-union consciousness which seeks to negotiate concessions from the dominant class but does not challenge directly the overall social and economic framework of capitalism. What is lacking in the subordinate value system is the institutional power to sustain a system of values contradictory to the dominant system; as a result, consciousness of social reality is highly localized. Purveyors of a radical value system seek to overcome this restricted social vision by promoting a consciousness of class. In order to achieve this objective, they attempt to demonstrate that class inequality is systemic and pervasive; they advance an egalitarian creed that attributes dignity and esteem to manual occupations; and they develop an institutional basis, the socialist party, to sustain the counterideology and counter-value system. They may be successful in this enterprise, but in bourgeois societies they inevitably work at a disadvantage. The best evidence for a “hegemonic” interpretation of British society and its political culture is of two sorts: (1) indications that political ideas and values of members of the subordinate (working) class are inconsistent or contradictory, and (2) indications that the possession of values deviant from dominant ones varies with the individual’s social distance or “insulation” from the dominant institutions of society. It has already been noted that the evidence on the first score is considerable; moreover, much of it comes from the very studies that sustained the culturalist interpretation. Mann’s (1970) contribution, for example, consisted of a reexamination of several culturalist studies of Britain, including the Almond and Verba study, in order to show that (1) value consensus does not exist on the main values of British political culture, and (2) the dissensus is greater among working-class respondents who possess stronger tendencies to support deviant values as they relate to everyday experience or vague populist ideas. In a similar vein, Cheal (1979) isolated “core” groups of Labour and Conservative voters from the Butler and Stokes (1974) surveys and demonstrated that core Labour voters have a higher degree of contradiction in their political opinions than do their Conservative counterparts; Westergaard (1970) showed that items from studies by Runciman (1966), Goldthorpe and associates (1968), and McKenzie and Silver (1968) can be reinterpreted in much the same manner. Typical of these contradictions and inconsistencies in working-class attitudes is the coexistence of endorsement for the private enterprise system coupled with widespread disapproval of the power of big business, and conversely, the endorsement of middle-class criticisms of trade union activities coupled with support for the action of one’s own union.

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Parkin (1971, pp. 93-95) interpreted these findings as indicating that when general or “non-situational” questions are posed to workers, the dominant value system tends to provide the frame of reference, whereas questions that relate more to particular contexts of belief or behavior evoke the subordinate value framework. Inconsistencies of the sort just indicated used to be interpreted in terms of the lack of ideological sophistication or “constraint” among the less well educated, but for proponents of the hegemony school, the proof that something more is involved lies in the structuring of these opinions in society. Parkin expected deviation from the dominant value system to occur to the extent that the respondent is insulated from institutions that purvey those values. Elements of social structure conducive to insulation from dominant values include such factors as residence in primarily working-class areas, union membership, and employment in large plants (which entails less likelihood of faceto-face contact with employers). In contrast, workers who are regular churchgoers, attended grammar or public schools, work in small enterprises, own their own homes, live in middle-class or agricultural districts, and so forth, can be expected to fall under the sway of dominant values including deference to governmental authority and, more specifically, to vote for the party best embodying those values, the Conservatives. The most thorough test of these hypotheses was conducted by Jessop (1974, pp. 129-34, 145-54), who found confirmation for all of them among his respondents. l 8 Evidence for the tendency of central institutions to disseminate dominant values is more indirect, but suggestive nonetheless. Mann (1970, p. 436) pointed out that studies of British schools have found a bias in teaching that favors a conservative view of contemporary society in which disruptive events such as industrial conflicts are seen as “just happening” and the values of nationalism and individual competition are stressed over class solidarity. As for the media, one long-standing complaint of the Labour party is that the British press is predominantly 18Two qualifications are needed. Jessop found that structural position does not explain all of the relationship between support for traditional values and Conservative voting; traditionalism, independent of structural position, is still an important causal factor. In addition, Jessop (1974, p. 39) pointed out that the validity of the thesis is enhanced when Parkin’s interpretation of Labour voting as a sign of deviance from dominant values, which has drawn criticism in view of that party’s record of support for the political system and the values embodied therein, is recast as an indication of trade-union consciousness characteristic of the intermediate state of confusion and inconsistency in values and attitudes. Chamberlain (1973, pp. 479-80) also argued this point.

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Conservative; and although television attempts to be nonpartisan, it seldom presents views that challenge fundamentally the socioeconomic order or the individualistic and competitive orientations that sustain it. On the other hand, the finding of some studies (Dennis et al. 1971; Tapper 1971) that few significant differences exist between grammar (mainly middle-class) students and secondary modern (mainly working-class) students in terms of political cynicism or potential for political participation would appear to present a challenge to a class-based theory of exposure or insulation that has not been satisfactorily addressed. A more difficult challenge for adherents of this interpretation of British politics, however, is to explain how the alleged hegemony of the ruling elite came to be established in the first place: orthodox Marxism, after all, predicted class conflict growing to the point of conflagration. This challenge has been taken up most effectively by Perry Anderson (1964, 1966, 1968) and Tom Nairn (1964a, 1964b, 1970) in several publications appearing mostly in the New Left Review. The one basic fact that explains the accommodative or “corporatist” stance of the British working class vis-A-vis their capitalist masters, in their view, is the failure of the British bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century to develop a general theory of society, much less a revolutionary ideology such as that of the Enlightenment, that would have provided the working class with the precepts and categories with which to analyze society and “thereby attain a fundamental pre-condition for changing it” (Anderson 1968, p. 57). A number of reasons are proposed for this aberration, including the aristocracy’s capture of the public schools and universities in the sixteenth century, which prevented a separate “clerisy” from forming; the absence of Roman law, which would have fostered the growth of an intelligentsia based on law faculties; and the fear of general ideas inherited from Burke and the experience of the French Revolution. But overriding, or rather underlying, these factors is the fundamental uniqueness of English development: Because of the “earthquake” of the seventeenth century (the English Revolution), the feudal state in England disappeared comparatively early, and the agrarian economic order became capitalist well before industrialization had begun. There was, accordingly, no need for the industrial bourgeoisie to dislodge the aristocracy from its dominant position in the nineteenth century, but to the contrary, a powerful inducement to coalesce with it as the subordinate partner in the fight against lower-class disorderliness, as exemplified by French Jacobins and English Chartists. Of course, some new thought did emerge after the industrial revolution, most notably, Bentham’s utilitarianism and

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later Fabian socialism. But these philosophic movements are relegated to the status of “subordinate forms” (Nairn 1970, p. 20). In contrast, as Anderson (1968, p. 12) put it, “the hegemonic ideology of this new society was a much more aristocratic combination of ‘traditionalism’ and ‘empiricism’, intensely hierarchical in its emphasis, which accurately reiterated the history of the dominant agrarian class. ” The growth of imperialism in the nineteenth century played some role in the co-optation of the working class, but it was not the lateVictorian frenzy for territorial expansion that mattered so much as the informal empire founded on British economic supremacy. The success of British society, indicated by its global economic domination, reinforced the legitimacy of aristocratic control that the lack of ideological critique had made possible, and preempted the opportunity for radical opposition until very late in the century, by which time trade-union ‘ ‘economism” had become its inevitable institutional mode of expression. The primacy of the intellectual vacuum is, however, underlined: the fate of the working class was “internal” rather than imposed upon it. Alienated from bourgeois reason, it lacked the intellectual tools to assimilate Marxism and develop a fundarnental critique of English society until it was too late. This presumably accounts for why, with higher levels of dissent and populism emerging in the post-World War I1 era of imperial and economic decline, opposition to the system for the most part has taken the form of contradictory consciousness rather than radical rejectionism. It is clear that the Anderson-Nairn thesis takes on a pronounced Gramscian tone; at one point Nairn (1970, p. 33) even asserted that the Victorian working class was ‘‘won over” to conservatism. Nevertheless, its Marxist credentials have been forcibly challenged, both with respect to social structure and superstructure. The Anderson-Nairn thesis provoked a stinging response from E. P. Thompson (1965), who pointed out that Marx himself supposed the distinctive English contribution to ideas to have been not an aristocratic blend of traditionalism and empiricism, but the quintessentially bourgeois ideology of the classical political economists, notably Adam Smith. “How is it possible,” he (p. 336) asked, “for Marxists to overlook this when Marx himself saw at a glance that this was his most formidable ideological opponent, and devoted his life’s work to overthrowing it?” Nor was this all. When taken in conjunction with the Protestant and liberaldemocratic inheritance and the contribution of bourgeois natural scientists such as Darwin, what emerged for Thompson is an impressive, distinctly bourgeois culture wrongly belittled or ignored by Anderson and Nairn. The triumph of this culture corresponds, moreover, to the

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political triumph of the bourgeoisie innineteenth-century Britain. Thompson did acknowledge some areas of aristocratic predominance-the House of Lords, the armed services, Oxbridge, the City, the Empireand noted the “shameless observances of status and obsession with a spurious gentility” (Thompson 1965, p. 330) that characterized the English bourgeoisie. But he ultimately subscribed to Bagehot’s famous thesis, shared by Marx and Engels, that the ceremonial parts of the constitution were allowed to persist because they were useful in cloaking its efficient parts, which were firmly under bourgeois control. A number of other writers, both Marxist and non-Marxist, have concluded that Thompson occupies the firmer ground in this debate. In Nield’s (1980, p. 498) view, the Anderson-Nairn usage of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is distorted; instead of indicating an area of consent or negotiation requiring much effort to sustain, it has been exaggerated into a matter of “total cultural and political dominance, a fixed and historically determined set of power relationships, generating a supine bourgeoisie and a wholly corporate working class.” Johnson (1976, pp. 25-26) both endorsed this criticism and rejected much more emphatically than did Thompson himself the idea of a nineteenthcentury aristocratic hegemony. In his view, there were throughout that century two different and essentially antagonistic social formationsagricultural and industrial capital. The former, embodying the social values of “gentry paternalism,” was in relative decline; the latter, basically liberal in outlook, was in ascendancy. Poulantzas (1967, p. 70) also asserted the long-standing dissociation of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie from the landed interest and, although acknowledging that a degree of amalgamation eventually took place, insisted that the aristocracy remained “merely the ‘clerk’ of the bourgeoisie, both in this power bloc and in relation to the State.” Among these clerklike acts, according to Abercrombie and associates (1980, p. 107), was the passing of the new Poor Law of 1834 to create a free market in labor, the reform of laws governing banking and joint-stock companies (e.g., limited liability) to create needed capital markets, and the introduction of free trade. If the co-optation of the working class is not to be explained by means of the failure of the bourgeoisie to mount an effective political and intellectual challenge to the dominance of the landed upper class, how is it to be explained? Two alternative lines of explanation have been elaborated. The earlier, and simpler, of the two is the thesis of the “labor aristocracy,” most closely associated with the names of Lenin and Hobsbawm. In its classic version, it was a buy-out theory: A superior stratum of skilled and unionized workers emerged by the

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mid-nineteenth century whose loyalties were purchased by the bourgeoisie from the profits of imperialist expansion and exploitation (at the expense of unskilled workers); the new stratum managed to steer the labor movement, which it dominated, in an accommodationist direction. As Moorhouse (1978, pp. 67-68) noted, critics of this interpretation have argued that the distinction between skilled workers or artisans and the unskilled is an age-old one; that it is difficult to identify empirically a distinctive stratum of labor aristocrats from data on family income; and that it is unclear why economic advantages would have led labor aristocrats to accept bourgeois values in any case, since rising standards of living are known to have preceded revolutionary outbursts in other historical instances. Refinements on the thesis have therefore been produced which argue that the labor aristocracy was a new social formation quite different from the old artisan class; that it was deliberately created at that time by employers to act as pacemakers or subcontractors of‘ unskilled labor; and that, lacking the autonomy that the old craft guilds had afforded their members, it was in a particularly vulnerable position vis-8-vis the bourgeoisie and therefore much more compliant. Other factors allegedly making for cooptation by the bourgeoisie include the desire of labor aristocrats to maintain their distinctiveness from the mass of unskilled workers and the spread among them of a bourgeois-inspired culture molded by temperance, adult education, the cooperative movement, and Methodism (Foster 1974; Stedman Jones 1975). Moorhouse (1978, p. 79) pointed out that a major difficulty with this explanation lies in accounting for why the rest of the working class should have accepted the ideological lead of a stratum of their immediate bosses, especially as the latter apparently had adopted a separate set of cultural values. The second explanation for working-class docility-not explicitly Marxist but consonant with Marxism-is somewhat more subtle. In this version, nineteenth-century British society is still seen as dominated by a propertied ruling elite, but this domination was not preserved through either buying out skilled workers or giving ground sufficiently promptly to demands emanating from below for greater political power, as culturalists tend to believe. Rather, in a striking inversion of that logic, it is maintained that the ruling elite kept its control precisely because it delayed democratization long enough that a “pragmatic acceptance” of its rule had become internalized as a norm by the masses (Mann 1970; Moorhouse 1973). Interestingly, this process of judicious delay apparently was applied first by the aristocracy on the bourgeoisie. As noted in Chapter 4, proponents of this view interpret the Reform Act of 1832 not as a means of opening up the

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system to greater middle-class input but as a device to preserve the power of the landed classes by removing town votes from county seats and greatly expanding the number of the latter. At some point, however, the bourgeoisie became part of the ruling elite and the working class the prime object of the delaying strategy. It is unclear when this took place, however, because the 1867 Reform Act is also interpreted as a measure to bolster the landed interest against the manufacturing interest (Arnstein 1973, pp. 216, 220; D. Moore 1976, pp. 180-81, 381-91). In any case, that act enfranchised no more than 30 percent of the urban male working class, and even the 1884 Reform Act, usually taken as the point at which full male suffrage was introduced, left half of the male electorate without the vote. With residency requirements, disenfranchisement of those on poor relief, highly unequal constituencies, and no parliamentary salaries-each of which discriminated against the working class-the preeminence of the ruling elite remained unassailable until 1918. By that time, deferential voting patterns had become “self-reinforcing”: “The only thing it was possible to do became what men expected to do; external constraints became internalized; institutional controls became cultural dispositions of a particular type” (Moorhouse 1973, p. 354). Since working-class support is seen in terms of pragmatic acceptance rather than moral commitment, Moorhouse concluded that the British political system may be less solidly entrenched than is usually thought. In positing such a meager foundation for allegiant behavior, this interpretation, too, lays a basis by which a rapid evolution in British political culture in a more populist direction in recent years might be explained. Yet the (unsubstantiated) psychological foundation of his thesis raises very troubling questions: For example, why should exclusion from the political system lead to the internalization of values that support it? If internalization did take place, can the outcome still be described as ‘ ‘pragmatic acceptance”? Internalization, after all, sounds more akin to true belief.l9 Another difficulty is that the theory assumes that workers were new to politics in the latter nineteenth century. Hart (1978, pp. 150-51), in her study of workingclass politics and culture in the nineteenth century, argued that this was not the case: they were merely new to voting. In her view, the central fact is that their already-formed political culture was “fragmented in its grounds for analysis and criticism of politics, passive in its implications for action” (p. 93). More specifically, her investigations led I9In addition, it is not clear that a mere pragmatic acceptance would have produced the patterning of supportive attitudes within the working class that was noted earlier.

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her to conclude that workers viewed political action as marginal to the achievement of social and economic goals, and that working-class political culture suffered from what she termed “the absence of norms and indeed of language” with which to express its undercurrent of criticism (p. 203). Hart has not been the only one to argue points that would seem to support the Anderson-Nairn thesis. Arnstein (1973, 1975), in particular, has been a most enthusiastic advocate of the idea that aristocratic domination persisted in Britain throughout the nineteenth century, and Eccleshall (1979) has traced the triumph of liberal ideas in Britain to the twentieth century. Notwithstanding their arguments, the controversy remains very much alive. Whether the nineteenth-century bourgeois thought constituted a “great arch” or a “subordinate form”; whether, more specifically, classical political economy was a “hypnotic, monocular account of the economic system” (Anderson 1966, p. 22) or “a systematic framework of thought so comprehensive and yet so flexible” that it structured Victorian social sciences and political thought, underwrote commercial imperialism, conquered the bourgeoisie worldwide, and eventually the British working class (Thompson 1965, p. 336) ultimately seems to come down to one’s understanding of nineteenth-century social structure. Did, or did not, the English bourgeoisie challenge and ultimately supplant the aristocracy to become the dominant class during the nineteenth century? Both major possibilities have been argued within Marxism: the bourgeoisie became incorporated as a subordinate partner to the aristocracy according to Anderson, Nairn, and Arnstein; the bourgeoisie triumphed over the aristocracy according to Marx, Engels, Poulantzas, and Thompson. Equally controversial, within the Marxist school as well as without, is the validity of the proposition that the emergence of a revolutionary bourgeois ideology was an essential precondition for socialism to find acceptance among the British working class. Thompson noted that socialism had been well known in Britain for a long time. If working-class discontent had been rife in the late nineteenth century, would not Marxism or some other socialist ideology have been able to win over substantial numbers of workers? Can one really blame its failure on the bourgeoisie’s propensity, a couple of generations earlier, to prefer the doctrine of the invisible hand to that of the general will? Finally, if the absence or weak development of bourgeois ideology is not at fault, can one attribute acceptance of the system to a buy-out or a political lockout of labor? Why should either have led to the internalization by workers of norms that apparently served the interests of their presumed exploiters?

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In raising these questions, it is not my intention to suggest that a Marxist interpretation of British political culture and regime support, or even a rational-choice one for that matter, is without validity or value. Both types of theory introduce elements of social structure into the analysis of political values and orientations in ways that are plausible and even insightful; we have already seen that such attempts are also necessary. Rogowski’s rational-choice approach, on this analysis, seems to be the one that accords less well with what is known of British social structure and history in the nineteenth century, but of course the tests applied here and by Rogowski himself are less than rigorous. The Marxist interpretation just outlined, on the other hand, goes some considerable way toward handling the various deficiencies noted in Rogowski’s theory and in the culturalist approaches discussed in the previous sections. For instance, it postulates with a fair degree of exactitude and empirical support, if not which values are most fundamental and how they might best be defined, at least how they are distributed in the population. Specifically, the cluster of civic and deferential traits Almond and Verba (among others) proposed are not so much rejected as identified with the value system of the dominant class. In so doing, anomalies relating to the alleged homogeneity and consensus of British political culture are given a logical explanation. In terms of causal ordering, there is little doubt concerning the lack of independence of cultural values: structure accounts for culture in the final analysis. The emphasis is thereby shifted to social structure and, in this regard, there is a very clear sense of hierarchy: control of major political, economic, and cultural institutions determines domination of society and provides the means by which political stability is assured. As for the issue of cultural change, the emphasis on the permanent undercurrent of confusion or discontent would seem to provide a basis for an explanation of recent changes in British political culture. But here, in particular, we encounter difficulties, of which the most serious are these: (1) Marxists do not agree on the fundamental nature of the social structure at the time the deferential/directive political culture was consolidated in Britain; (2) they do not agree on the mechanism by which deferential (or at least acquiescent) political attitudes became prevalent within the working class; and (3) in consequence, there can be no single explanation for why the political culture is becoming less deferentiallacquiescent and more populist at the present time (if indeed it is). Considering the interpretations of Rogowski, Anderson and Nairn, and Thompson together, it is perhaps not too much to conclude that social structure in Britain, at least in the nineteenth century, has become as uncertain and elusive a thing as British political culture ever

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was. It would appear that our quest to bolster the vagaries of culturalism with the solidity of structural fact has not taken us very far from what might fairly be termed a state of “contradictory consciousness.”

IV It is worth bearing in mind that the inability of the rational-choice and Marxist approaches considered here to explain in a totally satisfactory fashion the historical dimension of political support in Britain does not amount to a vindication of the culturalist approach. Without arriving at a more precise understanding of the concepts and linkages involved, no autonomous role for political culture can be credibly asserted, and nothing discussed so far has changed that situation. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the dilemma is irresolvable. From the previous discussion, certain facts and conclusions relating to these matters do seem to be reasonably well established and may provide clues to a more acceptable resolution to the dilemma than the ones we have considered thus far. It seems reasonably clear, for instance, that an acceptable interpretation of British political culture and its relationship to political support must be able to tackle in a cogent manner the nature of British society during the period of the democratization of British politics and the consolidation of a modern political culture of a particular type in the nineteenth century. The interpretation, to be persuasive, must also take some account of structural features of British society, including the element of hierarchy among social classes, and, in addition, incorporate the hierarchical patterning in the adherence to dominant values according to the individual’s exposure to or insulation from the dominant institutions of society, for the evidence on this point appears strong. Finally, I would suggest, the content of the political cultural mix must incorporate not just the norms of deference and directiveness but also the concepts of traditionalism and organicism that usually are associated with an aristocracy-dominated society. If we are to make sense of these points, we must sort out a basic problem uncovered in the previous section: In the hierarchy of nineteenth-century British society, which class was on top-the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy? The highly controversial premise of the Anderson-Nairn account is that the bourgeoisie was always a subordinate social formation, yet comments here and there in their writings tend to undermine that position. For example, the idea that the English bourgeoisie staged a major assault on the status quo at some point is clearly implied in Nairn’s (1970, p. 19) comment that it “‘gave up’ its rad-

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icalism at a certain stage, when it was satisfied with the social universe it had half-inherited and half-created. ” Before that point, later identified as the mid-nineteenth century, no compromise or alliance had been possible between the contrasting civilizations of landowner and factory owner (Nairn 1964a, p. 20). Both Anderson and Nairn argued that the only option was amalgamation or fusion between the two social formations; and in the latter part of the century when this was being achieved, “the English aristocracy was rapidly becoming as factually ‘bourgeois’ as the English bourgeoisie was becoming aristocratic” (Anderson 1964, p. 34). As a consequence, Bagehot’s classic division of the British constitution into dignified and efficient parts is seen as too absolute; the bourgeoisie ruled through the theatrical show, not behind it (Nairn 1970, p. 16). In these remarks, there appears to be a substantial, if reluctant, admission that (1) the nineteenth-century industrial bourgeoisie mounted a powerful and largely successful challenge to the traditional, aristocracy-dominated structure of British society, and that (2) the clash of opposing philosophies and ways of life subsided after midcentury as the two groups fused into a single, dominant social formation. As I indicated in Chapter 4, there is good reason to believe that both points essentially hit the mark, that the assault of the bourgeoisie on the aristocracy’s preeminence, in other words, first waxed and then waned as the two groups merged. This proposition cannot be proved in any definitive sense, any more than can the other interpretations of the evolving social structure of Victorian Britain. I shall therefore elaborate what I believe to be the political implications of these points, including how political culture and political support in the twentieth century were affected, leaving it to the reader to decide just how plausible the case is. The first assumption, then, is that the rise of industrial civilization during the nineteenth century entailed a major assault on the position of the landed upper classes in British society and politics and the values that supported it. The point is essential, because only by appreciating the full extent of the bourgeois transformation of British society can one adequately come to terms with the full extent of the revulsion felt at the less desirable consequences of industrialism and the shallowness of the liberal political and economic philosophy that sustained and vindicated it. To midcentury social thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, the rise of industrial capitalism and the resultant ascendancy of the middle class had brought with it a very disturbing element of philistinism that begged for correction. In this light, the egotism that seemed to motivate previous social theory, in particular

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Bentham’s utilitarian social philosophy, Smith’s political economy, and even James Mill’s association psychology, came to be seen as profoundly unsatisfying from a moral and emotional point of view (Rothblatt 1968, pp. 98-1 16). The physical devastation and human degradation that accompanied industrial life reinforced this point of view and encouraged a response of rustic antiquarianism among the better-off. It became more and more tempting to associate higher social status almost exclusively with distance, psychological as well as geographical, from industrial and commercial activity; and the appeal of an idealized version of the life-style of the landed classes grew accordingly (Weiner 1981, esp. pp. 30-63). Both developments converged in the reform of the public schools and established universities, where the sons of gentlemen and the sons of industrialists and merchants received a common formation that emphasized, in essence, the acquisition of style rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge was disseminated, of course; but it, too, took on value to the extent that it was dissociated from the possibility of practical application. In this respect, immersion in the classics was highly appropriate: it both fostered the inculcation of a gentlemanly humanism and denoted an existence devoid of concern for the pursuit of material gain. It is true that this process of fusion of the two classes through a common educational experience involved compromises on both sides, but one cannot help but be struck by the extent to which ideals and values associated with the landed classes-character, demeanor, harmony, manner, “form,” honor, leisure, amateurismwere emphasized and absorbed. By this point, the middle-class assault on the aristocracy and its values had clearly ebbed. The reasons for the emphasis on aristocratic perspectives in this new “model of man” become clearer when one recalls that the reaction involved more than changing sensibilities. In the wake of the French Revolution and the lower-class unrest of the early nineteenth century, the loss of community became an obsession of the propertied classes; and the “effortless superiority” of the aristocrats’ style of leadership, the deference and even awe it seemed capable of inspiring from the lower orders, took on the highest valuation. Moreover, the rise of the empire greatly enhanced the attractiveness of this style, for imperial grandeur seemed to require the aristocrat’s touch: the “white man’s burden” smacked of noblesse oblige; the spirit of public service seemed a prerequisite of national greatness; the breadth of the generalist rather than the narrowness of the specialist, the control of men rather than machines, the values of hierarchy and tradition rather than those of competition and change were what the times seemed to de-

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mand. In sum, aesthetic revulsion, territorial expansion, and social control combined to exalt the social ideal of the leisured (if not landed) gentleman over that of the rugged entrepreneur even within the entrepreneurial class, and the public schools assumed the task of molding the desired product. Some might be tempted to argue, along rational-choice lines, that skills traditionally associated with the aristocracy acquired, during the rampant imperialism of the late nineteenth century, a social importance that permitted aristocratic power and influence in society to increase. There is truth in this view, but not in the strict sense of Rogowski’s theory. Formal conquest and rule of foreign territory were never essential to Britain’s survival; the informal empire of commercial domination mattered far more, and it was hardly an aristocratic monopoly. The bourgeoisie had already penetrated other aristocratic skill areas, as we have seen. There remains the matter of maintaining social order. This could only be added to Rogowski’s list of essential skills at the expense of the theory itself (since social order is supposed to follow automatically if the other conditions of the theory are met). Even so, it is difficult to see how the aristocracy could be said to have monopolized this skill in the nineteenth century, given that the problem of order manifested itself among the emerging working class of the new industrial cities, with which the aristocracy had little or no involvement.*O In fact, what increased was not aristocratic power but aristocratic prestige and the appeal of certain values traditionally associated with the landed elite. In essence, the narrowness of pecuniary motivation in a society of isolated, competitive individuals yielded to the attractions of traditional values such as social authority, organic unity, and paternalism, as well as to the appeal of deference and obedience from below that seemed so lacking in the tumultuous world of industrializing Britain. Such, in brief, were the origins of that particular combination of deference, organicism, and traditionalism that has formed the dominant axis of the standard cultural model of British politics. This interpretation accounts, I believe, for the evidence of a strong 20 Elster’s suggestion (1986, p. 38) that bourgeois acquiescence to aristocratic control can be explained in rational-choice terms as an instance of the free-rider phenomenon also fails. If it was rational for the bourgeoisie to stay out of politics unless the state adversely affected their interests-in other words, to free ride on aristocratic governancethen why would aristocrats not do the same? Conversely, if there were gains to be had from political office (such as wealth, power, or fame), then bourgeois should have been as interested in pursuing it as were aristocrats.

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middle-class assault on aristocratic values and power-there was no default of bourgeois ideology-and the evidence for the middle class’s increasing attraction to a “spurious gentility” over the course of the nineteenth century. But what of the working class? Certainly, working-class acceptance of this cultural mix and of the power relationships it embodied was not automatic, but neither was it purchased through the creation of a labor aristocracy, nor merely pragmatic. Indeed, it might not have happened at all if concessions had not been made to the demands for political reform that, for a time, united capitalist and worker. But in the latter nineteenth century, developments were running strongly in its favor. The apparent success of British society, economically and imperially, and the willingness to apply traditional upper-class paternalism (an aspect of organicism) to the more flagrant abuses of industrialism were both very powerful influences in the process by which the domination of the increasingly unified bourgeois/aristocratic ruling elite came to be accepted more or less willingly at all levels of society; and they clearly acted to discourage the launching of fundamental challenges to the social order from middle-class intellectuals and working-class radicals alike that so frustrates contemporary Marxists. More was involved, to be sure, than concessions and favorable circumstances, The new formula incorporating a traditional deference to the political authority of social superiors with limited participation from below was promulgated through the newly emerging institutions of mass education and popular journalism as well as through more traditional sources, and very likely reinforced, in the sense of Eckstein’s hypothesis, via the tendency of the prestigious Westminster model to be imitated or copied in organizations and institutions throughout British society.21 Part of this formula involved the myth that the manner and breeding of the public-school product were prerequisites for the exercise of high political office; and Rogowski’s perception that political deference follows upon essentiality-or better, the appearance of essentiality-would seem to be relevant in this regard. But the key point is that the power and influence of this stratum did not flow solely from its penetration or monopolization of essential functions-the bourgeoisie would have displaced the aristocracy if that had been the only criterion-but from the appeal of the values it ”In this respect, Eckstein’s congruence hypothesis could be seen as positing one of the structural mechanisms by which class hegemony may be imposed (albeit very gradually, given cultural inertia) in bourgeois societies, a possibility Marxist theorists do not appear to have explored.

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represented at all levels of society22 and-to give the Marxist emphasis its due-to the ability to use institutional resources effectively to propagate and reinforce those values. The complacency that is often associated with the ethos of the ruling class in Britain reflects the extraordinary success of that strategy; so does the equally surprising electoral success over the past century of the party best embodying the values it promoted, the conservative^.^^ Nevertheless, it is evident that, were the circumstances that had permitted the establishment of the hegemony to alter, it, too, could be challenged. This is precisely what has happened since 1914. Several causative factors may be suggested to explain the attack on what came to be called the “Establishment” and the apparent decline of deferential attitudes which sustained its rule. The leveling process of the two world wars comes immediately to mind. The effect of the second war in generating a groundswell of support for the egalitarian thrust of the 1945 Labour program is too well known to require elaboration here, but the major social changes effected by the first war deserve equal attention. These changes include the conversion of the Labour party to socialism, the massive rise in trade union membership, and the fundamental reform of the electoral system in 1918, as well as the more subtle changes in attitudes consequent upon the discrediting of the leadership capacities of the officer class during the war and the evident inability of business or government to set the economy to rights in its aftermath. The gradual loss of Britain’s economic preeminence, which had begun well before but became more noticeable after 1918, and the related decline in Britain’s status as a world power and the eventual loss of its empire, also served to undermine the manifest bases of the ruling elites’ claim to deference. In a sense, the middle and upper classes in Britain adopted a course that seems in retrospect to have been especially self-defeating: Britain had achieved worldwide economic and political dominance through the ruthless acquisitiveness of its commercial and industrial classes; in order to manage that re221 am aware that I have not presented any reason for believing that the appeal of these values extended to the working class. The reason why I think it must have done so is given in the next section; the theoretical basis for the phenomenon forms the core of Chapter 6. 23The relationship between the aristocratic ideal and Conservative political domination was made by Nordlinger (1967, p. log), who pointed out that nineteenthcentury Tory leaders such as Disraeli and Randolph Churchill developed and exploited to great electoral effect an antibusiness ideology which portrayed Liberal industrialists as “crass self-seekers” who neglected the public service obligations that should come with the possession of wealth.

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sponsibility , its triumphant middle class readily abandoned those very traits in favor of more aristocratic ones, achieving in the process certain virtues in government much admired abroad (or the appearance of those), but sacrificing in the long term the economic dynamism that made its claim to political authority credible in the first place. Finally, one must recognize that between deference and democracy exists an inherent tension which probably cannot survive the penetration of government into all aspects of life that became the hallmark of the post1945 state. The often-discussed politics of “outbidding,” in which both major political parties compete in promises to aid various sectors of society, has tended to reward organized groups that participate actively and promote their demands aggressively at the expense of groups or individuals whose political orientations are more passive or deferential. It is probably not possible to sort out the relative effects of these various factors, but at the very least they encourage us to locate the attitudinal changes in postwar Britain--and the possibility that they appeared before serious economic difficulty-in a much broader historical perspective than one that focuses exclusively on the postwar era. In essence, we are obliged to realize that the particular combination of old and new traits that has made up the somewhat paradoxical political culture of twentieth-century Britain was to a large degree the creation of the equally paradoxical society of imperial but liberal nineteenth-century Britain, and that the long process of decline of Britain’s Victorian preeminence had to entail some erosion of the cultural value system whose emergence and consolidation it had facilitated. That cultural achievement, however, did last a long time, and in many respects will do so for some time to come. Indeed, what is as striking as the rise of the “new populism’’ is the persistence of old attitudes and orientations, as exemplified in the extent to which the economic crises and confrontations of the 1970s and 1980s continued to be confined within economistic bounds and did not lead to the political delegitimation many expected.

V I suggested in Chapter 4 that the importance and independence of cultural factors in British politics are evidenced in the extent to which they have outlived the conditions that fostered their creation and consolidation. Marxists of the ideological-hegemony school, of course, would scoff at this; for them, the survival of old values is no more than a reflection of the continuing control of a certain elite. But is this

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answer adequate to dispose of the issue? Can one really explain the domination in a society of a cultural mix supposedly inimical to the material interests of the majority of its population, including most notably the working class, simply in terms of ideological conversion engineered through control of that society’s leading institutions, aided perhaps by initially favorable circumstances such as those indicated above? If so, why have counterinstitutions not been able to set workers straight (particularly once the favorable circumstances had disappeared)? Admittedly, as long as culturalism stands for little more than the notion that behavior is affected by orientations acquired through socialization, it offers little with which to counter the Marxist perspective on the role of norms and values. But rather than subscribe to the notion that people can be taught to believe anything, a better alternative might be to search for a more substantial foundation for culturalism-one that explains, for example, the appeal of aristocratic values and perspectives among nonaristocrats. The somewhat voluntaristic nature of the interpretation given of the nineteenth-century middle class in this and the previous chapter-that it chose to embrace a different social ideal-points to the same conclusion. Although aesthetic revulsion, the influence of imperial conquest, and the fear of lower-class disorder motivated that decision, it is not totally clear why those concerns came to prevail over more materialistic ones. That people were willing to avoid or abandon profitable pursuits-and even, to some extent, political power-for other ends suggests the irreducibility of certain cultural values to acquisitive motivations, but in so doing it surely begs the issue of their true basis. That issue is addressed in the next chapter, which attempts to unite the variety of findings and conclusions thus far presented into a comprehensive interpretation of the British experience.

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Chapter 6

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his study is meant to be a work of synthesis. Like all works of synthesis, it is also a work of analysis. The sorting, sifting, and selecting of facts and views make it so. The danger in such an enterprise is that the contexts within which those facts and views are embedded will get slighted or violated. There may not be any excuse for such infringements, but there is a justification: the development of a different, presumably more adequate, context. This is the task now at hand. Throughout the preparation of this monograph, I have been conscious of the inadequacies of attempting to answer large questions in single chapters. Many complex historical and contemporary controversies have been given short shrift, their finer points of detail ignored. References and footnotes at best only partially compensate for these deficiencies. Again, no more than a justification can be offered: the need to bring interpretations from very different schools into confrontations of manageable proportions in order to determine what is valid in each. In this chapter, the sweep of my treatment of fact and theory is even broader, inevitably more offensive to some. Nevertheless, there is a mortgage to be lifted on this study, and the method of payment is clear: it is the establishment of some degree of unity of interpretation. It stands to reason that a valid unifying interpretation should be able to incorporate the diversity of findings, observations, and conclusions for which support has been found in the preceding chapters, while avoiding the empirical and analytical pitfalls of the theories and explanations that packaged them. It is the pitfalls that are of particular concern at this stage in the analysis, for they are the surer guides to a better explanation. In the most general terms, they may be characterized as follows: (1) the culturalist approach lacks a modicum of causal specificity, (2) the rational-choice approach lacks an appreciation of social hierarchy, and (3) the Marxist approach lacks the capacity to 173

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deal with cultural persistence. Doubtless these conclusions will raise hackles, and with good reason: Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis is very elaborately specified, for example, and there is no better example of cultural persistence than Anderson’s “remanences” from antiquity. Nonetheless, each contains an important kernel of truth that ought not be overlooked. The absence of causal specificity in the culturalist approach can be seen very clearly in its explanation of British political stability. Although there is some convergence on the idea that British political culture is characterized by a balance or mix of deferential and directive attitudes, the predominant trait, deference, has been defined in different ways with different results. Moreover, none of these definitions affords an escape from the dilemma presented by the existence of substantial inconsistencies in deferential attitudes within certain sectors of a population supposedly characterized by a well-integrated and homogeneous political culture. There is also a likelihood that the other trait, directiveness, has been insufficiently highlighted in standard interpretations of political culture. This, too, raises the whole issue of what the mix of attitudes is, how it is distributed across the population, and with what consequences for politics. The lack of precision in defining the independent variable carries through to the hypothesis: terms such as congruence and conduciveness often hide an uncertainty over the nature or even the direction of the causal connection between culture and system structure or performance, an uncertainty that crosssectional survey findings can scarcely hope to address. The best way to establish causal priority is with the time factor, but it is not totally clear to what extent there have been significant changes in British political culture in recent decades and whether they preceded or followed such changes in the system’s performance as the appearance of serious economic difficulties. None of this augurs well for the goal of salvaging something of value from the culturalist approach to social scientific explanation, and the fact that Weber’s thesis runs into empirical difficulties when it is extended beyond a congruence format, or that Weiner’s thesis never really makes the attempt except as speculation, only compounds the dilemma. Before resignation becomes complete, however, it would be useful to remind ourselves of the defects in the other two approaches. To the extent that the problem of causal specificity results from the “squishiness” of culture, rational-choice approaches have evolved an ideal solution: they ignore it. Proponents of the approach are quick to point out that this position is not an integral part of their paradigm, which posits only the rational pursuit of whatever ends the individual

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values. In practice, however, the possible ends tend to come down to just one: the individual’s short-term material advantage. This is crystal clear in the theories of North and Olson, which are concerned with economic matters, but it is also bound up with Rogowski’s theory of rational legitimacy, where political influence is the goal to be maximized. Rogowski’s world view makes no allowance for the possibility that social position might be evaluated in terms other than its potential for determining political outcomes; if it did, his theory would not have stumbled over the spectacle of middle-class Victorian Englishmen seeking absorption into a less essential aristocracy. This propensity existed for reasons that were not misguided or irrational, but in order to see this, we would have to alter our fundamental conception of the nature of mankind. Marxists have no trouble with hierarchy; their rejection of the notion that exchange in politics or economics entails the premise of equality takes care of the issue for them. Nor are cultural factors bypassed in their framework. Like North, they see utility in the inculcation of norms and values that support, or facilitate, the continued hegemony of those at the summit of the societal pyramid; they also expect belief systems to arise from occupational and regional differences. Where problems do occur is over the persistence of cultural traits. As dependent adjuncts of social structure, cultural traits should wither away relatively quickly once the structural circumstances that sustained them have changed. Yet, if anything is clear from the discussions of the previous three chapters, it is that clusters of cultural traits characteristic of a certain social system and era can reemerge under quite different circumstances and in quite different times. Of course, this is not a random process unrelated to structural conditions, but it is not tied in a one-to-one fashion to structure either. It, too, begs a conception of humanity different from the materialistic one shared by Marxist and rational-choice theorists. The conception of humanity that I advance in the following pages is based on the idea that human beings are motivated to seek not just material advantage but also social distinction. I argue that this motivational dichotomy finds expression, at a higher level, in a differentiation between societies organized according to hierarchical principles and societies organized according to the pursuit of material gain through markets, with associated cultural value systems (cultural specificity). Although market societies have usually been more successful economically, I attempt to show that the direct and personal forms of social coordination employed in hierarchical societies possess a greater appeal, particularly when tempered with norms of reciprocity or ex-

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change of duties across stratification lines to render more palatable the obligation to obey. To oversimplify somewhat, my thesis is that the appeal of direct social coordination, stable expectations, and reciprocity explains not only why individuals often endorse hierarchical value systems and social structures even when they themselves stand little chance of exercising authority (social hierarchy), but also why hierarchical values have often proven to be so enduring (cultural persistence), as in the case of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.

I We begin the development of this thesis with some assumptions about human nature-assumptions that go beyond mere means-ends rationality. Barrington Moore (1978, p. 7) has argued for a conception of innate human nature in which both physical and psychic deprivations are noxious; among the latter he lists the absence of favorable human responses, the inhibition of aggressions, and boredom. The desire to avoid physical deprivation may be accepted without debate; it is consistent with all three paradigms and, indeed, forms part of the rationalchoice theorists’ standard starting point. The rest of that starting point has more to do with psychic motivations, however, for the quest for material gain is never assumed to cease at the point where physical deprivation is no longer at issue. A great deal could be included under the rather vague rubric of “favorable human responses,” but Moore singles out for special notice the desire for distinction, which he feels is universal. Clearly, distinction may be sought through material wealth, but it may also take the form of social prestige or authority. Authority, Moore reasons, is a manifestation of the basic societal need for coordination. So are the division of labor and the rules governing the allocation of goods and services. What all three have in common is the fact that some groups in society benefit more from them than do others. The last-mentioned category involves material benefits, but the division of labor and the exercise of authority go beyond that realm. Specifically, Moore (1978, p. 33) notes that certain tasks, such as high military, political, and religious functions, almost always rank at or near the top in terms of status or prestige. What seems to be involved is not just the possession of essential skills but, more importantly, control over other human beings. Such control appears to be universally valued in itself and a source of distinction for those who possess it.’ ‘This point is not, of course, uniquely Moore’s. Schumpeter (1955, p. 160) ob-

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The problem with authority is that control by superordinates implies a lack of control by subordinates. If one accepts Moore’s argument that the inhibition of aggressions is a source of frustration, then the need that all societies have to control aggressive impulses, to “monopolize violence” in the classic phrase, is bound to be resented. In a more general sense, it may even be the case, as Moore (1978, p. 23) suggests in a footnote, that human beings have a natural anarchistic streak, an innate desire to be free of the restraints imposed by others, to control the direction of their lives or at lease share in that control. A long tradition in political thought extending from Aristotle’s ‘‘political animal” conception of citizenry to the worker participation/industrial democracy literature of recent decades takes inspiration from this perspective on human nature. On the other hand, it is equally clear from the record of human history that man’s capacity for obedience to authority is profound-often disturbingly so. Studies of French authority patterns and attitudes have been particularly sensitive to the implicit contradiction between these two orientations. Crozier (1964) elaborated it in. terms of a contrast between an absolutist conception of authority which rejects the idea that authority can be divided or compromised and an intense egalitarianism which shuns face-to-face dependence relationships. Pitts (1965) followed a very similar theme in positing a distinction between doctrinaire-hierarchical and aesthetic-individualistic impulses in French culture. Schonfeld (1976) suggested that the source of these diverse responses to authority in France may be a failure to internalize norms of obedience to authority, leaving revolt as an ever-present possibility. However one constructs the conceptual framework, it would be erroneous to conclude (as was often done) that this ambivalence toward authority was simply one of the paradoxes of French political life; as Moore emphasizes, similar tendencies have been found in many cultures. Two major points follow these observations. The first is that, given authority’s problematic nature, it has often seemed desirable to establish political authority on the basis of an implicit contract, an understanding of what rulers owe the ruled in return for the privileges of material wealth and control over others. This, too, is a classic theme in political philosophy, and one to which I shall return. Of more served some time ago that “the relative social significance of a function” is determined by “the degree of social leadership which its fulfillment implies or creates.” Recently, Della Fave (1986a, p. 439) has suggested that “because of our weakness and consequent dependency, we humans are very impressed by our own and others’ ability to control successfully the physical and social environment. ”

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immediate concern is the second point: that not all systems of political authority strike the same balance between the principles of authority or hierarchy, on the one hand, and those of freedom or equality, on the other. The inherent contradiction between these principles, in other words, may lead to very different resolutions. These different resolutions may involve not only authority relations, but other human needs and motivations as well. Indeed, I would suggest as a rule of thumb the following: societies that emphasize the equality side of the dichotomy (within an appropriate property rights framework) are more likely to stress economic efficiency and hence material wealth, whereas societies that concentrate more on hierarchical authority attribute greater importance to the psychic benefits of distinction. Western civilization has long been familiar with these alternative societal options. The contrast between the ancient Greek city-states and the Roman Empire, or between the Renaissance cities of the northern Italy-Flanders corridor and the Hapsburg-Valois proto-empires that flanked them, has excited the imaginations of countless generations of Western literati. Various labels have been put to the contrasts: for Montesquieu, there were virtuous republics and glorious monarchies (Keohane 1972); for Spencer (1882), industrial and militant societies; for Fox (1971), commercial and administrative societies; for Skocpol (1979) and Dyson (1980b), statist and nonstatist societies; for Douglas and Wildavsky (1982), hierarchies and markets; for Hall (1985a, 1985b), capstones and organisms.2 On a more dynamic and grandiose vein, Wallerstein’s differentiation between world systems and world empires is an attempt to capture the ramifications of the fundamental choice between expansion through trade and investment or expansion through territorial conquest, and Mann’s (1986) distinction between empires of domination and “multi-power-actor” civilizations retains the emphasis on two very different types of social organization as central to human history . 3 These characterizations do ’Weber’s (1958a, pp. 180-95) distinction between societies stratified according to class (market situation) or status (social honor) also relates to this dichotomy. It should be noted that Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1982) classification is not, strictly speaking, dichotomous, since they also propose a third type, sects, which they view as small scale and peripheral to the larger societies they inhabit. In other work (Douglas 1982; Wildavsky 1985, 1987), they advance a fourth cultural type, apathy or fatalism, which is characteristic of subject populations, such as slaves. It is clear that hierarchies and markets are the main societywide types, however. 3Mann’s larger sweep brings the whole of Europe into the multi-power-actor category, arguing that Europe’s parcelization of sovereignty is largely accountable for its dynamism. Given the global perspective that he adopts, this seems justified, one

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not agree in every respect, but in this there seems to be substantial consensus: differences in economic structure lie at the source of the dichotomy, and differences in ethos or culture, social structure, and political form are among its many ramifications. The tight historical connection, within city-states primarily, of a trade-based economy with an open, pragmatic culture and a somewhat less than autocratic political structure is a common theme of this literature. Fox expressed it well in the passage cited in Chapter 3, but no better than did Hintze (1975a [1902], p. 163) some seventy years earlier when he argued that “close union simply in terms of space and intense communication among the inhabitants produced a vigorous, unified, collective political consciousness. . . . This communal spirit is responsible for the inclination toward a republican form of government common to all city-states: the associative principle of organization prevails over the authoritarian. ” This societal configuration is familiar to us; it seems remarkably modern. The extent of its distinctiveness can be brought into focus, however, by contrasting it with one of its foremost hierarchically ordered alternatives in Western civilization, feudal society. The essence of medieval feudalism consisted in the existence of a distinct class, the aristocracy, which monopolized the means of violence and was supported by the labor of a peasantherf class working land that, in theory at least, was granted to aristocrats by a higher authority (such as a king or emperor) in return for military services. In western Europe, it was intimately bound up with the development of armed cavalry as the most effective means of warfare, for this necessitated both specialized training and resources beyond the capacity of monarchs in weakly monetarized economies to provide directly. Agricultural production, organized on the basis of relatively self-sufficient manors and villages, constituted the economic backbone of this society and the main support of the aristocratic or warrior class. Trade and commerce never disappeared entirely in the Middle Ages, but given the poor state of transportation and communications, its overall contribution to the economy was relatively small. To a very large extent, therefore, land equaled wealth. Since innovation was sporadic at best, self-enrichment could take but one direction: the acquisition of more land. consequence, however, is that his schema (as opposed to his discussion of Europe) passes over the distinctions within Europe that are crucial here. His associate, John A. Hall (1985a, 1985b), is much more sensitive to these distinctions, lumping old-regime France with other “capstone” states such as the Chinese empire rather than with Britain.

The values of the aristocracy corresponded to this imperative. Warfare, with its associated martial virtues, was seen as positive; it provided opportunities for plunder, territorial aggrandizement, and the attainment of glory and honor (Kautsky 1982, pp. 144-53). Honor, the key aristocratic virtue, involved above all else doing one’s duty. The importance of duty undoubtedly reflected the aristocracy’s origin in relationships of vassalage and fealty. Bendix (1978, p. 230), following Weber, suggests that the emphasis on personal ties accounts for the aristocratic contempt for impersonal relationships, such as those generated by markets, and for utilitarian motivations and calculations in human affairs more generally. Certainly, money making was despised, and orientations that seem to us to be distinctly lacking in prudence, such as those favoring leisure over work, lavish expenditure over productive investment, and generosity over frugality, predominated in aristocratic circles (Kautsky 1982, pp. 180-94). Personal prestige and distinction were critical to the aristocrat’s self-image. The aristocrat, Kautsky (1982, p. 183) notes, received income for what he was, not what he did. His status was inherited and fixed; no provision was made in medieval social theory for what we would call upward social mobility. Even after the forces of capitalism had made themselves strongly felt, prestige continued to constitute for the aristocrat what financial gain was for the bourgeois: the underlying rationality of his universe (Elias 1983 [ 19691, p. 92). The tendency for successful bourgeois to buy into aristocratic status, even when it involved considerable financial sacrifice in both the short term (the purchase price) and the longer term (through adherence to rules of derogation), is a good indication of the continued appeal of distinction in European societies well past the feudal era. Although distinction and material advantage are both valued by mankind (and indeed are interrelated), there is a very important difference between societies organized around the individual’s pursuit of wealth and societies placing greater stress on personal distinction. Distinction is relative; its value diminishes to the extent that it is shared throughout society. The same, however, is not necessarily true of wealth. Although people do often think in terms of relative differences in wealth, it is easier to conceive of a society in which everyone is well off in terms of material wealth than it is to conceive of one in which This would seem to make formally egaleveryone enjoys di~tinction.~ itarian societies more attractive on the whole, but there is an offsetting 4An exception might be an imperial society in which all members enjoy a sense of superiority over the peoples they have conquered.

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consideration. Material abundance in human history has generally been achieved through efficiency and innovation stimulated by competition in the marketplace. But competition implies winners and losers, upward and downward mobility, a society of change and flux. In such a society, not only are extremes of wealth and poverty likely to appear, but one loses the security of having stable expectations about social relationships, of knowing who one is and who everyone else is, of what is expected of each person and how each should be treated. This can be a very significant cost indeed and may suggest why hierarchically ordered societies have been the norm in human history. It is appropriate to consider more closely why stable expectations of the sort established in hierarchical societies should be so highly valued. At the level of the individual, the issue might conceivably be addressed by means of the Durkheimian concept of psychological strain, upon which Eckstein (1966, pp. 255-62) based his theory of political stability. Strain induced by uncertain expectations concerning social behavior undoubtedly exists-consider the frustrations of the tourist in an unfamiliar land-but it is not clear why it exists. It is possible, of course, that the desire for stable expectations is simply innate, and that the absence of such stability needs to be added to the list of psychic deprivations with which this discussion began. I would like to suggest, however, that it has something to do with the requirements for collective human survival. At a certain stage in the evolution of many human societies, population growth and the resultant overexploitation of the resources available to hunters and gatherers created a powerful incentive for the development of agriculture in settled communities. As North (198 1, p. 94) pointed out, this development generally involved the establishment of exclusive communal rights over a delimited piece of land in order to exclude outsiders from sharing the output generated by the community’s efforts, and some means of community defense in order to enforce those rights. It also entailed the creation of mechanisms by which communal decisions concerning the management of the agricultural cycle and the sharing out of the produce could be taken and enforced; it required, as societies grew larger, the creation of an environment of stable expectations concerning the behavior of individuals in society, backed by a state. 5These options are not mutually exclusive. The desire for stable expectations could be the product of processes of natural selection that favored individuals disposed to organize their social environments or to comply with rules of social organization already in existence.

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Stable expectations thus are part and parcel of the need for coordination in settled agricultural communities. But economic coordination can also be achieved by means other than hierarchical controlthrough the operation of markets, for example. Indeed, the classical political economists and their present-day followers would argue that the free operation of markets is inherently capable of doing a much better job of coordination than any “visible hand.” From this position it might be deduced that the more authoritarian forms of coordination would have tended to diminish rapidly once the definition and enforcement of individual property rights became possible. As North realized, this is a naive point of view. Yet his own solution, which is to introduce the ruler’s need for revenues and his concern to minimize the costs of raising them, does not capture the whole picture either. The problematic nature of authority suggests a broader perspective. The development of hierarchical authority to meet the requirements of defense and coordination in agricultural societies was an important advance in human organization, but as noted earlier, it meant for subordinates a loss of personal autonomy and control: one became the object of another’s decisions or whims. Even worse, the nature of authority is such that the power of a superordinate usually increases with the degree to which the subordinate’s activities are controlled or predictable while the superordinates’ are not. Authority involves, in other words, delimiting the freedom of action or unpredictability of others while at the same time maintaining one’s own freedom of action or unpredictability. It is therefore not surprising that authority is often perceived as difficult to bear. On the other hand, it is also evident that as societies increase in size-which the development of agriculture facilitates-the possibilities for subordinates to shirk their duties or free ride on society will grow as well. The result is a double-barreled problem from which relief has generally been sought in the elevation of the requirement of social coordination to a paramount, even sacred, consideration. To this end, ideological constructs, including religious ones, that highlight the overriding importance of societal survival, the organic interconnectedness of all roles in assuring survival, and most significantly, the idea that even the most privileged ones involve duties that in some way correspond to the social distinction they bear, are commonly developed and propagated. There may be no necessity that bonds of reciprocity across stratification lines be firmly in place in order for social systems to persist stably, but it certainly facilitates the . task of legitimating authority structures to subordinates if they are. Market principles have little with which to counter the appeal of

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such theories. The human species has survived through cooperation, and the margin between survival and nonsurvival for most of human history (and prehistory) has been narrow rather than broad. Theories that deny the need for purposeful human coordination of society and posit the right of each individual to pursue his or her own advantagealthough possessing an undeniable appeal to basic human motivations-run against much of the experience of humanity. Moreover, they tend to entail the development of ideologies that contradict the spirit of the very principles upon which those societies are based; if the pursuit of private advantage is the acknowledged prime motivation in human conduct, it is difficult to come up with logically consistent arguments for not free riding-and free riding can be devastating for social order. Finally, it may be noted that although markets often do enhance societal wealth and therefore the margin of survival far better than do more purposeful forms of societal coordination, they may also meet with resistance because of their propensity to produce effects that abrogate traditional notions of a “just return” on labor or effort, notions that often seem better respected in more organically defined societies. Markets may be efficient, but they are not always perceived as fair. For all these reasons, social coordination through hierarchical control can usually be legitimated more readily than coordination through the free or uncontrolled operation of markets, even when the conditions for the expansion of markets exist or can be brought into existence. It is no accident that virtually all of mankind’s most exalted values are altruistic or collective in nature. In attempting to explain the appeal of stable expectations, I have been led to the importance of social coordination for the survival of traditional agricultural societies and to the advantages hierarchical authority appears to possess in providing for social coordination. From these points two major implications follow, each establishing a locus of differentiation from the rational-choice interpretations considered here. The first implication is the high valuation that Moore and others have observed to be characteristic of tasks involving control over others. It is this element that is absent from an otherwise quite similar conception of reciprocity that anchors Rogowski’s theory of legitimacy. The gist of that theory, it will be recalled, is that the distribution of influence in legitimate political systems is expected to correspond to the degree to which various groups control essential social skills. Thus, the political domination of aristocratic classes in feudal societies follows from their monopolization of defense in a violent world, and the greater diffusion of political power evidenced in commercially oriented city-states reflects the higher occupational interchangeability that re-

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liance on markets produces. Both interpretations make a great deal of sense, but problems begin to arise when the relative importance of strata possessing different essential skills is assessed. Unwilling to introduce an ordering of skills into his theory, Rogowski is obliged to fall back on perceived internal cohesiveness or coalition credibility of strata in order to explain power distributions within societies. As we have seen, this position renders extremely difficult the task of accounting for the assimilation of one stratum by another. Once it is accepted that essential skills are not all equally valued, that, more specifically, those involving control are accorded higher status, these difficulties become resolvable. In distinguishing between essential governmental skills and other essential skills in some of his examples, Rogowski (1974, pp. 276-82) seems to recognize this fact implicitly, and it is surely no coincidence that the roles he places in the former category are the very ones-divine mediation, military leadership, government administration-identified by Moore as conferring high status in all societies. The second implication is that legitimacy is neither a matter of rational calculation, as Rogowski asserts, nor a matter of idoctrination, as North seems to believe. A purely rational approach to legitimacy is insufficient to explain order, because even if individuals do attribute legitimacy to regimes on this basis, there is still no reason not to free ride. Rational-choice theory does not assume that individuals play fair; it assumes that they will cheat whenever they think they can get away with it. At the other extreme, the notion that rulers can induce their subjects to accept ideologies that serve the rulers’ interests rather than their own attributes too much to the efficacy of socialization; North’s theory of ideology is, in this respect, excessively culturalist. The approach adopted here takes a middle position. It suggests (1) that legitimacy does involve the internalization of social norms and values or, in rational-choice terms, that people can be taught to introduce collective goals into their preference orderings, but (2) that there are constraints on what can be achieved in this domain. One constraint is that power is more readily legitimated if it incorporates an exchange of duties across stratification lines.6 6Many authors, including “social exchange” theorists such as Homans (1961) and Blau (1964), see reciprocity or equity-the belief that rewards should be proportional to contributions to society-as a basic human orientation. Of course, what constitutes reciprocity can be manipulated by the ruling authorities, but as Przeworski (1980, p. 24) noted, even Gramsci believed that a hegemonic ideology must also express the interests of subordinate groups to some extent. Recently, Hechter (1987b) has ad-

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Ideologies thus bind rulers as well as subjects. This means thatpace North-rulers are not free to raise revenues as they choose, subject only to the opportunity wealthy subjects have to defect to other rulers or would-be rulers. In societies whose legitimacy had been founded upon feudal principles, for example, it was much easier for monarchs to amass central power in the face of foreign threats (or temptations) than it was to tax nobles in order to pay for that undertaking. Expressed more crassly, it was easier to eliminate some of the duties the aristocracy owed society than it was to eliminate the advantages society owed to it. The issue was not simply one of appeasing a powerful class that had the option of defecting. To destroy the principal privileges of the aristocracy would have been tantamount to a social and ideological revolution, one that might eventually have engulfed the monarchy itself, but to build up the power and resources of the monarch to counteract internal disorder and foreign challenge suggested a much less disruptive strategy of expanding and reinforcing the principle of hierarchical authority. It was clearly the more viable option. The rub, of course, is that the strategy of preserving the powers and privileges of the aristocracy but severely curtailing its role in social coordination and control could easily involve a violation of the principle of reciprocity. For Rogowski, the failure of a stratum with superior political influence to perform commensurate social functions would be expected to produce a fairly quick reaction of alienation and-assuming the free-rider problem can be overcome-perhaps also insurrection against the political order that failed to meet the standard. Extremely high expectations concerning both human ratiocination (the generalized ability to determine social needs, the groups that provide for those needs, and what each is entitled to in return) and human willingness to act when significant imbalance is perceived are clearly entailed in this position. Considerably fewer demands are placed on human nature, however, if Rogowski’s objective concept of essentiality is modified to take account of an older and more subjective concept, inevitability. Under this perspective, individuals’ ability to ’

vanced the seemingly opposed thesis that social order ultimately rests upon the degree of dependence of citizens on their society and-to prevent free riding-the “control capacity” of that society. Since control exercised at the societal level is bound to be costly, given the greater temptation to free ride in large groups, he stresses the shifting of control costs to smaller groups, citing the extensive patron-client networking in Japan as an illustration. What is not mentioned, however, is that patron-client networks are based upon reciprocal relations of a highly visible (and often tangible) sort. The importance of visibility is discussed later in this chapter.

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compare the existing social order with imaginary alternatives is seen as rather limited. Discontent may be felt if reciprocity is not perceived; but unless an alternative authority structure is perceived as a concrete, workable reality, rejection of the existing system is unlikely to As Stinchcombe (1978, pp. 40-41) pointed out, this is a common feature of both Tocqueville’s and Trotsky’s explanations of revolution. Moreover, it is central to the concept of contradictory consciousness that Parkin (1971) employed to account for workingclass deference in England. It is also consistent with Eckstein’s theory of political stability, which explained legitimacy in terms of the degree to which political authority is congruent with the authority patterns into which the individual has been socialized. Judging from the diversity of applications and evidence, it is one of the more solidly established observations in the social sciences. Social order in this view involves a balance between the natural tendency to accept what is, even where reciprocity is not present to anchor norms of legitimacy, and countervailing influences emanating from other forms of social organization that may be present, including those that feed upon egalitarian impulses. The key is to assess the balance accurately. For example, in liberal democracies, there is, as Offe (1984, pp. 143-44) pointed out, a disjunction in organizational structures and norms between government and the private sector: democratic governments are held publicly accountable in ways that businesses are not, governments allocate benefits according to need rather than merit, and so forth. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether this disjunction represents a threat to stability. Eckstein’s (1966) concept of ‘‘graduated resemblances” embodies the important insight that the more distant a sector or organization is from government, the less closely it must mirror the governmental authority pattern in order to assure political stability. A mere mimicking of governmental forms and norms, as Nett1 (1965) noted of British business, is sufficient to meet Eckstein’s congruence criterion. What this suggests is that the crisis of political authority must be palpable, the countermodel directly relevant, before the momentum of inevitability can be checked.* 7The difference between accepting the status quo and perceiving a regime as legitimate does matter, however: mere acceptance may preclude insurrection or revolution, but not widespread free riding (breaking the law whenever one believes one can get away with it). ‘Offe was concerned with the public sector serving as a model to delegitimize the private sector, but the principle remains the same: the disjunction is neither as clear nor as perceptible as he supposes.

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The force of inevitability implies that challenging the existing order is no easy matter, especially when the free-rider obstacle to collective action is factored in, as it must be. The limited social vision of the average individual does, however, contain a curious paradox: 'Although members of subordinate strata can acquiesce in situations of low or no reciprocity, they also can fail to perceive that leadership tasks are in fact being performed by segments claiming distinction. The point about distinction, after all, is that it will only be accorded to individuals performing control functions to the extent that such control is perceived; the face-to-face exercise of authority, as well as ritual displays of authority, is especially important in this regard. In stratified societies, the tendency of higher strata, particularly those under threat of penetration from below, to seek distinctiveness through social distance may mean that there is little to connect the activities of higher and lower strata and therefore little to inform the latter concerning the activities of the former. Elites in those societies may therefore be caught in a dilemma, whether they know it or not: the more distinction is pursued through isolation from other strata, the greater the risk that reciprocity will not be perceived, even when, objectively, it exists. As we shall see, one of the great strengths of the English ruling strata has been their clear appreciation of this danger.

I1 With these ideas concerning the individual, authority, and society in mind, let us now turn to consideration of how they may be brought to bear upon the divergent experiences of Britain and France in the modern era. The principal forces disrupting the inevitability of hierarchically ordered feudal societies in the West undoubtedly emanated from the increasing penetration of markets. We have seen that capitalism was able to establish itself and flourish in part because the fragmentation of authority in the medieval period allowed free towns to survive in the interstices between feudal jurisdictions.9 As land was not the towns' sole or even their dominant source of wealth, the acquisition and protection of large tracts of territory was not a major concern; what protection was required could readily be purchased from the profits of 9J. Hall (1985a, 1985b) and Mann (1986) have suggested a second qualifying factor: the normative and cultural unity of Western Christendom maintained by the church, which supplied the cohesion necessary to make trading possible across separate political jurisdictions. Ashworth and Dandeker (1986) critique this view, but in a manner that seems to confuse the role of institutionalized Christianity in fostering normative order with the political and military power of the papacy.

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manufacturing, commerce, and banking. The values that prevailed in these towns and cities were therefore less often hierarchic and military than egalitarian and commercial. It may even have been the greater dynamism and the weaker sense of organic interconnectedness in commercial societies that encouraged people to think as individualists or “rational egoists” in the first place; it is perhaps no coincidence that individuals qua individuals clearly emerge for the first time since antiquity in the historical and artistic record of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance. lo The reaction of aristocracies to the rise of capitalism was profound. Initially, aristocrats often appreciated the change, because capitalists provided the flow of luxury goods that the aristocratic emphasis on status, prestige, and liberality demanded, as well as the flow of funds by which it could be afforded. Eventually, however, resentment became widespread as the inability of aristocratic largesse and leisure to hold their own against bourgeois frugality and hard work became ever more apparent. To make matters worse, monarchs tended to side with their bourgeois classes; with the end of the era of independent citystates, both had an interest in the consolidation of large territorial units that spelled the demise of aristocratic autonomy. A typical response to this dilemma on the part of aristocrats was the erection or reinforcement of barriers of etiquette, style, speech, and values to maintain their distinctiveness and close off access to their ranks; as one might imagine, feudal aristocratic values provided excellent raw material from which to stigmatize bourgeois acquisitiveness. In France, the eventual result was the emergence of a court society, a complex social system in which aristocratic distinctiveness was nurtured through high levels of within-stratum interaction and isolation, both psychological and physical, from other strata. For Rogowski, the creation of stigmata by aristocracy would be expected simply in order to maintain effective monopolization of essential skills; for Olson, to avoid having to share the advantages of aristocratic status more broadly than was necessary. Certainly, the aristocracy coveted ‘?he idea that rational egoism is a trait specific to market societies rather than a universal feature of human life, staunchly defended by Marx, Weber, and Polanyi (1957 [ 1944]), is often seen as the principal factor differentiating “sociological” from “economic” approaches to the study of mankind. However, it is perfectly amenable to a rational-choice interpretation as a process in which social goals disappear from individual preference orderings and are replaced by individualistic ones. These alternatives correspond to the two ways of merging rationalism and culturalism noted in Chapter 2. For the current purposes, the important point to note is simply the correspondence between attitudes and social structure.

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high positions and privileges, but it must also be borne in mind that the barriers that were erected involved the aristocracy’s loss of control of at least one essential function and a declining ability to maintain its share of national wealth. Not only was commerce deprecated as unnoble,” but the coordination of agriculture, a traditional seigneurial task, became inconsistent with the aristocratic self-image. What aristocrats sought to exclude above all was the replacement of social forms oriented around the prestige of inherited status with forms that highlighted utility and material gain. In court society, as Elias (1983 [1969], pp. 86-87) put it, Etiquette and ceremony increasingly became . . . a ghostly perpetuum mobile that continued to operate regardless of any direct use-value, being impelled, as by an inexhaustible motor, by the competition for status and power of the people enmeshed in it-a competition both between themselves and with the mass of those excluded-and by their need for a clearly graded scale of prestige.

Aristocratic distinctiveness was not easily maintained in an era in which the monarchy’s finances depended largely on the sale of titles and offices, but the situation was far from hopeless from the aristocracy’s point of view. For one thing, its position (unlike that of the gentrified bourgeoisie of late-Victorian Britain) involved an exaltation of certain of its own traditional perspectives, perspectives that continued to hold some sway in what was still a hierarchically organized, agrarian society. For another, the aristocratic world view was not totally dissociated from notions of utility. As Stinchcombe (1982b, p. 92) observed, the fight against venality and in favor of aristocratic closure was based on the argument that “a nobleman who got his status through buying an office that carried nobility was a nobleman only because he was rich, not because he was deserving.” True merit, in contrast, could be demonstrated through control of high administrative, military, and ecclesiastical positions. Indeed, the story of the run-up to 1789 is not, as Rogowski posits, one of erosion of the aristocracy’s sole remaining skill monopoly, defense, but rather one of gradual extension to the point of monopoly of the aristocratic stake in ”It is true, as Runciman (1983, p. 326) pointed out, that nobles were often involved in business activities, just as it is true that ennobled bourgeois families tended over time to drift away from business and into more traditional aristocratic pursuits (Taylor 1964, pp. 485-86). The point is that the pursuit of business opportunities did not form part of the aristocracy’s self-defined role in society, and the negative image aristocrats had of business discouraged active involvement in it.

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these positions.12This should not be taken to mean that the relationship Rogowski proposes between essentiality and survival ought to be reversed, but rather that essentiality as he interprets the term was not at issue. The fate of the French aristocracy had more to do with certain consequences attendant upon the ways in which its position in society had been bolstered. Stinchcombe (1978, p. 44) has suggested that Tocqueville’s account of the old regime in France is contradictory in asserting that status barriers were more rigid, yet aristocratic rank could be acquired (purchased) much more easily than in the supposedly more open society of Georgian England. Actually, the obsession with aristocratic status prevailed precisely because the benefits it conferred were accessible to those successful enough to be able to afford it. Once purchased, aristocratic status and privileges were vigorously defended, the closure of further access advocated. But closure was a dangerous choice. As it took hold in the eighteenth century, the effect was to anger and alienate newer aspirants from the Third Estate. What made matters worse in their eyes was that the regime also seemed incapable of defendingmuch less advancing-purely bourgeois interests in the face of fierce competition from the English. However mercantilist government policy developed, it remained, in Anderson’s (1974, p. 59) apt phrase, “fixated on the traditional contest for land till the end.” Thus, a basis existed for bourgeois discontent; and criticism-even ridicule-of the regime became a prominent feature in the eighteenth century. Ideas, however, do not make revolutions; neither, for that matter, did the French bourgeoisie. The bedrock of eighteenth-century French society was the peasantry, and the sense of inevitability that dominated its world view could only have been challenged from a concrete basis, that is to say, through the lessons of everyday experience. In France, this happened in two ways. First, the cultivation of aristocratic distinctiveness, together with the efforts of royal agents to undermine seigneurial control of the peasantry (in order to protect the monarchy’s tax base), had effectively ended the landlords’ direct role ”Rogowski (1974, p. 276) argues that the bourgeoisie began to see the aristocracy as nonessential once the upper bourgeois and aristocratic cultures had become indistinguishable and penetration of the skill of military leadership had been achieved. However, the source he cites to this effect (Ford 1953) defended the very different thesis that what was involved was a process of assimilation of the bourgeoisie into the aristocracy, not a process of bourgeois penetration and takeover of aristocratic functions. These new aristocrats, the noblesse de la robe, then became the staunchest defenders of aristocratic status and privileges. See Kiser (1986-87) for a recent development of this important point.

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in agricultural and community life in the eighteenth century, leaving the conduct of rural affairs to largely autonomous village communities (Root 1986-87, p. 241). With an open-field system of cultivation and extensive common lands, collective decision making in local communities was especially important, and it apparently resulted in the development of strong community ties and considerable resentment against landlords who, after all, still expected to collect feudal dues (Skocpol 1976, pp. 194-95; 1979, p. l2O).13 Second, coupled with the removal of aristocratic influences in local affairs was the emergence of an alternative structure of authority, staffed at the lower levels by non-nobles, to handle those powers or functions to which the state laid claim, such as the administration of justice. Tocqueville, in particular, stressed this factor: the existence of a visible alternative within the existing order which would effectively undermine the sense of inevitability. Together, the widespread peasant resentment at the aristocracy’s reneging on its feudal obligations of reciprocity (while still claiming its benefits); the absence of face-to-face aristocratic control of rural life and the consequent growth of peasant solidarity; and the existence of an alternative, functioning authority structure created conditions that made possible the violent overthrow of the regime. That the French aristocracy should have turned to closure is readily understandable. Although most societies do have a reciprocal element to their conceptualization of the rules governing relations between classes or strata, the deadweight of the sense of inevitability often means that upper classes or strata can bask in the illusion that they do not have to fulfill those parts of the bargain that appear to them to be debasing. A belief that one’s privileges exist because of what one is rather than what one does, the superiority of one’s blood rather than the superiority of one’s performance, is bound to seem an excellent means of erecting barriers to entry from below as well as of justifying an existence of aloof splendor. Closure also has the blessing of rational-choice theorists, who see it as an effective means of preserving class position (assuming free riding can be curtailed). What is not appreciated in either perspective is that even a successful effort at closure can be self-defeating. The impulse to erect barriers to mobility generally becomes operative when there is a perceived threat from below, which in this case meant when capitalism had made a signifi‘3Tocqueville (1955 [ 18351) believed that the highly unequal system of taxation had the effect of destroying all ties of community and association in the old regime. More recent authorities, such as Hampson (1963, p. 24) and Bendix (1978, p. 337), support Skocpol’s contention that such ties persisted at least up to the revolutionary period.

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cant impact on the social order and produced a large and growing number of wealthy aspirants to noble status. As long as these individuals could buy into positions of distinction and prestige, they had little incentive to oppose the social order, but once access was closedunfairly in their eyes-the temptation was great to abandon aristocratic conceptions of the ideal social order in favor of more “bourgeois” ones, especially as appropriate foreign models were already in existence (England and Holland). In addition, aristocratic aloofness, even when combined with control of higher duties in state or society, runs the risk of denying for most of the population the element of visibility that is essential to maintaining the sense of reciprocity. As noted earlier, “nobler” conceptions of aristocratic rights and duties tend to be counterproductive; they open the way for the development of attitudes subversive of the social order they exalt. The aristocracy in England avoided the fate of its French cousins in part because its position and power in the early modern era never depended upon the erection of status barriers or the renunciation of bourgeois conceptions of utility. This is not to say that aristocratic values did not pervade West End town houses and country estates or that the aristocracy’s acceptance of wealthy commoners was without prejudice or disdain. Certainly, English aristocrats were intensely proud of the superiority of their lineages and expected the accoutrements of place, prestige, and authority to be yielded willingly by those of lesser rank. Yet there can be little doubt that the English aristocracy differed from its Continental counterparts in this most fundamental respect: its interests and those of mercantile and finance capital were much more closely conjoined. In the story of the rise of modern capitalism, the English upper classes, despite all the humbug, were in on the ground floor. How did this state of affairs come about? To my mind, two factors stand out as of fundamental importance. The first was the early development of a centralized feudal state, a consequence primarily of the Norman Conquest. It may already have been their custom to do so in Normandy, but once in England the Norman ruling class, faced with a far more numerous, alien population, had a very powerful incentive to maintain effective means of intraclass cooperation in order to subjugate and administer its new possession. Instead of staking out positions of regional autonomy or opposition, therefore, the aristocracy collaborated with its kings in the governance of the land, the king appointing the officers of his law and authority, the aristocracy providing its leading personnel. Symptomatic of this unity of purpose was the absence of the cycle, typical of France up to the time of Richelieu, in

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which the monarchy appointed officers to administer the territories of the realm, and local magnates subsequently established control over those posts in order to bolster their local authority, thereby obliging the monarchy to create new royal offices to achieve its original purpose (Finer 1975, pp. 126-27). Symptomatic also was the absence of regional parliaments in England and the continued vitality of the English national Parliament when its French counterpart had fallen into disuse. The establishment of the French king’s right to tax without the approval of the Estates General under the pressure of foreign invasion is a well-known development which centered North’s account, but what should also be mentioned are the difficulties the French monarchy experienced with an Estates General composed of appointees from regional assemblies that were unwilling to delegate tax-making powers to the central body (Anderson 1974, p. 89). The greater unity of the English ruling class made its parliament a much more effective body for the elaboration of national policy, and it allowed the feudal notion of reciprocal rights and duties between monarch and subjects to prevail over the more “theocratic” conception of monarchy (Dyson 1980b, p. 52) that disunity in France seemed to call forth. The great steps in the development of French absolutism invariably followed upon periods of regional strife. The English aristocracy, unlike its French counterpart, never became dissociated from its role as a ruling class, but this in itself would not have saved it. As Brenner persuasively argued, responsibility must also be attributed to another, although related, consequence of rulingclass unity-the ability of lords to alter tenure arrangements in response to market incentives. In this regard, French aristocrats were caught in a classic bind. On the one hand, their ability to exploit their peasants was limited by the fact that the lack of interaristocratic solidarity provided peasants with opportunities for flight to other jurisdictions if conditions became unacceptable. On the other hand, the extension of royal power in the face of aristocratic squabbling and hostility to central authority entailed the protection of peasant property from landlord predations: the crown preferred to sustain its troublesome aristocracy by making it economically dependent on itself instead. The absence of struggles of this sort in England, in contrast, allowed the more feudal conception of lordly jurisdiction over serfs and the lands they tilled to prevail. As a result, English landlords were in a position to collaborate effectively with merchants in exploiting the advantages of commercial agriculture when the opportunities for profit through the market began to appear; the munificence of an absolute monarch was never required. Their alliance with the urban bourgeoi-

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sie, moreover, was strongly represented in Parliament. Together, these groups could mobilize substantial political and economic resources, should their mutual concern for the development of more efficient property rights and the minimization of state expenses be thwarted, as the Stuarts discovered to their surprise and dismay. The second fundamental factor is the relative isolation of England from major foreign enemies. The point is not that the English Channel constituted an invincible barrier-the Normans, after all, had managed to ford it. Rather, the significance of the waters surrounding Britain lay in the fact that (1) they imposed a considerable obstacle to the territorial expansion of the kingdom beyond the British Isles, and (2) they prescribed a naval emphasis in order to defend the kingdom from the voraciousness of Continental monarchs. The importance of navalism is difficult to overestimate. Although naval forces could defend the kingdom from external enemies, they provided a very poor-in fact, useless-tool for internal control or repression. Moreover, given the high degree of aristocratic unity and the relative weakness of English regionalism, there was neither pressure nor excuse to rectify this deficiency; for most internal purposes a militia would do. This meant that English monarchs had to work directly with the aristocracy and its bourgeois allies; on the most serious occasion when a king attempted to go it alone, his lack of a large land force cost him his head. To assert that “absolutism and militarism go together on the Continent just as do self-government and militia in England” (Hintze 1975b [ 19061, p. 199) may be slightly hyperbolic, but it captures the flavor of the relationship between military need and state structure. Another aspect of navalism deserves mention: sea power is not only a form of defense appropriate to an island kingdom but also an instrument admirably suited to commerce. The connection between commerce and the sea is an underlying theme of most attempts to delineate societal types. Fox (1971, p. 34), for example, placed great emphasis on the role of water transportation in the development of commercial cities; only it could allow for the easy movement of large quantities of goods over long distances that made significant improvements in economic productivity and social organization possible. It is the central idea behind the extensive literature on the rise of the Atlantic economies and the relative success in that regard of Holland and England, states more often referred to as “maritime” than “Protestant.” The theme also colors Wallerstein’ s capitalist world economy, although here Modelski would argue that Wallerstein underplays the crucial role of navalism in its operation. For Modelski, mastery of the seas has been the key to hegemony in the modern era: it conferred critical

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advantages in security, knowledge of and access to global transactions and communications, and the capacity to “set the rules” in international economic and political relations, while imposing no more than a minimum of territorial burdens (Modelski 1978, pp. 227-28). Territorialism is certainly more than the refuge of second-rate powers seeking compensation in “ill-founded schemes of universal mission” that Modelski (1983a, p. 120) envisioned-it is difficult to see how Continental states fearing powerful neighbors could do otherwise than think territorially-but its feudal baggage is difficult to gainsay. In contrast, as Hintze (1975b [1906], p. 214) pointed out, “sea power lacks all feudal vestiges,” and therein lies its advantage. Through these comments, I have attempted to sketch in the outlines of two distinct societal types, types that differ in their economic orientations, political structures, and ideational configurations and that, in their nation-state forms, are particularly well exemplified by Britain and (prerevolutionary) France, respectively. For reasons developed in Chapter 3, a good indication of the extent to which any European state approached one or the other type can be gained from its prevailing attitude toward the structure and ethos of the Roman Catholic church in its Counter-Reformationary incarnation. At bottom, however, the issue is not religious in nature. Rather, the contrast is between systems that hold forth acquisitiveness or distinction-or, if one prefers, achievement or ascription-as the primary focus of human concerns. One appeal of this categorization is its simplicity; its main danger, on the other hand, is the assumption that it must be static. Although the path the English took proved to be highly successful in its own termsthe maximization of personal and thus national wealth and power-we have seen that England remained vulnerable, and eventually succumbed, to the temptations of what in other contexts is known as “backsliding.” Our next step is to consider why this was so. Wallerstein (1980b, p. 39) has suggested that the decline of hegemonic power is connected with an evolution in the bases of its economic position from productive efficiency to commercial superiority to reliance on international banking and foreign investments. He has not spelled out why this course from a producer to a rentier existence takes place, and the only example he has discussed so far, the United Provinces in the seventeenth century, is compromised by his observation that its economic position seemed so unassailable to the English and the French that they relied on force to destroy it (Wallerstein 1980b, p. 65). Some of his supporters have come to his defense, but their efforts seem both unrelated theoretically to the world-system perspective and rather unimpressive. Among the explanations offered are ( 1 ) the ten-

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dency to overspecialize in products and processes associated with the rise to hegemonic status and the resultant high costs involved in adapting to newer markets (Bousquet 1980; Chase-Dunn 1982); (2) the ability of rival economies to catch up quickly by importing capital, techniques, and machinery of the hegemonic power (Bousquet 1980; Goldfrank 1983), (3) the higher wage levels that tend to prevail in the hegemonic power (Chase-Dunn 1982; Goldfrank 1983); and (4)the political power of owners and workers in the hegemonic power which can be used to slow down the rate of adoption of new techniques and products (Chase-Dunn 1982; Goldfrank 1983). l 4 In fact, the first three points make little sense without the fourth because, other things being equal, one would expect that hegemonic economies would generate sufficient capital for investment in new plants and new industries (they certainly have plenty to send abroad), that competition from abroad would stimulate further innovations at home, and that wage rates and working conditions would tend to reflect productivity levels there as elsewhere. The fourth factor is in reality Mancur Olson’s. The difficulty with Olson’s solution to the riddle of Britain’s economic decline resides in the ad hoc and perverse qualities of its account of middle-class attitudes and behavior. I do not mean the perversity of acting so as to inhibit economic growth; Olson is quite correct in arguing that such behavior can often be in the economic interests of particular groups. Rather, it has to do with the nature of the barriers created to restrict social mobility and the place in the social hierarchy where they were erected. As Parkin (1979, pp. 54-56) pointed out, a bourgeois class can and usually does maintain its privileged position in the socioeconomic structure via the tendency for the skills and attitudes associated with success to be transmitted through families, reinforced by credentialism; that is, the elaboration of professional standards and credentials involving high academic performance in areas related to the tasks in question. Such a strategy allows the threat of upward mobility from the working class to be largely neutralized, while still permitting legitimation consistent with bourgeois achievement criteria through reference to the apparently objective qualifications of those who lay I4Chase-Dunn (1982, pp. 84-85) also included the costs of maintaining world order and the difficulties created by the erection of tariff barriers against the hegemonic power’s products. As Modelski noted, the former costs should be minimal and well worth it unless territorial acquisition is pursued. Territorial acquisition, in his view, is more a symptom of decline than a cause of it. As for tariffs, Stein (1984) has demonstrated that they were not raised against Britain in the freer trade area created in the 1860s, and Tylecote (1982) also argued that they had no significant effect on Britain.

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claim to the high-level occupations. l5 In nineteenth-century England, the professionalization of white-collar occupations was an important current, and the motivations Olson and Parkin suggested must surely have been involved in it; but what is much more striking is the fact that the process formed part of a larger movement of disengagement from tasks and orientations associated with the production of goods and even, to some extent, with pecuniary gain. Rather than “credentializing” the function of industrial management, the English middle class chose to stigmatize it instead. No elite business schools on the American model were therefore required: the barriers the bourgeoisie erected were designed to exclude itself from the very skills that had facilitated its rise in economic and political power and to turn them over to lesser men. This is not what one would expect from the rational-choice theories considered in this study. One might expect it, however, if one takes into account the inability of liberalism to provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of social order and the continuing appeal of the values of prestige, hierarchy, and control, as represented by an aristocracy that had never been discredited. It is one thing to develop and legitimate North’s (1981, p. 202) “individualistic maximizing postulate of economic theory” as a means of disrupting the aristocracy’s monopoly on wealth and power; it is quite another to disparage aristocratic values and traditions at a time when the transformation of social and economic structures and the unraveling of traditional bonds of dependence and deference were arousing the sleeping lion of lower-class discontent. As the negative side of those transformations began to sink in, as it became appreciated that the freeing of markets had generated not just economic growth but also a qualitative change in the nature of the economy and of society with many disturbing features, nostalgia for an (idealized) earlier era when manufacturing existed on a much smaller scale in tranquil pastoral settings naturally festered. Acquisitiveness began to lose its appeal as the ultimate human motivation in such circumstances; distinction correspondingly regained its luster. It at least had the virtue of entailing control over men, something which in the first half of the nineteenth century seemed in rather short supply. Empire clearly played an important role in this process. It may have ”Legitimation through meritocratic criteria also has the advantage of downplaying the disjuncture between the competitive principle of the capitalist economy and the “de-commodified” provision of services by the state that Offe (1984) perceived in advanced capitalist societies; individual ability becomes the criterion for advancement in both spheres.

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been acquired in a “fit of absentmindedness”; perhaps, more realistically, as a defensive step to preserve strategic position and market access in an increasingly nationalistic and competitive world. But the essence of empire is territoriality, and it cannot fail to evoke values and demand skills that had previously been the prerogative of aristocrats. For those who would escape the monster that their philosophy seemed to have created at home, it was seen, in many cases quite literally, as a godsend. The aristocratic way of life no longer appeared so parasitic when it involved ruling the world. It must be stressed that this process involved a change in values, not a hypocritical vaunting of certain values to maintain social order. The importance placed on socializing the children of the elite clearly points to a process of internalization; so does the apparent infrequency of free-riding (pursuing industrial careers shunned by others). It is not clear in any case how the adoption of anti-industrial and antientrepreneurial attitudes could have enhanced social order. It follows from Rogowski’s theory that bourgeois credentialization and hence monopolization of industrial management skills would have been a better strategy for preserving social order (not to mention the material positions of the bourgeoisie); instead, what seems to have occurred is that the less desirable products of the triumph of acquisitive individualism-industrial squalor, social unrest-and new social requirementsmanagement of an empire-combined to generate a genuine questioning and ultimately a downgrading of its definition of life’s ends. The motivation was not one of subservience to a class that controlled social order, because clearly the aristocracy did not. But neither did it follow the course favored by its French counterpart. The English aristocracy in the nineteenth century was probably no more open to membership bids from rich bourgeois than the eighteenth-century French aristocracy had been (in terms of titles, even less so); nor was it any less a rentier class. But despite its failure to involve itself as fully in industrialization as it had in the earlier phase of commercial expansion, the British aristocracy maintained one major advantage: it had never isolated itself completely from the rest of society. From centuries of experience, it had learned that face-to-face control is essential to preserving political and social authority, and that authority had been preserved in many respects. In the nineteenth century this feat was accomplished in part through aristocrats’ continued domination of local government (Arnstein 1973, 1975). Equally important was the skillful manipulation of the movement for parliamentary reform, a movement created to advance the representation and power of urban interests, but in fact compromised into expanding the number of coun-

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try seats and overrepresenting rural areas, where the traditional landed elite still held paternal sway.16 Finally, its status was preserved through the judicious use of charity, a t,raditional form of subordination that was greatly expanded in the nineteenth century and targeted on the so-called “deserving poor” (Garrard 1983; Newby 1975). The key to this strategy is its ability to maintain a sense of inevitability through the exercise of directly observable means of control linked to the performance of duties (reciprocity), and the positive effect this had on the internalization of deferential attitudes toward authority among the lower classes. The withdrawal of face-to-face control as in France, on the other hand, has the opposite consequence of undermining reciprocity and thereby rendering acute the sense of the problematic nature of authority. The English aristocracy did have to make certain concessions to win over the bourgeoisie. For one thing, it had to tame its own behavior to conform to bourgeois expectations; for another, it had to permit some degree of class merger, at least with the more “respectable” of the bourgeoisie. But with its economic position secure and its political skills in demand both at home and in the empire, it had relatively little to fear: the terms of the bargain had to be largely in its favor. And, indeed, they were-for a time. The situation could last in its pristine, “cock-bird” form, however, only as long as the circumstances that sustained it. Inevitably, the loss of hegemony abroad weakened the legitimacy of hegemony at home; the substitution of organic and hierarchical values for open, competitive ones undermined economic growth; the maintenance of face-to-face contact became increasingly difficult in an urbanized society dominated by large-scale public and private organizations, many of which served the same control and welfare functions. l 7 The story of twentieth-century Britain is largely the story of the slow unraveling of the nineteenth-century compact. Nevertheless, a powerful testimony to the strength of its appeal is 161t should be noted that it was not just the presence of the landed elite and its representatives in Parliament that mattered; their support was important in enacting factory and other acts designed to curb industrial abuses, and as noted in Chapter 5, they were able to present themselves as defenders of the worker against the inhumanity of the factory owners. ”As urbanization and industrialization removed much of the lower-class population from aristocratic control and encouraged government to create new agencies to exercise paternalistic or control functions, the English aristocratic/City elite did increasingly seek distinctiveness through social isolation and closure. Whether this accelerated the decline in the aristocracy’s influence beyond that which these other developments had made inevitable is unclear, however.

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contained in the failure of any powerful movement or ideology to emerge that could break out of the patterns and parameters that it cast upon British society. The ideological neutrality of the British state has been brought into question in recent years, but only by a relative few. For many Marxists, the slow rate of the unraveling is seen as simply a reflection of the power of ideological hegemony, created and sustained by elite control of the dominant institutions in society, including most notably those that manage the flow of information and ideas. We have seen that there is much to be said for this interpretation, but it is clear that it misses a great deal as well. Symptomatic of its blind spots are the confusion and contradiction within the Marxist literature on the social structure of nineteenth-century Britain. Which class ruled-the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie? Which set of ideas dominated? Marxists have come down on both sides of these questions, yet neither in itself is satisfactory. To some extent, their dilemma is understandable, for persuasive evidence exists to support both the thesis of bourgeois ascendancy and that of aristocratic dominance. What Marxists cannot readily embrace is the particular interpretation I have put on the two sets of evidence: that a strong bourgeois push existed in the first half of the century, but subsided as the appeal of the once-spurned aristocratic values and standards became more evident under the provocations of lower-class unrest, the horrors of industrialism, and the pressures of competitive nationalism. The reemergence of a largely vanquished class and class perspective is difficult to assimilate into a vision of history as a one-way street. The difficulty evaporates, however, if teleology is put aside and, more important, if human motivations are no longer forced into the narrowly acquisitive form that anchors both Marxist and rational-choice theory. As a pursuer of material advantage, man undoubtedly acts in his own interest as he sees it. As a member of a socioeconomic structure, he also has material interests in common with others of his class. In the tradeoff between the advantages of class solidarity and the temptations of free riding, it would seem that the rational-choice theorists have the better of the argument: class action is conspicuous by its rarity; free riding seems omnipresent. Yet this is to look at only one facet of human existence. In many other domains, man is a profoundly social animal. For one thing, he obeys authority more often than not, although selfinterest would dictate that he free ride whenever possible. For another, while he often free rides on class action, thereby rendering it ineffective in most cases, he almost never free rides on national action. Usually unwilling to participate in general strikes, he seldom hesitates to participate in wars, where he has a great deal more to lose.

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Behavior of this sort cannot be explained by a simple reference to the power of ideological manipulation by the state or the ruling class. If man is able to perceive his own self-interest, as most rational-choice theorists believe, one would expect him to ascribe to ideologies that advantage him, not to ideologies that advantage his rulers. If he at least occasionally fails to perceive his personal advantage, as the theory of ideological hegemony implies, then some account must be given of which ideological constructs possess the power of mass deception, under what circumstances, and why. In this domain, ad hoc answers will not do. The answer I have given these questions revolves around the importance of cooperation and coordination for the survival of human societies; the appeal of hierarchical or “personal” forms of social coordination over those that rely on the blind, impersonal forces of markets; and, within the European context, the fact that those needs were met by aristocratic classes whose values of honor, duty, leadership, and prowess have possessed, for these very reasons, an enduring appeal. Only in these terms, it seems to me, can one account for the self-denying character of the attitudes and orientations chosen by the English middle class to demarcate its newly acquired social standing, or for the lasting legitimacy of these values among many, particularly of the working class, who would seem to have the least to gain from their paramountcy. It is Britain’s misfortune that the values and orientations most closely linked with social order and coordination are not the ones best suited to maintaining economic dynamism.

I11 This study began with the example of the rather puzzling mixes of pragmatic and ideological features in both British and French politics. I noted in Chapter 1 that although the pragmatic bent in English life can be seen as an effective camouflage for the ideological hegemony of a consolidated aristocratic-bourgeois ruling class, its existence clearly predates that development by a considerable margin. Similarly, while the pragmatic gamesmanship of the politicians of the French parliamentary republics provided an appropriate antidote to the ever-present danger of an eruption of ideological divisiveness, its cultural roots, too, can be traced back well before the parliamentary era. In Chapter 2, the picture was complicated by the observation that if pragmatism is linked with empiricism in social and political thought, and similarly ideologism with rationalism, then little sense can be made of the association of the former traits with British culture and the latter with French culture: the French tradition has been nearly as empirical as the

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British has been rationalistic. What is rather more consistent, on the other hand, is the individualism of British thought and the collectivism of Continental thought, including that of the Continent’s supreme individualists, the French. The reasons for these differences become clearer when they. are placed within the appropriate historical contexts. The individualism of the English tradition, as well as its pragmatic or practical nature, is rooted in the related circumstances of the early success of market forces and orientations in English society and the even earlier establishment of an impressive degree of national unity. The unity that France achieved under the absolute monarchy, in contrast, was a contentious construct imposed in the face of regional aristocratic and religious opposition and foreign threat. It called forth the development of ideological justifications that emphasized hierarchical authority and brooked no challenge or dissent (at least in theory). When discontent did become rife in the eighteenth century, it naturally tended toward the elaboration of alternative societal models: the option of reform within the system seemed closed. The situation also engendered, as we have seen, a strong emphasis on equality, a suspicion that the state might be used by others for their own ends, an acute appreciation of the two-edged nature of authority-hence the wary individualism of French culture. It was France’s misfortune that no generally accepted solution to the dilemma of political authority could be found in the century and a half following the overthrow of monarchical absolutism; instead, ways of containing the potential for divisiveness within tolerable bounds by neutralizing that suspiciousness were all that could be managed. A much stronger thread of national unity and consensus runs through the EnglisWBritish historical experience, but there were also occasions when its prevailing order was thrown into contention. One such occasion saw the triumph in the seventeenth century of the principle of parliamentary supremacy over Stuart predispositions toward absolute authority on the French model. To a large extent, this struggle represented the culmination of a course of development that national unity, an increasingly market-oriented economy, and a correspondingly individualistic ethos had pointed to for some time. A second occasion, which this study has emphasized, was constituted of the early nineteenth-century challenge of a rising bourgeoisie with its liberal, utilitarian ideology and its later partial assimilation into, partial acquiescence under, an aristocracy-led hegemonic compact-a compact molded in the public schools, Oxbridge universities, and new state institutions that attracted their graduates, and guided by a world-view that combined aristocratic values of honor, duty, and disdain for in-

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dustry with bourgeois standards of personal rectitude and respectability. This outcome clearly went against the grain of much of previous British development. The argument of this chapter is that it is precisely because the more organic and hierarchical values represented by the aristocracy possessed an appeal unmatched by acquisitive individualism-not just a snob appeal engendered by stigmatization but an appeal rooted in concerns over social coordination and control-that made it possible for them to reemerge as circumstances demanded, or seemed to demand, in the nineteenth century. Those values were not created anew; they had been around for a very long time. They endured to become dominant again because cultural values and value complexes can and do endure, particularly when they are related to basic human needs and proclivities. That, it seems to me, is the essential legacy of the culturalist mode of explanation. The more standard version of culturalist explanation, in contrast, relies on a rather pathetic relativism that begs for rebuttal. Anchored in little more than socialization theory, it is poorly equipped to resist the premise of rational-choice theorists that norms and values represent means to selfish ends or the premise of Marxists that they reflect structural realities. Certainly, one would not want to deny that cultural traits often do serve material purposes or that certain kinds of structures imply certain kinds of ideational and value constructs. But what needs to be borne in mind is that, once created, these constructs often gain a life of their own, sustained not by material self-interest or concrete structural circumstances, but by their appeal to more fundamental human needs and expectations, such as those of social coordination, order, stability, and reciprocity. In this study, two critical value changes have been noted in the history of Britain. The first occurred in the nineteenth century, when the middle-class rejection of the philosophy of man advanced by the utilitarians and the political economists began just as the country was approaching the height of its economic success. The second took place in the twentieth century, when the cultural matrix centering on deference started to erode even as military victory and material affluence still colored the national mood. Certainly in the first case and arguably in the second, the value change preceded the economic circumstances that have been employed to explain it. That alone suggests the inadequacy of reducing culture to an epiphenomenon. Standard culturalism has also been justly criticized for the lack of generality of its explanations. There can be little doubt that the tendency of culturalists to characterize cultural complexes in ways that make them appear to be unique to the societies under investigation is

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largely at fault. The approach taken here of identifying societal types1* and the human needs and motivations that they embody does, however, offer the possibility of an escape. Although particular details will vary from one setting to another, the implication of this approach is that not only are societal types of general import, but that their associated value complexes are as well. If this is true, further comparative work should facilitate the differentiation of the essential or common features of each type from those that are society specific and lead to the discovery of other types as well. An indication of the possibilities of the first suggestion is given by the following conjunction of observations. In seeking to determine why England in the period up to 1780 was more successful economically than France, Holt and Turner (1966) were led to associate England’s social system with that of traditional Japan and, conversely, France’s with that of imperial China. In general terms, their analysis accords well with the dualistic framework that differentiates large, centralized agrarian states from smaller, more decentralized and commercially oriented polities. In characterizing the education and value systems of late nineteenth-century England, on the other hand, Wilkinson (1964) found remarkable similarities with those of imperial China, particularly in the high valuation placed on classical education, leisure, a rentier existence, and a landed life-style. It would be consistent with the analysis of this study to conclude that it was the sea change in Britain in the nineteenth century that took the nation from Japan’s category to China’s. Although European cultures differ profoundly from those of East Asia, this line of interpretation strongly suggests an underlying commonality of cultural matrixes and societal types , as well as the possibility that a society might change from one type to another; both in turn imply a foundation in underlying human motivations and needs. Concerning the discovery of new societal and cultural types, the field is quite open, but an obvious candidate for investigation would be the type of society best known for its dense networking of patronclient relations. Although “connections” have at times mattered a great deal in England and France, neither country properly fits this type today, but many others do. Apart from its ubiquity, clientelism seems “The term societal type is not meant to imply that each national society possesses only one type. As we saw in the French case, nations may exhibit tensions resulting from the coexistence of more than one type within the same society. The adjective societal is used to emphasize that these types are broad based enough to be capable of characterizing whole societies (or even larger entities such as multistate regions).

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relevant for this pursuit because, in a sense, it represents an intermediary form between the two societal types described in this chapter. If commercially oriented societies organize people horizontally on the basis of networks of exchange, and territorially oriented societies organize people vertically on the basis of relatively fixed hierarchies of authority and dependence, clientelism is a form of social organization in which small-scale vertically ordered networks assist members of both dominant and subordinate groups in adapting to the intrusion of market principles into traditional agrarian societies. With traditional forms of dominance they share a pattern of unequal authority usually based on ascriptive criteria; with market principles they share an orientation toward individual upward mobility based partly and imperfectly on criteria of individual merit and performance. Moreover, patron-client networks clearly cater to the satisfaction of basic human motivations such as material gratification, distinction, and security in a changing and uncertain social environment. The linking of societal types and their associated value complexes with basic human motivations is the key element in the approach adopted here; it is what, in my opinion, gives culturalism its autonomy.19 If values are treated as dependent on structure, two major dilemmas emerge. The first is to explain how values can survive the structures that gave them birth; the second is to explain what caused the structures in the first place. Structuralists tend to deny the first and, as Hechter (1987a, p. 29) notes, avoid the second. Marx’s class-struggle explanation for changing modes of production is a notable exception to the avoidance rule, but as rational-choice theorists are keen to observe, is, rootedness in individual motiit lacks “micr0foundations”-that vations. Despite their greater concern for microfoundations, rationalchoice theorists also engage in avoidance, albeit of a different sort. What emerges most clearly from the examination of rational-choice theories undertaken in this study is that the attempt to exclude norms and values or to treat them as rationally chosen means to asocial ends cannot be sustained, yet rational-choice theorists prefer to remain agnostic concerning the possible presence of social norms and values in individual preference orderings. The premise advanced here is that the explanations of the origins of social structures, of the nonreducibility of norms and values to structures, and of the preference orderings that motivate action can all benefit from rooting them in a more complex ”It is also what differentiates this approach from the important work of Wildavsky (1985, 1987) and Douglas (1982; see also Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982).

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conception of human motivations than either structuralists or rationalchoice theorists are characteristically willing to countenance. There are, to be sure, many lists of human motivations, and little reason to believe that the one employed here is exhaustive or conclusive. There is also the question of the origins-social or genetic-of human motivations. Exploring these issues will clearly entail an enormous research agenda. Nevertheless, the identification of general types of social organization and the exploration of their cultural underpinnings is a good place to start; at the very least, it should allow the culturalist perspective to avoid more successfully than in the past the shoals of amorphousness, epiphenomenality , and particularism that have hitherto plagued its shaky course and take on a truly comparative significance. If the lessons of the British experience are anything to go by, it would seem to be a course well worth pursuing.

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Author Index

A Aaronvitch, S., 98n Abercrombie, N., 157 Abrams, M., 144n Aldcroft, Derek, 98, 105, 108 Alford, B.W.E., 108 Allen, G., 98 Almond, Gabriel, 4, 135n, 136, 137, 139n, 141, 153, 161 Anderson, Perry, 29, 54, 63-66, 75, 86, 91, 94, 117, 1 18, 1 19, 120, 122, 124, 128, 133, 155-156, 160, 161, 162-163, 174, 190, 193 Aristotle, 177 Armstrong, J.A., 128 Arnold, Mathew. 134, 163 Arnstein, W . , 122n, 124, 159, 160, 198 Ashford, D., 15 Ashworth, C.E., 83n, 187n Aston, T.H.,8111 Axelord, R., 36

Baechler, Jean, 61, 62, 72n Bacon, R., 113n Bagehot, Walter, 140, 157, 163 Baker, K., 144 Barnett, C., 98, 101, 129 Barry, Brian, 28, 33, 34, 52, 141 Beer, Samuel, 1811, 106, 142, 143, 145, 146 Bendix, Reinhart, 180, 19111 Benn, S.I., 33, 35 Bentharn, Jeremy, 27, 124, 134, 155, 164 Blank, Stephen, 105, 106, 108 Blau, Peter, 184n Bloch, Marc, 76, 93 Bois, G., 93 Bousquet, J . , 196 Brenner, R., 76, 7811, 80n, 81-82, 92, 93, 94, 193 Britton, Samuel, 106, 109, l l l n

243

Brown, A.J., 106 Burke, Edmund, 16, 20 24, 2811, 134, 155 Burrell, S.A., 60 Butler, David, 153 Buxton, N., 108

C Cain, P.J., 120-121, 122n Cairncross, A.K., 109, 11 I n Carswell, J . , 123, 130 Caves, R.E., 109 Chamberlain, C., 154 Chase-Dunn, C., 99, 196 Cheal, D., 153 Christoph, John, 5, 21 Coates, D., 98n Cohen, J . , 60n Coleman, D.C., 102, 126 Coleridge, Samuel, 134 Collins, R., 41, 65 Conradt, D., 144 Cooper, J.P., 80n Cornford, F.M., 19 Crafts, N.F.R., 80, 104 Croot, P., 82n, 92 Crouzet, F., 90, 91 Crozier, Michel, 4, 22-24, 177

D Dahrendorff, Ralf, 37n Dalton, R., 144 Dandeker, C., 83n, 187n Davis, R., 8111, 82n, 90 de Gaulle, Charles, 23 Della Fave, R., 177n Dennis, J., 139, 155 de Vries, J . , 81n, 90, 91, 93 Douglas, Mary, 178, 205n Dowie, J.A., 108 Downs, Anthony, 32-33

244

AUTHOR INDEX

Durkheim, Emile, 29, 30, 181 Dyson, D., 178, 193

E Eatwell, J . , 99 Eccleshall, R., 20, 128, 160 Eckstein, Harry, 12n, 28, 46-48, 51, 136, 139-140, 142, 143, 166, 181, 186 Edelstein, M., 103n Elbaum, B., 98, I l l n , 112 Elias, Norbert, 180, 189 Elster, Jon, 3211, 34, 53, 115, 16511 Eltis, W., 113n Engels, F., 53, 151, 157, 160 Erasmus, J., 87, 89 Evely, R., 108n

F Fauvet, Jacques, 3 Femia, J . , 152 Fine, B., 98n, 112 Finer, Samuel, 193 Fischoff, E., 60, 62 Ford, F., 190n Foster, J . , 158 Fox, E.W., 81n, 85-86, 88, 178, 179, 194

G Gamble, A,, 117, 118 Garrard, J . , 199 Garst, D., 83n George, Charles, 61 George, Katherine, 61 Giddens, Anthony, 29, 62n Goldfrank, W.L., 196 Goldstone, Jack, 76, 88n Goldthorpe, J.H., 153 Goodin, R . , 19 Gourevitch, Peter, 76 Gramsci, Antonio, 124, 152, 156-157, 184n Gurr, T., 139

H Hall, John A., 8311, 178, 179n, 187n Hall, Peter, 98, l l l n , 112, 113n Hampson, N . , 191n Hannah, L., 108

Hardin, R., 36, 37n Harris, L., 98n, 112 Hart, V . , 142, 159-160 Hartz, Louis, 15 Hayward, Jack, 16, 19, 21 Heath, A , , 33, 36, 51n Hechter, Michael, 184-18511, 205 Hildebrandt, K., 144 Hintze, Otto, 85n, 179, 194-195 Hobbes, Thomas, 27 Hobsbawn, Eric, 98, 99-100, 11 In, 124, 157 Hoffmann, Stanley, 9-10 Holt, R., 204 Holton, R.J., 60n Homans, G.C., 184n Hopkins, A.G., 120-121, 122n Huntington, Samuel, 13

I Ingham, G . 11 In, 120-122, 127-128 Inglehart, R., 144-145

J Jessop, R.D., 138-139, 140, 154 Johnson, Nevi], 15, 42 Johnson, R., 17n, 51n, 157 Jouvenal, Robert de, 6-7, 8, 19, 23

K Kaldor. Nicholas, 9811, 99 Kautsky, John, 180 Kavanaugh, Dennis, 5 , 136-137, 138, 140-141, 14211, 143, 144 Kennedy, W.P., 103, 104 Keohane, N.O., 178 Keyder, C., 79n Kilpatrick, A., 98 Kindleberger, Charles, 91 Kirby, M.W., 97, 9811, 108 Kiser, E . , 8811, 190 Kumar, K., 11211, 124

L Landes, David, 101, 102, 11 1 Laver, Michael, 35 Lawson, T., 98

AUTHOR INDEX Lazonick, W., 98, l l l n , 112 Leites, Nathan, 4, 7-9, 12, 19, 23 Lenin, V.I., 157 Lijphart, Arend, 12n, 141n Lipset, S.M., 137, 15111 Little, I., 108n Locke, John, 15, 27 Luethy, Herbert, 60, 61

M Mackintosh, J.P., 102, 109 MacRae, Duncan, 4, 13 Maddock, R.T., 112 Manchester Guardian Weekly, 110n Mann, Michael, 83n, 88n, 139, 153, 154, 158. 178, 187n Margolis, Howard, 33, 34 Marriss, R., 108, 109 Marsh, A., 144 Marshall, Geoffrey, 41, 61, 62 Manvell, G . , 52 Marx, Karl, 29, 30, 51-52, 5311, 59, 6211, 65, 67, 72, 73, 81n, 134, 151, 156-157, 160, 188n, 205 McCloskey, Donald, 103, 104, 105n, 110 McKenzie, R., 137, 153 Mill, James, 27 Mill, John Stuart, 124, 163 Modelski, George, 83, 194-195, 196n Montesquieu, Charles, 178 Moore, Barrington, 54, 119, 141-142, 176-177, 183-184 Moore, D., 12211, 124, 159 Moorhouse, H.F., 158

N Nairn, Tom, 1711, 19, 106, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 124, 128, 133, 155-156, 160, 161, 162-163 Namier, L., 123, 130 Nettl, J.P., 102, 186 Newby, H., 120, 199 Nield, K., 157 Nordlinger, Eric, 4, 137, 167n North, Douglass C., 35, 38-41, 43, 45-46. 50, 52, 53, 54, 5511, 67-72, 75, 76, 80, 81, 84, 90n, 9211, 94, 175, 181, 184, 185, 193, 197 Norton, P., 143

245

0 O’Brien, Patrick, 76, 79n, 80n Offe, Claus, 186, 197n Oliver, P., 52 Olson, Mancur, 31, 35, 44-46, 48, 50-51, 52, 53, 114-116, 175, 188, 196-197 Ordeshook, Peter, 33

P Parker, D., 82n, 92 Parkin, F., 116, 152, 153-154, 186, 196-197 Parkin, M., 106n Parsons, Talcott, 28, 134 Pateman, Carole, 139 Peacock, A , , 98n Perkin, H., 101, 123, 124 Phelps Brown, E.H., 109 Phillips, G.A., 112 Philpin, C.H.E., 81 Pitts, Jesse, 177 Poggi, G . , 41, 5311, 62, 63n Polanyi, Karl, 188n Pollard, S . , 103n, 104, 10611, l l l n Porter, B., 129, 131 Porter, R., 123 Posner, M., 111 Poulantzas, N., 157, 160 Przeworski, Adam, 37n, 5311, 18411 Purdy, D., 109, l l n

R Rae, J., 109, 128, 129 Rapkin, D.P., 76 Ray, J.L., 76 Ricardo, David, 27, 123 Richardson, H.W., 105 Riker, William, 33 Roderick, G.W. 110 Roehl, R., 7911 Rogowski, Ronald, 31-32, 35, 37n, 46-50, 52n, 5.511, 7111, 1351, 136, 137n, 143-144, 146-151, 161, 165, 166, 183-184, 185, 188, 189-190, 198 Root, H., 191 Rosa, Richard, 137, 138, 140

246

AUTHOR INDEX

Rosencrance, R . , 99 Rothblatt, S., 164 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 134 Rubinstein, W., 122, 124, 125 Runciman, W.H., 153, 189n

S Sabia, D., 53 Sandberg, L.G., 110 Sartori, Giovanni, 15, 20, 26-27, 51 Schonfeld, William, 177 Schumpeter, Joseph, 176-177n Searing, D.D., 5 Seidman, S., 29, 51 Shonfield, Andrew, 16, 17, 18, 20, 127n Siegfried, Andre’, 11 Silver, A., 137, 153 Sked, Alan, 131n Skocpol, Theda, 90, 178, 191 Smith, Adam, 27, 45, 59, 134, 156, 164 Spencer, H., 178 Stafford, B., l l l n Stedman Jones, G . , 158 Stein, A , , 99, 19611 Stephens, M.D., 110 Stinchcombe, Arthur, 186, 189-190 Stokes, Donald, 153 Stone, J., 123, 125, 130 Stone, L., 123, 125, 130 Strange, Susan, 106 Sutherland, L., 123

T Tapper, T., 155 Taylor, G.V., 18911 Temin, P., 104, l l l n Thomas, R., 4511, 69n, 70n, 76, 9011, 9211

Thompson, E.P., 5111, 156-157, 160, 161 Thompson, F., 131n Tocqueville, Alexis de, 23, 91n, 186, 190, 191 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 60, 61, 86-88, 89 Trotsky, Leon, 186 Turner, J., 204 Tylecote, A , , 196n

V Verba, Sidney, 15, 136, 137, 13911, 141, 153, 161

w Wallerstein, Irnmanuel, 54, 72-80, 82-84, 85, 89, 92, 93, 94, 99, 178, 194, 195 Ward, D., 129 Warwick, Paul, 1011, 14n Weber, Max, 29, 40-41, 43, 59-65, 67, 86, 87, 89, 9211, 94, 134, 174, 17811, 188n Weiner, Martin, 43-45, 100-101, 128, 174 Westergaard, J.H., 153 Wildavsky, Aaron, 178, 20511 Wilkinson, R . , 204 Williams, Philip, 9, 11 Wood, A., 125 Wootton, G.,106

Y Young, Arthur, 123

Z Zolberg, Aristide, 76

Subject Index economic development, 39-40, 59, 65-66, 68, 70, 72, 80, 82-84, 90-95, 105, 107-108, 117-118, 119-122, 123, 156, 166, 167, 192-195, 204 education, 100-101, 104, 109-111, 124, 126, 127, 128-129, 132-133, 154, 155, 164, 166, 204 Empire, 99, 112, 117-118, 119, 129, 131, 156-158, 164-165, 167, 169, 197-199 entrepreneurial values, 42-44, 96-97, 100-102, 105, 108-111, 112, 113, 114-116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123-128, 132, 150, 197-198 Labour Party, 5 , 112, 133, 149, 153, 154, 167 Liberal Party, 13011, 148, 149 Marxist analysis of, 19, 21, 93, 97, 107, 117-120, 133, 151-165, 167-169, 200 monarchy, 40, 66, 68, 77, 84, 92-93, 117, 125, 130, 132, 138, 140, 192, 194,202 oceanic orientation, 66, 75, 78-79, 83-84, 94, 123, 194 Parliament, 17, 40, 47, 6611, 68, 94, 125, 138, 193, 194, 199 philosophic tradition, 24, 26-30, 31, 125 political culture, 4-5, 15-22, 24, 25, 3711, 43, 45, 47, 54-55, 106, 136-146, 147, 152-154, 156, 158-161, 162, 165, 167-168, 174, 197, 199, 201-203 political supportilegitimacy, 47, 50, 134-169 ruling-class hegemony, 19-20, 27, 54, 117-121, 124, 153-162, 166-167, 199, 200, 201, 202 social structure, 17, 19, 21, 47, 95, 117-122, 123, 126, 128, 130-132, 136, 139, 140, 141, 147-151, 154, 161-162, 163, 204

A Absolutism, 63-65, 85, 94, 117, 130, 140, 193, 194, 202 Aristocracy, 179-180, 183, 185, 188-190, 201. See also Britain, aristocracy; France, aristocracy. Associationism, 34, 164 Austria, 86 Authority, 176-178, 182, 183, 185-187, 191, 192, 198-199, 200-202, 205 authority patterns, 47, 136, 139, 186

B Balance of payments, 106, 107, 11In Bank of England, 107, 127 Board of Trade, 122 Britain, 6, 11, 16, 17, 38, 47, 82, 176, 17811, 187, 190, 192, 195, 206 aristocracy, 66, 68, 70, 75, 113, 114, 117, 120-122, 130, 148-151, 155-159, 162-165, 174, 193, 197-199, 200, 201 aristocratic values, 18-20, 43, 101, 117-1 18, 120, 123-125, 128-129, 131, 156-157, 162-165, 169, 192-194, 197-200, 20 1-203 bourgeoisieimiddle class, 19, 68, 75, 94, 123-126, 130-131, 133, 148-150, 157-159, 162-163, 165, 166, 174, 189, 192, 193-194, 196-198, 199, 201, 202 bourgeois values, 10, 101-102, 113, 115-116, 123-126, 131, 133, 140, 148, 155-156, 160, 162-166, 196-203 civil service, 16, 17, 18-20, 21, 40, 47, 94, 101, 102, 109-110, 120, 125, 132-133 Conservative party, 5 , 20, 133, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 167 economic decline, 42-45, 96-133, 143, 156, 167-168, 195-199 247

248

SUBJECT INDEX

the state, 15-16, 24, 75-79, 93-94, 118, 157, 16511, 192, 200, 202 working class, 19-20, 21-22, 117, 119, 126, 128, 138, 148-149, 155, 157-161, 164-165, 196, 197, 199n working class values, 19, 139, 140-141, 151-155, 156-162, 166-169, 186, 20 1

C Calvinism. See Capitalism; religion and Cambridge School, 133 Capital export of, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104, 107, l l l n , 113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 129, 132 domestic investment, 96, 98, 103-104, 105, 106, 111, 119 Capitalism. See also Britain, economic development; France, economic development population growth and, 41, 67, 69, 72, 73-76, 80, 82, 93, 94 property rights and, 39, 41, 45, 61, 63-65, 67-72, 80-82, 85, 92, 93, 94, 178, 182, 194 religion and, 41-42, 59-63, 65, 67, 71, 86-87, 89, 91, 174, 18711 rise of, 38-42, 59-95, 187-188, 191-194 role of feudalism in, 63-66, 72, 73, 84, 86, 92, 93 role of the state in, 38-39, 64-65, 67-71, 75-79, 82-83, 85-89, 181-182, 194 values of, 42, 51-52, 61-62, 64-66, 71-72, 92n, 94, 180, 188 Chamberlain, Joseph, 121, 12911 Charles VII, 69-70 Charity, 199 Chartists, 155 China, 204 Church of England, 125, 132, 138 Churchill, Randolph, 167n City of London, 97, 112, 114-11511, 120-121, 122n, 126, 127, 130, 157, 19911. See also Capital Classical political economy, 27, 29, 38, 51-52, 54, 67, 124, 128, 134, 156, 160, 164, 182, 203 Clientelism, 18511

Climate, 73 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 90 Contradictory consciousness, 19, 152, 156, 162, 186 Corn Laws, 119, 122, 129. See also Tariffs Counter-Enlightenment, 28-29, 134 Counter-Reformation, 60, 88, 90, 91, 94, 195 Credentialism, 116, 128, 132, 196-198 Culturalism, 54, 132.-133, 143, 147, 158, 162, 168, 174, 203-206 assumptions of, 3, 31, 34, 43-44, 46-47, 48, 85, 136, 141, 143, 145-146, 169, 203-204 dilemma of, 5-6, 24, 25, 142, 174 relationship to Marxism, 25, 29, 53-54, 62-63, 142, 146, 161, 166n, 168-169, 175 relationship to rational-choice theory, 26, 30-32, 35, 42, 45, 48, 50-52, 55, 59, 134-135, 146, 174, 184, 188n relationship to structuralism, 6, 22, 24, 141-143, 174, 175, 18811, 205 Czechoslovakia, 12n

D Deference. See Britain, political culture Directiveness. See Britain, political culture Disraeli, Benjamin, 167n

E Eastern Europe, 74, 76 Elizabeth I, 66n Empiricism. See Political cultures, rationalist vs. empiricist English Revolution, 117, 118, 119, 155 Enlightenment, 15, 19, 20, 28-29, 30, 55, 124, 134, 155 Estates-General, 69, 70, 193 European Economic Community (E.E.C.), 133

F Fabian socialism, 156 Feudalism. See Capitalism, role of feudalism in; Societal types, feudal Flanders, 74, 87, 92

SUBJECT INDEX France, 7, 1411, 38, 5 5 , 99, 107, 109, 112, 131, 155, 187, 195, 204n aristocracy, 69-71, 77-78, 83, 85, 91, 93-94, 149, 188-193, 198 bourgeoisieimiddle class, 91, 92, 149, 190, 192 economic development, 39-40, 43, 45, 60, 65, 68-71, 74-84, 90-95, 188-191 Fourth Republic, 3-4, 9, 11-13, 23 French Revolution, 6, 15, 16, 19, 28, 117, 19, 149, 155, 164, 191 ideological divisions, 9-10, 13-14, 21 monarchy, 39-40, 69-71, 77, 84, 85, 189-190, 192-193, 202 parliamentary behavior, 3-4, 6-9, 11-13, 19, 23-24, 201 political culture, 3-4, 5 , 6, 13, 15, 21, 22-24, 25, 31, 54-55, 177, 199, 201-202 political parties, 6, 10, 11 social structure, 9-10, 13, 21, 95, 188-190, 204 the state, 13-14, 21, 22-23, 24, 40, 69, 83-84, 86, 93, 109, 191 Third Republic, 6, 9, 10, 13, 23 Free Trade, 120, 125, 127, 129-13011, 133, 157

G George 111, 130 Germany, 43, 44-45, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 107, 109, 110, 112, 118, 119, 121, 126, 131, 141, 143-144, 151n Grey, Lord, 125 Gold standard, 120, 121-122, 127

H Henry VIII, 40, 66n Holland. See Netherlands House of Lords. See Britain, Parliament Huguenots, 60, 92 Human motivations, 176-178, 180-187, 189, 191-192, 195, 197, 200, 203-206. See also Utility maximization Hungary, 60, 61, 63

249

I Ideologism. See Political Cultures, pragmatic vs. ideological India, 129 Industrial revolution, 101, 104, 122, 124, 134, 155. See also Britain, economic development Industry. See also Britain, economic development, economic decline production, 97-99, 103-104, 105, 108, llln productivity, 97, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 127 management, 102, 108-1 11 Inevitability, sense of, 185-187, 191, 199 Inflation, 106, 120 Interest groups, 44-45, 47, 106, 113-114, 136, 168 Italy, 60, 64, 74, 77, 86, 87, 89, 90, 141, 178, 188

J Jacobins, 155 Japan, 43, 45, 98, 112, 121, 18511, 204 Judaism. See Capitalism, religion and

L Labour aristocracy, 157-158, 166 Legitimacy. See Political support Limited liability, 101, 157 Lutheranism. See Capitalism, religion and

M Marxism, 19, 21, 2 5 , 72, 78, 93, 97, 107, 117, 133, 148n, 151-165, 167, 168-169, 200. See also Britain, Marxist analysis of relationship to culturalism, 25, 29, 53-54, 62-63, 142, 161, 166n, 168-169, 173-174, 175, 203 relationship to rational choice theory, 46, 51-53, 5 5 , 115, 134, 175, 205 mercantilism, 75, 83, 88, 120, 122, 125, 190 Mexico, 141 Middle Ages, 64, 67, 73, 74, 76, 81-82, 84, 93, 179, 180, 187

250

SUBJECT INDEX

Military technology, 64, 67, 75, 179 Monetarism, 106

N Navigation Acts, 79 Navalism. See Britain, oceanic orientation Netherlands, 12, 60-61, 65, 66, 74-75, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 130, 131, 192, 194, 195 Normans, 40, 93, 192, 194 Norway, 12

0 Old Corruption. See Patronage Order. See Social ordericontrol Overseas investment. See Capital, export of

P Patronage, 120, 122, 124, 125 Patron-client relations, 204-205 Pluralistic Stagnation, 106, 114 Political cultures. See also Britain, political culture; France, political culture individualistic vs. collectivist, 29-31, 202 pragmatic vs. ideological, 3-5, 14-15, 20, 25, 26-27, 30, 201-202 rationalist vs. empiricist, 15, 26-31, 20 1-202 Political stability, 3, 9, 17, 23, 47, 5 S , 136, 159, 161, 174, 182 Eckstein’s theory of, 47, 136, 139, 142, 166, 181, 186 Political support, 47, 55, 134-169, 182, 184, 185, 186n, 197n Rogowski’s theory of, 48-50, 136, 146-151, 161, 165-166, 174, 183- 185 Portugal, 74 Poor Law Amendment Act, 12511 Post-materialism, 144-145 Pound sterling, 107, 111, 112, 119, 127 Pragmatic acceptance, 158-160, 166 Pragmatism. See Political cultures, pragmatic vs. ideological Price revolution, 74 Prisoner’s Dilemma. See Rational-choice theory, Prisoner’s Dilemma Game

Protestant ethic. See Capitalism, religion and Puritanism. See Capitalism, religion and

R Rational-choice theory, 24, 25, 26, 29-37, 67, 85, 95, 114, 133, 13511, 142, 161, 165, 173-175, 176, 183, 184, 191, 200-201 Assurance Game, 34, 53 free-rider problem, 35-37, 38-39, 44, 45-46, 49n, 52, 70, 114, 132, 16511, 182-183, 184, 185, 18611, 187, 191, 198, 200 Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, 34, 35-36 relationship to culturalism, 26, 30-32, 35, 42, 45, 48, 50-52, 55, 59, 134-135, 188n, 205-206 relationship to Marxism, 46, 51-53, 55, 115, 134, 175, 205 role of social norms in, 32-37, 46, 48, 50, 52-53, 70-71, 115-117, 132-133, 146, 184, 203 voting paradox, 32-33 Rationalism. See Political cultures, rationalist vs. empiricist; Rational-choice theory Reciprocity, Norm of, 175-176, 182, 183, 184, 185-187, 191, 192, 193, 199, 203 Reform movement, 119-122, 123-125, 126, 128, 198-199 electoral reform, 119, 124, 158-159, 167 Reformation, 60, 63, 65, 86, 89, 94. See also Capitalism, religion and Religion. See Capitalism, religion and Renaissance, 42, 60, 63, 86, 87, 89, 178, 188 Richelieu, Cardinal, 192 Roman Law, 64, 66, 155

S Scotland, 60, 61, 63, 86 Social coordination, 181-183, 185, 201, 203 Social distinction, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 187-190, 195, 197, 199n, 205 Socialization, 126, 129, 132-133, 136, 143-144, 146, 166, 184, 198, 203. See also Culturalism, assumptions of

SUBJECT INDEX Social mobility, 45, 115-117, 147-148, 151, 180, 183-184, 191, 196, 205 Social orderkontrol, 19-20, 128, 131, 132, 135, 155, 164-165, 169, 176, 183, 184-18511, 186-187, 192, 197-201 Societal types, 146-148, 183-184, 186, 189, 194-195, 204 commercial vs. administrative, 85-86, 95, 130-132, 204 -205 feudal, 179-180, 183, 187, 191, 193, 195 market vs. hierarchical, 175-176, 182-183, 187, 188, 205 Spain, 60, 65, 74, 77, 86, 87, 90, 94 Stable expectations, 181-183, 205 Star Chamber, 117 State-building, 64-65, 67, 68, 73, 75-76, 78, 82-84, 86, 94, 181, 185, 188, 192-193, 202 Structuralism, 6, 22, 24, 25, 35, 51, 141-143, 174, 175, 203, 205-206. See also Marxism Switzerland, 60

T Tariffs, 99, 121, 125, 12911. See also Corn Laws

Thatcher, Margaret, 133 Trade unions, 96, 106, 107, 109, 113, 133, 153, 154, 156, 167 Treasury (British), 107, 108, 122, 127

U United Provinces. See Netherlands United States, 97, 99, 100, 104, 109, 110, 118, 124, 126, 131, 140, 142, 152, 197 Utilitarianism, 27, 54, 123, 124, 128, 134, 155, 164, 203 Utility maximization, principle of, 32, 38, 42, 43, 46, 52, 62, 67, 174, 197

V Venice, 117, 122, 130, 131

W Welfare state, 106 Wilson, Harold, 107 Wool trade, 66, 68, 92, 94

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