Class Formation, Civil Society and the State: A Comparative Analysis

Class Formation, Civil Society and the State A Comparative Analysis of Russia, France, the US and England

Michael Burrage

Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

Also by Michael Burrage REVOLUTION AND THE MAKING OF THE CONTEMPORARY LEGAL PROFESSION IN FRANCE, THE UNITED STATES AND ENGLAND PROFESSIONS IN THEORY AND HISTORY Rethinking the Study of the Professions (edited with Rolf Torstendahl) THE FORMATION OF PROFESSIONS Knowledge, State and Strategy (edited with Rolf Torstendahl)

Class Formation, Civil Society and the State A Comparative Analysis of Russia, France, the US and England Michael Burrage

© Michael Burrage 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–1–4039–4594–5 hardback ISBN 10: 1–4039–4594–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 17

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Pamela

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Contents

Acknowledgements Chapter 1

ix

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery

1

Why no one answered Orwell England in cross-national surveys Questions and clues arising

1 6 14

Chapter 2

19

Lessons from Comparative Theories

Djilas’s theory of a ‘new class’ Post-Marxist theories in Britain Comparison via correlation coefficients in the United States A bold step backwards

19 21 26 30

Chapter 3 Them?

35

What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves

Class defined The two agents of class formation How will we identify classes?

35 36 45

Chapter 4

49

Class Formation in Two Russias

The official classes of Imperial Russia And the unofficial ones formed in civil society Continuities in the management of stratification in Soviet Russia Classes in the two Russias compared

49 63 71 81

Chapter 5 France

87

Civil Society as Adversary and Collaborator in

A proletariat that preceded industrialization The social capital of the French working class Adaptation of their revolutionary script in the twentieth century Intellectuals appear in lieu of self-governing professionals The emergence of cadres and of a lesser bourgeoisie Has the Fifth Republic facilitated the formation of a ruling class? A short history of a long relationship Tested by a socialist U-turn and e-commerce The domain of pantoufleurs And their ‘control practices’ Are they a mandarinate or a class? vii

87 93 99 105 111 115 119 125 128 132 137

viii Contents

Chapter 6

Civil Society Acts Alone in the United States

141

Civil society restrains the state Deprofessionalization disbands the middle class Are American workers exceptional, or just different? Surges of working class solidarity Climax and decline Searching for class distinctions in everyday life Civic upper classes and aristocracies Obstacles to the formation of a ruling class Some reported sightings

141 150 156 164 172 179 187 191 201

Chapter 7

Interim Conclusions from Three Societies

207

Chapter 8

Re-examining the English Mystery

213

The aristocracy as prototype The elites who succeeded them ‘Issue areas’ as a measure of elite integration The middle class organizes in corporate form Professionals v. entrepreneurs as class builders The working class inherits and re-invests its social capital When, why and how these two classes parted company Manual workers establish self-regulation in their workplaces Class solidarities compared A powerful agency of class formation What’s in a name? Laissez faire versus laissez gouverner

213 217 227 231 240 244 251 254 262 266 269

Chapter 9

275

Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity of the Argument

Why didn’t an intelligentsia emerge in England? Why were trade unions not interested in class warfare? Why didn’t public ownership reduce class consciousness? How could class consciousness be combined with high rates of mobility? Why did classes in England form a unique system?

275 282 286 291

Chapter 10

A Brief Reply to Orwell

304

Chapter 11

The Class System Comes to an End

310

294

The themes and finality of Thatcher’s reforms The hidden injuries of classlessness A final question about Orwell’s ‘wild ride into the darkness’

310 322 338

Notes

342

Bibliography

414

Index

446 viii

Acknowledgements This book began as a talk to a seminar during my stay at the Arbeitstelle für Vergliechende Gesellschaftsgeshicte, the Centre for the Comparative Study of Social History, at the Free University in Berlin. I am grateful to Jürgen Kocka, its director, both for inviting me and persuading me to collect some initial thoughts on this theme, and also to the continuous stream of helpful suggestions and provocative questions from Hannes Siegrist while doing so. A number of other academic sojourns abroad also helped by obliging me to look at English society afresh, and as an outsider, in particular one at Hosei University, Tokyo, where with the patient guidance of Hiro Muto, along with his wife Satomi, and my students I also learned a little of Japanese society, and another at Kyoto University. Apart from allowing me to enjoy the best journey to work in the world – through the empty grounds of the Imperial Palace – I there benefited from the stimulating interrogations of Kaeshi Saeki and his graduate students. I enjoyed Dmitri’s Verbitsky’s hospitality in Moscow and benefited from his advice on numerous occasions, and other Moscow advocates, especially Natasha Lobova, Gennady Sharov and Michael Rosenberg were patient interpreters of the Russian language and Russian ways, as was my former tutor and colleague Ernest Gellner. I also owe much to three Anglophile comparativists at the University of California, Berkeley, Martin Trow, Nelson Polsby and Sheldon Rothblatt for references, insights and amusing anecdotes. Kevin Lewis frequently gave me useful advice, as did my son Nicholas, from the point of view of a post-class generation, and my wife Pamela who is, of necessity, continuously engaged in cross-cultural analysis. Michael Burrage

ix

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1 An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery

Why no one answered Orwell In an essay written in 1941, George Orwell observed that England was ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun.’1 Although his remark has been cited approvingly on numerous occasions, no one has ever attempted to say whether the immense amount of research and debate on class conducted over subsequent decades showed that he was correct when he made it, and offered an explanation of why it should have been so, or contradicted him by naming other societies that were more ‘class-ridden’. Professional social scientists may have looked on the remark as the casual aside of an amateur, whose thoughts on class were never particularly wellorganized or well-documented, which therefore did not warrant a reply. I suspect, however, that there was a simpler and more telling reason why they never responded: they couldn’t. Although the amount of research and discussion of class accumulated rapidly, it could hardly extend to every country ‘under the sun’. Much of it, in fact, dealt with just one class, over a specific period, within a specific community, in one country. It was, therefore, unable to tell us whether England was more class-ridden than anywhere else. Some research was, to be sure, cross-national, and compared voting behaviour, or the distributions of wealth and income, or differences in the rates of social mobility in Britain and other societies, but such comparative data could not provide a summary verdict about how ‘class-ridden’ England or other societies might be, since they provided only ambiguous and limited clues about the peculiarities of classes in the societies they studied, and said little or nothing about their collective institutions and consciousness. Comparative studies that touched on such matters were extremely rare, and still are. When, in 1998, Cannadine completed his exhaustive, copiously-documented, study of the ways the British as a whole have perceived and interpreted their own class differences through three centuries, he seemed to have some sympathy with Orwell’s verdict, but could not cite a single piece of evidence to support it. He could only refer, 1

2 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

rather lamely, to unnamed foreigners, who had, he assured us, ‘regularly and repeatedly observed that the British are more obsessed with class than any other nation in the world.’2 Marx encouraged the practice of trying to understand class by studying just one society. In the belief that he had discovered the primary determinant of class formation in the first capitalist society, England, he thought it would serve as a model to understand the process in all the capitalist societies that followed. De te fabula narratur as he famously wrote in the preface to the German edition of Capital – it is of you I write –, even though my evidence is all drawn from England. Many later analysts seem to have adopted the same strategy, though practical considerations may perhaps have also pushed them in this direction. Comparative analysis is immensely time-consuming and academic careers demand specialization in a country, or a period, and often enough, in just one class. Whatever the reason, the habit of trying to understand class dynamics with samples of just one society continued. A sociological effort at ‘renewal’ of class analysis in Britain in 2000, for instance, brought together some of the best and brightest in the field, who proposed a variety of remedies, but none favoured the shock therapy of cross-societal comparison, with its ability to crush at a stroke cherished, long-standing beliefs.3 ‘Renewal’ was to be conducted in the traditional manner, with evidence from Britain alone. In the same year, one commentator conducted a thorough review of research on class in Britain, and concluded as if he had simultaneously been discussing all capitalist societies, that ‘there are clearly no class actors in contemporary capitalism.’4 How, on the basis of the evidence he examined, would he know? Samples of one limit what one may say about any phenomenon. A zoologist who had observed only one elephant, would have a limited knowledge of elephants. The next one he encountered might be pink. And we might reasonably doubt the expertise of a psychiatrist who had only ever examined one patient, no matter how intensively, or of a political scientist who had studied the political institutions of just one country, even if he had devoted a lifetime to the task. One may have similar doubts about students of class who have only studied one society. McKibbin’s investigation of the way class permeated almost every aspect of the lives of the English people over the years 1918 to 1951, illustrates the point rather well, precisely because it was so comprehensive, and so superbly conducted.5 He is a Canaletto of English classes, and provided an enormous amount of ammunition that seemed entirely consistent with Orwell’s observation. In the end, however, he could not be said either to support or refute it, since he had no evidence from anywhere else. And whilst he could record numerous changes during his chosen period, the dynamics of England’s class subcultures remained somewhat mysterious. It was not clear why English people remained attached and enclosed in them over his chosen period, or

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 3

when and why, for that matter, they might dissolve and disappear, as many observers claimed they were doing when his book appeared in 1998. The three main classes, into which he thought the English were divided over those decades, had not come from anywhere, and were not apparently going anywhere. They were simply there. March, Sproull and Tamuz wrote a clever piece called ‘Learning from Samples of One or Fewer’, but they were endeavouring to show that all was not lost, that organizations might make the most of limited and infrequent data, not recommending a preferred research strategy.6 Folk wisdom, which Rudyard Kipling neatly paraphrased, offers a rather better methodological rule: ‘little he knows England, who only England knows’. At times, this may seem a rather tough, and even unreasonable, requirement. After reading McKibbin, one would hardly wish to conclude ‘little he knows England’, but then it is not at all certain that he ‘only England knows’. On the contrary, hints are scattered throughout his work that his acute observation of English preferences and distinctions has been sharpened by comparisons with other countries, which surface in frequent remarks like ‘Visitors to England were always astonished …’ or in references to ‘a strange habit which strikes nearly all visitors to England’, and ‘taboos which constantly surprised and bemused visitors to England.’ He was himself, as it happens, one of the bemused visitors. He is Australian. His comparisons with Australia and everywhere else were, however, not for publication, no doubt because he felt that they did not have quite the same scholarly status as the evidence about England which he had so painstakingly collected. It likewise seems difficult to imagine that those engaged in the ‘renewal of class’ project mentioned above were not making comparisons as they proceeded. Some of them did in fact occasionally glance over their shoulders at other societies, and since they were not all English, it is a fair bet that they made frequent cross-cultural comparisons during their coffee-breaks. Implicit, occasional, coffee-break comparisons do not, however, quite satisfy the folk rule, which requires explicit comparative evidence which a reader can evaluate. At first sight, it might seem that an easy way round this rule is open to any diligent student, simply by reading studies of class formation in England alongside similar studies from another society, noting the differences, and then drawing conclusions about how and why they differ. In so doing, one might benefit from the detail that intensive single-country studies provide, and at the same time obtain the advantages of comparison. Such do-it-yourself comparisons are, however, by no means easy. To begin with, it is difficult to find studies that can be read side-by-side and readily compared with one another. If, for example, one looks for a historical ethnography of France comparable to that of McKibbin, one finds that the many celebrated class theorists from that country have provided rather little comparable evidence about the way in which classes have actually

4 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

shaped the life and leisure, and everyday behaviour and relationships of French people over time. One turns in hope to Zeldin’s dazzling multivolume montage, which is by far the most comprehensive analysis of the normal everyday behaviour of the French of all classes, from the midnineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and therefore includes the period covered by McKibbin. His titles give fair warning, however, that class has not emerged as one of his major organizing themes. They refer to personal qualities, like ambition, love, taste and anxiety, rather than to class. His introduction is also sceptical as to ‘whether the animosities between social classes were as total as they sometimes appeared.’7 Nonetheless, since he is a scrupulous, perceptive, and seemingly indefatigable researcher, we might reasonably expect him to show how class had shaped or intersected personal virtues and vices of the French, if such had been the case. When he turned, however, to examine, one by one, the classes which are commonly supposed to have defined and divided French society, almost all of them fragmented in the light of his copious evidence. Thus, having minutely documented the diversity within and between many bourgeois occupations, he decided that the evidence ‘does not support the view of this class as unified, coherent or class conscious. The internal conflicts and contradictory interests within it appear as a major characteristic of it.’ Having similarly reviewed the evidence about the lives of peasants, he asked whether their declining economic condition and social status over his chosen period had produced ‘a sense of class unity or class consciousness’ among them. ‘The answer’, he declared, ‘seems to be definitely that it did not.’ Having gone on to document the wide differences in organization and income of French workers, he concluded that ‘it is impossible to talk about the proletariat as a homogeneous class, because it was changing all the time and because the variations within it were very considerable.’ Indeed, he thought that the ‘internal divisions among the working class were even more profound than those among their employers.’8 In the end, he found only two enduring class or near-class formations in France over his entire chosen period: civil servants and intellectuals. Despite their hierarchical stratification, Zeldin thought civil servants ‘almost formed a hereditary class, with considerable cohesion of outlook and values.’9 The other enduring class formation, that of intellectuals, had been anticipated at the very beginning of his study, when he declared that he hoped to ‘assess the place that intelligence, or reason, or ideas have in French life, (and) to explain how intellectuals came to be held in such exceptionally high esteem.’ At the end, of his first volume, they remain his heroes because of the ‘crucial role they played both in subduing disunity and in attacking traditionalism’. Perhaps, he reflected at one point, ‘one ought to talk not of the domination of France by the bourgeoisie, nor even by money, but of the unacknowledged rule of the intellectuals.’10 The chance of making a comparison with these two classes in England seem

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 5

slim. McKibbin seldom referred to civil servants, and then not as a class. Intellectuals as a collectivity or class are never mentioned. If we next turn to the United States, there appear to be possibilities of comparing Fussell’s account of classes there, published in 1983 with Cooper’s account of class in England, published two years earlier, which had insisted that class was ‘alive and well and living in people’s minds’, and ‘pervaded everything in England, gardens, food, drink, health, the arts, sports, sex, religion and death, everything.’11 The possibility of comparing them seems to have occurred to DeMott, but he went on to observe differences that made it difficult to do so.12 Cooper’s account of class in England is, he pointed out, from within, while Fussell’s is that of an angry outsider who has nothing but contempt for class-oriented attitudes and behaviour of many of his fellow Americans. Cooper therefore begins her book with ‘an extended account of her own social location within the middle class’, and as she proceeds it is clear that she sees herself as ‘entangled at each moment in social coils from which extrication is finally perceived as neither conceivable nor desirable.’ Fussell, by contrast, only wants to identify the ‘status obsessions … self-deceptions and vanities’ of other Americans. For Cooper, ‘class-based responses seem as natural … as breathing and eating: one is, she assumes, one’s class’, whereas Fussell ‘strongly implies that he himself is classless, that class is an option not a fate, (an option taken up by fools, a baleful influence from which escape is blessedly possible) and that intelligent people can break free from the constraints and anxieties of the whole class racket.’ If pursued, therefore, this particular comparison would, in the end, turn out to be a rather lop-sided one between a humorous account of the behaviour, manners and speech of each of England’s classes, and of their enduring, institutionalized relationships with a stern critique of the status-stratified consumption patterns of Americans, drawing heavily on market research. Authors of studies of class in one country feel, as all these studies show, under no obligation to proceed with the same priorities and organizing concepts, or to gather the same types of evidence as authors in another, and opportunities for do-it-yourself comparisons are therefore rare. Comparison is evidently a separate intellectual exercise. It requires an analytical or theoretical framework of some sort that will transcend, but not distort or obliterate the peculiarities of classes in the countries being compared, and will also allow us to organize and interrogate the available historical and sociological evidence about each of them, so that we may identify, and try to explain, their similarities and differences. As cross-national evidence on various kinds of class-related topics began to appear in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, some efforts were made to construct comparative theories in this manner. It follows that if we hope to make a coherent and informed reply to Orwell, we have two preliminary tasks. The first is to consider the cross-national data mentioned above, ambiguous

6 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

and incomplete as it may be, to see if it provides any clues about the peculiarities of English classes. None of it refers to Orwell’s claim, but it may nonetheless be of interest to see how well his claim stands up against this evidence. The second is to see whether the theoretical efforts over the third quarter of the twentieth century provide a strategy or concepts or an analytical framework that might help us to conduct comparisons making use of the considerable volume of subsequent historical and sociological evidence about classes in individual societies.

England in cross-national surveys There are five main kinds of cross-national evidence, though one must first note that in some of it England appears alongside Wales, in some as part of Great Britain, and in some as part of the United Kingdom. This is a difficulty which bedevils any attempt to study English society; there seems no simple way round it, short of ditching and re-analysing all the British or U.K. data, which is a task I cannot undertake. Currently, just short of 84% of the population of the United Kingdom resides in England, while the evidence I use sometimes includes the nearly 9% who live in Scotland, the 5% in Wales, and the 3% in Northern Ireland, proportions which have changed over time, though not massively.13 Given that these non-English populations have been subject to the same national government as the English over a long period, that they share many of the same institutions, and that there have been extensive ties and extensive mobility between these countries over many generations, one may reasonably assume their classes also have many common characteristics. However, observable differences in the religious, educational and political behaviour of these other British nations also suggest that it would be unwise to assume that their classes and class relationships have been, or are, identical, and I do not do so. I therefore use evidence from Great Britain and the United Kingdom to analyse England, only because it is unavoidable, and in the belief that it will not lead to fatal errors or distortions. Of the five kinds of cross-national evidence available, voting behaviour deserves first consideration since it may provide a reasonably direct and unambiguous indicator of class loyalty and solidarity. Alford was the first to devise a cross-national measure of voting behaviour, and used it to compare the British electorate with three other English-speaking democracies, Australia, Canada and the United States over the years 1936–1962.14 It showed, without much doubt, that British voters over this period were consistently more inclined than voters in the other three to vote on class lines. His findings were corroborated by a number of later studies. In an analysis based on four American election-year surveys between 1966 and 1972, and four British surveys between 1963 and 1970, Vanneman found ‘striking differences’ in the extent to which the manual/non-manual distinction cor-

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 7

responded with voting differences. It was ‘four times more important for party affiliation in Britain than in the United States.’ Moreover, subjective class self-placement ‘was the most important determinant of party affiliation in Britain’, whereas in the United States, Vanneman added, ‘it is difficult to show that the same class-identification variable has any effect at all.’ Britons, he concluded, ‘affiliate with political parties and vote in a far more “class conscious” manner than Americans.’15 In their three-country comparison, Weakliem and Heath went back to 1936 and found ‘class voting is strongest in Britain, somewhat weaker in France, and considerably weaker in the United States.’16 However, before awarding Orwell one point, we must add that when comparisons were later extended to other continental European societies, Scandinavian electorates were found to be as class polarized as the British, and perhaps more so.17 Moreover, Weakliem and Heath also showed that while class polarized voting in Britain had increased over the years until 1936 to 1951, it thereafter declined, most dramatically in 1979, the year of Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory, when the chances of a non-manual worker voting Conservative, and a manual worker voting Labour, the basis of Alford’s original measure, dropped sharply.18 Voting is, of course, a rather limited item of behavioural evidence to judge how ‘class-ridden’ a society may have been, in the strict sense perhaps not behavioural at all, since it measures only reported voting, or voting intentions, but there are in any event no other simple cross-national behavioural measures. Responses to pollsters’ questions about class are a second source of comparative evidence. These cannot take us very far back in time, and they encounter their own distinctive methodological hazards. A survey by Gallup in 1979 illustrated one of them. It asked respondents in 13 countries: ‘If people in society can be divided into the five classes shown on this card, which class would you say you fall under?’ On the face of things, the responses seemed to show that the British were indeed distinctive, since they were between five and ten times more likely than all the other nationalities to choose the lowest class offered, which in their case was ‘working class’, to which 43% assigned themselves. However, for some unexplained reason, the other countries were offered ‘low class’ or its equivalent, rather than ‘working class’, a flaw in the questionnaire design, and understandably perhaps, only 5% or less of respondents in the other 12 countries said they belonged to it. So we will never know whether the distinctiveness of the British at that time was real, or simply due to a momentary slip by Gallup’s staff.19 Non-random surveys of foreign opinion have occasionally offered some support for the view that foreigners have seen the British as especially class conscious, but the methodologies of such studies do not enable one to draw any confident conclusions from them.20 Cross-societal attitude surveys without obvious methodological flaws, are rare, recent, and refer to fewer countries, usually only to the Britain and the United States. They offer occasional, but rather uncertain, support for the

8 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

claim that the British have been peculiarly conscious of class. In his comparison of the American National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey and the British Social Attitudes Survey of 1986, for example, Davis reported that though British and American respondents did not differ much in their overall perceptions of the degree of inequality in their societies, the British were much more likely to classify themselves as working class, despite the fact that the distribution of occupations in the two countries was about the same.21 The British were also more likely to think that ‘what you achieve in life depends on your family background’, from which one might infer, I suppose, that they were more inclined than Americans to think that their life chances were class-determined. They also favoured welfare and redistributive government policies to reduce inequalities to a much greater extent than Americans, and this might also, perhaps, be seen as a corollary of their view that inequalities are the result of individuals’ class origins rather than their own merits and effort. Seven years later, in 1993, Evans was able to compare national samples in Britain and the United States alongside those from five other countries. In this wider comparative context, however, it was the United States, not Britain, which emerged as exceptional. For instance, the association between objective class position as determined by occupation and subjective self-identification was not very close in any of the seven countries, but in Britain it was less close than in Austria, West Germany and the Netherlands, suggesting that respondents in those three countries had, at this time, a clearer perception of class than the British, or at any rate a perception that more closely corresponded to the occupational categories that sociologists use to distinguish classes. The association was least close in the United States, prompting Evans to suggest that ‘Class divisions appear to be rather more blurred to Americans than to other nationalities.’22 British respondents in this 1993 survey were the least likely to believe that they had ‘a good chance of improving their standard of living’, and gave the most class-divided responses to this question. American respondents, by contrast, gave the highest proportion of affirmative responses, indeed were nearly unanimous, with only marginal class differences. Respondents’ answers to multiple questions intended to determine whether they saw ‘getting ahead in life’ as a product of class advantages or of personal attributes and merits did not show the British to be especially inclined at this time to emphasize class advantages and disadvantages by comparison with other European societies. Britain stood out from the six other countries in only one respect: support for policies to reduce class-related inequalities differed more sharply by class than elsewhere. In this respect, Davis concluded, Britain was an ‘exceptionally class-divided society.’23 In the end, the evidence persuaded him that, in 1993 at least, ‘received wisdom has some basis in reality. The United States is indeed a relatively classless society.’ However, the received wisdom ‘does rather less well’, he

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 9

thought, ‘in the case of Britain. Britain is not after all as class-bound as it is often painted, though it is among the class-bound in most respects.’24 Clearly, there is still much to understand about instant answers to doorstep interviewers and their relationship to actual behaviour. This relationship is sometimes puzzling, to put it mildly. In one 1991 survey for instance, two-thirds of a random sample of the population in Britain replied negatively to the question: ‘Do you ever think of yourself as belonging to a class?’ However, when the interviewer pressed on regardless, and asked interviewees to what class they would assign themselves, almost the same proportion assigned themselves to the working class. This, Adonis and Pollard noted, represented an increase of more than 20% over the 43% who assigned themselves to the working class in one of the earliest such polls in 1943.25 Since the working class as formally defined by sociologists had sharply declined over these years, one must wonder what, if anything, we should infer from these replies. Still more baffling was the trend in the responses to the question: ‘There used to be a lot of talk in politics about class struggle. Do you think there is a class struggle in this country or not?’ And in the 18 times that Gallup asked this question since 1961 the proportion steadily rose until in 1996, when about 80% replied in the affirmative.26 Unfortunately, the interviewers were not told to ask the respondents what they meant by class struggle, or how they themselves and their neighbours engaged in it. Opinion surveys, one must conclude, provide limited and rather uncertain evidence on which to judge Orwell’s claim. Bits of them might be cited either way, though as the 1979 Gallup survey showed, responses might hinge on a single ill-chosen word. A third kind of comparative evidence is that provided by comparative studies of social mobility. Since these measure the chances of those from less advantaged backgrounds to enter occupations of higher status, and probably therefore to earn higher incomes and own property, they might conceivably offer some evidence to enable us to evaluate Orwell’s claim, for if social mobility in Britain was peculiarly restricted compared to that of other societies, then we might infer that class barriers were working more effectively than in other countries, and that the British therefore had reason to be more concerned with class. In the event, none of the mobility evidence supports this line of argument. We may begin with sectoral rather than national studies, and specifically with higher education, which is a major avenue of social mobility, and is thought to determine to a significant extent, subsequent career opportunities. In his historical cross-European comparison of access to higher education in 1985, Müller found that over the previous three decades England’s higher education had been ‘among the less socially selective.’ Countries were, he found, ‘spread along a considerable range, the extremes of which are represented by France and England. In France more than 55% of graduates have grown up in one of the two service classes, and in

10 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

England only 35%.’27 To anyone familiar with the sociology of education in England, where every step has been analysed as a class obstacle, this is a somewhat disconcerting finding. Despite these obstacles, according to this study, English higher education was actually the most open in Europe. Studies of mobility at the workplace offer further support for the view that England and Britain have been distinctively open and mobile. In 1972, Granick conducted the most thorough comparison of managerial selection and careers to date, which was based on the re-analysis of dozens of earlier studies from France, the United States, Russia and Britain. He concluded that British industry was peculiarly ‘egalitarian’ in two senses: first, a larger proportion of British managers were recruited from the shopfloor than in any of the other three industrial societies, and second, manager/worker income differentials in Britain were smaller than in France, the United States, and possibly even the Soviet Union.28 In 1974, Mannari provided further support for this view of British egalitarianism in the workplace, though he did not label it as such, by documenting striking differences in opportunities for mobility between Japanese and British industry. While less than 1% of managers in his Japanese sample had come from manual worker homes, more than 16% of British managers had done so.29 In 1986, Ishida assembled comparative evidence from the United States, Japan and Britain and came to a similar conclusion. Current occupational status was, he found, less likely to be determined by the first job of the respondents in Britain, and more managers were recruited from unskilled manual worker origins in Britain than in either Japan or the United States. Britain was therefore, as Granick had suggested, distinctively egalitarian.30 In 1997, Cassis provided still further corroboration for this conclusion in his study of the family background of the CEOs of very large French and British companies over most of the twentieth century. Whereas 16% of the fathers of British CEOs in 1953 were manual workers, only 4% of the French were, and in 1989, the proportions had risen to 39% of the British CEOs and to just 9% of the French.31 Over the twentieth century, therefore, the CEOs of very large British firms were consistently about four times more likely than their French counterparts to be the sons of manual workers. Some society-wide comparisons of mobility rates pointed in the same direction as these sectoral studies, though the pioneering study of this kind, by Bendix and Lipset in 1956, poured cold water on the idea that Britain was in any way unlike other industrial societies. They found that the rate of mobility between manual and non-manual occupations was roughly the same in the five societies they analysed and concluded that the rate of social mobility was simply an integral and continuing aspect of industrialization.32 However, a subsequent cross-national comparison by Fox and Miller differentiated classes more precisely and found that Britain was, in the back-handed way they chose to put it, ‘less congealed in some respects’ than either the United States and Japan. They argued that

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 11

‘Downward mobility may be more indicative of social fluidity than upward mobility’, and found that ‘Great Britain has the most downward movement and is second (to the United States) in upward mobility.’33 Their evidence therefore suggested that Britain was the most egalitarian of their four societies. In 1992, Erickson and Goldthorpe compared mobility rates in nine societies. They reported a ‘constant flux’ around a ‘core pattern of fluidity’, and were reluctant to distinguish, in any significant way, one of their societies from any other. They seemed, in fact, to enjoy stamping on various national stereotypes, including the view that England’s class structure was peculiarly ‘sclerotic’, as they put it. Nonetheless, some interesting cross-national variations can be discerned amidst the ‘constant flux’. Their data showed, for instance, that mobility during working lives was higher in England than in France, and also higher than in two then-socialist societies, Hungary and Poland. In total vertical mobility, England came second to Sweden, and was followed by Scotland, while Scotland and England were highest in downward mobility, ahead of Germany, Sweden, France and the Netherlands.34 Overall, therefore, cross-national mobility research does not seem to offer any support for Orwell’s claim. A fourth kind of comparative evidence refers to the inequalities in the distribution of wealth, which might reasonably be thought to throw some light on class formation, since inequalities of wealth have often been thought to be the bedrock of class identification. This data goes back further than any other. Lindert, for example, analysed samples of probates since the early nineteenth century, and showed that there had been a marked surge in inequality of property and wealth in England and Wales from 1810 to 1875, by which date 1% of the adult population owned 61% of all property.35 ‘Victorian England and Wales’, he decided, ‘was as unequal as any in the North Atlantic community … Among the advanced countries of the nineteenth century Britain led the way, so to speak, with wide pre-industrial income gaps that grew even wider during the Industrial Revolution and the lifetime of Marx.’36 If, therefore, inequalities of wealth encourage class identification and class formation, then the English at the time had every reason to form classes and think of themselves in terms of class. The year 1875 seems, however, to have been the high point of inequality of property ownership in Britain. It thereafter steadily declined. Rubinstein, who compared the trends in property ownership in Britain and the United States over the greater part of the twentieth century, observed that from the First World War, ‘the picture for Britain is one of a continuing trend to greater equality’, though by the middle of the twentieth century, property ownership was still less equally distributed than in the United States. Lampman concurred. By his calculations, in 1946–1947 the top 1.5% of adults owned 53% of the total wealth in England and Wales, but only 27%

12 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

of total wealth in the United States.37 Rubinstein was able, however, to continue the comparison, and he found that Britain continued to evolve ‘toward greater equality in a much more consistent and striking way than … America’. After the third quarter of the twentieth century, the degree of inequality of property ownership in the two countries was about the same, so that ‘the richest 1% of the population in Britain owned at most marginally more in 1981 – and on some measurements rather less – than did the richest 1% of Americans in 1972.’38 In 1995, Woolf continued the analysis still further. After confirming Rubinstein’s argument that there had been a dramatic decline in the individual inequality of wealth in Britain over the 50 years 1923–1974, he noted that the share of the top percentile of the population fell from 59% in 1923 to 20% in 1974. By 1990, he calculated that Sweden was three percentage points and the United States about 18 percentage points above the U.K., which meant that the top percentile in the U.S. owned proportionately twice as much as their U.K. counterparts.39 Shorrocks’ re-examination of various sources confirmed ‘a substantial downward trend in wealth concentration’ in England and Wales over the years from 1923 to 1980.40 All of this evidence, however, significantly understates the redistribution of property ownership in Britain over the course of the twentieth century, and therefore the contrast with the United States, since Britain experienced dramatic redistributions for which there was no American equivalent, namely the transfer of ‘the means of production’, of manufacturing, of services and of housing, from private to public ownership. After being taken under public control, these things no longer appeared in property ownership or estate data like those cited, though we can get some rough idea of their scale by the figures for 1955, when some 11% of the manufacturing labour force worked in the public sector, which was also responsible for some 55% of gross capital formation. If we add service sector public enterprises, such as health care, universities and broadcasting (private broadcasting only began in Britain in 1955), then we would have to include a significant slice of the labour force, probably about 25%.41 This still does not quite exhaust the transfer of property to the public sector in Britain, since in the inter-war period and in the immediate post-war years, publiclyowned housing increased in Britain much more rapidly than private housing, and then constituted about a third of the total housing stock, whereas in the United States, at its highest point, in 1958, it never amounted to as much as 3%, and then shrank to under 1%.42 A great deal of evidence therefore indicates that over the first threequarters of the twentieth century, there was a consistent trend to greater equality in the distribution of private property ownership in Britain. It came to an abrupt end, however, in the 1980s. Woolf found that in that decade the trend was ‘almost flat’, though he showed that this brought Britain no closer to the United States and Sweden since in both countries

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 13

inequalities continued to increase. In the same decade, the displacement of private by public property was also reversed, as the Thatcher governments privatized the nationalized ‘means of production’, and sold council houses to their tenants. The fifth kind of comparative evidence, about the distribution of income in Britain, follows roughly the same course as that of the distribution of property, namely, extreme inequality until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, followed by an unbroken trend towards greater equality over more than a century, and a sharp reversal and increase in inequality at the end of the twentieth. Williamson conducted the most thorough study of the early sources of evidence about income distribution, and concluded that in England and Wales ‘there was a rise in inequality across the century following 1760.’ However, ‘a corner was turned soon after 1867’, and thereafter, ‘to World War I, an egalitarian levelling is unambiguous, pronounced and pervasive across the full income distribution. The bottom 40% increased their share of late Victorian income, while the top five and ten per cent suffered a very sharp erosion.’43 Williamson was trying to demonstrate the existence of the so-called Kuznets’ ‘curve’, which suggested that inequality always increases in the early stages of industrialization but declines thereafter, and was not interested in identifying differences between industrializing societies. However, those who have done so agree that by the mid-twentieth century Britain was amongst the more egalitarian in terms of income distribution. In the fifties, for instance, Lydall and Lansing found a more equal distribution of income in Britain than in the United States.44 Reviewing a more diverse range of comparative measures, Watanabe decided that ‘Japan and the United States appear to have had similar patterns of income inequality to those found in France, and all three countries showed a much greater degree of concentration of income than could be found in either Australia or Britain.’45 Atkinson’s six-country comparison of percentile shares of income in the 1960s and 1970s found that while the top 20% of income earners received least, and the bottom 20% most, in Australia (38.9% and 6.3% respectively), Britain was not far behind on both measures (39.4% and 5.7%), and that some distance separated both Australia and Britain from the other four countries in the study: Eire (44.5% and 4.1%), Japan (46.2% and 3.8%), the United States (46.4% and 3.8%) and France (47.0% and 4.3%).46 Other scholars have come to a similar conclusion. Rubinstein’s data on income distribution from the 1950s to the early 1980s showed that by the end of this period there was in the U.S. ‘a somewhat greater level of income inequality than in Britain’.47 Plotting trends since World War II, Brandolini and Rossi, found that pre-tax income inequalities placed Britain in roughly the same category as the United States in the 1950s, but the two countries then diverged as Britain joined the ‘highly egalitarian’ countries in post-tax

14 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

income, like Australia and Scandinavia, which they distinguished from the ‘inegalitarian’ ones, like the U.S., France, Germany, and Italy. However, just as the studies of property ownership noted a U-turn in the 1980s, Brandolini and Rossi also noted a rise of income inequality in the mid-80s, which included Britain along with other industrial societies.48 Working with a different set of countries, Fritzell, however, found that, though the increasing inequality was found in other European societies, Britain experienced the ‘largest and most sustained’ increase in inequality of them all.’49

Questions and clues arising This review of some of the cross-national evidence apparently relevant to class collected over the past 50 years has therefore proved rather inconclusive, as we suspected it would. It is not at all clear whether it might be said to either confirm or reject Orwell’s claim. The massive inequalities in the distribution of wealth and incomes up to 1875 might be said to have given the English a head start in feeling classridden, and the studies of voting behaviour in the mid-twentieth century, which showed that the English voted in a more class polarized manner than other English-speaking democracies, as well as France and Southern Europe, offer him a little support. As it happened, they were most inclined to do so in the election of 1950, a few years after Orwell made his remark.50 Some later opinion polls of class attitudes and self-identification might, with some qualifications, also be quoted on his behalf. Most of the comparative evidence, however, seems to be against him. Throughout his life, wealth and income were becoming progressively more equally distributed in Britain, and simultaneously being squeezed or displaced by the rapid growth of public property. Moreover, many studies of social mobility suggested that Britain was more open and mobile than most other societies, especially in the workplace, often supposed to be the engine-room of the entire class system, which makes it difficult to see how or why England should be more class-ridden than anywhere else. How, one wonders, would Orwell have responded to such evidence? Since he was not very consistent on the subject, there are a number of possibilities. He might simply have cited later knowledgeable observers of English society to support his view, but they would take us no further forward, since none provide any more comparative evidence than he did.51 Or he might perhaps have observed that even after the century-long trend of ‘equalization’ and ‘leveling’, more than sufficient inequalities of wealth and income, and more than sufficient barriers to upward mobility, remained to generate perceptions of class difference and provoke class consciousness, and perhaps antagonism. Such a reasonable reply, however, still does not answer the question why England should be more class-ridden than other less egalitarian, and less mobile, societies. Perhaps he might have met the

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 15

evidence head-on, or simply dismissed it, on the grounds that there is no direct relationship between inequalities of wealth and income, or blocked opportunities for social mobility, and class institutions and class consciousness. Some of his comments on class seem to preclude this kind of answer, since they suggest that he thought that class was a product of economic inequalities. He once observed, for instance, that ‘a person who has grown up in council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum’. He also noticed that ‘while in 1910 every human being in these islands could be placed in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case.’ In the ‘new townships’ of the South East, he observed ‘wide gradations of income’, but added that, ‘it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, so that after 1918 there has begun to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class’.52 His more considered reflections on class, however, show that he thought of it as rather more than a result of one’s standard of living or a response to perceived inequalities of wealth, income or opportunity, and as something learned, deeply absorbed and collectively maintained, and a permanent part of English identity and culture. When, for instance, he reflected on his own class position in The Road to Wigan Pier he observed that ‘nearly everything that I think and do is a result of class distinctions. All my notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful – are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honor, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body are the products of a special kind of upbringing, and a special niche about halfway up the social hierarchy.’ He therefore thought that it was almost impossible for him to have real contact with ‘a proletarian’ since ‘I would have to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes as well. I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person.’53 Hence his final answer would, I imagine, be that this cross-national evidence we have reviewed does not get to the heart of the matter. ‘Go away!’, I imagine him saying, ‘Get some evidence that allows us to compare the way class enters the lives of people, affects their notions of good and evil, their tastes, manners, accents, loyalties and their sense of honour. We will then decide whether or not any other society has been more class-ridden than the English.’ Answered in this manner, we might well feel our review of cross-national evidence has been entirely wasted, but this is not quite the case. While it might not have reached any firm conclusion, it has at least suggested where we should not look, for if an ‘unambiguous, pronounced and pervasive’ century-long process of ‘egalitarian leveling’ and higher rates of mobility

16 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

than other societies had no significant impact on class affiliations and sentiments of the English, or at least none that McKibbin and other assiduous students could readily identify, then it seems unlikely that an explanation of the persistence of classes in England is to be found in such phenomena. Economic inequality, though often taken to be synonymous with class, evidently has a rather uncertain relationship to it, and perhaps no relationship at all. To understand the formation and persistence of classes in England or anywhere else, and their distinctive manners, tastes and senses of honour, this evidence suggests that we would be best advised to look elsewhere, at actions, events and agents that helped to form and maintain classes, at collective associations which have defined and articulated class interests, at institutions which have reproduced and sustained class manners and cultures. It suggests, in short, that we would be better advised to examine the politics of class formation rather than the economics. If Animal Farm and 1984 are taken as Orwell’s definitive view of class formation, there can be little doubt that he would strongly support this suggestion. And the sudden reversal, during the 1980s and 1990s, of the century-long equalization of wealth and income in Britain, which may well have been accompanied by some ‘flattening’ or even decline in the rate of social mobility offers it further support.54 If classes had all along depended on material conditions and ‘life chances’, class should then have become more important in the lives of the English people, instead of which exactly the opposite appears to have been the case. Class-polarized voting declined, and along with it public and sociological discussions of class, prompting many informed observers to speak of the demise or death of class.55 Classes are, it seems, altogether more curious and puzzling phenomena than research measuring the various inequalities of wealth and opportunity might lead us to believe. They must, therefore, be approached in a quizzical, interrogatory spirit, rather than simply documented and deplored. Lord Bauer, a Hungarian-born economist, was one of those who approached them in just this spirit. In a pamphlet first published in 1978, he declared that the British were ‘obsessed’ with class, but what was puzzling about this for him was that they had little reason to be.56 He admitted that they had always enjoyed ‘fine and small’ social distinctions, but Britain had, he thought, been a particularly open and mobile society through most of its history, and the British had never enforced rigid class distinctions as many other countries had done, and certainly had ‘not been governed by a rich ruling caste.’ He cited Disraeli, son of a Jewish immigrant, Lloyd George, an orphan, Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a fisherwoman, as past prime ministers who came from lowly family circumstances, and alongside recent ones, such as Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher and Major, all of whose ‘backgrounds are not exactly upper class’. He also mentioned a number of notable recent cabinet ministers of both parties who went to state schools, and whose fathers were in modest circumstances. He gave

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 17

various examples to show that British industry ‘is managed and has been managed for decades or even centuries by new men, people who have made their own way, often from humble beginnings’, adding that ‘only 31% of the 500 richest people (in Britain today) inherited their wealth.’ He then gave more examples of top civil servants, senior military officers and distinguished academics, who had risen from poor family backgrounds, and even one Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘These are not’, he insisted, ‘isolated examples. They can be multiplied indefinitely.’57 How then, he wondered, had the British acquired such a strangely mistaken view of themselves? In his view, ‘intellectuals and politicians, journalists and academics’, especially intellectuals, were largely to blame, ‘because they are inclined to compare British society with American society (which on the surface at any rate is more open than British society)’, rather than with ‘continental European societies, which they know less well’, and ‘where class distinctions are clearer and firmer.’ He also thought that ‘the long and relatively peaceful continuity of British history’ conveyed an impression of ‘a stable social system and impregnable and static ruling class’, adding that the ‘open and mobile character of British society’ may itself ‘have enhanced the preoccupation with class, since it made the aristocracy and prosperous groups accessible and conspicuous, and thus more envied and resented than elsewhere.’ Bauer then urged the British to be rid of their obsession. They had, in his view, been punishing themselves with it for far too long, and it had besides prompted them to embark on a number of unwise public policies in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the nationalization of industries, council housing and heavy and steeply progressive taxation. It had also made them tolerate numerous ‘trade union privileges and restrictions.’ Paradoxically, these policies had, he thought, made Britain in the 1970s rather less open and mobile than it had previously been, ‘both directly, and by making it more difficult to start new businesses, indirectly.’58 Ringen, who enthusiastically endorsed Bauer’s argument when it was reprinted in 1998, described the belief in a rigid class structure as ‘the great British myth.’59 He was aware that myth is a social phenomenon that itself requires explanation, though he provided none, other than to point to the mistaken research methodologies and misleading assumptions, which sociologists in Britain had come to accept over the past few decades, and which had led them to conclude incorrectly that there has been no change in the class structure. These misleading methodologies and assumptions could, however, only have influenced other sociologists and their students, and perhaps historians, but they could hardly have generated a national ‘myth’, which a great many others who have no time for sociological methodologies accepted, just as Orwell did. If it is a myth, then it certainly deserves close attention since it has continued for rather a long time and acquired a certain stature, even grandeur. It is to myths what the Great

18 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

Wall of China is to bricklaying, or the Sphinx of Cheops to sandcastles. Like the Sphinx, it seems to be hiding a deep secret, in its case about the peculiar character of English institutions, and the distinctive way the English have chosen to interpret themselves and relate to each other. Calling class an obsession, or a myth, does not therefore bring the mind to rest. Its mystery remains. The rest of this study is an attempt to solve it. If we hope to do this, we have already decided that we must first understand how classes have been formed or dissolved, succeeded or failed, in other societies. And if we are to do that, we have also already decided, we need a set of concepts, or an analytical framework of some kind that enables us to compare the evidence about classes in one society with that from another. We may therefore now turn to our second preliminary task, and consider the efforts to construct theories of class mentioned above, and see if they provide any guidance about how we might best proceed.

2 Lessons from Comparative Theories

Djilas’s theory of a ‘new class’ The first theoretical contribution which deserves attention is that of Milovan Djilas, who in many respects was Orwell’s soul-mate. While Orwell wrote allegories of Soviet life, Djilas observed it first-hand, by personal contact with Stalin and other Soviet leaders, and as a member of the political elite of a sister socialist regime, his native Yugoslavia. They came to the same conclusion about Soviet Russia. In his essay The New Class, first published in 1956, Djilas turned Marx’s central proposition that a ruling class derived from property ownership on its head, and argued that the political elite of the Soviet Union and other socialist societies had used their political power to control and enjoy property without being its legal owners, and thereby created a new ruling class.1 Orwell similarly thought that ‘a new governing class’ had emerged in Russia.2 Animal Farm and 1984 imaginatively reconstructed its methods and mind-set. Djilas’s analysis of this new class did not rest on any systematic empirical research. It could hardly have done so, since little was available about socialist societies in the 1950s. In any case, he was under house arrest or in prison much of the time so he could hardly contribute much to it, unless his imaginative reconstruction of the inner thoughts of a young actress who married into the new class, be counted as such.3 His information about capitalist societies was dated and thin, and largely drawn, as he admitted, from Marx himself. He was, one might say, one of Tolstoy’s hedgehogs, who knew one big thing, that he had observed at first-hand, in many social settings: the formation of a class which flatly contradicted Marx’s central proposition. It was because he refused to keep quiet about this discovery, he spent nine years in Yugoslavian prisons. In various later writings after his release, Djilas elaborated a little on some of the peculiar dynamics of ‘the new class’ he had discovered. ‘In past societies’, he argued, when a class ‘arrived in power’ it was ‘the final act of its formation and its awareness of selfhood’, whereas ‘the new class was 19

20 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

finally formed after it itself had come to power.’ Compared with previous classes therefore, ‘the cart came before the horse, because this new class had not taken root in the life of the nation beforehand.’ The ‘roots of this new class lay … in that stratum of professional revolutionaries who constituted its core before the Party as a whole came to power. Out of that very thin layer of revolutionaries there developed by degrees a completely new ruling class, of owners and exploiters.’ They ‘first created the Party’, which then ‘spawned the class’, and then ‘the class grew on its own, using the Party as a basis.’ Since the Party ‘drew strength from the proletariat’s struggles and antagonisms’, it was ‘compelled to construct the most rigorous organizational structure possible and to think through its public statements with extreme care. It was therefore more class conscious, and more organized than any class in history.’ Moreover, it used its political power to silence civil society completely. It ‘dealt with challengers … whenever they questioned its illusions or contested its supremacy, more harshly than any other.’ In time, ‘ever more irresistibly, the party attracted into its ranks those spurred on by greed who wished only to insinuate themselves into this new class and climb its rungs, while pushing out those whose eyes were still fixed on ideals.’ As ‘the class grew stronger – the Party declined.’4 Classes in Western societies remain a shadowy foil throughout Djilas’s explanation of the dynamics of the new class, but despite this lop-sidedness his work still commands our attention for two reasons. First, it made the most emphatic claim on the role of political power in the formation of classes, and thereby offered a bold and novel hypothesis about the formation of a class in stark contrast to the Marxist and Weberian perspectives to which social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic at the time had grown accustomed. Second, it has stood the test of time rather well, better it seems than any other twentieth-century theory of class, being corroborated and routinely adopted both by those who lived under the Soviet regime, as well as by foreign observers who have studied it and its postSoviet successor. Andrei Sakharov was one of those who observed the new class from within, indeed he was a member of it, before affirming his membership of an older Russian class, the intelligentsia. In 1975 he remarked that ‘the nomenklatura, as its members call themselves, or the “new class” as Milovan Djilas has named them … has its own life style, its own clearly defined social status … and its own way of talking and thinking … and has recently become hereditary. The nomenklatura has in fact an inalienable status.’ He then went on to liken it to the ‘inner party’ of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984. More than 25 years later, the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to a similar conclusion. In 2001, in a speech on the tenth anniversary of the coup against him, he argued that it had been organized to defend the privileges of the nomenklatura.5 Correspondents of Western newspapers in Moscow in the Soviet era were among the first to report on the distinctions

Lessons from Comparative Theories 21

between the nomenklatura and the rest of the population. Various Russian and non-Russian scholars later spelt out the full range of privileges it enjoyed.6 Many analysts have subsequently observed that it continued to play a central role in Russian life even after the fall of the Soviet regime.7 More support came from the only researcher who was able to utilize the normal social science methods to study class differences in a socialist society, Pavel Machonin, who documented the clone of the Soviet nomenklatura in Czechoslovakia.8 Because of the primacy it gave to the political determinants of class formation and because it was subsequently supported by the facts, Djilas’s argument provides a convenient preliminary marker by which we can assess the merits of the comparative theories that subsequently began to appear on both sides of the Atlantic. These theoretical efforts tended to move in rather different directions. The British, led by an expatriate German, were inclined to continue the century-long debate with Marx, and attempted to characterize the class structures of capitalist and industrial societies as a whole. Contemporaneous American efforts stuck closer to social mobility research, and in particular to the occupational prestige scales which were the accepted prerequisite of them all. However, despite their differences, most of these theoretical forays sought to include the Soviet Union and other socialist societies. We may therefore ask whether any of them accommodated the established facts about these societies in at least as satisfactory a manner as Djilas, and whether they improved on his rather rudimentary comparisons with capitalist societies.

Post-Marxist theories in Britain Dahrendorf was the first academic sociologist to react to Djilas’s essay. He was then trying to formulate a new ‘general theory’ of class. His central proposition was that this required the replacement of Marx’s narrow definition of property in favour of a broader, more realistic definition of property rights to include those who controlled the means of production. Class could then be taken to refer to possession of, or exclusion from, authority, and this amendment would, he argued, allow the construction of a new general theory.9 For this reason, he was happy to accept Djilas’s support for the view that classes need not be exclusively derived from property and ownership. However, he declined to make any further use of Djilas’s argument that political power might be used to make classes, on the grounds that it ‘cannot easily be applied to other countries’. Contrary to Djilas’s personal observations, and with no supporting empirical evidence whatever, Dahrendorf claimed that the ‘new class’ of socialist societies, ‘far from being a homogeneous entity, is a highly explosive unit in which local and central, industrial and agricultural, dogmatic and adaptive, bureaucratic and entrepreneurial “pressure groups” struggle for domination.’10

22 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

On the face of things, one might have thought that the analysis of authority would require the introduction of political decisions and political events, since political power commonly shapes and legitimizes structures of authority, and that Dahrendorf would therefore wish to incorporate Djilas’s argument and evidence into his theory. But it was not to be. ‘Class signifies conflict groups that are generated by the differential distribution of authority in imperatively co-ordinated associations’, Dahrendorf explained, ‘but the structural origins of such group conflicts must be sought in the arrangement of social roles endowed with expectations of domination or subjection.’ And such group conflicts, he went on, ‘are not the product of structurally fortuitous relations of power but come forth wherever authority is exercised – and that means in all societies under all historical conditions.’11 Djilas’s analysis, of course, rested squarely on the way that ‘structurally fortuitous relations of power’ had shaped ‘expectations of domination or subjection’ in all socialist societies, so he could make no further contribution to Dahrendorf’s theory-building. In hindsight, Dahrendorf’s rejection of Djilas’s argument looks like one of the more decisive, and unfortunate, turning points in the study of social stratification, for though no one subsequently made any use of the general theory that he proposed, many followed his rejection of Djilas’s analysis, especially those who later sought to characterize and compare the stratification of capitalist and socialist societies, as Parkin did in 1972. He suggested that classes in capitalist societies were determined by market forces, while the stratification of socialist societies was determined by political decisions. He therefore agreed with Djilas on one point, namely, the primacy of political action in socialist societies. He was, however, at some pains to distinguish his argument from that of Djilas. He thought it ‘doubtful’, for instance, ‘whether we should represent the system of inequalities (in socialist societies) in terms of a traditional class model’, given ‘the absence of inherited property in them’ and the ‘large-scale movements across the entire range of the reward hierarchy’. He placed particular emphasis on the absence of class barriers between non-manual and manual workers in socialist societies, and concluded that the ‘theorists who claim that socialist society is “classless” because it lacks sharp normative differentiation have thus touched upon an important feature of this type of society.’12 Parkin never, in fact, recognized a ‘new class’ or any other class in any socialist society. He admitted that the technical and professional intelligentsia of socialist societies were recruited to a much greater extent than in capitalist societies from universities, but he portrayed this not as a class difference, but merely as a ‘social discontinuity’. He made no reference to other ‘social discontinuities’ in these societies, such as the nomenklatura, or to the millions of geks, the inmates of labour camps. In an essay published a year later, Giddens echoed Parkin’s arguments. Djilas’s ‘new class’ thesis was, he said, ‘overstated’. The ‘new class’, he

Lessons from Comparative Theories 23

declared, ‘is not an appropriate mode of designating the place of the Party in this type of society, or of the system of privilege which has become built up around it.’ He admitted that the ‘power exercised by the higher Party officials considerably outstrips that wielded by political elites in the capitalist societies; and party positions may be, as Djilas emphasizes, means for the attainment of a distinctively high level of economic reward.’ But ‘to admit the factual validity of these statements is not to demonstrate the emergence of a class formation comparable to that typical of capitalist society.’ Nor, he added without further elaboration, ‘can such a case be plausibly made out for the intelligentsia’. Overall, Giddens concluded that, in capitalist society, ‘the class system continues to constitute the fundamental axis of the social structure, and remains the main channel of relationships of exploitative domination. The state socialist societies on the other hand, have genuinely succeeded in moving towards a classless order.’13 They had, for instance, limited the ‘emergence of class structuration at the top … primarily because the abolition of private property prevented the transmission of advantages across generations.’ They had therefore, he thought, created a ‘much more open system of elite mobility than that which characterizes the capitalist societies as a whole.’ Moreover, by reducing the differentials, in income, job security and fringe benefits, between blue and white collar workers, state socialist societies had ensured that the division between manual and non-manual labour ‘does not have the same class significance’, and ‘lower non-manual occupations do not form the sort of “buffer zone” which they do in capitalist societies.’ Like Parkin, Giddens also noted the importance of educational qualifications for access to higher managerial positions in socialist societies but decided, for some unexplained reason, that this was not a process of class structuration.14 Much of the evidence used to support the contrast between socialist and capitalist societies by Parkin and Giddens was subsequently shown to be false. There was no ‘buffer zone’ of mobility between white and blue collar workers in Britain.15 Soviet Russia at the time when they were writing was not a particularly egalitarian or mobile society.16 The notion that inequalities in socialist societies were generically different from those of capitalist societies was further thrown into question by detailed comparative studies of the links between social background and education and between education and social destination which showed that the differences between two socialist societies in the 1970s, Poland and Hungary, ‘were at least as large as those between the Western European nations’.17 There seems therefore little reason to accept the categorical distinction they drew between socialist societies whose stratification was politically determined and never resulted in classes, and capitalist societies which were, as Giddens put it, ‘intrinsically’ class societies, and owed nothing one way or the other political leaders, events or decisions, since their classes were ‘founded ultimately in the economic structure of the capitalist market.’18

24 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

Exactly why it proved so difficult for all three of these social theorists to incorporate political power and political decisions into their analyses of classes in capitalist societies is still rather puzzling. Social historians and sociologists without theoretical ambitions seem to have had no difficulty, or hesitation, in doing so.19 Perhaps, as social theorists they felt it necessary to draw a sharp analytical distinction between estates of feudal societies, whose rights and privileges were formally defined in law, and classes in capitalist societies whose defining characteristic was precisely the absence of any such formal, legal definition. This widely-accepted contrast may therefore have led them to underestimate the possibility that the state might continue to contribute to the formation of classes in capitalist societies, even if it did not formally delineate classes. Or perhaps it was simply that political events and decisions seemed too specific to a particular society to be fitted into any general, theoretical framework that they could think of. There was a hint of irritation in Dahrendorf’s remark that Djilas’s theory ‘could not be easily applied to other countries’, and it might have been shared by the others. The legacy of the three major classical social theorists, in whose footsteps these late twentieth-century theorists were all explicitly treading, could not have helped, since those revered figures had all tended to underestimate the impact of political power on social structures. Weber had been the most likely of them to introduce it into his analysis of stratification, since he recognized power or party as one dimension of stratification.20 But he died before he could fully explain and illustrate this third dimension, and in his discussion of class there is much common ground with Marx. ‘The factor that creates “class”’, he wrote, ‘is unambiguously economic interest.’ As Wright observed, ‘posing Marx and Weber as polar opposites is a bit misleading because in many ways Weber is speaking in his most Marxian voice when he talks about class.’21 Marx himself of course continuously referred to political leaders, events and decisions when discussing class formation and class conflicts, and in this respect his writings present a marked contrast with most of his followers where politicians and political events hardly rate a mention.22 Dahrendorf was able to cite ‘a multitude’ of his statements to document what he thought ‘may well be the most important step’ in Marx’s theory of class formation, namely that classes did not consist of the mere ‘gap between the conditions of life’ or mere ‘identity of interests’ and did not ‘constitute themselves as such until they participate in political conflicts as organized groups.’ Hence ‘class formation and class conflict were phenomena belonging to the sphere of politics’ and involved ‘the association of people in a strict group, party or political organization.’23 Marx did not, however, incorporate this theme into his theory of class, and most of his followers have therefore focused on the initial economic determinants of their formation, rather than political ones that might be said to complete

Lessons from Comparative Theories 25

it. Something of his economic determinism seem to cling to all those who have sought to construct class theories, even to those who disagree with him on many points, including Dahrendorf. He seemed determined to distance his theory from that of Marx, insisting that ‘classes are neither primarily nor at all economic groupings’, but nevertheless did not entirely shake off his influence. He hoped, after all, to devise a general theory of class in industrial society, which is an economic rather than a political category, and implies stages of pre-industrial and post-industrial development in the manner of Marx. Moreover, his whole effort to construct a theory of class which would identify its common properties ‘in all societies under all historical conditions’ was Marxist in inspiration and ambition.24 Whatever their reason for excluding the political determinants of class in capitalist societies, it seems clear these three works can provide little insight into the sources of variation between capitalist societies, and little help therefore in solving the English mystery.25 None of the three, moreover, can help understand the structured inequalities of socialist societies in a more illuminating manner than Djilas suggested. Parkin said nothing of the origins, varieties and careers of their ‘social discontinuities’. While Giddens was sure that Djilas had not chosen the ‘appropriate mode of designating’ the structured inequalities of socialist societies, he could only suggest that they were characterized by ‘a system of closely knit elite integration’ though why this is more ‘appropriate’ or illuminating than referring to a ruling class he did not say.26 The general reaction to Djilas’s argument among British social scientists was therefore dismissive, even hostile. Rather than trying to show what the variations and limits of political power might be in the process class formation, they rejected his ideas outright. In so doing they contributed to the divergence between specialist, sociological analyses of class and public discussions of the subject which has continued ever since. While Djilas was readily intelligible and persuasive to the general public, they were neither. In the academic world, however, as three influential sociological works from Oxford, Cambridge and London had confidently agreed that Djilas’s personal testimony could be dismissed, and that he had misunderstood the nature of inequality in socialist societies, he was not thereafter thought to have anything much to contribute to discussions of class, and was excommunicated from the sociological canon.27 In 1987, Hamilton and Hirszowicz’s popular text repeated what seems by then to have become a standard sociological interpretation of inequality in socialist societies – in Britain at least. They first warned that the problem of inequality is ‘much more complicated than a theory of the “new class” or “red bourgeoisie”’, and referred, presumably with Djilas in mind, though like any heretic he is never mentioned by name, to ‘the sterility of the class-oriented approach with regard to communist systems.’ They concluded that ‘a model based on class cannot be meaningfully applied to

26 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

explain economic, social and political differences in these societies’, but declined to say what model might be ‘meaningfully applied’ in its place.28 Instead, they divided the Soviet population neutrally into categories of workers, peasants, intelligentsia and party-state bureaucracy, and then comprehensively, and insightfully, documented the differences or inequalities between them, while managing never to say saying what these categories were, except that they were not classes. The word had, it seems, to be scrupulously avoided in the discussion of socialist societies. Over the subsequent decades, no one in Britain proposed an alternative strategy of comparative analysis that paid any attention to the politics of class formation. In 1997, Devine conducted a thorough review of stratification studies in the U.S. and Britain, placing them side-by-side wherever possible, and identifying points of resemblance and contrast, but she did not attempt to provide a comparative framework that we might apply to these or any other societies.29 Debates about class continued with much of their customary vehemence, though to a declining, and increasingly sceptical, audience and to intermittent Pythonesque heckling that the parrot is not just sick but dead. Attention turned to how gender and ethnic inequalities, which had become of greater interest, might be reconciled with, incorporated in, or better subordinated to, a class analysis.30 In 2000, Savage, having decided that classical Marxist and Weberian traditions of class analysis were both exhausted, and in the face of evidence that class was no longer a significant source of identity in Britain, sought to rescue class analysis by portraying it as ‘an individuated process’. Evidence of collective consciousness, collective institutions and collective action was, in his view, no longer required. Class cultures were to be seen as ‘contingently embodying forms of individualized identities which operate relationally’, a difficult notion for other researchers to handle, even perhaps for the author himself, and holding little promise for cross-societal comparative analysis.31 In recent years comparative analysis has been left to social historians, and conceptual frameworks are not their strong suit.32

Comparison via correlation coefficients in the United States Over the same period as these post-Marxist discussions were unfolding in Britain, some American scholars were taking advantage of the ordinal scales of occupational prestige that were the foundation of studies of social mobility then being undertaken in several countries, to speculate about the nature and determinants of stratification. In 1956, Inkeles and Rossi compared five scales that had been used in mobility studies from the United States, Japan, New Zealand, Germany and Britain. Finding high rank-order correlation coefficients between the positions of individual occupations on these scales, they concluded that, to all intents and purposes, they were the same. To explain this cross-national uniformity, they then suggested that ‘a

Lessons from Comparative Theories 27

great deal of weight must be given to the cross-national similarities in social structure, which arise from the industrial system and from other common structural features, such as the national state.’33 Over the next few years, studies of social mobility increased in popularity, and the number of occupational prestige scales therefore multiplied rapidly. In 1962, Hodge, Treiman and Rossi, were able to compare those of 23 societies. They once again found high rank-order correlation coefficients between them, and were similarly impressed by their uniformity, but since the 23 included several semi-industrial societies, they decided that the industrial system could not be a primary determinant of this uniformity. They therefore amended Inkeles and Rossi’s original proposition by stressing the needs of the state. In their view, the uniformity between these societies was a consequence of the ‘major institutional complexes serving central societal needs which exist in all societies’, and ‘the common bureaucratic hierarchy imposed by the nation state’. These, they suggested, acted ‘to insure (despite vast differences in level of economic development) similarity between nations in the white collar prestige hierarchy, and to a lesser extent, in the blue collar hierarchy.’34 In 1979, Treiman had more than a hundred prestige scales available, from more than 60 contemporary societies at varying different stages of economic development. Like his predecessors he also was struck by the high correlations between the scales of different countries, and argued that these high correlations were best explained, neither by industry nor by the state, but by the division of labour. In all societies, he suggested, a division of labour will necessarily develop, and it will, moreover, develop in a similar way. In his own pithy, Pythagorean phrasing: ‘since the division of labour gives rise to characteristic differences in power, and power begets privilege, and power and privilege beget prestige, there should be a single, worldwide occupational prestige hierarchy.’ The correlations he had found between the scales demonstrated, to his satisfaction, that there was.35 The theoretical ambition and confidence of these three American studies evidently increased along with the number of scales of occupational prestige available. Inkeles and Rossi’s modest observations grew into Treiman’s full-blown universal theorem. All three of them, one may notice, referred to the role of political power in creating the prestige of occupations. Inkeles and Rossi included the ‘national state’ among the ‘common structural features’ of industrial societies. Hodge, Treiman and Rossi claimed that the nation-state imposed a ‘common bureaucratic hierarchy’, and Treiman argued that the distribution of ‘power and privilege’ determined the distribution of prestige. To that extent, there was a link with Djilas’s thesis, though none saw any reason to develop it or even mention his work. One possible reason they declined to do so was that the correlation coefficients had already persuaded them to look for a uniform factor, not a differentiating one – and Djilas’s portrayal of new class was precisely that. However,

28 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

the more likely reason, it seems safe to say, was that the data admitted into their comparison had to meet certain methodological requirements, and Djilas’s anecdotes and unsystematic personal observations, first-hand and unique as they might be, simply did not meet them. Since we are hoping to find ideas that might assist this comparative investigation, it is worth pausing briefly to identify these methodological requirements, so that we too may decide whether to insist on them, or discard them. To begin with, it is clear that to enable such comparisons to be conducted, these researchers felt they had to ignore a variety of commonly observed features of occupations in their subject societies, on the grounds that were so peculiar that they could not find any immediate basis of comparison with other societies. Thus, to allow Soviet occupations to be included in the comparison, the nomenklatura and full-time party apparatchiks had to be excluded, as had geks, since capitalist societies had no ‘occupations’ comparable to these. Correspondingly, entrepreneurs had to be omitted from the American side, because Soviet Russia, supposedly, had none. Forms of status distinction that intersected a single occupation, such as that between the favoured ‘public’ and the disadvantaged ‘private’ sector of French medicine, for example, or between the engineers from the grandes écoles and those who graduated from mere universities, and selftaught ingènieurs maisons also had to be forgotten. Likewise the differences between employees in the size of firms, which have often been found to be much more important than skill in differentiating the status of Japanese workers, had to be ignored, as well of course as something as unique as the Britain’s titled aristocracy and its system of honours. To make their comparisons viable, they also had to overlook the fact that occupations, both professional and craft, have had remarkably varied histories. In some societies, most notably England, professions had a long history of autonomous collective organization and action, during which they accumulated considerable powers of self-government over training, credentials, jurisdiction and discipline, while in other societies professions had been organized by the state and exercised few self-governing powers and had little capacity for collective action. Similarly, in some societies, again most notably in England, craftsmen and skilled workers had been commonly organized as independent and exclusive trade unions, while in others, craft or occupation has been quickly submerged in, or replaced by, other bases of union organization such as the plant, the firm, the industry or, as in France, by political beliefs, all of which attempted to unite workers of every kind, skilled and unskilled, white collar and blue collar. In sum, the methodology of these comparative analyses required the researcher to compile a uniform list of occupations for each country, and to exclude those that were unique, then to assume that all occupations were uniformly defined and demarcated, equally independent of one another, equally self-conscious and equally cohesive in all the societies being com-

Lessons from Comparative Theories 29

pared. When occupations in all the subject societies had been converted into cross-culturally standardized units like so many social euros, the comparison could then proceed to measure the degree of similarity between the prestige of occupations in all the countries by calculating rank-order correlation coefficients. Both steps in this form of comparative analysis are suspect. First, the preferred measure of similarity is defective. A study of 12 ‘orders of precedence’ issued over some 200 years by the Lord-Mayor of the City of London, to determine the position or ‘stations’ of its guilds or ‘companies’ on public occasions, found that most were above 0.86, and all of those in the 16th century were above 0.93. Nonetheless, there were over this period dramatic, and well-documented, shifts up and down the orders of precedence, which sometimes provoked violent conflicts between companies. Even correlation coefficients of 0.93 and above, therefore, do not entitle one to claim uniformity and stability, and there is no reason to pay much attention to those who claim it on the basis of lower coefficients.36 The second objection is that the standardized units have already been stripped of the things that made them distinctive, and necessarily therefore have a considerable degree of uniformity imposed on them, even before calculating coefficients between the social skeletons that remain. When social mobility research is based on such prestige scales, it incorporates these defects, and similarly tends to exaggerate the uniformity between societies. However, it need not always do so. The number of societies compared evidently makes a difference. When, for instance, Ishida compared just three countries, Japan, the United States and Britain, he had the time, and the knowledge, to explain some of their historical and institutional peculiarities, and hence put back, or re-contextualize, much that his methodology had compelled him to remove or ignore.37 His study therefore raised more interesting questions for subsequent investigation than any of the multiplecountry studies. Connor similarly worked with a small number of socialist and capitalist societies, and was able to support and explain mobility data by reference to the history and politics of each, an effort which prompted him to put forward the startling proposition that, rather than comparing capitalist and socialist societies, it would be more illuminating to compare Europe, both capitalist and socialist, with the ‘non-egalitarian classless’ societies of the United States and Soviet Russia.38 Comparative mobility studies of particular sectors, like Granick’s or Cassis’ comparisons of managers cited above, also do not have to deprive their subjects of everything that might distinguish them before proceeding. They were able to supplement and explain their mobility data with historical and contemporary behavioural evidence, and therefore found more interesting and illuminating differences between their chosen societies than ‘constant flux’. In the end, the lesson that we may draw from this review of the approaches to the comparative analyses of stratification is not so different from the

30 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

lesson we drew from our consideration of the structural approaches of the British. In their case, it was the search for a general theory that had, we decided, prevented adequate attention being paid to historical and political factors in the formation or dissolution of classes. In the case of these American studies, the search for methodological rigour, and for standardized units of comparison, had the same result. General theory and methodological rigour are, of course, worthy goals, but the pursuit of both may, it seems, be sought prematurely, and at unacceptable cost. If, instead of setting off in pursuit of a general theory, true of ‘all societies under all historical conditions’, or of all capitalist societies, would-be theorists had set themselves more modest goals, and referred to a limited number of societies, it would have been possible to take account of their distinctive historical and political experiences, indeed impossible to ignore them. The same might be said of the theories derived from the ordinal ranking of occupations. Once the comparison embraced dozens of societies, however, everything that made a society distinctive had to be discarded, and it was only possible to compare skeletal remains. By contrast, when only a small number were being compared, as Ishida, Connor and Granick among others have demonstrated, it was entirely possible not only to recall and take account of their peculiarities, but also to illuminate and understand them. The moral for comparative analysis seems to be: small is beautiful. If we compare too many societies, we run the risk of standardizing and eliminating historical events and institutional peculiarities that ought to remain a part of the comparison.

A bold step backwards All of the approaches we have examined thus far were proposed in the third quarter of the twentieth century, and it is curious, given the frequency with which social scientists have subsequently moved around the world, that they should have had few successors. After the fall of the real Berlin Wall, comparisons of capitalist and socialist societies inevitably lost much of their rationale, and the failure of multiple-country, cross-national studies of mobility to contribute anything to the understanding of societies included in them might have discouraged other kinds of comparative analysis. In recent times, discussion of globalization seems to have smothered interest in national peculiarities. There was, however, one lonely, rather startling, exception to the general rule: Wright’s comparison of capitalist societies published in 1997.39 Its first surprise was that it was conducted with an explicitly Marxist framework. The earlier studies discussed above had all assumed that Marx’s work was passé, and should be either rejected, radically revised, or ignored. Moreover, since Marxism had long served as an ideology of repression around the world, his theory had inevitably also fallen into some disrepute. Wright,

Lessons from Comparative Theories 31

however, was not at all discouraged by such considerations, and even hoped that he might convert ‘non-Marxists skeptical of the fruitfulness of Marxism as a theoretical framework’.40 His results were still more surprising, for it seems fair to say that he identified more interesting crossnational variations among the three capitalist societies on which he focused than had emerged from most of the preceding comparative studies. He began in an orthodox Marxist manner by dividing the population of capitalist societies into owners and employees and added his own further divisions; of owners into three class locations according to the number of their employees, and of employees into three more locations according to ‘the relations of domination and exploitation’ that he thought they entailed, and then a further three more according to their level of skill. This gave him 12 ‘class locations’, though a considerable proportion of these populations ended up in ‘contradictory’ class locations, meaning they were linked to the process of exploitation and domination in contradictory ways. Managers were the classic example, since they were non-owners, and therefore among the exploited, but simultaneously engaged in domination and exploitation on behalf of the capitalist class, and therefore among the exploiters, but they were only one example. In fact, almost everyone who was neither a capitalist nor a proletarian seems to be in a ‘contradictory’ class location. About a third of his samples were also in ‘mediated’ class locations, meaning that they had a foot in at least two class locations, as for instance when respondents were in a working class location but their spouse in a middle class one.41 One imagines that if Wright had continued this kind of analysis over generations, or included siblings, the overwhelming majority of his populations would have been found to be in either ‘contradictory’ or ‘mediated’ class locations. In the event, it did not matter much, since neither the 12 locations, nor the ‘contradictory’ or ‘mediated’ classes, were used to identify new class formations, but simply to determine, on the basis of responses to attitude surveys in these societies, whether or not they aligned themselves with three familiar, non-contradictory, non-mediated, Marxist classes of employers, petty bourgeoisie and working class.42 The attitude surveys he drew on were conducted in seven industrial societies during the 1980s, though he focused for the most part on just three: Sweden, the United States and Japan. His comparison proceeded in two steps. The first was to confirm some basic uniformity of these societies which defined them as capitalist, and in most cases, though not all, vindicated Marx’s view of them. His second step was to identify ‘anomalies’, ‘departures’ or ‘surprises’ that did not square with what he called the ‘usual Marxist analysis’, a few of which he attempted to explain. Having, for instance first established that the working class, as he defined it, was ‘still the most numerous’ in all of these societies, he then noted that

32 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

the Swedish working class was proportionately larger than that of the United States, and its managerial class correspondingly smaller. To explain this difference, he referred briefly to ‘the political specificity’ of the Swedish ‘social democratic compromise’, negotiated decades before, under which workers agreed to moderate their militancy in exchange for guarantees that wages would rise more or less in step with productivity and that unemployment would be kept to a minimum. This might, he suggested, have ‘reduced the need for intensive supervision and surveillance of the labour process’ in Sweden.43 A second uniformity was the rate of self-employment, which he found had not declined, and hence, contrary to the ‘usual Marxist analysis’, the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ was not disappearing, and ‘the class structure of capitalism’ was becoming ‘increasingly complex rather than simplified around a single class antagonism.’44 In the United States, however, self-employment had not merely ceased to decline, but had increased significantly, while in Japan it had halted at a rate more than four times higher than that of Sweden. To explain the American ‘anomaly’, he raised a number of possibilities, such as the growth of the service sector and of the post-industrial economy, the entry of the ‘baby boom’ generation into the age range when self-employment was more likely, and the surge in the employment of married women. He also wondered whether it might simply be an illusion due to changes of nomenclature, or of the method by which employers hired labour.45 To explain the Japanese anomaly he could only add, rather feebly, that small firms in Japan were dominated by traditional family enterprises.46 A third uniformity was the ‘class polarization’ in all three societies, meaning that the working class were more likely to express anti-capitalist and pro-state attitudes than capitalists. However, he then went on to observe that the Swedish working class was more anti-capitalist than the American, and its middle class was less likely to think its interests were the same as those of the capitalist class, differences which he attributed to the much higher proportion of the labour force in Sweden that was employed by the state, and the higher proportion that was unionized.47 However, the Japanese were even less class polarized than Americans, an ‘anomaly’ that he sought to explain by arguing that Japanese trade unions were ‘basically like company unions’, so that ‘the concrete organizational context may have a bigger impact on the micro-relationship between an individual’s class location and class consciousness than is usually suggested within Marxist class analysis.’48 When he turned to analyse female respondents, he was again able to identify one basic pattern which ‘is the same across all countries: women are much more proletarianized than men’. There are, however, ‘very sharp differences’ in the class distributions of males and females in his subject countries. Women in three English-speaking countries (the United States,

Lessons from Comparative Theories 33

Canada, and the U.K.) were more than twice as likely to exercise authority in the workplace than in Sweden and Norway, and six times more likely than in Japan, but at this point the cross-cultural variations outrun the time and space for explanations. Unfortunately, this is also the case with the host of variations that arise in the most innovative part of his study, a comparison of cross-societal variations in the ‘permeability’ of three class boundaries, those of ownership, authority and skill, to three kinds of cross-class movement, inter-generational mobility, friendship and marriage. Among other things he found that marriage across the property barrier, and inter-generational mobility across the authority barrier, is rather higher in the U.S. than in Sweden, while marriage across the authority barrier is somewhat lower, and friendship across the property barrier very much lower.49 Among women in all these societies, however, the property barrier is more permeable than both the authority and skill barriers, which is a result, he suggested, of ‘the operation of marriage markets’.50 After provocatively identifying a somewhat bewildering number of such variations, he could, however, identify a reassuring uniformity, among men at least, which lends ‘support to the general expectation in Marxist class analysis that the property dimension of the class structure remains the most fundamental in capitalist societies.’ The ‘boundary Marxists predict to be the least permeable is indeed the least permeable’, and it is the least permeable of all in the ‘most capitalist society’ of all, the United States.51 What are we to make of these ingenious and provocative comparisons? Do they mean that Djilas’s critique was not quite so fatal after all and that he had no need to upend Marx? Or that Marxist theory has a previously unsuspected potential for comparative analysis? Wright’s use of Marx is, one must first observe, both selective and inventive, both less and more than ‘the usual Marxist analysis’. Less, because it is Marx without wheels. He says nothing about the dynamics over time of the ‘more complex class antagonisms’ that he referred to. More, because Marx and Marxists have not said much about ‘permeability’, or about crosscultural differences in mobility, friendship and marriage, and their theoretical contribution to this part of his research is fanciful, a thought that seems to have crossed his mind.52 More importantly in the present context, it is clear that having provided the model, Marx can make no contribution to any of the ‘departures’ from it. Wright was then out on his own, and almost invariably responded with ad hoc, compressed references to political events and decisions, such as the references mentioned above to Sweden’s ‘social democratic compromise’ to explain their lesser managerial controls, or to the ‘heavy influence of (its) macro-societal context’ to explain its higher class polarization, or to Japan’s ‘concrete organizational context’ and the defeat of its militant unions in the early 1950s to explain its low level of class consciousness.53 He did not, therefore, propose any new theory or method of comparative analysis that might make sense of the many

34 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

cross-societal variations his surveys threw up, excusing himself on the grounds that his data did not allow him to evaluate ‘alternative explanations of the cross-societal patterns in class formation we have been mapping out.’ ‘Ultimately’, he thought, ‘this would require constructing an account of the historical trajectory in each country of class struggles and institution building, especially of unions, parties and states.’ A satisfactory comparative analysis would, in other words, focus on political events and decisions, in a continuous and systematic manner rather than his own ad hoc random references.54 It is an odd conclusion, more contrary perhaps to the ‘usual Marxist analysis’ than anything else in his work, but then he did not pursue all the ‘anomalies’ and ‘departures’ from Marxist writ with equal vigour or interest. The outstanding example is his finding that Sweden was not only the most classpolarized society, but also had the most public employment and was the most unionized. This naturally leads one to suppose that class polarization has less to do with capitalist development than with the political decisions that led to both the extension of public ownership and to the encouragement of trade union membership, but he does not entertain the thought.55 In the end, his work impresses more for its devotion to the Marxist cause, and to the ingenuity and perseverance with which he seeks to salvage Marx’s theory, than for the discovery of some previously overlooked Marxist method of comparative investigation. He showed that Marx’s theory can serve as a heuristic model, though no one ever doubted that. Djilas used it as such. He utterly failed, however, to show that cross-societal variations of authority or social mobility or intermarriage or managerial control, or any of the other variables he identified, are illuminated in any way by reference to Marx. Far from providing any promising analytical categories or strategies that would enable us to improve on Djilas’ rudimentary argument, he could only suggest that ‘ultimately’ it would be necessary to do precisely what Djilas had begun to do 40 years earlier when he had outlined the ‘historical trajectory’ of the formation of a new class in Soviet Russia.56 Wright did not therefore provide a demonstrably superior method of comparative analysis, or indeed any method at all. And since none of the earlier twentieth-century theorists we considered have provided any insight into the variations in the class structures of the societies to which they referred, we can only try to learn from the one comparative theory that has stood the test of time rather well, that of Djilas. His theory was, as we have observed, fragmentary and lop-sided, so we still have to devise an analytical framework which will enable us to identify and compare variations in the class structures of both socialist and capitalist societies. But we may take one important lesson from Djilas’s effort, namely that such a framework should enable us to identify and compare the political events and decisions, as well as the political actors and organizations, that may have contributed to the formation of classes.

3 What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them?

Class defined The first step in devising a framework of comparative analysis must be to define the phenomena under investigation – classes. And it follows from the preceding discussion that a usable definition of them must not incorporate any explanation of their origins or determinants, whether political or economic, and must leave us free to assess any possible contributor to their formation. We can satisfy this requirement by defining classes as enduring, horizontally-demarcated segments of a national population whose members distinguish themselves from those they consider above or beneath them in the belief that they have common interests and share a distinct way of life. The common interests of classes may be either privileges they enjoy or injustices from which they suffer, but in either case they transcend those of particular regions, industries or occupations. Classes may be regional when they first emerge, and may well remain more clearly identified in one region of a country rather than another, or among some occupations rather than others, but they are national phenomena. And they endure over time. They are not therefore responses to some passing grievance or distress. Members of a class may define and express their shared interests by the foundation of some kind of purposeful association that disseminates them, and less consciously by the creation of, and participation in, distinctive institutions that separate members of one class from other members of the same society and enable the class to reproduce itself by transmitting its loyalties, habits and ideals to future generations. In the course of creating their own associations and maintaining their own institutions members of a class necessarily interact more readily with one another than with other members of their society, and are therefore likely to respond to political, economic and social changes in a similar manner, to find similar ideals and ideologies appealing, and over time therefore to form distinctive sub-cultures and communities.1 35

36 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

It follows that classes are audible and visible social phenomena. They are in E.P. Thompson’s memorable phrase, ‘something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.’ 2 Their emergence and their careers can therefore be documented in records of their collective actions, of the associations and institutions they have created, and with evidence from workplaces, or from political, religious, educational and recreational activities. Since their associations and institutions both create and depend on inter-personal obligations and loyalties, they are also, one might add, moral phenomena, with a collective consciousness and even conscience, rather than mere economic interest groups. This definition seems to fulfil the basic requirement of comparative analysis, in that it provides generic terms to describe all possible cases that might present themselves for analysis, and does not make any assumptions about the origins of classes or their interests. Socialist societies need not, therefore, remain in a classless, undefined, benign limbo. Nor need capitalist societies be assumed to be ‘intrinsically’ class societies. It also allows us to examine the emergence and dynamics of classes without being locked into the view that they are exclusively, or primarily, the product of economic development, or that there is a predetermined or theoretically-derived number of them in any society, or that they inherently or invariably conflict with one another, or that all members of a society are necessarily members of one class or another. We may therefore consider the possibility of stable, class relationships during periods of rapid economic transformation, or of radical changes in the class system during periods of economic stability, and even of a decline in class sentiments, while inequalities of income and property are increasing, a combination that we have already noticed may be of some relevance in contemporary England.3

The two agents of class formation Having defined classes, the next task is to identify the actors that might contribute to their formation or dissolution. As befits an initial exploration, we may define these actors in the broadest and least controversial way possible, and say there are just two: the state and civil society. If the latter be taken to include any form of collective action whose initiation and continuation depends primarily on private individuals rather than on the authority of the state or on family obligations, there can be no other relevant actors, and no other form of collective action in any society. While families may belong to classes, and help reproduce them, they can hardly contribute to the formation of a class unless they federate or organize with others, whereupon they become a part of civil society. Our investigation will therefore be comparing the capacities and inclinations of states and civil societies to contribute to the formation or dis-

What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them? 37

solution of classes and their effectiveness in doing so over time. Moreover, since one is the only possible ally or opponent of the other, it follows that the relationship between them must be the key to understanding the formation and fate of classes in any society, and the central focus of any comparative analysis of class formation. That being so, we cannot begin the investigation presuming that we already know what that relationship is. We cannot assume, for instance, that the actions of one have been determined by the other, that the state for instance necessarily depends on employers, or that associations of either employers or workers are a necessary consequence of reaching a certain stage of economic development. These two actors must initially be considered independent of one another – artificial as that may be – and their relationships and inter-dependence, or their degree and forms of collaboration or conflict, determined by examining the evidence in each case. In any other social science, this caveat would not be necessary, but economic determinism has been so deeply entrenched in sociological thought, and especially, as we have already noted, in the study of class, and along with it the idea that certain interrelationships can be pre-judged rather than remain open pending empirical investigation. It may have declined somewhat in recent times, but not that much. Devine and Savage declared, in the volume devoted to Renewing Class Analysis published in 2000, that ‘economic determinism … has cast a long shadow over class analysis in the last fifty years.’ However, neither they, their co-editors, nor their contributors, seemed quite ready to step out of it. Their co-editors proclaimed, for instance, that ‘processes of production, distribution and consumption … are class processes, and they produce classes.’ They then applauded all their contributors for attaching ‘primary importance to the study of economic and market processes’, and sought ‘a renewal of the core concerns of the sociology of class and stratification by considering the sociological implications of new processes of economic restructuring and the generation of material inequalities.’ In the circumstances their own final recommendation, that ‘the economic should be brought back into class analysis’, albeit ‘as a set of practices that are imbued with cultural meanings and experiences’, seemed a trifle redundant.4 The present investigation will, hopefully, step more decisively out of this ‘long shadow’, and make no assumptions about the two main actors whose behaviour and relationship will be central focus of the analysis. Instead, we will simply introduce them, and briefly consider the power and resources they may each bring to the task of making or breaking classes. States invariably have a formidable armoury of powers, by virtue of their capacity to act on, and differentiate between sections of the entire population of a nation. They may, for instance, decide to tax their citizens, or grant or withhold legal, political or social rights selectively, and in so doing divide and stratify the population in ways that are nationally recognized

38 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

and enforced, and thereby assist the formation of classes. States may also, of course, use their powers to unmake or dissolve classes. Educational institutions controlled by the state have been an especially powerful instrument in both respects, class-forming and class-dissolving, since schools not only influence the aspirations, relationships and manners of their pupils, but also determine, to a considerable degree, how, when, and at what level, they enter the labour market and their fate within it. State-supported educational institutions are most likely to be class-forming when they are selective at an early age, and offer distinctive curricula and careers for those selected. They are likely to be class-inhibiting or class-dissolving when they are open to the entire population, and have abundant entry and re-entry points. The only class distinction that schools can then help to form is that between those who attend and graduate from them and those who do not. States may also help to form classes by the way they provide welfare services, but this is likely to vary with the duration and universality of the provision. Housing, for instance, seems likely to have a greater potential than unemployment benefit, since public-supported housing is seldom offered to the entire population, and thereby tends to create permanently segregated, instantly recognizable, residential communities with some common interests. Unemployment benefits, by contrast, are more likely to be temporary, and are therefore less likely to be class-forming. The British National Health Service (NHS) was designed as a universal service from the very beginning, and is therefore a rather unusual welfare institution that has few recognizable class differences in access or delivery, and can therefore contribute only to the dissolution of classes. It has proved difficult to reform, or to combine with private provision, precisely because of fear that this would mean ‘second class’ medical care for a section of the population. The English may have been class-ridden, but they have evidently created at least one institution that treats everyone equally, without regard to their class background. Orwell did not mention it, but then he did not live to see it in action for long. If states happen to differentiate the population simultaneously in two or more of the ways mentioned, and these happen to coincide, then their class-forming potential is of course increased. State powers, however, probably need no further emphasis or elaboration. They are so considerable that any selective state policy, whatever its intention, may contribute to the formation of classes. States may well, in other words, help to create classes inadvertently. We will soon encounter examples. There is, however, no reason to suppose that their powers are unlimited, and perhaps the more open and interesting question for investigation concerns the limits of their powers, when civil societies either fail to respond to their class-forming or class-dissolving initiatives, or actually oppose them. The idea that civil society, or organized groups within civil society, are agents of class formation, seems somewhat novel at first, though only

What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them? 39

because we have long grown accustomed to being told that classes are formed spontaneously and exclusively by economic resources and relationships, or by market transactions. If classes exist at all, however, it follows from the definition proposed above, as indeed from most others, that their members must have transcended their particular labour market situations, and begun to identify themselves, and organize themselves, not only at their workplaces, but in the wider society. In that event, politics must be involved, since whether, when and how any civil society has organized has been decisively affected by political decisions and is not simply a product of blind economic forces. We may now, therefore, identify some of the organized interests in civil society that are likely to have contributed to the formation of classes. The first example that springs to mind, especially after discussing Djilas’s analysis of the new class, are political parties. For a long time, many analysts were inclined to see them simply as derivative expressions of previously formed or half-formed class interests, the classic statement of this view being that of Duverger.5 Lenin was probably the first exponent of the contrary view, that political parties were themselves agents of class formation, and Djilas might be said to have been following him, though they were referring of course to different classes. It was some time, however, before Western social analysts came to accept this possibility, and incorporate it into their analyses. Sartori seems to have been the first to do so. ‘To put it bluntly,’ he exclaimed, ‘it is not the “objective” class … that creates the party, but the party that creates the “subjective” class … The party is not a consequence of the class. Rather, and before, it is the class that receives its identity from the party … large collectivities become class structured only if they are class persuaded.’6 Thereafter the idea became a more familiar one. Cannadine later put it succinctly. ‘The task of politicians’, he observed, ‘is the creation and manipulation of social identities, sometimes articulated in the language of class, sometimes not. It is not so much that “real” social identities directly inform and animate party politics, it is that party politics is concerned with creating social identities.’7 There is, unfortunately, no convenient empirical indicator which would enable us to determine whether, or how far, political parties have merely been articulating the grievances of existing classes that they hope to enlist as electoral supporters, or have themselves been creating or reinforcing new class identities and loyalties, or of course undermining them. In the belief that the new class had no predecessor, Djilas thought that it was a clear-cut case of a class created by a party, but his initial assumption is not beyond dispute. Deciding whether parties are creators, or merely voices, of classes seems still more difficult in representative democracies, and probably only to be decided with the available evidence to hand in each case. For the moment, we may simply acknowledge that political parties are potential agents both of class formation and of class dissolution, the latter being

40 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

more likely, of course, if they decline to address themselves to a particular class and try to appeal indiscriminately to the entire electorate. Private schools are a second voluntary organized interest in civil society that might contribute to the formation of classes, especially if they are numerous enough to collectively constitute a distinct sector of the educational system. Like political parties, they also have often been seen merely as derivative and dependent, as vehicles of classes or class interests that preceded them, but they obviously have no less a claim to be considered as active agents of class formation, as originators and perpetuators of classes in their own right, than state educational institutions since they may socialize their students no less indelibly. Hence, the contribution of public and private schools to the formation or dissolution of classes has to be scrutinized anew in each case. How open or selective is their recruitment? How different are their curricula? Do their differences have national reach and recognition? Are they linked to other educational institutions, or the labour market, in distinctive ways? Organized occupations, such as professional associations and trade unions, are a third set of potential agents of class formation in civil society. Occupations have long been used as fundamental reference points by which class membership is identified. The very first question Marx thought of asking workers in the questionnaire he designed for the Revue Socialiste in 1883 was: what is your occupation?8 Later students of classes, like those we have discussed above, were therefore only following in his footsteps when they took occupations as basic units of classes. Like Marx, however, they usually assumed that occupations were passive, inert, uniform units of the larger class formations which were the main actors, and the main subject of interest and investigation. However, since we are considering the way classes have been formed, we must consider and compare organized occupations as constituent actors, and examine the ways they may, or may not, have helped to shape or reinforce classes. As already noted, their form and functions may differ greatly. Some professional associations are powerful self-governing bodies, which control the training, admission, work jurisdiction and behaviour of their members, and can organize and mobilize virtually all the members of their own occupation, while others are merely pressure groups, or provide optional services for those practising professionals who care to join. Similarly, some trade unions sharply differentiate between blue and white collar workers, and hence may reinforce this particular distinction, and give it a class character. Others recruit, promiscuously and indiscriminately, blue collar and white collar workers alongside technicians and professionals, and hence may either mobilize classes on a different basis, or undermine them altogether. If occupations, whether non-manual or manual, are entered after an extended, and mandatory, period of practice-based and practitionercontrolled training, they will probably have high rates of self-recruitment,

What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them? 41

and their solidarity and potential contribution to class formation will probably be greater than those that require only a formal educational qualification, and may be entered at any age. All organized occupations, however, even those without any kind of practice-based training, are potential agents of class formation, since they have spontaneous and continuous networks of communication, and therefore find it easy to persuade their members of their common interests, to internalize and uphold invidious distinctions against outsiders, and of course, to act collectively. Their ability to organize nationally is particularly important. After pointing out that classes could not be defined merely by ‘their common conditions of life’ or by an ‘identity of interests’, Marx observed that something more was required: ‘In so far as there is merely local contact – in so far as the identity of their interests does not produce a community, national association, and political organization – they do not constitute a class.’9 On all three counts, our definition of class allows us to agree with Marx, as long as political organization is taken to include all varieties of political action, and not simply parties who present candidates for political office, or organize coups d’etat or revolutions. On Marx’s first two counts, – forming a community and a national association – professions and trade unions have few rivals since these two things have been among their first items of business, and there are innumerable examples that they have done both effectively. German professional associations provide one of the more striking instances, since, as McClelland observed, they ‘carried out a large measure of standardisation and nationalisation of professional practice’ even before there was any genuine political structure one could call ‘Germany’, and even though individual states ‘retained ultimate legal competence over their activities.’10 More typically, of course, professions have followed the formation of the state, and if we exclude established churches, they have usually been the first national voluntary association of any kind, and followed by trade unions. Together, one might say, professions and trade unions have been the vanguard and flag-bearers of civil society. Both have gone on, at different rates in different places, to establish their preferred national occupational nomenclature and qualifications, and to enforce national standards of pay and conditions, and thereby organize national markets for their members’ services. To do these things has inevitably involved some kind of political action and some kind of response from the state. By regulating the workplace division of labour, they have also institutionalized their relationships with occupations above, equal or below them, and positioned themselves in the nationwide hierarchy of occupations, and thereby, it seems safe to say, contributed to the formation of classes. Marx, however, did not think that occupations could or would provide the ‘community, national association and political organization’ that he thought were needed to form a class. On the contrary, he argued that class

42 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

solidarity would require the elimination of occupational solidarity, a process that he thought the advance of the capitalist mode of production would complete, much as it had, in his view, already obliterated occupational loyalties of professionals. These processes cannot, however, be prejudged in this manner. If we stick to our original requirement that all organized interests of civil society be treated as independent actors, they must be decided by empirical investigation. Did occupational solidarity decline in our four societies as the capitalist mode of production advanced? If it did not, and at first glance there is little reason to think that the solidarity of the professions declined, was it true, as Marx assumed, that occupational solidarity inhibited class solidarity, and that class solidarity only emerged as it declined and disappeared? By comparison with organized professions and trade unions, another organized interest in civil society, entrepreneurs and employers, was a late starter. Although often portrayed as founding members of civil society, national associations of capitalist employers were long preceded by those of professions and unions.11 The artisans’ tour de France and the English craftsmen’s ‘tramp’ were well-established national institutions when most employers had thought only of organizing in their own towns.12 English barristers began to organize their inns of court in London in the late thirteenth century, and were quite well-organized, nationally-recognized bodies by the sixteenth, by which time they had been joined by physicians. By that time also, journeymen and apprentices in the City of London had formed their own corporate institutions within their guilds, and these were the kernel from which national trade unions later emerged, which they did long before their capitalist employers had created any kind of national association to succeed the guilds. In most countries, as we will see, employers have only organized nationally in response to the associations of their employees, in particular their skilled employees.13 If class requires national organization, then owners of capital, entrepreneurs or employers are not the pre-eminent class-builders they are sometimes cracked up to be. They have, it is true, certain decided advantages. Being few in number, and having adequate resources at their disposal, they have less need of permanent national communication networks, and less need perhaps than professions and trade unions to find ways of maintaining the solidarity of their members. Their solidarity and common interests cannot, however, be taken for granted. After all, they do, sometimes, compete with one another, and some win out at the expense of others. And their economic capital is not immediately convertible into social capital. This is hardly a controversial observation. The histories of organized labour demonstrate over and over again, that propertyless workers can generate abundant amounts of social capital, and often of symbolic capital, as well as one form of capital that Bourdieu rather slighted, the craft capital of their knowledge and dexterity.14 Entrepreneurs and employers seem more

What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them? 43

inclined to use their symbolic and social capital for the benefit of their own companies, rather than on behalf of entrepreneurs or property owners as a class. There is no reason to believe that employers caught up, so to speak, and that their solidarity as a class has increased as the amount of financial capital invested in their enterprises has increased. The opposite is more likely since the roles of investor, entrepreneur and employer which were combined in the early stages of industrialization were then differentiated and diverged. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, an everlarger proportion of capital came to be controlled by institutions rather than by individuals. Members of the Investment Managers Association (IMA) of the U.K., for instance, currently have ‘under management’ some £2,000 billion.15 The decisions about where and how this vast sum should be invested are taken by salaried experts, or supposed experts, whose main goal is to find companies which offer a good return on an investment, either by way of dividends or growth, or the possibility of a takeover bid. Although these fund managers occasionally organize to press their common interests on company boards or governments, it is difficult to take them as agents or representatives of a capitalist class, let alone members of it, since they are accountable only to their individual clients, rather than to a collection or class of them. If these clients are nevertheless thought to form or belong to a class, then the existence of the class clearly has to be demonstrated by some means other than the fund in which they happen to have invested. The idea that all investors or savers in all the managed funds listed in the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal form a class, or a fragment thereof, is absurd. Fund managers are also rather poor representatives or spokespersons of a supposed capitalist class. They seldom talk in public, and are reluctant to act, as every crusading financial journalist and activist shareholder knows. In company disputes, they usually prefer to remain completely passive. Abstaining is their idea of a protest vote. Of the three options that Hirschman suggested were open to dissatisfied members of organizations, exit, loyalty, voice, they invariably prefer the first – the Wall Street walk – withdrawing from one company’s stock and looking for more promising opportunities elsewhere.16 The vast accumulations of capital in contemporary capitalism, therefore, have no articulate representatives, other than an occasional self-appointed oddity, like Calpers or Warren Buffett or Yoshiaki Murakami, or perhaps an ad hoc shareholders’ association. They therefore have no class loyalty or voice. Contemporary accumulations of capital are classless, not measures of the power of the capitalist class. Most analysts of class, however, starting with Marx, have been less concerned with the capacity of capitalists to form a class amongst or for themselves, which they often take for granted, than with their capacity to provoke the formation of a working class amongst their employees. Since

44 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

this process has often been assumed to be natural or automatic, it is worth distinguishing between employers’ capacity to generate inequalities and their capacity to create classes. The former is limitless and endless. Capitalism is, by its very nature, a prodigious, perpetual engine of inequality, continuously generating and reproducing inequalities as a matter of daily routine, rewarding some owners and investors, some managers and even some workers, while pitilessly punishing others. However, its significant characteristic is that it does not reproduce and reiterate, just one fundamental and lasting inequality, but successive inequalities, which may imperfectly overlap with, and therefore blur, fragment, or intersect their predecessors. Its inequalities are therefore continuous in a statistical sense, rather than discrete, though sociologists may, of course, present them discretely, by for instance, taking the top quintile or decile of property owners, or the mean incomes of various kinds of occupations, and thereby create ‘class’ distinctions in their own homes.17 Moreover, income inequalities are not only continuous. They are also dynamic and unstable, rather than categorical and durable, and need not, therefore, contribute to the formation of classes. Left to itself, capitalism tends to produce only economic differentiation and inequality rather than classes, which is another way of repeating what has become a truism since the work of E.P. Thompson, namely that the formation of a working class requires imagination, determination, and courage, as well as organizational skill, and it also requires a supportive political environment. It is not an automatic by-product of employers seeking a profit. There is no reason, therefore, why the numerous inequalities that individual employers continuously generate among their employees, – in power, income, career prospects, security of employment, holiday entitlements, bonuses and expense accounts, and shareholding or pension arrangements – should be converted into national classes. They seem most likely to assume a class-like form in company towns, or single-industry towns or regions where employers are well-organized, and the distinctions they impose are widely-known, consistent with one another, and embrace an entire community. Industries with national associations and national collective bargaining, may also give the inequalities they create a wider, regional or national significance, though in such cases, employers usually require the collaboration of the state or of trade unions, or both. More commonly, individual employers seem to have preferred to act independently in the marketplace, and to have lacked either effective mechanisms or strong incentives, to enforce national standards of income and status. Such differentiation as they imposed on their employees could often, therefore, remain idiosyncratic and local. It was trade unions and professional associations that forced them to recognize national qualifications and national rates, and to take part in national bargaining. This was clearly grasped by the Thatcher and Major governments in the 1980s and 1990s in Britain.

What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them? 45

Both consistently sought to dismantle national bargaining structures erected by professions and trade unions, so that employers could respond to diverse local market conditions. The former protested, the latter did not.

How will we identify classes? This completes the preliminaries, a rather modest set perhaps. All we have done is define classes, identify the two main agents of their formation, suggest that the relationship between them should be the focus of comparative analysis, and indicate the phenomena, and the kind of evidence, that will enable us to identify classes: a recognition of some common interests, collective activities, associations, and institutions, habits and ways of life that distinguish their members from others in their own society. Everything else remains to be decided in the light of the available evidence. We have said nothing about the number of classes that we might expect to find in these societies, and have not suggested that they are symmetrical or together form a system, or made any of the standardizing, procrustean assumptions common in comparative studies of social mobility, such as the idea that everyone in a society must belong to one class or another. We are ready, therefore, to recognize classes of varying shapes and sizes, in various stages of formation, in differing states of vitality and passivity, and with different bases of organization and solidarity. In an exploratory study, drawing on secondary sources, it would be foolish and counter-productive to impose overly stringent requirements before recognizing a class. We will not, therefore, insist that a class should have organized all or even a majority of its potential members in the country, or that its members should have united in a single national association, or that they should participate equally in its collective institutions or demonstrate a uniform lifestyle and culture, or subscribe to a common ideology. Outsiders, with little direct personal experience of a particular class, commonly tend to exaggerate their homogeneity, as Marx exaggerated that of ‘the proletariat’, and Orwell that of the lower middle class.18 Those who have studied classes most carefully, on whose evidence we will rely, have invariably found all sorts of distinctions within them, co-existing with solidarity against outsiders.19 We might reasonably expect therefore to find that classes have an organized core and a larger, less organized periphery, less conscious of their class membership. Since we will be tracking classes over time, we will also be ready to find emergent, half-formed, fragmentary and even episodic classes, and since the quality of the available evidence varies, we also expect to find ambiguous cases, classes about which there is still room for doubt and disagreement. That said, however, there are limits on what we can accept as a class. We can hardly recognize a class that has failed to create any distinctive collective associations, or uphold any distinctive and enduring institutions,

46 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

that has never displayed any inter-occupational, inter-regional or intergenerational solidarity, or a class whose supposed members have never recognized themselves, or been recognized by other members of their own society, as a class. It follows that many of the classes known only to their authors, and identified and labelled them by some ‘objective’ criterion they themselves consider important, or by some interest that they believe ought to unite a class, will not be recognized as classes in this investigation, whatever their uses in various kinds of social, market or electoral analysis may be. Wright drew a distinction between what he called ‘processual’ criteria of class, meaning that classes are recognized ‘above all by the lived experiences of people’ and seen as ‘an embodiment of the past in the present’, and ‘structural’ criteria, meaning they are recognized by ‘the objective conditions facing different actors’, and seen as ‘an embodiment of possible futures in the present.’20 All of the former we can identify will figure in this investigation, and none of the latter, since they have not been seen and heard over time, and their ‘possible futures’ might well turn out to be figments of their authors’ imagination. Classes are here, to repeat E.P. Thompson’s words, ‘something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.’ Amongst those excluded therefore are the quintiles and deciles drawn from analyses of the distributions of national wealth and income, and often taken as class proxies, as well as the numerical classes, categories and divisions invented by census bureaux, social scientists and market researchers for their own purposes, including the seven classes originally defined by the RegistrarGeneral of the United Kingdom in 1911, as well as the somewhat similar seven used in the Oxford Mobility Project, and later amended in the Comarative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations (Casmin). These included a ‘service’ class, which was originally defined as ‘those exercising power and expertise on behalf of corporate bodies plus such elements of the classic bourgeoisie (independent businessmen and ‘free’ professionals) as are not yet assimilated into this new formation.’21 Apart from failing to identify any collective associations or institutions that have distinguished those ‘exercising power and expertise on behalf of corporate bodies’ or any process of assimilation, the main indicator of its collective existence was demographic, meaning that ‘its members’, as they were called, ‘despite their diverse origins, display a high degree of both intergenerational stability and worklife continuity’, criteria that would allow a sociologist to create as many classes as he or she cared to. The classes included in this investigation are, by contrast, distinguished by their members’ collective actions and institutions, by boundaries they and others recognize, and by historical or contemporary records of their collective actions. It seems improbable that any members of this supposed service class, or anyone else, were aware that they belonged to it. When, however, either the Registrar-General’s or Casmin’s seven classes are collapsed into middle and working classes, they immediately become eligible, since

What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them? 47

there is documentary evidence of a collective awareness and collective institutions among both. Lots of other classes, exciting as they often sound, are also left by the wayside. Brooks, for instance, argued that, over the past two decades or so, a class of ‘bobos’ had emerged in the United States, combining an old bourgeois ethos with a bohemian spirit and an enthusiasm for equality, fitness and environmentalism, but had no evidence as yet of their collective organization, sentiments or actions as a class.22 Florida’s ‘creative’ class, consisting of all those who ‘create meaningful new forms’, will also be excluded, as will his version of the ‘service’ class, consisting of those who ‘take care of the creative class and do their chores.’23 Zweig’s ‘secret’ American working class, which consists, of the 60% of the American labour force who ‘have relatively little control over the pace and content of their work’ is also, for the same reason, ignored.24 It is a class that Zweig virtually admits does not actually exist, though he would very much like to summon it into existence. Many of its members refer to themselves as middle class, and show no signs that they belong, or wish to belong to, an organized working class. Mount’s ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ must also be excluded, simply because he also provided no evidence of collective actions or institutions that define one or other or distinguish one from another.25 His ‘downers’ seem close to being an underclass, which one might add is also ineligible, not because it does not exist, but because it is defined largely by the absence of any kind of collective association, institution or identity. Taking to heart one lesson from the earlier review of comparative analyses, we will compare England with just three other societies, Russia, France, and the United States, which allows both author and reader a reasonable chance of keeping track of historical events and institutional variations that might make a difference to the way classes in these three societies have been formed, defined or dissolved. Even though limited to this relatively small number of cases, the ground to be covered is vast, and we can therefore examine only a sample of the available evidence. Hopefully it is a reasonably representative one, since no effort has been made to select studies from any particular point of view, only to find those that shed light on the collective activities that have distinguished one class from another, or the interests that have united them and explain their solidarity. As far as possible, the investigation focuses on the results of the research rather than its methodology or sources. Initially, it sought to steer clear of the debates that some of them have provoked, on the grounds that entering them, let alone trying to resolve them, would scupper the investigation by making it interminable. This proved to be a hopelessly naïve aspiration, and I have to opt for one side or the other, often no doubt after insufficient evaluation of their relative merits. No effort is made to generate new evidence, or report the very latest research. Any discoveries, or shocks in the course of the investigation therefore arise, not from the revelation of hitherto unknown data,

48 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

but simply from the juxtaposition and re-consideration of long-familiar, and occasionally long-forgotten, evidence that comparison necessarily entails. As befits an investigation which was provoked by Orwell, and resumes a dialogue with Djilas, we will begin with the society which preoccupied them both – Russia.

4 Class Formation in Two Russias

Russia is the extreme case of the use of political power to make or break classes, but it is tsarist, not Soviet, Russia, that deserves first consideration, since it provides a much longer-lasting and more durable example of a state’s attempt to control and manage the stratification of its society, a point that both Djilas and his critics overlooked. As it has turned out, Soviet Russia’s efforts in this direction were relatively brief, and in any case it is hardly possible to know what should be attributed to Soviet policy in this respect without knowing something of the stratification that preceded it.

The official classes of Imperial Russia The basic criterion of social differentiation in Imperial Russia, the great social divide which predated the Romanovs, was the form of state obligation, between those who rendered personal service to the tsar and were tax exempt, the so-called muzhi or liudi, the big men, meaning the nobility, military and civil officials, as well as the more prosperous merchants, versus the little men, the muzhiki, the tiaglo-bearers, whose obligations were defined collectively and who paid taxes in addition to their labour services.1 The clergy did neither, but for most purposes belonged with the muzhi. Service created a distinctive frame of mind, what Raeff called ‘the basic normative framework for individual and social relationships’ in Imperial Russia.2 Any investigation of its classes must therefore begin by recognizing this prior division between those who rendered personal service to the tsar, held appointments in the imperial bureaucracy, and acted in his name, and the rest of the population who were subject to them. Peter the Great (1682–1725) laid the foundations of this bureaucracy, and it was to remain a superior source of power, prestige and authority, and the pre-eminent social reference point throughout the Imperial era. He arranged all military and civil offices in a ‘Table of Ranks’, which differentiated the responsibilities 49

50 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

of 14 military and civil positions. All military ranks in the Table, and initially the top eight civil ranks, were hereditary noble ranks, though pressure from the nobility later prompted it to be limited to the top five, and later four, civil ranks.3 Over time, the legally-imposed and enforced rules of the Table of Ranks came to be seen as very much more than specifying positions in a bureaucratic hierarchy. In Bennett’s words, they defined ‘norms of private acceptability’, and ‘as categories in which the world worked.’4 Active measures were taken to ensure that these ‘norms’ were properly observed in daily life, by appointing inspectors to mingle in polite society and identify ‘insolent individuals’ who claimed a higher rank than that to which they were formally entitled. Although there was no legal collective term for all those who held an official rank or chin, they came in time to be colloquially referred to as chinovniki, and became stock figures in Russian literature. Outsiders therefore clearly recognized their collective identity, which prompts one to wonder whether they might themselves be considered as a class. They had, of course, a number of things in common. Their power and status emanated from the same source, and they all acted in the name of the tsar, and one may infer that they felt a common interest in the continuation of the regime and the existing social order. They all had lifetime careers and, after Catherine the Great’s (1762–1796) rather casual decision, could expect automatic promotion every seven years, and after Paul I (1796–1801) every three years, though selection to the four most senior ranks, the generalitet, required the personal approval of the tsar.5 Although positions were not hereditary, selection procedures favoured the sons of existing office-holders, and hence provided a means of occupational inheritance.6 All officials had designated titles and forms of address. Ranks nine to 14, for instance were all to be addressed as ‘your honour’ and their precedence in ceremonial rituals and official dress were spelt out in the Code of Laws. The Muscovite tradition of ‘feeding off’ the population, which ‘gave the civil service free rein to exploit the country, as long as it turned over its fixed share to the state’, continued informally even after the creation of a salaried civil service in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in the provinces. Noting the ways in which they converted the public service into an instrument of personal gain, Pipes decided in disgust, they ‘were not “public servants” at all’. Personal gain, however, had a collective dimension since they expected others to be similarly implicated in bribery, ‘instinctively ejected from their midst the overzealous and scrupulous’, and developed strong bonds ‘of mutual responsibility’. Such bonds, regardless of their purpose, may be considered a form of class solidarity.7 There were few whistleblowers. The notable missing element of a class is that they never formed a collective association by which they might articulate their interests, but then they had no more need of one than Djilas’s new class. The state apparatus

Class Formation in Two Russias 51

served as such. Wallace described chinovniki as ‘a peculiar kind of class’.8 Raeff also thought Russian officials ‘constituted a class’ rather than ‘a genuine bureaucracy’ since there was no ‘common legal language … between society and state.’9 Pipes described them as ‘a closed order’, with a ‘distinct tendency to form a closed, hereditary caste’, associating ‘only with their own kind, fawning on superiors and bullying inferiors.’10 One only hesitates to follow these authoritative sources because chinovniki were also divided in various ways, first by the ministry to which they were attached since each minister was individually responsible to the tsar, and only towards the end of the regime was there a prime minister or cabinet and any form of collective responsibility as a government.11 There was also an ‘almost unbridgeable gap’ between those who worked in St. Petersburg, and the other less educated four-fifths who worked in the 89 provincial administrations, leading one to doubt whether they ‘found it easy to interact with one another’ as members of the same class.12 Most importantly, there was a profound vertical cleavage in status and culture at the top of the Table of Ranks between the career officials, the bureaucrats, or pure chinovniki who had acquired nobility as a result of their promotion, and those who were born into it, and entered imperial service with a title, family estates and serfs. The latter tended to enter at a higher level than promoted commoners, either because they had attended schools reserved for nobility, or because they had risen through many ranks during their prior military service. They also seem to have enjoyed decided advantages in promotion to the highest ranks in the capital.13 Pipes referred to ‘a growing gulf’ between the two categories of dvoriane in the eighteenth century, and later to ‘two constituent elements of the service class’, perceptively noting that those born into the nobility were commonly referred to as dvoriany and never as chinovniki.14 Pintner’s evidence showed that in the midnineteenth century, there was still ‘no significant economic or social blending at the top’, meaning that career bureaucrats made no effort to emulate the land-owning nobility by acquiring estates and serfs, and there was little inter-marriage between the two elements.15 Even though we have accepted that classes may be internally differentiated, this division, as well as the departmental and capital/provincial fissures, raises the question whether the service nobility as a whole, ennobled bureaucrats as well as landowning hereditary nobility, had sufficient common interest and solidarity to form a single class. Perhaps we may best return to this question after considering the latter, the dvorianstvo, the hereditary landed nobility, as a class in its own right. All observers agree that it differed greatly from the land-holding aristocracies of Western Europe, whose members often bore the name of the place from which their family had sprung, and had ancestral claims not only to their land, but also to the loyalty of their retainers and dependants as well as that of the communities amongst whom they resided. Wallace, who

52 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

lived in Russia between 1870 and 1875, and came to know many members of the Russian nobility, put a common view. It differed, he said, from those of Western Europe in that ‘it was formed out of more heterogeneous materials, and these materials did not spontaneously combine to form an organic whole, but were crushed into a conglomerate mass by the weight of autocratic power. It never became a semi-independent factor in the State. What rights and privileges it possesses it received from the Monarchy … it has no hoary traditions or deep-rooted prejudices … has little or nothing of what we call aristocratic feeling. Hence there is a certain amount of truth in the oft-repeated saying that there is in reality no aristocracy in Russia.’16 Peter had intended that the property and honour of the nobility should derive exclusively from their continued service to him and their rank in his service. He therefore continued with methods that his predecessors had used to prevent the nobility acquiring and exercising any independent political or governmental power.17 As a deliberate act of policy, nobles’ property was scattered around the country, and they therefore lacked permanent ties with, or responsibilities for, any particular region. They were often required to exchange land and serfs they had been granted in one region for those in another. They were never appointed to serve in their ‘home’ territories, and constantly rotated from one region to another.18 The economic foundations of a powerful landed class were still further weakened by the nobles themselves, who insisted that their property, along with their titles, be inherited by all their male heirs. It was therefore sub-divided every generation.19 As a result, the Russian nobility was both extremely large and highly differentiated internally. Vast differences in wealth and lifestyle separated those with the ear of the tsar at the top of the Table of Ranks from those living in the profoundest poverty and ignorance alongside peasants in the countryside.20 Blum was in little doubt that Peter had succeeded in welding the servitor nobles into a single class so that ‘despite their internal stratification a sense of unity and cohesiveness grew among all levels … from the reign of Peter on.’ By the mid-eighteenth century, he observed, ‘nobles forthrightly identified themselves as belonging to a corporate body all of whose members shared the same interest and ambitions.’21 Blum, however, was not concerned to disentangle the ‘interest and ambitions’ they might share simply as members of a land-owning nobility from those that they might have acquired as officials, and therefore share with ennobled bureaucrats. Moreover, the eighteenth century was the high point in the corporate autonomy of servitor land-owning nobles, the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–1796) often being described as their ‘the golden age’. In 1736 Anne (1730–1740) had reduced their service requirement from life to 25 years, and one son was permanently excused from service if he managed the family property. During his short reign, Peter III (1761–1762) abolished the service requirement completely, and nobles were then free to

Class Formation in Two Russias 53

decide whether they wanted to serve or not. Although some decided to serve only for a limited period, there was no mass exodus from service back to their estates to build ties with local communities.22 By then, it seems, the idea that status derived primarily from state service was too well-entrenched. Catherine made many concessions to them no doubt because, as both a usurper and a foreigner, she felt in need of their support. In 1785 she promulgated the Dvorianstvo Charter. Besides leaving them with absolute powers over their serfs, this confirmed their freedom from compulsory state service and taxes, exempted them from corporal punishment, precisely defined the offences for which they could be deprived of their rank, and confirmed their full title to their land and its mineral resources, which they were allowed to exploit by establishing manufacturing and trading enterprises as they wished. She also granted them certain broad powers of local government through triennial assemblies of nobles established in every province.23 All these things were, however, by her gift, bestowed rather than won, as her son and successor Paul I (1796–1801) demonstrated by reversing them almost overnight, apparently to spite his dead mother.24 A small group of nobles then retaliated by assassinating him. Another group of nobles, the so-called Decembrists, later sought to assassinate Nicholas I (1825–1855) on the first day of his reign. Plots, however, are not much of a contribution to, or substitute for, the continuous use of corporate institutions to normalize the rights and privileges of a class. Of this, there was very little sign. Nobles appear to have seen their assemblies either as another kind of state service, or as social gatherings, rather than as a means of mobilizing and exerting sustained collective pressure on the tsar as a class of hereditary land-owning nobles – at least until the twilight of the regime.25 They never, therefore, converted them into parliamentary bodies, and they were not in any sense precursors of the later state dumas. Indeed, they only sprang to life at the end of the regime when a section of the nobility organized to oppose the state dumas.26 Pipes thought that all along the nobility were less interested in exercising political power as members of a corporate body than in their economic privileges and social status, and these depended primarily on their relationship with the tsar and the state, rather than on their membership of the nobility. Their serfs recognized the difference. ‘Serfs paid great attention to rank of their master’, Raeff observed. ‘They spoke reverently of “the general”, and never spoke of the “nobleman” with the same feeling of reverence and awe.’ They had ‘no respect for a noble without rank’, and even ‘snubbed masters with lower rank than that of their own.’27 After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a process of dispersal or decomposition among the noble estate commenced, and continued to the very end of the regime.28 The ‘broad easy road on which the proprietors had hitherto let themselves be borne along’, as Wallace put it, ‘suddenly split into a number of narrow, arduous, thorny paths.’29 A minority

54 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

converted themselves into commercial farmers, often with the help of mortgages on their remaining property. Some sought to live on their not very reliable redemption payments, perhaps as investors in government bonds or industrial stocks. Some became entrepreneurs, businessmen and professionals, and then identified themselves as members of the intelligentsia rather than the nobility.30 One imagines that Wallace met a disproportionate number of these, since few of the nobility he spoke to ‘were thinking about the rights and privileges of their class’ and were more interested in ‘the political liberty of the people as a whole.’31 Manning focused on the dwindling segment of the provincial landowning gentry who devoted themselves to their estates and to local public affairs, and who made use of the privileged position on the governing boards of the zemstva, the institutions of local government created as one of the great reforms in 1864. At first, zemstva had been the centre of gentry opposition to the regime and of demands for representative institutions. A number of gentry leaders, allied with ‘the third element’, the technically qualified employees of the zemstva, had even sought, both officially and unofficially, to enlist peasant support, and to do so had been quite willing to pay the price by agreeing to expropriation of their own land – albeit under certain conditions and with compensation. However, the peasant unrest following the urban revolution of 1905 changed everything. Since the angry peasants made little distinction between those who sympathized with their plight and those who did not, and were, if anything, more hostile to those who had sought to modernize their estates, many of the gentry fled the countryside, and joined in panic sales of land. The rump who remained ejected their progressive leaders and set about curbing ‘the third element’, whom they held responsible for stirring up the peasant unrest. After the election of the First State Duma in 1906, a majority of whose members were peasants, they became still more conscious of the threat to their way of life, and then organized nationally to resist any kind of expropriation of their land, any extension of the zemstva franchise, or any further advance towards constitutional or representative government. They became in fact resolute defenders of the autocratic powers of the tsar, against both elected dumas and the reform initiatives of the officials of the imperial bureaucracy. Their national organization rested on frequent congresses of representatives of the governing boards of the zemstva, on the resuscitation of the long-somnolent noble assemblies and the formation, in 1906, of a modernlooking political association, the United Nobility. This was far from being representative of the nobility as a whole.32 Over the next few years, however, it proved to be an effective pressure group, and could rely on support from the local marshals of the nobility whom the provincial nobles elected, from the appointed State Council – one quarter of whom joined the United Nobility, and which, on the creation of the state dumas, became the upper

Class Formation in Two Russias 55

house of the legislature – and from relatives, sympathetic officials and courtiers with the ear of the tsar. In sum, this tiny and most traditional fragment of the nobility, whose way of life seemed about to disappear, suddenly developed an extremely high degree of class consciousness and solidarity, and near-total agreement on their class interests. They distinguished themselves as independent country gentlemen from other members of the nobility who served as state officials, from those who had acquired professional qualifications and identified with the intelligentsia, and of course from those who participated as merchants and entrepreneurs in the rapidly emerging urban industrial economy. Over the last years of the regime they bested them all, most critically in the two years 1906–1907, when they blocked or amended beyond recognition virtually all of the reforms proposed by Stolypin. In so doing, they sealed the fate of the regime. By birth and upbringing, Stolypin himself belonged to this newlyemergent class of provincial landed nobility, but his career made him one of those who, as Orlovsky put it, saw themselves ‘more and more as bureaucrats, as servants of the state … rather than members of their hereditary legal estate.’33 Towards the end of the regime, it was in fact increasingly difficult to distinguish those within the administration who had inherited their titles from the military service of their forbears in earlier generations from the landless sons of the preceding generations of ennobled chinovniki.34 Although the hereditary landed nobility continued to be over-represented in higher positions until the very end, it is clear that their lineage and land counted for less. Orlovsky’s sample of 87 of the elite officials of the Ministry of Interior between 1855 and 1881 showed that 61% of them were landless, and the hereditary landed nobility amongst them appear to have earned their position more because of the exclusive schools they had attended than because of their birth.35 Despite the seniority rules, and despite their superiors’ prejudices, as well as those of the tsar, the service had become accustomed to promotion on merit, and commoners were certainly able to reach the very highest positions.36 Moreover the proportion of ex-military hereditary nobles in the service had also been declining right through the nineteenth century, and along with them, one imagines, the attitudes that had maintained the cultural divide between the two ‘constituent elements’ of the service in the past.37 Orlovsky’s evidence from the Ministry of the Interior also suggested that career advancement frequently involved mobility between ministries, as well as between central and provincial departments, and though officials in the latter were still less educated and less well-paid than those in the capital, one may infer that they too were coming to see themselves as career officials dependent for both their income and their status on their rank within the service.38 Nobles who still considered themselves primarily as landowners might seek refuge in a number of remaining ‘gentlemen’s enclaves’ within the administration, but it seems reasonable to conclude that by the end of the century a single service class was

56 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

emerging within the imperial administration around the values and shared interests of professional bureaucrats.39 Thus, although the hereditary landed nobility could not be said to have formed a single class, it had contributed to the emergence of two other classes: one mobilized to defend their remaining privileges, and the other owing more to their ancient obligation of personal service to the tsar. We will consider its contribution to yet a third, the intelligentsia, in a moment, after considering whether either of the other two officially-designated categories of the population, urban merchants and peasants, might be said to have formed classes. Elsewhere in Europe, urban merchants had emerged under the protection of the state, and had then often gone on to establish their corporate institutions and established a considerable degree of independence from it. No such sequence of development occurred in Imperial Russia. Russian merchants never had the opportunity to create their own towns, or develop their own institutions within them. Towns had emerged more as militaryadministrative outposts than as market centres. In the sixteenth century, the Grand Princes of Muscovy had confined merchants to specific quarters of them, called posady, from which they were to conduct their business. They were tied to their posady, much as serfs were tied to the land, and like a rural community they bore collective responsibility for the fulfilment of their hereditary tiaglo obligations, which were, if anything, still more onerous than those of serfs. These obligations and the restraints on their freedom might have been expected to prompt merchants to coalesce as a group or a class, but apart from the disturbances in several posady in 1648, they never demonstrated any spontaneous collective consciousness or action. Their economic opportunities were in fact limited, since princes, and later tsars, claimed ownership over basic raw materials like timber and coal, declared monopolies in certain traded products, such as salt, alcohol and potash, and were themselves proprietors of the early metalworking and textile factories. Others were farmed out and run by merchants and businessmen drafted for the purpose, much against their will, for despite the honour seemingly bestowed on them, they realized that they would have to give priority to the tsar’s business at the expense of their own.40 Peter had reduced the number of royal monopolies, and sought to encourage private enterprise and the emergence of an indigenous bourgeoisie by creating two classes of trading corporations or merchant guilds, similar as he thought to those he had observed in Western Europe. However, he continued to control industrial activity by means of licences and concessions: those supplying armaments, clothing and supplies to the military, being obliged to accept the condition that if any of their products were found unsatisfactory their enterprise reverted, in its entirety, to the state. Manufacturing and mining enterprises were still launched by drafting merchants to run them, along with the serfs who were to work in them.41

Class Formation in Two Russias 57

Catherine, who similarly hoped to encourage an indigenous bourgeoisie, added a third class of guild, and she went still further in reducing direct state ownership and management of economic activity. In 1762, anyone was free to start manufacturing establishments wherever they wanted, except for environmental reasons, in Moscow and St. Petersburg.42 However, since there were no laws or courts to define and uphold the rights of private property, and the guilds gave no sign of mobilizing to defend them, the distinction between public and private ownership meant little. Her officials retained ample means of intervening arbitrarily in any private economic activity. Members of the merchant guilds were privileged in certain ways. Members of the first two were exempt from military service, though not from the obligation to quarter troops. All three were exempt from the despised soul tax, though not as tax-free as the nobility and clergy, being taxed as corporate bodies. In that respect, they were no different from guilds in Western Europe, but unlike them, Russia’s guilds were not granted a monopoly or any protected jurisdiction in return for their taxes. Russian merchants always had to compete, therefore, with any dvoriane or clergymen who had a mind to take up their line of business, and indeed with any serfs who had been given freedom to start a business by their masters.43 Moreover, merchants proved no more capable than the nobility of converting the corporate institutions that had been granted them into a means of defending their collective interests and extending their rights. In practice, therefore, their guilds were simply a means of registering, controlling and taxing merchants, of forcing them to accept various administrative and fiscal obligations, not a means of freeing them from the supervision of the imperial bureaucracy.44 The history of Russian financial institutions illustrates their inability to convert hereditary obligations into collective solidarity. The first commercial exchange, established in St. Petersburg in 1703, was not the result of their initiative, but was imposed on them by Peter. Though given selfgoverning powers similar to those of the London and Amsterdam exchanges that he had observed, Peter ‘soon tired’, Rieber tells us, ‘of the sluggish and unsystematic response of his merchants’, and made the exchange responsible to the imperial bureaucracy. Over the next century, the government sought to ‘instil a sense of order, regularity and responsibility into the activities of the merchants dealing on the exchange’, periodically passing laws against ‘fighting, spreading unfounded rumours, engaging in political discussions and trading in paper securities.’45 Merchants only started to create their own exchanges in the 1830s and 1840s, but those in both Moscow and Rybinsk, had difficulty in persuading members to abandon their traditional private methods of dealing, and make use of the services of brokers. Lacking corporate institutions that elicited their loyalties and generated any sense of corporate pride and honour, merchants came to be, like the

58 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

nobility, dispersed over the entire social hierarchy, a few being the equals of the noblest servitors, while many were indistinguishable from trading peasants.46 The richest never became spokesmen for the rest, or enlisted the support of their assistants, clerks, and suppliers in any larger urban class formation or interest group. They did not provide any shelter for artisans whose products they sold, or serve as a model of civic independence for the artisan corporations that Peter had created alongside those of merchants.47 Entrepreneurs had no particular sympathy or ties with urban merchants, and no incentive to accept the obligations that membership of their guilds entailed. They tended therefore to avoid urban communities altogether, and to retain their original identity and legal status, whatever that might be, noble, priest or serf.48 Entrepreneurs were therefore outsiders, drawn from all classes, rather than being members of some new bourgeois or urban class formation, or a class of their own. Moreover, in the period of rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century when they began to appear in some numbers, a high proportion of those creating large-scale enterprises were foreigners, who could not be readily fitted into any indigenous collective institution or prestige ranking. Rieber reckoned that merchants were the most passive and submissive soslovie or estate, of the entire empire, and described them as lying ‘between opportunity and bondage’ with ‘one foot on the Table of Ranks and the other stuck fast in the legal and fiscal obligations of the urban community.’ Over the hundred years preceding the Crimean War, he recorded only one instance, in St. Petersburg in 1754, of ‘outright resistance … to official state policy’.49 Nor could later Russian merchants be said to have been ‘emerging’, ‘rising’, or ‘ascending’, as the bourgeoisies in the rest of Europe are commonly said to have been. If anything, Rieber thought, were declining during Russia’s period of industrialization at the turn of the century. Together, industrialists and merchants constituted 5.6% of the membership of the first duma of 1906, and some of them tried, but failed, to form their own party. McKean traced the activities of the St. Petersburg Society of Mill and Factory Owners, the most important of the several employers’ associations in the city. It did not, however, represent a cross-section of firms in the capital and was dominated ‘by a very small group of about eleven individuals’, almost all of whom were ‘of Swedish, German and French extraction.’50 After the failure of its attempts to secure representation in the First State Duma in 1906, the Society ‘divided on many issues’ and since it was later in a state of ‘near permanent dissension’, could hardly have been an effective instrument of class interest and pressure.51 When the Provisional Government assumed power in February 1917, manufacturers still had not organized as a class, or combined to defend their interests.52 Hence, we may conclude that while merchants, like the landed nobility as a whole, had formal legal characteristics and corporate institutions that might have defined them as a class, they did not respond to these initial

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cues from the state to communicate and collaborate with their peers, to define their common interests, or to assert their own collective identity and status independently of the state. The relationship they individually established with state officials was evidently more important to them than the relationships they established with other merchants. The merchant guilds were state rather than class institutions. A bourgeoisie that could not even come together either to celebrate what was supposedly its own revolution in February 1917, or to resist a second, a few months later, that threatened its demise, hardly deserves recognition as a class. The corporate institutions of the peasants, the commune or mir, were by contrast with both the noble assemblies and merchant guilds of considerably greater effectiveness, and have attracted more attention both from historians and other social commentators. They were once thought to have expressed timeless moral values, to have been the foundation of a distinctive communal and egalitarian way of life which embodied Russia’s true spirit, for though their members held their houses and garden plots as individuals, they were organized around the periodic repartition of strips of the commune’s arable land. The number of strips each household received was determined by its needs and resources, and took account of the lie and fertility of the soil as well as its distance from the village. To ensure that the land was divided fairly, the allocation of strips to particular households was usually decided by lot.53 The commune as a whole remained responsible for the aged, infirm and orphaned and other dependent and unattached persons who could not fend for themselves. Observers could therefore see in the commune a spontaneous, miniature form of democracy, even of socialism and the welfare state. Research has not been kind to such legends. Serfdom had been reinvented in Russia in the late sixteenth century, and was thereafter strengthened and extended just when it was disappearing elsewhere in Europe, to prevent excessive migration from the forest-heartlands of central Russia to the fertile, newly-conquered black lands in the south and east.54 Communes were not therefore natural communities, or the product of a spontaneous co-operative sentiment of the peasants, but administrative units, of one or more villages, or half of a large village, for the collection of taxes and the recruitment of soldiers. Officials and landowners therefore had as much interest as serfs in maintaining the villages’ communal institutions and in repartitioning the land fairly, for no family could then avoid paying their rent or labour to their owner, or their taxes, or supplying their sons to the army. Serfs supported them for the same reason: to ensure that these crushing burdens were equally shared. Moreover, the autonomy of the mir was checked in a number of ways.55 Although communes enjoyed a considerable measure of self-government in their domestic affairs – resolving disputes, punishing minor crimes, providing passports for those who wished to work in the cities, and distributing

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communal funds to the sick and aged – state officials and proprietors could override their decisions, replace their starotsa or elected officials, command a repartition, and even disband the commune.56 Nor were the communes quite as egalitarian as many outside observers imagined. Older male peasants were often able to act in concert with state and seigniorial officials to dominate and exploit the majority. Peasants’ extended families were themselves patriarchal and authoritarian, and embodied ‘a system of day-to-day subjugation’, as Moon put it, ‘that replicated the oppression of all Russia’s peasants by the ruling and landholding elites.’57 Moreover, whenever the peasants went into trade and handicraft production, a considerable degree of economic differentiation often emerged within the commune.58 After their emancipation in 1861, peasants remained quite separate from the rest of the population in a kind of transitional regime, as if not yet ready for full citizenship. And though they were formally free to move, to own property, to sue in the ordinary courts, their communes remained collectively responsible for the redemption payments to their former masters, and members were required to obtain permission from the commune if they wished to absent themselves for any length of time. In reality, therefore, the commune retained its authority over its members, perhaps even increased it.59 Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, state supervision of their affairs also increased. ‘Land commandants’, chosen by the bureaucracy, were given extensive powers over their villages. Even after redemption payments were finally abolished in 1906, the commune stubbornly clung to its authority over its members, and strongly resisted the attempts to create a free market in farming land, and a new class of yeoman-farmers.60 Many of the features of peasant life mentioned, both before and after emancipation, might appear to have provided almost ideal conditions for the formation of a class. Although there were considerable variations by region and by type of proprietor, all peasants were similarly oppressed and exploited. All lived permanently under the threat of arbitrary intervention in their lives from tax and army recruitment officials, proprietors and their bailiffs. All were to some degree self-governing, and all were clearly demarcated from the rest of the population, by their work, their communal institutions, their family structures, festivities and culture, as well as by law. They also shared certain ideas about themselves, and the world in which they lived, which might perhaps have been ingredients of a class ideology such as their notion that evil nobles surrounded and perverted the wishes of the ‘good’ tsar, or their claim ‘while we belong to our lords, the land belongs to us’, and their dream that one day there would be a great ‘black’ repartition when all the land, including forests and pasture land, would be returned to them. And yet, despite all these apparently favourable, long-standing preconditions, their potential as a class only began to be realized at the very

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end of the regime. The mir was an inward-looking, isolated, deeply conservative little world, centred on peasants’ loyalty to their extended family and to their own commune. Being largely illiterate, at least until the final decades of the regime, and lacking adequate roads or means of transportation, one commune was unable to communicate routinely with others, or with the rest of Russian society, and they seem to have had little sense of belonging to it. Their courts never accumulated precedents or any common law.61 And their assemblies did not provide much useful experience of selfgovernment, since they never developed or accepted rules of debate or procedure. They usually voted by acclamation, seldom challenged the rule of their elders, and the only literate or semi-literate person within them, their clerks, kept few records and accounts. They were, Pipes observed, more like meetings in nomadic encampments than the settled institutions of an English or Japanese village.62 Since they had no standing committees or permanent executive officers, they were unable to collaborate routinely with one another, or form alliances and federations.63 Kimball focused on one village institution that was at the centre of its communal life, the kabak or village pub.64 It was usually, he observed, ‘the most prominent enclosed public space in the village, after the church’ and therefore utilized for the village assembly, court sessions and bazaars. It served variously as a social club and meeting place, as a dealing and trading forum, and as a centre of communication with the outside world, often by public readings of newspapers. He suggested kabaki were peasant versions of the kruzhki or voluntary societies of intellectuals, and of the ‘angliiskii klubi’ found in the imperial capitals, and plausibly argued that they should be seen as ‘one facet of civil society in the early stages of formation’. However, the only inter-village movement that they appear to have provoked was the ‘empire-wide temperance movement’, a typically Russian misnomer one must say, since this ‘temperance movement’ was in reality a protest by ‘the drinking public’ against the reform of the alcohol excise tax system which sharply increased the price of vodka. While the kabak may well have been ‘the location of conversations on the most important questions of peasant life’, these do not seem to have included many conversations about their common plight or their common class interests.65 Small-scale peasant disturbances, usually focusing on a local grievance or a particular proprietor, bailiff or official, were very common, but any kind of class action by peasants was extremely rare. They seem to have preferred the individual ‘weapons of the weak’, flight, stealing, dissembling, feigning illness or ignorance, working as little as possible, concealing land and resources – rather than collective revolt. ‘One of the most striking features of the history of peasant protest’, Moon thought, ‘is not not how much active resistance there was, but how little.’66 Their four main revolts were all led by Cossacks, who had a quite different pastoral or nomadic way of life, and they drew disproportionately on peasants working in atypical

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settings, such as mines, factories and foundries, and on non-Russians in the borderlands where serfdom, and the restraints of communal life, were relatively new or less oppressive.67 Even the large-scale protests of 1905–1907 and 1917–1921 owed much to external support, being responses to urban unrest rather than spontaneous peasant-organized movements.68 In reality, therefore, the obstacles to class formation outweighed the favourable factors, as young radical intellectuals, the narodnoki, discovered in the mid-1870s when they fanned out from the cities to tell peasants of the exploitation and oppression from which suffered, and to urge them to protest as a class against it. They were frequently greeted with indifference or as unwelcome intruders, and turned over to the authorities, or thought to be witches and sometimes burnt. One political party developed out of the narodniki and other revolutionary groups at the turn of the century, the Socialist-Revolutionaries. It accepted the legend of the commune as an indigenous form of socialism, thought that peasants rather than workers would lead the revolution, and therefore made the peasants’ dream of a ‘black repartition’ the central plank of its programme. Although it was supported by peasants in elections for the First State Duma, and again in elections for the Constituent Assembly in 1918, its leaders and activists were all intellectuals and students, not peasants.69 It was, in any case, more of an underground terrorist organization than a mass or class movement. Until the final years of the regime, it is therefore difficult to discover any actions, institutions or spontaneous collective solidarity that would allow one to describe peasants as a class. Like the land-owning nobility as a whole and merchants, they were merely an official legal category, and failed to articulate or defend their collective interests. They only began to do so after the revolution in 1905, or more specifically after the Election Law of December 11, 1905, for though there had been ‘some pooling of effort’ between villages in their protests during the revolution, the ‘typical disturbance’, Manning observed, ‘rarely involved more than one village’, and ‘conflicts between villages were at least as common as co-operation between them.’70 The Election Law of December 11, 1905 was significant because for the first time it offered peasants the opportunity of participating in the political life of the nation, and they then suddenly demonstrated a remarkable capacity to organize election meetings, usually without local officials’ consent, to nominate their candidates and to bring out the vote on a ‘massive’ scale. These efforts seem to have owed much more to their own ‘village intelligentsias’ of teachers and paramedics of the zemstva and to those who had been employed in the cities or seen service in the army than to the activities of revolutionary parties. Peasants constituted just over half of all voters (51%) throughout the Empire, and with the help of indirect electoral procedures intended to severely under-represent urban voters, 45.5% of the 508 deputies in the First State Duma were also peasants.71 As long as it continued, peasant communities maintained a

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continuous interest in its proceedings – public readings of newspapers in the kabak being particularly important in this respect. Many villages passed resolutions and petitions to support their representatives, and sent delegations to St. Petersburg to make sure they were not diverted from their main concern, their fundamental class interest, the redistribution of land. This First State Duma lasted only 72 days, and due largely to the efforts of the provincial land-owning gentry, who, as we have seen, were simultaneously mobilizing as a class, its three successors had substantially less peasant participation. They were, however, sufficient to demonstrate the first stage of the formation of a class of peasants with an awareness of common interests and the rudiments of a national association via the duma. A Peasants’ Union was formed, which claimed it had 200,000 members and clearly intended to organize across Russia, but it was subsequently suppressed. It only resumed its public activities in 1917 when it convened a national congress, rejected the Bolshevik coup, and seemed set to define its class interests independently of the new regime until the Bolsheviks also decided that, like the imperial regime, they did not want an independent organization of peasants, and suppressed it by converting it into a Soviet organization.72 We may therefore add a third emergent class, that of peasants, to the rapidly-mobilized provincial gentry and the coalescing service class already described. Earlier political events had also helped to form two other classes: the intelligentsia, which began to emerge in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, and the working class which emerged at the end of the nineteenth, but only assumed a class character in the early years of the twentieth, in particular during the First World War.

And the unofficial ones formed in civil society Raeff traced the origins of the intelligentsia from the decision of Peter the Great, which compelled the nobility to acquire an education if they wished to be legally recognized as an adult, to be able to marry, or to become an officer, and to advance in the service of the state. Previously, most children of the nobility had been cared for by their mothers, who were often ignorant and illiterate, and by serfs who indulged their every whim. If they attended a local school, they received privileged treatment. Serf classmates were, for instance, often punished for their transgressions. They were, in short, brought up without discipline, without paternal supervision, and without peers. When reorganizing the service nobility, however, Peter decided that prior to entering service at the age of 15, the sons of the nobility should be better educated than in the past, and that they should be obliged to attend special military or technical boarding schools. Such schools subsequently began to appear under military, ecclesiastical or university auspices, and sometimes by private initiative.73 Sons destined for state

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service then had to make a traumatic break from their families between the ages of six and eight, and were isolated for some years both from their families and the rest of society. Most schools, even the private and ecclesiastical ones, were organized on military lines. Advancing a class was described as advancing in rank, and the teaching staff were often addressed by military titles. Obligations to the state were therefore instilled from a very early age. Schooling became in practice the beginning of state service. To go to school was to be ‘in service’.74 As a result of this shared experience, pupils often developed close attachments, and a strong sense of solidarity with their peers, who were similarly alienated from their elders, their homes and the society around them, and alongside whom they had first been introduced to Western ideas and discovered a new world of the spirit. When they left school, however, they usually found it difficult to apply anything they had learned, and many of them were therefore quickly disaffected from the state they were supposed to serve. Instead, Raeff suggests, their sense of service was redirected towards the Russian people at large, and many of them became determined to use their knowledge to shape a new Russia, even a new humanity.75 Raeff argued that this common experience was the foundation of the intelligentsia which began to emerge in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, roughly coinciding with the emergence of the great age of Russian literature. Over the following decades, their members adopted and became known by, their collective name, and increasingly began to look and behave like a class.76 While its members were initially drawn almost exclusively from the gentry and nobility, over time, and especially after Alexander II’s reforms, landowners, former military officers, doctors, professors, teachers and students, public officials, especially in the zemstva, also began to identify themselves as members of the intelligentsia, and passed on their membership to their sons and grandsons. They created their own distinctive collective institutions: discussion circles, at first in the country houses of the nobility; then in urban salons and the offices of so-called ‘thick’ or ‘fat’ journals, as well as bookshops and voluntary societies; later by organizing conferences, political parties and unions.77 They also of course had close and continuous affiliations with universities, until the repression following the assassination of Alexander II in 1883, which resumed when the repression was lifted in 1906.78 On many occasions members of the intelligentsia demonstrated their willingness to organize and participate in collective action. Indeed, it was their organized protests, rather than those of trade unions, which led the assault on the regime in 1917.79 The only reason one might wish to question their credentials as a class was that they not infrequently organized against each other. However, there were many occasions when their shared alienation from the regime brought a broad spectrum of intellectual opinion together under national umbrella organizations, such as the Union of Liberation formed in 1903, and Union of Unions of 1905, and demon-

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strated, for a while at least, their solidarity as a class.80 It was probably this class solidarity, more than anything else, that persuaded many members of the intelligentsia to hold their fire against the Bolsheviks even when they profoundly disagreed with them.81 Although no class was destined to have a more momentous impact on the destiny of Russia, it is not easy to define or explain its membership. Malia observed that ‘No recognized system of social analysis, either those known to the intelligentsia itself, or those elaborated since by modern sociology, makes provision for a class held together only by the bond of “consciousness”, “critical thought”, or moral passion.’ Most writers on the subject have therefore thought, Malia continued, ‘that the intelligentsia must be founded on something other than ideology alone, and have suggested that they were ‘conscience-stricken noblemen’, or raznochchintsy, people of no estate in particular.’ He found little evidence to support these speculations. Quite a number of members of the intelligentsia, he pointed out, ‘were successful and “integrated” professors, doctors and lawyers.’ They came ‘from all estates in general and no estate in particular. Its members were not defined by the Table of Ranks, by their degrees, nor by any other kind of indirect state recognition. Uncomfortable as it may be for those who wish to find a material interest behind every class, it was wholly self-defined.’82 Malia therefore described the intelligentsia as ‘a supra-class body’, since it was the absence of any kind of common material interest that helps to explain its distinctive character. Intellectuals were, in his words, ‘unfettered in their extremism by the concrete interests of anyone with a potential stake in the existing order’, and they ‘obtained a leverage against official society from ever-present possibility of exploiting the elemental destructiveness of the desperate masses.’83 Their collective identity also seems to have depended on the relative scarcity of other organized interests in civil society, for it allowed their members to feel they had the duty to speak and act in the name of a mute people. Only one profession was permanently organized as a self-governing body – advocates. Initially, their colleges were not spontaneous creations of civil society, since they owed their existence to the Judicial Statute of 1864, which had legally defined their attributes and powers. Unlike the nobility and merchants, however, advocates quickly converted their corporate institutions into authentic self-governing bodies. Their colleges promulgated and enforced their own rules, and created amongst advocates in many cities a genuine sense of corporate honour and pride, which they jealously defended against any kind of state intervention.84 Other professions also began to organize after the turn of the century. Galai identified 14 ‘intelligentsia unions’ formed between 1904–1905, including those of agronomists, veterinary surgeons, engineers, technicians, medical and academic personnel, government, municipal and zemstva employees, but could give

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little information about their membership or duration.85 It seems certain, however, that they found it impossible to follow advocates’ example, principally because in varying ways, they were dependent on, and integrated with the state. Physicians, for instance, were sharply divided between the salaried employees of the zemsvta and the fee-for-service private practitioners in the major cities, and they were also, unlike advocates, incorporated into the Table of Ranks.86 Advocates did not therefore prove to be the pioneers of a succession of self-governing professions which might have provided an alternative basis of middle class organization. The intelligentsia therefore continued to flourish by drawing on members of diverse professions. In the final years of the regime, it was joined by another organized interest in civil society: trade unions of skilled workers. The earliest worker organizations in Russia seem to have depended heavily on the solidarity of the rural communities from which they had migrated, rather than on that of their occupation or class. Johnson argued that it is wrong to separate peasant and proletarians, as if individuals were either one or the other. His evidence showed that Moscow workers travelled back and forth between the city and the countryside, and were firmly attached to both, and that those from the same area often came together to form zemliachestsvo or clubs in the city. This explains many of the traits that set these ‘peasant-workers’, as Johnson called them, ‘apart from the workers of other countries.’ The tradition of collective action was, he pointed out, ‘far stronger in the country, reinforced by the village assembly, and perhaps, by repartitional tenure.’ He found that ‘industries and regions that in Marxist terms should have been most advanced – those with large mechanized factories whose workers were spiritually further from the countryside – had average or below average rates of labor unrest, whereas … those that were smaller and less mechanized and had workers more closely tied to the village – had much higher rates, especially if workers were drawn from the same village or region, and especially if they possessed a piece of land.’ He concluded that, in this way ‘the countryside may have given impetus to the workers’ movement.’87 Proletarian was not, however, the urban identity that most organized workers adopted. That of their trade or craft seems to have been more important, so both Menshevik and Bolshevik members of the intelligentsia continuously had to urge the unions which sprang into existence after the revolution of 1905 to shed what they saw as their narrow and selfish tsekhovshchina, craft or trade consciousness, and become true proletarians. Many trade unionists seem to have been reluctant to do this. The industrybased unions formed at the time often turned out, on closer inspection, to be confederations of semi-autonomous craft groups. The St. Petersburg Bakery Union, for instance, had 12 separate sections for different kinds of bakers. The union of office clerks and bookkeepers in the city had six, the metalworkers, no less than 116. In Moscow, the union of workers in

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the textile industry was divided into eight trade or occupational groups, and the union of industrial construction workers into six. Metalworkers had originally organized to unite factory committees, but subsequently decided to organize into 52 occupational ‘sections’, each with their own funds and directing boards. In response to the repeated urging of their Social Democrat friends, some unions formed larger craft unions or federations. The pattern-makers joined the woodworkers’ union. The electrical workers joined the metal workers, and the knitters joined the textile workers union, though this can hardly be seen as transcending or discarding occupational or trade loyalties, since the merged groups seem to have remained entirely separate entities. The 70 knitters who ‘joined’ the textile workers union, to take one example, still met separately to discuss their special interests and kept their own funds.88 Bolsheviks had every reason to describe any kind of collective action among workers as proof of the existence of a working class, in whose interest they claimed to act. Many Western scholars who have studied workers in Petrograd and Moscow evidently sympathize with them, and seem disinclined to examine the Bolsheviks’ claim too critically, so it is not always easy to distinguish hopes and wishful thinking from the authentic voice of the working class. Pipes acidly observed that ‘hordes of graduate students, steered by their professors, in the Soviet Union, as well as the West, especially in the United States, have assiduously combed historical sources in the hope of unearthing evidence of worker radicalism in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The results are weighty tomes, filled with mostly meaningless events and statistics, that prove only while history is always interesting, history books can be vacuous and dull.’89 He went on to provide ample grounds for his scepticism about both the existence of a working class, and its oft-acclaimed leading role in the revolution. Industrial workers were a tiny proportion, less than 2%, of the population of Russia. Moreover many factory workers were employed in rural areas, and many of those in Moscow and St. Petersburg were still peasants, leading him, like Johnson, to describe them as ‘a branch of the peasantry rather than a distinct group’.90 While acknowledging that ‘proletarian attitudes’ emerged amongst skilled workers in the 1880s, he pointed out that very few workers were still unionized in 1914, and that protest against the regime was always led by intellectuals and students, rather than by organized manual workers. For that reason he opened his study of the Russian revolution in 1899, the year of mass protests at Moscow University.91 Moreover, he showed that the tiny covert political parties could not have co-ordinated or mobilized a working class movement, since they were dominated by the intelligentsia, and had only a handful of workers amongst their members. The intelligentsia similarly dominated other assemblies, which the unwary might assume to be examples of working class action, such as the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies of St. Petersburg in 1905 and 1917.92

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Much of the evidence thought to describe the emergence of a working class does not answer these objections, since it refers to isolated events and episodes, and is often rather ambiguous, unless we have already accepted that process of class formation must have already been in train. Zelnik, for instance, identified some of the more notable strikes in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. He acknowledged that they commonly ‘involved members of the intelligentsia or workers propagandized by them’, and that workers’ most significant organizational creation, the kruzhok or workers’ circle, was ‘the plebeian equivalent of the aristocratic salon’, but went on to say that a few of these ‘displayed skilled leadership and organization’, sometimes ‘entailed co-operation among workers from numerous factories’, and even ‘invoked the language of collectivism and social justice, if not doctrinally articulated socialism’.93 If one has already decided that there was a working class revolution in 1917, then these are the exciting preliminaries to its formation. If we have not, they were no more than occasional strikes. Hogan’s in-depth examination of the impact of the Electoral Law of 1905 in St. Petersburg provided workers with possibilities similar to those which peasants had exploited to the full. The law required workers at every workplace to come together on election day to choose delegates who, indirectly, would choose members of the state duma. She reasonably suggested that this ‘magnified the workers’ sense of himself as a worker rather than as a citizen’ and went on to describe the subsequent creation of a number of bodies which assumed and encouraged a class outlook, such as the St. Petersburg Council of the Unemployed, elected by those attending soup kitchens in the city in 1906, which organized district councils to link the employed and unemployed in the city, and successfully, if briefly, campaigned to persuade the city duma to initiate public works as well as public relief.94 McKean’s evidence – in a weighty tome that is far from vacuous and dull – is more persuasive since it does not describe isolated events and episodes, which we can frame as we wish but provides a continuous record and analysis of collective action among workers and revolutionaries over the entire decade before 1917. Much of his evidence might be cited in support of Pipes’s sceptical view. He records, for example, how trade unions having reached their peak with 245,335 members in 1907, had been reduced by employers’ and police opposition in the years before the war to ‘a paltry 31,246.’ Many of them were poorly run, and since they were suppressed during the war, whatever their class-forming role may have been, it was then in abeyance.95 He also shows that workers’ participation in other associations, such as the kassy or insurance funds, was minimal.96 Moreover, workers did not correspond to the image of a revolutionary proletariat, since the most active strikers over all these years were artisans employed in tailoring, baking, printing shops and especially small and medium-sized metal-working plants in the Vyborg district of St. Petersburg, rather than

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the more proletarian workers in the gigantic ‘Fordist’ factories in Neva, Peterhof Side, and other districts.97 His evidence also confirms that revolutionary parties, including or perhaps especially, the Bolsheviks, could not have been agents or catalysts, or leaders of a class formation, since their organizations lacked any means of keeping in regular contact with workers.98 After examining hundreds of disputes, he thinks workers were most concerned about the disrespectful and arbitrary way their managers and foremen treated them, and not much influenced by socialist ideals. The radicalization of a minority of skilled workers, he decides, ‘owed very little to the endeavours of the revolutionary parties’ and ‘far more to their acquaintance with urban and industrial life.’99 Workers demonstrated their radicalization in just one collective instiution, strikes and stoppages. There was a very rapid increase in their number in 1911 and 1912, in common, one might add, with several other industrial societies, and about 40% of the total number recorded in the entire Empire were in St. Petersburg. Although ‘stoppages motivated by purely economic objectives were responsible for the bulk of working days lost in St. Petersburg during the years immediately prior to the war’, about 60% of all strikes were politically inspired, a number of them being sympathy or commemorative strikes, especially following the massacre in the Lena Goldfields on 4 April 1912, and therefore demonstrate some class loyalty.100 Moreover, although they lacked formal union organization, McKean shows that strikers somehow found their own leaders, and created ‘surrogate forms of organization’, meaning temporary strike committees and general meetings which, despite being ad hoc, amorphous and ephemeral, were able to organize quite long disputes, during which they commonly demonstrated their class perspective by persuading semi- and unskilled workers, though not white collar and service workers, in non-striking factories to join them.101 In the early months of the war, the number of strikes declined, but it climbed again during the summer of 1915 and through 1916, and unlike the pre-war strikes, they enveloped all sectors of the economy, all kinds of factories, and were more evenly spread geographically across the city. In the first seven weeks of 1917, there was ‘a pronounced increase in the frequency of political strikes, especially in Petrograd where virtually all strikes became political.’102 Moreover, strikers increasingly took their demonstrations to the protected city centre, and specifically to the Nevskii Prospekt, on which most government offices were located, and which the police, troops or Cossacks became progressively less willing to defend. One such general strike of 27 February 1917 was said to have been supported by some 80% of the city’s working population, including many civil servants. It was these massed crowds in the centre of the city that persuaded the tsar to abdicate and brought his regime to an end. What are we to make of such evidence? It does not confirm the formation of a working class, nor allow us to dismiss the sceptical view. But it

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is surely enough to demonstrate the beginnings of a working class. Russian workers’ actions at this time bore a certain resemblance to those of English workers in the eighteenth century, who similarly struck repeatedly without any permanent, formally organized national associations.103 The circumstances of English workers were, one need hardly add, different in a great many respects, and we can of course never know whether the Russian strikes might eventually have led to national trade unions and a fully-formed, working class like the English, or whether their solidarity would simply have fizzled out, as that of American workers often seems to have done. If, however, we decline to recognize an emergent Russian working class, it is difficult to think of a more appropriate term. They had become something more than ‘a branch of the peasantry’, and rather more defined than mere ‘working people’ or ‘industrial workers’ or crowds. McKean consistently referred to them as the working class without misleading anyone, since he also spent time discussing the peasant elements within it, its geographical concentration, and the ‘frailties’ of its collective institutions.104 At the end of the tsarist regime, we may therefore identify five classes that had demonstrated some degree of collective consciousness, solidarity and action: two of rather ancient origins, the service class and intelligentsia, and three more recent ones, the provincial landed gentry, and the emergent classes of peasants and workers. Only the peasants corresponded with the official classification of the population, but the state had indirectly contributed to the formation of all five, and their relationship with the state seems to have been the critical determinant of their character and careers. The provincial landed gentry that sprang to life only as their political privileges and economic foundations were about to disappear, was only able to organize rapidly and effectively because it could take advantage of various pre-existing statecreated institutions, such as the governing boards of the zemstva, the noble assemblies, the marshals of the nobility and the State Council. The service class had deeper roots, being defined by, and dependent upon, the state apparatus, even if it had still not quite erased the ancient division between dvorianstvo and chinovniki, or that between the capital and provinces. The intelligentsia was perhaps the most independent class, indeed looks like a spontaneous emanation of civil society, emerging from exchanges and contacts made in aristocratic salons or through journals, papers and discussion circles, and seeming to rest on nothing more substantial than individual conscience and conviction. It had, however, originated in schools that prepared sons of the nobility for state service, and sought to instill an ethic of service, which accounts for their disillusionment and disaffection when they actually entered it. It had also benefited from the spread of the zemstva, whose educated employees had no readily available alternative affiliations and identities, and it was able to find audiences and recruits in the universities, at least when they were free of state repression. The state also assisted its formation by stifling other organized interests, such as trade

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unions and self-governing professions, and unintentionally provided intellectuals with a mandate and mission.105 The Electoral Law of 1905 seems to have been the trigger which initiated the formation of a class of peasants by prompting their isolated villages to connect with one another via their elected representatives in the First and Second Dumas, though the period during which they organized and communicated with one another was so brief, and is so poorly documented, that their class seems more promise than accomplished reality. There is rather more evidence of organization and communication among workers, but any fuller account of their formation as a class would also make constant references to various political decisions. First of all, it would refer to specific pieces of legislation: to the 1903 law, which was ‘the first legal recognition by the authorities of the workers as a corporate body’ and ‘gave workers, under certain conditions, the right to choose a kind of shop steward’; to the legalization of approved trade unions in 1906; to the electoral laws of 1905 and 1907, which granted the franchise to a section of the working population; and to the Social Insurance Laws of 1912, which allowed workers to elect representatives to administer the funds of kassy, and provided the Social Democratic party with a means of stimulating working class consciousness to some degree.106 The state was also involved more directly because a number of the most successful early worker organizations had been created by a state official, Serge Zubatov, the head of a special section of the Okhrana, the secret police, until 1903. Pospielovsky called Zubatov’s state-created unions ‘the real birthplace of Russian trade unions’ which ‘provided the trade-unionist movement with its first cadres of professional trade union workers.’107 The protest before the Winter Palace that launched the revolution of 1905 was led by the Assembly of Mill and Textile Workers, which had been created by Father Georgii Gapon, Zubatov’s successor in many respects, who also had the backing of the secret police.108 Finally, one would have to mention the state decision that had fatal consequences for its own survival – the decision to enter the war – since the economic and social dislocations, and disasters during it, seem more than anything to have accelerated the formation of the working class and explain the disaffection of the police and of troops who had previously controlled striking workers without difficulty.109 It is only too easy, in discussing any revolution, to take the revolutionaries’ word that they overthrew the state, and to overlook the state’s own contribution to the mobilization of the revolutionaries.

Continuities in the management of stratification in Soviet Russia In his account of the revolution, published in 1935, Chamberlin referred to the revolution of February 1917 as ‘one of the most leaderless, spontaneous, anonymous revolutions of all time.’ Although his remark has been

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picked over many times, no one has been able to contradict it with a plausible narrative of class conflicts that continued into the subsequent seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, and the civil war that followed.110 One may only be reasonably sure that certain class conflicts did not occur. The Bolsheviks, it is clear, never had to confront a proud and resolute landowning aristocracy with its own regional bases of power, but only the rather less formidable opposition of office-holding nobility, whose ethic of service, like that of many officials, seems to have been transferred, rather painlessly, first to the Provisional Government and then to the Bolsheviks.111 Rigby likened the latter turnover to ‘those occurring in Washington in the heyday of the spoils system’.112 Nor did they have to confront a powerful, organized bourgeois class, since as we have seen Russia had never developed a bourgeoisie remotely commensurate with the scale of its industrial and commercial development, or with the bourgeoisie of Soviet folklore. Two of the organized and self-conscious classes, the intelligentsia and emergent working class, were to be found on both sides, and hence can only provide examples of intra-class conflicts.113 Disentangling class alignments has proved difficult for analysts of every revolution, and the Russian is no exception, even though its victors, by their constant use of a class vocabulary, have persuaded some observers otherwise. In the present investigation, however, we will leave such questions aside, since it is more important to identify the class alignments that became a permanent part of the Soviet regime. Fortunately, these seem somewhat easier to analyse and describe. The Bolsheviks claimed, and believed, that they were inaugurating an entirely new society and even a new age for mankind. The vocabulary they used to legitimate their actions was, of course, entirely new. They acted in the name of revolution, or the working class, or socialism, or the laws of History, but in certain respects their actions differed little from those of their predecessors. To begin with, they claimed a monopoly of political power, and from the very first moment, used it to manage the social stratification of Russia, much as their predecessors had sought to do. The advances that civil society, and in particular intellectuals and advocates, had made since the reforms of Alexander II, and such progress as trade unions had been able to cling on to after the revolution of 1905, were all reversed. The constitutional protections of individual and corporate rights proposed by the Provisional Government were forgotten. Despite the somersault in rhetoric, the relationship between the state and civil society, which we have suggested is the key to understanding how classes are formed, was not at all revolutionary, but a reversion to the kind of relationship which obtained in pre-Reform Russia. This might be documented in a hundred ways, in the history of any organized interest in civil society, but perhaps the most telling examples are the extensions of state power over the most trivial and

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innocent activities, such as stamp-collecting clubs or artely, the small voluntary groupings of handicraft and service workers.114 Since the relationship between the state and civil society was similar to that of pre-Reform Russia, it follows that the forms and mechanisms of stratification that emerged under the Soviet rule would also bear a marked resemblance to those of its predecessors. The first, and most notable, continuity with the tsarist regime was that between the service class designated in the Table of Ranks and the nomenklatura.115 The former seems, in fact, to have inspired the latter, which originally referred simply to the lists of those positions that required party approval, though gradually, during and after industrialization, as the number of such positions increased, it came over time to be used colloquially, like chin and chinovniki before it, as a collective term to describe the holders of such positions.116 Stalin, who is generally credited with inventing the nomenklatura, had previously been responsible for appointing officers in the Red Army, so it may well be that, like the Table of Ranks, it was originally inspired by military usage. As it happened, the nomenklatura, like the Table of Ranks, had 14 ranks.117 Apart from occupying all the significant decision-making positions in all the political, economic, military, scientific, educational, cultural and recreational institutions in the country, nomenklaturists came in time to be distinguished from the rest of the population: by their access to special stores from which they could obtain the best food, clothing and other consumption goods; by privileged access to most services, such as theatre seats, medical facilities and holiday resorts; and by access to the outside world, meaning passports and currencies for foreign travel, as well as foreign books, newspapers and films.118 There can be little doubt that they had a distinctive way of life, and that others recognized them, for though they did not flaunt and publicize their lifestyle – Voslensky called them an ‘invisible aristocracy’ – certain aspects of it could hardly be hidden. Their clothing for a start, and they tended to drive not only distinctive makes of car, with distinctive number plates, and on some centre-city roads could drive in special reserved lanes. Since their privileged position also enabled then to obtain access for their children to educational institutions, they also had means of transmitting their privileges to the next generation.119 And just as the tsarist regime had sought to police the Table of Ranks, so in the same spirit the Soviet regime took steps to ensure that the nomenklatura did not mingle casually and indiscriminately with the rest of the population. Its members were, ‘for security reasons’, warned to ‘restrict their social contacts, and as far as possible not make friends outside the nomenklatura.’ By Voslensky’s account, the nomenklaturists followed this injunction to such an extent that they came to believe and to act as if ‘they were living not in the USSR but in another, entirely different and special country’, which he dubbed Nomenklaturia.120

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The class privileges of the nomenklatura were noticed by Nikita Khrushchev, who was evidently embarrassed by them, and sought to end them by imposing time limits on the tenure of office.121 By his time, however, it was far too well-entrenched, and in all probability his attempts to eliminate or reform it were one of the main reasons for his own downfall.122 A short time after succeeding him, his successor, Brezhnev, definitively confirmed the ‘stability of the cadres’ and the principle of life tenure.123 The nomenklatura therefore continued to develop as a class until the very end of the Soviet regime, In 1983 Rigby estimated that it consisted of about two million people.124 Its durability as a class was demonstrated by its survival after the Soviet regime collapsed. Former members made up three-quarters of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, and the overwhelming majority of regional elites, so that ‘the whole system of government was within a nomenklatura framework.’ The Soviet tradition of ‘selection and allocation of cadres’, Krystanovskaya and White observed, was, in effect, revived and with it the ‘Table of Ranks’, that … had given rise to the nomenklatura itself when it was established in the early 1920s.’125 Senior nomenklatura managers in industry seemed to have a pronounced sense of their class interests.126 When their efforts to have the initial privatization law amended to grant them a larger proportion of the shares of ‘their’ enterprises failed, they collaborated in various manoeuvres to defend themselves both against the numerically superior workers, and against ‘outsiders’ who might wish to dispossess them, and seize control of plants that they insisted belonged to them.127 A second continuity with the tsarist regime may be observed in the treatment of the peasants, despite the abolition of strip farming and repartition, and indeed their whole communal way of life brought about by the collectivization launched in 1928. Communes themselves were replaced by much larger sovkhoz or kolkhoz, state farms or collective farms, headed by the Bolshevik’s version of the tsar’s ‘land commandants’, state-appointed, party-approved managers of sovkhoz, or state-appointed though nominallyelected chairmen of the kolkhoz.128 Whatever degree of self-government communes had previously enjoyed was thereby eliminated. Their private plots, livestock and property were also confiscated. Kulaks or wealthy peasants were the special target, but other distinctions between the serednaks or middle peasants, bednyaks or poor peasants and batraks or day labourers were also erased, so that there remained just one single undifferentiated official category of agricultural labourers.129 At the end of it all, however, peasants were no less sharply differentiated from the rest of the population than they had been prior to their emancipation, and no less expected to ‘silently obey’ their new masters than enserfed peasants had been. In its first decade, the Soviet regime eliminated the possibility of peasants developing as a class by imprisoning or killing the leaders of the Socialist-

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Revolutionaries, the political party most closely identified with peasants’ interests at the national level. And since collectivization had entailed mass executions and starvation, it was unlikely that any new leaders would spontaneously emerge to express their interests as a class. The regime institutionalized peasants’ separation from the rest of the population in a variety of ways. Their status was recorded on their internal passports, and they were deprived of the right to travel, a return to a form of serfdom. For the first 40 years of the Soviet regime, their welfare arrangements also remained distinctly inferior to those of industrial workers, indeed to a considerable degree, they were left to fend for themselves. It was only in 1964, when the proportion of the labour force engaged in agriculture had fallen to 40%, that Soviet law provided that collective farm workers would be guaranteed a pension on retirement, though this was considerably below that provided to urban industrial workers.130 Rural medical care and educational provision also remained inferior to that in the cities. After documenting its relative deficiencies in the 1980s, Davis argued that these were due less to any deliberate state decision, than to policies that had given a low priority to roads and sanitation, which made it difficult for farms to supplement their health care arrangements as industrial enterprises in urban areas had been able to do. In the present context Soviet intentions are less important than the fact that peasants were still distinguished from the rest of the population. They had, as Davis acknowledged, a ‘low status in the power hierarchy’ of the regime, and ‘few effective channels of appeal.’131 In its treatment of peasants, McDaniel observed, the Soviet regime ‘mimicked some of the conservative traits of tsarist society.’ In the nineteenth century, the peasant had been ‘most definitely a second-class citizen, subject to the arbitrary will of local authorities and the object of numerous restrictive laws on mobility and property ownership applicable only to this group.’ The Soviet regime, in his view, was little different. ‘Soviet law was highly particularistic in its designation of the rights and responsibilities of different groups’, and ‘this particularism bears striking similarities to the logic of the tsarist estate system, which also sought to freeze the position of every social group in a state ordered hierarchy.’132 Peasants therefore continued to be a lifeless, leaderless class, recognized by the state and in law, but incapable of formulating any collective consciousness, creating any collective organization, or taking any collective action. The intelligentsia are the notable example of abrupt and profound discontinuity with the old regime, though since the role of the new intelligentsia was defined in opposition to that of the old there was necessarily an element of continuity, and besides, at various times, ghosts of the old reappeared. The first Soviet rulers were, of course, themselves members of that old intelligentsia, and some no doubt maintained the intense dedication to the service to the Russian people, and to humanity, that had

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distinguished it. Having acquired power, however, and grown use to exercising it, most of them, as Djilas suggested, progressively acquired an entirely different collective consciousness, akin to that of the service class they had dispossessed. They are therefore best understood less by reference to their predecessors in the old intelligentsia than to the chinovniki. For the overwhelming majority of the old intelligentsia, however, no such conversion was possible. They were unsympathetic to the Bolshevik cause. The Bolsheviks wooed them on occasion, and persuaded a small number to accept their patronage, and for a few years at least, granted them a modest degree of freedom. Most, however, preferred either to emigrate, or were forced to emigrate. Some were able to withdraw, and live ‘quiet, private, unsubsidized and unadvertised lives’. Some were imprisoned, some shot.133 The institutions on which they had once depended, their ‘thick’ journals, salons, country houses, were all suppressed, and since the universities had been transformed beyond recognition, they could no longer serve as ‘islands of liberty’ or provide any kind of shelter for them. From an early point, the regime made clear that it would manage all cultural life, literature, visual and performing arts, so that they would serve the interests of the regime, or of the working class, and this would entail the creation of a new type of intelligentsia. Overall responsibility for this mission was passed to a single body, the Commissariat of Enlightenment in addition to its functions as a Ministry of Education, and it was later joined by other supervisory agencies and specialist educational institutions.134 The new official intelligentsia that eventually emerged was salaried, worked full-time for the future of socialism, and consisted of an officially-designated band of white collar occupations, which had little in common with Russian civil society’s original intelligentsia.135 It was initially described as ‘a toiling intelligentsia’, then as ‘the new Soviet intelligentsia … a stratum with characteristics never before seen in history’. In time, it came to include everyone who worked with their minds rather than their hands. After examining its internal composition in 1960, Labedz observed that ‘Writers, artists, technical specialists, managers, apparatchiki, army officers, state bureaucrats, doctors, teachers – all these and the army of clerks and foremen do not seem to form a very cohesive group. Is it’, he wondered, ‘conscious of itself as a group and of its oppositions to other groups?’ He cautiously concluded that ‘No clear-cut answer can be given to such a question.’136 Bearing in mind the sharp differences in income, prestige, power within it, and that over the subsequent 40 years no evidence of any kind of collective consciousness came to light, we can now firmly answer No! to his question. The interstices of freedom, which had enabled the tsarist intelligentsia to emerge, were sealed by the Soviet regime. The Soviet intelligentsia therefore showed little more collective consciousness or life than Soviet peasants.137 It must, therefore, be seen as another inert official category rather than a class in our understanding of the term.

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This is, however, not quite the end of the story. All memories of the tsarist intelligentsia had evidently not been erased, for after the death of Stalin in 1953, and more precisely, following Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ exposing Stalin’s crimes in 1956, a miniature, dissident intelligentsia, briefly reemerged amongst a handful of artists, poets and writers, joined by some natural scientists.138 Like their predecessors, they were also drawn from those in relatively privileged material positions, with higher educational qualifications. They also expressed their alienation from the regime, and from the society around them, and seemed also to share the intense social conscience and sense of duty to the Russian people that had distinguished the old intelligentsia.139 Although initially rather sympathetic, Khrushchev soon changed his mind about this spontaneous and unofficial intelligentsia, defined its outspoken members as ‘parasites’, and suppressed them. Somehow or other, the aspirations and ethics of the original intelligentsia nonetheless survived, and inspired a few brave souls to resume its historic mission. Pipes suggested they were able to do so because the cultural heritage of the old intelligentsia, ‘especially as embodied in its greatest single glory, Russian classical literature’, exercised such a strong hold over all educated Russians that ‘a class that is historically dead acquires, posthumously, ever new heirs and successors.’140 Thirty years later, after Gorbachev’s glas’nost, more heirs and successors emerged, and in much greater numbers, to the evident astonishment of Gorbachev and his colleagues. These re-appearances under the Soviet regime of replicas of the original intelligentsia were, however, too intermittent, and their numbers too small, to allow us to recognize them as a class, though since one of the hallmarks of any class is its ability to transmit its shared consciousness to future generations, they provide striking corroboration of the class credentials of the original tsarist intelligentsia. There is one remaining class formation, or possible class formation, the class which the whole Soviet experiment was about, and in whose name it always acted: the emergent working class. When the Bolsheviks seized power, we have observed about 2% of the adult population of Russia were industrial workers, but when the Soviet regime collapsed, over 60% of the working population could be formally classified as workers or working class.141 In census terms, therefore, there can be no doubt that a working class emerged during the Soviet regime, but what sort of class was it? It is difficult to see them simply as successors of the emergent working class that helped to topple the tsarist regime. The workers in Petrograd and several other cities, as we have already observed, organized against the Bolsheviks, and their ad hoc ‘councils’ and ‘assemblies’ were suppressed, and their leaders imprisoned. The surviving trade unions were also dissolved, though not without a struggle, and spontaneous factory committees were incorporated into new state-sponsored unions, whose members were recruited, as radical parties before the revolution had always hoped

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they might be, from all employees – blue collar, white collar, technical specialists and managers – in particular industries or sectors of industry.142 The working class was, in short, reconstructed by the Soviet regime. There is a certain resemblance in this respect to other trade union movements, who all, in different ways that we shall shortly examine, broke out of their original craft enclaves, recruited all kinds of workers, and could then claim to be class movements. Soviet Russia, however, was unique in that the state forcibly eliminated the original craft unions, refused to allow workers to choose their own form of organization, and when they did so, as ‘sections’ within the new unions, took steps to eliminate them. Soviet trade unions and the Soviet working class were not, it is clear, the heirs and successors of the emergent working class of the tsarist era.143 Leaders of regime themselves looked on workers as a new social entity and therefore spent much time in their early years arguing about how it should be organized, what the functions of trade unions and the goals of class action and class struggle might be now that capitalism had been overthrown. Trotsky argued that since there was no longer anyone against whom the workers had to be protected, and since they could hardly negotiate with, or strike against, themselves, trade unions should be integrated with the state, turned into an instrument of management which would discipline those who shirked the universal obligation to work.144 By contrast, Tomsky, chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions and many others wanted trade unions themselves to be directly responsible for managing industry.145 In 1920, Lenin authoritatively settled the argument. He argued that a trade union ‘is in fact a school: a school of administration, a school of economic management, a school of communism.’ Since the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by the entire proletariat, trade unions should be a ‘link’ or ‘transmission belt’ from the ‘vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class’ and exercises that dictatorship on their behalf to ‘the mass of the advanced class, and from the latter to the mass of the working people.’ Though not ‘designed for coercion’, trade unions should therefore have powers to discipline workers in their own courts. He refused, however, to contemplate granting them any kind of collective managerial responsibilities.146 There are no grounds, as we have already suggested, for accepting the claim that workers themselves had become the new ruling class, or that their new rulers, the nomenklaturists, were merely their ‘vanguard’ with interests identical to those of workers. The possibility remains, however, that Soviet workers, though deprived of the right to strike, to form their own trade unions and to choose their own leaders, might have developed some new kind of class formation with a collective consciousness and solidarity quite different from that of their predecessors or their counterparts in capitalist societies. In the early years of collectivization, the regime itself and some of its Western sympathizers liked to think that there was evidence that socialism

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had in fact transformed the motivation of workers, so that they now worked with an enthusiasm and commitment, and at speeds, that were impossible under capitalism.147 Outstanding cases, such as the coal miner Stakhanov, were widely publicized and emulated in many Soviet industries, and for a while Stakhanovites became an organized national movement.148 Other workers were also reported to have engaged in various forms of comradely socialist ‘emulation’, where worker brigades competed with other brigades in the same factory, or with other factories, producing similar products. Many workers, called subbotniks, were supposed to have volunteered to work without pay on Saturdays to ensure that their factory did its part in fulfilment of the original mission. Others were supposed to have prepared so-called vstrechny plans, meaning counter-plans, in which they voluntarily decided to exceed official plan targets.149 Could these have been, as the regime sometimes claimed, expressions of a new form of class consciousness? At first sight, much of the evidence might equally well demonstrate the kind of competitiveness found among Western workers under piece rate or group bonus schemes before workers themselves have been able to take steps to restrain or undermine it. Since the regime routinely exaggerated the achievements of socialism, it is difficult to dismiss critics who suggested that these were another example of the same, instigated, staged and publicized by party and trade union officials.150 In the end, however, even if we were to accept them as authentic expressions of a new form of collective solidarity or class consciousness, they were so brief and isolated that it is difficult to accept them as evidence of a new class formation. No student of the Soviet economy has ever suggested that it continued to benefit from a special commitment or enthusiasm of its workforce comparable to that often attributed to Japanese industry after World War II. Some other evidence is therefore required to show that this was an authentic and durable class, and capable of spontaneous collective action. Lane thought he had provided some. He argued that the working class in the U.S.S.R. ‘probably has greater influence in society than does the working class in capitalist society … symbolically the working class participates in the institutions of Soviet power.’ He thought that the fact that about 10% of manual workers were party members, ‘illustrates that this class is well integrated into the structure of the Soviet political system.’ He then noted that ‘up to the time of Gorbachev the working class acted as an effective “veto group” on the political elite’, meaning ‘that the working class as a collectivity has the power to prevent any action by the government or the employers, unless it is perceived to be in their interests.’ Elsewhere, he pointed out that they could also veto ‘the speeding up of the tempo of production’ and ‘management’s quest to increase levels of productivity.’151 None of these, however, satisfy our initial, not very stringent, criteria of a class. These required evidence that its members themselves recognize and define their common interest and concerns (not that these were recognized

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and defined for them by others), that they form their own national, representative organizations (not that some of them were admitted to a party organized by others), that their members spontaneously respond to their circumstances in a similar manner, and decided on their own course of collective action (rather than the state doing so symbolically). Most observers have found that this symbolical status counted for little in everyday life.152 Moreover, the supposed ‘veto powers’ of the working class did not prevent the regime imposing extensive and fearsome instruments of control over workers, and exercising total control over trade unions.153 One piece of post-Soviet research based on ‘records from the largest metal-working factory in the Soviet capital’ showed that ‘a profound rift had developed between the party and the class which it was supposed to represent’ by the mid-twenties. By this time all opposition had been defined as ‘criminal’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ and every voice of opposition had been extinguished. It did not discover any kind of worker veto on ‘the tempo of production’ or anything else.154 Straus argued that the working class under Stalin had concluded ‘a social contract’, under which it refrained from collective protest in return for its honoured status in Soviet life.155 A contract, however, implies, indeed requires, consent, and if he had explained how the mass of workers, or their representatives, had indicated their consent to this ‘contract’, we might perhaps be able to take the absence of strikes after 1934, other than those against the official unions, as an indication of the formation of a new working class. But he did not do so. Rather more persuasively, Filtzer showed ‘the small working class’ had been ‘atomized’ by the ‘ruling stratum’ which ‘meant breaking down its collective traditions and suppressing all forms of collective protest.’156 Protest was, he observed, ‘individualized’, and expressed only by absenteeism, insubordination, frequent job-changing and drunkenness, all of which are reminiscent of the ‘weapons of the weak’ used by peasants before the revolution. The only collective solidarity amongst the workforce that he detected was local, informal and personal. It rested on the mutual exchange of favours (blat) with immediate supervisors or palmgreasing (namazki). Since the Soviet working class meets none of our requirements, it must be seen as one more of the inert classes of Soviet Union, like the intelligentsia or as a puppet class, rather like the puppet regimes that Soviet forces installed across Eastern Europe.157 This conclusion may be confirmed by comparing it with both its predecessors and its successors. In terms of energy, organizing skill and determination, it hardly comes close to the emergent working class of St. Petersburg in February 1917. Once the Provisional Government had assumed power, factory workers, Smith records, ‘unleashed a ferocious onslaught on the old factory order.’ After convening general meetings of workers, they decided on ‘mass expulsions of unpopular administrative personnel, in one factory after another, and the organizing of elections to select their successors.’158 A comparison with its post-Soviet

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successor is no less relevant and illuminating. If the Soviet regime had indeed formed a working class, then one would reasonably expect that, after generations of experience, it would know how to organize to protect its interests when the regime collapsed, and perhaps abrogate the ‘social contract’ if there was one, or negotiate a new one. In the event, workers in post-Soviet Russia seem extraordinarily supine and somnolent, or ‘patient’ as Ashwin preferred to put it, despite extreme provocation, such as not receiving any wages for months on end.159 They seemed incapable of summoning meetings to define their interests, of finding spokespersons or leaders, or of agreeing on any course of action, and seldom called strikes, except when prompted by their managers, who used them as a means of bringing pressure on Moscow.160 In the face of managerial manoeuvres to take control of privatized factories, workers seem to have been entirely uncertain about how they should protect their interests, even though they were legally the majority owners of many factories.161 The Soviet working class was, we must conclude, a figment of party leaders’ imagination, an official creation, an indispensable part of the regime’s ideology, but one to which civil society was never permitted to respond. In that respect, there is a degree of continuity with the tsarist regime. We earlier mentioned the contribution of Serge Zubatov, the head of the Special Section of the Okhrana, the imperial secret police, to the creation of trade unions, who acted in the hope that the tsar would ‘place himself at the head of the working class.’162 The Bolsheviks might be said to have done just that. Zubatov himself committed suicide when the tsar abdicated, but Soviet trade unions might well be seen as the completion of his work. Trud was closer to the mark that it realized when it boasted that ‘the position of trade unions changes basically with the victory of Socialist revolution. From an organization of the oppressed class they turn into an organization of the ruling class ….’163

Classes in the two Russias compared Despite the abolition of private property and of hereditary nobility, we have found a considerable measure of continuity in the nature of the stratification of Russian society under both the tsarist and Soviet regimes, and in the mechanisms by which it was maintained. Both regimes sought to differentiate and ‘classify’ the population for their own purposes. Both also sought to restrain civil society, and as a result, the officially-designated categories into which they divided its population never spontaneously developed into self-conscious and organized classes. The distinction that really mattered in both cases was that between civil society and the state, whose officials formed a well-defined ruling class, and had no need to organize independently since the state itself served as an association to protect their class interests.

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The main difference between the two regimes was that the tsarist regime, especially after the reforms of Alexander II, controlled civil society in an inconsistent and erratic manner. It tried to combine an autocracy with limited and temporary freedoms of assembly, of speech, of the press, of association, and when threatened, responded with repression or modest concessions, and sometimes both. The inevitable muddle and inconsistency in its policies provided a degree of freedom which enabled interests in civil society – intellectuals, provincial landed gentry, peasants and workers – to organize as classes. The Soviet regime, by contrast, created a far more efficient and comprehensive apparatus of control, and armed with an ideology which had considerable popular appeal, had few inhibitions about terrorizing, silencing and reorganizing civil society as it wished. It could therefore enforce its definition of its official class categories more effectively than its predecessors, and allowed much less opportunity for unscripted, unofficial classes to appear. It is rather misleading therefore to portray the October Revolution as a transition from a class-divided to a classless society, or to claim that Russia had advanced by means of a revolution, or by ‘direct political agency’ to some superior kind of social order that property-owning capitalist societies could never hope to emulate. In fact, the tsarist regime made continuous use of ‘direct political agency’, in the attempt to categorize, tax, draft and control the population, and to distribute political privileges and rights in the manner it preferred. The Bolsheviks and the Politburo of the Communist Party behaved in much the same manner, and for similar reasons. On occasion, they seem to have tried to reinforce rather than reduce the homogeneity of the categories into which they had divided the population, and the demarcation between them. The social distance between managers and workers, to take one example, had frequently offended workers before 1917 but collapsed during the October Revolution. Far from welcoming the disappearance of this class-forming distinction, Lenin and Stalin did everything they could to restore it. Lenin’s insistence on ‘one man management’ rather than any kind of workers’ control was the first step. Stalin continued in this direction by insisting managers be both ‘red and expert’, meaning both members of the Party and graduates of higher educational institutes. He then encouraged engineers to resume wearing the uniforms that had distinguished them under the old regime, and later decided that graduates, should also be publicly recognizable by special lapel badges.164 The ‘direct political agency’ that really distinguished Soviet society, therefore, was not that supposedly intended to create a classless society, of which there was precious little, but that used to terrorize and silence civil society, so that the categories into which the regime had divided the population could never openly articulate their interests and emerge as classes. Since the tsarist regime could never control civil society to the same degree, it had to tolerate a certain dissonance between the official and non-official

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vocabulary of social hierarchies, and to accept market-induced contradictions of it, such as poverty-stricken nobles alongside fabulously wealthy serfs. It had neither the means, nor perhaps the will, to impose its preferred language of class. In the late eighteenth century, sostoianie, meaning ‘condition’ and then ‘legal status group’, was used officially to classify the population into four such groups: the nobility, clergy, townspeople and peasants. Sostoianie remained, in formal governmental usage, the basic legal term until the end of the tsarist regime. The Svod Zakanov, or Digest of Laws, published in 1835, also defined the rights and obligations of sosloviia, usually translated as estates.165 Initially, Freeze explained, soslovie meant ‘society’, ‘community’ or ‘constituted body’, but in ordinary usage it slowly gathered additional connotations ‘of corporateness, of a common culture, and of caste-like endogamous exclusiveness.’ In 1847, the Academy of Sciences Dictionary recognized these colloquial connotations, and defined a soslovie as ‘a category of people with a specific occupation, distinguished from others by their special rights and obligations.’ Soviet historians used the term soslovie to describe the entire stratification system up to the Great Reforms of Alexander II, and from that point on until October 1917 claimed that Russian society was divided into classes, and they were therefore able to fit it, to their own satisfaction, into the official Marxist schema of feudalism, capitalism and socialism. Freeze pointed out, however, that civil society never used the term soslovie to refer to ‘vestiges of the feudal past’, or to an ordered and comprehensive framework of four estates. Far from declining, he thought that sosloviia were actively evolving after the reforms of Alexander II. Advocates, a wholly new occupation and product of those reforms were, for instance, often described as a soslovie, and later on physicians sought to assert their independence of the state by referring to their soslovie. The term was, as we noted earlier, sometimes applied to merchants.166 Freeze thought soslovie ‘became the primary descriptive term for the social system in late Imperial Russia’ in ordinary speech, and referred to ‘enormously complex congeries with numerous distinct subcategories’ in the main, one suspects, of occupation.167 It coexisted, however, with a variety of other colloquial terms such as: raznochhintsy, which referred to the ever-increasing number of people of no particular legal category; meshchanstvo the lowest category of artisans, labourers and petty traders; and the ‘third element’ of educationally-qualified zemstvo employees. Wirtschafter sought to pin down these and other social categories, but ‘the porous boundaries, indeterminate definitions, flexible structures’ and ‘fluctuating identities and insecure legal moorings’ of imperial Russian society made it impossible for her to do so.168 The Soviet regime was, by contrast, determined to prevent similar ‘porous boundaries’ and ‘indeterminate definitions’ and any similar dissonance between official and ordinary usage. It therefore decided to micro-manage

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the distribution of rewards and privileges, and to enforce a monopoly of the language of class, ensuring that distant, dissenting voices, like those of Djilas and Orwell, that contradicted the official vocabulary were never heard.169 The two Russias’ management of social stratification, we may conclude, differed in scope and consistency, and in the means of enforcing it, which is a difference of degree rather than of kind. Both regimes, one might notice, had to cope with the disruptive effects of market forces. Since the tsarist regime never gave its merchant guilds sufficient powers to protect themselves from the competition of tiagloexempt groups, entrepreneurs emerged at all social levels, from dvoriane to serf, and were themselves completely classless. The emancipation of the serfs in 1862 gave more scope to market forces and some peasants were able to become substantial landowners.170 The decomposition of the dvorianstvo and its dispersal into other social categories also accelerated. When the class of provincial landed gentry sought to arrest the advance of representative government, they urged the reinstatement of the old estate divisions of the population that market forces had been dissolving, and the replacement of the duma by a zemskii sobor, an assembly of sostoianiia or sosloviia. Market forces threatened to work in the same disruptive manner under the Soviet regime. Three of the prime agents of confusion in the official stratification of the old regime were eliminated at a relatively early date: entrepreneurs, kulaks or wealthy peasants, and self-assigned members of the intelligentsia, but thereafter the regime still had to cope with the disruptive effect of market forces, since these were not, as the categorical distinction between capitalist and socialist regimes might lead one to think, totally eliminated. After the brief enthusiasm for wage equalization, for instance, income differentials were utilized as incentives. And these were not, Lampert decided, entirely the result of a conscious political decision. ‘Even in the absence of a free labour market’, he observed, ‘there were apparently strong “market” pressures towards greater differentiation in wage and salary scales.’171 Shearer has similarly shown that in the early 1930s, even after collectivization was well under way, ‘the social, institutional and economic dynamics that drove the industrial system defied attempts by Stalinist leaders to impose their own order … Despite constant attempts by higher political and administrative bodies, most factories and trusts were forced to rely on their own devices to get supplies, secure labor, and actually produce something. Networks of traders, recruiters and subcontractors arose out of and reinforced remnants of older commercial and administrative practices.’172 The regime claimed, of course, that it controlled and planned everything, and some observers believed them, but reality was, Shearer observed, ‘rather different.’ Hence the ubiquitous tolkachi who in various imaginative ways reduced the frictions in the official planning machine, perhaps even enabled it to continue, by negotiating private deals between state enterprises. Khrushchev later legalized free

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movement of industrial labour, and this, as Filtzer argued, ‘fundamentally stamped the entire fabric of relations between workers and management and between workers and political authorities … the ability of workers to leave their jobs whenever they wished meant that the labour market once again became a seller’s market. Workers could not be dismissed against their will, yet they could come and go virtually as they pleased.’173 There was also a considerable market sector in Soviet agriculture. In 1930, kolhozniks, their relatives and dependants and other rural workers were allowed to keep private plots, just as they had been allowed to do so by their landlords in pre-Reform Russia, and they were allowed to sell their products in local markets. Their number grew steadily so that by 1973 there were, according to Wädekin’s authoritative calculations, ‘fifty million small-scale producers’, and they contributed, at the time, about 30% to the gross value of Soviet agricultural output.174 There was also the submerged and illegal ‘black’ economy that operated outside the socialist distribution of rewards.175 Moonlighting and use of state equipment and supplies enabled ‘a kind of capitalism’, as Willis put it, to flourish ‘at the lower end of the class scale, among taxi drivers, chauffeurs, interior decorators, car mechanics, hairdressers.’176 No doubt, by comparison with capitalist countries, these are still rather limited, interstitial forms of market relationship, so it may seem an entirely reasonable simplification to define the Soviet regime for analytical purposes by the absence of market relationships. Nevertheless, if we overlook the fact that it was continuously engaged in suppressing market forces, and policing their acceptable limits, we may also overlook the interesting questions why the ‘mix’ of direct administrative control and market distribution of rewards and privileges stopped where it did, and why, given that income differentials and progressive taxation are relatively easy to administer, the Soviet regime did not rely exclusively on them to differentiate the population just as it wished, from General Secretary of the Communist Party down to the lowliest peasant, rather than micro-managing the differences between strata. The most likely answer is that it was precisely because income differentials alone were thought to be too uncertain, too unpredictable and unreliable a means of differentiating the nomenklatura from other citizens. They might have confused and undermined the officiallydesignated social hierarchy. Some ‘insolent person’, a diligent, thrifty, single worker perhaps, or a worker in the black economy, might somehow or other lay their hands on a Chaika, even a Zil, the cars of the nomenklaturists. And then what? They might obtain salutes from the police, or drive on the special reserved lanes of the highway, and enjoy respect from other drivers, to which they were not entitled, until their number plates gave them away unless they had also managed to forge or buy those. This is not, by the way, a fanciful possibility. It occasionally happened under Brezhnev.177 To prevent such anomalies and mistakes, and to make the official hierarchy instantly recognizable and universally respected, the regime therefore

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committed itself to the prodigious administrative effort of distinguishing access to every kind of good and service, and reinforcing income differentials by ‘direct political agency’ to ensure the official hierarchy was stable, publicly recognized and respected.178 It was only towards the very end of the regime that the privileges of the nomenklatura were increasingly turned into cash, by taking advantage of the difference between official and unofficial exchange rates, by establishing joint enterprises, by property dealings, and by premature, negotiated privatizations, preceding those to the general public. Some of the younger members of the nomenklatura were then able to leapfrog their superiors. Outsiders were able to join the economic elite, and market forces were able to undermine the officially preferred stratification of Soviet society.179 The key therefore to understanding both the resemblances and the differences in the stratification of the two Russias is the relationship between the state and civil society, and it is not helpful to assume, as the Bolsheviks hoped we might, that there was a categorical and comprehensive distinction between socialist and capitalist societies. The benefits of focusing on the relationship between the state and civil society seem, however, to be still greater when we consider the formation of classes on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in capitalist societies.

5 Civil Society as Adversary and Collaborator in France

On the grounds that comparison best proceeds by considering cases that have much in common, we will next consider France, for in a number of respects it comes closer to Russia than the other two capitalist societies we will consider in that the French state made greater efforts to control or regulate organized interests in civil society than either the United States or England. Marx once likened it to a boa constrictor coiled around ‘the living civil society’. French civil society was, however, never terrorized or silenced by this boa constrictor for very long. It intermittently rebelled, and on two occasions, in 1830 and 1848, overthrew the regime and installed a new one. On a third occasion, in Paris in 1871, it expelled the state apparatus from its own capital, and for 72 days sought to devise a communal alternative. On each of these occasions, it contributed to the formation of a class whose triumphs and tragedies have inspired both class analysts and activists around the world more than any other – the French working class.

A proletariat that preceded industrialization The most striking characteristic of this legendary class is that it appeared long before widespread industrialization. Even in the very earliest stages of industrialization in France during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), there was already a certain ‘passion for the proletariat’, and workers were portrayed as prolétaires menaçants.1 In 1831, when there were still only a few miles of railway track, and very few factories, Auguste Blanqui, the perennial revolutionary, during the first of his many trials, put the case which was to inspire Lenin, for a vanguard party to help the proletariat overthrow their bourgeois oppressors. In the event, as Noiriel showed, ‘a genuine industrial proletariat’ of life-long, full-time, and second-generation wage labourers employed in large-scale manufacturing plants only emerged in France on a significant scale before and after World War I, and their collective actions only ‘entered French history’ in 1936, more than 100 years after the proletaires menaçants of the July Monarchy.2 87

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Marx and Engels claimed that they had seen ‘the first great battle … fought between the classes that split modern society’ during the June Days in Paris in 1848. Traugott has shown that they were imagining things since the two sides in this ‘first great battle’ were indistinguishable in their class backgrounds, both being overwhelmingly artisan.3 The main difference between them was that the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ was drawn heavily from the employees of the National Workshops, a job-creation programme started only months before, but whose director had just been dismissed and whose closure had been announced, while the ‘bourgeoisie’ and their ‘lumpenproletariat allies’ were soldiers of the Mobile Guard, a paid but volunteer militia.4 Traugott’s restrained and reasonable conclusion was that we should recognize the ‘decisive role of political and organizational variables in explaining the course and outcome of collective action.’5 How are are we to explain the strange prematurity, and these strange premonitions, of a class that was thought to have appeared before the conditions that were supposed to create both it and its main adversary, even existed? Many students of the French working class have directed our attention to changes within corporately-regulated, artisanal forms of production, but in a comparative study, with other cases on the table, one inevitably approaches their work in a rather sceptical frame of mind. In England, where capitalist means and relationships of production were more advanced than in France, workers nevertheless lagged far behind the French in terms of class consciousness and of militant collective action. If we then look in the other direction, at Russia, we find a textile industry, using the latest imported British machinery, ‘accommodated itself perfectly well to serfdom’.6 Is there any relationship at all, one wonders, between the means and the relations of production, and could either have any necessary relationship with class formation? For the moment, however, we may put such sceptical thoughts aside, since the argument that changes in the corporate regulation of production were decisive in the formation of the French working class has been supported by some outstanding studies of the French workplace. We will consider three examples. The first, by Johnson, sought to document a ‘rapid acceleration between 1750 and 1850 of objective proletarianization’ meaning an ‘increase, both absolute and proportionate in the number of wage labourers in a given population and their increasing domination by capitalists.’ He tracked changes among Parisian tailors and compared them with those among woollen workers in the tiny mono-industrial city of Lodève, with a total population in 1798 of just 7,200.7 Driven by the strong, though uneven, demand for the products of its workshops, workers in Lodève were far in advance of those of Paris. Some four decades before the revolution, entrepreneur-fabricants in Lodève had ‘broken’ the guild institutions and regulations, and by the ‘meshing together of functionally separate crafts’ had created a proletariat in ‘a factory system without machines’.

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Under the Restored (1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848), workers in Lodève were therefore able to launch ‘a class struggle of epic proportions’, involving numerous strikes over their pay and conditions, and even to organize a general strike in 1845. Over the decades following the revolution, Parisian tailors also experienced ‘the full swing from a corporative or guild mode of production to an industrial capitalist one’, as some master tailors increased the size of their work forces, sub-divided their tasks, created new hierarchies of control and of skill, and hired increasing numbers of unapprenticed home workers, largely women, at half the wage of the journeymen who worked in their shops. As in Lodève, these changes were accomplished ‘without the least mechanization of the industry.’ So-called confectionneurs who specialized in the growing market for ready-made clothing, accelerated these changes in the second quarter of the century, by producing clothing in standardized sizes which they marketed through the new department stores. Journeymen tailors ‘whose work and beings were being de-artisanized’ responded to these changes with ‘typical trade union activity’, sometimes against their bespoke masters, but in the late 1840s more often against the confectionneurs. They ‘fused together in struggle…. joined one army in the working class war against industrial capitalism’, alongside cabinetmakers, shoemakers, masons, carpenters and joiners and others who had been similarly ‘de-artisanized’. This Parisian ‘army in the class war’ only managed, however, to create a ‘powerful ideology of craft consciousness’ that hoped to preserve the autonomy of their trades by producer-cooperatives. The other army, the Lodèvois, were therefore ‘the “truer” proletarians’, and ‘more exact prototypes of the modern industrial proletariat, harbingers as they were of industrial unionism and class conscious socialism.’ Proletarianization may, one must conclude, be hidden, and may proceed without mechanization and without factories, so we should be wary of using aggregate national indices of steam engines, factory employment and the like. Aminzade, our second example, traced the ‘long and slow’ transformation of nineteenth-century Toulouse from a society divided by status distinctions and trade loyalties to one divided by class.8 This transformation was ‘evidenced’, he thought, by the decline of compagnonnages, fraternities of journeymen descended from craft guilds, and their replacement by mutual benefit societies, secularized descendants of the confrèries of the ancien régime but a more modern form of association which became ‘politicized agents of class struggle.’9 Although these societies assumed some of the welfare functions of the compagnonnages, they were less concerned, Aminzade thought, with their rules to control entry to their trades or to protect the wages and working conditions of their members, since they ‘usually’ drew their members from a variety of occupations, even from nonmanual and unskilled workers, and sought to promote ‘common identities among members of different trades.10 In the 1840s, they responded to the

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‘many appeals for working class unity’ which all came to fruition immediately after the revolution in February 1848. They then formed a Sociètè des travailleurs which aimed at the ‘prompt and complete fusion of all trades (corps d’état) into a general association of workers.’11 Aminzade argued that all these changes were ‘brought about by the rise of industrial capitalism’, even though, as it happened, and as he showed, Toulouse was never ‘an important centre of factory production’. Even by 1872 only 7.1% of the labour force of the city was engaged in manufacturing, and its position as a commercial centre steadily declined in the nineteenth century, in the middle decades of which it suffered from both a ‘crisis of commercial capital’ and a ‘flight of industrial capital’. Its industry therefore ‘remained largely handicraft and small scale in character.’12 Although he could identify a number of changes within the artisan workshops of Toulouse similar to those Johnson identified among Parisian tailors, the main reason why artisans in Toulouse assumed ‘new selfidentities based on the common position of wage labourer’ and became ‘actively involved participants in the class struggles of the period’ was the threat to their livelihoods presented by northern industrial centres.13 Hence it was the advance of industrial capitalism elsewhere that made Toulouse’s artisans more class conscious, even more class conscious in fact than workers in the industrial centres who had themselves been proletarianized. It was not, as he put it, ‘among the most proletarianized workers that the solidarities of class were strongest’, but rather among ‘artisanal workers who faced the threat of proletarianization.’14 Since he readily acknowledged that the manufacturing labour force ‘remained a very small segment of the French population during the middle decades of the nineteenth century’, it would appear that this ‘very small segment’ generated the class consciousness of artisans across France. Since Toulouse also complained of English competition, we may also infer that proletarianization across the Channel was actually contributing to the class consciousness of French artisans. Our third example is Sewell’s attempt to explain why ‘the political attitudes and behaviour of the working class of Marseille were revolutionized’ after 1848. Unlike Toulouse, the city had grown rapidly over preceding decades and included a small manufacturing sector which by 1866 had grown to about a fifth of the labour force, so that the majority who remained in the small-scale handicraft sector ‘could see the factory system advancing menacingly before their eyes.’15 Nonetheless, his evidence did not suggest that either the growth of manufacturing employment, or the threat of its further advance, had much to do with the change in the political affiliations and political activity of the working class, since artisan trades were also expanding over this period, and in 1866 were still nearly three times as large as the manufacturing sector. As far as he could discover, there was also no ‘subtle process of proletarianization’ within the trades over previous decades. Their workshops had not increased in size, their rate

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of strikes had not increased, and though artisans’ purchasing power had declined somewhat before mid-century, those who suffered most did not participate in radical movements any more than those with above average earnings. In any case, he also found that many of the city’s factory workers ‘retained strong resemblances to workers in the handicraft sector’ having ‘personal responsibility for the quality of their product, high levels of skill, high wages, and a strong sense of pride and dignity.’16 So although there was no subtle process of proletarianization, there was evidently one, to coin a term, of ‘artisanization’ within factories. The proletariat of Marseille, as Sewell defined it, consisted of a mere 17% of the labour force who were employed in unskilled, insecure and low paid jobs, often impoverished, frequently oppressed, and illiterate. In marked contrast to artisans, they were poorly organized, if at all, incapable even of organizing strikes, and took little part in the collective action of the working class. Sewell suggested that the key factor explaining the conversion of workers away from their monarchist and Catholic loyalties was the extremely high rate of migration into the rapidly-growing city, and while some trades remained exclusive, others were more open to the immigrants. It was among these ‘open’ trades that conversion to republican and socialist causes was most marked. Nearly half of the names on the police lists of activists came from them, almost twice their share of the population as a whole. About a quarter of those on these lists had ‘bourgeois’ occupations, and only 7% came from exclusive trades, who were ‘relatively immune to republican and socialist propaganda’, as were the proletariat. In sum, the economic factor that mattered most was the rapid growth of the city, the ‘crisis of expansion’ as Sewell called it, and the growing demand for the services of some trades, and the resulting decline in their homogeneity and cultural cohesion.17 These three studies all raised interesting questions about proletarianization. It might proceed ‘without the least mechanization’, ‘without large factories’, and even ‘without capital’, while in Marseille, it hardly affected artisanal relations of production at all, and did not occur within the new factories. In the end, however, they do not resolve doubts about explanations of the formation of the French working class that rest on changes in the relations or means of production. This is not because the three studies identified different causal dynamics of class formation, but rather because, as much as these alleged dynamics differed, the collective consciousness and collective action of artisans in these cities somehow synchronized nationally. Thus, although the woollen workers of Lodève had been ‘thrown together by objective forces of industrial change and forged a unity of purpose’ long before the backward tailors of Paris, the class solidarity of both nonetheless ‘reached a climax at roughly the same time’, that is following the revolution of February 1848.18 Likewise, Toulousan artisans suffering from the effects of northern and British competition, transcended their

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trade solidarity shortly after the same revolution, and only then formed their first working class electoral association, the Société des Travailleurs, and started to help each other during their strikes.19 And despite the fact that Marseille’s artisans had not been subject to the same proletarianization as those in Lodève, Paris or Toulouse, their ‘mass conversions to republicanism and socialism’ nonetheless occurred ‘above all in the wake of the revolution of 1848’ and prompted them to mount an uprising in June of the same year ‘in concert with’ that in Paris.20 One may, therefore, reasonably conclude that the economic changes that supposedly encouraged class formation, whatever they may be, do not in the end make much difference. Be they as premature, as rapid and as immediate as those in Lodève, or as slow-moving as those in Paris, or as far-removed as those in Toulouse, or as selective as those in Marseille, the destination and time of arrival was pretty much the same. Aminzade later compared the workers of Toulouse, with those of St. Etienne and Rouen through to 1871, still focusing on changes in the mode and relations of production he sought ‘to map out each pattern of early capitalist industrialization and delineate the consequences for class conflict and for divisions and solidarities within each city’s working class’.21 In the event, his evidence showed that the most developed class consciousness over this later period was to be found in the least capitalist city, still sleepy Toulouse. It remained a city with many artisan workshops engaged in urban household trades and had little large factory production, but nevertheless in 1871 it was the most revolutionary of the three and declared a commune in sympathy with that in Paris. St. Etienne, which had a more diverse urban economy with a traditional silk-ribbon industry, and paternalistically-managed steel and mining firms, was the intermediate case. It also declared a commune in 1871, though by Aminzade’s standards was rather less revolutionary than Toulouse, since its commune was led by radical republicans rather than by socialists. Economically dynamic, and modern Rouen, by contrast, which was dominated by large textile factories, and had created the real thing, a homogeneous, undifferentiated proletariat was, however, led by conservative and liberal leaders. No commune was declared in the city, and it must therefore be considered the least class conscious of the three. These inter-city variations, however, only remind us of the inter-societal variations raised at the start of this discussion when we wondered why England was backward relative to France. Now we may wonder why Rouen was backward relative to Toulouse. If economic factors are decisive, why should the most advanced economically be the least advanced in terms of class formation? In his retrospective view of Marseille over a similar period, Sewell observed that the spread of republican and socialist attitudes among artisans in the city ‘was certainly not a steady and linear development’, which is what one might reasonably expect if these had been the result of eco-

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nomic development. He identified three critical moments: ‘the first burst of political activity coincided with the general unrest of the early 1830s’, the second was the ‘mass conversions to republicanism and socialism … in the wake of the revolution of 1848’, and the third occurred ‘in the politically effervescent years of the late 1860s’, which led on to the declaration of a commune in the city in concert with Paris in 1871. There is no reason to think that Marseille’s bursts of class solidarity and class action were atypical, for these moments all coincided with national class mobilizations. Nor, of course, is there any reason to suppose that they coincided with sudden changes from artisanal to more ‘proletarianized’ forms of production, or that French industry reverted to artisanal means of production from 1835 to 1848 or after Louis Napoleon’s coup in 1851 when trade forms of organization once more became the usual form of worker organization. Clearly, the main factor explaining the transition from trade to class consciousness was freedom of organization and action. All of these bursts coincided with periods when workers were momentarily free, de facto or de jure, to organize as they wished, namely, in the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830, in the wake of the revolution of February 1848, and in ‘the politically effervescent years of the late 1860s’ which were sparked by the semi-legalization of trade unions and strikes in 1864 and of chambres syndicaux in 1868. Political events were therefore critical steps in the formation of the French working class, and if we wish to understand that process we must consider workers not simply as victims, whose form of action was decided for them by changes made by entrepreneurs in the mode and relations of production, but as political actors making choices of their own in the light of the opportunities open to them, and their available collective resources.

The social capital of the French working class Three of these collective resources stand out. The first, and much the most important, was the revolution itself, and French people’s memories or images of it. In France, Tombs observed, class ‘derived meaning from the Revolution … From the very beginning, the Revolution, and subsequently its nineteenth century aftershocks were explained as class conflicts.’22 French working people did not therefore have to discover or invent a working class, or to find a justification for it, since it already existed. They had only to draw inspiration from its heroic role in the making of modern France, and renew its struggle in the face of new forms of oppression, and new Bastilles. Memories of the revolution were not, moreover, simply ideas and images. They were also scripts of class mobilization, and guides to a certain form of political participation and protest, that were repeatedly validated, and firmly institutionalized, over the course of the nineteenth century. What might appear to an observer to be hastily assembled crowds, therefore had

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a certain direction and agenda, even a routine. Early one February morning in 1848 Tocqueville was struck by the way workers built barricades, felled trees, ripped up paving stones, defaced insignia of the July Monarchy, in preparation for a day of protest as if they had been choreographed. ‘The men of the first revolution were’, he observed, ‘living in every mind, their deeds and words present to every memory.’23 During the insurrection in June he was sitting with other deputies in the National Assembly, when armed men burst in, one of whom pointed his musket at him. Why, he wondered to himself, was he not frightened by it, and decided, ‘That man’s musket was loaded in 1793. He is not a fighting man. He is an actor repeating the gestures that he has seen in some picture of 1793.’24 In 1871, the Paris Communards provided an astonishing demonstration of the instant recall of the revolutionary script by mimicking the great revolution in numerous ways: its calendar, its committee of public safety, its anti-clericalism, its courts, newspapers and clubs. Rather little had to be added to bring it up to date, and make it seem modern and socialist. Cobb conveyed the liturgical character of these re-enactments by referring to the ‘revolutionary passion play’. Tombs elaborated his idea and documented several performances of its six acts.25 However, to recognize the contribution of revolutionary memory to the formation of the working class we might also view it as a semi-organized form of political participation and association, lying somewhere between a union or party and a crowd. ‘Meetings’ were summoned by news of some perceived oppressive act by the state, or by its inadequate response to widespread economic distress. They were invariably convened in public spaces, in front of the hôtel de ville or another official building that symbolized state power, if possible of sacred revolutionary memory. Meetings were open. Anyone could participate, but their leaders were those who had already come to public attention by their recent opposition to the government. The agenda was unspecific and extremely general, and encapsulated in a few slogans, which preferably resonated with terms of the original revolution. Meetings were closed either with a concession or promise from a state official, or with muskets, batons, arrests and trials, or just possibly, with the fall of the regime. The most important characteristic of this form of political participation in the present context is that it had no defined membership. Anyone with a grievance against the regime, or some sympathy with those who had, could participate, and this enabled ‘the working class’ to be extremely heterogeneous in composition, and on occasion, vast in scale. Marx noticed how peasants, the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes joined popular protests during the Restored and July Monarchies, and he liked to think that they were ‘siding with the proletariat’ or ‘regrouping around the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary force.’26 Whether they were or not, he overlooked the state’s contribution to these coalitions. The legitimacy of both regimes was strongly contested, and therefore supporters of previous regimes formed a

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tacit, though temporary, freemasonry of opposition, and joined any protest against them. Moreover, their constitutions divided the population into those with full political and civil rights and those without them.27 Such state-imposed class demarcations preceded and, it seems safe to say, had far wider social significance than any distinctions that a handful of industrial employers might have imposed on their employees. They only declined in significance as the legitimacy of the Third Republic was established by several elections with adult male suffrage, and as it went on to protect freedoms of speech, of the press and of association. The French working class were therefore the descendants of ‘the people’ who had played a heroic role in the great revolution. Les proletaires, Tombs observed, ‘were usually seen as all those working for wages and hence included peasants, teachers, clerks, journalists, and certainly left-wing intellectuals’, ‘proletarians like me’ as Blanqui used to say. Newspapers of the Paris Commune in 1871 spoke of the labouring bourgeoisie (la bourgeoisie travailleuse) and the heroic proletariat fighting together to defend the Republic. Indeed, the concept of the working class became so all-embracing, that it was roughly synonymous with ‘all citizens’, or ‘all good people’ and could readily be combined with rather nationalist and xenophobic sentiments. Who, then, was left to oppose it? Only ‘the oppressive State’, Tombs suggested, along with ‘its overpaid lackeys, soldiers, policemen and priests; the idle rich and the landlords.’28 Without reference to the revolutionary origins or pre-formation of the working class, it would be difficult to understand why it preceded industrialization, or many of the other characteristics for which it is best remembered and honoured, and which distinguish it from every other working class: why, for instance, it was able to mobilize on such a spectacular scale; why its protests were commonly directed against the state, and why the capital city was the scene of so many of its exemplary struggles, even though Paris was far from being the centre of French industrialization. Its revolutionary form of participation and protest, and the ecstatic moments of struggle that it unleashed, is the single most remembered, and admired, collective institution of the French working class. No foreign admirer has ever found reason to commend its permanent class associations, or the institutions which have enabled it to reproduce a distinctive class culture. By contrast with the memory and script of revolutionary mobilization, the other collective resources at the disposal of the French working class seem extremely modest. Regular association of those with like political views in political clubs was one of them. Clubs also of course had first-class revolutionary credentials, though over the course of the nineteenth century no political club was ever able to create anything remotely comparable to the original Jacobin Club’s national network of affiliates, or was ever allowed to try and do so. Most of the time clubs could only operate in secret, under cover of mutual

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benefit societies or producer co-operatives, apart from the brief intervals when freedom of association was possible. One such interval occurred between the fall of the July Monarchy in February 1848 and mid-April, when more than 200 ‘open admission’ popular societies appeared in Paris which, Amann estimated, attracted between 50,000–70,000 members out of the city’s adult population of 400,000. Since laws against clubs had not been repealed they ‘depended on official toleration and support’, and with government funding nearly 150 of them united in a Club of Clubs. These clubs saw themselves ‘as a training ground for popular democracy’, but in the many elections that followed, for officers of the National Guard and for the Constituent Assembly, they had, Amann thought, little discernible impact. Their demonstrations were not particularly successful, and an attempted insurrection in May by one of them was ‘botched’ and led to the flight or arrest of its leaders. Their involvement in the June days was therefore ‘marginal’.29 Given the change in the complexion of government after the national elections, ‘nothing much was left’ of the original 200 clubs. A ‘handful’ re-emerged in September, but ‘without regaining political influence’, and they were all suppressed in 1849. Some again reappeared in 1851, to resist Louis Napoleon’s coup, after which they were again suppressed. Magraw surveyed the clubs in a number of other cities, including those in the most ‘advanced’, the ‘red city’ of Lyon. More than 150 of them appeared after February 1848, and they had some 8,000 members. Given Lyon’s bitter labour conflicts in the early years of the July Monarchy, its ‘labour movement’ was, Magraw tells us, ‘precociously mature’ and workers were ‘well aware that a considered political strategy was a prerequisite of success’. ‘Labour leaders’, he says, tended to discourage violent protests, though there were nonetheless a good number of them, and they worked, with some success, in co-operation with the organized trades, to secure the election of Republican and socialist candidates ‘of various tendencies’ both locally and nationally. In that respect, however, the clubs of Lyon were almost alone, and the failure of republicans and socialists nationally, ‘created tensions within the left’ in the city, Magraw argued, and their clubs were ‘struggling to survive’, some under the cover of producer cooperatives. They nonetheless were able to discourage their members from following Paris and launching an insurrection during the June Days. They were not therefore suppressed, and though under police surveillance, continued their electoral campaigning, again with some success, in the municipal elections in 1849. A short while later, however one militant club, the Voraces, after hearing false rumours of the defeat of the French army in Rome, decided that the moment was right to launch an insurrection against the recently-elected government, and replace it by a ‘red republic’ in the city. Their march on the town hall attracted some 15,000 people, but the troops in the garrison did not defect. Instead, they turned their

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cannons on the insurgents’ barricades, killed 25 of them, arrested some 800, and dispersed the rest. After this ‘rash adventure’, as Magraw called it, the city was placed in ‘a state of siege’, the remaining clubs were suppressed, and ‘the Lyon left had largely been demobilized as an effective political force’.30 Amann hailed the political clubs as ‘precursors of mass political parties’. Magraw suggested that they ‘contributed to the modernization of repertoire of French popular protest’, but their own evidence suggests that the clubs’ contribution to the later development of the working class was a minor one. The very fact that there were so many of them suggests that doctrinal or personal differences were more important than class solidarity. Moreover, they could hardly have helped to define the working class, since their own class composition was somewhat mixed and uncertain. Amann thought that their leaders ‘tended to be disproportionately of middle or lowermiddle class background’ but that ‘a working class rank and file committed to a socially-oriented republic predominated in most of them.’ Magraw, by some undisclosed means, decided that 70% of the members were working class, but whatever the percentage was, they do not appear to have institutionalized links among working people, or generated much class solidarity, since they disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared. Nor do they appear to have been particularly effective as secret societies since government informants could affirm their republican or socialist beliefs as convincingly as anyone else, a point that the great conspirator Blanqui never seems to have grasped. Moreover, any one of them might, like the Voraces of Lyon, find the revolutionary form of protest irresistible, re-enact the revolutionary script, and bring state retribution on them all. Later evidence shows that the ‘repertoire of French popular protest’ never developed into effective and durable nationally-organized associations and political parties, even after their freedom of association was assured by the Third Republic. In this respect, the most advanced working class of the capitalist world seems to have been among the more backward. Until the turn of the century the ‘ostensibly class parties remained in fact socially heterogeneous, weak and spectacularly fragmented.’ Socialist parties and the socialist electorate remained very small until the 1890s and even as the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) made headway before World War I, the votes and leaders of socialist parties did not come mainly from workers. In the twentieth century, French political parties remained ‘numerous and divided’ and offered ‘a model of acute instability’, the notable exception being the party that took as its model a Russian rather than a French political club.31 A third, more significant collective resource, was the association based on métier or trade. This had been much the most common form of association among urban workers before the revolution, and remained the bedrock of worker organization over the first three quarters of the nineteenth century

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in the form of compagnonnage, or more importantly, the trade-based mutual benefit society.32 It had certain in-built advantages over any other form of association. It was based on interests that tended to be lifelong, was entered only after a lengthy socialization, and the loyalty of its members was continuously reinforced by their everyday working relationships. As a result, it was largely self-administered, able to survive fluctuations in the enthusiasm or apathy of its members, and the attempts of either employers or the state, to suppress it, since even if disbanded, it immediately began to rebuild itself covertly on the next working day. Every account of French communities in the first half of the nineteenth century draws attention to the ubiquity of these societies. Sewell referred to ‘the avid sociability’ of Marseille’s artisans and to the ‘dense network of overlapping formal and informal ties’ they created, and to the distinctive artisan sub-culture they sustained. Johnson formed an impression of ‘an incredible network of professional, social and familial links’ in Lodève, ‘all intertwined, that produced virtually instantaneous action when needed’ and ‘completely eluded police surveillance.’33 Neither Sewell nor Johnson, one might add, give the least hint of the famed inability of the French to form voluntary associations. Here then was a formidable collective resource, but considered simply as contributors to the formation and mobilization of a working class, these societies also have decided weaknesses, as the Bolsheviks noticed, and intellectual friends of the working class everywhere else have frequently pointed out. They are, to begin with, exclusive, and inconveniently provide no locus standi for friends of the working class. Their primary interest is their own trade and their obligations are to other members of it, not to members of their class. Moreover, they sometimes quarrel with one another over their jurisdictions and their status.34 Hence they seem to require some special provocation or some special incentive to mobilize, or be mobilized, as a class, such as when many trades suffer simultaneously, or when they face a common threat, both of which happen of course, but are not routine occurrences. In France, trade societies had one additional, rather distinctive and debilitating weakness, for although they might be provoked to follow the revolutionary script, they fell short of revolutionary ideals of political participation and collective action. Along with other forms of intermediate association they had in fact come under sustained ideological assault during the revolution on the grounds that they were incompatible with its cardinal principles of sovereignty of the people and of equality. After the abolition of the guilds, some Paris journeymen societies re-organized, thinking that the Constituent Assembly was only attacking their masters. The then president of the Jacobin Club made it clear, in the law that bears his name, the loi Le Chapelier of 13–21 June, 1791, that they weren’t. Earlier and later revolutionary declarations and constitutions repeatedly confirmed the same principle, and consistently applied it to every form of occupational association whether

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organized by professionals or journeymen.35 In sum, the two most durable collective resources of French workers – the revolutionary tradition and the trade society – were at odds with one another, and even irreconcilable. The survival of trade societies therefore raise two questions. The first is why they were able to continue at all despite the loi Le Chapelier and subsequent prohibitions. But that is easy to answer since when describing their in-built advantages we observed that they were better able to cope with state repression than any other form of association. The second question is rather more difficult. Why was it that they started to decline in the later years of the Second Empire, and still more rapidly during the Third Republic and then disappeared altogether? Putting this more generally, one might ask why in an economy like that of France, which remained artisanbased over a very long period, trade and craft did not remain the bedrock of the working class organization through the late nineteenth and on through the twentieth? If they remained central to the organization of French production, why not to the organization of French labour? Why did they not modernize together? The common answer to these questions refers to the growth of large-scale manufacturing industry from the end of the nineteenth century, but we have already aired our doubts about looking at worker organization as an automatic response to changes introduced by employers. Comparison with England only reinforces them, as we have already observed. Although manufacturers there introduced mechanized, large-scale, capital-intensive methods of production earlier, more rapidly, and more extensively, than in France, English workers maintained their exclusive artisanal or trade basis of collective organization, commonly inventing new ‘crafts’ and trades within largescale manufacturing enterprises, a process of ‘artisanization’ similar to that Sewell noticed in Marseille. They continued in this ‘backwards’ direction right through the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. One may therefore infer that workers in the two countries were making a choice, and that the means of production have nothing much to do with it. French workers rejected what English workers hung on to, and they did so, one can only assume, because they thought that revolution, which they either remembered or had re-enacted, promised a more inspiring alternative than the localized, piecemeal amelioration of their condition that the trade societies offered.

Adaptation of their revolutionary script in the twentieth century This inspiring alternative briefly assumed an organized legal form in the bourses du travail, the first of which was established in Paris in 1887. Funded by the central government and by municipal councils anxious to attach organized labour to the still fragile republic, they addressed a long-standing

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artisan grievance against private recruitment agencies. The bourses spread rapidly. In 1892 ten of them federated in a national association under the leadership of anarchist-journalist Fernand Pelloutier, the head of the Paris bourse. Although they provided job placement services and travel assistance for those seeking work, Pelloutier and his militant staff saw their bourses as something more, much more, as agencies of class solidarity and class struggle. Pelloutier described the Paris bourse as a ‘gymnasium of revolution’.36 To this end, they ran libraries, evening classes and dispensaries, provided medical insurance and legal advice, organized recreational activities, theatrical events, festivals, carnivals and conferences, but most important of all they gave organizational, financial, and moral support to trade societies who were invited to hold their meetings in their municipally-provided facilities. In effect, therefore, the bourses became France’s first trade union federation, the nerve centre of strikes, organizing publicity, speakers, pickets, and strike funds and co-ordinating support among the trades. They were a formidable class resource, though one established and funded by the state, and therefore destined to disappear when the state decided it had had enough of them. While helping trade societies in the depressed fin de siècle years, the bourses necessarily diverted their members’ attention away from the interests of their own trades and towards the greater cause of inter-trade class solidarity. Their educational activities were intended, as Pelloutier put it ‘éduquer pour révolter’, not to uphold trade apprenticeship rules, which would in any case have required the collaboration of employers. The bourses also had no interest in trade jurisdictions or inter-trade disputes, and none at all in defending the distinction between skilled and unskilled workers. Much the same was true of the other form of national federation of trade unions, the Confédération Général du Travail (CGT) which was created in 1895, for it too hoped to unite workers for class struggle, and thought organization by region or by industry more appropriate for this purpose than organization by métier. For a while these two forms of union federation competed with one another, but in 1902, inspired by another anarchistjournalist, Emile Pouget, deputy secretary and editor of the CGT’s paper, the bourses became a part of the CGT.37 In 1906, at its Congress at Amiens, the CGT, along with representatives of the bourses du travail issued a charter, a founding charter one might call it, since it was to define the direction of the French labour movement over subsequent generations. After acknowledging, in a rather perfunctory manner, that one part of trade unions’ work is the improvement of workers conditions ‘telles que la diminution des heures de travail, l’augmentation des salaries, etc’, it concentrated on the other which it evidently considered of far greater importance, namely ‘l’émancipation intégrale’ of the working class ‘qui ne peut réaliser que par l’expropriation capitaliste’ and was to be obtained not by the ballot box but by means of a general strike.38 Since the charter

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went on to assert the right both of trade unions and of individuals to act outside ‘du groupement corporatif’’ we may assume that the 43 signatories did not think trade societies had much to contribute to this task, even though at least 24 of them were themselves craftsmen. They had, one must assume, been converted to the higher cause of class struggle. Six of the other signatories were officials of various bourses du travail. Apart from Emile Pouget himself, the occupations of the remaining 13 are impossible to ascertain. Few appear to have been semi-skilled or unskilled factory workers, and it therefore seems unlikely that the decision in favour of a new form of association could have been the result of the decline of artisanal forms of production and the presence of a proletariat from large-scale manufacturing plants.39 In any case, we know that there were at the time a great many groupements corporatifs and that the traditional artisan workshops remained much the most unionized sector of the labour force for several more decades, until both the public sector and of large-scale industries unionized in the 1930s.40 At Amiens in 1906, we may conclude, activist French workers made a deliberate choice to turn their backs on the extensive national network of chambres syndicaux, to discard the one collective resource that had served French workers through all the repressive regimes that had followed the revolution, and whose roots stretched far back into ancien régime, and opted instead for the form of collective participation and protest legitimized by la grande révolution and its several successors. The revolutionary script was therefore ensured further re-enactments in the workplace. It is only by reference to it that we can make sense of the peculiarities of French working class action in modern times. To begin with, it enables us to understand why, though it was the first working class to emerge, and though it engaged in more militant action, and suffered more fatalities, than any other, it was never able to form strong and durable national associations. Through to the end of nineteenth century, and right through the twentieth century, France appears to have been one of the least unionized labour forces in the western world with the exception of brief peaks of enthusiasm during the Popular Front government 1936–37, and immediately following the Liberation of France in 1944.41 It was precisely these years through to the mid-1950s that Noiriel described as ‘the apogee of a certain kind of working class culture’. Thereafter, it began to decline and has continued to do so ever since. Currently, unions have organized 8.2% of the total labour force, and just under 5% of the employees in the private companies that they hoped to overthrow.42 This cannot be attributed to any supposed national characteristic since, as we have already noticed, workers associations were ubiquitous in French cities when they were organized by trade. This failure must therefore be due to their decision to organize on the more ambitious and hazardous basis of

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class, and to try and convert the enthusiasm they had experienced intermittently on the streets into a permanent associational form. Unlike a trade, however, a class cannot rely on an enduring lifelong interest of its members. Its interests are likely to vary along with the circumstances of its diverse members, of the economy and wider society and of the state. They must therefore be a continuing subject of debate, and therefore of disagreement, which may at times be irreconcilable. On three occasions, leaders of the CGT disagreed amongst themselves about the implications of international events for the working class and split the confederation.43 Some trade unions had in fact been less than enthusiastic about the goal originally set out in the Amiens charter, and in 1919 formed their own federation Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens, though since this similarly was based on belief, it also split.44 Some CGT members later decided that their professional interests should after all take priority, most notably teachers, who seceded in 1947 to form the Fédération de l’education nationale, but it too later split.45 Hence while their protests could intermittently mobilize vast numbers, unions could never translate this mass enthusiasm into permanent union membership. Intending to unite the working class, they often wasted their energies accusing each other of ‘class betrayal’ and competing for members or battle honours, and therefore collectively recruited only a tiny minority of the labour force. Moreover, their preferred form of action had adverse consequences for the other goal that they had, rather perfunctorily, acknowledged at Amiens, that of improving the working conditions of their members. Since the latter entailed negotiation with employers, it could not be readily combined with a strategy of direct action, and employers were naturally unenthusiastic about negotiating with those calling for their ‘expropriation’. In any case, unions were themselves hopelessly ill-equipped to participate in meaningful negotiations. They lacked the shopfloor organization which would force employers to the negotiation table, the shopfloor savvy to bargain over the details of workplace organization, and they could never deliver a binding agreement if they got there, since their revolutionary commitment precluded no-strike agreements. Strikes were not therefore a calculated endgame but depended, like their revolutionary model, on an elusive climat social both in the workplace and beyond. Collective bargaining was therefore rare, and strikes were seldom the result of its breakdown. They had altogether different dynamic, reminiscent of revolutionary protests, often starting before any union vote or any serious bargaining effort to negotiate had been undertaken, and even before any demands had been formulated. Trade unions might then pose as their leaders and organizers, but in reality often followed workers’ protests, and retrospectively tried to identify the grievance that initially provoked the disturbance. After studying more than one hundred years of strikes in France, Shorter and Tilly wanted to contest the view that unions did not control or

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organize strikes, on the grounds that they found strikes were more extensive and frequent where workers were unionized. However, they were obliged to admit that many strikes were neither planned by the unions, nor in furtherance of their declared aims. At one point, they likened French strikes to bar room brawls, the union representative being the person who eventually stands on a table and calls for order.46 In the end, of course, if strikers’ grievances were to be resolved, a response of some kind was required from their employers, but in the absence of routine collective bargaining, this could only be obtained, indirectly, by the intervention of the state. Strikers and their unions therefore commonly directed their fire against the state, the original target of their preferred revolutionary form of protest, rather than against employers who were the actual cause of their members’ present distress. They typically opened, therefore, with a commotion or manifestation in public spaces, in front of the prefecture or other government buildings, rather than at their employers’ premises, and whenever possible raised the spectre of a revolutionary assault against the public authority, in the hope that the state would then compel employers to respond to their demands. Historical evidence suggests this hope was often realized, and that the state frequently intervened at their request and on their behalf, forcing employers to accede to some or all of their demands.47 In this roundabout way, by protesting against and negotiating with state officials, unions were able to improve the conditions of their members. It was, however, a method that had enormous benefits for employers, firstly because state intervention was an occasional rather than a routine occurrence. Secondly, and more importantly, because it left them free all the while to organize their enterprises much as they wished, since the state was no better equipped than the unions to intervene in the nitty-gritty of workplace organization. Hence, by trying to organize and mobilize as a class the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ surrendered control of their immediate work settings to their employers and managers. Numerous studies of all kinds of French workplaces, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrate this point, especially those studies which compare them with English workplaces where workers were unwilling to allow their employers and managers any such freedom.48 We examine a number of these studies below. The legendary French working class has, one must conclude, in large measure been formed and defined by its relationship with the state, which has been, at different times, either its main adversary or main ally or both. For the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, the state was primarily its adversary, though indirectly the state was also extending the boundaries of the working class and encouraging and institutionalizing a certain form of class action by limiting freedom of association and expression of large sectors of the population. During its short life, the Provisional

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Government of the Second Republic rendered more direct support to the working class via the Luxembourg Commission, the Club of Clubs, and the National Workshops.49 As we have already seen from Traugott’s research, both ‘classes’ in ‘the first great battle … fought between the classes that split modern society’ were in fact, organized and funded by the state. The Third Republic began to assume the role of ally, first of all through the bourses du travail, but then by intervening in labour disputes in the manner described above, and this continued through the Fourth Republic and the first three decades of the Fifth.50 It was the state, rather than the unions that sought to abandon the revolutionary script. Following the election of a socialist government in 1981, and the first socialist president in 1982, four lois Auroux sought to bring to an end the roundabout method of negotiating through the state after mobilizing working people as a class. By legally defining the ‘citizenship’ rights of employees to free expression, to organize, and to bargain collectively on certain specified matters, the government hoped that unions would direct their attention towards collective bargaining with those who had supposedly been their prime adversaries all along, the bourgeoisie, their employers. The first law included the provision that ‘unions should state their demands’, which seems to foreign observers like a statement of the obvious, but in France it was not so obvious, in fact rather rare.51 Employers initially feared that these laws would provoke militant mobilization of employees, but his study of four plants in Grenoble persuaded Smith that they actually aided the companies’ policies of employee integration, and created ‘new problems for the unions in that they implicate militants more deeply in technical and legal issues such as health and safety, working conditions and investment decisions.’ Unions at these plants preferred to continue in their traditional ways, and he found little change in the amount of collective bargaining. In the three strikes he observed, they played ‘a significant preparatory role’ by ‘mobilizing discontent’ through their constant campaigns of sensibilisation, or raising awareness of the injustices suffered by the working class. The strikes themselves, however, were ‘explosions, which they did not initiate or control’, though once underway, they played a role in organizing and sustaining them.52 In 1992, Amadieu cited several studies which suggested that there had been little change as collective bargaining, ‘whatever its subject, is not a regular occurrence, although progress has been made since 1982; rather it is an outcome, indeed one of the goals of industrial disputes.’ Moreover, it ‘carries little weight because it does not involve a commitment on the part of representatives of the workforce.’ Both employers and unions, Amadieu thought, still seemed determined to uphold their traditional adversarial relationship, though this still did not involve any disagreements about the organization of work or shopfloor grievances. Employers ‘consider organizational changes to be one of their prerogatives’, and ‘unions tended to

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agree with their employers in this respect’, and ‘considered that the organization of work was outside their sphere of influence.’ They therefore ‘have little control over the processes of production, due’, Amadieu explained, ‘to a lack of adequate coverage and a suitable organization of work (no system of trades).’53 In 1997, a cross-national survey found that though French trade unions had organized one of the lowest proportions of the labour force in the industrial world, France nevertheless had, by far the highest proportion of its labour force covered by ‘collective bargaining agreements’. This is at first sight, a curious combination but entirely comprehensible given the roundabout way in which unions may ‘negotiate with employers’.54 In 1997, we may assume, the state was continuing to perform its dual adversary/ally role, and imposing ‘collective bargaining agreements’ on employers on behalf of organized labour. Finally, in 2002, two decades after the passage of the Auroux laws, researchers at the European Observatory detected a change of direction, which suggested that the laws might at last be having their intended effect, and lessening unions’ inclination to treat industrial disputes as part of a class struggle. In comparing wage bargaining throughout the industrial world, it placed France, alone among continental European societies, alongside Britain, and Japan and the United States, as a country with a high rate of company-level bargaining.55 Commenting on these figures, Vincent and Aksaz noted that ‘the most significant change over the last decade has been the growth in company-level bargaining.’56 If this was really true of France, and if it takes hold, it would mark the decline of the collective protest, and the relationship with the state, that long defined the French working class. Some quotes from the later reports of others whose business it is to monitor contemporary industrial trends across Europe suggest, however, that we should be cautious: ‘Frequently, the content of collective agreements is merely a repackaging of the wording of general statutory frameworks … A number of firms … still use the term “bargaining” for simply providing information on management decisions to union delegates … there is almost stagnation in the amount of bargaining … employers’ associations and unions exert serious pressure on political parties and the government to obtain through legislation what they cannot get through bargaining. … In France, apart from working time, the organisation of work has not been the subject of much bargaining and indeed, appears to be a difficult area on which to negotiate.’57

Intellectuals appear in lieu of self-governing professionals The French working class has frequently been portrayed as having been cheated of the just rewards of their revolutionary exertions and sacrifices by the class it wished to overthrow ‘the bourgeoisie’. It has proved, however, extremely difficult to define this bourgeoisie, the supposed victors of every

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revolution, as a class. Marx identified at least six bourgeoisies in his analysis of the period between the revolution in February 1848 and Louis Napoleon’s coup in 1851, to which we might add the ‘working bourgeoisie’ welcomed by the communards.58 Looking at the nineteenth century as a whole, Tombs found it ‘hard to think of a single issue on which the bourgeoisie and only “the bourgeoisie” agreed, or a single interest they all shared.’ It is also hard to think of the associations and institutions which might have helped them to form a class.59 The bourgeoisie was, he decided, ‘a cultural creation’, and ‘one of the most potent of the nineteenth century.’60 Part of the difficulty is that many of those that one might suppose belonged to it seem to have joined the all-embracing working class, and many of those remaining seem anxious to distance themselves from it at all costs. The French bourgeoisie evidently failed to generate a sense of class honour to which its members might proudly lay claim. They all want to be artists, Oscar Wilde once observed. Its virtues, whatever they might have been, were far outweighed by a long list of well-publicized dishonourable characteristics, headed by grasping materialism, poor taste, prejudice and narrowmindedness.61 In the social space between rulers and working class that an organized bourgeoisie might have occupied, we can however observe three forms of collective action, three kinds of collective loyalty, and three groups therefore, who can reasonably claim to have formed a class: intellectuals, who emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, and continued through the first half of the twentieth, a petty bourgeoisie of small businessmen of all kinds including farmers that appeared in the 1950s and lasted for two decades or so, and the cadres or middle-level white collar workers that emerged shortly before World War II and continues to this day. However, before considering each of them, it is worth considering why the emerging band of professional occupations failed to develop the kind of corporate institutions, manners and ethics which contributed so much to the structure and culture of the English middle class, that is to say, to try to understand the non-appearance of a stable middle class in France before examining the three classes that appeared in its place. Only one French profession, that of advocates, was allowed to organize, as a self-governing corporate body. The corporate institutions of all the others were abolished, along with the organized trades, for reasons already mentioned, during the great revolution, and this was one revolutionary legacy that all succeeding regimes were pleased to accept. None wished to encourage, or cope with, autonomous self-governing professions. When professional associations were finally legalized in 1892, the state had already usurped the functions that self-governing professional bodies might have performed, and provided alternative, bureaucratic career paths to security, prosperity and public esteem for their members. These alternatives attracted sufficient numbers in every profession, and usually divided them from their putative

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colleagues who were self-employed, so that the chance of united professions recreating self-governing corporate institutions never occurred. Advocates were the exception only because there were a fair number of them amongst Napoleon’s advisers, and indeed were his collaborators in what he considered his greatest achievement, his codes. Overcoming his antipathy towards the profession, he eventually bowed to their pleas and grudgingly allowed them to revive their orders and some of their prerevolutionary corporate institutions in 1810, while making sure that they remained subject to state surveillance and intervention. Advocates considered these state controls on their autonomy extremely offensive to their corporate honour, and continually sought to remove them, but did not manage to do so until the very last days of the Second Empire.62 Notaires might perhaps be considered a marginal exception or perhaps a hybrid profession, since the corporate institutions they had created under the ancien régime were also re-established, and placed unambiguously under direct state control, without the least pretence of any degree of corporate independence.63 Notaires, however, were less inclined to think their corporate honour depended on their independence from the state. On the contrary, they welcomed its protection. Rather than openly resisting state regulation, they quietly and patiently undermined it from within, and over a very long period of time converted ostensible state regulation into a de facto form of self-government.64 Engineers illustrate the more normal form of professionalization in France. Their expertise was needed by revolutionary regimes at war, and Napoleon’s military campaigns greatly increased the demand for their services, prompting him to lay the foundations of a new form of profession: entered by competitive, intellectually exacting, concours, years of disciplined, militarized training in a grande école, followed by a lifetime career in one of the grands corps of the public service.65 Given their Napoleonic associations, the Restored Monarchy did not look on these schools with any particular favour, so their graduates did not immediately enjoy privileged access to power or any remarkable public prestige.66 Under the July Monarchy, however, they began their steady ascent, and under the Second Empire, both the grandes écoles and grands corps finally came into their own, and acquired an intellectual and social pre-eminence which has occasionally been challenged but which they have never lost. Harrigan caught them during their ascent under the Second Empire, when the École Polytechnique and others were seen ‘as avenues of social mobility to elites for those of rather mixed social background, much as the legal profession had done in the eighteenth century.’67 Grandes écoles proliferated under the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics.68 In the 1840s, students at the Ecole Centrale des arts et métiers, had repeatedly sought to establish an association for all practicing engineers, that would, whether consciously or not, have been similar to the professional institutions of English civil and mechanical engineers. They were, however, discouraged

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by their professors, and it was only during the heady days of the Second Republic that they succeeded in convening an inaugural meeting. Although this was open to all engineers, few non-centraliens attended, and while the society they formed, the Société des Ingénieurs Civils de France survived, it long remained de facto an alumni association of the Centrale.69 Alumni of other schools organized on a similar basis. French engineers therefore had little opportunity to assert their solidarity on the basis of their shared knowledge and expertise as engineers. They remained stratified according to the status of the school they had attended, that of the elite who had attended one of the grandes écoles being confirmed by the status, income and lifetime security that they enjoyed as serving members of the grands corps that dominated the military and civil arms of the state. State engineers were, therefore, almost the exact opposite of advocates. Everything they most valued and enjoyed derived from the state, which controlled their admission and training, provided the main avenues of advancement, designated their rank, and guaranteed their rewards and status. Advocates, by contrast, engaged in a long struggle to free themselves from state surveillance, during which their corporate solidarity was continuously reaffirmed and institutionalized. Since prosecutors were officials of the parquet, a state bureaucracy, advocates could only appear, in criminal trials, against the state. Their codes of ethics constantly reiterated their independence from the state in every aspect of their working lives, and for this reason they long declined to participate in any system of publicly-funded legal aid.70 Academics were obliged to follow the engineers’ rather than the advocates’ path of professionalization. After Napoleon created his Imperial University, to which every faculty in every university was subordinate, they were organized as an official corps enseignant, enabling state officials to become the ultimate arbiters of academic merit and success. When the institutions Napoleon had established began to be properly funded and staffed after 1830, they revealed, in Fox’s words, a new ‘bureaucratic conception of academic life’.71 Under the Second Empire it took hold completely. All professors were then required to take an oath of allegiance to Louis Napoleon, and especially over the years 1851–1863, an intellectual and political conformity was enforced by strict censorship of curricula, especially in public lectures. Duruy, one of Napoleon III’s Ministers of Public Instruction, would only sanction public lectures which dealt with subjects of a scientific or literary nature that ‘fulfilled his twofold objective of providing useful and morally improving information for the classes laborieuses’, and what he called ‘an elegant and beneficial diversion for the classes elevées’. He and his officials therefore carefully scrutinized applications to give lectures, and later the transcripts of lectures that had actually been given. These reviews generated much correspondence about the soundness of potential lecturers. ‘Professionalization’, Fox observed, ‘meant different things in different countries’. In French academic life, it evidently meant ‘a unified state corps of

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universitaires’ who had continuous difficulties ‘reconciling notions of the freedom and universality of science with the reality that they were the scientists of the state.’72 Engineers were largely, and academics wholly, salaried professionals, but the state also had a significant impact on professions with a large proportion of fee-for-service practitioners, such as medicine, and on professions that were still to be defined, such as accountants, and even on the pursuit of expert knowledge by amateur members of voluntary societies. State hegemony over voluntary societies has been brilliantly dissected by Fox, but some of the landmarks in the emergence of doctors and accountants as professions may be briefly identified.73 In the first national congress that doctors were allowed to hold after the revolution, in 1845, a number immediately called for the reconstitution of their ancient corporate institutions, but with a brusque reminder that this was tantamount to a restoration of the ancien régime, their request was ignored.74 They never subsequently organized as a self-regulating profession on the basis of their shared expertise and experience, and remained sharply divided between those who were, like advocates, entirely dependent on private practice, and those who held an appointment in the state medical schools, or held some kind of full or part-time public appointment. When doctors were finally free to organize under a law of 1884, they still did not unite as a profession, but preferred to follow the working class and organize as trade unions, and like them often competed with one another to bring pressure on the state to solve the various grievances that had preoccupied them in previous years, such as the organization of medical education, the competition from officiers de santé, the second class medical practitioners created during the revolution, and the role of private medical insurers as third parties to the traditional doctor-patient relationship.75 Accountants had no pre-revolutionary organizational roots. They emerged in the late nineteenth century from diverse sources: from the clerks and bookkeepers who kept the accounts of commercial firms, and were usually trained in their company’s office, from the very highest levels of the state administration, in the Treasury and other departments, among specialized judges, and the Conseil d’Etat which before 1867, had to approve the formation of every société anonyme; and after the reform of company law of 1867, from the commissaires aux comptes, who were required to approve the accounts of public companies.76 At this time, English accountants were similarly heterogeneous and disorganized, but professional organization in the two countries soon diverged radically because a company law in England, comparable in many respects to that in France, prompted the diverse persons performing accounting functions to organize themselves, to elect representatives, to agree on the specialized skills and ethical standards that should be required of all accountants, and then to lobby for a royal charter to enable to become a self-governing profession.77 Once the charter was obtained, they imposed

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admission and training requirements, and enforced their standards on everyone else who thereafter sought to practice as a ‘chartered accountant’. In France, the reform of company law had no such effect. Accountants remained scattered, sharply differentiated from one another, and unorganized. Students at the École des Mines and other grandes écoles continued to be taught some aspects of accountancy as a subsidiary part of their training, which probably explains why accountants have remained subordinate to engineers within French enterprises ever since. Company chefs de comptabilité continued to train their bookkeepers, and commissaires aux comptes continued to be chosen rather casually by company presidents. As accountancy work expanded, it came to be performed by a bewildering variety of persons calling themselves variously inspecteur-comptable, expert-comptable, censuer-comptable, organisateur-comptable, comptable-conseil, comptable-consultant etc, etc. While small learned societies of accountants were occasionally formed, no organized body of practitioners appeared to define and raise accounting standards, which long remained the rather rudimentary ones included in the Code de Commerce. A nationallyorganized profession only began to emerge in 1942, when an educational qualification for experts-comptable was required by the Vichy regime. After World War II, this statute was confirmed by the Liberation Government, and the profession of accountancy then slowly, very slowly, began to organize nationally around this state-imposed educational requirement. Architects might well be added to this list.78 Enough has been said, however, to show why the French middle class could not be organized around a series of roughly comparable self-governing professions, upholding their own admission and training requirements, elaborating their own rules of ethics and etiquette, and making their own appeal to the public at large for recognition and respect. The first of the three other distinctively French classes that appeared in their place were les intellectuels, the closest comparable case being the intelligentsia of tsarist Russia we have already discussed, though that was far more durable and better organized than the French proved to be. There have been only the palest equivalents to it in either the United States or England. Zola’s open letter J’Accuse to the president of the Republic on the 13th January 1898 is widely taken to mark the emergence of les intellectuels in their modern form in France, and of the widespread public recognition of their social and political presence. His letter ignited the Dreyfus affair, which cast a pall over all the representative and legal institutions of the Third Republic, whose legitimacy, never particularly glittering or robust, steadily declined as l’Affaire unfolded. Zola’s prosecution, conviction and flight to England provoked petitions with multiple signatories from the world of scholarship, journalism and the arts. Such petitions and manifestos were not without prerevolutionary precedents, and they afterwards became one of the most distinctive forms of collective assembly and expression of intellectuals until their demise after les événements of 1968. Charle has examined a number of them,

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from both the left and right, amongst which were a plea for an imprisoned trade unionist in 1911, for industrial co-operation in 1921, against Hitler’s antisemitism in 1933, for republican Spain in 1936, and nationalist intellectuals in Spain in 1938, and those for and against Algerian independence in 1960.79 These indicate, as he puts it, that ‘the structure put in place at the beginning of the century came into operation again on various other occasions between the 1920s and the end of the 1950s, and in roughly similar ways.’ One of the constant characteristics of these petitions was that their signatories came from various disciplines and occupations, reminding themselves and their readers that they were rising above their petty professional concerns in the service of a cause, and demonstrating that intellectuals were an extra-professional or supra-professional community. Charle refers to the collection of signatures for these public petitions as a ‘form of action’ and pointed out that, ‘it had the advantage that it did not challenge the deep-seated individualism of the academic, and saved him from a longterm organizational commitment.’ It may equally indicate that the signatories had no ‘long-term organizational commitment’, and the same might be said of the followers, the rank and file of the intellectual class, often students, those who responded to their words, and participated in various auxiliary activities to support them, such as public meetings, pamphlets and posters, ad hoc associations and movements. Long-term organizational commitments might, to put it another way around, have limited the likelihood of a class of intellectuals appearing at all. After reviewing several empirical studies of French intellectuals, Collini defined an intellectual as ‘someone of acknowledged standing in a creative or scholarly activity who also speaks with authority on matters on which there can be no experts’. He contrasted this with ‘the mere deployment of expertise’, or ‘the application of a body of technical knowledge to social questions…’80 However, the number of ‘matters on which there can be no experts’, about which intellectuals can therefore hold forth with authority, will tend to be larger if the real experts lack any form of organization, if they do not hold regular meetings, and if they do not have organized means of expressing their views. Once they do, part of their routine everyday activity is precisely ‘the mere deployment of expertise’ and ‘the application of a body of technical knowledge to social questions…’ which would limit the opportunities for allpurpose intellectuals, and undermine their authority. Both Charle and Collini attributed the decline of French intellectuals in the 1960s to the emergence and growth of organized professional specialties.

The emergence of cadres and of a lesser bourgeoisie The second, distinctively French, class formation to take advantage of the absence of rival forms of association and affiliation for middle class occupations, that of cadres, made its first public appearance in a number of strikes

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in the early 1930s.81 Boltanski has shown that they were then a vague, elusive, contradictory collection of employees, defined variously, as salaried employees, as those who exercised discipline within the firm, or as those who relied on their educational capital or cultural patrimony rather than inherited wealth, or simply as those who came between employers and workers. Sometimes they were also defined by their supposed personality traits, lifestyle or political opinions. They were held to be thrifty and productive, and critical of both capitalism and Bolshevism. At this time, however, there was still no agreement about who could properly be included in their number, or about what should be the basis or direction of their collective action. A multiplicity of competing, fragmenting and ephemeral committees, associations, federations, blocs, leagues, claimed to represent them.82 Some of these, however, thought that the ‘middle class’ was a more appropriate and inclusive basis of organization, while others, mainly consisting of engineers, argued that ‘the professions’ were the strongest and most instinctive basis of collective mobilization and collective action, but both of these alternative bases of organization were destined to fall by the wayside. Several of the associations claiming to represent cadres sensed that the crucial pre-condition for class organization was state recognition. They were, however, excluded from the Matignon talks convened in 1936 to settle the labour unrest across the country, and from the Agreement which emanated from those talks and established state arbitration boards. After the defeat of France in 1940, their leaders continued to press their case for recognition on the officials of the Vichy regime established in nonoccupied France. Somewhat fortuitously, their aspirations happened to coincide with the ideals of the ‘National Revolution’ which Pétain proclaimed, and which was based on the proposition that France had been defeated only because it had become excessively egalitarian and individualistic ever since the great revolution. This ‘National Revolution’ was therefore intended to resuscitate group loyalties and to restore France’s social cohesion. In the Charte du Travail which gave substance to these ideals, and set out how the economy was henceforth to be organized, cadres received their first official recognition. It was a start, but a class only began to be ‘made’, Boltanski showed, when a new organization, the Confederation Général des Cadres (CGC), successfully claimed, in the euphoria of Liberation, that it was the rightful and sole heir of its many pre-war namesakes. Cadres themselves had not in the meantime become any less vague, amorphous or ill-defined an occupational category, or any the less subject to competing definitions than they had been in the 1930s. In the immediate post-war years, the CGC made state recognition its primary goal, and successfully organized strikes in which it obtained recognition as ‘the most representative union’ of cadres. It fought for and won, for its disparate membership of salesmen, managers, engineers, supervisors

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and technicians, advertising and marketing executives, representation on social security, retirement and other state bodies established under the Parodi Accords of 1945. It then obtained recognition from the state statistical service, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economique (INSEE). However, CGC’s major breakthrough came as the representative of its members on the boards responsible for organizing retirement benefits of various occupational groups. Boltanski thought this ‘was the primary means of mobilizing the group’s fairly heterogeneous membership.’ Support for the CGC’s retirement plan ‘was, and to a certain extent still is, the major bond uniting a rather diverse assortment of people and organizations.’ Participation in a retirement plan for cadres then became the widely-accepted criterion for determining whether an employee was a cadre or not.83 Having finally obtained these various forms of state recognition, the CGC began to persuade other unions to recognize the existence of cadres as a class, even though their Marxist ideology of the day told them it could not exist. But now – lo and behold! – here were their representatives, sitting beside them in negotiations with the state, so a class of cadres must exist! Finally, even sociologists recognized their existence, and began conducting inquiries into this new class. By the 1960s, they had become, Boltanski observed, ‘the embodiment of modernity … the magnetic pole in discussions of class around which other groups arrayed themselves in everwidening circles.’84 By this time, their ‘middle class’ and ‘professional’ rivals had dropped out of the race.85 The associations which claimed to represent the ‘middle class’ splintered, disintegrated and never managed to establish the kind of solid, durable, reasonably representative institutions to enable them to be recognized by the state. The professions were, as ever, internally divided, and the uniquely well-organized, but numerically tiny, orders of advocates could not therefore form the basis of a class consisting of selfgoverning professions. The success of cadres led Boltanski to conclude that ‘boundaries between groups do not spontaneously emerge … from different economic circumstances.’ They are not ‘natural’. On the contrary, ‘institutionalizing the boundaries between groups is always a political issue’. Berger’s study of small independent property owners, of farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and small businessmen, which she called ‘the traditional middle classes’ in the midtwentieth century led her to a similar conclusion. She was puzzled by the fact that, despite their economic and numerical decline after World War II, they did not seem any the less cohesive, less powerful or less willing to engage in collective action in the seventies. To explain this counter-intuitive outcome, she argued that ‘their cohesion and power depended on a certain common relationship to the state more than on common economic interests … What stabilizes and hardens the distinctions between these groups and others in society,’ she argued, ‘are political decisions and social perceptions and values. Political crystallization of interest and value creates out of an economic

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domain with rather weak elements of cohesion, a class with stable contours and considerable potential for collective action. Politics not only firms up the boundaries of class; it determines membership.’86 She illustrated this point by showing how various subsidies, legislative protection and exemptions in the late sixties had contributed to the formation of this class, a decree on profit-sharing, for instance, applied only to companies with more than 100 employees, another on union representation only to firms with more than 50 employees, and another made special tax credits available only to firms with a turnover of under 20 million francs. All of these policies are, one may note, examples of the way in which a state may help to form a class unintentionally, and while looking in another direction. Market forces would have created only a shifting continuum between firms, but these political decisions divided them into ‘distinct and discontinuous segments.’ Berger went on to point out that none of the collective movements representing this class were particularly good in formulating coherent demands, indeed they are ‘most in their element when conducting an all-out attack on the state’. There were, nonetheless, marked changes over time in their preferred form of collective action, and these can best be explained she thought, not by reference to changes in their economic situation, but to changes in national political context. Some were due to minor shifts in electoral fortunes, but one towered over all the rest, being the major political transition of the period, that from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic in 1958. This, she explained, constituted ‘a massive transfer of power … out of parliamentary arenas and into bureaucratic ones’, with adverse consequences for those organizations which had previously relied on their parliamentary influence, but brought new strength to those which rested on expert staff trained in the same schools as the bureaucrats.’87 The biggest casualty of this transition was the movement led by Pierre Poujade, a bookseller-stationer from Lot, which had enjoyed considerable support in the 1950s, having won almost 10% of the popular vote and 52 seats in the National Assembly in the last election of the Fourth Republic. Poujade always declined to make any specific demands, or to formulate a programme, or to enter into negotiations with politicians and bureaucrats, and instead organized mass rallies ‘to rescue republican institutions from those sold out to trusts, foreign interest and corruption’, and to return Parliament ‘to its original mission of defending the common people.’88 After the creation of the Fifth Republic, Poujade’s movement disappeared, and leadership of the class was assumed some years later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by Gérard Nicoud’s Comité d’information et de Défense-Union Nationale des Travailleurs Indépendents (CID-UNATI) which after violent protests on the streets, and the arrest and imprisonment of many of its leaders, including Nicoud himself, formulated a list of specific demands in the manner of a pressure group. After 1972 a steady stream of

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concessions, ‘poured out of parliament’, to protect small shopkeepers from supermarkets, to reform social security to the advantage of the selfemployed, to allow ‘pre-apprenticeship’ employment of children in the last two years of their schooling, to fund compensation schemes for those affected by competition, and to provide grants for commercial centres set aside for small employers. These culminated in 1975 with an extremely favourable tax reform. Nicoud, having been amnestied, could claim a spectacular victory for his class, but in subsequent years, his movement also declined, and was replaced by other organizations claiming to represent owners of small and medium businesses, notably the Union des Chefs des Entreprise (UN-ICER), formed by Léon Gingembre, long-time president of the Confédération Générale des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises.89 The re-emergence of these class associations was, Berger argues, the result of Giscard d’Estaing’s neglect of the traditional middle classes as he attempted to woo the Left. They responded to the perceived instability of the regime, by seeking, rather like Poujade, ‘to aggregate and politicise diverse middle-class interests in a broad-based movement.’90 Once the Union of the Left that had threatened Giscard had collapsed, these movements also declined, as the government again paid more attention to their members’ concerns. The life-history of this class seems to have been extremely brief, and the ‘fit’ that Berger proposed between regime transition or Giscard’s manoeuvres, and the organization and tactics of interest groups representing the ‘traditional middle classes’ seems less than perfect. It is difficult, however, to quarrel with her conclusion that their ‘surges of collective action’ are best explained ‘by political transitions and opportunities, rather than by changes in their economic circumstances.’91

Has the Fifth Republic facilitated the formation of a ruling class? It remains to be seen if one final class formation, an upper or ruling class, exists in France. Many observers have claimed that it does, and have often drawn comparisons between it and the Soviet nomenklatura.92 Dogan insists that it does not.93 His first point is beyond dispute, namely, that since the great revolution ‘France has changed the foundations of the State eleven times’, each time excluding ‘people in powerful and prestigious positions, making room for newcomers. … There is not a single generation in modern French history that has avoided the battle between rulers and ruled.’94 Each of these regime transitions dispossessed a segment of the ruling political leadership. He documented in some detail, the transition to the Fourth Republic following World War II. ‘Overnight a new political class was born from the Resistance movement’ which ‘had no ties with “capitalistic” circles, not with the older State bureaucratic elites, nor with the old military establishment, nor even with the religious elites.’95

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He also presented evidence to show that only a small proportion, about 15%, of 8,000 of France’s political leaders since 1871 had relatives who were themselves politicians of some distinction or political journalists. One need not accept his assumption that ‘in a typical ruling class system the rate of social reproduction would reach almost 100 per cent’, to accept his conclusion that France ‘has not had a hereditary ruling class over several generations.’ Deputies over this period were, he showed, being recruited from wider social backgrounds.96 Whilst this evidence makes it clear that France could not have had a hereditary ruling class since the revolution, or since the Paris Commune, or since World War II, it does not quite eliminate the possibility that a ruling class has been forming over the nearly 50 years since the last regime transition, the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Moreover, some of the constitutional changes it entailed might have made a critical difference, since they increased the power of the executive, headed by a popularlyelected president, at the expense of the legislature, and lessened the separation between the executive and legislative branches of government. In these respects, it contrasts sharply with its two immediate predecessors. The legislatures of the Third and Fourth Republics were too unruly and unpredictable to contribute to the integration of a ruling class, and they seem to have enjoyed humbling those who sought to exercise political power.97 The legislatures of the Fifth Republic have been more disciplined and less powerful, and therefore have had fewer opportunities either to block the work of governments, or to overthrow them. Legislation has been initiated primarily by the executive, and parliamentary control of the executive power ‘appears today as a theoretical legacy of constitutional history’, so that the executive has a better chance of integrating a ruling class without being continually disrupted by the elected representatives of the people.98 Many more of these representatives are themselves officials from the grands corps, to which all senior civil servants belong, or their juniors. The legislatures of the Third Republic were dominated by self-employed advocates, who were still strong in the Fourth, though steadily overtaken by union leaders, party militants and others. Civil servants were a minority in both, but they seem to have come into their own in the Fifth.99 In 1993, 107 members of the National Assembly, or just short of one-fifth of the total, were former civil servants, 91 of them ‘high civil servants’.100 This figure, however, rather understates their influence, since senior civil servants have dominated the governments of the Fifth Republic, of both right and left, out of all proportion to their number in the Assembly. Of the 16 prime ministers since 1958, 13 have been from the ‘high administration’, and between 33% and 45% of their cabinet ministers have had the same background. All the major parties are dominated by senior fonctionnaires. The Front National, as one keen observer of French political life put it, is now the only party of les autres.101

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The ascent of higher civil servants has been facilitated by the absence of any constitutional requirement, or customary expectation of a separation of powers, and of any inhibitions about possible conflicts of interest, that would prevent civil servants running for elective office. If they win, the service obligingly gives them leave of absence, during which they continue to accumulate their pension rights, and if they lose they may immediately return to their former employment. The judiciary are also civil servants, and dependent on the Minister of Justice, a political appointee, for promotion up the many steps of the bureaucratic ladder of the French judiciary.102 The ruling elites of the Fifth Republic therefore seem more integrated across the three branches of government, and the emergence of a ruling class centred on higher civil servants more likely than in the U.S. where a separation of powers is a constitutional principle, or even than the U.K. where there is no such formal commitment, but where self-imposed conventions prevent civil servants participating in party politics. The impression of a particularly cohesive political elite is reinforced by the distinctively French custom of cumul des mandats that allows elected offices to be held simultaneously at municipal, departmental, regional and national levels. Although those appointed ministers in the government are required by Article 23 of the Constitution to abandon their elective offices at the national level, as well as any public or private employment, they may keep their subnational ones. A number of prime ministers of the Fifth Republic such as Chaban-Delmas, Mauroy, Fabius, Chirac, and Rocard, have therefore simultaneously been mayors of large cities, and simultaneously collecting their salaries as both, while many members of the Assembly have been mayors or regional, departmental or town councillors, or maybe all of them.103 Dogan’s answer to such suspicions is to point out that the political and economic elites in France remain, as they always have been, quite independent of one another.104 A list of the 500 richest people in France over the years 1996–2002 has only five or six names which are also on the list of the 500 people ‘holding the highest positions in politics’, which is even less overlap than that of similar lists for 1920–1940. He then showed that there was little overlap between these 500 richest people and the 500 most senior civil servants, or the 500 managers of public corporations, or the 200 most senior military officers, or 500 celebrities of various fields. He therefore concluded that there was ‘a tectonic fissure isolating the capitalist elite from five other elite categories. However, he did find ‘a large overlapping’ of somewhere between 80–150 names, between the 500 richest persons and the 500 managers of the greatest private corporations, but since these were not also on the political lists, he felt able to conclude that ‘Theories of the “ruling class” or of the “power elite” based on the assumption of a fusion between the “capitalist class” and the other powerful elites, are not validated.’105 This evidence does not, however, quite resolve the matter. There must, first of all, be some doubt whether the absence of overlapping names on

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lists eliminates the possibilities of class solidarity between legislators, ministers, functionaries, public and private enterprise managers. And the fact that the 500 richest people in France are not also the most politically powerful would be a telling consideration only if one defined a ruling class primarily by property ownership.106 Many of France’s 500 richest people are, one imagines, ex-entrepreneurs, or their widows, or investors and bankers, or heads of small enterprises, in the service sector, or in real estate, and therefore do not have much interest or opportunity to control other people’s lives. The fact that there is mobility into all France’s elites is also less than conclusive. Dogan thought that a ruling class should have a ‘social reproduction rate of 100%’, but by that standard it is doubtful whether a ruling class has ever existed, anywhere. While it is no doubt true that families are the most effective way of transmitting class values across generations, institutional forms of socialization can perform similar functions. If they could not, classes could hardly co-exist with any social mobility. As it happens, all but one of the classes considered thus far have been defined by their collective action, rather than by their self-recruitment or ‘social reproduction rate’, about which we in any case had no information. The exception was the dvorianstvo, and while their titles were hereditary, their positions in the imperial bureaucracy were not. If we insisted on a high reproduction rate to define a class, we would certainly have to exclude the nomenklatura. When first observed by Djilas, it was still in its first generation, and had been repeatedly ravaged by Stalin’s purges, which were rather greater one suspects than ‘the dozens of permutations of posts’ which follow the election of a new president or a change of government in France, and which Dogan thought would preclude the formation of a ruling class.107 It seems reasonable therefore to leave open the possibility that a ruling class might be formed over a single generation, if they are appropriately selected, trained and socialized, have recognized their own common interests, have been able to occupy many or most of the positions which enable them to command their fellow citizens, have erected barriers against intragenerational mobility, and have established their right to rule both in their own minds and in those of their subjects.108 This is more likely to happen if those who occupy these powerful positions are able to take advantage of long-standing and long-accepted institutional arrangements that facilitate the formation of a class. The new class or nomenklatura of Russia was, we found, constructed on old foundations, and it was therefore not difficult to identify continuities with its predecessor. One of the reasons why it was able to establish and assert itself was that Russian civil society had been long accustomed to an arbitrary and merciless state, and had rather little experience of pressure groups and public debate that might disturb its prerogatives and institutions as a class. Hence if we wish to understand the formation of any ruling class in France or anywhere else, it seems advisable first to discover whether there are old foundations on which it might build.

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In France there most certainly were. The relationship between the state and private economic activity had proved spectacularly indifferent both to the great revolution itself and to all 11 of the regime transitions mentioned by Dogan.

A short history of a long relationship State interest in private economic activity may be traced from a very early point in French history. From the mid-sixteenth century on, there are hundreds of acts, ordinances, decrees, edicts defining the jurisdiction of guilds, the details of their internal government, and the procedures for settling conflicts between members. These regulated workshop location and production methods, where products were to be sold, the number of apprentices, the length of time they should serve, their working hours, their duties to their masters and their masters’ towards them, the details of their ‘masterpiece’, that is the piece of work to be submitted before they could advance to master. These powers far exceeded those asserted by English monarchs.109 The decision of Francis I in 1522 to convert the sale of office into a regular system of public finance further increased royal involvement in guild affairs.110 In 1771, the so-called bureau des parties casuelles, which marketed and conducted the sales, hit on the idea of selling guild masters’ hereditary rights to their offices to which their predecessors had been elected, and hence converting them into fully paid-up royal office-holders. This relationship might be portrayed simply as a typical and expected one between absolutist kings and the ramshackle corporate institutions of an ancien régime, both of which were obsolescent, and soon to be swept aside by the revolution and the emergence of a capitalist economy. This would be a mistake. To begin with, French kings took steps to ensure that these corporate institutions were not obsolescent, by assuming responsibility for improving the standards of their workmanship and by fostering new arts and crafts. To that end, they brought to France a host of artists and craftsmen from neighbouring countries, Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini among them, and set up their own studios and workshops in manufactures royales, at Sèvres, Gobelins and Beauvais, St. Gobain, and the Louvre itself, which in 1700, employed some 480 craftsmen along with their journeymen and apprentices.111 French kings had, in other words, assumed responsibility for developing technical knowledge, and for advancing technical training. That responsibility was accepted by the French state after the revolution, right through industrialization, and every regime transition.112 It continues to accept it to this day. France therefore usually heads international comparisons of formal school-based technical training.113 The institutional forms have been modernized, but the underlying relationship has been immune to changes of regime, and has proved to be as modern and it was medieval. Moreover, if French kings were involved in a

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pre-modern economy, they were equally involved in early capitalist endeavours, by virtue of their ownership of all ores and mineral products in the kingdom, and their exclusive right to extract them. They had also organized their own engineers, the corps des ponts et chaussées, and committed them to the construction of roads, bridges and canals, to what we now call the infrastructure of a capitalist economy. The Bourbons might reasonably be recognized as the leading entrepreneurs of ancien régime France. The revolution made little difference to the underlying relationship between the state and economic activity. Napoleon’s commercial code of 1808, which itself drew heavily on that of Louis XV, ensured that the state remained involved in all the public joint-stock enterprises.114 Every sociètè anonyme had to be authorized by a decree of the conseil d’état, a lengthy politicized process since the conseil had to approve the individual directors personally, as well as the aims and methods of the proposed company, and allowed the officials of the Ministries of the Interior, of Public Works and of Foreign Affairs, of the Bank of France, as well as prefects and chambers of commerce, to comment on the proposed activities of the company.115 In considering applications to establish a sociètè anonyme, the conseil saw itself as ‘the guardian of business probity’, and set itself completely against any kind of industrial diversification. Insurance companies were, for instance, allowed to insure against only one kind of risk. Industrial firms usually had to confine themselves to one specified kind of activity, probably one suspects, because their activities would then coincide with one or other ministry or department, which would make supervision of them easier. If the conseil was uncertain about the activities of a firm, it would appoint a commissioner to their board, or even appoint the chief executive. After approval was obtained, a sociètè anonyme continued to operate in a highly politicized environment. Perhaps because of these obstacles, only 642 sociètès anonymes were authorized between 1808 and 1867, and only 192 of these remained in existence in 1867.116 Sociètès en commandite par actions, by contrast, were a simpler, and more general alternative form of incorporation, and offered a means of circumventing many of these state restrictions, but these firms could not seek capital from the general public, and they only provided limited liability to those who took no part in the running of the company. In the 1830s, however, commandites were the subject of a number of legislative enquiries. In 1856 they were made subject to rather strict state requirements, and permanently supervised by so-called ‘councils of surveillance’. In the last years of the Second Empire, 1868–1869, the procedure for establishing sociètès anonymes was simplified and it was finally liberalized under the Third Republic, from which time we may date truly general laws of incorporation. French entrepreneurs were, however, never to be as free of the state as their ‘AngloSaxon’ counterparts. The establishment of both forms of company remained a lengthy bureaucratic process, and by all accounts remains so to this day.117

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Moreover, both types of company remained under state surveillance, since as we have seen, the French state did not entrust the monitoring of company performance to independent professionals who would report to shareholders, but rather to commissaires aux comptes who were supposed to report to the state, rather than to the shareholders or the stock market, about the companies to which they were appointed. The French state did not, however, merely regulate entrepreneurs. It performed a much more important role, sharing the risks of large enterprises, by subsidies, offering loans at low rates of interest, providing concessions and other privileges. The close connection between state and private enterprise in the railway industry has been particularly well-documented by Dobbin.118 Unaware that they were entering a new age of steam, or inaugurating an industrial revolution, the engineers of the corps des ponts et chaussées merely assumed the same leading role in the construction of railways, that they had long performed in the building of roads, bridges and canals. Private investors were invited to participate, but on terms set by the state. The first railway charter, for a line to carry coal from the mines of St. Etienne to Andrézieux, was granted by an ordinance of Louis XVIII in 1823. The line was not therefore for public use, but its charter nonetheless included detailed controls over every aspect of the company’s finance, engineering, prices and administration, and ended by ordering that, on its completion, the prefect of Loire should submit for the approval of the Minister of the Interior ‘a plan of rules that will establish the procedures for loading, transport and unloading of merchandise.’119 A law of 1842 built on this precedent and set out the public/private relationship, which in essentials continued for the next century, until the railroads were nationalized under the Sociètè Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF) in 1947. There was not much doubt about who was the senior partner in this relationship. The state planned the route, purchased the right of way, graded the land, built the bridges and tunnels, while private concessionaires received operating franchises, which required them to lay the track, to erect the terminals, and to purchase the rolling stock. The railway company charters, which were written by state engineers, reminded private concessionaires that they were performing a service for the state. One result was that standardization of gauges, timetables and signalling proceeded much more rapidly than in either Britain or the United States, and since state engineers were involved in the management of every company, there were also, in Dobbin’s view, ‘fewer problems of interfirm co-ordination.’ State controls did not only deal with engineering design, technical issues and operating procedures. They also referred to the internal administrative structure of firms, and sometimes reserved important company positions for ponts et chaussées engineers, hence encouraging the transfer of senior civil servants into private firms, a practice which later became known as pantouflage, and which we discuss below.120 In 1852, the state decided to compulsorily merge smaller

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railway companies and created six regional monopolies. In 1889, it also regulated working hours and retirement ages of employees. The end result, Dobbin concluded, was that private railway company owners ‘exercised surprisingly little control over their own enterprises.’ Comparing them with British and American railway companies, he observed that ‘what most sets them aside is that at no time in the century did the French policymakers view the railroads as properly private undertakings.’121 State subsidies, state representatives on their boards, ex-state officials in their midst, and the comprehensive state tutelage and controls, meant that French railways were semi-nationalized throughout their history. Indeed, since the significant technical knowledge was monopolized by the engineers of the corps des ponts et chaussées, railway expertise might be said to have been nationalized, long before the track, rolling stock and stations were taken back from the concessionaires in 1947. Railways everywhere have entailed a degree of state involvement, but in France the kind of relationship Dobbin described can be observed in many other industries. Reid, for example, traced a similar degree of state involvement in a coal, iron and steel enterprise in Decazeville, in the Aubin basin of southwest France over some 250 years from 1692 to 1962, an historical continuity which confirms how little the underlying public/private relationship had been changed by the great revolution or by any subsequent regime transitions.122 Shonfield tracked some innovations in the relationship after World War I, when, he observed that ‘the “mixed enterprise” i.e. a partnership of private and public capital, made its debut on a large scale’, especially in ‘branches of production where private capital would not venture on its own.’ The older method had been to grant an exclusive concession to a favoured firm, (as we have seen in the railways) but in both the oil and chemical industries, the state became the joint owner along with private interests. In the case of the Compagnie Française des Pétroles, for instance, the state shared in the management and decided to make it ‘a fighting company which would involve the national prestige in a struggle for position with the established giants of the industry, American, British and Dutch.’ In the case of the Crédit National, it ‘took another approach, and rather than taking an equity stake, granted the bank a number of privileges, in return for the right of appointing all of its senior management. After it had made these appointments, it was able to guide the direction of the bank’s investments over a wide range of private industry. Thus, there was, Shonfield observed, ‘a marked extension of public activity without any doctrinal bias in favour of nationalization.’ 123 Since large French businesses had been dependent on les hauts fonctionnaires from the start of industrialization, they had little need, or opportunity, to organize amongst themselves, and to define and press their collective interests. Their activities were co-ordinated by the state, or perhaps by the former members of the grands corps they all employed, rather than by each other as

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members of trade or industrial associations. Napoleon had thought it would be useful if all the businesses of the cities and departments were organized, and Chambers of Commerce had therefore been established by law in 1802. These, however, were quasi-state bodies, their members being appointed until 1901, and though representing the interests of local industry to the state, they performed certain defined semi-public functions, and organized local institutions, such as technical schools, warehouses, and stock exchanges. To fund these functions, they were granted powers of local taxation.124 In 1864, when spontaneous voluntary associations were first partially legalized, a Committee of Iron and Steel Manufacturers had been formed, and had pioneered a new kind of independent industrial association. Similar associations were subsequently formed in other industries. However, these associations did not long remain independent of the state. After World War I, the state became a party to many of them, extending and reinforcing many of their agreements to divide markets and fix prices, and making some of them compulsory.125 Ideologically, such associations suddenly assumed immense importance after 1940, and German occupation of much of France, for reasons we have already touched on. The Vichy regime’s ‘National Revolution’ sought to revive the social cohesion of France, by dividing the entire economy into ‘professional families’, each of them headed by a tripartite Comité d’organisation, of civil servants, employers and organized labour. Each Comité d’organisation was to become the government of its industry, approving investment decisions, distributing raw materials, regulating prices and wages, and resolving employment disputes, in keeping with the regime’s paternalist, corporatist and communitarian vision. In reality, as Jones has persuasively shown, the prior direct relationship between big business and the state overrode the ‘professional families’. Big businesses, in fact, often used the cover provided by their comité d’organisation to restructure their industry in their own interests.126 The representatives of trade unions on the comités were of little account, and were in any case divided in their opposition to the regime, while the fonctionnaires who included the later Socialist President, François Mitterand, declined to perform the impartial, even-handed, supervisory role assigned to them. Thus, by default, big businessmen with the support of sympathetic ministers and officials, continued to run their firms much as they always had done. Far from promoting the regulation of the economy by corporatist trade associations, the Vichy regime only prepared the way, after a bout of nationalizations immediately following the Liberation, for the technocratic vision and planning institutions of the Fourth Republic that followed. In short, the original relationship between the state and major economic actors had outlasted defeat, occupation, the rhetoric of Vichy’s National Revolution, and the Liberation. The planning institutions of the Fourth Republic were remarkable, first of all, for their independence from the National Assembly, that is to say, from

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the elected representatives of civil society. The Commissariat au Plan was, Shonfield pointed out, able to draw on public funds independently of the annual budget, allowing it to by-pass parliament, as it thought necessary. The first and third plans had been initiated by government decree, the second only scrutinized by parliament when in its third year. The fourth plan, however, was scrutinized by parliament before publication and approved, though only as an outline ‘instrument of orientation.’ No provision was ever made for continuous parliamentary scrutiny. It was as if, Shonfield observed, the planners thought the National Assembly might express the will of the majority at a given moment, while the national plan was ‘a truer, deeper expression of the interest of the nation in the economic sphere. It was an expression of volunté générale, which was evidently considered superior to volunté de tous as expressed in elections, and of course to the volunté du gouvernement.127 The plans also, one might add, by-passed other organized interests in civil society, small businesses, trade associations and organized labour, and were indifferent to their intermittent militant class action. After 1975, however, France’s rate of economic growth declined, unemployment increased, her balance of payments deteriorated, a number of her much-vaunted industrial policies, such as the Plan Calcul, which was intended to give French firms a leading place in international markets for computer hardware and software, failed, despite massive state subsidies. Policies in other sectors were no more successful. Nevertheless, some time elapsed before it was thought that the overwhelming influence of the state on economic activity might itself be responsible in some way for these problems. Indeed, in 1981 a Socialist-Communist government was elected on a pledge to undertake a ‘rupture with capitalism, and to lift state intervention to new heights’, a pledge which, for two years, it gave every sign of keeping.128 Nationalization meant that 13 of the largest 20 French firms ended up as state-owned, and 24% of the entire labour force came to work for the state. Ambitious production targets were set for the declining coal and steel industries, and equally ambitious sectoral plans for chemicals, textiles, machine tools, and other industries. Acting in the manner Shonfield so admired, the SMEs of the machine tool industry were merged and expected to reconquer the domestic market, and assume a position of global leadership. Five large companies, Bull, Thomson, CGE, Matra and CGCT, were expected to lead the charge into electronics, to create 80,000 jobs, and transform the balance of payments deficit into a substantial surplus. Irrespective of the wishes of the firms themselves, the state organized an exchange of their assets, so that each specialized in one or two areas. By 1983, however, it was clear that this reassertion of the traditional role of the state was failing to produce the expected results. ‘National champions’ were falling well short of their planned goals. A recession loomed, while a surge in the government deficit, and an adverse balance of payments, brought

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pressure on the franc. Mitterand and the Socialist-Communist government then faced the choice of either continuing with their interventionist policies, which would have entailed exchange controls, devaluation of the franc, and temporary withdrawal from the European Monetary System (EMS), or reversing course, and making severe cuts in public spending and reining back state intervention in the economy. They decided on the latter, and hence there was an abrupt turnaround of economic policy, perhaps the greatest in the entire history of the country.129

Tested by a socialist U-turn and e-commerce Planning was forgotten, aggressive nationalization gave way to cautious but progressive privatization, state controls of investment to deregulated capital markets, which the state encouraged by creating a Second Market, which specialized in raising capital for SME’s, and by a little ‘big bang’ in 1988, which ended the monopoly of brokerage houses on trading in bonds and shares. State subsidies to national champions were also reduced, as were foreign exchange controls. Political leaders and state officials adopted a more ‘modest stance’, as Levy put it, and stopped forcing mergers, trying to pick winners, and imposing uniform national prescriptions. Price controls were removed in 1986, and labour markets freed, to some degree, by the abolition of the 1974 requirement that labour inspectors should approve all layoffs. At first glance, these reforms bore a considerable resemblance to the contemporaneous reforms of Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States.130 Appearances and rhetoric, however, were somewhat deceptive. Privatization was not, as it was in Britain, a triumphant liberation of the spirit of private enterprise, or an opportunity for popularizing share ownership. It was a slower, more reluctant and more managed process, which ensured a select group of investors, a noyau dur, would continue to control the newlyprivatized enterprises, and that the state did not completely lose control.131 The Minister of Finance therefore often fixed the price of the sale, chose the new shareholders and composition of the new board, and prevented foreigners from owning more than 20%. Partly-privatized public enterprises, and supposedly soon to be privatized enterprises, like Renault, Electricité de France, and France Telecom engaged in aggressive takeovers abroad of foreign companies, presumably concerted by the state, as if they were still national champions seeking to establish France’s place in the world, before being obliged to become fully privatized when they might no longer be so concerned with the national interest. Privatization did not therefore break entirely with the past. ‘Quite the contrary’, Bauer thought, ‘it fully illustrated the State’s interventionist tradition and even reinforced it.’132 Lame duck enterprises were never treated as brutally as in Britain, and the state commitment to VET was not reduced

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in the least. More importantly, public spending did not decline, and there was no attack on the welfare state. French policies had none of the extreme competitive individualism of their British and American contemporaries. Creating institutions that might enforce the proclaimed rules of market competition, completely independently of ministerial intervention, proved to be asking too much.133 Political leaders could not quite bring themselves to denigrate state action in the same manner as Reagan or Thatcher. Although, as Prime Minister in 1986–1988, Chirac sometimes used an aggressive neo-liberal, Anglo-Saxon rhetoric which defined the state as the problem, he later reverted to more familiar French ground, which Mitterand had continued to occupy, despite his industrial policy U-turn. The political identities of both major parties therefore still revolved around state leadership. Even after the break with dirigisme, Levy remarked ‘the tradition of state leadership could not be abandoned and French people could not be persuaded to trust the market’ in the manner of the British or Americans.134 Levy did not, however, merely observe the change in central government policies. He also sought to identify their consequences by interviews with political and business leaders over the years 1990–1995 in Besançon and St. Etienne. Whilst he found a ‘sea change’ in official rhetoric and demeanour, he found that elements of the former dirigiste philosophy remained. Behind most programmes lay the notion that ‘heads of small firms do not recognize their own best interests, and that the state must therefore encourage desirable practices’, and their encouragement ‘often included an element of coercion’. Since this now involved SMEs, whereas the state had formerly confined its attention to large firms, Levy decided that, paradoxically, ‘at no point in French history has the state meddled in so many firms and in so many prerogatives of management as under today’s ostensibly postdirigiste regime.’ Most local public initiatives that he observed limped along, and rarely achieved their intended goals, mainly he thought, because of a ‘lack of social capital’ that is, of a readiness of public officials and small businessmen to work together for common ends. The idea that public officials would recognize market opportunities better than entrepreneurs generated a good deal of antipathy among the leaders of small and medium-sized businesses in the two cities, and helps to explain why they were only reluctant participants in public programmes.135 Many of them had, one imagines, once supported Poujade or Nicoud. Many observers think, however, that technology is a more powerful agent of change than the law. Social scientists have not been far behind dotcom promoters in enthusiastically heralding a new kind of economy and society that would emerge as a result of new communication technologies, so it may be as well to notice that one of the paradigmatic examples of the traditional relationship came from that sector – Minitel. This was the first device in the world to combine the telephone and the computer for everyday access to information and e-commerce, so it, rather than the

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internet, might fairly be said to have inaugurated the age of e-commerce.136 It did so by means of a simple terminal with no ‘stand alone’ computer power, which was provided free of charge to telephone subscribers by the state telephone monopoly, France Télécom (FT). In effect, therefore, the state was to provide the Télétel mainframe and every household in France was to be given a peripheral Minitel. Between 1983–1991, five million Minitels were distributed free of charge to telephone subscribers, which by 1989 had given about 40% of the population access to some 12,000 services. After some years of very rapid growth, the internet began to provide a highly competitive alternative, and in the mid-90s by most measures of Minitel use, business to business usage, services to consumers, sales, hours of use and duration of calls, started to flatten out or even decline.137 In 1997, M. Jospin, the Prime Minister, observed ‘we have fallen behind’, and warned of ‘dire repercussions on competitiveness and employment.’ He went on to propose a shift of Minitel services to the internet, but this was far from throwing in the towel, as one suspects any other government would have done. FT managers, with state support, responded by devising an Internet Service Integré (ISI) to make the Minitel compatible with the internet by means of a dedicated, simple and cheap terminal which used internet language and presentation.138 Standards of the ISI were developed by an open forum of service providers and of hardware and software manufacturers. FT was to ‘pioneer the market by launching new terminals’ (much cheaper than a PC, though not free) and ‘once they have set the ball rolling’, manufacturers were allowed to sell competing terminals wherever, and at whatever prices they chose, as long of course as they incorporated the agreed FT-devised ISI standards. In sum, ISI was, and is, intended to encourage market competition and innovation, while remaining under centralized FT management and co-ordination.139 In more recent times, Minitel has been launched on an entirely new career as the main instrument of French e-government administration and e-democracy, allowing the payment of taxes, school registrations, inspection and license renewals.140 National figures on R&D show that Minitel was not an exception. In 1987, there were 150 French firms with more than 50 research staff, and these 150 firms, concentrated in a few industries in which the state was already heavily involved – aerospace, armaments, nuclear power, oil, railroads and telecommunications – received 90% of all direct state support for research.141 Some of the remaining 10% may have ended up with the 100 high-tech, research-based start-ups Mustar studied over the years 1984–1987, since by that time, as Levy pointed out, the state was reaching down to smaller companies. It had provided the funds which enabled 60 of Mustar’s 100 researcher-entrepreneurs to develop the industrial applications of their research. The state had, Mustar observed, first created the links between the world of research and the world of industry in France,

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and its funding was far more important than that of venture capital firms, who typically tended to help only after a start-up that had established connections with the state. State subsidies, encouragement and advice, he found, ‘play a determining role in the … creation of these firms … public powers simultaneously play the role of initiator, launcher, and accompanist.’ Indeed, ‘anchoring to the state’ (les ancrages avec l’État) is one of the essential conditions of their survival.’142

The domain of pantoufleurs More than enough has been said to show despite all regime transitions, despite fundamental technological innovations, despite apparent somersaults of ideology and policy, the long-standing relationship between French public administrators and private economic elites has endured. Why? Why should entrepreneurs have ever agreed to become dependent and subordinate partners in their own enterprises, and accept state leadership? And one must assume they did accept it, because there has been little sign of any collective resistance, at any time, on their part. If there had been we would probably have been able to write more about the bourgeois class. Businessmen did not demand the U-turn of 1983, or celebrate it as if they had at long last been relieved from the unwanted embrace of the state. Bourgeoisies are not supposed to be quite so pliable. A few members of it were not.143 Considerable numbers had, however, been persuaded, by some means, to accept the intellectual authority and leadership of senior civil servants and ministers, to maintain harmonious working relationships with them, and to accept that this was the proper way of doing business. Shonfield, writing in the 1960s, when planning institutions were at the height of their fame and credibility, suggested that their acceptance had both intellectual and institutional foundations. The main intellectual foundation was, he thought, the long-standing belief, shared by civil servants and a good proportion of businessmen alike, ‘that the effective conduct of a nation’s economic life must depend on the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of exceptionally able people, exercising foresight, judgement and experience of a kind not possessed by the average successful man of business.’ Both ‘the construction and the realization of the plan was’ therefore, ‘an act of voluntary collusion’ between the ‘average successful man of business’ and the ‘exceptionally able people’ in the public service. He reasonably inferred that it was voluntary because the powers of the Commissariat au Plan were not precisely defined in law, and it continued to operate effectively despite the many discrepancies between the planned targets and actual outputs and the large amount of guesswork and ‘quasi-ritualistic’ figures its plans often contained. At other times, he referred to ‘a conspiracy’ from which emerged ‘a series of bargains between state officials and big businesses, each of whom were extremely sensitive to the others’ interests.’144

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The main institutional foundations of this collusion were, Shonfield suggested, the grandes écoles which provided an advanced technocratic training to all senior civil servants, as well as many leading politicians, and leaders of large private firms. They were inclined, and able, to ‘collude’ and ‘conspire’ therefore because many of them had attended the same schools. Supported by the long-established relationship between the state and private industry, and the ‘long-standing belief’ in state direction, the grandes écoles provided a stable institutional foundation on which a ruling class might be built. They had survived, indeed flourished, through all 11 of the regime transitions noted by Dogan. The two young civil servants who had first proposed Minitel in the late 1970s, like the engineers who built the first railways, had been educated at one of them, as indeed had the President who acted on their report, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. By Bourdieu’s tally in 1996, there were over 80 of these schools.145 The Conférence des grandes écoles currently lists 238, and defines them as ‘institutions of higher education and research, independent of the universities, with rigorous entry requirements’, providing a ‘polyvalent and generalist education’, based on close collaboration with les milieux economiques. 146 They are all state or para-state institutions, often linked to particular ministries or local governments, by whom they are financed and directed, and by whom many of the best of their graduates will normally be employed, though the greatest, and most celebrated of these schools are not linked to any particular ministry, and their graduates may enter any of the five grands corps. At one point in the early nineteenth century, there was a chance that a private initiative might create a rival institution, even a rival tradition, of higher education. In 1829 the École centrale d’arts et metiers was created by a small band of researchers and teachers, with the help of a like-minded industrialist, who were openly critical of the excessively theoretical curriculum of the École polytechnique, and of its orientation to the requirements of the state. Centrale was the first institution in Europe explicitly dedicated to training industrial engineers, but whatever its founders’ original intentions, it soon came to resemble the École polytechnique, albeit a little less elitist, with rather less of a mathematical and scientific bias, less military discipline and no halls of residence.147 In 1889, however, with the enthusiastic support of its private governing body, and of its alumni, the Ecole centrale came under state control, and was subsequently recognized as one of the grandes écoles. Seven years earlier, some members of the Paris Chamber of Commerce had established another school the École des hautes études commerciales (HEC), which they hoped would provide a more relevant training for commercial careers than Centrale had managed to do. However, it evidently aspired to join the grandes écoles since it required its students to wear military-style uniforms. Until after World War II, HEC provided a rather specialized training in commercial law, accounting and finance,

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rather than in subjects like corporate strategy, marketing and personnel of more direct relevance to the actual management of private firms. Neither of these institutions, therefore, could be said to have inaugurated a private, or semi-private alternative to the recruitment policies, pedagogic methods, atmosphere or status of the older state schools. The professional formation of public and private elites did not, therefore, diverge markedly. The leaders of large private firms continued to demonstrate their respect for the state schools, by employing their graduates either immediately after they had graduated, or more commonly after they had accumulated some years’ experience in the public service, and inaugurated the mid-career mobility, that came to be known as pantouflage (lit: slipperage, or putting one’s feet up) apparently because in the early days of the practice it was thought to be a move from arduous state duties to cushier private ones. Pantouflage steadily increased through the second half of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth, as more large companies emerged who could afford to employ former members of the grands corps, and who senior members of the corps deemed suitable as employers of their younger colleagues. In the first half of the nineteenth century, about 2% of polytechniciens resigned their commissions upon graduation to enter private business. For the class of 1918–1919, the proportion had climbed to 78.8%.148 It continued during the inter-war years, and after World War II, became a rather normal career progression for members of the grands corps, and they tended to move into the most dynamic industries of the day.149 Pantouflage occurs in only one direction. No one seems to have thought that private business experience would benefit the public sector. One study after another has shown how pantoufleurs have extended their monopoly of the public sector to the commanding heights of the private. In 1970 Granick found that all the chief executives of 35 nationalized firms were graduates of grandes écoles, and none at all were merely university graduates, while 65% of the most senior managers of 509 ‘prestigious’ large private firms had been to grandes écoles and only 10% to universities.150 This finding prompted him to distinguish French management from British, American and Russian in all of which he found the force of pre-entrance qualifications to be ‘weak’, whereas French companies had what he called a ‘closed promotion’ character, meaning ‘the selection task has already been done at the moment of a man’s entrance into the firm.’ It was ‘those with a previous government career who travel the royal road in French management’, while ‘the opportunity for reaching the upper levels of management is extremely limited for those who begin their careers as ordinary white collar employees or as foremen, let alone for those who begin as manual workers.’151 In 1968–1969 Savage found that 72% of his sample of 291 firms with 1,000 or more employees were headed by graduates of grandes écoles.152 Morever, when he separated out the 19 large firms in his sample whose CEO had arrived by a managerial route, rather than having founded the firm

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themselves, he found that 93% were graduates of grandes écoles, and the overwhelming majority of them, graduates of just three of these schools, École polytechnique, École centrale and École des mines. Nearly 20 years later, in 1987, Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot found, that 73.4% of the chief executives of the top 200 firms in France were graduates of grandes écoles, of whom 51.5% came from the elite schools, and the 21.9% from their lesser kin.153 They found that the rate of pantouflage had accelerated sharply in the early 1980s, that is to say, precisely at the moment when Mitterand was announcing his great U-turn of economic policy. Entrenched institutions, however, have a way of mocking political rhetoric. Their data showed that a rather larger proportion of pantoufleurs were then being ‘helicoptered’ into private enterprises at a high level, after long experience in the public sector, while fewer were entering as ‘mountaineers’ at a ‘low’ level, working their way up, and learning about private industry as they did so.154 All of these studies also map the outer limits, and perhaps moving frontier, of the domain of the pantoufleurs. In the ‘non-prestigious’ firms, in Granick’s sample, meaning firms in the retail and cosmetics and food sectors, ‘only’ 35% of PD-Gs (Présidents Directeurs-Généraux) had been to grandes écoles versus the 73% in the more prestigious firms. Savage found that ‘only’ 42% of the chief executives of firms with under 200 employees had been to grandes écoles, while those who had founded or inherited their firms had attended lesser schools or none at all. Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot had found that that while over 70% of the PD-Gs of the largest French manufacturing firms had been to a grande école, the proportion among service firms was only about half as large – 35% of the largest 24 service firms were headed by their graduates – while in what they call the commercial sector (mass retailing, commodities, travel, advertising) the proportion declined to less than 10% and they were outnumbered five to one by entrepreneurs.155 Bourdieu spent more time than most in the borderlands of the pantoufleurs, and found that their dominance started to decline as the distance of their firms from the state increased. There was ‘an opposition’, as he called it, ‘between state bosses, placed at the head of large enterprises with strong state ties, either large industrial companies (nationalized, mixed or dependent in large part upon government contracts, or large banks), and the private bosses, who are at the head of private banks and private industrial and commercial companies that are smaller (relatively) and less closely tied to the state.’156 The state bosses were more likely to come from families of higher civil servants and professionals, and have ‘a great deal of academic capital, as well as a great deal of social capital consisting of contacts they inherit or accumulate in their passage through the civil service and ministerial cabinets’, and their entire careers are ‘placed under the sign of the public maintained through important events of technocratic dialogue (state business lunches, planning councils) and consecrated by highest official decorations (Officer or Commander of the Légion d’Honneur)’. They often

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have important responsibilities in the Conseil National du Patronat Française (CNPF), the main employers’ association, and are seen as quasi-official, and always as being ‘accommodating’ to the state, meaning, as Shonfield would have put it, ready to collude and conspire. They meet at the Association des Grandes Enterprises Françaises (AGREF), which was created in 1969 ‘to give large companies the means to think as a group.’ They often sat on the boards of directors of the top 25 companies, were trustees of higher education institutions, especially the grandes écoles, and shunned local responsibilities. As he moved away from the larger private companies with links to the state, he found that the amount of higher education of PD-Gs fell, along with the size of company, ‘the most striking opposition being commercial or corporate heads whose entire career has been in the family business, and who had no higher education at all.’ PD-Gs of blue collar or white collar origins were much less likely to have spent any time in the public service, and more likely to have spent their entire careers in the private sector. They were also less likely to be on boards of other companies, rather suggesting that inter-firm links were themselves dependent on the state.157 These ‘private bosses’ had ‘many reservations about and often scorn for politics and politicians, public service and public servants, and lacking the disposition and connections that favour exchanges with politicians and higher civil servants, rely (not without some hesitation) on appointed spokespeople, and limit their political action to the level of local institutions, over which they often exercise complete control.’ But they were ‘rooted in the regions’, and ‘never hold positions outside the economic field.’ Hence, the significant fissure that Bourdieu identified was not between political and economic elites, nor between the public and private firms, but between the state and large private firms connected to it, and smaller, entrepreneurial or family-owned firms, whose managers have not attended grandes écoles or had any experience in the grands corps. Bourdieu’s analysis, like most of those cited, concentrated on manufacturing industry, but Kadushin’s analysis of France’s financial elite showed that ‘large private sector (financial) firms with long-standing relationships with the state recruit via pantouflage like their industrial counterparts.’ The French financial system, Kadushin concluded, ‘remained firmly in the hands of upper class ENA graduates.’ It is, he observed, ‘much tighter than even the British system … and is certainly tighter than the relatively diffuse American elite system.’158 Survey data supports his conclusion.159 Birnbaum had earlier detected a further linkage to yet another elite in that the pantouflage of military officers to the financial sector was particularly marked.160

And their ‘control practices’ What, Therborn once asked, do the ruling class do when they rule? It is a question we may ask of the pantoufleurs if they are to be considered as part

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of such a class. Studies of French workplaces suggest that one thing they did was to construct distinctive structures of control and stratification within the firms to which they were appointed. Berlanstein charted one of the earliest cases at the end of the nineteenth century, when graduates of the state engineering schools took control of the Paris Gas Company from the ‘idiosyncratic’ entrepreneurs who had created the firm and the industry.161 As they did so, the Company became more centralized, its managerial hierarchy became, as he put it, one of ‘closed castes’, according to the status of the school attended, and engineer-managers ‘inevitably looked to engineers of the state corps to define their responsibilities and work culture.’ Following ‘the officers of the corps’, they ‘eschewed specialization’ and ‘welcomed involvement in every aspect of supervision’, and demonstrated their polyvalence by dealing not only with technical issues, but with personnel, marketing, accounts and even legal matters.162 They also adopted a distinctive style of management. For instance, when ‘they were directly involved in decision-making, they posed as impersonal authorities who could evaluate a matter with detachment.’ They also ‘asserted a degree of independence from their immediate employer and identifying with a larger scientific community’, though not Berlanstein quickly adds ‘that they had a chance to form an autonomous professional group with individual careers as the focus of professional life.’ On the contrary, ‘state engineers imparted a sense of comfort with bureaucratic procedures, lifelong commitments to the organization, and ambiguity about the morality of the marketplace.’163 Over time, the careers of their subordinates, the ‘factory superintendents with 20 years experience’ who had had to watch these newcomers ‘shoot past them’, came to emulate and resemble in some respects the state engineers. Although their ‘long hard roads’ led only ‘to the middle under the best of circumstances’, they came to forget ‘the hurlyburly of the early years of the industry, jumping from one firm to another as an attractive opening appeared’, and settled into stable lifelong careers, advancing slowly by seniority. Even at the routine white collar level, ‘the situation of the fonctionnaire served as an influential model’, which the company was reluctant to change even when the civil service itself began to contemplate reform.164 Ethnographic studies conducted in French workplaces since World War II picked up many of the same characteristics. Crozier was the first to do so. He noted steep, and sharply stratified hierarchies, which prompted a ‘defensive egalitarianism’ from every subordinate strata, as they sought to protect themselves against any possible discretionary interference by their superiors.165 This in turn provoked increasing formalization of procedures, and a vicious circle of bureaucratization of a kind that his studies of organizations in other industrial societies suggested was uniquely French. However both of his research sites were publicly-owned enterprises, and more telling evidence came from Horowitz’s 1980 comparison of ‘control practices’ in 15 large to medium to

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private French firms with matched British companies. He excluded all multinationals to eliminate the possibility of cross-cultural contamination.166 There were marked differences. The British usually had a small central headquarters staff which ‘only shaped policy decisions and acted as bankers to subsidiary units and monitored their performance.’ De jure or de facto, the typical British structure was that of a holding company, with subsidiaries (or divisions) having their own boards of directors (or divisional management committees), chaired by an executive from headquarters staff, a structure which allowed for considerable autonomy and entrepreneurship at the operational level. British CEOs saw themselves as trying to distribute power throughout the organization and were generally quite happy that they had done so. One British chief executive explained that ‘We expect them to run their units without detailed direction.’ And another, that ‘When a problem arises we ask what are they going to do about it and when; with 30 subsidiaries we cannot contribute to solve problems.’ The British, Horovitz concluded, seem to be ‘more lenient and participative in their leadership style … leaning towards autonomy and self-control, feeling it better to stand as a trustee than a sentinel.’167 French firms by contrast ‘seem to be more … oriented towards control as a means of policing operations and more inclined to concentrate control at the top of the hierarchy … this reveals quite a tough management style, oriented towards operational efficiency and pyramidal organisational settings.’168 French firms were usually functionally organized with a large central headquarters staff whose main task was to ‘keep the boss informed’, to ‘watch operations’, and more of their decisions, such as purchasing, therefore remained centralized. French chief executives ‘look at more things more often than their British counterparts’, and ‘committee management was scarce … leaving the chief executive as a “one man show” to make many final decisions especially when problems arose between functions.’169 They were likely to receive more frequent information than their British counterparts, mostly based on past performance, almost always quantitative, and more sales and production oriented.’ Most of this information comes from their central staff.’170 French chief executives, Horovitz pointed out, tended to ‘come from the technical side … such executives are naturally inclined to pay more attention to what they know best, which is production.’ They are ‘more involved in operational matters than their British counterparts, and there is closer control of production matters … a more detailed inflow of operational information on product, profit and departmental costs for each unit to central office…’171 The French CEOs ‘want to make sure they are informed of what is going on’, while the British ‘want only to be warned of unusual matters.’ In France, the financial controller will ‘surprisingly … often come from engineering: in this case, he is likely to look for heavy, computerbased, information systems.’

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However, the most compelling and detailed account of the internal stratification of private French firms, by Ishii, et al., in the series of Aix-Osaka studies in the mid-90s, emphasized the importance of schools as the transmission agent.172 They compared reasonably matched large chemical, electrical engineering and machine tool plants in France and Japan, and decided that the demarcated horizontal strata they observed within their French firms were ‘externally determined’, or ‘a priori’, and were ‘imported’ directly from the school system. French firms had therefore ‘surrendered’ to the educational system their freedom to determine the ability and merit of their own personnel, not only at the most senior level, but throughout their companies. Having accepted this external validation of their employees, they thereafter paid less attention to assessing their performance according to their own criteria and their own specific requirements. The French chemical company, for example, recruited graduates from the grandes écoles, and immediately put them on an accelerated, signposted route, which led to the top management positions, though a few of them opted to remain in research.173 University graduates were treated much less favourably. Even a doctorate, did not make them the equal of the grandes écoles graduates. Ishii et al. reported a similar stratification at a lower level in the French machine tool plants, where the technicians recruited from technical schools occupied an intermediate position, and thereby blocked the promotion possibilities of experienced workers and operators. There was, they observed, ‘rather little movement from non-managerial into managerial positions.’174 This imported stratification was often reinforced by laws or collective agreements (negotiated with the state rather than employers), or both, often of some antiquity, such as the collective agreement for the chemical industry under the law of 10th July 1934, and the decree of 10th October 1937. These specified the kinds of educational establishments and university qualifications that made one eligible to carry the title, and perform the functions of, an engineer, or to exercise managerial authority over other engineers. Such laws and collective agreements further pre-empted company decisions by setting out reference points and minimum salary levels, which included coefficients for those with doctorates to compensate them for their late entry to the firm.175 In a similar manner, in the French electrical engineering plant, all personnel were categorized in accordance with the classification system laid down in the collective agreement covering the metal industry, supplemented by various company agreements. Together, these ‘hierarchized’ various skill levels into three broad classes by formal qualifications: tech BAC for manual workers, BAC+2 for technicians, and a diploma or university degree, equivalent to BAC+5, for engineers and managers.176 These formal, imported, a priori horizontal divisions were further elaborated and reinforced, by the employees themselves, who might therefore be

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said to have taken their cues about invidious class distinctions from the state.177 Marginal differences on entry were elaborated within the company into collective stereotypes of ability, outlook, ambition and temperament, entrenched in distinctive sub-cultures, and reflected in the behaviour of members of each strata or class. Engineers in the chemical firm, for instance, considered themselves holders of scientific knowledge, as opposed to the merely practical knowledge of their technicians. The self-taught ingénieur maison was thought to lack the capacity to establish a relationship between theoretical knowledge and knowledge of the product. One engineer observed of his technicians ‘… they can only solve problems at a technical level, as soon as a scientific reflection is required on the bibliography, patents, No! … Me, I bring new ideas, based on scientific fact. They can master technical knowledge. The theory is my domain, at the practical they are better, I leave it to them.’178 Not surprisingly perhaps, personal relations between engineers and technicians were not close, and they did not, the research team observed, eat together in the canteen.179 The division of labour in the chemical plant corresponded to these supposed differences in intellectual ability and temperament. The engineer in his office, rarely got his hands dirty, acted by procedures, drafts, ‘bibles’ of various kinds, while the technician stayed at his workbench, communicating orally, and acting in a ‘do it yourself’ spirit. Qualified engineers were somewhat uncomfortable when technicians confounded their expectations. They did not, for instance, much like to see their technicians spending time in the library.180 In the electrical engineering company, there was a wide organizational, professional and social ‘gap’ between engineers who were mobile, and technicians who remained in one plant, and one job. The division between expert engineers and technicians reappeared in the design phase of innovation, where engineers monopolized all the conceptual and relational functions, while technicians were confined to the execution of tasks.181 These distinctions generated continuous frictions and animosities. They created ‘a sort of non-communication’, ‘an impermeable barrier’, a ‘lack of dialogue’ that ‘ruled out all direct co-operation’, and even ‘silent struggles’, though none of these were documented.182 There is no reason to suppose that the distinctive relationships observed in French firms were the product of their technologies, since they did not exist in the matched Japanese firms. The only plausible explanation is that their PD-Gs and senior managers preferred the kind of order and control with which they were familiar, that had already identified and rewarded their own talents, and that they were now able to impose in their private workplaces. Their ability to do so, and to persuade their subordinates that they too should act on the selfsame criteria of state-certified merit, and reproduce as far as they were able similar career paths, is a rather telling demonstration that they have exercised the kind of power that might reasonably be ascribed to a ruling class.

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Are they a mandarinate or a class? The long-standing inter-connection between the state and large private firms, and the elevated walkways that enable the graduates of a small number of elite educational institutions to move from positions of at or near the pinnacles of public power to comparable positions at or near the pinnacles of private power may reasonably be seen as a platform for the construction of a ruling class. It may well be that over previous generations the ‘periodical beheadings’ which followed regime transitions prevented a ruling class making much of these possibilities. In any case, unruly and unpredictable representative legislatures made the central task of ruling rather difficult. The Fifth Republic, however, has ended the in-fighting between the political elites, tamed the legislature, indeed constructed another walkway for senior civil servants into it, and further integrated political and economic power, an essential precondition for the formation of a ruling class. Moreover, it also seems, for the moment at least, to have brought regime changes and sudden personnel ‘permutations’ to an end, and thereby much improved the chances of a ruling class establishing itself.183 If we insist that a ruling class should be hereditary, should include all the richest people in the country, should not have any inward social mobility, should monopolize all the command positions, and that its members should never compete with one another, then plainly a ruling class has not formed in France. If, however, we adopt rather more reasonable criteria, and think that a class may be formed when a recognizable small strata of the population has distinguished itself from the rest of the population at an early age, has received a privileged education and an indelible socialization and public identity, has advanced from a monopoly of public executive power both to dominate the legislative assembly which represents the people as a whole and to occupy a broad swathe of positions exercising private power, then the graduates of the grands corps appear to qualify, or at the very least to have a class under construction. Selection for entry to it begins with admission to the right lycée and includes a degree of self-selection as well as parental support since they must dedicate themselves to the gruelling courses preparing them for the competitive national entry examinations, and distinguishing them from their peers who take the easy route to universities. These examinations are open, formally at least, to all French children, which is quite crucial to establishing their later authority, since they enable the victors of this national competition to persuade themselves and others that they are France’s best and brightest, and therefore entitled to the finest education that the state can provide. Bourdieu described entry to these boarding, and often militarystyle establishments, as ‘a vast consecration ritual’, which entails ‘a break with all family ties’ and ‘transformation of an entire way of life.’ He could quote many personal, and often affectionate, recollections of their fellow

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hypotaupes or hypokhâgnes and former teachers, which suggested that these preliminary courses and schools themselves generated life-long identities, loyalties and networks.184 Since past graduates are often involved in the teaching the stages and travaux pratiques they are able to ensure that their ‘entire way of life’ is conscientiously reproduced, and not undermined by teachers with interests of their own.185 The best of their graduates then enter public service, and after some years those who hope to enter the political elite must obtain promotion to a ministerial cabinet, so that they may find a ‘godfather’ to guide their political career. Dogan underlined the importance of this particular step, pointing out that ‘two thirds of the highest positions in the financial domain, half of the prefects, the majority of the directors of State administration, and the majority of the managers of public corporations have previously passed through ministerial antechambers.’186 Others may either remain in the public service and either sooner or later move sideways by pantouflage into a public corporation, or to a large firm in the private sector, where they may then proceed along the ‘closed promotion’ career paths to the top. As they do so, they may expect help, every step of the way, from their personal networks, which by many accounts they assiduously maintain and utilize.187 Whether these networks link or unite members of a class of functionaries is not so clear, for they are most likely to render assistance to alumni of their own school, and to members of their own corps. Individual schools and corps have been extremely jealous of their status relative to one another. The long-standing rivalry between the technical and administrative corps is well-known, and graduates of the schools are more commonly referred to as les enarques, les X, les gadzarts etc rather than by any collective class term. Les corpsards might seem appropriate, but it is not widely used. When, however, the grandes écoles come under public attack, as they did in the years before World War I, and again immediately after World War II, and during les évènements of 1968, they appear to close ranks, and show a certain consciousness of collective class interests.188 In a questionnaire Suleiman administered to 120 members of three elite corps, 82% of them preferred to describe their relationship with other corps as one of ‘profound solidarity’, and only 13% described them in terms of ‘rivalry and conflicts’.189 How far this ‘profound solidarity’ might extend, we have no way of telling. Bourdieu suggested that the similarity in their exacting admission requirements, pedagogic methods and vocational missions, privileged staff-student ratios, special relationship with their sponsoring Ministry, and self and public perception of the superiority of their credentials to those of mere universities, promoted a kind of ‘organic solidarity’ amongst the graduates of the grandes écoles.190 It is also not clear whether they could be said to have recognized certain class interests, or share a common class outlook, though they are them-

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selves of course walking embodiments of a distinctive interpretation of the ideal of les carrières ouverte aux talents. Talents that matter are only possessed by a few, must be evident at an early age, can be measured by examinations, and when cultivated in a certain kind of school become polyvalent, trumping all specialized professional abilities and qualifications, and entitling those who have them to command others in any kind of organized setting. They also seem to share, whatever their political affiliation, the view that the public interest demands the management of market forces, and hence transcend a political divide often thought to be found in all capitalist democracies. They are especially hostile to one manifestation of these forces, foreign takeovers, though this is an instance where it is difficult to distinguish class from national values. Foreign takeovers, one may only observe, pose a distinctive threat to the grands corps as a class, since they threaten the pantouflage walkways to which they have grown accustomed, perhaps also to the structures of control and stratification they institutionalized in private firms over generations.191 The offer of state support to any large French company targeted by a foreign one is, however, so instantaneous, and so effective, that it strongly suggests continuous ties between senior managers and serving state officials. It also indicates, one might add, that power and control are the main class interest, rather than capital ownership. In 2005 foreigners, largely ‘Anglo-Saxon’, owned 61.4% of all CAC-40 companies, even though no American or British company has ever managed to take control a large French one.192 Bauer’s 1987 study of wholly-owned subsidiaries of foreign companies tended to support this line of argument, for though graduates of the grandes écoles were quite well represented among their chief executives, only one of the 37 in his sample had obtained his position along the walkway from the senior civil service into senior management.193 Some doubts remain, therefore, about the class solidarity of the members of the grands corps, and their shared recognition of their interests as a class. They have no class-wide association but then, like the Soviet nomenklatura, they are able to use state institutions as a class resource. And membership, like that of the nomenklatura, is lifelong. Dogan rejected this analogy on the grounds that the grands corps do not have a monopoly of political and economic power, and occupy ‘only a preponderance … of the most powerful positions in the economy, the State administration and high politics.’194 He thought it would be more accurate to liken them to mandarins during the Sung and Ming dynasties of China, on the grounds that they also were recruited by scholarly examinations. However, this analogy anaesthetizes rather than illuminates. Chinese mandarins never had to subordinate a supposedly sovereign elected, democratic assembly, nor to colonize independent sources of power in civil society, nor to convert them to their own methods of governance, nor to transcend anything comparable to the structural differentiation of modern society. His analogy rather underrates

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the achievement of the grands corps in connecting various public elites with those of a free, independent, and sometimes ferocious, civil society. Besides it also diverts attention from the threat they represent. Mandarins are usually portrayed as wise, kindly and gentle souls, self-effacing and without an ounce of self-interest. Class seems to capture their common characteristics in a more intelligible and neutral manner. Dogan acknowledged that the position of the ‘mandarinate’ has ‘matured during the last four decades’ and, since they have increasingly moved out from their dominant position in public administration to become both politicians and managers, that there is ‘a significant interpenetration at the highest level of a significant number of higher state administrators, executive managers heading the largest public corporations, and of powerful politicians.’195 It can, of course, only be a matter of opinion when such ‘maturity’ and ‘significant interpenetration’ might become a class. He sets the bar at a rather high level so that even the Soviet nomenklatura might have difficulty qualifying. Set a little lower France’s high functionaries seem to qualify as a class. And what other word would describe them more accurately than ruling?

6 Civil Society Acts Alone in the United States

In both Soviet Russia and France, the relationship between the state and civil society was defined in large measure by their revolutions, which were therefore critical to understanding the careers of their classes. There is no reason to suppose that the revolution which led to the creation of the United States will prove any less important. We will therefore begin by considering its peculiarities, and to do that, we must begin with a word about colonial society.

Civil society restrains the state Arendt pointed out, the first settlers in the colonies brought the ideal and practice of self-government with them across the Atlantic.1 An active civil society therefore emerged in every colony, whatever its original form of government: proprietorial, royal or chartered company. Some proprietors were formally granted seemingly absolute powers, but it made little difference.2 In all of them, representative assemblies gradually accumulated powers at the expense of their appointed governors. They had all been given the right to initiate legislation, and modelling themselves on the House of Commons in London, they used parliamentary manoeuvres to delimit the powers of their governors, so that by the 1750s, they were all ‘more powerful than their governors’, and the ‘one principle firmly established … was that of government by the consent of the governed.’3 Along with it came strong local government, freedom of association and an active civil society, as demonstrated by chartered colleges, by the two emerging self-governing professions of lawyers and physicians, by free churches and voluntary associations of various kinds. Jefferson’s reference in the Declaration of Independence to ‘a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States’ was, therefore, by any historical or contemporary standard far-fetched, a wild exaggeration, a political myth, necessary to rouse and mobilize a population less than wholly 141

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persuaded of the case for independence. Subsequently, however, the myth seems to have been instilled in every American child, is sometimes shared by adults, including presidents, and encouraged them in the belief that freedom might spring from the violent overthrow of a ‘tyrant’ and required no social support or infrastructure whatever.4 In fact, the infrastructure provided by an organized and active civil society, preceded the revolution by a considerable period. It therefore also preceded the formation of a national state, indeed might be said to have summoned that state into existence, and when it did so, it was careful to place strict limits on its powers. Clearly such circumstances sharply differentiate the American Revolution from both the Russian and French which were both terminated by authoritarian rulers, who defined the meaning of the revolution, and the powers of the post-revolutionary state over their civil societies. In America, both of these tasks were performed by representatives of civil society, assembled in a convention, and the constitution they devised only acquired legitimacy because it was subsequently ratified by popular, and hotly-debated, referenda. America’s post-revolutionary state was therefore surrounded by a vigilant, aroused, often hyperactive, civil society that constitutionally prevented it from exercising powers that had hitherto been thought to belong to all national states. The preface to any analysis of formation of classes in the United States is therefore to note the limited powers granted under the constitution to this new federal government. The very first article of that constitution, which forbids the granting of any title of nobility, should not be overlooked, since it eliminated the possibility of one class that had played a leading historical role in two of our other societies, and an enduring one in the third, England. The fact that the federal government was also granted no powers with respect to education also seems especially important, since our French evidence has already shown that educational institutions may make a critical contribution to the process of class formation. A number of the founding fathers, including George Washington, initially hoped that the federal government might play a more active part in the education of citizens of the new republic. He tried to establish a University of the United States, but his wishes, and his bequest to the putative institution, were ignored.5 Trow and Rothblatt reasonably suggested that, if it had come to fruition alongside analogous capstone institutions in the states, it might well have been the means of recruiting, training and defining an ‘establishment’ or ruling class.6 But it didn’t. A third major limitation on the powers of the federal government was with regard to economic activity, its powers being limited to questions of foreign trade and interstate commerce, the second of which was then of minor importance. For nearly a century, therefore, until the interstate commerce became a ‘live’ clause of the constitution, the federal government was not directly involved in the regulation of domestic economic activity.

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Moreover, since the federal government had not been granted any powers of incorporation, it could not award charters to company promoters, and by that means sponsor favoured, well-placed petitioners, and possibly assist the formation of a business elite or class. Andrew Jackson interpreted the limited rights granted to the federal government in this respect more strictly than his predecessors. He thought they had been wrong to make an exception of the Bank of the United States, despite a decision of the United States Supreme Court to the contrary. In 1832 he therefore vetoed the bill to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, ‘a contrivance’, as he put it in his veto ‘to make the rich richer and the poor poorer’. In so doing he reduced the opportunities for the federal government to sponsor or encourage the formation of a financial elite alongside the political one.7 In one matter related to domestic economic activity, however, the power of the federal government was not delegated to the states – the right to issue patents. It is of some interest to observe how the federal government chose to exercise the unqualified and unquestioned power granted to it by comparison with its British counterpart. From the very beginning, the U.S. Patent Office sought to limit the possibility that patentees would be drawn disproportionately from one class of the population. It therefore rapidly decentralized and simplified its procedures, and in case the cost might discourage any applicants, paid the postage of them all.8 Its guiding principle was that talented inventors might appear anywhere and everywhere, and that its task was to record their achievements, and thereby protect their rights. The British Patent Office, by contrast, established procedures that made the employment of a specialist intermediary near its office in London a virtual necessity, and British patentees therefore tended to be drawn exclusively from wealthier segments of the population. Moreover, it always behaved as if it was granting a royal privilege, rather than protecting inventors’ rights, and therefore scrutinized all applicants with immense care to determine whether they were really worthy of the honour and protection that a patent provided. As a result, the U.S. Patent Office not only issued far more patents per capita than the British, but also lessened the chances of patentees having a distinctive class coloration. State governments were not inventions of civil society to the same degree as the federal government, since they inherited assemblies, legal institutions and a small cadre of officials from their colonial predecessors, but they might perhaps have used the powers reserved to them in ways that assisted class formation. However, one must immediately note that subnational governments inevitably have less chance of creating classes, whatever their intentions may be, since classes are, we have already agreed, national phenomena. In the event, most state governments were no more inclined than the federal government to differentiate their white male inhabitants in ways that might have prompted the formation of classes.

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Most of them defined the meaning of the revolution in exactly the same way as the federal government, that is to say, by means of constitutional conventions ratified by popular referenda. As a result of these conventions and the new constitutions they devised, many, though not all, of the property restrictions on the suffrage of adult white males were removed, other than in Connecticut and Rhode Island which continued for some decades to be governed by the provisions of their colonial charters.9 One effective way of creating class distinctions, was therefore all but eliminated at an early date in American history. Another way in which state governments might have divided or ‘classified’ the population was by using their powers to grant corporate charters only to those with sufficient influence, connections and resources to persuade state legislators to pass a special act of incorporation through the state legislature. However, within a few decades, many state governments began to pass general laws of incorporation so that any adult meeting certain specified conditions was able to incorporate as a company. In sharp contrast to Britain and the rest of Europe, the number of joint-stock companies increased rapidly.10 By 1830, there were nearly 2,000 in New England alone, and about the same number in the rest of the country, which was many times more than Britain and the rest of Europe combined.11 Many of the charters which had been granted by the colonial authorities came under attack after the revolution, including those granted to a number of universities. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had denied the right of state legislatures to recall them, the legislature of New Hampshire sought, in 1816, to annul that granted to Dartmouth College, accusing the college of ‘aristocratic tendencies’, and declaring its intention to convert it into a state-controlled Dartmouth University for the benefit of the entire population of New Hampshire. The trustees resisted, and in a celebrated confrontation triumphed before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1824. State governments thereafter had to respect the rights of all chartered private educational institutions. However, if they could not recall colonial charters, legislators were able to undermine the privileged status that they thought colleges like Dartmouth enjoyed, by responding favourably when lobbied by academic entrepreneurs and the boosters of ambitious towns, and freely granting charters of incorporation to their proposed degree-awarding institutions. Some 516 colleges or universities were chartered before the Civil War, about 182 of which proved to be permanent.12 Old colonial institutions might still preserve a certain status, but the proliferation of competitive degree-granting colleges and universities, and the democratization of American higher education, was on its way. State governments themselves later became significant participants in it, especially after the Morrill Act of 1864, and its extension in 1890, provided endowments in the form of federal land-grants for state higher educational institutions. In many newer states these often became the leading institutions of higher education, but

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they were never monopolies. Access to higher education was not therefore something that states could control or bestow on a select section of their young people. A status distinction of a sort did, of course, remain between private feepaying institutions for those who could afford them, and public-supported ones for those who could not, but the willingness of state legislatures to grant charters for degree-granting institutions rather freely to all those who applied for them, meant this distinction was also blurred, and provided a rather uncertain foundation for the formation and reproduction of a class. American higher educational institutions were soon as varied as the products in any competitive market, and for all purses, and the new institutions were not legally distinguished or disadvantaged in any way from older ones like Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth that had been granted charters by the colonial authorities. As a result, Trow observed, ‘it has always been more difficult to link particular types of American educational institutions with particular classes than in Europe.’ They have had, in his view, ‘multiple and overlapping functions and the boundaries between traditional and adult education, college and non-college, full-time and part-time, vocational and general’ are ‘permeable and blurred.’ Europeans, as he put it, generally ‘prefer to keep the boundaries between different kinds of institution clearer, their functions purer, and with less overlap.’13 European higher educational institutions have, in other words, tended to be more congruent with, and supportive of, class differences than American ones. To illustrate his argument, he listed the further and higher educational provision in a single American city, Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1980s. He found, in all, 11 institutions, whose respective roles and catchments had not been planned or co-ordinated by any public body, and in which the federal government had no role whatever. ‘No doubt’, he observed, ‘with careful empirical research we could rank these institutions by the socioeconomic background of their students but they cannot be linked in a familiar, immediately acceptable colloquial, manner with classes and strata.’14 Much the same might be said of elementary and secondary schools. Bailyn thought that the colonies had begun to diverge from the mother country in this respect at a very early date when the early settlers ceased to rely either on family resources or on apprenticeship, and made formal collective arrangements, often by importing indentured servant teachers from England, to establish schools to which parents sent their children, and masters their apprentices. He identified more than a 100 of such schools that were established in the American colonies between 1723–1790.15 Schools therefore assumed particular importance in colonial American life, while apprenticeship, the ‘ancient form of subordination and dependency’ as Bailyn called it, began to change both in form and character. Masters no longer acted in loco parentis, and young men no longer grew up in an inherited network of moral obligations. As a result of the shift to an ‘open world of publicly

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available schools … trade education … lost something of its mystery.’16 Moreover, these new schools did not depend on the state, on an educated elite, on wealthy benefactors, or on those responsible for giving the instruction, but on the communities ‘who had created and maintained’ them. Hence began, Bailyn argued, ‘one of the lasting, distinctive characteristics of American education’, which is that ‘it is very sensitive to community pressure….We live with its consequences still.’17 After the revolution, most state governments committed themselves to support public education.18 Five of them included the support of common schools in their first constitutions, ‘common’ meaning schools open equally to all members of community, which the English later came to call ‘comprehensive’.19 Several more subsequently did so, either by constitutional amendment or by declaring such support a principle of public policy. Although these were often merely statements of intent, and followed by such clauses ‘as soon as circumstances will permit’ which allowed them to postpone action, the number of states that sought to fulfil their commitment to provide tax-supported schools available to every child, in every community, slowly but steadily increased through the early and mid-nineteenth century. As they did so, there was a real possibility that a class distinction might have emerged between the private schools supported by those who could afford to pay for their children’s tuition, and publicly-supported schools, reserved for the children of those who could not.20 In Pennsylvania such a distinction had in fact emerged by the 1820s. Immediately after a common school law was passed in 1833, some legislators hoped to maintain and institutionalize this distinction by proposing an amendment to the law that would have limited access to publicly-supported schools to those children whose parents could not afford to pay for their education. Campaigners for the tax-supported common schools clearly understood the class-forming potential of this amendment. In 1834, Thaddeus Stevens spoke for them in the state legislature. This proposed amendment would mean, he said, that ‘the names of those who have the misfortune to be poor men’s children shall be forever preserved as a distinct class … hereditary distinctions of rank are sufficiently odious, but that which is founded on poverty is even more so. Such a law should be entitled “an act for branding and marking the poor, so that they may be known from the rich and the proud.”’21 The amendment was defeated, and no American state thereafter ‘branded’ and ‘marked’ the poor, or public schools, in this manner. American educational institutions became socially selective and differentiated, but indirectly – via the community which they served – and indistinctly as there was no sharp, clear and institutionalized dividing line between types of institutions, between exclusive, long-established private schools to which all the more prosperous parents preferred to send their children and poorly-funded public ones for the rest.

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Overall, therefore, it is difficult to find actions of the American federal or state governments towards education that might have helped to create or institutionalize and reproduce class barriers, and the same might be said of other kinds of public provision. In his comparative study of American and German white collar workers between 1890–1914, Kocka was in no doubt that this was one of the main reasons why ‘the collar line was simply not as significant a dimension for differentiating….social classes and groups’ in the United States over this period as it was in Germany. After noting, and emphasizing, the absence of a stratified school system, he pointed out that since the beginnings of Bismarck’s social insurance, the German state had ‘differentiated the rights and benefits of salaried employees and workers groups along the collar line.’ It thereby ‘reinforced the significance of the distinction between them’ and, incidentally, gave them both ‘a motive for collective organization.’ American governments declined to do anything of the kind.22 Public housing provides another example. Since it is designed to help the most needy, it must necessarily distinguish them from the rest of the community in a particularly visible and enduring manner, and might easily therefore create or reinforce a class distinction. Public housing began in the United States only in 1937, which is much later than in other industrial societies, and therefore corroborates Kocka’s argument. It also advanced at a slow pace, because, as Fuerst put it, ‘real estate committees, citizen groups or local legislative councils have made concerted and usually successful efforts’ to block it. Every site selected … was required to obtain the approval of a local legislative body. A number of states and a number of localities have laws which require a local referendum before any site can be approved.’ Such local referenda were repeatedly challenged in the courts, but their legality and binding force were approved by the U.S. Supreme Court by an 8 to 1 majority in 1970.23 This is one reason why less than 1% of the American population currently resides in publicly provided housing. The motives of the parties, and the merits of the case are not here our concern. The only point of interest is that it demonstrates the same reluctance, or inability, of the state to take actions which might appear to favour, or to distinguish one segment of the population from the rest and might thereby encourage the differentiation of classes. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), launched in 1963 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘great society’, provides another example. Among other things, it was intended to protect the poor, by providing free legal services, from ‘the capricious ways that some businesses intervened in their lives’ – by repossession orders, garnishment of wages and evictions, and the like. Katz’s study of the agency showed that by doing so, it ‘had helped to create classsegmented public programs in housing, food, medical care.’24 These classforming consequences of OEO’s activities were, however, widely noticed and criticized, and were probably one of the reasons why the agency only survived for some two decades.

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Diametrically opposing this line of argument, DeMott argued that public policy in the United States is ‘routinely class-biased’ in that ‘publicly financed options, advantages, programs theoretically available to all are in fact restricted by official rulings, and by social distribution of civic and other competencies to a favoured few.’25 He implies there are many examples, but examined only two to prove his point. The first was the action of draft boards during the Vietnam War 1963–1974, which was he thought the ‘worst recent episode of state-administered class injustice’. He showed that boards did not draft randomly from the age-cohort of the population, but disproportionately from ethnic minorities, from the less educated and the poor. He mentioned a Harvard Crimson report that of the 1,200 in the class of 1970, only two served in Vietnam. His second example was tax exemptions allowed on mortgage interest payments. No doubt he is right to point to the class bias in both of these public policies, though mortgage tax exemptions can hardly be said to be limited to ‘a favoured few’, but neither of them seem likely to have created a shared class interest or visible and durable class distinction between those who have benefited from them and those who have not. Harvard alumni who avoided the draft are unlikely to have recognized any common interest with those who benefited from mortgage tax exemptions, nor all non-Harvard alumni with all non-mortgagees. It seems unlikely, therefore, that these decisions provoked any recognizable ‘them’ and ‘us’. The one big exception to the general rule of American public policy against visibly segmenting sections of the population derives, of course, from race not class. Slaves were distinguished from citizens in Southern states by law, and after emancipation, a multiplicity of legal provisions in access to voting and all manner of public facilities continued to distinguish Afro-Americans from the rest of the community, and largely informally, the distinction became a national one. If slavery and discrimination were the great exceptions to the general rule, the attempt to be rid of their legacy is not. Affirmative action programmes designed to reverse and compensate for this prior discrimination have themselves encountered opposition on the grounds that they create a favoured, identifiable class of citizens, consisting of members of all those ethnic groups who can claim that their ancestors were discriminated against, and that their descendants now deserve special preferential consideration in academic selection procedures or in employment hiring tests. They have, therefore provoked the same kind of political opposition that blocked public housing and the Community Legal Services of the OEO. In California, this opposition obtained sufficient support to permit a referendum, which appeared as Proposition 209, on the ballot in the California election of 1996. It proposed, in language lifted from the equal rights provisions of the constitution, that affirmative action be abandoned. It was supported by 54% of the voters, and as required by California’s consti-

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tution, the result of this referendum was immediately added to the constitution of the state. It became Article 1, Section 31, and went into effect on August 28th 1997.26 Irrespective of the outcome of the present campaigns that this has provoked in other states, both for and against, and the merits of the argument, it seems safe to predict, if past practice is any guide, that the days of affirmative action across the United States are numbered.27 It will not, of course, have escaped anyone’s attention that the restraints that civil society placed on the federal and state governments in the early decades of the republic were all designed to prevent the emergence of privileged classes, either of a titled aristocracy, or voters, or of company promoters, or of university graduates, whereas the more recent ones, like public housing, legal services, or affirmative action, were measures to help the most needy and disadvantaged sections of the population, who attract considerably more sympathy, especially among foreign observers. In the present context, however, the only point is to observe the consistent principle informing public policy, whether in the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries which is best expressed in Jefferson’s dictum ‘equal rights for all, special privileges for none.’ As a result, it seems unlikely that we will find state actions, or statesupported institutions, favouring specific segments of American civil society in some way, granting them different rights and privileges from the rest, and thereby prompting the formation of classes, as we have been able to do in both Russia and France, and if we do they are likely to be exceptional. It follows that if national classes have been formed and maintained in the United States, they must have depended largely, if not entirely, on spontaneous and voluntary action by organized interests within civil society. Our investigation will therefore proceed by focusing on those organized interests that have hoped and intended to create a class, or those that, incidental to some other goal, may unwittingly have assisted in the formation of one. Everything we have been told about the major American political parties suggests that they have been disinclined to perform such a task. Minor political parties, such as the workingmen’s parties, the Grange or the agrarian populists have occasionally articulated and addressed class grievances, and the Socialist Party explicitly sought to represent the working class nationally, but they were all short-lived, in all probability precisely because they were explicitly class parties. The permanent, major national parties have been unwilling to limit their appeal to a particular class, even when they drew their support disproportionately from one socio-economic section of the population rather than another. Most of the time, to quote one typical mid-twentieth century observer, they have ‘preferred to engage in a contest of the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ for the spoils of office’ and were often therefore ‘hardly distinguishable from one another with respect to principles or objectives.’28 The major political parties are more likely therefore

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to have helped to dissolve classes than to have been agents of the formation of any class. We will have to look elsewhere.

Deprofessionalization disbands the middle class If we turn to consider the middle class in the light of these considerations, organized professions seem to the best candidates, since in the early years of the Republic, lawyers and doctors in several new states continued the exclusive associations they had formed in the colonial period. These associations collectively limited access to the practice of their profession, enforced certain rules amongst their members, and sought to define their own exclusive work jurisdictions, and distinguish their members from unadmitted practitioners. If other newly-emerging professions had imitated them, they might, collectively, have constituted the organized core of a middle class. This, however, never happened. The corporate institutions of both barristers (as they were still called) and physicians were attacked and destroyed, precisely because they were seen as a potential class in the making, though they were usually portrayed by their critics as a potential ‘aristocracy’ or ‘ruling class’, rather than a middle class. Under continuous electoral pressure, state governments progressively repealed their licensing privileges, and allowed a free market in the practice of law and medicine to develop.29 Deprived of any form of regulatory corporate body, lawyers and doctors became as competitive and entrepreneurial as tradesmen, and both they and their clients were more likely to be randomly distributed across all sections of the population. Bar associations continuing from the colonial period collapsed, with the sole exception of the Philadelphia Law Association. Despite Americans’ supposed special capacity to create voluntary associations, none were successfully established between 1835 and 1875 when the Association of the Bar of the City of New York was formed. The medical profession experienced a similar, though less catastrophic, hiatus of professional association.30 Another possible corporate base of middle class pride and ethics was the civil service, for aside from the elite, which may form part of an upper or ruling class, the vast majority of civil servants might have constituted, as they have elsewhere, a solid foundation of middle class rectitude, sobriety and organization. But career civil servants were also prevented from performing such a role in the United States. Under pressure from popular electorates, state governments had introduced a ‘rotation’ or ‘spoils’ system into their administrations almost immediately following the revolution, so that their civil servants were removed at the end of the terms of the elected officials who appointed them. Following his election victory in 1828, Andrew Jackson imported the system into the federal government, and the subsequent periodic influx of spoilsmen to the federal capital, prevented the federal civil service acting as the anchor of a ruling class, a

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middle class, or any kind of class.31 It was too unstable, and its members too individualistic, too competitive, and too venal, to perform any such role. Over the second quarter of the nineteenth century, while the organized bar, organized medicine, and career civil services were being reformed, the judiciary was subject to electoral attack for the same reasons, and over subsequent decades was made elective for fixed terms.32 A stable, secure, tenured judiciary could not therefore compensate, as it were, for the disappearance of an organized bar. The absence of an established national church meant that clergymen did not maintain certain standards of income, of life style, or of conduct that would have enabled them to contribute to the definition and demarcation of a class. Connecticut was an exception and maintained an established church through the early decades of the republic, but elsewhere churches competed in a great national marketplace of belief.33 For reasons already mentioned, there were also no ‘established’ universities, but only a highly differentiated marketplace of academic knowledge offering degrees and institutions for varied income levels and aspirations. All the professions therefore – lawyers, doctors, civil servants, judges, clergymen and professors – were internally differentiated and competing in their respective marketplaces, and quite unable to provide stable, corporatelyorganized foundations of a recognized middle class. Historians have been unwilling to give the early opponents of the professions much credit for strangling an emergent class at birth, principally, I suspect, because the professions have never been thought to be significant agents of class formation in the first place. However, in the light of the evidence of the exclusive admission requirements, and phenomenally high rates of self-recruitment of the unreformed, post-revolutionary bar of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and of the subsequent actions of the exclusive Philadelphia Law Association, not to mention the role professionals have played in class formation in England which we consider later, the claims of the early enemies of the professions deserve to be reconsidered.34 Let us imagine for a moment, counter-factually, that something like the Suffolk County Association or the Philadelphia Law Association had survived and flourished along with similar associations in New York City, Baltimore, Williamsburg, Charleston, Atlanta, New Orleans and in Washington D.C., and that they had formed an American Bar Association in 1828 instead of 1878, and that bar associations in the newer cities in the middle and far West had been formed, and affiliated to it through the midnineteenth century. Alongside them, let us also imagine medical societies that had resisted the attacks of the Thomsonians, Botanics and other ‘irregulars’, gone on to organize their profession nationally, and controlled who was admitted to it, and the training of all their recruits. And to complete the counter-factual picture, let us also imagine career civil servants, in both the federal and state governments, or the clergy of an established church or the professoriate of a network of universities linked to the University of

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the United States in Washington D.C. Over time, as each of these professions established their own self-governing institutions, and developed their own codes of ethics and etiquette, their own distinctive customs and manners, it is reasonable to predict that the members of each of them would have come to acknowledge their equals in terms of honour among the others, would have tended to self-recruit and intermarry among themselves, and in so doing they would have defined a confident and secure middle class. Imagining this counter-factual experience does not, as it happens, require a great leap of the imagination. One has only to glance across the Atlantic at contemporaneous England to see the entire process, or nightmare as it might seem to American observers, graciously acted out. And what is it that one has to imagine away from the United States to sustain this counterfactual reverie? Nothing, surely, to do with the means of production or with inequalities of wealth. What one has to imagine away, above all else, are the political forces that destroyed the organized professions, that replaced a lifetime civil service selected by merit with one based on electoral spoils, that tolerated the proliferation of university charters, and left a multiplicity of religious denominations to compete with one another, while leaving none of them inferior to an established church. The differences between the two countries, which explain the contrasting opportunities they offered for the organization of the middle class, were in other words political rather than economic. The ‘fanatics’ who harassed the organized legal profession of the early American Republic, the ‘irregulars’ who brought down the organized medicine, and the supporters of the spoils system, therefore deserve recognition for their part in dismantling, or rather pre-empting, the formation of a class system, because they prevented the creation of a network of interlocking, stable, corporately-organized professions that could have provided it with a solid, self-conscious middle. Some lawyers, some doctors, some professors, some architects, no doubt recognized their common interests without any formal corporate institutions. Informally, an ‘inner bar’ survived in several cities and on frontier circuits, and no doubt other professions had their equivalents.35 But without a formally-organized, and state-recognized body controlling access to the profession, responsible for training recruits, defending some ideal of professional practice, and reminding all lawyers of expected standards of professional behaviour, American lawyers became enormously differentiated in ethics, clientele, and working methods. The same differentiating forces were at work in other professions, with an elite acknowledging some common standards while disdaining the much larger number of their fellow practitioners, who practised like petty traders, and acknowledged no wider obligations and responsibilities. The Philadelphia Law Association, the only surviving bar association, is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon, an enclave of honour, ethics and organization, sur-

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rounded by a mass of unorganized lawyers whom they didn’t know, and didn’t wish to know.36 In the absence of corporately-organized professions, the middle class is rather difficult to see and define, though Blumin claimed that white collars made it visible in the two or three decades on either side of the Civil War. By his account it was, however, only a wraith of a class, since before the war it was ‘not fully formed’, and soon after it ‘the mostly formed crystals of class would alter in form and partly dissolve’37 Moreover, its members do not seem to have been enthusiastic about publicly proclaiming their distinctiveness. They were not inclined ‘to articulate their position in a class taxonomy’, indeed they often denied the very existence of classes, and they never acquired any organized political expression or collective ideology. The two major political parties had, Blumin pointed out, already created ‘institutional machinery’ to mobilize voters from all classes, and adopted ‘the rhetoric of classless democracy’ though this was not, he argued, altogether fatal, since ‘the social values, styles, and networks that gave the middle class its greatest coherence were not those that required expression through politics.’38 Instead, they emerged in the workplace, from differences in income that were translated ‘into differences in lifestyle, outlook and aspiration’, and were evident in their residential and consumption patterns, in their participation in voluntary associations and in their family life.… so that a middle class was formed’, and came to represent, ‘a specific set of experiences, a specific style of living, and a specific social identity – a social world, in sum, that was distinct from others above and below it …’39 This fleeting middle class was, one may notice, entirely the work of civil society, building on differences of income and working conditions. Blumin does not refer at any point to any political decision, any law, any state action or public provision that might have assisted its formation, other than to note that children of non-manual parents were more inclined to stay at public schools rather longer than those of manual workers.40 Manufacturing and retail employers contributed to it, by differentiating the workspace and employment conditions of their white and blue collar employees. Activists in voluntary associations also contributed, for though they were not exclusive, most appealed, Blumin claimed, disproportionately to one class or other, as did entertainment and sports entrepreneurs. Finally, and perhaps most importantly in his view, housewives made a contribution by buying food and furnishings which created a distinctive middle class home environment. Organized professions are never mentioned, and trade unions only in passing. Indeed this class had no distinctive and exclusive collective institutions at all, and no collective voice, which is presumably why it didn’t last long and why the ‘categorical’ distinctions between classes that Blumin sought always eluded his grasp. Over the closing decades of the century, the boundaries of this class became ‘less clear’ as the upper class above it ‘lost visibility and force’, and

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was displaced from public view by national celebrities, and as the rapidly growing armies of routine non-manual workers were no longer assured of higher incomes or better promotion prospects than manual workers. Outside the workplace at least, manual workers, and their wives, increasingly ‘saw themselves as middle class’, and the gap between the proportion of their children entering and completing high school and those of nonmanual parents narrowed. The blue and white collar distinction therefore ‘no longer symbolized consistent differences in life style … that had shaped class in the nineteenth century.’41 As it happened though, just as white collars were losing their classforming potential, the professions were reorganizing, and seeking to reverse the radical deprofessionalization of the early decades of the century. Bar and medical associations were established in the late 1870s, and rapidly increased in number towards the end of the century. The Civil Service Reform League was formed in 1877 to reverse the spoils system. Largely due to its efforts the Pendleton Act, which permitted the restoration of merit appointments in the federal civil service, and thereby inaugurated the revival of a career civil service, was passed in 1883.42 Authoritative reports on the educational preparation for three of the most important professions appeared in the twentieth century: Flexner on medical education in 1900, Reed on legal education in 1910, and the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education’s (SPEE) Report on Engineering Schools in 1934.43 These reports were concerned with the widely varying, and sometimes abysmal, standards of admission and education of their respective professions, which had emerged as a result of the rapid, free-market growth of colleges and universities, and only secondarily with the conduct of practitioners. Their recommendations were intended to improve educational standards by raising requirements for admission to the professional schools, and by extending the length, and raising the quality of the schools’ courses. If the proposals in all three reports had, by some magic, been immediately realized, then it is possible that these three professions, alongside a simultaneous and instantaneous reform of the civil service, might have formed the spine of an organized middle class, which other organized occupations might have sought to emulate and join. These reports, however, were private elite initiatives. They were not sponsored or published by the federal government or by state governments intent on restructuring the professions. Nor were they responses to a groundswell of opinion among practitioners hoping to revive their corporate ethics and esprit. Flexner’s report had the most immediate impact. Through the second decade of the twentieth century, by means of newly-established accreditation procedures, many of the cheaper medical schools catering to ethnic minorities and poorer students were, at the urging of the American Medical Association, and with the help of state legislatures, closed.44 Access to the profession was therefore restricted, and it must have become more cohesive

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as a result, though even so the AMA appears to have been able to recruit a substantial majority of physicians only briefly during the inter-war years.45 In the other two professions, it is impossible to detect any such impact. Early attempts to restrict access to the legal profession via reform of the law schools, provoked political opposition very similar to that which had destroyed the organized profession in the early decades of the Republic. Accreditation of law schools therefore proceeded at a much slower pace, which ensured that the legal profession could not become too exclusive. In any case, voluntary bar associations only managed to recruit a substantial proportion of practising lawyers in the original 13 states, and it was therefore only in those states that lawyers could give some semblance of belonging to a corporate body that was responsibly endeavouring to uphold its own code of ethics. Elsewhere, the failure of voluntary self-regulating bar associations meant that lawyers were organized compulsorily, and often unwillingly, by law into so-called ‘integrated’ bar associations. These are, one may notice, one instance of state recognition of a segment of the population and might therefore, alongside the licensing of other professions, have contributed to the formation of a class. In the event, they were widely resented, and frequently had considerable difficulties imposing their authority on practitioners and reminding of them of their professional obligations, so it seems unlikely that they did much to instil any wider class sentiments.46 The SPEE’s efforts are thought to have encouraged some engineering schools to raise their admission and teaching standards, but they had virtually no effect on their number, and there was no consensus within the profession to use accreditation as a means for licensing or closure, as doctors had done, and as some bar associations were attempting to do, probably because too many engineers had already entered management and would themselves have found it difficult to obtain a license. Besides, virtually all the engineering associations were financially dependent on corporate support.47 The elite of civil engineers, a large proportion of whom were self-employed or worked in partnerships, was an exception. They had always favoured licensing legislation, and although such legislation began to be passed by state legislatures in the 1930s, and by 1947 they had all done so, this did not close the engineering profession or make it much more exclusive, since the licensing requirements only applied to engineers engaged on certain kinds of public projects.48 None of these three reports had any direct effect on the organization or the practice of the three professions. They are landmarks, therefore, in the history of professional education, but not in the history of professional government or professional practice. As for the Pendleton Act, it permitted, rather than required, presidents to reclassify positions into the merit or career service, and altogether excluded the higher policy-making jobs, which remained political or spoils appointments. It took a very long time to complete reclassification. Franklin Roosevelt stalled it considerably.49 Richard

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Nixon was the remarkable exception. Where previous presidents had only classified positions on leaving office, after they had made use of it for political purposes, he completed the reclassification process on entering office in January 1969, leaving a so-called ‘excepted service’ of political appointees, who currently constitute less than 1% of total federal employment. The classified service has, however, shown little inclination to organize by professsional or occupational specialty, or by their rank or their ‘class’ like the British counterparts. Neither occupation nor class spontaneously emerged as a natural basis of collective organization and action among American civil servants.50 Unions with substantial numbers of federal employees commonly include professionals, senior managers, white collar and blue collar employees, and can hardly therefore coincide with any tentative class alignments in the wider society. Over a very long period therefore, American professionals were either without any corporate association, or organized only as minorities, and therefore enjoyed a large measure of freedom to conduct their practices as they wished, and to compete for customers like tradesmen or businessmen from whom they were often difficult to distinguish, being no less marketoriented, and no less inclined to measure their success purely in market terms.51 Organized professions have, therefore, been able to make only a limited contribution to the definition of a middle class by way of their corporate institutions or distinctive working practices, or their ethics or manners. As a result, the American middle class has remained rather difficult to define and identify, and seems to be little more than a vast, rather vague and amorphous income bracket to which almost every working person could claim to belong. When confronted by an interviewer, most Americans seem happy do just that, and amiably identify themselves with almost everyone else, including the interviewer. Part of the difficulty in defining and delimiting the middle class, however, is that those who might have organized above and below them also failed to distinguish themselves by creating enduring and distinctive corporate institutions.

Are American workers exceptional, or just different? When we come to consider the formation of the American working class, we face a peculiar problem. The United States was one of the earliest industrial societies, but unlike the industrial pioneer, England, soon organized its manufacturing enterprises in exactly the manner Marx had predicted, that is, by de-skilling and homogenizing its manual labour force, which it did more rapidly, more thoroughly and comprehensively than any other capitalist country.52 American employers were the first to separate the design and planning of work from its execution. If they were not the first to employ graduates as managers, they were certainly the first to employ them in large numbers, and they were simultaneously indifferent or hostile to

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the apprenticeships of skilled workers. Nor did they encourage or support any alternative publicly-provided of technical schools for their manual workers. Hence, they created much the most sharply divided labour force in the industrial world, with the highest proportion of formally-educated managers controlling the least formally-educated manual workers.53 Shadwell was among the first to notice its peculiar educational profile. In 1906 he observed that American education ‘supplies industries from above rather than below’, and he then went on to document the scarcity of lower trade and technical schools.54 There are no reliable, cross-national historical series of the educational profiles of the labour forces of industrial societies to track this over the twentieth century but the very fact that the United States was both the first to develop business education on a wide scale, and as we shall see below, always had a low proportion of skilled workers, tends to support the view that the American labour force had quite distinctive ‘relations of production’.55 Hence, if Marx had correctly identified the processes by which a working class is formed, then the United States should have been the first to form one. The first homogeneous, unskilled industrial proletariat should have been American, not English. Many of his followers therefore had high hopes for the revolutionary potential of the American proletariat. Engels was among the first to be excited by the prospect. It ‘took the working class in England years and years before they fully realized that they formed a distinct … permanent class’, he observed, ‘and years again until this class consciousness led them to form themselves into a distinct political party’, but ‘on the more favoured soil of America … where history begins with the elements of modern bourgeois society … the American working class has advanced as far, in ten months.’56 Lipset identified various other Marxist theorists who, until the Russian Revolution confounded their predictions, ‘anticipated that, following the logic of historical materialism, the United States would be the first country in which socialists would come to power.’57 As we all know, it didn’t turn out like that. The ‘relations of production’ may have been just right, and there may have been more than adequate inequalities of wealth and income, but most observers, especially foreign observers, have had to spend their time trying to explain the comparatively feeble and limited expression of working class consciousness in the United States, and its failure to generate much support for a socialist party or labour movement. The United States may have had high rates of social conflict, civil disorder and labour unrest, but virtually none of it could be called class action, in the sense that it mobilized members as a class or had a specific class objective.58 A large and stimulating literature, to which Marx, Sombart, Lenin, Wells, Hartz and many others have contributed, has sought to explain American ‘exceptionalism’. Lipset’s comprehensive review of it found ‘so many explanations’ that he thought ‘the outcome seems

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overdetermined.’ He classified them into eight ‘societal factors’ not counting various sub-variants, and four main ‘political’ factors.59 In a sense, the present analysis can be said to be at odds with them all, since it is trying to show that class formation in the United States can be analysed and understood by reference to exactly the same political variables as the class formation in the other three societies, and that these same variables will also explain the fate of all potential class formations in the United States, not simply that of the working class which was the concern of the ‘exceptionalists’. Moreover, it also hopes to show that these other societies vary among themselves as much as they differ from the United States, and are all therefore, in certain specified respects, exceptional. It is, however, unnecessary to argue with any of the contributors to this exceptionalist literature since some of the factors which they adduce to explain why American workers have proved unenthusiastic about socialism refer, indirectly or under some other heading, to the relationship between the state and civil society, and it would not advance the argument to note these points of agreement. Two points, however deserve notice because of the empirical support they received from Laslett’s remarkable comparative study of class formation among miners in Illinois and Lanarkshire, Scotland, over the period 1830 to 1924. The first, the extension of the suffrage to white adult American males before those in other countries, has frequently been mentioned in the ‘exceptionalist’ literature, but Laslett’s research delineated its significance. He concluded that the process of class formation among miners in the two countries was ‘similar at the workplace’, with ‘some differences at the community level,’ while it ‘diverged most sharply’ in the area of electoral politics. American miners were, he explained, already socialized into the pre-existing two-party system, and this ‘prevented U.S. colliers from adopting a collectivist response to the industrialization process’ by supporting the formation of a separate Labor Party like their counterparts in Scotland. While ‘primary elections enabled radical candidates to enter’, they also ensured that a moderate who represented the widest range of Democratic or Republican opinion would be selected as the candidate.’60 His evidence also lent some support to a second idea, to which we have already referred but which received much less attention in the exceptionalist literature, that the earlier and wider access to education, especially higher education, weakened working class solidarity. The Illinois miners were among those who applied electoral pressure to encourage state governments to live up to their commitments and expand publicly-funded common schools.61 He also noticed ‘severe limits on what even the most ambitious among the Lanarkshire miners could hope to achieve’, while ‘a significant minority of the most talented leaders among the Illinois miners, taking advantage of a superior education system, became engineers, professional men or even mine owners.’62

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The American labour movement, and along with it the American working class, therefore faced a formidable rival, for there appears to be an in-built incompatibility between the two mass ‘movements’ of labour organization and of education: the former offered collective betterment and was therefore class-forming, while the latter promised individual betterment and was therefore class-dissolving. Eugene Debs, socialist candidate for the American presidency in 1920, urged his supporters to ‘Rise with your class not out of it’, and though mass higher education was already beginning to encourage Americans to ‘rise out of your class, not with it’, most American workers probably did not feel that way until after World War II.63 In 1947 only 13.4% of white males and 7.3% of black males had attended college for at least two years.64 Currently, however, nearly onethird (32.8%) of those over the age of 25 in the American labour force have graduated from college, and getting on for two-thirds (60.4%) have had some college experience. By contrast, only 12.2% are union members.65 Over the second half of the twentieth century, we may reasonably infer, many American workers must have come to the view that they would rather rise out of their class than with it, and similarly persuaded their children. No other labour movement seems to have faced the same challenge, at least not to the same degree. In France, Russia, and a fortiori England, mass labour organization preceded mass higher education by a considerable period of time. In all probability a satisfactory account of labour and class organization in the United States would, therefore, be told alongside an account of the extension of access to colleges and universities, and of the chances of individual betterment they offered. Neither of these differentiating factors – cross-class political parties and mass higher education – require however that we put the United States in a separate ‘exceptional’ category, and conduct some different kind of analysis that does not focus on the relationship between the state and civil society if we hope to understand the process of class formation in the United States, for both of these differentiating factors were merely consequences of the American variant of that relationship. The question remains, nevertheless, whether any of the other factors mentioned in the exceptionalist literature were of such importance to the formation, or malformation, of the American working class that it would be unnecessary to refer to the relationship between the state and civil society? Three ‘exceptional’ factors stand out in this context: first, the moving frontier, which was thought to have discouraged class consciousness because it promoted, even required, individual self-reliance rather than collective action; second, slavery and its successors; and third, the ethnic pluralism created by mass immigration, both of which are thought to have fragmented the working class and undermined its solidarity.66 In Turner’s original formulation, the frontier thesis offered a materialist explanation of American behaviour, a sylvan one of course, but nonetheless materialist, since the land, the forests and the plains were made the prime

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explanatory variable for American institutions and behaviour. In hindsight, one can only wonder why social scientists ever gave it so much attention. Sixty years before Turner, Tocqueville had considered this explanation, for it had been popular even then, and sought to test it by making comparisons with neighbouring frontier societies in Canada and Latin America, where settlers had faced similar boundless territories and forests, and therefore provided an opportunity to assess the effects of material circumstances on their political institutions and habits.67 Tocqueville noted profound differences in the way in which various open frontiers had been owned, settled and governed, and therefore decided that prior political decisions and cultural preferences must have been more important than material conditions. Turner ignored his argument, proclaimed the theory, and made no attempt to test it with comparative evidence. If it were to be used today to explain aspects of America’s class structure, or its classlessness, then we are entitled to expect that it first pass the comparative test by showing that those who have settled frontiers elsewhere have responded to them in a basically similar manner to that of Americans. If they have not, then it is difficult to see how the frontier as such can be considered a significant explanatory variable. Tocqueville’s conclusion that the mode of settlement on the American frontier was itself politicallydefined, and those who settled it brought with them institutions, values and expectations from the East, has been supported by abundant evidence.68 We may therefore conclude that the American frontier was itself an expression of the pre-existing relationship between the state and civil society, rather than an independent determinant of a new one. It cannot therefore provide a plausible alternative explanation of the way classes have formed, or failed to form, in the United States. The institutionalization, in a section of the new republic over its first three-quarters of a century, of the horrific distinction between people, based on ownership of one person by another, presents a much more serious problem for the comparative analysis of class formation. After slavery was abolished, it was succeeded by its grim descendant: Jim Crow. As AfroAmericans migrated to Northern cities in the 1920s and 1930s, they were informally diffused across the nation, which created an exceptional national form of racial discrimination against the former slaves. The closest resemblance to this in our other cases is serfdom in Russia, which has sometimes been described as a form of slavery. But Russian serfdom did not coincide with skin colour, and though various forms of institutionalized segregation remained after the formal abolition of the institution in 1862, and even as we have seen were re-formalized after 1928, the mass mobility of peasants into urban occupations and into other classes makes the comparison a rather remote one. Slavery and Jim Crow are therefore exceptional, and might reasonably therefore be held responsible for the peculiarities in the formation of the American working class.

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Acknowledging that point does not, however, enable us or compel us to dispense with references to the relationship between the state and civil society in favour of some other analytical approach. On the contrary, while slavery was a means and distinctive form of relations of production, and therefore an economic institution, it might equally well serve to illustrate the pre-eminent power of politics in institutionalizing, and destroying, forms of stratification, since it was the initial, fateful compromise during the making of the federal constitution, which eliminated the substantial slave populations of Pennsylvania and New York, while legitimizing those of states in the South. Capitalism thereafter flourished in both. The political union might not have been able to survive half slave, half free, but capitalism evidently could do so, without any difficulty. The existence of slavery does not, therefore, demonstrate the pre-eminence of material factors in the analysis of stratification in the United States, or suggest that the relationship between the state and civil society is of secondary importance. What it first demonstrates are the limitations of formal, constitutional declarations of equality, and of state action without the corresponding affirmation and support from civil society. What it also demonstrates is the capacity of civil society to maintain and institutionalize segregation and discrimination not only when state governments supported its efforts, as they did in the South, but even when they remained indifferent, as they did for the most part in the North and West. Civil society itself, therefore, with state support in only one section of the country, was able to create this pervasive, national form of stratification that marked and disadvantaged Afro-Americans everywhere.69 And the eradication of it only began in earnest when civil society was aroused and organized nationally by the civil rights movement in the 1960s, that is to say by political action, which prompted legislation and the creation of federal and state agencies to try and root out this most durable form of stratification. In short, slavery, and the strange career of Jim Crow, are themselves only to be understood and explained by reference to the relationship between the state and civil society. They do not require or invite an alternative kind of explanation. The question remains, however, whether, and to what extent, the long experience of segregation and discrimination, and the campaign against it, may have undermined working class solidarity. This is an extremely difficult matter to determine, probably impossible. There is no doubt that Afro-Americans long had good reason to be suspicious and hostile to the craft unions of the American Federation of Labour (AFL).70 While its national leaders claimed that they recruited without regard to race or religion, AFL locals frequently barred Afro-Americans formally, or used various subterfuges to exclude them informally. Hence there was considerable friction between spokesmen of the black community and the AFL, and in the 1930s black workers were quite willing to be used as strikebreakers.71 It was only competition from the industrial unions of the

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Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which led the AFL to relax its racial restrictions. The CIO was always more favourably disposed towards Afro-American organizations, churches, newspapers, and to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and gave them financial support. The only union in the South not to have institutionalized segregation was the United Mineworkers (UMW), a founding member of the CIO. In recent times, survey evidence shows that AfroAmericans have more positive feelings about organized labour than whites, and identify with the working class more readily than whites, but past damage is impossible to assess.72 How is one to measure the effect of the early generations of discrimination and friction on the growth of the union movement, and on its role in organizing the working class as a whole?73 Similar difficulties arise if one hopes to measure the impact of ethnic pluralism. The only research design to resolve the matter would require comparisons of class solidarity in similar communities or regions with and without considerable numbers of immigrants, or before and after their arrival, or perhaps before and after unions were obliged to use languages other than English, and then the construction of some kind of measure of the overall impact on union or class solidarity. For many reasons, this is an impossible set of requirements. We therefore have to make do with evidence from particular communities, with particular types of immigrants, in particular industries, at particular times. It points both ways. Gutman was convinced that ethnic immigration had no adverse consequences on union and class solidarity. He pointed out that ‘immigrant workers in the mid-1880s joined trade unions in numbers far out of proportion to their place in the labour force’, and supported his argument with two unusual studies, one from Illinois in 1886, which found that only 31% of native-born workers were members of unions versus 69% of the foreignborn, and the other from New Jersey in 1887, which found that 48% of native-born and 52% of foreign-born were members of unions.74 Schneirov and Suhrbur’s study of one of the major craft unions in multi-ethnic Chicago, that of the carpenters, over more than a century 1863–1987, provides little evidence that rivalry or conflict between the astonishing array of ethnic groups amongst its members inhibited union or class solidarity in any respect.75 Greene specifically rejected the proposition that Slavic immigrants were ‘poor union material’ in the coalmining industry of Pennsylvania, though employers in the industry often acted on the assumption that they were, and that ethnic diversity would undermine union solidarity.76 Laslett collected telling cross-national evidence, which showed that the political and cultural divisions that emerged between Protestant miners and their Irish Catholic counterparts in Lanarkshire, Scotland, over the years 1830 and 1924 were more, rather than less, damaging to the development of long-term class loyalties than were the ethnic conflicts that developed between the British, Italians and Slavs in Illinois.77

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On some occasions, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that observers do not want to believe that their heroes, the working class, could have been tainted by ethnic prejudice, and therefore hoped that class unity would override ethnic divisions. Kornblum, for example, recounted the successive struggles of various ethnic groups in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as they competed to establish ‘a residential and institutional base’ and for respectability, security and power in communal institutions.78 One of his informants, a Mexican unionist, described the importance of an electoral campaign ‘When you win it means you get respect and a little power. You have to get your own people calling the shots for a change. We would be able to put some people in jobs, positions in the city, and in Springfield. We need a win real bad … When you win your people can hold their heads up, they can feel confident when they go into new places.’ Kornblum himself observed that ‘status cleavages have often prevented the consolidation of class unity in the community’. However, he then pointed out that ‘local unions and parties may draw members from the highly diverse cultural segments of the local society’, and referred to the ‘negotiations of new alliances and constituencies in which ethnic identities are played down and blended into a more unifying working class culture’.79 Most of his evidence, however, referred to the ‘status cleavages’ and to the ethnic rivalries that prevented the consolidation of class unity, while the blending into ‘a more unified working class culture’ seems more of an expression of Kornblum’s own hopes for the future than a conclusion from his evidence. Halle was similarly optimistic. The comments and behaviour of the oil refinery workers from many ethnic groups in New Jersey in the early 1980s, suggested to him that ethnic ‘cosmologies’ were ‘mediocre’, and their ‘ethnic identities and symbolism superficial.’ He argued that ‘ethnic distinctions based on immigrant cultures fade, but the class structure of America persists. Indeed, the former were, in his view, melting into the latter. The ‘fading of ethnicity reveals … a society in which the major distinctions are those of race and class, not ethnicity.’80 Others have plausibly suggested that the impact of immigration depended on the time period under consideration. Blumin for instance, suggested that since first-generation immigrants before the Civil War were overwhelmingly manual workers, immigration then ‘reinforced the collar distinction’. But when the second generation of immigrants moved into white collar employment in the late nineteenth century, they ‘increased the likelihood that class and ethnicity would become separate rather than reinforcing identities … For the first time middle class identity and ethnic identity pulled in different directions’81 Freeman’s account of New York City suggested that the degree of class solidarity varied between ethnic groups, since some found it easy to form class alliances, while others did not. In the two decades following World War II, he found that ethnic divisions did not preclude or disturb class solidarity. While acknowledging their ‘complex relationships to one another’, he thought they had ‘no problem in working

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together’, and gave the example of the Italian-Jewish alliance in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). However, after the post-1965 wave of Hispanic immigration, ‘the strength of ethnic identity and organization … tended to leave class identity – and the very notion of working class New York – in the shadows.’82 Numerous studies have, however, shown the adverse impact of ethnic loyalties elsewhere, long before 1965. Cantor observed that ‘no one can safely disregard the recurrent warfare among working peoples of different national origins, rather than between them and their employers.’ Examples abound – which he then demonstrated from half-a-dozen states from the 1830s to 1870s.83 Holt thought that Slavic and Hungarian immigration into the workforce of the steel mills was ‘profoundly divisive’. There is ‘ample evidence that “Hunkies” and “Polaks” were despised and discriminated against by olderestablished groups and ethno-cultural divisions and tensions were pervasive features of milltown life from the 1890s onwards.’84 Mink was especially emphatic. She pointed to the ‘extraordinary heterogeneity’ of immigration to the United States, which unlike that of other ‘receiver’ societies, included many who were ‘outside the dominant culture’. She had no doubt that ‘immigration created and hardened divisions within the working class, separating settled and organizing workers from an imported proletarian underclass’, and that ‘class solidarities gave way before race and status solidarities’ with profound political consequences. Given ‘the immediacy of the problem’, organized labor ‘came to rely on political resources that already existed: the ruling political parties, rather than trying to devise an alternative’. Immigration therefore ‘made a political laggard of American trade unionism’ and ‘neutralized the politics of class’.85 There is therefore evidence for every view: ethnic differences have increased class solidarity, have undermined it, or had no significant impact. The net effect both of slavery and discrimination, or ethnic pluralism on union or class solidarity is, one is forced to conclude, unknown and immeasurable. But because the impact of one determinant or set of determinants is unknown hardly seems grounds for abandoning the attempt to identify the impact of others. Even those, like Mink who argue that ethnic differences had a decisive impact, do not suggest that they provide a complete explanation of the distinctive features of trade unions or of the working class in the United States. We will therefore not abandon the attempt to discover how both may have been affected by the relationship between the state and civil society, and try to cope with the unknown but always possible impact of racial or ethnic divisions by flagging them, whether or not the researchers on whom we rely have done so.

Surges of working class solidarity A key question about the formation of the working class everywhere, as our accounts of both Russian and French workers have already indicated, is

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when and how skilled workers, whose ‘narrow’, ‘selfish’ and ‘aristocratic’ associations were invariably the pioneers of working class organization, began to co-operate with one another; became less inclined to separate themselves from the mass of ordinary workers; accepted that they had common class interests with them; and committed their own considerable organizational skills and resources to the task of organizing and mobilizing all workers as a class. Three attempts to make this transition, to forge cross-trade alliances and unify the working class, stand out in American labour history, before the transition was finally completed with the formation of the CIO in the 1930s, after which American workers were finally organized as a mass movement, and on industrial rather than trade lines. However, if, we hope to identify and understand the peculiarities of the working class in the United States, we have to recall briefly these earlier efforts of class formation. The first consisted of the formation of the Workingmen’s Parties in the late 1820s and the so-called General Trades’ Unions (GTU) in New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the early 1830s, which sought to mobilize all workingmen ‘against the aristocracies of power, wealth and privilege which had seized power in the republic’.86 We will concentrate on that in New York City which has been described in great and loving detail by Wilentz.87 Although the Workingmen’s Party in the city had enjoyed some electoral success in 1829, it then disintegrated in disarray and recrimination, leaving little permanent mark on New York politics, except a preference within organized labour to support political candidates rather than try to form a party of their own.88 Hence the main agents of class formation in the city were societies of journeymen, who had, like their counterparts in France, started to recognize themselves as members of a distinctive class of wage earners some years before, when the original small-scale craft workshops began to be superseded by larger, specialized, workplaces created by a few of the more entrepreneurial masters who had turned themselves into employers of other members of their own trade.89 Most journeymen thereafter had little prospect of advancing to master, and were destined to remain lifelong wage labourers in workplaces with ‘lines of authority deeply at variance with American egalitarian values’, as well as with the original egalitarian and collegial ideals of the crafts. It was the trades most affected by these changes, the ‘bastardized’ crafts, as Wilentz calls them, which were ‘at the heart of New York’s emerging working class.’ Nine of their unions came together to form the General Trades’ Union (GTU) in 1833, which over the next four years led ‘a series of offensives’ which saw ‘New York wage earners organize over fifty unions and nearly forty strikes’. Most of the new unions were members of the GTU, which ‘helped to co-ordinate strikes of them all.’ Wilentz estimated, that somewhere between 20% and 30% of the white male workforce in the city were

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organized. Most of them were propertyless. They were also ethnically diverse, and their leaders ‘did their utmost to discourage ethnic disputes, especially where new forms of wage labour were most pronounced.’ They had few ties with organized religion – he seems pleased to report – and, included in their ranks some of the most outspoken free thinkers in the city as well as deists and rationalists, anti-sabbatarians and critics of clerical tax exemptions.90 Their internal procedures were, Wilentz noted, scrupulously democratic and egalitarian, ‘more so than middle class reform and political parties’, and they were ‘relatively free of jurisdictional disputes.’91 Their strikes were aimed above all else to regain control of the workshop regime, to halt the subdivision of work, and to prevent exploitation by contracting and sweating, and the ‘unprincipled, uncontrolled competition’ that was overtaking their trades. They were not, however, ‘selfish and money-oriented’ and ‘always looking to preserve their privileges and high wages.’92 They sometimes acted ‘for the sake of their brother workmen’, sought to build ‘a new brotherhood of craft workers’, and ‘proclaimed a unity of all organized journeymen as wage earners regardless of craft.’ They sometimes ‘reached out to semi-skilled workers’ and even ‘for a moment considered allying with common laborers in a general strike.’93 They were seldom violent, preferring ‘dignified opposition’ and ‘manly conduct’. They launched various benevolent projects, such as a newspaper reading-room and library; frequented their own clubs and taverns; and in union celebrations ‘paraded through the city behind their own banners, and singing their own songs.’94 Wilentz intended, he said, ‘to do for American working people and their past something of what Thompson had done for the English.’ Thompson had, he thought, ‘not simply given back to the English working class its dignity and its culture; he had given back its gift of intellection.’95 Like Thompson, he also declined to put himself into a conceptual straitjacket and treat class as if it were a ‘structure’ or ‘an abstract social category or group.’ He therefore did not claim it was ‘a single entity, bound by a unity of sentiment across the shifting barriers of trade, region, race, sex, or ethnicity, autonomous and eternally resentful of all other classes’ Instead, he saw it as ‘a new order of human relationships … defined chiefly … by the subordination of wage labour to capital’, within which ‘several tendencies and outlooks’ co-existed, and ‘various and changing forms’ of class consciousness and labor radicalism ‘emerged and abated, depending on a myriad of circumstances.’96 Like Thompson, he also claimed a certain license to include almost any form of association, collaboration, and any kind of protest, as evidence that workers were thinking and acting in new ‘class ways’, and beginning to form a class.97 He therefore discussed the great variety of political programmes that attracted them, including land and currency reform, and producer co-operatives of various kinds, but was able to feature only one authentic socialist ideologue, Thomas Skidmore, who called

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for ‘a civil revolution’ and the equalization of all property relations. In fact, few workers questioned private property per se, but many did claim that labor was their property, and therefore often accused their entrepreneurial masters of theft. Cumulatively, Wilentz thought, skilled workers in New York City in the 1830s ‘fashioned a new language – and a new consciousness – of social conflict … honed their own critique of capitalist wage labor’ and in his view mounted ‘as profound a critique of early industrial capitalism as any that appeared among the craft workers’ movements of Britain and France in the 1830s’.98 Unlike Thompson, who was able to quote evidence from all over England, Wilentz was unable to show that these workers were part of a national class. His evidence was drawn solely from New York City, and he was somewhat uncertain about how far he might generalize from it. He noted that some New York unions took an active interest in working conditions and strikes throughout the country, that they occasionally offered assistance to strikers in nearby states, and helped to form a National Trades Union in 1834, which was a ‘clearing house for reports’, and ‘added to the national ferment’, so that it was ‘possible to see the New York journeymen …. as part of a larger American working class, restricted neither to New York, nor to the crafts.’99 However, he elsewhere stressed that New York was ‘highly unusual’, cited Whitman’s remark that it was the ‘most radical city’ in America, and in the end regretfully concluded that it is no more than ‘an important part of the historical puzzle’, which might ‘suggest ways in which class formation might be approached in other areas of the country.’100 In 1837, however, the GTU, the organizational core of this class movement, collapsed with the onset of a depression that was to continue for seven years. Some craft societies survived, others later revived, and in the late 1840s began to resume their strikes. In 1850, there occurred what Wilentz called an ‘uprising’ by the ‘propertyless’, a strike of tailors that was ‘the bloodiest and most divisive … in antebellum urban American history’, leaving two tailors killed and dozens wounded.101 Nonetheless, the class unity and solidarity of the early 1830s were never recaptured. Although new co-ordinating bodies emerged, they were quarrelsome, short-lived and ‘only the faintest echo of the GTU’. The strikes were mostly of ‘those trades disrupted by structural change’, while those ‘unaffected remained relatively quiet.’ Diverse groups of ‘subterranean radicals’ kept alive ‘the language of class conflict, and some of ‘the old themes reappeared’, but many workers had been ‘diverted’ into nativist, evangelical, temperance, land reform and mutualist movements which were ‘not consistently focused on class conflict’, indeed a number of them were explicitly against both strikes and socialism. Some of this bewildering ‘mélange’ of new associations were ethnically segregated. The labour movement’s ‘semblance of solidarity had disappeared.’ It was ‘adrift’ and its ‘decay could not be arrested.’ Tammany

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Hall, the headquarters of the Democratic Party in New York, later ‘picked up the labour movement’s shattered remains’.102 The second attempt to form a class-wide labour movement in the United States was launched by six Philadelphia garment cutters in 1869, who, after disbanding their failed local craft union, decided to create a labor organization that would ‘bring together all wage earners in one great brotherhood’ that they called the Knights of Labour.103 Initially, however, they had some hesitation about admitting other trades, and unskilled workers, but soon did so, and allowed their local ‘assemblies’ to be either ‘mixed’, meaning open to any worker, or ‘trade’ meaning confined to workers of a specified trade. The latter could remain affiliated with national craft unions, and therefore hedge their bets on the Knights’ class aspirations. Local assemblies were co-ordinated loosely via elected district assemblies and a national convention or General Assembly, a form of organization that allowed a great deal of local autonomy, as well as plenty of opportunities for labour organizers’ entrepreneurial freelancing and power struggles. By 1879, the Knights had over 9,000 members, and over next few years spread to most major metropolitan areas of US, in some 12,000 assemblies. Aided in particular by their success in organizing a strike against railroad magnate Jay Gould, their membership soared to more than 100,000 in 1885. Engels portrayed the Knights as ‘a heaving, fermenting mass of plastic material….the first national organization created by the American working class as a whole … the raw material out of which the future of the American working class movement, and along with it, the future of American society at large, has to be shaped…’.104 Voss claimed that ‘For the first time in American history, a national labor movement had been built from the bottom up’, and she hailed their leader, Terence V. Powderly, as ‘labor’s first media superstar’.105 In 1884, however, against Powderly’s advice, many assemblies supported the call for a one-day general strike on May 1st 1886 to obtain an eighthour day. As this campaign spread, membership was said to have reached to three-quarters of a million. It was the Knights’ high point. Another strike against Gould in the spring of March 1886 ended in utter defeat. On May 4th, three days after the general strike had passed without incident or effect, during a demonstration in Chicago to support the eight-hour day campaign, a bomb exploded, injuring large numbers, and killing a policeman. The police then opened fire on the demonstrators, killing and wounding an unknown number. Despite the absence of any evidence linking the Knights with the bomb, and Powderly’s condemnation of it, they were, nonetheless, indelibly and fatally associated with it. Their membership dropped sharply. Their leaders began to quarrel amongst themselves, embarked on a number of ill-advised and poorly-organized strikes, and became embroiled in a dispute with the newly-formed national craft union federation, the AFL. By 1893 their membership was less than 83,000, and a few years later

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‘the heaving, fermenting mass of plastic material’ had effectively disappeared, though the Knights did not disband until 1917. The third episode began in 1893 in Montana and Colorado with the organization of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) by the charismatic ‘Big Bill’ Haywood which was initially a member of the AFL even though it was more of an industrial than a craft union. In 1897, however, their contempt for the craft demarcations and the policies of AFL unions prompted their withdrawal, and the WFM then declared its goal of recruiting all labor in the West ‘irrespective of occupation, nationality, creed or color’. In 1905, an open meeting of unionists, radical activists, socialists and anarchists in Chicago, chaired by Haywood, drew up a constitution of ‘One Big Union’, and that would ultimately organize ‘One Big Strike’ which would bring capitalism to an end. It also approved an invitation to labor unions and socialist parties in the U.S. and Europe to help found a revolutionary labor movement on industrial lines, which was to be called the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, of which the WFM was ‘virtually the only part that had any real existence.’106 The IWW became known colloquially as the Wobblies. They appear to have been strongly influenced by Confédération Générale du Travail, and for the same reasons were no less prone than their French model to doctrinal squabbles and schisms. From the very beginning, those who thought they should engage in politics and elections were at odds with those who considered elections a tool of capitalism, and favoured direct action, in the form of strikes, demonstrations and sabotage. They finally agreed to compromise, and do both, while not becoming attached to any one political party. Like the CGT, the Wobblies seemed to have little interest in creating permanent local organizations, so their membership figures are not reliable, and again like the CGT, it attracted far more sympathizers and supporters during strikes than were ever formally enrolled as members. A number of these strikes were successful, most notably one on behalf of Nevada gold miners for an eight-hour day. They achieved fame, or notoriety, by being frequently involved in the courts. In 1907, Haywood was tried, and acquitted, for the murder of the governor of Idaho, and in 1915 Joe Hill, an IWW organizer, was tried, convicted and executed, for murdering a store owner during an armed robbery. In defiance of local ordinances passed by several cities banning their speakers from public meetings, the Wobblies organized a ‘free speech’ campaign, which often led to violent confrontations with employers’ goons, the police and local vigilantes. During one of them, in Everett, Washington, five Wobblies were killed. Their most celebrated strike was that organized in January 1912 in support of the men, women and children who worked in the mills of Lawrence, Mass, who were drawn from no less than 25 immigrant groups. Their pay had been cut after the Massachusetts’ legislature reduced the legal working week to 54 hours. When IWW brought supporters to the

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town from New York and many other cities, violent confrontations followed. After holding out through several wintry weeks, the IWW began to evacuate the children of the strikers out of Lawrence, which provoked further violence, but also press and public outrage against the employers, who then caved in to the strikers’ demands. During World War I the Wobblies opposed both the war and the draft, and found themselves in head-on confrontation with the federal government when they organized strikes in industries contributing to the war effort. President Wilson authorized raids on their offices across the country, which resulted in more than 100 IWW officers being charged with conspiracy to obstruct the war effort. In 1918 a jury found them guilty as charged. Many received heavy prison sentences, though Haywood, free pending an appeal, fled to Soviet Russia where he later died. His flight, the imprisonment of other leaders, the huge fines and legal costs imposed on the union, quarrels among the leaders who remained free, as well as the adverse public image created by the trials, effectively killed off the Wobblies, though they linger on to this day, as their website testifies.107 These three movements, the major episodes in the history of the American working class up to World War I, show that its formation proceeded by sudden, exhilarating surges of union organization, and perhaps also of class consciousness, which rapidly subsided, leaving little permanent organizational or institutional legacy for later generations. After its four years of activism, the GTU had, Wilentz claimed, provided ‘blueprints’ of reform, ‘raised points that would remain important to labor movements over the rest of the century’, and left ‘a legacy of battle, one that honored independence, equality and commonwealth.’ That legacy cannot, however, have been transmitted by the institution on which the inter-generational continuity of crafts has invariably depended, apprenticeship, for even in the mid-1920s, before the GTU was founded, and could contribute to the process of class formation, it had been reduced to ‘a glorified form of juvenile wage labour.’108 ‘Subterranean radicals’, along with a few clubs and taverns, seem to have been the only legatees, though since three-quarters of the workforce from which the GTU was drawn were foreign-born, and no less than 96% of the tailors who were at the centre of ‘the crisis’ of 1850 were immigrants, one must suspect that the legacy that really mattered came from Europe.109 The Knights’ failure seems to have been definitive and terminal. In Voss’ view America ‘has had weak working class institutions and politically conservative unions’ ever since.’110 It marked, she thought, the beginning of American ‘exceptionalism’, that is of weak unions and feeble class solidarity. The Wobblies’ cultural legacy was much the greatest of the three, since they had shown that the unskilled, and apparently unorganizable migratory and illiterate workers, even on the frontier, could be mobilized in strikes, and that unions could be organized on industrial lines. Its public demonstrations

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and sit-down strikes were to be imitated by the CIO in the 1930s. They also showed that labor benefited when public opinion was on its side, as in Lawrence in 1912, and paid dearly when it was not, as during World War I. It also contributed a disproportionate share of martyrs, legends and folk songs to organized labour. In the end, however, it is difficult to see these three movements as cumulative steps which widened and deepened the solidarity of the American working class. None of the historians of these movements, one may first observe, mention racial discrimination, or ethnic rivalries as a reason for their demise. They seem to agree that all three movements were overwhelmed by the strength of the opposition: from employers and the state or both. They seldom mention public opinion. Wilentz decided that the GTU ‘could not sustain itself in face of the intimidating superiority of police and employers and the vicissitudes of the business cycle.’111 Voss argued that the Knights collapsed because ‘American capital countered the labour movement with effective organization of its own’ and that the class struggle waged in the early 1880s had been won by employers before the end of the decade.112 After fully documenting the internal weaknesses and disputes of the Knights, Weir came to a similar conclusion. The KOL ‘was done in by opposition, not primarily by structural and ideological ineptitude. Even had it been a flawless organization, filled with competent and altruistic leaders, it would have struggled to overcome the fury of capital’s counterassault, the blows delivered by its myriad enemies (including those within labor’s own ranks), and from the hostility of the state, courts and the press.113 The Wobblies similarly faced strong employer opposition, though its own decision to engage in a direct confrontation, during a war, with the US government is usually considered the fatal blow.114 As in any contest, however, the opposition that was too strong is not easy to distinguish from the loser that was too weak. The collapse of all three might equally well be attributed to their failure to engender the kind of enduring and instinctive solidarity that came naturally to the one form of organization that they all sought to transcend, or even destroy, the craft union. Some of the in-built advantages of craft unions were mentioned when discussing French unions and the one is only reminded of them when considering the American. They were seldom riven by internal disputes. They occasionally squabbled with one another, but had no reason to compete for members, and were able to reconstruct themselves after the worst setbacks. Hence despite all the adverse factors that ended these surges of working class consciousness, they continued to grow. In 1881, they had come together to form the American Federation of Labor, which had been put on a permanent footing in 1886. They had watched the rise of the Knights, with some apprehension, and their decline with relief. They had survived the abuse and the organizing raids on their members by the Wobblies, and by 1920 had recruited 18.7% of the labour force, a figure

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which suggests that some of them at least had been recruiting unskilled workers alongside their skilled members.115 Many of them were, however, still elitist and exclusive, and still attached to their jurisdictions, and were indifferent to the vast and still-growing unskilled labour forces of the new mass-production industries: steel, automobiles and others. They had not, in other words, escaped the elite enclave in which all labour movements begin, and had not shown much inclination to organize American workers as a whole, as a class.

Climax and decline We have already observed how Russian skilled workers escaped from their enclave, partly by the ferment of World War I, and more permanently by Bolshevik force, though then only to a form of state captivity. French workers escaped with some state aid in the form of the bourses du travail, but more importantly of their own volition under the inspiration of revolutionary ideals, and confirmed their resolve to abandon trade form of organization at Amiens in 1906. State intervention also played a critical role in the escape of American workers, which is something of a surprise, given that we began this investigation of American classes by observing that the federal government was reluctant to legislate in a manner that enabled any section of the community to form a class. Organized labour is, however, something of an exception, albeit only a temporary one. The decisive measure of state support was the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, sponsored by two Republicans, Senator George Norris of Nebraska and Representative Fiorello H. LaGuardia of New York, carried with overwhelming Congressional support, and signed by a Republican president, Herbert Hoover, in 1932. There were modest, but consistent, precedents for this legislation. Federal government measures sympathetic to organized labour had started with the Lloyd-LaFolette Act in 1912, which had made it easier for post office employees to organize. It was followed by the Clayton Act of 1914 which had exempted labor unions from the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act, by the creation of the War Labor Board in 1917 which enforced prounion measures on all those doing business with the federal government, (and seems to have been largely responsible for the increase of union membership from 9.4% of the labour force in 1910 to 18.7% in 1920), and by the Railway Labor Act of 1926 which mandated collective bargaining on railroads. These measures owed something to the lobbying efforts of the AFL, and might be said to confirm that its bi-partisan political strategy paid dividends for organized labour. However, the more important factor was the steady shift in public opinion, as well as academic and even business opinion, helped on by the World War and the Great Depression. Before the Norris-LaGuardia Act, employers had, in practice, two methods of resisting the unwelcome advances of organized labour: physical force or

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injunctions. Injunctions were restraining orders which halted unions’ organizing, picketing or strike activities, pending a full trial of the issues, and were enforced by the courts, the police, and if need be, the army. However, since the enthusiasm of the moment is difficult to rekindle, they usually brought union organizing efforts to a close. In the 1920s some 921 injunctions were issued during labour disputes – far more than in previous decades – leading union supporters to refer them derisively as ‘government by injunction’.116 Norris-LaGuardia was vitally important to unions because it prohibited their use in labour disputes, both in state and federal courts. It is therefore sometimes known as ‘the Anti Injunction Act’. It also gave unions immunity from suits for damages; outlawed ‘yellow dog contracts’, meaning those in which a worker agreed not to join a union as a condition of employment; and confirmed employees’ freedom to form labour unions without employer interference. Norris-LaGuardia is sometimes seen merely as a preliminary to the strong statement of employees’ right to bargain collectively through their own freely chosen representatives in section 7a of the National Recovery Act in the following year, and more decidedly to the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 which required employers to bargain in good faith, set up an enforcement agency to see that they did so, and to oversee union representation elections. The National Recovery Act, however, was declared unconstitutional in 1935, and the ‘Magna Carta of Labor’, as the Wagner Act is sometimes called, proved, as we shall see, to be double-edged. NorrisLaGuardia might well, therefore, be seen as the high point of state support for union organization. In 1992, Geoghegan, a lifelong labour lawyer, went so far as to say that ‘Norris-LaGuardia … created American labor….After the Norris-LaGuardia law, there was no law at all. No injunctions. No U.S. Army to enforce the injunctions. Nothing. It was a total vacuum. It was in this total vacuum that the Big Bang occurred’, meaning the explosion of union membership.117 The eight unions that led these organizing drives in mass production industries formed a Committee for Industrial Organization within the AFL but five of them declined to accept that the AFL as a whole should determine how the new recruits should be affiliated to its member unions, and then broke away to establish a new labour federation, the Congress of Industrial Organization.118 In quick succession, they organized new industrial unions, the Rubber Workers in 1934, the Autoworkers in 1936, the Communication Workers in 1939, and the Steelworkers in 1942. Still more support from the state came during World War II, when government contractors were obliged to accept union organization of their labour forces. The rate of unionization therefore increased rapidly, and reached a peak in 1954, when just over 35% of the non-agricultural labour force was organized.119 In 1955, the AFL and CIO buried past animosities and merged. Finally, therefore, after three failed attempts, organized labour had broken out of its craft enclave, created a united national organization

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which counted for something in the nation’s industrial and political life, could generally rely on the support a national political party, the Democrats, and therefore might reasonably be said to have transformed itself into a class movement. Freeman provided a vivid account of the high water mark of this movement, and of American working class consciousness in New York City in the years immediately following World War II. He showed how the city then ‘crackled with the political energy of a mobilized working class’, and how organized labour ‘solidly established its presence’, and was accepted as ‘a leading institutional force’ by the city’s political leaders.120 Unionorganized political rallies filled Madison Square Garden. There were frequent organized parades, left-wing papers, clubs of all kinds, schools, resorts and summer camps, a multitude of tenant and neighbourhood associations, and of fraternal and ethnic societies. Organized labour had persuaded the City government to adopt ‘social democrat policies’ of various kinds, such as rent controls, public housing, tuition-free colleges, free municipal hospitals, public arts and recreation facilities, so that the public welfare provisions in the city had ‘more in common with post-war European norms than with the rest of the United States.’121 Throughout these post-war years, organized labour remained ‘an unrivalled force for progressive change’, for although unions sometimes engaged ‘in discriminatory practices that … fragmented the working class and bred ethnic, racial and gender resentment’, on most occasions ‘class transcended ethnic, racial and religious loyalties.’ In 1945, the city had pioneered civil-rights legislation prohibiting discrimination by race, creed, colour, or national origins.122 In his account of the emergence of the working class in the city more than 100 years before, Wilentz had doubts about how typical or representative it might be. Freeman had none. He referred to its ‘foreignness’, and described it as ‘in the United States but not of it’, less Protestant than elsewhere, with fewer home owners, and a much higher proportion of small businesses than cities of comparable size. It was ‘a non-Fordist city in the age of Ford’, as he put it. It was also ‘more of a union town than any other’, and its unions were, ‘more AFL than CIO’, meaning they were still organized by trade, though these were often locals of industrial unions, creating a ‘hybrid craft-industrial structure.’123 Considerable ‘residential bunching by occupation … deepened solidarities and contributed to class consciousness and the strength of the labour movement’ which was frequently demonstrated by strikes, during which other New Yorkers generally respected their picket lines.124 It was also, of course, still a city of immigrants and their children. In 1950, first and second generation white immigrants were a majority of the city’s inhabitants, which tends to confirm the suspicion prompted by Wilentz’s account of the city in the 1830s, that its exceptional class consciousness was continuously replenished from Europe.125

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Freeman went on to show how New York’s ‘exceptionalism’ came to an end over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Starting with a fiscal crisis in 1975, which threatened the City with imminent bankruptcy, welfare and social democratic programs of all kinds were drastically cut, and unions and other New Yorkers alike were obliged to accept ‘that the market would better serve the public than the government.’126 Labor unions were forced to accept redundancies, and make concessions in pay and conditions, to call off strikes, though ironically as their power receded, their own massive pension funds became the financial mainstay of the city when Wall St declined to invest in the city’s bonds.127 More or less simultaneously, the ethnic composition of the city also began to change. ‘The post-1965 wave’ of immigrants were, as we noted earlier, more interested in ethnic politics and devoted more of their energies to cross-class ethnic associations, which undermined labor unity, and ‘overweighed working class identification.’128 New York also began to look more like other cities, as national retail and fast food chains advanced into it, and New Yorkers ‘of varied economic backgrounds became more likely to shop in the same stores, buy the same things, and eat in the same restaurants.’129 At the end of it all, the working class ‘no longer formed the heart of the city’. In spite of ‘the continued presence of a huge working population and a still powerful labor movement – the notion of a working class had virtually disappeared from public discourse, popular culture, and the mental maps New Yorkers had of the city.’ In part, this may have been because ‘the white light of new money, radiating from Wall Street, made other economic groupings look pale, difficult to discern’, but it was also because ‘for decades there had been a national predilection to spurn the language of class’, a predilection shared by the AFL-CIO.130 At some distance, New York City, was only following national trends.131 For labor unions, these had been almost unrelentingly downhill ever since the mid-1950s. By 2004 union membership had fallen to 12.2% of the labour force, and only two pockets of higher unionization survived: in the public sector where 36.4% were unionized, and in transportation and utilities with 24.9%. Even the construction industry, once famed for its strong unions, had become largely non-union with a mere 14.7%.132 Comparison with Canada and other industrial societies suggests that this decline had little or nothing to do with structural changes in the American economy.133 There were three more probable causes: first, the kind of union, and unionism that had developed in the United States as a result of the Wagner Act and subsequent amendments to it; second, the steady evaporation of electoral and public support for labor unions; and third, the continuous expansion of the alternative to the collective betterment promised by labour unions to which we have already referred – provided by schools and colleges. Each deserves a brief comment, since the fate of unions is the best guide we have to the fate of the American working class.

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The Wagner Act in 1935, the supposed ‘Magna Carta’ of organized labour, which its supporters had hoped would provide permanent legal protection both for organizing unions and for collective bargaining created a legal framework for regulating labour relations. It therefore brought to an end the brief period of extra-legal freedom, comparable to that long enjoyed by British trade unions, that had been provided by the Norris-LaGuardia Act three years before, and, by contrast with it, imposed legal requirements while providing legal protection. In so doing, it shifted the task of recruiting members from the shopfloor, from picket lines, sit-down strikes and mass meetings, to the hearing rooms of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), to elections organized by the NLRB, and required the intermediation of lawyers.134 The NLRB soon decided that it would give no preference to the one proven foundation of worker solidarity, their craft or skill, that it would not allow craft secessions from recognized bargaining units, and that the ‘wishes of employees cannot be determinative’ of its bargaining unit decisions.135 American workers were thereby denied the right of deciding the basis on which they would organize and negotiate, a curious, and seldom noticed, limitation of the rights of American employees, which smacks more of Soviet trade unions than of western democracies. French and English employees were never restrained in this manner.136 Moreover, after the end of the World War II, the Federal government did not remain consistently supportive of organized labour, nor did the rest of American civil society. The Wagner Act was amended by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and then by the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1953, in ways which made it far easier for employers to delay, divert, and defeat union organizing campaigns which, with the help of their lawyers, they quickly learned how to do. Gross thought that the political composition of the NLRB made a difference, and that, despite Taft-Hartley, Democratic appointees sought to live up to Wagner’s original hope of promoting industrial democracy via collective bargaining, while Republican appointees used Taft-Hartley to protect the rights of individual employees to refrain from collective bargaining, and thereby helped employers undermine Wagner’s original intent.137It may be that there was a difference of this kind, though since two Democratic presidents, Carter and Clinton, did not lead to any significant halt in the decline of union membership, one cannot help but think that the die was cast once the determination of the bargaining unit was determined by quasi-legal procedures before the NLRB, and especially after it decided to define bargaining units by criteria it deemed appropriate rather than by the wishes of workers themselves. This enabled employers to bring their superior legal firepower, as well their specialist union-busters, to help defeat organizing drives. Their impact is difficult to measure, and we will only observe that the steady decline in union membership dates from the mid-1950s i.e. not long after the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947, and that

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lawyers and consultants employed to resist unions prospered mightily, presumably because they had proved to be effective.138 The second reason for unions’ decline was the loss of electoral support and public sympathy.139 This can be attributed first of all to the fact that the new industrial unions no longer had defined jurisdictions as craft unions had within the AFL, and therefore competed vigorously with each other, sometimes violently, but no less keenly in the elections organized by the NLRB. Apart from dissipating much of their energies, this inter-union competition for the dues of potential members was not always an edifying sight. Another reason why public support declined was that the democratic institutions of the craft unions of the AFL were not feasible within CIO unions trying to organize the diverse labour forces of entire industries.140 Industrial unions required business-like administrations, and soon came to resemble the business organizations that they opposed, with career officials and lawyers barely distinguishable from those on the other side of the table. Most union leaders didn’t look as if they had toiled and suffered alongside their members for very long. One later leader, César Chávez, founder of the United Farm Workers had, and as a result earned a great deal of public sympathy. But he was a deviant. Deprived of the constant accountability of craft unions, the new industrial unions were also prone to corruption, both from employers, and from specialists in another kind of protection, the mafia. In sum, labor unions were bitterly at odds with each other, showed little respect for the democratic norms of the larger society, and were prone to violence, racketeering and corruption. They could hardly, therefore, retain the sympathy of the general public, or of politicians. Nor could they present themselves, or be taken seriously, as the collective conscience of the American working class. In 1995 Gross noted the ‘extraordinary reversal of public perception’ so that labor unions, ‘seen by many as liberating forces of social and economic justice in the 1930s, have come to be commonly regarded as instruments of oppression and exploitation.’141 He thought the televised hearings of the Senate ‘Labor Rackets Committee’ in 1957 were a watershed in this respect, and that ‘unions have never shaken free of the images created in the McClellan committee hearings.’142 Lipset and Schneider analysed a variety of opinion poll data through 1966 to 1981, and showed that, though they ‘have the largest mass membership of any organization’ in the United States, and though there was ‘widespread support for the principle of unions’, labor unions were found to be ‘the least trusted major institution in American life’, and that their leadership was ‘widely believed be exceptionally corrupt and unethical.’143 The final blow to union and class solidarity came from the rapid expansion of higher education, to which we have often had reason to refer. During the war the Federal Government had given strong support to the unions, but when it came to an end, it gave a tremendous boost to its rival

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in the form of the GI Bill, which guaranteed financial support for any veteran who wanted to go to college. College enrolments thereafter increased, as remorselessly it seemed as union enrolments declined. In 1990, the proportion of American schoolchildren going on to some form of higher education passed 50%, and ‘going to college’ came to be seen as the essential first step for everyone who hoped to make something of their life.144 In fieldwork in the summer of 1970, Ruttenberg found some union members and officers in the Baltimore area who were less than fully committed to it. While supporting free education for all, including college, his union informants ‘felt no obligation to provide college education for their own children’, prompting Ruttenberg to think college education was still ‘a middle class or upper-class value’.145 They must have been an exception. Not long afterwards, Rainwater found that working class people ‘feel pressured by the rest of society, which continually emphasizes the value, the desirability, the moral superiority of college education….Until now they have regarded college as for the mobile young man’, but they were ‘no longer surprised that many people from their group attend college.’146 This pressure from ‘the rest of society’ has evidently been stronger than the pressure unions have applied to persuade workers to come together to improve their lot collectively. While college has become a near-universal aspiration which defines mainstream American society, the values of the labour movement have become strangely at odds with it. After more than three decades as a labour lawyer, Geoghegan looked back and asked himself why he had committed his life to the labor cause. He recollected that when he was a student in the 1960s, organized labour had, even then, ‘the appeal of stepping into some black hole in American culture, with all the American values except one: individualism.’ Thirty years later he reflected, ‘here, in this black hole, paunchy, middle aged men, slugging down cans of beer, come to hold hands, touch each other, and sing “Solidarity Forever.” O.K., that hardly ever happens, but most people in this business, somewhere, at some point, see it once, and it is the damnedest, un-American thing you will ever see. Two or three days later, you will not even believe you saw it. I had to see it twice before I could believe I saw it once…. Solidarity….The very idea of it is gone, blanked out from the disconnected halves of our labor union brains….It is the love, the only love left in this country that dare not speak its name.’ Organized labour, he went on, ‘thinks of itself, consciously, as American as apple pie. But it is not. Go to any union hall, any union rally, and listen to the speeches. It took me years to hear it, but there is a silence, a deafening Niagara-type silence, on the subject of individualism. No one is against it, but it never comes up. Is that America? To me, it is like Spain.’147 The three earlier episodes in the formation of the American working class left the impression that class solidarity and consciousness were intermittent and ephemeral, moods rather than a mindset. The final climactic episode

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following the formation of the CIO during which unions finally organized a large proportion of workers, and its later merger with the AFL, does not erase this impression. The surge of working class consciousness and solidarity that accompanied it was longer, and more national, and suggested that class might become a permanent reference point in the lives of American workers, and in the American polity and society more generally. After just two decades, however, the organized core of the working class began to crumble, and class solidarity receded yet again and all but disappeared, even in New York City.

Searching for class distinctions in everyday life Unions may be the best indication of working class solidarity, but it is possible, I suppose, that as they waxed and waned class entered the normal routines of everyday life of American workers, unionized or not. Anthropologists and sociologists who have lived in ordinary, small-sized communities, and observed and recorded their social life enable us to test this idea. There are many such studies, but two are especially revealing, because they were both conducted during the decades of mass union organization, that is to say precisely when one might have expected commitment to their class to have been strongest, and also because they both have been subject to follow-up studies some decades later, which therefore provide some check on the observations and predictions of the original researchers. The first, that of the Lynds, is perhaps the most celebrated. They studied ‘Middletown’ (Muncie, Indiana) on two occasions, first in 1924 when it had some 36,000 inhabitants, again in 1935–36 when the population had grown to some 50,000. We will concentrate on their second study, which the Lynds began with high hopes that they would witness the formation of a working class. At one point they observed that ‘the more active role of the Federal government since 1933, coupled with the fact that some resulting legislation has been of benefit to workers, has introduced a potential line of division in outlook’, which they thought might become significant in the future. They went on to observe that Middletown’s ‘business class feels bitterly that the Federal government is … playing against us’, and they detected ‘the first faint awareness’ amongst some of Middletown’s workers that government ‘instead of being simply a miscellaneous ally of everybody in general, may actually be able to do things for “us”, even if need be against “them.”’ As their studies proceeded, however, the Lynds were to be disappointed, observing at one point that ‘… the sprawled inertness of Middletown working class opinion – as over against the more vocal and coherent opinion of the business class – may conceivably take shape slowly in a self-conscious sharpening of class lines. But neither class morale, sources of information, nor personal leadership for such a development is apparent at present among Middletown’s working class.’148

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When they directly posed questions about class, and sought to discover whether Middletowners themselves thought that the distance between business people and workers had widened, they found that business people ‘seemed uneasy in the face of such a question, and one got the distinct impression that they do not like to think of “classes” and feel happier ignoring the possibility of their existence.’ Middletown’s working class, likewise, ‘does not, for the most part, spend its time thinking of itself as different from people on the North Side’ – the better part of town. ‘In the main, it has followed the same symbols, trying intermittently, as work allows, to affirm them as loudly as does the business class, and to narrow the gap between symbol and reality. Hence, a large degree of unconsciousness as to class … was … a marked characteristic of Middletown’s working class even in the sixth year of a great depression. To most of its people, therefore, “class differences” and “class consciousness” are vague, unfamiliar and, if recognized, unpleasant and sinister terms.’149 The evidence they presented on the unionization of Middletown’s labour force was consistent with this conclusion. The rate appears to have fallen over the first decades of the century, and by 1929 only about 900 of the 13,000 manual labour force were members of 16 locally-chartered unions, most of them skilled workers in the building, metal-working and printing trades, but these were ‘mainly negligible minority groups in the industrial life of the city.’ Most workers in its large automobile and glass-making plants were unorganized, save for a few skilled moulders and patternmakers. Businessmen were pleased to describe Middletown as ‘open-shop’. As a result of unemployment, the number declined still further in 1933, though a number of organizing drives – benefiting from Norris LaGuardia – suddenly more than tripled the number to 2,800 in 1934, and for a few months a labor newspaper was published. By 1935, however, it had fallen back again to about 1,000, notwithstanding the Wagner Act. While the business class, and one of the local newspapers, were overjoyed by the unions’ failure to hold on to their initial gains, neither the union organizers themselves, nor the Lynds, attributed it primarily to the efforts of the business class. They blamed instead the intense competition between the AFL and CIO unions, and the unscrupulous behaviour of some organizers, which meant that unions were soon being described by workers as ‘rackets’.150 They referred to the botched and clumsy efforts of the craftsmen who dominated the Central Labor Union, the co-ordinating body of unions in the town, to take advantage of the National Recovery Act and ‘build – against the traditions of the local culture and the will of the business class – control mechanisms’ and ‘a large and powerful labor organization’, which is to say, a unified class organization. The Lynds thought their efforts created only ill-will amongst new and potential members.151 The fear and insecurity of many workers therefore remained ‘largely an individual experience for each worker, and not a thing generalized by him

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into a “class” experience.’ Neither union organizers nor the Lynds suggested, by the way, that discrimination against Afro-Americans, of which they found a good number of cases, or of ethnic tensions, of which they found far fewer, were in any way responsible for this state of affairs. Union activity does not appear to have had the least effect on voting behaviour. In the election of 1936 there were no sharp cleavages along class lines. Some 47% of the votes in the precincts the Lynds defined as those of ‘the business class’ went for Roosevelt. Workers in the town showed no inclination to form a Labor Party. A motion to that effect was voted down at an AFL meeting by 20 to 1, and other radical parties appealing specifically to workers were widely disliked.152 When the Lynds tried to describe the class structure of Middletown as a whole, they faced considerable difficulties, and their picture of it is neither clear nor unambiguous. What emerges is a rather unstable, differentiated hierarchy of ‘groups’ rather than of classes, and there is no trace of class conflict. They portrayed one family in the town as ‘a reigning royal family’ and placed it at the centre of an ‘inner business control group’, though another scarcely less wealthy family had opted out of civic affairs. At one point, they noticed ‘an old middle class of wealthy local manufacturers, bankers and the local head managers of one or two of the national corporations … and one or two outstanding lawyers’, which was, they thought, ‘becoming an upper class’, and separating from the larger group ‘of smaller manufacturers, merchants and professional folk, and the salaried dependants of the city’s big-business interests’, and from the minor employed professionals, very small retailers, entrepreneurs, clerks, small salesmen and civil servants. At other times, however, they identified ‘all business and professional people as a single middle class group’, and recorded ‘the impression … based upon frankly tenuous data and brief observation of the crystallizing of a “middle class”.’153 Under the business class, upper class and differentiated middle class, they identified an upper group of the working class, ‘an aristocracy of labour, foremen, building trades craftsmen and highly skilled machinists’, and below them the semi and unskilled workers, machine operatives, truckmen, labours and the mass of wage earners. Finally, they put a ‘ragged bottom margin’, comprising some ‘poor whites’ from Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginian mountains, … the type of white worker who lives in the ramshackle, unpainted cottages on the outlying unpaved streets, and is without regular employment.’154 One cannot quarrel with their categorization, or with the names they chose to apply to them. Sociologists, after all, are free to categorize populations as they wish, but it is clear that their terms were not utilized or preferred by Middletowners themselves. And though the Lynds thought ‘the scene had been set for the emergence of class consciousness and possibly eventual conflict’, even for ‘class explosions’ in the future, since ‘militant working class organization’, was ‘so basically foreign to the present

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population of Middletown’ they thought it would more probably be ‘diffused from larger industrial centers.’155 They were to be disappointed, for a follow-up study of the town by Caplow and Chadwick some 40 years later in 1976, found that classes had neither emerged spontaneously nor been diffused from elsewhere. Most of the very few attitudinal and the behavioural differences that the Lynds could mention to support a basic two-class division between business and working class had disappeared. ‘There has’, Caplow and Chadwick concluded, ‘been a real convergence of life-styles, and if the watershed between the two major classes in Middletown still exists, it is so eroded by now that its eventual disappearance does not seem unlikely.’156 In 1939, four years after the Lynds’ investigations in Middletown came to an end, another participant observer, James West, commenced a two-year investigation of a much smaller Midwest town to the south of Middletown, which he called Plainville. It had a population of only 275, but it is important in the present context because West thought he had found what had eluded the Lynds, namely a fully-formed ‘class system’, even though initially he had deliberately chosen a town that was ‘as “level” as possible socially and economically’, and which at first sight had ‘no recognized “aristocracy” or other well-defined social “classes,” a community where people were all living as nearly as possible on the same social and financial plane.’157 In short, he claimed he had found classes in a town that was, at first sight, classless. His findings therefore appeared all the stronger, and all the more startling, which is presumably what he hoped. Everything hinges, of course, on what he took to be a class. West claimed that the ‘class system’ of Plainville, ‘might well be called a “super-organization” because it provides for every person living there a master pattern for arranging their lives, according to relative rank every other individual, and every family clique, lodge, club, church, and other organization or association in Plainville society.’158 Somewhat disappointingly, if one is hoping to draw national implications, the ‘only exceptions are the Republican and Democratic parties.’ However, he felt able to add that ‘important social discriminations are involved’ in party affiliation.159 He then distinguished an upper class, which ‘includes about half the people in the community’, and ‘the other half belong to the lower class’ and claimed that all social groups could be placed in this 50–50 ‘class system’.160 He meant, of course, that they could by placed by him in this ‘class system’. Plainvillers themselves, however, clearly did not accept this twoclass system as a point of reference in their lives. On the contrary, as West admitted, they denied the existence of class altogether. The ‘upper class prides itself on being average, and no member would admit to upper crust classification for himself or for his family’, and the lower class was no more anxious to recognize itself as a class. Hence, although Plainvillers invidiously distinguished and ranked one another, they did not do so

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according to the ‘master pattern’ that was so clear in West’s mind. Relative rank remained relative rank. They had many different views about what West, but not Plainvillers, called ‘the class system’, and West provided diagrams of four of their main ones, which varied according to the religious affiliation of the respondents, though as he admitted, to ‘tell how “everybody sees the classes” would of course require many diagrams, because the tradition of denying class enables individuals to attach more weight to one criterion than to another.’161 Another anthropologist, Gallaher, returned to study Plainville 15 years later, and found it impossible to find West’s two classes. Plainvillers, as he put it, ‘do not use labels with sufficient consistency, applied to a specific group of people, to warrant their use for classificatory purposes.’ He found that most of them agreed ‘on what constitutes a desirable style of life’, and of course, that they differed in their access to it. Gallaher also found that West’s conclusion that ‘every friendship clique, lodge, club, church and other organization could be ranked according to its position within the social stratification system’ was still ‘partly true’, but he preferred to describe this as ranking ‘along a continuum of imperceptible gradation between two extremes. While these extremes are identifiable, he decided ‘the bulk of Plainville’s families’ lie in between.’162 Gallaher then proceeded to identify the criteria by which individuals are assigned to different status ranks, continuously emphasizing that these are ‘not two rigidly or clearly distinguished lifestyles’, and do not provide a basis for any collective consciousness, loyalty or recognition as a class. While not wishing to contradict West directly, whose work had in the interim become a minor classic, he observed, that ‘possibly there was a system of dual social classes in 1939, and that these ‘may have split unevenly along the hill-prairie residence dichotomy’ which West had emphasized. But he could not ‘definitely conclude that there were classes’ of the kind West described, ‘as clearly crystallized and tightly structured, with boundaries almost caste-like’, because he ‘found the hill-prairie residence criterion (was) no longer a basis of prestige, and the value differences formerly attached to these two ways of life largely levelled into a common system.’163 In the end, he wondered whether West had actually observed ‘an incipient class structure which, because of the many changes he has described never fully crystallized.’ His conciliatory conclusion was that West’s ‘analysis of Plainville social stratification … might have been more meaningful if viewed in a status rank conceptual framework rather than that of social class…. Certainly, I found no clearly established system of classes.’164 Thus these studies of two Midwestern communities do not provide much support for the idea that Americans saw themselves as living in classdivided communities, or that class provided a clear reference point in their lives, even though they were conducted during a surge of union organization, and even though their authors anticipated and hoped they would.

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The follow-up studies provided even less. Hence if we still hope to identify national classes and class cleavages, we have one more option, national survey data, which is not only more recent, but also more certainly representative of the entire United States. Kingston reviewed a vast amount of data of this kind, and failed to find any classes, other that is, than those defined by researchers. Classes, he observed, are not demographically well-defined or readily distinguished groups, since ‘individuals do not usually, much less routinely, inherit their class positions, and very often, they belong to different classes over their working lives.’165 He gave considerable attention to Davis’s research which showed that members of conventionally-defined classes, net of education, do not have distinctive beliefs, customs, values and morals, and therefore reasonably concluded that class cultures did not exist.166 This is not to suggest that the beliefs, customs, values of Americans are randomly distributed, or that their life styles are indistinguishable from one another, or that, for example, audiences of the Lincoln Center or visitors to the Guggenheim are a representative cross-section of the population of New York City. Members of the higher managerial class are, Kingston pointed out, more likely to prefer classical music, and blue collar and routine white collar workers are more likely to prefer country and western. But how illuminating is it, he asked, to say there is a class difference between them in this respect, when classical music is preferred by only a tiny minority of the higher managerial class, and the majority, by a margin of two to one, prefer country and western? By every other criterion by which we might reasonably hope or wish to distinguish classes nationally, Kingston showed the evidence does not permit us to do so. Classes do not, for instance, have distinctive patterns of social association. They do not have distinctive family structures, or behave in distinctive ways within the family, or have distinctive patterns of religious belief or observance, and class counts for little as predictor of political orientation, and in many respects ‘borders on the irrelevant.’167 He does not, for a moment, wish to deny that there are many differences and inequalities among Americans, but only to say that these are finely differentiated by social status rather than segmented by class, and that they are better explained by education than by class membership. The only traces of class formation that Kingston detected were among the contemporary survivors of the two groups that we noted earlier had been deprived of their classforming potential by political action: professionals and skilled workers. These two groups, above all others, were likely to remain in the same occupation all their lives, and therefore to remain members of the same class, whatever it may be called.168 Everyone else was more likely to be upwardly or downwardly mobile, and therefore ‘very often “belong” to different classes over the course of their lives’. Contemporary survey research on behaviour therefore points in the same direction as the field research of

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communities. Classes may be defined by researchers however they wish, but Americans themselves seem ill-inclined to recognize or live by them. A minority of attitude surveys seem to contradict this conclusion, since they have found that substantial proportions of the American population were at least willing to identify themselves as working class. In 1947, for example, Centers found that about half of his representative sample did so. He went on to claim that Americans ‘had become class conscious, and a part of them, calling themselves the working class, have begun to have attitudes and beliefs at variance with traditional acceptances and practices.’169 He had, however, no longitudinal evidence to support the tenses used in this remark, or his implicit promise of things to come. In 1983, Jackman and Jackman also found that over a third of their national sample described themselves as working class.170 However, at the very beginning of this investigation, we found reason to wonder what behavioural conclusions might be drawn from attitude surveys of this kind, and the doubts persist. Everything seems to hinge on the format of the questions asked. In 1979, Scholzman and Verba confirmed these doubts by comparing open-ended and fixed-choice questionnaires. They found that, while only 8% of blue collar workers spontaneously identified themselves as working class in an open-ended questionnaire, when they forced their respondents to choose, they could make 23% of them do so.171 When presented with an open choice, 62% of blue collar workers in their sample identified themselves as middle class. Such ‘incorrect’ self-identification is commonplace in questionnaires in the United States, as we have seen.172 Most open-choice attitude surveys suggest that most Americans are reluctant to distinguish either a working class or an upper class from a vast, amorphous vaguely-defined middle class to which they think they themselves belong.173 Like most of Rainwater and Coleman’s respondents, they tend to see class as ‘an almost infinitely graded hierarchy – a continuum as it were – rather than a series of discrete groups’, and they distinguish positions along this continuum by income level and lifestyle.174 After reviewing these and many other studies, Kingston concluded. ‘Very few Americans spontaneously claim to be working class. That term doesn’t readily cross Americans’ lips.’175 There is, however, a near-equivalent word that does more often pass their lips, or so Halle concluded after seven years participant observation at an oil refinery in New Jersey over the years 1974–1981. He had observed that while blue collar workers at the refinery ‘rarely’ referred to themselves as ‘working class’, many of them frequently used the term ‘working man’.176 None of them ‘ever disputed the appropriateness of the term, and almost everyone at some point used the term … most men do so regularly, though sometimes they talk about “working guy”, occasionally “working slob”, or working stiff”. Since he could cite no less than eight earlier field studies that also mentioned the use of this term, there is some justice in his generalization that ‘in America workers commonly refer to themselves as “working men.”’177

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His careful analysis of the connotations attached to the term by his coworkers, indicated that they thought that ‘working men’ were those whose jobs involved physical, dangerous or dirty routine work, whom they distinguished from those in white collar and professional occupations, especially those they thought did no productive work, and were overpaid, in particular lawyers. They also distinguished working men from the unemployed, from the poor, and from those who do not want to work, all of whom they commonly saw as synonymous, and towards whom most of them were equally hostile. Moreover, ‘working man’ was, Halle insisted, a job specific term, and did not allow one to predict common interests, concerns and ways of life beyond the workplace. This rather disqualifies his co-worker subjects as members of a working class, since it was precisely a wider sense of common interests and lifestyle that we originally suggested defined classes, so that their members are, as we put it, more likely ‘to interact more readily with one another than with other members of their society, to respond to political, economic and social changes in a similar manner, to find similar ideals and ideologies appealing, and over time, to form distinctive sub-cultures and communities.’ The distinction drawn between ‘workingmen’ and others by refinery workers in New Jersey in 1977 did not differ greatly from that used by the original workingmen’s movement in the 1820s and 1830s, as Halle himself noted. The secretary of the General Trades’ Union which had co-ordinated the emergence of the working class in New York in 1830s as described above, had declared that ‘true unions should embrace every citizen whose daily exertions, from the highest Artist to the lowest Labourer, are his means of subsistence’. The secretary of the Boston Trades’ Union formed in the following year, argued that ‘there are but two parties in our country … all who labor whether as boss or journeyman, and the rich men, the professional men and all who now live, or who intend hereafter to live, without useful labor, depending on the sweat of their neighbour’s brow for support.’178 The Working Men’s Parties excluded only ‘lawyers, gamblers, bankers and liquor dealers’.179 The Knights were similarly ‘open to all working people except for bankers, lawyers, stockbrokers, doctors and liquor manufacturers’.180 Over very long periods of time, therefore, working men’s perceptions of their class appear to have remained blurred and imprecise. Any account of America’s classes would, it seems, have to place, alongside an ill-defined, unorganized middle class, an occasional or episodic working class, that failed either to create enduring, national institutions or to distinguish itself very clearly from the sprawling middle class. In all probability, many of those, like Centers, who have insisted on the basis of opinion surveys that American workers have a considerable degree of class consciousness would not disagree with this conclusion, since they did not deny that there has been little overt expression of working class solidarity, or that social conflicts have seldom been conducted in class

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terms. Centers himself admitted that working class consciousness in 1947 was restricted to ‘a narrow political-economic compass’, which he attributed to weak unions and the absence of a political party ready to mobilize the working class. Jackman and Jackman also noted the failure of the ‘party system … to provide a clear electoral outlet for distinctive class views’. Wright similarly acknowledged the lack of any overt and organized class consciousness, which he attributed to weak unionism and the moderation of the Democratic Party.181 These observers have, what we might call, a sleeping princess view of the American working class. While their surveys demonstrate, to their satisfaction at least, that a working class exists, it has never received the kiss of life from political parties, pressure groups or unions. The conclusion of the present argument is that while inequalities and injustices that are the raw materials of class formation are always available in the United States as everywhere else, political action is not merely the kiss that finally brings a class to life, but rather the starting point of class formation. Without it, there is no princess.

Civic upper classes and aristocracies When we turn to consider whether there has been, or is, an upper or ruling class in the United States we must first recognize that if capitalist market forces were alone sufficient to make an upper or ruling class, then they would surely have least difficulty in doing so in the United States. It had no land-owning ruling class, with nationally-recognized hereditary political privileges, or distinctive institutions, titles and manners, to impede or obscure the emergence of a class based exclusively on the accumulation of industrial capital. Its history begins, as Engels put it, ‘with the elements of modern bourgeois society.’ The strong support for individual property rights enshrined in the federal constitution has restrained public ownership so that private capital in the United States has never been counter-balanced by a large public sector as in other industrial democracies. In recent decades, the level of inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth have steadily increased, without apology or embarrassment, blithely indifferent to Kuznets’ curve, to reach levels which are part of Europe’s long-forgotten past.182 Moreover, the first amendment to the constitution has ensured that wealth enjoys almost unlimited advantages in influencing the electoral process, so that it is not uncommon for multi-millionaires to be competing for the people’s votes. Cumulatively, all these things ought to provide the most favourable environment imaginable for the formation of a capitalist upper or ruling class. But does it exist? Has it ever existed? In 1830, Tocqueville observed the dumbing effects of monotonous, unskilled labour in early American factories, and the ever-increasing inequality between ‘the class of workmen and the class of masters … one born to obey … the

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other to command’, and decided that capitalism was leading the young American republic ‘away from democracy and back towards aristocracy.’ On reflection, however, he decided that this ‘class of masters’ was a new and rather strange sort of aristocracy, ‘since it is not inherited, and may not continue indefinitely’ since employers often went bankrupt. Moreover, American workers were not permanently tied to any particular employer, and ‘may be dependent on a master but not on any particular master.’ In the end, therefore, he decided that though the new aristocracy which he observed in America was ‘one of the harshest that ever existed’, it was also ‘one of the most confined and least dangerous’ and that ‘the wealthy manufacturers do not really constitute a class, since they have no feelings or purposes, no traditions or hopes, in common; there are individuals therefore, but no definite class.’183 Sociological research on American communities in the mid-twentieth century came to a rather different conclusion. In an analysis of eight such studies, including the Lynds, Polsby noted a consensus that a homogeneous upper class ruled these communities, and exerted, in its own interest, an all-purpose power over a wide variety of local issues.184 Social conflict in them all was therefore, their authors claimed, primarily between the ruling upper and the lower classes. Polsby was, however, far from persuaded that the evidence they had collected supported this consensus. There was, he observed, a certain arbitrariness in deciding the membership of this supposed ruling class, and the community issues that were supposed to demonstrate their power. When, for example, the putative ruling class did not prevail over the objections of others, the issues were often defined as ‘trivial’. Some researchers claimed that the dominant business group could ‘potentially’ exercise decisive power, even though it did not actually do so, and that though ‘apparently powerless’ it remained powerful because of its ‘strategic position’, or that its power was exercised behind the scenes, where things were exactly the opposite of what they seemed, and where, of course, the researcher could not observe them. Polsby went on to suggest that these arguments were not the result of the political views or prejudices of their authors, but necessary consequences of the stratification theory embedded in their analyses.185 Everyone in the community was assumed to belong to one layer of the stratification system, and since the researcher invariably took wealth, income or status as an index of the power of each class to realize its will over the objections of others, there had always to be, by definition, a reasonably stable top layer. Having differentiated their communities in this manner, everything else necessarily followed: the upper class must rule because it was at the top of the economic and status hierarchy, its power must be as stable and continuous as its wealth, while groups organized on some basis other than class must be less significant, even invisible, and the conflicts they engaged in must be marginal. The possibility that groups of the more numerous lower

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classes might have more power in aggregate, and get together and on occasion outvote the upper class, must also be ignored. In Polsby’s view, therefore, these studies gave a distorted view of the exercise of power in American communities. He ended by calling for an entirely different research strategy to identify the distribution of power in any community, one that focused on ‘issue areas’, rather than simply on the economic resources of members of various classes to which the researcher assigned his subjects. A later study that is not open to Polsby’s objections is Jaher’s prodigious research among the tax records, ‘civil lists’ of political office-holders and appointees, as well as the records of political parties, companies, professional associations, cultural, charitable and other voluntary associations, and churches and clubs in five cities – Boston, New York, Chicago, Charleston and Los Angeles.186 These were supported by the records of births, marriages and deaths which enabled him to trace the kin networks linking the economic, political, and cultural elites. Jaher’s studies extended from the earliest days of the five cities, meaning the colonial era in three of them, down to the present day, meaning 1982. He satisfied Polsby’s standards, because he frequently referred to ‘issue areas’ or policy decisions in each city. In all five Jaher showed that those who first became the ‘economic arbiters of their cities’ soon recognized that ‘political leverage aided entrepreneurship’, and therefore established their ‘command over municipal government’, which ‘at least for a time, was not effectively contested.’ Having integrated economic and political power, they also ‘took a proprietary interest in their communities’, and became leaders of ‘urban welfare and cultural institutions and programs.’ They assumed, therefore, a ‘generalized hegemony’ on the basis of which Jaher reasonably felt entitled to call them ‘an upper class’. In two of these cities, Charleston and Boston, children of this upper class inherited this ‘generalized hegemony’, and having benefited from ‘the essential aristocratic attribute of intergenerational bequests of rank and role’ could, in Jaher’s view, justly be called an ‘aristocracy’.187 The period of ascendancy of both the upper class and/or aristocracy in each city varied, but his evidence showed that they all underwent ‘a process of decomposition’ and were ‘ultimately swept aside’, hanging on longest to ‘what they secured last’, that is, to their cultural and charitable activities, and all the clubs, dinners, dances, schools, and social activities associated with them.188 In New York City he found the ‘post-Revolutionary entrepreneurs’ leadership did not last long enough to assume an aristocratic dimension’, and ‘by mid-century they had been replaced by nouveau riche capitalists and ethnic political bosses, that is, by specialized functional elites.’ Charleston’s aristocracy came to an end abruptly with the Civil War and ‘was never to be reconstituted’. Chicago experienced more than 50 years of upper-class leadership but Los Angeles only 30 to 40, after which in both cities the ‘incessant surge of newcomers engulfed the older elite’, thus

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‘creating a rapid circulation at the top that made three generations of upper class families a rare event.’189 Boston’s aristocracy survived the longest until the end of the nineteenth century, though he acknowledged that there were similar aristocracies in other cities, most notably Philadelphia, which also absorbed ‘newly-risen capitalists and preserved community leadership until the end of the nineteenth century’ when the process of ‘decomposition’ and the ‘fragmentation of sovereignty’ caught up with them.190 Charleston was a special case, but in the other four cities it was rapid economic growth that provided opportunities for new entrepreneurs to displace the old economic elite, and mass migration that encouraged the emergence of new ethnic politicians, and these two processes that together converted the leadership of a class into one of specialized, functional elites. Although the newly-ascendant economic elites often sought, like their predecessors, to extend horizontally into other areas of civic life and convert themselves into an upper class, Jaher found none that had successfully done so. Each of these upper classes, he noted, decomposed and declined in their own time according to local economic and political circumstances, rather than according to any national timetable or events. He found no evidence to suggest that they were branches of, or integrated into, a national upper class or national aristocracy. In fact, Jaher frequently described them as ‘enclaves’ and as ‘insular’ rather than national phenomena, though most were anxious to assert their national pre-eminence.191 After the Civil War, New York City seemed to have done so. It then became ‘the economic capital of the country and the Manhattan business elite … increasingly dominated economic activity’ everywhere, and ‘impinged on the autonomy of their counterparts in other major cities.’ However, ‘even at the zenith of its commercial predominance, New York never achieved monolithic economic rule, and the robber barons of Manhattan incessantly squabbled among themselves.’ In any case, their economic superiority did not ‘entail supremacy in other, admittedly less important, dimensions of leadership, a necessary condition for the emergence of a national upper class.’ Boston’s upper class or aristocracy which supplied a disproportionate number of presidents, cabinet officers and well-known senators, and whose local college had become something to a national finishing school, obtained more national recognition, and retained national elite cultural leadership, he thought, until Hollywood asserted its leadership of a rival sort of culture, and other states after World War II pioneered the sunbelt lifestyle. Texas and California, in particular, then seemed more important than New York in national political leadership.192 Jaher concluded that the ‘contemporary power structure’ of the United States is ‘fixed, neither geographically, culturally, nor hereditarily united’ and ‘if there is a national power elite, it has shifting geographical bases and high turnover in personnel, and great responsiveness to political and economic change.’ Baltzell’s detailed analyses of Philadelphia’s aristocracy was

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entirely consistent with this conclusion. It left a similar impression of an enclave, continuously drained by outward migration, confused and overwhelmed by inward. The family name that meant so much there, the exclusive clubs, the favoured schools and resorts carried little cachet in New York City, and still less, one suspects, anywhere else.193 Blumin traced the social networks between Philadelphia clubs, voluntary associations, the boards of local banks, and the University of Pennsylvania, but the networks did not extend to City Hall, or to Harrisburg, the state capital, or to Washington D.C. Its elite had decidedly less national reach than Boston’s.194 A sample of smaller, slower growing, less economically and ethnically diverse cities would, one imagines, also show both a slower rate of class decomposition, and a correspondingly longer ‘generalized hegemony’. But then their aristocracies would, in all probability, also have been even less able to participate in the formation of national upper class. There is no reason to think that the continental scale of the United States must have been a decisive factor in preventing the formation of a national upper class. There is considerable similarity in the political, legal, economic and educational institutions all the way across the 50 states. Sports and other leisure pursuits crossed the Mississippi, the Great Plains, the Rockies, even the Pacific Ocean, and became national pastimes. In any case, the distances are not always vast. Philadelphia is closer to New York City and to Washington than Manchester is to London. Russia has still greater distances. The failure is therefore better attributed to economic changes that enabled new business leaders to disrupt the ‘generalized hegemony’ that upper classes and aristocracies had established in many cities, and to the absence of political institutions that prevented them connecting as a national class.195

Obstacles to the formation of a ruling class One may, however, try to identify an American upper or ruling class from the other direction, that is to say from a national rather than a civic point of view, and ask whether there is any evidence of its sine qua non, that is, closely integrated political and economic elites. As some earlier remarks have already indicated, the relationship between these two elites in the United States is a distinctive one. Its peculiarities may be traced back to the earliest years of the Republic, for the electorate then showed itself to be fearful not only of state power, but also of any concentration of private power, or of any group which they thought to be a monopoly or seeking to become one. We have mentioned the adverse consequences of this hostility for the organized professions, for the career civil service, for privileged corporations of all kinds, for universities with colonial charters, for the Second Bank of the United States, for the proposed University of the United States, and indeed for any institution which had the semblance of class about it, such as established churches and even military academies. West Point

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and Annapolis were both seen as ‘nurseries of caste’ and compelled to reform.196 The word monopoly, Letwin observed, first referred simply to ‘a special legal privilege granted by the state’, but over time Americans came to be equally hostile to any form of ‘exclusive control that a few persons achieved by their own efforts’, and the word monopoly then came to apply to any ‘sort of unjustified power, especially one that raised obstacles to equality of opportunity.’197 Thereafter, many privately-owned enterprises were deemed to have an element of the hated monopoly. Chartered banks were treated with enormous suspicion in the ante-bellum decades, and either strictly regulated, limited in the number of branches they could establish, sometimes replaced by a state monopoly under the control of the state legislature, or prohibited altogether.198 Electorates were no less suspicious of railroad companies and in the 1870s and 1880s state governments began to create utility commissions to control what were then thought to be the natural monopolies of gas and electricity, by means of regulated franchises to private companies. Hence, state governments, urged on by their electorates, were unwilling to accept unaccountable and unlimited concentrations of private economic power which left alone might have become the foundation of a ruling class. When large inter-state railroad networks started to emerge, the limitations of state regulation to control such concentrations of private power were soon apparent, and the electorate therefore directed its concerns about monopoly to the federal government. In the mid-1870s, Congress was ‘snowed under’ with bills to regulate railroads, and in 1877 passed the Act to Regulate Interstate Commerce.199 In the 1880s, when large manufacturing companies, like the Singer Sewing Machine Co and Standard Oil, with the help of the railroads began to create and often to dominate national markets, they too provoked electoral opposition. Action against these so-called trusts became one of the central demands of minor parties, such as the Greenbacks and United Labor Party, and the defining principle of another, the Anti-Monopoly Party.200 The two major political parties could hardly overlook the electoral potential of the issue, and hence there was a queue in the 51st Congress to pass the legislation against trusts and monopolies in terms reminiscent of the attacks on the professions earlier in the century. John Sherman, veteran Republican senator from Ohio, somehow got to the head of the queue, and supported his bill by saying that ‘any combination to stifle competition, command the price of labor and raise prices … smacked of tyranny, of kingly prerogative and a nation that would not submit to an emperor … should not submit to an autocrat of trade.’201 It was amended and simplified, but quickly passed by 52 votes to 1. Trusts had few defenders. The House debated one amendment, but passed the bill overwhelmingly, and President Harrison signed it on July 2nd 1890.

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Although it required the creation of an enforcement agency, the Federal Trade Commission, and the more precise prohibitions of the Clayton Act of 1914, to make Sherman’s Act effective, his ringing declarations against ‘every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce’ rapidly acquired near-constitutional status, and signalled the determination of both the state and civil society not to allow big businesses to collude and collaborate at will.202 The Sherman Act is seldom mentioned in the context of class, since studies prefer to concentrate on personal attributes, school background, club memberships, wealth, and so forth, which are thought to distinguish the upper or ruling class. If, however, we concentrate, as Polsby suggested, on ‘issue areas’, it assumes considerable importance, being one of the most important issue areas in American history, which ended by institutionalizing a permanent tension or antagonism between political and economic elites which has no counterpart in any other industrial society. Neale compared American antitrust procedures and their British equivalents over the two decades 1960–1980, and was struck by the contrast between the principled, adversarial, legalistic and punitive American approach with the modest scope, and more collaborative and conciliatory procedures of the British. ‘Whereas American institutions often appear to be designed to hamper the exercise of power’, he observed, ours (the British) are designed on the whole to facilitate it.’203 If an upper or ruling class requires the integration of political and economic elites, and we have agreed it does, laws requiring the former to ‘hamper’ the exercise of power by the latter can hardly help. Of course, since the United States has had no permanent civil service at the most senior levels, it may be that this supposed adversarial relationship is perpetually being undermined by the American version of pantouflage, that is, the mobility of political appointees back to the private businesses being regulated, and the mobility of private businessmen to head regulatory agencies. Critics have claimed that regulatory agencies have often been ‘captured’ by those they are supposed to be regulating, and that relationship is therefore far less adversarial than it appears, and more often covertly collusive, but evidence that capture or collusion subsequently became a regular and permanent feature of government-business relations is hard to come by.204 It does not seem evident in the outcomes of regulatory decisions, since virtually all comparative analyses of regulation insist, like Neale, that American regulation has been more rigorous and punitive than that of any other country.205 Many of the major American companies of their day, such as Standard Oil, Paramount and all the major Hollywood studios, United Shoe Machinery, General Electric, Alcoa, Xerox, IBM and Microsoft bear scars from their encounters with the Department of Justice, some of which threatened their continued existence. They have survived, though often in a truncated form, or after paying hefty fines, or as in GE’s case, after a number of senior executives served prison sentences.206

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IBM may serve as an example since the inside story of its ‘big one’, that is the antitrust suit against the company which extended from 1969 to 1982, happens to have been told in the candid autobiography by Thomas Watson Jr, son of the founder of the company, and his successor as chief executive officer.207 The career of the father, Thomas Watson Sr, was from the very beginning to the very end, dogged by antitrust investigations of the Justice Department. His first brush with the courts occurred before World War I, and resulted in a one-year prison sentence, subsequently suspended, and never thereafter mentioned in the family. Tom Jr only learned about it as an adult, after a careless remark by an IBM executive, and the disclosure caused his father considerable distress. Tom Jr recalled that he thereafter had a more sympathetic understanding of his father’s behaviour ‘…. at least I now knew why my father had what I’d always considered the most irrational hatred of the Department of Justice.’208 There were several more brushes with the Department, so the company had a rather fearful anticipation of possible government investigation long before ‘the big one’ was actually launched in the federal courts. During it, as it happened, the company sought to better defend itself by hiring government lawyers, including a former Attorney-General of the United States. Watson Jr’s memoirs enable us to see exactly what role this former civil servant played in the attempts of IBM to escape the investigations of the Justice Department. They do not record the phone calls to his former subordinates in the Department, but they do show that his main contribution to company policy was to give precise, emphatic, and often unwelcome, advice as to what IBM should do to ensure compliance with the law. They also show the immense amount of energy, stress, anger and time that the company spent in responding to the Justice Department’s investigations and suits. Reflecting candidly on both his father’s career and his own, Tom Jr concluded that ‘the toughest issue Dad and I ever faced was antitrust.’ IBM may have been exceptional, though there is no reason to think that it was, and class loyalties may have allowed other companies to take the threat less seriously, though it seems unlikely that GE was amongst them. We need more evidence, but in the meantime it is difficult to believe that the adversarial relationship between political and business elites provoked by antitrust, or by other regulatory legislation has been an elaborate pretence to conceal class collaboration, or itself an expression of class interests. Are the 600 lawyers said to be currently employed in the legal department of Microsoft an elaborate façade to conceal its collusion with the political elite? For a brief period of the Great Depression, from 1933–35 during the life of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), antitrust laws were in abeyance, and under its auspices businessmen were able to collaborate and collectively agree on rules to regulate markets, prices, and labour con-

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ditions.209 It therefore provides a brief opportunity to observe the behaviour of American businessmen when they no longer had to maintain their normal wary and adversarial stance towards the state, and could legally ‘collude’ and ‘conspire’ with each other, and with state officials, in the French manner. As well as being a great experiment in economic policy, the NRA was also, therefore, an accidental experiment in class formation. If, despite Sherman, American businessmen already formed a class, the NRA allowed them to present themselves before the American public as such, and even to assume a legitimate place, as a class, in the American political and economic system. If, however, they had not yet come together as a class, then it provided them with an opportunity to do so, and to begin to form a class. Labor unions took advantage of its pro-labor provisions in exactly this way, and alongside Norris-LaGuardia, the NRA contributed to the surge of working class organization and solidarity already discussed. It should, however, have been much more favourable to the businessmen’s class-building efforts since the chairman of the NRA, and many of his senior appointees were outspokenly sympathetic to big business. Moreover, the ‘code authorities’, as the governing bodies of each industry were called, were dominated by businessmen, and the NRA itself never really accepted organized labour’s claim that it should have equal representation on all of them, but only on those of the few industries where organized labor had already established its bargaining rights.210 In the event, the ‘experiment’ provides rather limited support for the view that businessmen had already formed a class, and still less for the idea that they began to form one under the auspices of the NRA. Some 550 codes were formulated within two years, which might itself seem something of an achievement, and even perhaps a demonstration of class solidarity. In 28 cases, an existing trade association itself became the code authority, and in a further 218 an existing trade association assumed a dominant position, though in getting on for half of these (101), arrangements also had to be made for representation of non-members.211 The critical point, however, is that the code authorities seldom actually exercised any authority. Many businessmen were unwilling to collude, or to accept their class obligations. The best contemporary estimate was that 40% of the code authorities had no ‘trade practice complaint plan’ whatever, meaning that they had no enforcement procedures, while in the remaining 60% enforcement ‘probably averages out at a very low level.’ As one observer noted, ‘compliance was a step-child, neglected and under-nourished’, so that ‘many of their provisions, or even in some instances whole codes’ were ‘little more than writing in the sand’ and ‘chronic violators have operated with impunity.’ Later commentators have concentrated on the failure of the state to make the NRA work effectively, but it was no less a failure of the business class to behave like a class, to come together, to organize, and to regulate themselves. One contemporary noted the ‘inability of the

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members to agree on lines of action, or recalcitrancy on the part of members of the underlying industry.’ This ‘recalcitrancy’ provoked the continuous fragmentation of code authorities, the proliferation of codes, and innumerable jurisdictional disputes. There were, in fact, very few industries without ‘factional interests’ and recalcitrant minorities. The code authorities’ task was rather easier in concentrated industries, like automobiles, but even in them the code authority ‘seldom has the whole-hearted support of the underlying constituency’, so ‘internecine conflict’, was ‘a common attribute of code administration.212 Code authorities were also widely distrusted by reason of their access to confidential information, which led some businessmen to suggest that the federal government should be the confidential agency, but this ran headlong into widespread and long-standing hostility of most businessmen to any extension of the powers of the federal government.213 Organized business were apparently not enthusiastic about collaborating either with each other or with the Federal Government. If these be sine qua non of a ruling class, then American business firmly declined to participate in its formation.214 Two recalcitrant chicken farmers finally brought the NRA to an end by successfully challenging the delegation of legislative powers to the executive before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1934. The normal antagonistic and legalistic relationship between government and business, according to the principle enunciated by Senator Sherman, then resumed. It has continued ever since, and was subsequently reproduced in the regulation of the environment, of consumer safety, and of employment rights of individual employees.215 Hence, the rather curious, but indisputable fact that the country where the legitimacy and merits of free enterprise, of private ownership and of market competition have had most popular support now has the most intensively regulated business corporations in the industrial world.216 Despite this formal, public, adversarial legal relationship between America’s economic and political elites, it is possible of course that if sufficient members of the two elites shared a common formative, educational experience they might still have been able to maintain, in private, some degree of class solidarity. Did they? Did elite educational institutions in the United States select and socialize members of the two elites like their French counterparts? The community studies of Middletown and Plainville inadvertently indicated the limitations of American schools in this respect, for though the authors of both studies claimed that the business or upper class was the easiest class for them to identify in the two communities, neither mentioned private schooling or elite educational institutions as criteria of admission to it. On the contrary, the Lynds described Middletown’s high schools as ‘places where the whole range of cultural tolerances and intolerances grind against each other’, a process that continued at the local college, the rapid

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growth of which was ‘a source of immense civic pride and enthusiasm.’ West thought that for Plainville adults ‘the high school represents a new focus of community life and ritual.’217 Business and political leaders in these two communities could not, therefore, rely on class-segregated schooling to inculcate distinctive styles of life, accents, manners, or leisure pursuits, or to maintain their upper class position. Nor, obviously, to help them recognize their fellow members of an upper class in other cities. Domhoff was, however, persuaded that elite educational institutions had contributed to the formation of an American upper class, and sought to demonstrate it by showing that a small, though undisclosed, proportion of wealthy American parents sent their children to expensive private schools. They also belonged to exclusive clubs, had summer and winter residences in exclusive resorts, often inter-married, and had ‘such prestigious occupations as businessman, financier, and lawyer which’, he argued, ‘suggest the common interest of ownership and management of business enterprise.’ Other members of this upper class, he added, ‘function as museum directors, architects, art collectors and physicians, which are among the prestigious pursuits on the occupational ladder.’218 Some members of this class, he observed, have been shown by ‘acquaintanceship’ studies to know one another. Taken together, he thought that this demonstrated the ‘cohesiveness and consciousness’ that makes ‘the American upper class a sociological reality.’219 Domhoff’s evidence is less than persuasive. The elite private schools he presumably had in mind are unknown to the vast majority of Americans, and Kingston has shown that together they total somewhere between 0.05 and 0.17% of the American secondary schools’ enrolments, depending on how elite schools are defined.220 This makes them all the more exclusive, of course, but it also means that considerable proportions of those in prestigious pursuits that he included in the upper class must, like the upper classes of Middletown and Plainsville, have sent their children to public schools. Moreover, lacking widespread public recognition, it is difficult to see how they could influence relationships and institutions in American society as a whole. They are too few in number to dominate enrolments in elite universities, and have provided only a small proportion of members of either the political or economic elite, which makes it difficult for them to serve as nurseries of a class. In any event, whatever may have been the case in the more distant past, the student bodies of these elite private schools became far more heterogeneous in the 1960s by a process of what Baltzell called ‘aristocratic assimilation’. In 1960, nearly one-quarter of the student body of St. Paul’s was ‘on formal scholarship in varying amounts, while in 1962 Phillips Exeter had 170 boys on scholarships, including 50 former newspaper boys nominated by the circulation managers of major metropolitan newspapers across the country. Overall, he argued that these and other elite schools

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bear ‘dramatic witness to the staying power of the American Dream of equality of opportunity. Indeed, the familiar Left critique against these schools is not that they are forming a ruling class, but that they were ruining the chances of the formation of a working class by enrolling too many of its future leaders.’221 In their study of 1,041 political appointees from the five administrations of Roosevelt to Johnson, Stanley et al., found that 17% had attended 18 ‘name’ preparatory schools which, they thought, provides ‘impressive evidence that federal political executives tend to be selected from a high socioeconomic group.’222 But 17% hardly seems sufficient to infer a common class outlook, even supposing the 17% all came from privileged homes and included none of the ex-newspaper boys or other scholarship holders.223 They went on to show that 25% of these appointees had attended Ivy League colleges, and 40% had graduated from one of the ‘top 18’ undergraduate universities and colleges. In 1963, Lloyd Warner and his colleagues found that permanent, career senior civil servants, grades GS 14 and above were also unrepresentative of the population as a whole in terms of their educational background, and then identified the 30 higher educational institutions from which a disproportionate number of them were drawn. These were headed by George Washington University, City College of New York, Berkeley, and Harvard, followed by six of the largest state universities.224 As a group, these institutions do not appear to be particularly exclusive, or to share a distinctive ethos or culture that was likely to create a class solidarity or outlook. The only common attribute that Lloyd Warner and his colleagues thought relevant to mention was that these 30 institutions had more public administration programmes than others. And critics of the civil service of whom there have been many, seem to have a similar difficulty in recognizing its class characteristics. Numerous presidential and congressional candidates have ‘run against Washington’, but apart from Andrew Jackson’s original pre-emptive assault, they have usually criticized their number, indolence or inefficiency, rather than their class characteristics. The main issue here, however, is not whether political appointees and senior career civil servants themselves form a class, but whether a sufficient proportion of business leaders have shared the same selective and elitist educational background so that we might reasonably infer that there are bonds between these elites that might contribute to the formation of a class. In his series of studies between 1976–2002, Dye distinguished 33 ‘prestigious’ prep schools, and found that about 6% of the 286 senior members of executive branch of the governmental elite, and around 10% of 3,572 business leaders had attended them.225 This hardly seems sufficient foundation for any kind of class bond between the two elites. At college level, however, the foundation is more substantial. Four studies of top executives in large companies between 1950–1963 found that, at most, one in five of them had attended elite Ivy League colleges.226 According to Stanley

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et al., 25% of the civil service elite went to such colleges.227 If we blithely skate past the difficulties of comparability between the two studies, one might express this as a 20–25 bond, but it increases substantially to 55–44 in Dye’s samples. He distinguished 12 ‘prestigious’ universities, seven of which were Ivy League, and found that 55% of his business leaders and 43.5% of his political elite had attended them. Hence the strongest case for their being an upper or ruling class must rest on the fact that around half of each elite have attended one of 12 ‘prestigious’ universities. However, Dye himself was not persuaded that this was sufficient to integrate the two elites into a class. He concluded that ‘governmental leadership is not interlocked with the corporate world.’228 In the French version of this same debate, we were inclined to think that the two elites have integrated to form a class, but then the proportions sharing the same educational background appear to be much higher than the American, a bond, if we were to try and use the same measure, of 100–60 or higher. Moreover, this shared educational background distinguished them more decidedly and indelibly from their peers at an early age, included attendance at higher educational institutions which have a padagogic mission which separates them from universities, and on graduation provides exclusive access to high status employment, lifelong rights and prospects. The 12 ‘prestigious’ American universities chosen by Dye do not appear to be distinguished from other universities in a comparable manner in the minds of either school teachers, ambitious parents, children, or the graduates of other universities. Are the graduates of Northwestern, which is one of them, readily distinguishable from those of Northeastern, or graduates of Princeton from those of Williams or Brown? Moreover, the career paths of American elites do not appear to intertwine quite as much as the French, and they therefore have rather less opportunity to maintain the interconnections that generate instinctive class loyalties and solidarity. There seems little reason to question the conclusion of Matthews 50 years ago. After reviewing all the studies of American political elites, he decided that ‘those who make the most important political decisions in the United States … are very far from being a cross section of the electorate’, but they are also ‘a fairly heterogeneous lot.’229 In 1976 Dye was impressed by the ‘multiple paths to the top’ and ‘clear evidence of specialization’ among the members of the elites he has studied over nearly 30 years, since 80% of them held only one of the top posts.230 The notable exceptions in his view were the four families with members in many elites, the Mellons, duPonts, Fords and above all, the Rockefellers.231 In 1996, Lerner and his colleagues found that though most elite members are white and male, and almost all graduated from college, they are ‘far from a tight-knit network of upper-class dominance … only a plurality are Anglo-Saxon protestants, … a significant proportion of their fathers were not upper-status professionals or managers, but lower white and blue collar workers, many did not go to

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America’s most prestigious schools. They are defined as members of the elite, above all, by their occupation. Our study demonstrates how divided American elites really are.’232 It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the repeated attempts to identify the contribution of various schools to the socialization and formation of elites or a ruling class is a misconceived attempt to transplant European experience of class formation to the United States.233 No one doubts that American colleges differ greatly in status, but the differences between them are minutely graduated, rather than demarcating a class or classes. The only class difference that American educational institutions seem likely to have created is that between those who dropped out of high school and those who graduated, or between those who attended college and those who didn’t.234 If one is looking for the favoured gateway or socialization into the political elite of the United States from the beginning of the Republic to the present day, then qualifying and practicing as a lawyer would seem a far more promising point of departure than any prep school or Ivy League college. Twenty-five of the 52 signers of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers, about three-quarters of the presidents of the United States, their vice-presidents and members of their cabinets, have been lawyers, and over the years they have been measured, around 50% of members of both the Senate and House of Representatives, though in recent times the proportion has fallen to a mere 40%.235 If an upper or ruling class has existed in the United States, analysis of its formation, socialization and character might therefore sensibly focus on prior experience as a practising lawyer, especially as a significant minority of chief executives are themselves lawyers and lawyers are necessarily involved at the most senior level in every large corporation, and especially, of course, in their relationships with government.236 Moreover, American public policy has been, and still is, distinguished by the degree to which it is formulated by lawyers, either in the courts, the Congress or in law schools.237 In the event, this shared experience and shared vocabulary does not appear to have contributed to the formation of a class. Lawyers have never displayed a particularly strong corporate esprit or regard for their corporate status, and as we have already observed have had chronic problems in establishing a stable form of professional government and enforcing their professional ethics. Until World War II at least, entry to legal practice was open to graduates of all kinds of law schools, from elite, ‘national’ schools to commercial part-time night ones. Lawyer-legislators have been drawn disproportionately from the latter, and were not infrequently the bitter opponents of their fellow lawyers from the national schools who dominated the bar associations as they endeavoured to raise entry standards to the profession, and to establish effective and rigorous self-government within it.238 Their socialization and experience as lawyers was therefore

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rather varied and certainly did not prove to be a firm foundation of professional solidarity. It seems unlikely therefore that it contributed much to class solidarity.

Some reported sightings So far, we have found it rather difficult to identify an upper or ruling class in the United States, but we may complete our attempt by considering the work of some of those who have found it easier to do so. Useem thought he might document the networks and cohesiveness of ‘the American capitalist class’ over recent decades. In one of his most notable studies, he collected information about 8,623 directors of the 727 largest American corporations in 1969, and found that 1,570 of them or 18% held two or more directorships in these firms, though they might also of course have held directorships of other, smaller companies.239 He then found that 50% of this 18% also served as university trustees, 31% on the boards of philanthropic foundations, 27% on health-related organizations, 25% on charitable organizations, while 10% were trustees or members of an organization concerned with regional or community economic development. Overall, his evidence demonstrated a rather modest degree of civic involvement, which was directed more towards eleemosynary and community activities, similar to that which Jaher had noticed in his five cities as newlyemerging economic elites sought to extend themselves horizontally as a class. Useem found that, in 1976, 6% of his sample served on advisory bodies of federal government agencies, and 22% on those of state or local government agencies, and 12% were members of one or more of 12 major ‘business policy associations’, a list which includes all those thought by Domhoff to be ‘agents of the ruling class’.240 Useem was concerned to show that those with several directorships constituted an ‘inner group’ of capitalists which was more involved in the governance of other institutions than the rest, a point he demonstrated without difficulty being true by definition. Boy Scouts and the Greens, one imagines, have an ‘inner group’. He could not, however, take us much further, and identify the policies ‘that foster the more general interests of many, if not most, major corporations’ and could only conclude that ‘This inner group may be an important source of political leadership capable of promoting the more general interests of the entire capitalist class.’ The American ‘capitalist class’ was therefore a possibility rather than a reality, and ‘it remains’, to be shown whether these corporate directors do forcefully represent the interests of their class … when they participate in the governance of other institutions.’ He nevertheless, later developed his argument and claimed that there was an ‘inner circle’ of the capitalist class in both the United States and Britain and which had inaugurated ‘a new stage of capitalist development’, following that of ‘family capitalism’ and of

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‘managerial capitalism’. He labelled this new stage ‘institutional capitalism’, and thought it was characterized by an ‘intercorporate management network’ which in the 1970s and 1980s, in both countries, expressed ‘classwide political concerns’, ‘the filtered, refined view of large companies as a bloc’, and the ‘integrated vision’ of the corporate community. In Britain it was given ‘additional backbone’ by the ‘aristocracy’s extended kinship networks’. Filtered and integrated as it may have been, this vision nonetheless remained extremely vague. He claimed it contributed in both countries, ‘to the rise of more conservative political climates in the early 1980s’ and therefore to ‘reductions in social spending’, to de-regulation and ‘to the scaling back of programs beneficial to labor.’241 Domhoff thought he could identify the interests of the American ruling class more precisely, and supported his evidence about their members’ social backgrounds and networks with an analysis of numerous federal government policies, both foreign and domestic, precisely in other words the kind of ‘issue area’ analysis that Polsby had recommended. American foreign policies were, Domhoff argued, formulated by ‘a power elite … rooted in the dividends and salaries of large corporations and financial institutions’, which served as the ‘operating arm of the upper class’ and ‘eliminated other contenders for control of foreign policy, such as the military, the Congress and public opinion.’ Domestic policies were, he argued, often formulated by various ad hoc committees and councils, by think tanks like Brookings, or foundations like Rockefeller and Ford, whose ‘expert staffs were trained at universities’, which ‘members of the power elite finance and direct.’ They provided ‘the inputs into governmental process on social welfare matters’, enabling it ‘to deal with domestic discontent on their own terms’, meaning they preferred regulatory agencies rather than the extension of public ownership. It is therefore not surprising, in Domhoff’s view, ‘that the outputs have maintained the wealth distribution intact, and with the privileges, prestige and prerogatives of the few tenths of a percent of the population making up the American upper class.’242 There is no denying many parts of this argument, that for instance, foreign and domestic policies have been formulated by elites, that experts on these policies are drawn from think tanks, foundations and universities which are supported by wealthy benefactors, though his own work suggests that it would be unwise to infer the class loyalties of these experts by reference to the donors of their home institutions. There is also no denying, of course, that government policies have helped to preserve and promote capitalist institutions. How could it be otherwise? Or that inequalities of wealth and income have increased in recent decades. Res ipsa loquitur. Domhoff does not, however, demonstrate the relationship between the body or head of the upper class and its ‘operating arm’, nor does he describe any actual class mobilizations and confrontations. Instead, he imputes what he thinks might have been, or ought to have been, the interests of the upper and

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working classes in the various policy decisions he analyses rather than showing how the representatives of each class had formulated alternative or conflicting policies, and that those of the working class were sidelined or overruled, as he thought was usually the case, by the experts employed by, or dependent on, the ruling class. In short, he gives accounts of the inferred class interests of supposed classes, and fractions of classes, rather than account of actual class conflicts.243 He fails therefore to demonstrate the relevance of class as an analytical distinction in the policy issues he examines. In foreign policy, to take one example, he cannot show that most Americans were more favourably disposed towards Soviet Russia than the elite who formulated American foreign policy during the Cold War. Berger showed that from the Spanish-American War on, the leaders of organized labour, meaning initially the AFL, have seldom opposed American foreign policy, and never its basic principles, and have sought to export their own brand of unionism on the back of American political and commercial expansion.244 The re-united AFL-CIO strongly supported the post-World War II ‘cold war’ foreign policy of the United States, and were, if anything, more hardline than successive administrations. When President Nixon launched his policy of détente with Russia and China, the AFL-CIO denounced it as a ‘fraud’ and the executive council voted against it 24–4, a vote that was confirmed, without dissent, by their annual convention in 1973.245 Union leaders may differ, of course, from their members. The growing opposition to the war in Vietnam between 1966–1969 amongst all manual workers, and among the population at large, was not reflected in AFL-CIO statements, but then a two-thirds majority of all union members at that point either still supported the war or favoured a more aggressive policy.246 The best evidence of a split between leaders and members appeared in Harris polls during 1972 and 1973 which showed that bare majorities of union members opposed renewed bombing of North Vietnam and favoured the recognition of Cuba, while 72% endorsed closer relations with the Soviet Union and China. However, polls from these two years hardly seem sufficient to allow us to conclude that grassroots union members have always or often been misrepresented by their leaders, or that an alternative working class American foreign policy has been consistently sidelined by that of the ruling class.247 Similarly, Domhoff provided no evidence to show that domestic policies designed to protect business interests were unpopular with the mass of the electorate, or that, for instance, the working class preferred the nationalization rather than regulation of private industry.248 As we have seen, regulation was first adopted with massive electoral support, and there is no reason to suppose that the majority of the American electorate were subsequently converted to the merits of public ownership.249 In 1986 the General Social Survey identified five industries and asked a national sample of respondents whether they favoured public ownership of each. There was most support for public ownership of local public transport, most meaning

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9%. Only 6% favoured public ownership of the electricity industry, 3% of banking and finance, while just 2% favoured public ownership of the steel and automobile industries.250 The absence of public ownership in the United States can hardly therefore be attributed to the power of the ruling class.251 Other answers to the same survey, led Davis to conclude that American attitudes towards government intervention in the economy were not laissez faire, and it would be ‘more accurate to say they prefer regulation’.252 They differed little, in other words, from those that prompted the 51st Congress to vote overwhelmingly for Senator Sherman’s bill. Fuerst analysed the failure of public housing, and in particular housing cooperatives, in the United States, a failure that readily lends itself to a class interpretation. But he never supposed that a ruling class had anything to do with it. They ‘have not been able to get off the ground’, he decided, ‘because the bulk of the US population, workers and farmers, have been so oriented to climbing the free enterprise ladder that it has precluded any sustained interest in co-operative housing.’253 Nor was there much popular support for other domestic policies that Domhoff favoured, and thought the working class should favour, such as redistributive taxation to ensure greater equality of incomes. The General Social Survey in 1986 reported that only 17% of Americans favoured government action to ‘reduce income differences between rich and poor’, and when asked to indicate their support for specific government policies, the most popular – that the government ‘should provide a decent standard of living for the old’ – was supported by only 40% of the population.254 Coleman & Rainwater similarly found that while there was strong support for government action to reduce inequalities of opportunity, there was virtually none for government action to ensure equality of outcomes.255 Jackman and Jackman again found little support for redistributive taxation, or for any form of income equalization, and there were only slight differences across the different classes in these respects.256 The fact that various domestic policies have ‘maintained the wealth distribution intact’ can hardly, therefore, be used to demonstrate the existence or power of an American ruling class. There was, one might add, a sharp contrast between American and British attitudes on all these questions. The proposition that the government ‘should provide a decent standard of living for the old’ was supported by 83% of British respondents versus 40% of Americans, while 80% of British respondents said in 1988, with very little class variation, that they wanted the government to redistribute wealth downwards.257 Domhoff was not demonstrating the power of the American ruling class, but merely analysing and criticizing his fellow Americans and the American way. Vogel carefully tracked the relationship between business and political decision-making over the three decades 1960–1990. His first finding was that the ‘relative political influence of business’ has varied inversely with

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‘the public’s perception of the long-term strength of the American economy’, so that over his chosen period, he could document the decline of business influence as a result of ‘the strong performance of the American economy from the early 1960s through to 1973’, and then its growth as the economy faltered, so that by 1978, business was able to block the major legislative proposals of both organized labor and the public-interest movement, and ‘began to make significant progress in achieving its own legislative goals’, meaning the reduction of capital gains tax and corporate income tax in 1981.258 The second critical factor that Vogel thought had affected the political influence of business over these years was the failure of firms and industries to co-operate, an argument which reinforces our earlier observations about the NRA experiment. ‘One reason so many industries suffered so many political setbacks between the mid-1960s and early 1970s’ – he was referring to the extension of regulation for environmental and consumer protection, for equal employment opportunities, and occupational health and safety – ‘is that they received no assistance from other sectors of the business community.’ Business successes between 1978 and 1981 were, he concluded, due to unified action. ‘When business is both mobilized and unified, its political power can be formidable.’ But this ‘occurs relatively infrequently.’ Vogel concluded that ‘the class consciousness of American business, like that of the American working class, is limited’, and he might have added, similarly episodic.259 We began this attempt to see if there was an American upper or ruling class with Tocqueville’s reflections in 1835 that the differences between the American masters and workmen were probably too transitory and too materialistic, to provide a basis for the formation of a new aristocracy. Hemingway put much the same point succinctly to Scott Fitzgerald, who had observed that the wealthy are different from us. ‘Yes!’ Hemingway is said to have replied, ‘they have more money!’260 The American public has evidently arrived at a similar conclusion. In 1947, Centers found that more than two-thirds of Americans thought wealth and income were key factors in determining class membership. Forty years later, Halle reflecting on research over the intervening years, and on his own respondents at a New Jersey oil refinery, observed that ‘sociologists who ask blue collar workers about the meaning of class discover as I did, that almost all produce an image based on income-level and material standard of living.’261 No one disputes that there is an elite in the United States with more political power than everyone else, and also an elite with more money than everyone else, and that significant minorities of both have inherited their power and wealth. What is at issue is the readiness of these minorities to integrate with one another as a class, and to co-opt newcomers into their class institutions and outlook. Did the privileged upbringing, education and experience of those who inherited their elite positions give them, as

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Tocqueville put it, distinctive ‘feelings, purposes, traditions and hopes’ which the newcomers have been persuaded to share and which distinguish them from other Americans? The institutions, interests, issues, actions and boundaries that might define a class formation of this kind have proved difficult to identify.

7 Interim Conclusions from Three Societies

The preceding evidence of classes in these three societies falls a long way short of being exhaustive; indeed it should be considered a first trawl, illustrative and indicative rather than conclusive. Many sources have been overlooked, some for reasons of space, many more no doubt through ignorance. A number of the conclusions therefore remain open to debate, but even if we suppose that some of the final verdicts were reversed – that for instance the post-emancipation Russian dvorianstsvo was not quite as ‘decomposed’ as we suggested it was, and those of them making careers in the bureaucracy had not merged with the chinovniki as much as we thought, or that the French grands corps were not quite the ruling class we decided they were, or that American business leaders had more class solidarity than we detected – the evidence we have reviewed has nonetheless provided numerous examples of the way political decisions and events have affected the emergence, or non-emergence, of classes in these societies. Since this evidence is not particularly arcane, indeed little more than standard fare for anyone whose interest in class extends beyond their own country, and since the interpretation of it has not required any special ingenuity or manipulation, it seems reasonable to draw some tentative conclusions from it, especially when it points consistently in the same direction. First of all, it suggests that these three societies have not had the same complement of classes: late Imperial Russia had five, at varying stages of formation, Soviet Russia had just one, while France had five, but they only partially corresponded with the five of Imperial Russia. The United States seem to have had difficulty establishing any enduring, national class formations at all. Its classes seem to have been only episodic and half-formed, such as the ‘civic’ upper classes in a number of nineteenth-century cities, the short-lived pre-Civil war middle class observed by just one scholar, and intermittent and relatively brief surges of working class solidarity and sentiment. Furthermore, classes in these three societies do not appear to have moved along the same tracks, or to have been propelled by the same forces, at the same speed, over the same lifespan, nor to have included similar 207

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proportions of the entire population of the three countries. The assumptions that sociologists sometimes make when they try to generalize about classes or compare them, such as supposing that one society, allegedly the most advanced, might represent others, or plucking evidence from several to provide a composite picture of all, or assuming that they all have the same number, distinguished by the same characteristics, and everyone must belong to one or other, are difficult to square with this evidence. Second, it has been shown that the crucial events in the formation and dynamics of many of these classes long preceded the emergence and development of industrial capitalism, so classes can hardly be a product of it. Moreover, the striking resemblances between the two Russias suggest that the presence and absence of private ownership of the means of production is unlikely to have been a significant determinant of their class formations. And the marked differences between capitalist France and the United States only reinforce these doubts. Obviously, one would like to test this conclusion by pitting this evidence of class formation against an explanation which gave primacy to one or other material factors, and seeing which could provide more insight into the way classes were formed, or obstructed, in these societies, and the peculiarities of their careers. No one has, however, ever tried to do this.1 It is a moot point whether it could be done. Many observers seem to have decided, after giving primacy to material factors, that it need not be done, and that the class systems of capitalist societies must, in essentials, be the same. Alas! As the number of social scientists who are interested in classes is declining fast, we will probably never witness such a confrontation or be able to decide on the respective merits of the two approaches.2 The third main conclusion is that revolutionary events seem to be of particular importance in defining and understanding the crucial relationship between the state and civil society, and therefore in understanding class relations. Their metaphorical namesakes, industrial revolutions, no doubt determined the size of various classes, but real revolutions determine their structure, goals and relationships. This is not, as one might first suppose, because revolutions fundamentally transformed the relationship between the state and civil society, since we have found significant continuities in this respect through all three revolutions. It is rather because the revolutionary restatement or redefinition of this relationship provided a memorable and authoritative enunciation of its proper form, and this remained a superior source of legitimacy for later generations, a mountain peak of legitimacy one might say, which decisively influenced the way both states and organized interests in civil society subsequently behaved towards one another. Many of the later political decisions mentioned in the course of the three investigations therefore have an intelligible connection back to revolutionary events. Revolutionary politics evidently set agendas and parameters for normal politics.

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A fourth conclusion, towards which some, though not all, of the evidence points is that classes seem to have been formed most effectively when there was some form of continuous relationship or collaboration between the state and civil society. Imperial Russia provided several examples of the state acting alone to create classes, but all the classes its rulers invented and authorized, its nobility, bourgeoisie and peasantry, remained purely nominal, inert categories and gave few, if any indications of collective loyalties or collective life. We therefore declined to recognize them as classes at all. It also appeared to provide two examples – the intelligentsia and the emergent working class – of civil society acting spontaneously and alone, but then we could not avoid noticing how the state had contributed, often unwittingly, to the formation of both, so they can hardly be said to have emerged solely from within civil society. There remained the servitor nobility class, the merger of dvorianstvo and chinovniki, and its successor the Soviet nomenklatura, both of which were certainly creations of the state, and civil society only ‘collaborated’ passively in their formation by accepting that they shaped ‘the basic normative framework for individual and social relationships’ and were one of the fundamental ‘categories in which the world worked.’ The relationship between the state and civil society also seems to have been critical in the formation of all five French classes though the nature of that relationship differed in each case. Initially, the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ could only define itself by its adversarial relationship with the French state since it appeared several generations before there was any capitalist bourgeoisie, owning large-scale manufacturing plants, for it to oppose or overthrow. However, it maintained this adversarial stance even after the state became a representative democracy, and even though it depended on state support. Its relationship with the state, one might say, then became ambivalent, both adversarial and collaborative. While it still attempted to unnerve state officials whenever it could, it simultaneously recognized that it needed state intervention and support whenever it hoped to obtain a satisfactory response, or indeed any response, from employers. France’s intellectuals organized as class largely though not exclusively within state institutions, and in response to government policies which they hoped to change. The relationship with the state was similarly critical to the formation of classes of cadres and self-employed small businessmen, though in the former case the relationship was collaborative like that of their superiors, the corpsards, while that of the latter was violently adversarial and therefore resembled that of the working class. The emergence of a ruling class, or something close to it, under the Fifth Republic was only possible because higher civil servants were able to take advantage of their state credentials, state careers and of the long-standing relationship between the state and private business. It would, we may safely conclude, be impossible to understand

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the formation and behaviour of any of these French classes without reference to state institutions and decisions. The United States provided few examples of fully-formed enduring classes precisely because state and federal governments have generally been reluctant to grant selective rights, create privileges and exclusive corporate institutions around which interests in civil society might organize classes. Hence interests in American civil society have for the most part been left to organize and mobilize classes by themselves, and seem to have found it difficult to do so. The apparent exception was the surge of working class organization and solidarity over the years 1932–1947, but then it is not an exception, since it only happened because both the President and the Congress were willing to collaborate with, and support organized labour over these years. When that support was withdrawn, class solidarity and organization, and the promise of an enduring American working class, also began to dissolve. A fifth, more contentious, conclusion follows silently on the heels of the fourth, as soon as we seek to explain why class formation should benefit from the collaboration of the state and civil society. The most likely reason, or so this evidence suggests, is that either on their own is incapable of converting social inequalities into classes. If they do not collaborate, and one of them remains indifferent or hostile, it follows that the other single-handedly wishing to create a class will find itself opposed both by the indifferent or hostile other party, as well as by indifferent or hostile market forces. Such a contest, it would seem, is rarely an even one, and classes therefore find it difficult to form, or achieve any degree of solidarity or public recognition. Classes appear, in other words, to require the collaboration of the state and civil society against the market. The idea that market forces are indifferent to the formation of classes, and that the state and civil society must collaborate to successfully organize classes against them, might seem to fly in the face of much sociological wisdom which presents the market as the ultimate point of origin of classes. However, our evidence pretty consistently suggested that, left to themselves, market forces undermine and dissolve class distinctions and class organizations. They blurred all the legally-defined classes of Imperial Russia, and the possibility that they might undermine the official classes of Soviet Russia prompted its rulers to administer stratification in meticulous detail. Soviet rulers, one may safely say, would have accepted the proposition that market forces dissolve classes without the least demur. Post-Soviet Russia provides further evidence of the class-dissolving role of markets since the nomenklatura has been better able to maintain its position in political, than in economic life. In examining French classes, we had less opportunity to refer to the failure or dissolution of classes, though the very fact that all five of the classes we were able to identify were defined by their relationships with the state rather than by their market situations is consistent with the

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argument. Moreover, the non-appearance of an organized middle class is plausibly attributable to the fact that there were few self-governing professions that might have been supported by, or might have collaborated with, the state to organize it. The fact that the subsidiaries of foreign multinationals do not make use of the elevated walkway between political and economic power on which its ruling class depends suggests that market forces are already having some destabilizing effect. If the French state were to one day allow foreign take-overs of its large companies, we might then witness the class-dissolving power of the market. In the United States virtually all the potential agents of class formation were forced by state action to accept market competition which meant their potential remained permanently unrealized. There were numerous examples. The promiscuous chartering of universities, for instance, created a differentiated market among higher educational institutions, which helped to blur their capacity to create or reinforce class distinctions. State governments forced all professionals into the market place, and therefore long made it difficult for them to distinguish themselves collectively from tradesmen, and to organize and cohere as members of a class. Market forces also undermined the ‘civic’ upper classes and aristocracies, and prevented them coalescing as a national upper class. Antitrust laws made collaboration between business leaders, and collaboration with the political elite, more difficult, and therefore obstructed the formation of either a capitalist or ruling class. By encouraging mass immigration the Federal Government also helped to make a free labour market, and once the protection it had given to labour unions came to an end with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, labour unions were forced to compete continuously with one another, as well as with employers, for support. Again and again, therefore, the American state declined to collaborate with organized interests in civil society, and insisted they compete with one another in the marketplace, and this seemed a far more important factor in explaining the fragility of class institutions there than any of the supposed ‘exceptional’ factors in American history. It cannot be mere coincidence that of the three societies we have considered, the United States is the one where market forces have been given freest rein and is also the one where durable classes are most difficult to identify. Looking back over the evidence we have considered, it would be reasonable to deduce that ceteris paribus a classless society would be more likely to appear where the state only intervened to maintain perpetual and universal market competition, rather than where it benevolently sought to redress or eliminate class distinctions. Inequalities might then be immense, but classes, our evidence suggests, would have difficulty institutionalizing and organizing themselves. This view of market forces as a solvent of classes is not quite as radical and total a break with sociological commentary as at first it sounds, for

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some class analysts have come close to acknowledging this selfsame point. Sorensen, for instance, sought to provide a parsimonious and precise explanation of class conflict by arguing that it derives from rent-seeking behaviour, the privileged seeking to protect existing rents from which they benefit, while those who suffer from them, and are thereby exploited, seek to eliminate them. He concluded that competition eliminates rents, and so, as he put it, ‘a rent free labor market will be one where simple class schemes are increasingly less applicable.’3 Three of the examples he gave of successful rent-seeking behaviour – trade unions, professional associations and schools which grant credentials – presupposed some capacity to act collectively to obtain state recognition and protection, so his argument is not far from what is being proposed here.4 Or consider those who have investigated the rise of ‘consumerism’, such as Doyle’s analysis of cocoa advertisements in Britain. He sought to show that worker identities, linked with trade and class, were ‘co-opted to create and eventually homogenize a new consumer mass identity in which individual aspirations replaced political and group aims’, which is tantamount to saying that free markets blur, or even dissolve, classes.5 Two of the most influential commentators on the English working class in the mid-twentieth century, Hoggart and Williams, continually bemoaned the commercialism that was undermining its solidarity and collectivism.6 Many other observers come close to making the same point.7 The aim here, however, is not to write yet another commentary on class analysis, but simply to discover clues from the comparison of three other societies which may help to solve the mystery of the class-ridden English, with which we began. Two clues seem particularly important: first, that we should pay special attention to revolutionary conflicts, since they are likely to illuminate the all-important relationship between the state and civil society, and second, that we should study collective action prior to industrialization, if we wish to understand the formation of classes during and after it.

8 Re-examining the English Mystery

The aristocracy first defined the relationship between the state and civil society in England, and it remained a clearly-defined universally-acknowledged ruling class for the best part of a millennium during which it shaped numerous English institutions. Even today recollection of its former role lingers as a distinctive and visible symbol of the English class ‘system’. It must therefore be considered first, and any theory of classes in England, we may safely say, that does not incorporate this most ancient and durable of classes isn’t worth a candle.

The aristocracy as prototype The relationship between the state, in the person of the monarch, and English civil society was originally defined by the peculiar predilection of Norman and Plantagenet kings for exercising public power through private individuals in civil society, rather than by constructing a central apparatus by which they might directly control their subjects, as their cousins, the kings of France were doing. By deciding to act in this manner, they encouraged, as White put it, ‘self-government at the king’s command.’1 Although the summonses, juries, inquests, and various kinds of ‘assemblings’ convened for purposes of public administration, involved a degree of wider, and even popular, participation, they meant in practice that the early English state became peculiarly dependent upon the landed aristocracy and gentry, rather than on its own officials.2 Referring to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Briddick observed that the ‘early modern English state depended on participation’, and noted ‘a certain lack of clarity in the differences between public and private activities’, so when ‘there was a material interest or moral consensus among local and national elites it was effective, where there was no such consensus it was not.’3 In the present context, it is aristocratic participation in public, governmental functions, either locally and directly or through Parliament that matters, for it enabled the English aristocracy and gentry to legitimize and retain their powers and privileges, long after the 213

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aristocracies of continental Europe had been displaced, and rendered ‘functionless’ by centralized state administrations. The nature of the relationship between the king and the aristocracy, the degree of aristocratic participation in government, was not of course, immediately settled and defined by Norman and Plantagenet kings. The balance of rights and obligations between them remained a matter of continuous, and frequently violent, dispute, over centuries. Bush referred to an aristocratic ‘tradition of revolt’, from Magna Carta in 1216, and the Charter of the Forest in 1217, the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, and the ordinances impressed on Edward II in 1311.4 From this date until the Tudor accession in 1485, five kings were deposed by aristocratic opponents, and in the 25 years between 1460 and 1485, the Crown forcibly changed hands six times. Although these disputes usually involved personal and dynastic ambitions, aristocratic opponents of the king saw themselves, and presented themselves to their peers, as defenders of the aristocracy’s customary rights against royal absolutism. Specifically, they attempted to force the king to dismiss various ‘evil counsellors’, whom they usually portrayed as ‘upstart favourites or bureaucrats of foreign, clerical or commoner origin’, and they demanded that he consult his leading nobles more frequently on government policy, and especially on matters of law and taxation.5 The Tudor monarchs who ruled from 1485–1603 somehow had the happy knack of pacifying the aristocracy, and of ‘attaching them to the royal interest’, so they were seldom threatened either by aristocratic revolts or by parliamentary protests. The Stuarts who succeeded them were less fortunate or less adroit, and provoked two major conflicts which came to involve not only the aristocracy, but most, if not all, of the English people: the Puritan Revolution 1642–1649 and the Glorious Revolution 1688–1689, which may reasonably be seen as two stages of one revolution. Together, they defined the way the relationship between state and civil society was to continue in England, and later in Britain, from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth. In one fundamental respect, therefore, England was no different from our other three societies: the subsequent scope of state action, and the nature of its relationship with civil society, was defined by revolutionary events. Charles I prepared the way for the Puritan Revolution by his 11 years of ‘thorough’ government from 1628 to 1639, when he governed without a Parliament, apparently in the hope that he could rule as an absolute monarch and radically redefine his relationship with the aristocracy and the rest of civil society. That possibility was removed by rebellion in Scotland, followed by the invasion of England, and the occupation of Newcastle by a Scottish army. This compelled him to recall Parliament, that is, to assemble the representatives of the aristocracy and gentry as a corporate body, along with propertied commoners, so that he might obtain funds to raise an army to repel the Scots. Since he would not abandon his claim to absolute

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power, this decision eventually led, by events that we need not recount, to civil war and to his execution in 1649. This, however, and a decade and more of republican government, did not finally settle the relationship between the state and civil society. Having been restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II ruled for two decades before renewing his father’s effort to establish an absolute monarchy in the early 1680s in the last years of his reign. His aim was to bring Parliament, the courts and their inns, all the chartered boroughs, along with their companies and guilds, as well as the universities, under royal control. He did this, in the main, by the peaceful, and entirely legal, process of serving writs of quo warranto on most of the significant chartered bodies in the kingdom, boroughs, guilds and companies, which required them to show by what right they exercised their powers of selfgovernment. Given the changes of regime over previous decades, there were few charters that could survive scrutiny by a reasonably assiduous law officer of the Crown. Some chartered bodies contested the royal writs in the courts, but most surrendered their charters, hoping that they might be reissued on rather more favourable terms than if they continued to resist. In the event, the new charters invariably required royal approval of all their governing officers. Parliament, of course, had no charter, but many members of the Commons were returned by chartered boroughs, and writs of quo warranto served on them were therefore an indirect means of obtaining control over Parliament. When Charles II died in 1685, his quo warranto strategy was continued, and even accelerated, by his brother, James II. Again, other events, that we need not recount, intervened, such as the trial of seven bishops, the appointment of many Catholic officers in the army, and the unexpected birth of a son to James’ wife, raising the spectre of a Catholic heir to the throne. These, along with the attacks on chartered bodies, provoked the second and concluding stage of the revolution, the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, which ended with the flight of James II, and the accession to the throne of his younger daughter Mary, and her husband, William, Prince of Orange.6 Many observers wonder whether the events of 1688–1689 should be described as a revolution at all, since they were entirely peaceful, and were not inspired by any passion for radical political or social change.7 They had no celebrated leaders, and no John Hancock. The seven signatories of the critical invitation to William of Orange to ‘invade’ England and take the throne, wrote their names in cipher, and though subsequently referred to as the ‘immortal seven’, there is not an English person in a hundred could name even one of them.8 Moreover, the members of the Convention that followed William’s arrival did their utmost to disguise from themselves, as much as anyone else, that they had done anything the least unconstitutional or revolutionary.9 It was, one might say, a revolution that dared not speak its name. Like the Puritan Revolution before it, however, it was a

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successful struggle to resist royal attempts to establish a new relationship between king and Parliament, and between the state and civil society. Both were fought in the name of established rights, to preserve the ‘ancient liberties and franchises’ of the English people, and not, like the French and the American revolutions, in the name of some newly-discovered and proclaimed natural rights. In the event, the Glorious Revolution did rather more that preserve an existing relationship, since it made Parliament, previously considered an ancillary, secondary, and even optional, part of government and lawmaking, into a primary and permanent part, and thereby marked the beginning of representative government under an unwritten constitution which continues to this day. It also ensured that the wealth, power, status and functions of the aristocracy were never seriously threatened for the next two centuries, during which Britain industrialized, saw the emergence of new cities and new classes, moved slowly towards representative democracy, and created a centralized administrative state apparatus. Aristocratic political power appears to have been threatened less by the extension of the franchise to the middle classes, than by the growth at the end of the nineteenth century of political parties – a mechanism which, as Arendt observed, enabled the masses to choose their own leaders. Thereafter aristocratic representation in the House of Commons, and therefore in cabinets, slowly declined.10 Many of their local governmental functions were removed by the reform of local government in 1888. The introduction of death duties in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 meant that they could no longer pass on to their property intact to their eldest sons, and therefore undermined the secure economic foundations on which the class had long relied. Cannadine who exhaustively traced their decline, identified three factors of ‘the greatest importance’: the impact in England of ‘the virtual disappearance of the Irish grandees and gentry as the territorial, governing and social elite’ of that country; the First World War ‘during which a greater proportion of the aristocracy suffered violent deaths than in any conflict since the Wars of the Roses’; and third ‘the sales of land between 1910 and 1922 which amounted to a transfer of property on a scale rivalled in Britain this millennium only by the Norman Conquest and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’11 The decline of the English aristocracy was, however, uniquely tranquil and uniquely prolonged.12 They were never toppled, or overthrown, never violently attacked, indeed never discredited, since the contributions of some of their members to many British institutions, including the factory acts and social reform, were widely recognized and respected. Those who might have been expected, in the view of critical observers, to have sought to overthrow the aristocracy, the representatives and spokesmen of manufacturers, and those of the organized working class, declined to do so. Rather than abusing the aristocracy and all their works, and sweeping it aside, they both came over subsequent generations to join it, and became

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in name at least members of the aristocracy, thereby helping to preserve some aristocratic institutions and values. The English aristocracy had always been open to new recruits, first to those who earned the gratitude or enjoyed the favour of the sovereign, and later that of prime ministers. Prime ministerial patronage was used by Lloyd George in a rather squalid manner to reward those who contributed to party funds. Later prime ministers appear, however, to have used their patronage more honourably, and somewhat more transparently, to recognize and reward those they deemed meritorious, in one way or another, in various walks of life. Suspicions arose in March 2006 about Mr Blair’s nominations of four Labour peers, but the subsequent police investigation showed they were groundless, or at least provided no grounds for a prosecution. Since 1964 most new peers have been non-hereditary ‘life peers’, and the aristocracy has therefore become still more open, which no doubt helps to explain why its titles, its manners, its institutions, in particular the House of Lords, as well as hereditary peers, have been able to survive in an increasingly democratic society. In a comparative context, the endurance of the English aristocracy is remarkable, but it may be that the manner of its passing is still more remarkable. Push never came to shove. Having been progressively edged out of the House of Commons, the powers of the House of Lords were curtailed in the early twentieth century, and a half-century or so later the hereditaries began to be counter-balanced by life-peers and only at the turn of the twenty-first century were most of them, though not all, excluded from the House of Lords, and from any role in the legislative process.13 Such a lack of urgency must say something about the English and their classes. Perhaps it is a testament to the legitimacy that the aristocracy had established over previous centuries, but it more certainly suggests that there was no new class bursting at the doors, hoping to replace them.

The elites who succeeded them For most of English history, the ruling class is therefore relatively easy to define since it was virtually co-extensive with the aristocracy, and the monarch’s ennoblements conveniently announced the new entrants, though we might wish to supplement them with a few of the wealthier, untitled, gentry. Wealth, status and power, in other words, closely coincided with one another, and were concentrated in this one class. Since the nobility dominated both political and economic life, as well as the military, with the marginal exception of the Royal Navy, there were no rival elites. Public administration, such as it was, was also in aristocratic hands, since lesser officials were often their nominees, until 1870. The law long remained a rather aristocratic profession, and aristocrats were usually patrons of many voluntary activities. Younger sons of the aristocracy dominated the colonial

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service, the Church, and also played a part in the emergence of the new industrial economy.14 Every elite therefore recruited from people of the same background, and kin ties linked one with another. Aristocratic values were able to shape a host of British institutions, even their pressure groups, their sports and their leisure pursuits. The Marquis of Queensberry was not himself a boxer. However, as Britain became an industrial and democratic society, the ruling class became progressively rather more difficult to define. New elites emerged that did not draw their members exclusively from the aristocracy, and it was possible to obtain wealth, power and status, or any one of these things, without being a landholding aristocrat. Once that process got under way, and we might date it roughly from the Great Reform Act of 1832, the ruling class became steadily more differentiated, and increasingly difficult to recognize and define. Power, status and wealth no longer coincided, since members of these elites might be distinguished by one of these attributes but lack another, and kin ties no longer linked one elite with another. If we try to define a ruling class over the half century since World War II, when this process of the fragmentation of the ruling class was quite far advanced we would probably wish to include the shrinking remnant of those who inherited everything, position, title and wealth, including H.M. the Queen and the royal family. Alongside them, or perhaps below, we might then place the wealthier and more powerful life peers who have been awarded their titles, as well as serving ministers, and the heads of largest financial and manufacturing enterprises. We would probably also include senior civil servants and military officers, and also the leaders of major trade unions since they exercised considerable power over some of these decades. We might also find room perhaps, by reason of their ‘intellectual capital’, for the leaders of major professional bodies, and also for the Archbishop of Canterbury, other bishops of the Church of England, leaders of other religious denominations, by reason, one might say, of their ‘spiritual capital’. This list roughly corresponds with Guttsman’s analysis of all the power elites of Britain in 1963, which was probably the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted.15 At first sight this appears to be a rather varied collection of elites, who have risen to their positions of leadership in their respective worlds by diverse routes, some by heredity, some by winning the support of a local constituency political party and demonstrating their ability over a number of years in the House of Commons, and more recently, in the media, some by excelling in their undergraduate and civil service entry examinations and then by demonstrating their ‘soundness’ to superiors and colleagues. Financial leaders, in the past at least, seem to have benefited more than others by their elite public school or military backgrounds, while leaders of private manufacturing businesses, we know, came to the top in a great variety of ways, by inheritance, by entrepreneurial success, or by promotion through

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the ranks of salaried management and often, as we have seen, from the shopfloor. Professional and religious leaders presumably owed their advancement to the respect they earned from their colleagues in their own worlds. The question we have to consider therefore is whether these elites have been integrated as a class, either because their talents were polyvalent in the manner of the nomenklatura or the grands corps enabling them to have intersecting career pathways, or because they had some fundamental common class socialization and have some common class interest. Were there, or are there, functional equivalents of the institutions that socialized and integrated elites in Soviet Russia and France? There are three plausible possibilities: first, the public school education many of them experienced, second their wealth and the lifestyle it made possible, and the third is that one of the surviving integrative institutions of the aristocracy, the House of Lords, has continued to perform the same function for these new elites. The third seems the least likely possibility for though members of these elites certainly enter the Lords, they tend to do so in their twilight years, usually after they have left the positions of power whose integration is here at issue, so its functions in this respect, one guesses, are minor. In any case, no one happens to have argued, or documented, the contribution of the House of Lords to the integration of contemporary elites.16 We will therefore leave it on one side, and concentrate on the first two. Tawney was the first to try to measure the contribution that public schools made to the formation of the British ruling class. In 1927, he found that 75% of a sample of 1,218 of what he called ‘leaders of British society’, which included the Church, the law, civil service, directors of banks and railway companies, though not directors of manufacturing companies, had been educated at public boarding schools.17 Repeating the same exercise in 1939, the Fleming Committee found that the proportion was still 76%.18 In 1963, Guttsman was also impressed by the proportion of 12 samples of ‘contemporary elite groups’ who had received their schooling ‘either in public boarding schools or in independent day schools’ in the decade following World War II.19 In 1981 Fidler brought together nine earlier studies of the business elite between 1938 and 1975, and found that the proportions who had been educated at public schools varied between 52% and 71%.20 In his own sample of 130 leading businessmen in 1979, 59% had attended public schools. In 1993, however, Hannah became the first analyst able to record, and celebrate, a decline. He found that ‘only’ 42% of the current chairmen of the top 50 British companies had attended public schools.21 These are substantial proportions of these elites, and the key question is whether the public, and independent schools more generally, instilled a class solidarity which could last throughout their pupils’ lives. Many of them were boarding schools, and therefore what sociologists call total institutions, for most of the year at least, and since they were often isolated

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geographically, and under strict rules about the kind of contacts they could have with the surrounding community, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the socialization that adolescents received at them had a life-shaping influence on their choice of career, their political views, their friendships, reading habits, their sporting and leisure pursuits, their dress, their speech, and way of life. Countless novels, autobiographies and biographies and films bear testimony to their indelible influence, none perhaps more movingly than the film Another Country, the story of the traitor and defector to the Soviet Union, Guy Burgess, who, even after years in his adopted homeland, could never quite give up the habits he had acquired at Eton. Class solidarity was apparently not one of them. One of the reasons for hesitating to accept public schools as socializing agents is that they are themselves rather heterogeneous and difficult to define. Sometimes, they include only boarding schools, sometimes only the Clarendon Nine, two of which were not predominantly boarding schools, sometimes the 200 odd members of the Headmasters’ Conference, and sometimes they also include direct grant schools which received public funds on condition that 25% of their places were reserved for holders of local authority scholarships.22 Sometimes they are even taken to include, as Guttsman did, all independent schools, that is the entire ‘non-maintained sector’, meaning all schools not controlled or funded by the state, even though these schools, as McKibbin observed, have ‘differed enormously in success, prestige, provision and independence.’23 However, if we ignore these differences and treat them as a bloc, it is clear that these schools differ in important respects from French grandes écoles and the Soviet communist party as a means of class formation. They did not select entrants on the threshold of the ruling class by criteria deemed relevant by its existing members, and do not appear to have provided them with relevant vocational training, or guaranteed them access to the ruling class, let alone lifetime membership of it.24 They selected their entrants by a rudimentary ‘common entrance’ examination administered at an early age, and thereafter did not continuously screen their pupils for diligence and academic ability. They seem to have been more concerned to provide them with the manners of gentlemen rather than skills specific to their future tasks as members of the ruling class, unless mandatory team sports be counted as such. It does not seem likely, therefore, that they could have served quite as well as socializing agents of the ruling class as the special party schools for members of the Soviet nomenklatura or the French grandes écoles. Mack, the great historian of these schools, must be counted among the sceptics of their class-forming potential. He cautioned against exaggerating their impact, and wondered whether the ‘traits of the upper classes’ that they were frequently thought to have produced might not have been ‘either inherited, produced at home or acquired in later life.’25 Wilkinson, by con-

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trast, thought they were extremely effective socializing agencies, and subtitled his perceptive analysis of public school life, ‘a comparative study of the making of rulers’. However, most of his examples of the public schools’ contribution to ruling as such, were drawn from the colonial service. None refer to their old boys ruling in industry and trade, a rather serious lacuna if they were also to rule at home.26 His references to their intended and real contribution to British life refer to their encouragement of an ethic of public service, and to the ideal of a gentleman, which were surely not exclusive to the ruling class, and were just as appropriate for those entering the professions, which appear in fact to have been the most common destination for their pupils, though there is no evidence to prove the point. While Guttsman was persuaded, in 1969, that there was a ruling class, he continuously referred to the public schools as recruited from, and for, the middle class, not from and for an upper or ruling class. Orwell was an old Etonian and while he was also convinced there was a ruling class, insisted that he himself was middle class, or as he once put it when trying to give his precise class location, a member ‘of the lower upper-middle class.’27 Perhaps, therefore, we might be more accurately say that the public schools provided a peculiarly advantageous starting-point for entry to the ruling class, rather than an entry credential, or initial socialization for it. The advantages of this starting point appear to have been greatest when the vast majority of school leavers had no secondary school credentials at all, and to have steadily declined as secondary and university education expanded. A 1972 analysis of a national sample of the adult population, the majority of whom must have left school prior to World War II found ‘that school type made a substantial difference to occupational attainment even after controlling for qualifications’. However, when Heath and Cheung conducted a similar analysis of the 17,000 or so children born in the week March 3rd–8th 1958, who left school in mid to late 1970s, they found that school attended had no measurable impact on an individual’s occupation. They observed that the ‘notion that the old school tie brings major benefits is one of Britain’s favourite myths about itself, but we have failed to detect any evidence that the old school tie brought positive advantages to the NCDS cohort’ that is up to the time of their analysis in 1996.28 It would therefore seem that the public schools’ greatest contribution to the integration of elites, and to the formation of an upper class, was made over the several generations between the decline of the aristocracy, and the rise of mass secondary and tertiary education, and more specifically from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. The second possibility, that these elites are integrated as a class by their wealth alone, seems most plausible if one accepts that financial capital is the sole or primary source of political and social power, an assumption that we had reason to question when considering both the nomenklatura and the grand corps. Those who have been persuaded that wealth alone could

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create a ruling class used to argue that the financial elite of the City of London was the successor of the land-holding aristocracy and had formed a new English and British ruling class, or at least its core.29 Many sons of the aristocracy found acceptable employment in the City, and it also seems to have been well co-ordinated with some of the other elites. It has therefore usually figured at the centre of sociological analyses of the ruling class. In 1959, Lupton and Wilson reported that a high proportion of 422 leading figures in the City had attended elite public schools, that their kin ties included senior politicians and civil servants, that a considerable proportion of them had served in the military, usually in elite army regiments, and that, if they attended a university at all, it was almost always either Oxford or Cambridge. A sizeable minority also belonged to London clubs, where they could meet, and maintain their links with the administrative and political elites, or with one political party at least.30 Sampson’s impressionistic account corroborated the importance of family and school in the City’s elite, and noted that a significant proportion were either old or new aristocrats. Whitley’s more systematic analysis of City institutions found that little had changed by 1973.31 When, however, it is compared with the Soviet nomenklatura or range of powers and positions at the disposal of, or accessible to, French corpsards, the claims that the City of London’s elite were the successors of the aristocracy, and the core of the twentieth century ruling class, seem less than persuasive. Both the Russian and French, after all, occupied and used the apparatus of the state as their own collective resource, and the range and penetration of their powers over the rest of society seems far greater than that of the British financial elite, even when we look back to its heyday prior to World War I. To begin with, the British financial elite was always sharply divided, culturally and personally, from the leaders of manufacturing industry, the gulf between them being routine subject of commentary and of sociological analysis, and at times of political debate.32 One does not have to be a Marxist, to find it difficult to conceive of the core of a ruling class that does not incorporate the leaders of manufacturing industry. Bourdieu placed particular emphasis on the intellectual capital of the French ‘state nobility’, but finance capitalists of the City of London seem to have been happy to remain intellectually undercapitalized over a very long period. Only a minority attended university, if they did, their education was not related at all to their professional activities, and they were seldom persuaded to enlist the intellectual capital of the universities by tied donations to establish schools to prepare students for careers in the City. They seem, in fact, to have been wholly satisfied with their traditional practicebased training. Even their social capital, accumulated at public schools and in the army, and honed in their London clubs, seems in hindsight, to have been less than effective, whether as a ruling class, or even in their own specialist domain. One cannot help but notice the curious fact that the

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century over which their were supposedly ruling coincides with the transformation of Britain from being the most unequal capitalist society, as we noticed it was in 1875, to being among the most egalitarian, as it had become by 1975. Perhaps this was mere coincidence, or maybe they were rather inattentive to what Williamson called the ‘unambiguous, pronounced and pervasive’ egalitarian levelling taking place on their watch. Moreover, the moment the world they controlled was opened to international market forces, in the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986, which this supposed ruling class proved powerless to resist, they were shown to be mere boutique owners, and were swept away by large foreign financial institutions, and along with their old school or regimental ties, and their upper class manners. But this is a later part of the story. The more important point here is that, even in its heyday, financial leaders lacked the power, or apparently the desire, to dominate other institutions and the way of life of society at large, as its aristocratic predecessors had effortlessly done, and as the Soviet nomenklatura was able to do, and to a lesser extent French corpsards still do. In 2002, the argument that Britain has an upper class with ‘money at its core’, that its ‘central members are capitalists, very wealthy individuals’ who have ‘for the most part inherited their money’, was restated by Roberts, unfortunately without any supporting evidence, apparently in the belief it was self-evident.33 This upper class, he claimed, has a pronounced tendency to inter-marry, and whilst it is ‘recruiting new blood constantly’, it is also ‘cautious over admission to its inner circles’, so ‘outsiders can find it difficult to obtain admission.’ It is, he claimed, ‘unusually well-integrated’, ‘extremely well-organized’, indeed ‘contemporary Britain’s best example of a well-knit class’, and its members’ ‘personal networks interlock’, so that ‘the entire class is bound in an exclusive system of interpersonal relationships.’ In his view, ‘the clearest of all class divisions’ separates them from the rest of the population. Social and sporting events enable the members of this class to ‘meet all the people they need to know.’ He mentions grouse, partridge and pheasant shooting, stag and fox hunting, the Derby, Grand National, Wimbledon, Henley, Cowes, especially their royal enclosures, as well as conferences of the Institute of Directors, the Confederation of British Industry, and London clubs, none of which he appears to have attended. His picture is slightly marred by his admission that although this upper class is ‘currently the most powerful of classes’, indeed a ruling class, it is the middle class that ‘supplies nearly all our current members of Parliament.’ However, it does not, he explains, exercise political power directly, and when members of it deal with government personnel, they ‘are most likely to be speaking for their entire class’ and ‘can expect its views to be heeded’ and ‘its wishes to be decisive, whether the issue is joining the euro, setting statutory minimum pay, a ceiling on working hours, parental leave or trade union rights.’ Moreover, it is also a ‘submerged’ class that ‘has no need to explain and justify itself in person’, since its power is ‘consolidated

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by its ability to act as a class’, and since the ‘media are mostly in upper class ownership’, and ‘the owners are accustomed to seeing their views in print, (though usually without their names attached).’ Perhaps in sociology courses at the University of Liverpool, where Roberts teaches, the solidarity of the upper class might be self-evident, but the rest of us would like evidence, and it seems difficult to find. For instance, some of the best available information about a small sample of this supposed class with ‘money at its core’ the pinnacle of it, is to be found in the Sunday Times Rich List of the 1,000 wealthiest people in Britain.34 The 2004 list recorded that less than quarter (241) had inherited their wealth, and only 33 of the 1,000 were hereditary peers. On the face of things, it is difficult to discover what the class bond between those on this list might have been, since a significant minority are foreign-born and educated, (in the 2006 list some 16%) and apart from property owners, they include the self-made entrepreneurs from almost every kind of industry, packaging, fitness clubs, double-glazing, car parks, steel, on-line betting, a large number of pop stars, entertainers and sportsmen, a novelist, as well as denizens of the City, hedge fund managers, and 12 employees of Goldman Sachs. It is certainly not self-evident why these people should form a class, or have a common view on the euro, or anything else, or why they should have any common interests in conflict with that of other members of the population. Presumably they all prefer an efficient, growing and full-employment economy, but large proportions of the electorate seem to share that preference. Roberts suggested that it differed from the working class because the latter, in his view, preferred ‘matters to be subject to collective agreement’, has a ‘yearning for the security of a planned economy and desire to limit the scope of the market by guaranteeing certain basic social rights and gearing social services – health and education – entirely to need or merit.’ Contrary to Roberts, much evidence suggests that Britain’s elites are not ‘unusually well-integrated’, ‘extremely well-organized’ or well-knit’, but in fact inhabit rather separate worlds. In 1975, for instance, Christoph commented on the distinctive ‘segregation’ of British legislative and civil service elites, both from one another and from other elites. He noticed, for instance, ‘the virtual exclusion from the top political executive of persons from other walks of life, such as business, law, technology, trade unionism or academia. Whilst members of parliament ‘may have started in other occupations … by the time they have become ministers they have lost touch with developments in them…. Direct recruitment (of ministers) from outside parliament is extremely rare, and its results not considered so persuasive as to warrant revision of long-standing convention.’35 Kavanagh and Richards similarly noticed that the professionalization of political careers, the rise of the fulltime career politician, has ‘produced a fragmentation in elites’ in Britain. They observed that ‘to do well … MPs are best advised to enter the House of Commons early, say before 35’, and without explaining the source of

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their data, they added that ‘a choice of first occupation … may be influenced by the anticipation of a political career. In 1997, one-tenth of MPs came from a para-political occupation, such as employment in party headquarters, a spell as special advisor to a politician or work with a think tank or policy body. The figure would be higher, they added, if we included employment in such occupations as media, public relations and lobbying.’36 This trend to professionalization of politics, to lifetime political careers, is probably not unique to Britain, but in Britain it appears to have entailed the separation of political elite from other elites whereas in our three other societies they remained integrated: in Soviet Russia because socialism entailed political control of economic activity, in France because of pantouflage, and in the United States because of the spoils system and the mobility between political and corporate elites that it has promoted.37 In Britain, the prior professionalization of the civil service seems, by contrast, to have inhibited integration with the political or economic elite. Civil servants imposed rules on themselves which prevented them taking part in any political activities. Christoph noted that, by contrast with either the French or the American, the British civil service elite ‘does not serve as an instrument for systematically recruiting talent into other elites, whether they be members of parliament, political executives, local government officials, or managers in the private sector … few civil servants trade places in Whitehall for ones elsewhere’.38 Kavanagh and Richards observed that ‘the difference of temperament between politician and civil servant, arising from different attitudes to partisanship, expertise and personal publicity’ is ‘perhaps more important’ than any formal rules.39 They did not say whether their common public school backgrounds helped to bridge this ‘difference of temperament’. The industrial elite seems to have been especially segregated from the rest, mainly because, until recently, its new members were largely drawn from those with practice-based training and experience rather than elite educational qualifications. Granick brought together six studies of the background of senior managers in British industry through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and it was on the basis of this evidence that, as we noted at the beginning of this investigation, he decided that Britain was the most egalitarian and open of the industrial societies he studied. ‘Education’, he observed, ‘serves in only a minimal fashion as a preselector of viable candidates for British top management …. only 7 to 14% of the top executives have a truly elitist university education, in contrast to three-quarters of the Administrative Class of the civil service, and only a heavily overlapping 11% of business executives have an elitist secondary education.’40 Chairmen of the companies may have been public school alumni, but their senior executives evidently were not. In 1975 Fidler conducted an unusual study of the manufacturing elite in that he interviewed a sample of 144 chairmen and chief executives of large British companies, rather than the standard method of cataloguing their

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assets and directorships. He discovered that these manufacturing leaders did not see themselves as members of a ruling or upper class at all. Nearly all of them (84%) saw themselves ‘as part of a largish middle class’.41 Apart from participation in hospital and university boards, they took little part in local government affairs. They were somewhat more likely to participate in national bodies of various kinds, including business-government committees, boards of nationalized industries, and quangos, quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations, but only eight sat in the House of Lords, and three in the House of Commons. Whilst they were inclined to think that their predecessors had participated more in both local and national government, Fidler could only conclude that ‘The command posts of … industry and the state are not held by the same men.’42 In passing he noticed another rift. These business leaders had virtually no links at all with the military elite. His business leaders also gave their views of the power structure of Britain – as it seemed to them in 1975. Most thought that the government and civil service controlled business, and were inclined to think that the political power of private capital was minimal. In their view, trade union leaders had more power, since they could veto government action, while they themselves could only hope to influence government policy.43 Their only recourse in the face of a government decision they disliked was, they said, to publicize its adverse effects for business. They did not feel they had any other means of applying pressure. Whatever may once have been the case, personal contacts were not the basis of a close relationship between government and business. Private clubs were insignificant, and only four of the sample of 144 mentioned them. Formal pressure via the Confederation of British Industry was considered highly unsatisfactory, because the CBI had the impossible task of representing all businesses.44 Trade associations were rather better in this respect, but the most widely used form of contact was what Fidler called the ‘direct semi-formal contact’, an invitation to a minister to discuss matters over lunch. This was, however, only possible for the very largest companies, and the chief executives of these companies told Fidler that they were then most reluctant to be seen lobbying selfishly for their own companies.45 Comparative network analyses of interlocking directorships of financial and industrial businesses in ten countries a decade later raised doubts whether British businessmen even had a high degree of solidarity amongst themselves.46 They reported that France had the highest proportion of multiple directors of the ten and Britain the lowest, and that Britain also had the loosest, least integrated, least centralized network of directorships of all ten of the countries studied. ‘The British network stood out’, Ziegler concluded, ‘for its low level of interlocking’. The ‘cumulation of directorships and strength of inter-corporate links, as measured by their multiplicity, were both extremely low. Moreover, while ‘the American network displayed a

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similar structure’ when compared with the other eight countries, it was nevertheless ‘rather more densely connected’ than the British.47 Comparative research over recent decades therefore supports the view that Britain’s elites have been, distinctively segregated from one another.48 There is, however, another kind of evidence to which we may turn to determine the degree of elite integration. In examining both the formation of the French ruling class and the possibility of an American counterpart, we tried to observe a ruling class in action, over time, by its deeds, by ‘issue areas’, and by outcomes favourable to it. In France, we observed both the long-term relationship between political and economic elites, and relatively recent ‘outcomes’, such as the pioneering of e-commerce by Minitel that rested on ‘collusion’ or collaboration between them. In the United States, by contrast, we noted how the political elite, as a result of overwhelming electoral pressure, had been forced into a permanently adversarial relationship with the economic elite, and for that reason, among others, were not persuaded that they had together formed a ruling class. We may now conduct an analogous investigation of the British political and economic elites, in the hope that institutional and policy outcomes might enable us infer, or even observe, links between them – resting on either the old school tie or simply their wealth – that would entitle us to conclude that they were part of a ruling class.

‘Issue areas’ as a measure of elite integration Since the relationship between the state and private industry in Britain has followed an altogether different course from that of either France or the United States, one cannot expect to find ‘issue areas’ which exactly match theirs. Regulation of industry in Britain began in the early nineteenth century, and was not intended, as regulation was in the United States, to enforce competition between businesses, but only to improve conditions for those least able to bargain with employers for themselves, notably women and children in mines and factories, or to protect the environment. Electoral pressure in the two countries pressed in quite different directions.49 Regulation to preserve market competition is a much more recent concern in Britain, and never in fact appears to have been propelled by electoral pressure. It may be said to have begun with the establishment of the Monopolies Commission in 1948. Industrial policies, comparable to the French, other than those adopted during, or as a result of, the two World Wars, were an even more recent innovation, and proved rather short-lived, being adopted only over the years 1964–1979, in the interval one might say between the loss of faith in public ownership and the re-discovery of the virtues of markets. However, we may take these two policies – the regulation of market competition after 1948 and the industrial policies during the World Wars and between 1964–1979 – as occasions when the relationship between economic

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and political elites in Britain most closely resembled their American and French counterparts respectively, and consider whether they provide evidence of their integration and therefore of a class relationship. The Monopolies Commission, established shortly after World War II, which later became the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC), was the main agent of British competition policy for the next 50 years, and its work has been minutely, and masterfully, documented over the 50 years from 1948–1998 by Wilks.50 Over this period, other bodies, such as the Restrictive Practices Court, the Prices and Incomes Board and the Price Commission were at times created to promote competition policy. These sometimes adopted a different, and more adversarial approach towards industry, but the first was sidelined, and the second and third both abolished. The MMC, by contrast was ‘the great survivor’, and as Wilks observed, its ‘culture and procedures seem to have passed the basic Darwinian test of evolutionary success.’51 He summarized his findings by identifying what he called the ‘genetic code’ of regulation in Britain over the second half of the twentieth century. Its main components were that regulation was bipartisan, that it left considerable discretion with civil servants, that it was built on a voluntaristic and cooperative relationship with industry, (and altogether excluded the courts and third party actions), was therefore non-punitive, and finally, was based on an ad hoc interpretation of the public interest. As a result, British competition policy, in Wilks’ words, preserved ‘a proper sphere of autonomy for business’, and allowed industry a high degree of ‘self-regulation’. After more than 400 investigations, the Commission had still never codified rules about the acceptable and the unacceptable features of monopolies and mergers. For Wilks, ‘the central paradox’ in its history is that the members never committed to paper an agreed definition of the ‘public interest’, though they always acted, he thought, as if ‘they know it when they see it.’52 Generations of politicians and civil servants working under an unwritten constitution, had, of course, thought exactly the same thing. This ‘genetic code’ was a world away from the principled, punitive and adversarial regulation of private industry in the United States. Since the same contrast is observable over the history of environmental regulation in the two countries, it is reasonable to infer a fundamental difference in the relationship between the political and economic elites in the two countries.53 And since we earlier argued that the adversarial and punitive American regulatory approach limited the possibilities of class collusion between American political and economic elites, we might assume that the MMC would allow or even encourage the exact opposite. Its reluctance to impose strict rules of evidence in its hearings, to sub poena witnesses or even to admit lawyers, its preference for ‘site visits’ and private discussions with employers, and for industrial self-regulation, seem precisely the kind of procedures in which class connections and sympathies, and relaxed and affable relationships

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fostered by ‘the old school tie’ and club connections, could swing the outcome of the decision-making processes of the Commission. In short, we might assume that the genetic code was a class code. Wilks’ evidence does not, for a second, favour such an interpretation. He noted a certain distance between the members of the Commission and the leaders of the industries they examined, and never once implied that the barristers and academics serving part-time on the MMC panels which examined cases were ever in the pockets of the industrialists whose firms were the subject of their investigations, or that the industrialists ever made any attempt to ‘capture’ them. He referred only to the ‘mutual respect and accommodation’ between the two sides, which never compromised, or shed the least doubt on the independence of the Commission. Their reports did not, on the face of things, suggest any shared class strategy, unless one takes the view that the absence of recommendations of heavy fines or prison sentences is proof enough. Perhaps the shared class interest, and the old school tie, became significant at a higher level, beyond the scope of Wilks’ investigation, when civil servants and politicians who decided what to do about MMC recommendations. As it happens, when we consider the attempts to implement industrial policies in the wake of World Wars, and between 1964–1979 we can consider the chances of class collaboration at this higher level, since such policies necessarily involve close and continuous relationships between chief executives and senior managers of selected firms and ministers and senior officials of government departments. The first example concerns the attempt of the British government after World War I, to advance the research, development and production of light alloys and in particular aluminium, which were the prerequisite of the construction of all-metal airframes, and the foundation therefore of the modern aircraft industry.54 A similar effort was being made by the U.S. government. Both governments had benefited from their inspections of German research laboratories, but after the war, the allies became rivals. Graham compared their efforts, together with leading firms in the two countries, to develop these alloys for aircraft production. Her evidence showed that the research of the main British contender, Vickers, proceeded in complete ignorance of government research at the National Physical Laboratory, as well as from academic research, and that of other private companies. There was not the least sign that class connections facilitated the collaboration of this major armaments manufacturer with the government. On the contrary, it was the absence of any such collaboration that was the main reason, in Graham’s view, for Vickers’ relative failure. By contrast, the much smaller and later-starting, but ultimately more successful, American contender, Alcoa, had all kinds of continuous relationships with the Department of Defense, and with each of the armed services, as well as with academic research institutions. It was therefore the beneficiary of a

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steady flow of information from these sources, which was supplemented and reinforced by the mobility of personnel between the civilian and military state agencies, academia and its own research laboratories. In Graham’s view, this was the main reason for Alcoa’s ultimate success. The second case study concerns the efforts of the British government after World War II, to reap the benefits of Britain’s wartime lead in the development of computers, by creating a commercially-successful computer industry under the auspices of a government funding and co-ordinating agency, the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC). This was headed, as it happened, by an astonishingly far-sighted hereditary peer, who would figure in any account of the British ruling class.55 His efforts, and those of the NRDC, however, came to naught, since the interested firms declined to convey their real concerns or real plans to him or to his officials, and failed to establish close and trusting relationships with other government agencies or departments engaged in related research, or with the military. For its part, the government remained impartial and aloof. It had an ‘obsession’, as Hendry put it, with being ‘fair’ to all firms. In the event, this meant that all of them were kept equally in the dark about research which the government was itself conducting or financing elsewhere, with disastrous consequences for the programme’s stated aim, the development of a computer industry in Britain. Neither of these case studies suggests that the British ruling class was particularly cohesive, or that the public school education, which many of the leading players involved had doubtless experienced, helped them to recognize a shared class interest in advancing the cause of particular firms, or of British industry as a whole. And there is no reason to think that these two examples are isolated exceptions. Reynolds and Coates reviewed many industrial policies since World War II, including those during the period 1964–1979 when governments often attempted to follow French example. Their work is a catalogue of failures, which is why the Thatcher governments turned vehemently against such policies. Reynolds and Coates found them to be ‘voluntarist, never directional’, ‘reactive and passive rather than strategic and anticipatory’, ‘limited in scope, and largely self-defeating, being too rushed and ill-thought out to be successful.’56 Their failure tends to support the conclusions of the aluminium and computer case studies, namely that industrial policies have not worked in Britain because of the absence of the kind of close and continuous collaboration between the political and economic elites that one would expect to find if these elites had a strong class solidarity and were part of a ruling class. Their evidence, therefore, like that of Wilks of the MMC, tends to support the argument that British elites have lacked the cohesion, convertibility and polyvalence of their Soviet and French counterparts. Those two countries modernized with integrated political and economic elites, in Britain modernity meant that they became more differentiated.

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Had the English aristocracy been overthrown or displaced in one go, especially a violent go, it might have been easier for a new ruling class to emerge, since their successors might then have been prompted to justify themselves and recreate political, administrative and educational institutions more in keeping with their own values, and these might have provided the basis for a cohesive and well-defined ruling class.57 In the event, the ruling aristocracy was progressively displaced by a rather disparate collection of elites, drawn disproportionately from public schools to be sure, but having been socialized by varied and distinctive kinds of practice-based training, and advancing into elite positions by different career routes. They therefore tended to form and to inhabit rather separate worlds. In all probability, one of the reasons why British politicians have been rather less prone to corruption than either French or American politicians is that close relationships and inter-elite careers are less common, and hence the personal obligations and contacts that facilitate corruption are also less common. In the end, therefore we have failed to identify a ruling or upper class that has succeeded the aristocracy, merely rather heterogeneous elites. Their manners, and accents, and their leisure pursuits no doubt owe much to the public school education that many of them shared, and a fair proportion may end up in the House of Lords, but these do not seem quite sufficient to form a class interest or class consciousness. Apart perhaps from a few sociologists, English people seem to have had the same difficulty in identifying a ruling class. They have therefore colloquially used a variety of terms to describe elites with exceptional power, wealth or status such as ‘the establishment’, ‘upper class’, the ‘political class’, the ‘great and the good’, ‘the chattering classes’, or ‘fat cats’. Each of these has enjoyed a certain brief currency, and caught one or other of the characteristics of one or other of these elites, but no settled collective term to embrace them all has yet caught on.

The middle class organizes in corporate form Ever since the landholding aristocracy began to be displaced by rival elites, the pinnacle of the class system has been losing something of its clarity and coherence, but the system survived and flourished nonetheless, because the middle and working class were over the same period organizing and defining themselves as classes. Our next step therefore is to trace how they did this, and we must begin, as we did with the aristocracy, with the distinctive relationship between the state and civil society. While the aristocracy may have taken the leading role in defining and legitimating that relationship during the Glorious Revolution, these same events are also the key to understanding the later emergence and organization of both the middle and working classes. Besides securing for the indefinite future the rights of the corporate institution of the aristocracy and gentry, which is what Parliament

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then was, the Glorious Revolution simultaneously protected and legitimized the corporate institutions around which both the middle and working classes were eventually to coalesce and organize. The aristocracy was therefore the path-breaker and the other two classes followed in its footsteps. The middle class is sometimes presented as a nineteenth century invention, probably because the term itself then came to be commonly used. The Great Reform Act of 1832 had brought its members into the political nation, and institutionalized their separation from the non-voting working class, and the Anti-Corn Law League in the early 1840s suggested it had political clout. It also then became increasingly more noticeable, both culturally and numerically. In fact, however, the middle class was of much more ancient origin, and had begun to emerge long before the Glorious Revolution. Gretton pointed out that the charters granted to guilds in the twelfth century ‘opened the door to a certain independence of the lords’ for urban merchants and craftsmen in several cities, most notably in London, and by the fourteenth century there can no longer be ‘any doubt of the existence of a class, distinctly separable from the rest in its aims, its pursuits, its methods, its purposes and its share of the national existence.’ Merchants and craftsmen were joined by professionals, displaying what he thought was the ‘characteristic quality of development’ of the middle class, ‘individualism protected by privileged combination.’58 For many generations, however, there was only one significant ‘privileged combination’, the four inns of court. They emerged in the mid-fourteenth century when legal practitioners who appeared in the royal courts in London had converted four of the inns in which they met, dined and discussed legal issues into permanent, residential, self-governing communal institutions. With the support of the judges, though without any express legal or royal authority, these inns had assumed responsibility for training and admitting those who wished to join them and practice in the royal courts. Some time later, physicians in London formed a similar corporate body, but it was only in 1518 that their informal meetings were granted a royal charter which authorized them to perform similar regulatory functions. English monarchs seem to have lacked the inclination and incentive, as well as the administrative apparatus, to routinely regulate the affairs of the guilds or ‘companies’, as guilds with royal charters came to be called, or the professional bodies. They made no effort to try and improve the quality of guild workmanship, or to interfere with their forms of training, and apart from the royal armouries, did not establish any royal institutions comparable to the manufactures royales in France.59 Nor was there any equivalent to the bureau des parties casuelles which sold guild masters their own status and rank, and converted them into quasi-officials.60 English guilds did not, however, escape various kinds of personal, ad hoc royal interference. Once English monarchs hit on the idea of increasing their incomes by granting favoured courtiers and ‘projectors’ a monopoly of the trade or manufacture

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of a specified product, in return for a share of the promised returns, they began to grant personal monopolies that frequently infringed on the jurisdictions of long-established City of London companies.61 It is unclear who was the first to do this, but the number of these personal monopolies greatly increased in the later part of Elizabeth’s reign. In response to repeated complaints from the City, themselves an indication of a shared class interest, she expressed her dismay and promised to abandon the practice in her Golden Speech of 1601.62 James I evidently did not feel bound by her promise, and resumed the granting of charters to favoured courtiers, until 1624 when he too felt obliged to respond to the hostility they aroused.63 London merchants, it seems, drew a sharp distinction between artificial, royally-created monopolies granted to a single individual, and those granted to groups, like themselves, earning their living in a particular line of trade or manufacturing, and organized as a company or guild. As James did not feel bound by Elizabeth, so Charles I did not feel bound by his father’s promise, and the chartering of monopolies to royal favourites therefore resumed, and even increased, during his 11 years of ‘thorough’ government without Parliaments from 1629 to 1640. When he was finally compelled in 1640, to recall Parliament, to raise funds for an army to deal with the rebellious Scots, his grants of monopoly were one of the main items on the list of grievances which the Long Parliament presented to him in its ‘Grand Remonstrance’. In large measure, they explain why London was so strongly for the Parliamentary cause. Many of the individual monopolies ‘managed by gentlemen to the exclusion of traders’ were revoked before the outbreak of the Civil War, but the charters of corporatelyorganized monopolies were frequently renewed under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, despite the vociferous complaints of those who were excluded or suffered from them.64 The issue of corporate autonomy of chartered bodies was, however, far from settled, and was reopened by the writs of quo warranto issued by Charles II which initiated the second and concluding stage of the English Revolution, and to which we have already referred. Whilst Charles’ primary aim was, no doubt, to control the selection of members of Parliament, his writs were served on the City of London and its livery and trading companies, a host of chartered bodies in other cities, the professions, the Royal College of Physicians and the London Society of Apothecaries and the Company of Barber-Surgeons, and even some chartered schools.65 His attack on Parliament, the corporate body of the aristocracy and gentry, was therefore also an attack on the corporate institutions of their inferiors, the emergent middle class of merchants and professionals. As far as they were concerned, everything hinged on the fate of the writ issued in January 1682 against the City of London, the most powerful, and most ancient, chartered body of all. The hearing in the King’s Bench did not begin until February 1683. Defense counsel joined in a demurrer, which meant that

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the suit would be tried as a matter of law before judges alone, rather than as a matter of fact before a jury, which in hindsight was an unwise decision. The city’s counsel seems to have been calculating that their fellow lawyers would better withstand royal pressure than carefully vetted laymen of a jury.66 He argued, echoing Coke’s celebrated words on corporations in the Sutton’s Hospital case, that the Crown could not take action against chartered bodies because they are ‘invisible, immortal, cannot be outlawed, cannot commit Treason or Felony, cannot be excommunicate, hath no Soul, cannot do Fealty, cannot be imprisoned, are not subject to Imbecility or Death.’ Counsel for the King replied that ‘if charters be not forfeit, there would be so many little commonwealths, by themselves independent of the Crown, in defiance of it, little republics would spring up all over the Kingdom which would not be conducive to good government.’67 In October, 1683, the judgement went in favour of the Crown. And once the mighty City of London had fallen, many other chartered bodies, including those of the medical professions, decided to surrender their charters immediately, even before they were challenged in the courts in the hope of obtaining more favourable consideration from the King.68 The re-issued and ‘remodelled’ charters commonly purged existing officers whose loyalty to the king was in doubt, and made clear that in the future all the elected wardens, assistants, clerks and other officers of the companies would require royal approval, leaving little doubt that the goal of both Charles and James was to subordinate all chartered bodies to royal authority.69 As if to emphasize the beginning of a new relationship with the crown, James whimsically decided that the name of the College of Physicians should be changed to the Faculty of Physic of London, borrowed from the French.70 In all Charles and James issued some 239 writs of quo warranto, and though they were the most important means of extending their control over corporate bodies, there were others. Some were controlled by the appointment of so-called ‘regulators’. The universities were monitored by means of a special commission to exercise visitorial jurisdiction, which in 1687 decided to appoint a new vice-chancellor at Oxford, and to replace in their entirety the master and fellows of Magdalen College.71 The inns of court had no charter as we have observed. Their autonomy rested on custom ‘time out of mind’, but they were included in this new framework of government by the appointment of large numbers of King’s Counsel who were directly responsible to the King, and who the inns were forced to grant precedence on their governing bodies, their benches.72 The means therefore varied, but the aim was always the same: to create the institutional infrastructure of royal absolutism, or as one historian put it, ‘the seventeenth century equivalent of a modern dictatorship’.73 While their father had simply sought to assert his absolute rights, Charles II and James II were determined to create permanent institutional foundations for absolute rule. Charles could hardly have been more explicit about his purpose. After keeping the representa-

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tives of the Grocers’ Company kicking their heels for a considerable time, the king’s secretary emerged to tell them that ‘the King was not disposed to deprive them of their property or powers but desired only a regulation of the governing part, so that his majesty might for the future have in himself a moving power of any officer therein for mismanagement, in the same way and method that they themselves now used, and claimed to have power derivable from the crown.’74 As opposition to his rule mounted, James recognized his disastrous mistake, and in mid-October 1688 issued a proclamation restoring all charters whose surrender had not been enrolled, and returning others that had in their original form. But it was too late to save his throne.75 After William and Mary had accepted the Declaration of Rights, and Parliament felt reasonably sure of its own rights, it turned to secure those of the City of London in the most emphatic terms. In 1689 it ‘disinterred, reviled and comprehensively overturned’ the Kings Bench decision of 1683, which it declared to be ‘illegal and arbitrary’. It restored the ‘mayor and commonalty and citizens to their ancient liberties’ declaring that these ‘should never henceforward be forfeited for any cause whatsoever’, and ‘could only be dissolved by the death, or refusal to act, of its members’, and extended the annulment to all the City’s livery companies.76 This is as close as Parliament came to a statutory declaration of the rights of corporate bodies. All the other municipal, trading, and professional chartered bodies were left to sort out for themselves, often through litigation, whether their ‘liberties and privileges’ derived from their original, surrendered, remodelled or restored charter. The new king was, therefore, never legally deprived of the right to challenge the government of chartered bodies, but the significant fact is that neither William nor any subsequent monarch or parliament ever sought to assert a right to nominate, approve or purge the officers of any chartered body. Levin pointed out that this left ‘borough corporations … virtually free of all central control’ and enabled ‘corrupt and virtually unassailable pockets of power’ to establish themselves in many towns and cities. It also allowed professional bodies to run their affairs much as they wished. Before the Glorious Revolution, every monarch had felt free to instruct the inns of court on a variety of matters – to expel Catholics, or attorneys, to appoint a certain preacher, or to improve their dress or their military preparedness, and so forth.77 After the Glorious Revolution, no monarch ever tried to do so, nor did Parliament, and it was therefore a decisive turning point, perhaps the decisive turning point, in the history of the relationship between state and civil society in England. Parliament, the corporate body of the aristocracy and gentry, may be its best known beneficiary, but the city of London and its companies, the inns of court, the Royal College of Physicians, the Company of BarberSurgeons, the Society of Apothecaries, the chartered boroughs and all the other ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics’ in the kingdom, whether corrupt or honest, benefited equally from it.

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For some decades thereafter, barristers and physicians remained alone, solitary, self-governing, proud and exclusive little professional communities, disturbed only by the activities of practitioners of inferior adjacent occupations, especially when they decided that they too would like to protect themselves from market competition, and obtain similar status and rights of corporate self-government. As far as we can tell, the new pretenders usually proceeded in much the same manner as barristers and physicians before them, that is to say, they met in inns, hostelries or dining places, alerted fellow practitioners whom they considered of comparable skill and respectability, agreed on ethical rules of practice and a form of self-government, chose their leaders, and then approached the Privy Council or Parliament for a charter which would formally grant them powers comparable to those of the two ancient professions. The process was sometimes contentious, and usually lengthy. Decades and often generations might pass between the first informal meetings of practitioners and the grant of a royal charter, during which rival or geographically-separated groups of practitioners could come together, and the members of existing chartered bodies could satisfy themselves about the competence, probity and jurisdiction of the newcomers, since vociferous opposition from an existing chartered body could easily sabotage any petition to the Privy Council. Surgeons were already members of a corporate body, the Company of Barber-Surgeons, so in their case it was first necessary to break away and form their own college, which they did in 1745. They only overcame all the misgivings and objections of physicians and obtained a royal charter in 1800. Civil engineers, though organized in the late eighteenth century, were granted one in 1818, and solicitors, an elite of whom had been organized in London since 1739, had to wait for the best part of a century to overcome five centuries of obloquy accumulated by attorneys. They were granted a charter in 1831. Architects followed in 1837, pharmacists in 1843, veterinary surgeons in 1844, mechanical engineers in 1847, actuaries in 1848, accountants in 1880 and surveyors in 1881. After this date, the ‘mass’ mobilization of the English professions began. ‘Approximately a dozen new associations appeared in each decade between 1880 and 1910, and from 1910 to 1950 the formation rate of new associations increased to roughly two dozen in each decade.’78 Only a minority of them received royal charters. Others were incorporated, while yet others had to settle for a lesser form of recognition, perhaps only permission to drop the legally required ‘ltd’ from their title to distinguish them from commercial corporations. While members of Parliament occasionally found fault with the way one or other profession exercised their powers, they evidently saw no risk in delegating powers to numerous ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics’, and remained entirely sympathetic to self-regulation. Indeed, they seem to have considered the professions as scarcely less entitled to the protection of the unwritten constitution than Parliament itself, a view they

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continued to hold until late in the twentieth century, and the election of Mrs Thatcher. Although later professions modelled themselves on the two originals, barristers and physicians, their circumstances meant that few of them could hope to achieve anything like the same degree of autonomy, selfgovernment, and control over their claimed jurisdictions, or obtain the same high status. However, they usually obtained comparable powers, and tried, in their differing circumstances, to behave in similar ways. They usually insisted, for instance, on a mandatory period of practice-based training before awarding their own credentials, their own ‘call to the bar’ to those they deemed worthy of admission, and like the bar they usually ignored the universities and their degrees. They also staked out jurisdictions, promulgated codes of ethics, and collectively sought to uphold their status by distinguishing themselves from those performing contiguous but more routine clerical and mechanical tasks they deemed less honourable.79 Civil engineers therefore distinguished themselves from ‘mechanicals’, architects from builders, accountants and actuaries from book-keepers, surveyors from stewards, bailiffs and foremen, and bankers from cashiers. The professionalization of civil servants, to which we have already referred, deserves a moment’s attention since it illustrates the way in which an employed occupation which, for obvious reasons, could never assert a right to self-government comparable to those of the self-employed practitioners of the two ancient professions, was nonetheless able to mimic their behaviour in a setting that might seem to lead inevitably towards Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy. By the mid-nineteenth century, personal patronage, which had hitherto been the main method of recruitment to the service, was widely recognized to have made efficient working methods and organization impossible. In 1854, Northcote and Trevelyan were asked by Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to draw up a plan to eliminate it.80 They were not in the least impressed or influenced by the experience and bureaucratic structures of continental state administrations, nor needless to say by Jacksonian notions of democratic public administration in the United States. Their main inspiration was the Indian Civil Service, in which Trevelyan had served, and less explicitly perhaps, the ancient professions. Northcote was a barrister. They therefore concentrated on the selection of the topmost level of the service, the elite that might be compared with established professions, ignored ‘menial’ civil servants, and did not therefore try to define administrative principles for the service as a whole.81 Their main recommendation was that the elite of the service should be selected by an examination open to Oxford and Cambridge graduates or graduands, not because they expected or wanted either institution to provide any relevant training, but simply because they were the most likely sources of able and suitable candidates. Northcote and Trevelyan had almost nothing to say about the training their elite should receive after they had been selected, or the scope

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of their responsibilities, and they did not suggest any form of public or parliamentary scrutiny of their conduct. In other words, even though these new civil servants were part of the administration of the state, they were to be trusted to organize and conduct themselves much as if they too were a self-governing profession. In the century after the implementation of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in 1870, the evidence suggests this is exactly what the ‘first division clerks’ who passed the examinations and selection boards did. They, and their successors, known first as ‘the administrative class’, then the ‘unified grades’, and currently the ‘fast stream’, adapted to their own very distinctive work conditions behavioural norms and values similar to those of the ancient professions.82 They declined for instance, to institute any formal training process, and were long hostile to it. They thought one learned what was important on the job, not in a lecture hall, and by many accounts seem to have informally institutionalized a relationship similar to that between a university tutor and his tutee or a barrister and his pupil.83 They long declined to produce a code of ethics, and left newcomers to absorb insensibly the ethics of the service and its unwritten standards of conduct from the company of their seniors.84 They also defined and defended their own occupational ‘mystery’ or jurisdiction. This was, to quote Haldane’s celebrated definition, ‘the duty of investigation and thought, as preliminary to action’, meaning advising ministers about the translation of the policies of their government into practicable legislation and administration.85 Over this work jurisdiction, they claimed an absolute sovereignty and, again like other professions, resisted interference from their ‘clients’, which in their case primarily meant government ministers, who were not expected to involve themselves in internal departmental matters. They have been, and remain, still more reticent about revealing details of their internal workings, deliberations and disagreements to their other ‘clients’, that is, parliament and the public at large.86 Having secured their own jurisdiction, they correspondingly accepted, like most established professions, that they should not trespass on the jurisdictions of others. Hence – their selfimposed rules against becoming involved in party politics, either in their working or personal lives. In this respect, they probably made a decisive, though unacknowledged, contribution to the development of Britain’s unwritten constitution. Nor did they involve themselves excessively, in the tasks of their subordinates, which became known as the executive or clerical ‘classes’ of the service.87 They had, as Mrs Thatcher discovered to her disgust, little interest in managing their departments.88 No doubt, these subordinate classes came closer to bureaucratic forms of organization, though since the ‘first division clerks’ and their successors had little interest in directing and co-ordinating their work by conventional managerial techniques, the service developed as a hierarchically co-ordinated cluster of professional and semi-professional occupations, rather than as a bureaucracy.89 Most of the subordinate occupations were also trained

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on-the-job, also established their own distinct work jurisdictions, also had their own separate career ladders, so that promotion from one to another was akin to re-entering the service. Classes were typically organized in their own exclusive, professional associations.90 Professional ideals and professional forms of organization gave the British civil service a distinctive structure and a distinctive public service ethic. Without reference to them, both would remain a mystery. The process of emulating the example of ancient self-governing professions has continued until contemporary times in all types of work, information systems engineers being one of the more recent examples.91 At first sight, this would appear to be a process by which occupations distinguish themselves from one another, and almost the antithesis of class formation, especially as the host of new professions or semi-professions never expressed their class interests or federated as a class. When, for instance, barristers, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries were threatened with writs of quo warranto by Charles II and James II, they had made no attempt to act together as a class. And they have never done so since. It never seems to have occurred to their successors, when they and other professions were subjected to the reforming zeal of Mrs Thatcher, that they might share a common class interest in resisting state regulation of their domestic affairs. Occupational interests and loyalties of professionals always took precedence over any wider class interests. Why then should we nevertheless decide that they were the constituent units of the middle class? Marx once compared French peasants to a sack of potatoes to illustrate the point that proximity and common circumstances are not the same as class formation. The preoccupation of English professionals with their own private occupational interests might indicate that they were just another sack of potatoes, similarly devoid of class consciousness.92 These particular potatoes, however, behaved in ways that Marx did not anticipate, for while selfishly pursuing their own corporate interests, they continuously compared themselves with one another, used each other as reference groups, and continuously examined each others’ background, behaviour, credentials to decide whether they deserved parity of treatment and respect, or as we might say, whether they should be considered members of the same class. Professional histories are knee-deep in these comparative references. For most of their history, for instance, English solicitors compared themselves with the bar, which was the pole star, the one sure guide to the way to professionals ought to behave, and the bar’s decision to recognize them as equals was the final assurance that they had arrived. However, at various times solicitors also compared themselves with physicians and surgeons, and with accountants and estate agents, from whom they always tried to distance themselves.93 Other professions were doing exactly the same thing. Mechanical engineers, for instance, were comparing themselves with civil engineers, while all engineers continuously referred back to barristers and physicians.94

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These inter-professional comparisons were often made for a specific purpose, to determine the proper form of their professional government, or to decide on the appropriate policies for their corporate bodies, or to achieve parity of treatment from the state, or from the universities, or to argue that their salaried members were entitled to a rough parity of reward.95 From the point of view of class formation and reproduction, it may be that other, private, non-work comparisons and evaluations, of their place of residence, its furnishings, of children’s education, of sons’ and daughters’ spouses, of sporting and leisure pursuits, of vocabulary and accent, of dress and haircut, and many other aspects of their style of life were no less important. These daily comparisons and evaluations could only be documented in memoirs novels, movies and TV shows though since that has not yet been done, it is impossible to demonstrate that these public and private inter-professional comparisons formed and defined the core of the English middle class. Like Max Weber trying to demonstrate the connection between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one can only point to the affinity between organized professional behaviour and some of the noticeable attributes of the middle class behaviour: emulating or apeing one’s betters, disdaining one’s inferiors, maintaining certain standards of behaviour, and at all times keeping up appearances.

Professionals v. entrepreneurs as class builders Most observers of the middle class have not given professions quite such a primary role. They have paid more attention to entrepreneurs and manufacturers, small employers, shopkeepers, and to their salaried, white collar employees. The professions have in fact often been portrayed as neutrals in the class confrontations of capitalist societies, as well-meaning bystanders, and never actively engaged in the construction of classes. It is not difficult to see why. If one starts out with the assumption that classes are economic interest groups and their economic interests inevitably conflict, then the irresistible corollary of the formation of the working class is that those on the other side of the barricades, entrepreneurs and manufacturers, must also be a class. They, after all, created the capitalist economy, employed the workers, and they or their managers were the targets of trade union protest and action, whereas professionals were employers on only a small scale, and seldom involved in industrial disputes. If, however, one does not start out with this assumption, it is entirely possible to acknowledge that there is no necessary connection between creating a company, an industry, or even an entire economy, and creating a class. Our evidence from Imperial Russia, France and the United States lends support to this idea. In Imperial Russia we found entrepreneurs had not formed a class by themselves, had not contributed much to the formation of any other class, and instead belonged to all classes. The French bourgeoisie was especially

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elusive. It was once thought it must have been instigator, protagonist, and ultimate victor of the great revolution, but after Taylor tracked every entrepreneur in Paris at the time, and pointed out just how few of them there were this view became untenable.96 Cobban and others then showed that the pre-revolutionary French ‘bourgeoisie’ largely consisted of officeholders and professionals.97 Although an organized bourgeoisie, consisting of capitalists, remained firmly entrenched in the minds both of social theorists and of union organizers, few members of it stood up to proudly proclaim their membership, and to organize the others. Our evidence suggested that the more successful French entrepreneurs and manufacturers preferred to be junior partners or affiliates of a class centred on the grands corps. Although small-scale entrepreneurs and traders appeared, after World War II, in a rather short-lived, heterogeneous class led by Pierre Poujade and Gérard Nicoud, they appear to have been inspired more by the working class than by the bourgeoisie. In the United States, entrepreneurs and manufacturers certainly participated in the civic upper classes of several nineteenth century cities, but they failed to maintain a recognizable class formation for long, and they did not emerge clearly as a class in either twentieth-century community studies or from national poll data. The evidence from our other three societies gives little reason therefore to think that entrepreneurs and manufacturers were great class builders, and since the rival focus of middle class aspiration and affiliation offered by the professions was so much better organized in England than in any of these societies, there seems little reason to think entrepreneurs were any more successful as class builders in England. In the nature of their role, entrepreneurs are rather ill-equipped for the task of creating class distinctions. They are themselves often socially mobile, and their careers do not begin with an extended status socialization like that of professionals, indeed are more likely to involve an extended period of status humiliation as they struggle to get their business under way. Nor are they inclined to uphold any given division of labour and the status distinctions that accompany it. On the contrary, they are more likely to want to rearrange both at will. And they are not natural joiners. Like cats, they are difficult to herd. Although they sometimes formed or joined trade associations, in England such associations were often competitive, short-lived, and never received the charters or state recognition or public respect of professional bodies.98 The Federation of British Industries was not formed until World War I, and prompted largely by the government’s wish to have a means of communication with, and control over, industry to prosecute the war more effectively. By contrast, professionals seemed to have had little difficulty in forming permanent and united national associations, and their headquarters remain among the lesser architectural landmarks of the capital. If entrepreneurs and manufacturers had taken the lead in forming the English middle class, it is reasonable to suppose that public schools, to

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which the more successful of them sent their sons, would have responded to their concerns and interests instead of treating them with contempt. It is also reasonable to expect that the middle class they supposedly led would have elected them as their political representatives, and that they would have been well-represented in the political elite that displaced the aristocracy. In the event, professionals outnumbered entrepreneurs or manufacturers by more than three to one.99 Far from forming or leading their own distinctive class, English entrepreneurs tended to attach themselves to other classes, most often one suspects, to the professionally-dominated middle class, if they could. A few of the most successful were assimilated into the aristocracy, but they only illustrate the main point: the absence of any competing, attractive entrepreneurial class formation or identity. In England, entrepreneurs may be said to have made two important contributions to the formation of the middle class, both being aspects of the ‘creative destruction’ for which they are famed. Their destructive contribution was to undermine, and eventually destroy, the very first corporate institutions of the middle class, that is the guilds and companies which had organized and regulated the activities of their merchant and handicraft predecessors. For the middle class, the conflict with Charles II and James II that preceded the Glorious Revolution centred on the city of London and its companies, rather than on the bodies of organized professionals who were, for the most part, still peripheral players. As industrialization proceeded, entrepreneurs ignored and undermined the regulatory functions of the city companies, leaving them as mere honorific bodies, while the proliferating corporate institutions of professionals thrived and extended their regulatory authority right across the country, and far surpassed either the guilds or their trade association successors in social visibility and national significance. Entrepreneurs’ second contribution to the formation of the middle class was to organize the firms and industries, and generate the income and wealth on which the livelihoods and growth of the new professions, engineers, accountants, solicitors and architects and others, depended. In short, one might say entrepreneurs destroyed the original base of middle class organization, and provided the economic basis which enabled professionals to create a new one. To appreciate professionals’ contribution to class formation one has to look beyond intermittent workplace confrontations, important as they may be for the formation of the working class, and observe how class distinctions are respected in routine and peaceful settings, and accepted ‘as norms of everyday life’. In this process of normalizing or routinizing and nationalizing class distinctions, professionals seem rather better equipped than entrepreneurs and employers. They can be seen, first of all, to have taken steps that contribute to class barriers: by imposing and enforcing their rules of admission and training, by socializing newcomers to accept invidious distinctions between themselves and other occupations, and by cultivating

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the manners, demeanour, and speech that should be used with their clients. Moreover, they have collectively enforced divisions of labour that separated them from their supposed inferiors. There are some, rather limited, equivalents to these processes among entrepreneurs and manufacturers. They might, for instance, be held responsible for institutionalizing the distinction between non-manual and manual workers, though trade unions have often rendered powerful assistance in this respect. As a rule, however, they seem to have been more inclined to create their own distinctive company cultures, but these seldom survived their founders, or at any rate their firms. None of the firms that created the industrial revolution have survived. By contrast all the professional associations that were formed before or during it have done so, and have been able to reproduce over generations many of the rules, values and distinctions of their founders. The evidence about the role of organized professions in normalizing and nationalizing class distinctions is, it must be said, entirely circumstantial. Their reputation as bystanders in class conflicts has meant that they seldom receive much attention in studies explicitly concerned with class formation, so there is no compelling direct testimony. Now and then, however, they emerge from historical studies as overlooked suspects. One example is Trainor’s analysis of the exercise of authority by the Black Country elite during the horrors of early industrialization. He first identified ‘a resilient landed aristocracy’, with national affiliations, who tended ‘to disdain provincial businessmen, however successful they might be.’ Simply on the grounds of their great wealth, he thought a handful of the most successful industrialists should be placed at the top of the local status hierarchy, and lesser ones were also influential, but even then, at what one imagines must have been the high point of entrepreneurial influence, and before the mass mobilization of professionals had even begun, many of the leading roles in the administration of justice, local government, religious and educational institutions and voluntary associations of all kinds were taken by professionals, especially by doctors, solicitors and clergymen.100 Who, one wonders, did more to define the Black Country’s middle class? The handful of successful industrialists who sat at the top of the local status hierarchy or those who organized and ran civil society? One reason that contemporary evidence to confirm or refute the argument is not easy to find is that the normal sociological methods of measuring class differences do not pick up class-structured or class-ridden interactions at the workplace and the pub, in shops, schools, hospitals, courts, sports grounds and other settings. They require hard quantifiable data like measures of income or other material inequalities, but these tell us nothing about relationships. Ordinally-arranged hierarchies of occupational prestige, the basis of studies of mobility between classes do not allow the investigator to discover how members of any one occupation might behave towards, their ‘neighbours’ on the scale. Even if they did, it would hardly

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be relevant since the ‘neighbours’ are only there because of the pooled responses of randomly-selected informants. Occasionally, however, observers, entirely ignorant of proper sociological methodologies, have wandered about talking to people, collecting evidence of everyday life. They have brought back disgracefully unreliable ‘soft’ evidence about what they have seen and heard. Orwell, of course, was one offender. Hoggart was another and one of the worst. In the mid-fifties, he provided one of the softest ever descriptions of the working class. He tried to bring to life the way members of the working class saw those above them, to convey how they themselves portrayed the division they commonly drew between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. ‘Them’, Hoggart concluded, were the ‘shadowy but numerous and powerful group’ who were ‘affecting their lives at almost every point.’ They were ‘bosses’ and ‘public officials’. His working class informants gave him more specific details. They were, they told him, ‘the people at the top’, the ‘higher ups’, the ‘people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine you, made you split the family in the thirties to avoid a reduction in the Means Test allowance…never tell yer owt (e.g. about a relative in hospital), clap yer in clink…summons yer….treat yer like muck.’ When, in other words, his informants gave details of ‘Them’, they referred exclusively to professionals or semi-professionals, doctors, clergymen, policemen, civil servants, or local authority employees, to teachers, school attendance men, ‘the Corporation’ and the ‘local bench’.101 Entrepreneurs and employers did not rate a mention.

The working class inherits and re-invests its social capital E.P. Thompson traced the making of the English working class by documenting workers’ cries of anguish and protest during the early stages of industrialization, by sharing their pain. However, we wish to identify the institutional and organizational structures that reminded them of their common plight, distinguished them from other classes, and were the basis of their class sentiments and actions over many generations. To do this, it is clear that we will have to go back much further than Thompson.102 We must in fact begin not long after the bar established its corporate institutions, for it was then that groups of journeymen who could never hope to become masters began to form their own societies, and defend their own distinctive collective interests. One may infer their existence from accounts of the disputes in the cloth trade between 1350 and 1362 which, Lloyd observed, ‘are closely analogous to modern strikes’, from various pieces of legislation, like that of 1360–61, against ‘Alliances and Covines, and all Congregations, Chapters, Ordinances and Oaths of masons and carpenters’, that of 1425 against the ‘yearly Congregations and Confederacies made by the masons in their general chapters and assemblies.’, and that of 1549, which noted that ‘….artificers, handicraftsmen, and labourers have made

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confederacies and promises, and have sworn mutual oaths, not only that they should not meddle with one another’s work, and perform and finish that another hath begun, but also to constitute and appoint how much work they shall do in a day, and what hours and times they shall work, contrary to the laws and statutes of this realm.’103 Although these lesser ‘confederacies’ do not have records comparable to those of their masters, there is fair amount of direct evidence of independent organization among journeymen in London companies, among cordwainers in 1387, and of a ‘fraternity’ of the yeomanry (or journeymen) of the saddlers in 1396. In 1415 journeymen tailors were ‘living apart by themselves in companies … and were in the habit of assembling in great numbers, and making conventicles in divers places beating, wounding and ill-treating persons and even assaulted a master of the craft.’104 Two centuries later, in 1613, London tailors de facto constituted two companies, one inside the other; the chartered company of the City, and an informal company of the yeomen which had its own ‘treasury clerks, bedel, benefactions and alms’, held its own church services, and celebrated its own holidays. A separate organization of London blacksmiths was reported in 1434, and this had become recognized and accepted by their masters by end of the century. In 1597 journeymen in the Curriers’ Company complained to the Lord Mayor that they had been deprived of their role in selecting wardens. After due consideration, the Lord Mayor decided that they were entitled to elect a junior warden. In 1613, the ‘commonalty’ of the Joiners’ Company brought a lawsuit to recover what they claimed had originally been their right, that of electing assistants, masters and wardens, that is the governing officers of the Company. They were unsuccessful.105 In 1616, the yeomanry of the Clothworkers similarly sought to extend the suffrage of the Court of Assistants of their Company. They also failed. Thus the beginnings of working class organization are to be found inside the guilds and companies of London, and originally united small masters along with journeymen and apprentices. Unwin observed that there was ‘scarcely a company whose history has been fully investigated in which such an organization has failed to be discovered.’106 Some companies appeared to have tolerated these ‘lesser companies’, while others sought to suppress them altogether, though in the nature of things, they were difficult either to control or suppress, since the working lives, as well as the corporate activities of the guilds, continuously brought small masters, journeymen and apprentices together. In form, these lesser companies were replicas, more democratic replicas, of the company as a whole, and their protests had two main goals, first, to force their masters to uphold the rules of their trade more effectively, and second, to recapture the original democracy of the guild, which their masters had somehow – the yeomanry seldom explained exactly how – subverted.107 Their efforts, as we have already noticed, were never successful, since the Lord Mayor and Parliament

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always sided with their masters. The original equality of the guild was therefore never to be restored, not by law at least, but the collective memory and idealization of it was locked in the minds of the ‘yeomanry’ or ‘commonalty’ of the companies. Intermittently, it was burnished bright, and inspired more vain protests, but it was never forgotten and was to have enduring consequences for the making of the English working class. Unwin referred to these yeomanry organizations as ‘secession’ movements, but secession was obviously their last resort. They were, in fact, highly ambivalent towards their own companies, at times organizing against their masters, but on other occasions joining with them in defense of the companies’ interests, especially in their spirited, and sometimes violent, protests to uphold their status relative to other companies.108 Their ambivalence emerges strongly in accounts of the protests that ricocheted from one City of London company to another during the Puritan Revolution.109 No doubt revolutionary events triggered these protests, but their demands, like those of the parliamentary leaders, were entirely traditional. A number of them demanded the removal from their governing bodies of ‘foreigners’, meaning those who had not ‘served their time’. Such men were not, in their view, their ‘legitimate’ masters, and did not, therefore, properly belong on the governing body of their trade. Purged of these ‘foreigners’, the protesters hoped that the remainder, their legitimate masters, would defend the trade more conscientiously and vigorously than they had in the past, by searches, fines and prosecutions of trespassers. They also demanded that the companies should return to their original democratic constitutions. The journeymen weavers’ pointed out that the Weavers’ Company charter was granted ‘not to so many particular men but to the whole society’, and that ‘whatsoever any person or persons were afterward invested with power under it must of necessity be by the consent, election and approbation of the whole body.’ In this, quite exceptional, instance, Parliament came to the angry journeymen’s support, and authorized them to elect 140 representatives to act for the whole body.110 Since most of these protests occurred during the uncertain political context between Charles’ surrender to the Scots and his execution in 1649, and since they were more or less simultaneous, they were rather more threatening to their masters than the earlier ones. In the long run, however, they were no more successful. No company purged ‘foreigners’ from its governing body, and no company, not even the Weavers, became any more democratic than it had been before. Eventually, the journeymen and apprentices, along with the smaller masters, formed independent associations, though seldom, as far as we know, by formal secession as an organized intact group. Lloyd’s account of the cutlery trades in Sheffield is one of the few cases which allows us to follow the transformation from lesser company within a chartered company first to a trade society or trade union which later fragmented into a dozen or more unions of specific trades.111 His narrative began with the first corporate

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organization of the trade, in London in 1298, when there was a ‘fully organized body of craftsmen supervising and controlling the trade by means of regular gild machinery’, with annually elected officers who enforced a seven-year apprenticeship and deputized ‘searchers’ of premises to find ‘illegal’ goods. A separate organization of journeymen seems to have appeared by 1380 since the ordinances of the London Cutlers then made ‘definite provision … for the control of a distinct class of journeymen.’ In 1415, the company obtained its first charter of incorporation, which was intermittently renewed and amended. It must have been one of those companies served with a writ of quo warranto in 1684, because its charter was reissued in 1689, so the Cutlers’ Company was among the direct beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution.112 Thereafter, the cutlery trade in London entered into a long period of decline, though apprentices were still bound and enrolled by the Company as late as 1876–1880. In Sheffield, however, cutlery grew into a major industry. A corporate organization in the city had been recorded in 1565, when an ordinance, sanctioned by the Earl of Shrewsbury, lord of the manor, regulated the trade ‘according to the ancient customes and ordinances’. In 1624, it obtained a charter by an act of incorporation from Parliament. This recognized ‘one body politic, perpetual and incorporate of one Master, two Wardens, six Searchers and twenty-four Assistants and Commonalty of the said company of cutlers.’ It also allowed officers to appoint their successors, and thereby excluded the commonalty from a share in the government.113 Company records were not inclined to record the complaints of the commonalty, but they are known to have protested in 1711 about the master’s misuse of the Company’s funds which, they said, were not being devoted to ‘the relief and benefit of the poor of the said Corporation’. Thereafter they intermittently resisted fines imposed on them. Some of them must have participated in the formation of journeymen societies that appeared in the city over the subsequent decades, since these included a Filesmiths’ Society 1721, a Cutlers’ Benefit Society in 1732, a Grinders’ Society 1748, and dozens of friendly societies.114 In 1785 freemen of the Company were ‘definitely organized’. Their Freemen’s Committee was, Lloyd observed, ‘an association within the company, yet distinct from it … an anticipation of a trade union organization, … which … may be compared with the journeymen clubs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries…’115 It held regular monthly meetings, during which its members continually complained of the Company’s failure to regulate apprenticeship. In 1789, the Committee demanded to see the Company’s accounts, and collected subscriptions from its members so that it might take action in the Court of King’s Bench, and promote a bill in Parliament to reform and democratize the Company. Their suit and their bill both failed, and before they could propose another bill, they were persuaded to accept arbitration. This allowed them to nominate candidates for half of the governing body, from which the Masters

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would then select half as their successors. This evidently had little effect on the Company policies, since the complaints of its failure to protect its freemen against those who had not ‘served their time’ continued in subsequent years. Organized protest groups then appeared among particular trades under the jurisdiction of the Company, among scissors-grinders in 1790, springknife cutlers in 1796, and saw-smiths in 1797. Lloyd noted that ‘the model’ these trades ‘chose in drawing up their rules appears to have been the constitution of the Cutlers’ Company itself’, since they adopted the titles of Masters and Wardens, imposed ‘fines’ on those who refused to take office, and prominently reproduced the Company’s rules of apprenticeship.116 By the end of the eighteenth century, these freemen seem to have became part of a larger labour or class movement, for in their legal and parliamentary campaigns against their masters who controlled the Cutlers’ Company they were offered support by the buttonmakers, masons and tailors of Sheffield, by some of the 52 friendly societies then in existence in the city, as well as by ‘friends’ in Manchester, whose help they gratefully acknowledged. This campaign provoked their masters to respond in kind, and make a class-like appeal ‘to the gentlemen, clergy, merchants and principal inhabitants’ of the city.117 The same wider class alignments reappeared during the national campaign of skilled workers against the repeal of the Statute of Artificers in 1814, when their employers again briefly organized some 400 merchants and master manufacturers into the Sheffield Manufacturers and Mercantile Union, which built up a war chest to enabled it to prosecute, and to obtain the imprisonment, of a number of members of trade societies.118 The workers’ responded by organizing the Sheffield Mechanical Trades Association in 1822, which sought, Lloyd observed, ‘not merely to serve the purposes of a trade union, but also to usurp in large measure the functions of a reorganized and democratized Cutlers’ Company.’119 In 1836 some 20 trades sent representatives to a Committee of the Associated Trades, which sought ‘the establishment and perpetuation of a more intimate connection between all branches of the operative classes.’ These wider class forms of organization did not, however, lessen their concern for their own trade interests. Far from it. In subsequent decades, some of the trade societies felt driven to uphold their apprenticeship rules in their own way, either by ‘rattening’, that is by removing or destroying the tools and appliances of offending masters and workers, and by violent attacks on their homes and persons, two of which proved fatal. These Sheffield ‘outrages’, as they came to be called were among the most violent episodes in the entire history of organized labour in Britain. Publicly, all the trade societies condemned them, but a thorough government commission of inquiry in 1867, benefiting from informants and confessions, finally decided that of some 60 separate trade societies in the city, 12 had been party to them.120 The remaining 48 survived, and went on to form part of Sheffield’s strong and well-organized modern labour movement.

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There are only a few other trades, such as Nottinghamshire framework knitters, Lancashire calico printers, and London compositors, whose unions can be traced with some confidence from associations of journeymen formed inside London guilds or companies.121 In most cases there is no documentary record of any direct continuity, and one may only observe how journeymen reproduced the organizations of their fellows in other cities, or copied those of other trades, an imitative process not unlike that later found among professionals, though on a far wider scale. Rule focused on three trades: tailors, hatters and woollen weavers and combers, though he noted that ‘comparable levels of organization are well documented for many other trades.’122 None of the three kept written records. His account is therefore necessarily episodic and intermittent and rests largely on the complaints of their employers. It is, however, reasonable to infer that their organizations were both continuous and national. One account from 1700 refers to five clubs of London journeymen tailors which had formed a central union around ‘houses of call’, usually inns, taverns and pubs, which served as labour exchanges. These clubs appear again in a dispute in 1720–1721, which ended with Parliament prohibiting combinations of tailors in London and Westminster, and fixing their wages and hours. Nevertheless, they re-emerged in labour disputes in 1744–1745, and yet again in 1752. In 1756 we know from John Fielding that 40 of the tailors’ box clubs formed a ‘House of Representatives’, with an executive ‘Grand Committee for the Management of the Town’, against which the ‘master taylors … have ever been defeated … in some measure due to the infidelity of the masters themselves to each other, some of whom … have collected together with some of the journeymen and complied with their exorbitant demands.’ In 1764, according to masters’ complaints to Parliament, journeymen tailors had formed ‘a kind of republic’, holding meetings at 42 ‘houses of call’ to appoint delegates to the ‘Grand Committee’ which ‘made rules and orders for the direction of the masters and the whole body of journeymen tailors.’123 They emerged again in various disputes and prosecutions in the 1760s and 1770s, and then in 1824, Francis Place referred to their ‘perfect and perpetual combination’, and the unlimited confidence they place in the five executive delegates called the ‘Town’. They never discuss ‘the propriety of a strike’ for that would risk prosecution, but simply ‘strike when bid.’ There are intermittent glimpses of similar forms of organization among journeymen tailors in Birmingham, Cambridge and Liverpool. Journeymen hatters had ‘a history of combination at least as long as that of the tailors.’124 Their ‘congress’ made ‘by-laws, extracted fines and prevented many masters from taking apprentices beyond a prescribed limit.’ The authority of their congress evidently extended to Manchester since in 1775 employers there said they would not employ hatters who would not declare their intention not to obey ‘any pretended laws made by a Congress, Committee or any other Combination of piece-makers’. Employers sought

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parliamentary support to remove the restriction on the number of apprentices they could take, but Parliament also received counter-petitions from journeymen across the country. It sided, inevitably, with the employers, but journeymen hatters were nonetheless able ‘in most times’ to ensure an effective de facto limitation on the number of apprentices by refusing to work with those who they did not regard as ‘fair’ workmen. They continued their strikes right through the quarter-century of the Combination Laws (1799–1824), usually over the same issue of what they called ‘foul’ men, that is, those who had not served an apprenticeship in accordance with ‘the bye laws of the journeymen.’ Rule went on to provide evidence of hatters’ organization in four other towns, and then about wool-combers. Those in Yorkshire in the mideighteenth century were said by a contemporary to have formed themselves into a sort of corporation ‘though without a charter’, which was powerful enough to ‘give laws to their masters and to themselves’, adding that they ‘are becoming one society throughout the kingdom.’125 All this evidence about organization among working men from the thirteenth century on through to the eighteenth century did not impress two of the most respected historians of the trade unions and of the working class, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. They played down this oral, metastatic, cultural continuity with the guilds, as did E.P. Thompson, though to a lesser degree. The Webbs would not accept sporadic spontaneous and ‘ephemeral combinations against their social superiors’, or repeated strikes, as evidence of a trade union, and insisted on documented histories of continuous association.126 It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this stringent legalistic requirement was the result of a theoretical or ideological determination to portray trade unions and the working class as modern phenomena, as products of the capitalist mode of production. In so doing these great scholars of the working class obscured rather than illuminated the distinctive characteristics of the English working class, for in terms of their priorities and tactics, institutions, as well as their language, behaviour and collective institutions, the case that von Brentano made for continuity with yeomanry and journeymen societies within the guilds is an overwhelming one.127 It has been persuasively vindicated by later research.128 It is demonstrated by the enduring primacy of trade protection functions, by the methods of trade unions, and in the vocabulary of trade unions (shop stewards, blacklegs, brothers etc). It is visibly evident in the practice of embroidering heraldic banners that English unions carried, and often still carry, before them in public demonstrations. This was a guild practice and many of these banners incorporated the symbols of the guilds and companies from which the journeymen society which was the forerunner of the union had emerged.129 Without recognizing this cultural continuity from guild to union, it is impossible to identify the distinctive character and behaviour of England’s trade unions – or that of its working class.

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When, why and how these two classes parted company The early formation of the English middle and working classes therefore have much in common. The organizational roots of both are to be found in medieval corporate institutions and long preceded industrialization. In the case of the middle class, the point can hardly be disputed, since the ancient corporate institutions of barristers and physicians still survive, their histories are continuously documented, and it is not difficult to show that their practice-based training, their self-government, their protected jurisdiction and their corporate pride and honour, often served as models for subsequent professions. In the case of trade unions, the case for continuity has, as we have just seen, been disputed, since there is seldom a continuous documentary record. However, the circumstantial evidence provided by the behaviour of tradesmen of all kinds right through the eighteenth century is strong, and in a moment we will show that when some of these old trades or spin-offs from them, were employed in new industrial settings, they continued to behave in a similar manner, and were then imitated by a host of newly-invented trades in newly-invented industries. Before we do so, however, we must note how and why, despite their similar point of origin, similar concerns and similar associational forms, the non-manual and manual workers did not develop along parallel paths as mirror images of one another, but diverged, and along with them the middle and working classes of which they were the organized cores. The main reason was that non-manual occupations required intellectual rather than financial capital. Greater numbers of them could therefore remain self-employed, and since many of their members were already voters, they could expect, once they were appropriately organized, to be recognized by the state, and to be granted powers of collective self-government. By contrast, the more numerous manual occupations increasingly depended on those who had invested in physical capital, and were therefore likely to be employees throughout their working lives. Since few of them were voters, they could hardly, like professionals, count members of parliament among their clients, and they had no direct relationship with the state, while their employers often did. It was therefore inevitable, even without the political threat that governments sometimes thought journeymen associations and trade societies posed, that the state would be reluctant to offer journeymen and trade societies the same kind of recognition and protection that it offered to emerging professional bodies, and that professions and skilled workers would therefore go their separate ways. It is possible to identify the historical moment when they parted company with some precision. Between the summers of 1812 and 1814, groups of skilled workers organized the national campaign to obtain the kind of statutory recognition of their trade rights that, in a general way, they had been granted by the Statute of Artificers of 1563, and that some professions

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had obtained in more precise terms in their charters. As they organized their campaign, craftsmen already acknowledged that they were different from the professions, since they approached the state collectively, as an alliance of trades, whereas the professions that had formed by this time, such as the former members of the City of London’s barber-surgeons, had asked for recognition and protection as a single occupation. Craftsmen’s demands were also more basic than those of the professions, and focused on the one institution that they knew was the foundation of both their self-government and the regulation of their trades – apprenticeship. Their campaign had really begun some years before 1812, as journeymen societies in many parts of the country, including the Sheffield cutlers mentioned above and those in London companies that were still closely identified with a craft, had tried to enforce in the courts the seven-year apprenticeship rule included in the Statute of Artificers. Some kind of inter-trade association, about which no details survive, had financed and brought at least 19 separate legal actions over the three years 1809 to 1812.130 These related to 13 different trades, and the tradesmen who brought the actions lost 12 of them. As a result of these defeats, some journeymen, calling themselves ‘the mechanics of the metropolis’, decided during the summer of 1812 that it would be pointless to continue their legal actions without first obtaining parliamentary reinforcement or re-enactment of the Statute. Since the Combination Laws were still in force, they took counsel’s advice on the precise legal limits of the kind of campaign they could conduct. They then established a representative body, consisting of two men from every trade in London, which regularly assembled through the autumn of 1812 and early months of 1813, to prepare a petition to Parliament, and to draft a proposed bill. By April 1813, they had collected 32,000 signatures, more than half of which came from outside London, which supports other evidence that they were already linked with provincial trade societies with similar concerns and had established the rudiments of a national organization. After the presentation of their petition, a parliamentary select committee was appointed, which heard much evidence to support their argument, including the fact that H.M. dockyards never allowed any workman to be employed there without having properly served his apprenticeship. But they also received counter-petitions, not as it happens from wealthy entrepreneurs anxious to reorganize their enterprises with unskilled unapprenticed labour, but more often from poor masters or workmen, such as one from Plymouth which pleaded that he had been orphaned, and some from impoverished families saying that it was only their poverty that had prevented them serving an apprenticeship. Another, from fellmongers of Bermondsey, pointed out that their businesses could only survive by employing ‘blacklegs’. The Select Committee barely kept a quorum and declined to produce a report, which indicated that legislation would not, as the trade societies seem to have hoped, immediately follow. Moreover, the first sign of organized

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opposition from employers emerged shortly afterwards when a meeting of some 50 manufacturers, led by a barrister MP, set up a body calling itself, ‘Associated Manufacturers for repealing the 5th Elizabeth’. Given the legislative delay, and the sudden, belated appearance of this organized opposition, the journeymen decided to make their own organization permanent and national, with a subscription of tuppence per month to fund legal counsel. The new national association was also seen as a ‘means of keeping up the spirit of mechanics, by having an opportunity of meeting monthly, for the attainment of an object which is strictly legal.’131 They then increased their lobbying of MPs, both in their constituencies across the country and at Westminster, and launched a campaign of placards, posters and newspaper advertisements to win public support. Their own petition grew to 300,000 signatures, but there were also dozens of separate petitions from many other towns and trades, including 23 from the London trades alone. These petitions included a number from masters and employers, including one from the ‘Directors of the Chamber of Manufactures and Commerce of Birmingham’, because many employers in that city were persuaded that the craftsmen’s cause was a just one. However, the proponents of total repeal astutely neutralized this potentially powerful support for the trade societies’ cause, by rushing to assure the chartered corporations of London and of other cities, that their bill for repeal would not infringe their corporate privileges in the least. This journeymen’s campaign for statutory recognition of their apprenticeship rules was the first national organization and mobilization of workingmen in Britain, and indeed in the world. It is one of the great episodes in the history of the working class, and of British democracy, since it also embraced Scottish workers, and was the forerunner of many other national movements.132 And it was squarely based on a national network of trade societies. Its purpose, clearly, was the defense of trade interests, and it looked back to 1563 or even earlier, since the Elizabethan statute was itself merely a codification of practice over the preceding centuries. Perhaps because it looked backwards, preceded large-scale industrialization, was scrupulously legal, non-violent and had no martyrs, and took place while the supposedly ‘crushing’ Combination Laws were still in effect, it is slightly inconvenient for histories of the working class, most of which therefore ignore it completely.133 Although in terms of national organization and mass support, there was really no comparison between the two sides, the proponents of repeal nonetheless carried the day, and on July 18th 1814 the Elizabethan statute was repealed. Derry plausibly suggested that the decisive factor was the ability of the ‘promoters of repeal … to use the bogey of workingmen’s combinations to rally all forces to their side’. Employers who favoured repeal argued that apprenticeship was ‘… a never-ceasing motive to all denominations of journeymen to congregate in dangerous bodies and engender injurious

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measures to the peace and prosperity of the country.’ The main spokesman of repeal claimed that ‘the continuance of the law was affording a colour for the most dangerous combinations: Nothing would so much tend to unnerve them, as repealing these restrictions’.134 This line of argument might well have been strengthened by the national campaign that skilled workers had organized, since it provided stunning confirmation that there was some substance behind the bogey. Repeal of the Elizabethan statute meant that skilled trades were not to be granted any statutory support comparable to that of the professions, and it is for this reason that their campaign between 1812–1814 may be deemed a parting of the ways between professionals and skilled workers, and indeed between the middle and working classes. After this rebuff, skilled workers never sought or expected support or protection from the state or the law, and only hoped to be left alone. Over time, this is exactly what happened. In 1824 the Combination Laws were repealed, though the common law offences of conspiracy and restraint of trade left the trade societies on uncertain legal ground and enabled employers to threaten their existence, until this possibility was definitively removed by the Trade Union Act of 1871. Dobson identified 29 cases over the 80 years between 1720 and 1800, but no one appears to have counted how many legal actions were brought over the years up to 1871, and how many unions were in fact threatened, or destroyed, by them.135 Since they do not appear to have seriously interrupted labour organization in the eighteenth century, it seems unlikely that they had a serious impact during the nineteenth. National unions of skilled workers, and their national federation, the Trades Union Congress, were both formed while this threat still hung over them. Before continuing this part of the story of the formation of the working class, however, we had best consider how well they were able to defend their rights in their workplaces without any protection from the law.

Manual workers establish self-regulation in their workplaces Empirical research, from a great range of industries, from the nineteenth century through to contemporary times, demonstrates that they and their successors had a considerable measure of success. Behagg’s evidence from various workplaces in the first half of the nineteenth century, showed that while independent handicraft producers were fast disappearing, many of the workers employed in the new factories continued to think and behave like them.136 They claimed that ‘they “owned” (or “co-owned”) the product…and this gave them the right to control their time’, and even the workplace itself. In their view, ‘legitimate’ and ‘honourable’ employers were those who ‘would simply initiate the process of production and market the finished goods’, and accept that ‘what came between, the nature and pace of work, determining how and when an article was made, was

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properly the province of labour.’137 They claimed, in other words, that there should be no managerial control or supervision whatever over the production process itself, as if they were self-employed sub-contractors, or one might say, members of self-governing professions. Behagg then showed that the actual hours spent at work, and the actual amount of work performed, were often at the discretion of the workers themselves. For instance, a Leicester wool comber, interviewed in 1850, said that ‘we work what hours we please, but the shop is open for us from five in the morning until nine at night … The pot is never extinguished from Sunday to Sunday.’ London cooperages similarly remained open from 3 a.m. to 9 p.m., which obviously made it difficult for any employer to supervise production. In Kidderminster, ‘carpet weavers frequently carried their master’s keys, so that they could open and close the shop as they began and finished.’ According to one pottery worker, employers in his industry kept a very low profile. ‘One of them was rarely seen at work. The other used to come about ten o’clock in the morning in a carriage and pair, and stay half an hour or an hour. I never saw him in a workshop.’ If their employer tried to exercise close supervision, one worker in a Birmingham rule shop reported, they thwarted his attempts by ‘shying at him rotten potatoes, stale bread and …on occasions things of a worse description.’ Confounding all one’s expectations, and much academic commentary besides, Behagg suggested that the movement from traditional outwork to factory production sometimes involved a loss of control over the production process for the employer. Among other cases, he cited one Derby employer who, in 1845, had abandoned his factory, reverted to a decentralized putting-out form of production by hiring out some 4,000 stocking frames, explaining that in the large shops ‘the hands did more what they liked, they would not do this, nor would they do that; they would raise a quibble on every alteration made, and we had more frequent turn-outs (strikes) through it.’ Withdrawal from factory production altogether was, one may reasonably assume, rather exceptional, but observers of a great many other workplaces leave no doubt that English workers asserted a considerable degree of selfgovernment at the point of production. Lloyd thought that the Sheffield cutlery trades were so well-organized that their employers had no choice but to accept the way they wished to work, and that ‘during the first half of the nineteenth century many of the unions were so conscious of their strength that they were often dictatorial towards their masters’. In his view, this was because employers ‘possessed little of that power of voluntary cohesion and co-operation which was the secret of the trade union’s influence.’138 Cotton textile mills are the emblematic workplace of the horrors of the industrial revolution, and its workers often presented as the classic example of a semi-skilled or unskilled and undifferentiated proletariat. However, with numerous examples, Turner documented the emergence and proliferation of a

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strong occupational consciousness amongst them, and a high degree of self-regulation. One of his examples, calico printers, was probably the result of migration by journeymen of the City of London company of calico printers. Most of the others were newly-invented trades. He carefully traced how one of them, so-called ‘strippers and grinders’, raised themselves over several generations from the status of unskilled workers to that of skilled craftsmen, by establishing apprenticeship requirements and by defining their jurisdiction, and came to be recognized as skilled by their employers and their fellow workers, even though the content of their work had not changed a jot.139 Vichniac compared the British and French iron and steel industries from the 1830s on, and found that, although the British was much the larger and more advanced industry and served far larger markets, French employers first ‘found the independence implicit in sub-contracting impossible’ and ‘assumed greater control over hiring, training and promotion at an earlier historical moment’ than their British counterparts. They also employed engineers, supervisors and foremen to plan the labour process, to determine the pace of work, to monitor the quality of products, and to select and train workers for promotion. In Britain, by contrast, skilled workers remained in control of recruitment, training and promotion, were responsible for organizing production, while their unions or friendly societies performed the welfare functions assumed by French employers. Many of these contrasting features had, she thought, ‘continued to the present, shaping industrial relations in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the more powerful presence of British unions on the shopfloor.’140 Lorenz compared the degree of management control of work in the shipbuilding industries of Britain and France between 1880–1930, where once again the British firms were generally larger and supplying larger markets. He found, however, that it was managers in the French yards who were first actively engaged in planning the division of labour and ‘de-skilling’ trade specialties. The biggest of them had imposed scientific management prior to World War I. He characterized the French labour process as ‘flexibility and co-ordination from above’, while the British yards used ‘indirect forms of control based on the semi-autonomous work-group or squad.’ Since the British skilled workers ‘had a working knowledge of each other’s responsibilities’, each of them ‘could co-ordinate his own work in relation to that of his squad partners without the need for higher level supervision or instruction.’ In Britain, ‘professional groups’, as he called them, meaning platers, shipwrights, carpenters and the like, ‘engaged in corporate or sectional struggles aimed at controlling the job content of their profession.’141 In his comparison, of two oil refineries in each country in 1970, Gallie reported that in France, ‘management had kept a tighter grip over the control process: more powers were reserved to the supervisors, disciplinary sanctions were more severe.’ British management, by contrast, ‘had no powers

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of control through the payment system, and its capacity to issue instructions…was hedged round by a series of constraints that had been originally obtained through the organized power of the craft unions and had, to a certain degree, become consolidated into the customs of the refinery.’142 A similar contrast emerged from Dubois’ comparison of the divisions of labour in the fibreglass, canning and chemical products industries in France and England in the 1970s. In France, he noted, the employer was free to distribute work ‘as he chooses’, while in England, the ‘demarcation between trades is very precise’, and upheld by the workers themselves. Production workers in England did not, Dubois noticed, perform any maintenance tasks, and the two kinds of worker had therefore to be subject to quite separate hierarchies of supervision. In other words, the management structures of the British plants were themselves determined by the structure of the trades, not as one might assume, the other way around.143 Volume car production assumed the same emblematic status for the twentieth century as cotton textiles did for the nineteenth, and driven by unrelenting technological requirements supposedly imposed harsh, standardized work relationships on de-skilled workers in every capitalist society. A little classic of sociological analysis, written by a skilled worker in Coventry, Dwight Rayton, showed that whatever may have been the case in other capitalist societies, it was not like that in England.144 Ever since the earliest days of industrialization, he pointed out, Coventry workers had been engaged in ‘a continuous fight to civilise factory life … in the direct line of Coventry’s old craft tradition.’ As a result, the city’s workers had ‘never been overwhelmed by the sordid degradation of the early factory system’, and had established ‘their group way’ in many of the city’s early industries, ‘ribbon weaving, watchmaking, sewing machines, bicycles, motor cycles.’ He directly experienced its continuation in the manufacture of cars, aeroplanes, aero engines and machine tools, before during, and for some four decades after World War II. By his account, the practice of electing a ‘ganger’ had emerged in the late 1920s, and had become widespread when he went to work (‘we are not having a boss’, as he put it). The ‘ganger’ was obliged to answer questions in meal breaks (‘as in Parliament’) and could be sacked at any gang meeting. Workplace rules rested on an ‘unwritten contract’ (‘as in the Common Law kind of contract’) between the firm and the gang as an entity, usually of 20–30 men, though they could be much larger. They consisted of skilled men, ‘though we made no distinction on degrees of skill.’145 Once the gang was organized, ‘discipline was left to us … we ran the shop ourselves and the “gaffer” (manager) stayed in the office.’ The gang took care of apprentices, who also had their own gang, though they were simultaneously members of those of skilled men, and ‘could at times, participate in gang meetings, but without votes.’ A man was given ‘time to explain difficult jobs and complex aircraft systems …to “his” apprentice’. In the factory producing bomber

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aircraft in which he worked during World War II, this ‘gang’ system became ‘almost universal’, and was ‘transmitted to other aircraft plants, largely by the men themselves, though it was sometimes imposed from above by “the experts”’. After the war, it spread to bus and tractor production, machine tools, and even house-building in which, as a friend told him, ‘supervision became negligible’ since the ‘men resisted hostile people in middle management.’ The gang’s responsibilities extended beyond the workplace, to include transport to work and holiday arrangements, benevolent work for sick members and a host of leisure and sports activities. The main threat to this worker self-government, or ‘group way’ came towards the end of his working life from ‘Americanized measured daywork systems’, which he and his mates thought ‘take your freedom away from you … take your conscience from you …’ Coventry men, he reported, ‘are fighting against the American system’, which they saw as a new form of oppression. He did not record the outcome of their struggle, but they might be said to have won – in a manner of speaking – since volume car production under British management disappeared from the city not long thereafter. Fifteen years later, Rayton’s first-hand account received scholarly confirmation in Lewchuk’s careful analysis of the emergence of the automobile manufacturing industry in Britain.146 He repeatedly noticed how the entrepreneurs and managers who created the industry were quite familiar with Fordist managerial methods, but rejected them. In their place, they created what he called a distinctive ‘British system of mass production’, in which managerial control was ‘indirect’ and ‘incomplete’ and any ‘attempts to alter authority relationships within the factory, to grant managers more power and impose a new effort bargain, met with severe opposition’, meaning strikes, which usually ended with managerial concessions.147 ‘British capitalism’, Lewchuk concluded, ‘had adopted an institutional framework within which, to a large extent, labour regulated itself.’148 Grunberg’s field research in two car manufacturing plants, one in France, the other in Britain, owned by the same multinational company, making the same car, in 1976, provided further corroboration of Rayton’s and of Lewchuk’s analyses. Grunberg found that management in the French plant ‘enjoyed virtually uncontested control of the production process’, and had ‘complete freedom to determine man assignments and to move workers from one post to another … the speed of the assembly line could be increased at any time to recover losses caused by breakdowns.’149 In the British plant, by contrast, ‘workers did not permit this to happen.’ While repairmen in France not only carried out repairs but also assisted line operators, repairmen in the English plant ‘would have none of this.’ English workers got allowances for tea breaks, late starts and early finishes, while French workers got none of these things. ‘Very simply’, he says, ‘the English spent less time working’ than the French, ‘the work they did was at a slower pace’, and

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they had ‘a far greater ability to influence the conditions of their work’, than did the French.150 They were much more likely to challenge management on working conditions, on discipline, on manning levels and the pace of work. They were also far more likely to come out on strike, and especially unofficial strikes in which only a handful of men were involved. These averaged about two a day (my italics), while the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ in the French plant had not had a single dispute since 1947. The result was that the French plants was nearly 25% more productive, and more importantly as far as Grunberg’s research aim was concerned, it also had an accident rate sixty times greater. (The italics are his). He seems to have thought that no one would believe him. From our point of view, however, the key point is the marked contrast in the powers of workers, the ‘extraordinary strength of the workforce on the shop floor’ in England, while in France management had ‘a free hand on the shop floor.’ We have now given evidence from more than 15 industries, most of it comparative. We might give more, but will close with a non-comparative study from the late 1960s, which is a particularly illuminating example because the researcher, Temperley, was able to observe the creation of occupational identities, of a division of labour between them, and of self-governing institutions among unskilled workers, in what appears to be a most unpromising work setting. It is one with which every reader will be familiar: airport baggage-handlers.151 The airport was newly-opened, and the handlers had all been hired simply as ‘general hands’, but in just three months had created three distinct occupational roles, those of porter, sorter and loader. They had also institutionalized a centre of their communal life, which they called the ‘bothy’, a billet or restroom, where they met, talked, drank tea, relaxed and played cards. Over these same months, they replaced the individual communication with managers with which they began by communication through elected representatives, for each of their four shifts, and then elected an overall representative for all three ‘occupations’ and all shifts. On being elected, this overall representative resigned as ‘leading hand’, and then approached both ‘the union for recognition as the general hand shop steward and … the Ground Controller (who was the responsible airport manager) to inform him of the new workshop arrangement.’152 Everything had taken place thus far, therefore, without the participation, or even attention, of either union officials or managers. Subsequently, these ‘general hands’ went on to invent and enforce rules to cover various aspects of their work. They eliminated favouritism in the distribution of overtime, for example, by imposing a roster. They forcibly sanctioned a driver who declined to participate in any loading or unloading work, (driving had not been recognized as a distinct occupation in the division of labour they had defined). They prevented porters pocketing large amounts of extra income from passengers’ tips, so-called ‘bung money’, by persuading them to surrender them to a common fund. These were then booked, banked, and distributed

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equally to all the ‘general hands’ every month, wrapped in old newspaper. Porters suspected of withholding tips were upended, to shake free from their pockets any tips they might have ‘forgotten’. Temperley’s research ended however, in a few months, so we do not know when or how, or if, this episode of occupational self-regulation came to an end. The evidence of the workplace relationships of English workers we have reviewed is drawn from such diverse industries, with such varied technologies, in such varied market conditions, and from such different times, from the very beginning of manufacturing industry until the 1980s, that we may reasonably conclude that we have identified one of the distinctive and enduring characteristics of the English mode of production, namely, self-governing occupational groups who insulated themselves from direct managerial supervision. While skilled workers were usually the prime movers, the unskilled, as we have just observed, often behaved in a similar manner. There is a certain amount of aggregate cross-national data to support the conclusion that the English ‘mode of production’ was distinctive. Labour force data over time show, for instance, that far higher proportions of the English labour force have been able to lay claim to the autonomy of the skilled worker than either the American or the French. National statistics of skill levels are rightfully treated warily because of the absence of any standardized notion of skill, but the content and level of skill is not here at issue. The designation ‘skilled’ is simply taken as recording a customary form of social differentiation recognized in the workplace of each country, identifying those workers with a recognized occupational title who are expected to work without close managerial supervision. Over every decade where comparison is possible, industries in England and Wales have had a higher proportion of skilled workers than either American or French. The American ratio is known from 1900 when it was 2.3 unskilled workers to 1 skilled worker.153 The English and Welsh can only be given from 1930, when it was 0.73 unskilled to every 1 skilled worker. Over time, the two economies tended to converge. The American became more skilled, and the ratio declined over nine decades to 1.3 to 1 in 1994 and 1.2 in 2001. The English and Welsh meanwhile became relatively less skilled, and the ratio increased over the seven decades for which we have evidence to reach 1.1 to 1 in 1991 so that English manufacturing industry’s distinctive reliance on skilled workers had by then all but disappeared, though by that time much of its manufacturing industry had also disappeared.154 Roughly comparable figures are available for France only since 1960, and they suggest that the French manufacturing labour force more closely resembled the American in this respect, declining from a ratio of 1.89 to 1 in 1960 (when the American ratio was 1.7 to 1) to a ratio of 1.13 to 1 in 1987, compared to the American ratio just stated, of 1.3 to 1 in 1994.155 Further convincing corroboration of a distinctive English mode of production is provided by the categories in which official statistics, of both

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earnings and strikes, are collected in Britain. Government statisticians do not arbitrarily choose a method for collecting such data. Earnings statistics are, as Marsden astutely observed, ‘a social fact’, and ‘strongly influenced by the practice of firms and collective agreements.’ If they were not, they would be difficult to collect, and they would remain unused. In Britain alone, he observed ‘occupational categories prevail’, and reflect ‘the underlying reality of occupations with strong identities.’156 Strike statistics are presented in exactly the same form, ‘occupational categories prevail’ and for the same reason, because British employees routinely take industrial action as members of a particular occupation, rather than as workers in a particular plant or industry, or the workers of a particular employer, or as members of a particular union.157 If we hope to explain the peculiarity of the English mode of production revealed by these case studies and national data, it seems unlikely that we could do so by reference to technological or market forces since it has been documented in workplaces with diverse technologies, operating in all manner of markets, and over long periods of time. Adam Smith’s image of the division of labour as a rather automatic process limited only ‘by the extent of the market’ will have to be discarded, since English workers have plainly been better collectively organized to define and defend the division of labour they preferred, regardless of the extent of the market. Attempts to explain the differences between American and English manufacturing such as Habakkuk’s argument that American firms were more likely to adopt labour-saving inventions because of the shortage in the supply of skilled labour, or Broadberry’s thesis that differences in the organization of manufacturing firms in the two societies stem from differences in their ‘initial factor endowments’ seem similarly unhelpful.158 Our best chance of understanding and explaining the peculiarities of English workplace relationships is to refer back to ‘the power of voluntary cohesion and cooperation’ that Lloyd noticed among the cutlery trades or to the ‘impulse of associate’ that Turner documented among cotton textile workers.159 Once we do this, we can hardly fail to notice that non-manual, self-employed occupations that became professions had similar ‘powers’ and ‘impulses’, and that the self-regulation won by, or granted to, skilled workers, bears a close resemblance to the self-government granted to English professions. Both manual and non-manual workers differ, therefore, in exactly the same way from their Russian, French, and American counterparts. We must therefore recognize that we are dealing with a national phenomenon, and accordingly find an explanation that applies to all kinds of English workplaces, and all kinds of work, both manual and non-manual, both employed and self-employed, both high status and low status, since the ‘power of voluntary cohesion and cooperation’ and the ‘impulse to associate’ is evident in them all, and both employers and governments were evidently inclined, over many generations, to respect it.

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A satisfactory explanation of such an enduring and widespread form of work relationship can only be political, since it coincides with, and depends on, a distinctive relationship between the state and organized interests in civil society and must simultaneously explain a variety of institutional interconnections – between professional associations, universities, schools and vocational training institutions, trade unions, and employers – that sustained it, and enabled it to be transmitted from one generation to the next. The only political event that seems of sufficient magnitude and resonance to explain such a range of distinctive institutional interconnections is the Glorious Revolution, for no other event seems able to explain why English state should differ so markedly and continuously from the other three, why it should accept that organized interests in civil society should be granted self-governing powers similar to those granted to the ancient professions and why newly-emergent organized interests in turn felt they had the right to assert them in preference to some other form of collective action. The root cause of the peculiarities of the English workplace, therefore, was that it modernized by adapting, mimicking and re-inventing rather than discarding, medieval corporate institutions, a conclusion that everyone knows or intuits, but no historical or sociological theory prepares one to analyse and explore. Only one other industrial society seems to resemble the English in this respect, the other island kingdom off the Eurasian landmass, Japan, though there the heirs and modernizers of medieval institutions were corporations rather than organized occupations. The other three societies investigated here are decisively different. Russia and the United States never had any significant corporate institutions to inherit, adapt or rediscover. France most certainly had, but they were battered or destroyed by the revolution. Compagnonnages survived, as we have seen, though only as antiquarian semi-secret fraternities, and one of the later re-enactments of the great revolution, in 1848, finished them off.160 The French therefore had to create their classes on a new footing. In England alone, medieval corporate institutions survived to remind and persuade barristers and baggagehandlers alike that market exchanges and employment relationships ought properly to be tempered by collective action and rules. In asserting and enforcing their corporate rules, non-manual and manual workers provided a foundation for the formation of their respective classes.

Class solidarities compared We have now identified a fundamental similarity in the organizational core of the middle and working classes, and also a fundamental difference: the state’s response to the self-regulatory aspirations of the constituent organized bodies of the two classes. The solidarity of the two classes also differed markedly. That of the middle class rested, we have already observed, not on

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their interdependence or on any unified class-wide organization, but on the similarity of their associations and aspirations, their tendency to imitate and emulate one another, and on a rough approximation in their manners, mores and status. Their solidarity was therefore, to borrow Durkheim’s term, mechanical. By contrast, that of manual workers rested on a greater degree of interdependence, for though their organized occupations also imitated and emulated one another, and defended their own occupational interests as selfishly as professionals, they also recognized at times that they could not deal either with the state or with their employers on their own. As individual occupations, they were weaker and more vulnerable than professions, and needed each other. For that reason, their solidarity might reasonably be described as organic. Craft unions felt the need to form a collective body to define and represent their common interests soon after they became national organizations. In 1868 five of them formed the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the first permanent, national trade union federation in the world. It has endured ever since, never splitting, and never having had to deal with significant rivals or dissidents for long, all of which might lead us to assume that the organic solidarity of English working class was a spontaneous and natural evolutionary process. In the event, a common status as employees, and common exploitation and suffering, were not enough to unify workers as a class. No English trades ever relaxed their exclusive rules in the interests of solidarity with their working class brothers. In his entire account of the ‘making of the working class’, Thompson provided not a single instance. One might also recall that the TUC was initially indifferent to universal manhood suffrage, and excluded semi- and unskilled workers for some three decades after its formation. It only recognized the claims and interests of the semi- and unskilled workers, or of that ‘portion of the working community’, in the words of one of their outstanding leaders, ‘that is not called upon to keep one occupation for life’, because of pressure from the ‘new unions’ which began to be organized in the late 1880s.161 These ‘new unions’ often ignored the jurisdictional claims of the TUC unions, competed for their current or potential members, pouring scorn on their mutual benefit functions, and dismissing them as ‘coffin clubs’. The transition from the organization of the elite of skilled workers to the organization of workers of all levels of skill therefore was no more natural and automatic than it was in Russia, France, and the United States, and provoked conflict within the union movement just as it had in those countries.162 It was, however, completed in an entirely different manner. It did not entail the forcible destruction of the skilled workers’ unions as in Russia. It did not involve the voluntary surrender of unions’ trade protection functions in favour of some greater revolutionary goal as in France, and it did not require comprehensive state intervention, and the splitting of the existing national labour federation as in the United States. Instead,

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the craft unions of the TUC began to respond sympathetically to the fiery, socialist rhetoric, and to the successful recruitment campaigns, of the ‘new unions’ of ‘workers without an occupation for life’, and after a few years quarrelling, the two kinds of union were reconciled, and united in the TUC, and a short time later together formed the Labour Party. Thereafter craft unions became more willing to make use of class rhetoric, and began to recruit workers who had not ‘served their time’, though usually in separate membership categories. In short, trade and class were reconciled, not always harmoniously, but sufficiently for workers committed to defending their trade jurisdictions to unite in the same labour federation with those who had not yet established theirs, and even with those who were unlikely ever to do so. As a result of the years of competition between the two kinds of union, however, the basis of union organization had become somewhat confused. Some of the new unions had tried to recruit all the workers in a single industry. Other so-called general unions had moved across industries recruiting all those of a certain kind or level of work. Many analysts were thereafter reluctant to characterize the organizational structure of British unions as a whole, which might leave the impression that unions recruited promiscuously, on any and every basis. This was far from being the case, as our workplace evidence has already suggested. Beneath their sometimes misleading names, and beneath their national administrative structures, trade or occupation remained by far the dominant basis of union organization and action. The fact that some of the new unions returned, or one might say repatriated, members of the skilled trades that they had managed to recruit during the years of open competition, suggests that craft unions had not compromised on this matter. Newly-organized ‘industrial’ unions therefore frequently failed, or declined, to incorporate skilled workers of their industry. So-called ‘general’ unions were often organized internally by trade.163 Many of the craft unions who had responded to the competition by mergers usually did so under an umbrella for ‘amalgamated’ or ‘allied’ trades, names that constantly recur in the work of Marsh and Ryan, who meticulously traced the genealogy of thousands of local trade societies.164 Moreover, new and old alike, whether they were described as general or industrial or craft unions, adopted a front-line organization of shop stewards and concerned themselves with the ‘trade’ interests of their members just like the original craft unions. And when the white collar workers began to organize unions, they too did so overwhelmingly by profession or occupation, or along kin networks of similar occupations. The reconciliation between the ‘new model’ craft unions and the ‘new’ (general or industrial) unions did not therefore require workers’ to surrender their most durable and redoubtable organizational asset, the craft union. The democratic habits of these unions were maintained, and this in all probability explain why British unions were later found to be far more

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democratically governed than their American counterparts.165 In the other three countries, the transition had meant that responsibility for determining the interests of the working class passed from workers themselves to officials of one sort or another, to party and state officials in Russia, and to full-time career union officials in France and the United States. In both France and the United States as we have seen, union officials disagreed about what the interests of the working class might be at any particular time, and as a result their union movements divided and fragmented. By maintaining the trade basis of organization, British union leaders and officials had less opportunity to have such disagreements, or at least to carry them to the point of splitting of the union movement, and the degree of class solidarity was often left for British workers themselves to decide, unofficially, on the shop floor, in the course of labour disputes. Would they, or would they not, cross a picket line? Would they or would they not ‘come out’ in support of their fellow workers? Disagreements about the interests of the working class as a whole passed to another forum – the Labour Party. Occupational organization was, therefore, an essential part of the formation of the working class in England. Marx assumed that a class could only be formed after the dissolution of occupational loyalties, when, as he put it in the Communist Manifesto, ‘the various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more equalized in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour.’ Once this had happened, he anticipated that workers would no longer be concerned with petty trade issues, would come to recognize their common class situation and class identity, thereby move out of the economic realm into the political, and engage in class struggle.166 English workers proved him wrong by forming a class, and entering the political realm, while still building and strengthening trade and occupational barriers, and still inventing invidious ‘distinctions of labour’ between one occupation and another. In all probability, the English working class was stronger and better organized than either the French or American, precisely because the organized labour movement contrived to incorporate trade loyalties rather than destroying or undermining them. Workers proved perfectly capable of transcending such distinctions as and when provoked as a class, while subsequently returning to uphold them. And in the Labour Party they formed their own permanent, and effective political organization, while the Russian, French and American unions, which had all transcended and abandoned the trade basis of organization, failed to do so. One might compare, as many have done, the outbreaks of working class action in France, with some violent, explosive or volcanic natural force. Since violent protest was such a minor part of the growth of the working class in England, a more apt metaphor might be a coral reef, growing by the continuous emergence of ‘narrow’ and local occupational loyalties, which slowly affiliated with one another to form national amalgamations.

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Marsh & Ryan’s three-volume ‘directory’ of the origins, histories and interrelationships of some 5,000 local unions provided a breathtaking diorama of the accretions to this coral reef over more than two centuries.167 There is no similar diorama of the English middle class. The chart of the 110 ‘qualifying associations’ compiled by Millerson, and the directory of the codes of ethics of 509 professional bodies assembled by Harris are perhaps a start.168 The analogy with a coral reef is, however, somewhat less fitting, for though they show a steady cumulation of durable associations, which borrow institutions from one another, and to a degree therefore depend on one another, they are all proudly independent. They more closely resemble the near and distant cousinhood of family trees. There is the large medical family of 13 ‘royal colleges’ all descended from the original College of Physicians, an even larger family of 36 engineering professions, all stemming from the Civils who organized in the eighteenth century, a fair-sized accountancy one, full of family rivalries, and the little legal cluster stemming from the four inns of court, and including the Law Society, the Barristers’ Clerks Association, and the Institute of Legal Executives. Members of these ‘families’ differ greatly amongst themselves of course, and it is only when one looks at the other three societies, that one sees any family resemblances at all. If one keeps these other societies in mind, the family resemblance even extends to trade unions, since there was one institution which professional associations and unions were both committed, and above all else explains why they were both able to endure and reproduce themselves from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century – all were committed to practicebased, practitioner-controlled training. This was so much a part of English life, that it deserves a study all to itself. Here it will be considered briefly, focusing specifically on its likely contribution to the reproduction and solidarity of the middle and working classes.

A powerful agency of class formation One result of the autonomy granted to English professions was that they were never forced by the state, like the Russian or French, to require university education as a condition of admission. And since they retained control of admission to their ranks, and supplied the only marketable credential for their members, new entrants were never obliged, as in the United States, to obtain a university diploma to distinguish themselves from self-taught and self-proclaimed competitors. The organized professions therefore had no reason to abandon their traditional practice-based and practitionercontrolled training, even though some of them came to accept a university degree as an optional extra. Engineering professions only required a university degree a generation or so ago, in 1971. Other professions, like the two legal professions, still do not require it, though the non-graduate entry route to both has lapsed because most school leavers intending to enter them fol-

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lowed their sixth-form friends and peers to university, rather than because they were required to do so.169 English employers and managers remained similarly committed to practice-based training until the late twentieth century, which is why Granick found British firms to be distinctively egalitarian, and more inclined than those in other countries to promote from the shop-floor.170 Sociologists of education have often wrung their hands over the English children who were denied the opportunity of going to university, which they assumed was because they were forced to leave school at an early age, or lacked funds, or because there were too few university places. They seldom considered what to them was evidently unthinkable, that some at least of those who could well afford it, and were well-qualified, might not wish to go. Perkin’s study of the educational backgrounds of 3,277 in ten ‘major elite groups’ in Britain between 1880 and 1978 showed that ‘Until recently, a third of the new peers, half the great landowners, over half the company chairmen, nearly two-thirds of the millionaires, and most of the accountants, the architects and solicitors’ had not attended a university at all.’171 If we widen our perspective to include all males categorized as ‘Class I’ in the Oxford Mobility study in 1972, we find that less than a quarter had attended university. In 1998, England and Wales were found to have much the lowest relationship between the highest level of education and entry into the highest ‘two classes’ of 13 developed societies.172 Many qualified and economically advantaged young people had evidently preferred, or utilized, alternative routes into these ‘two classes’ provided by practice-based and practitionercontrolled training.173 For the professions, of course, this was often the mandatory route, while continuing to university was an optional extra, a mere frill, and therefore a minority choice. Even, however, when practicebased training was not mandatory and formally regulated, as in industry, many evidently preferred it rather than continuing to university.174 English manual workers have been no less committed to practice-based training than their ‘betters’. Apprenticeships in England and Wales reached a peak in 1969, when 42.6% of male school leavers, and 7.1% of female, entered them, while a further 14% of boys and 15% of girls were entering employment with ‘planned training, apart from induction training’.175 And though critics also wrung their hands over the inadequate provision of technical schools, the evidence shows that the supply of English technical training frequently outstripped the demand right through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.176 Formally at least, apprenticeship was not quite as practitioner-controlled as professional training because a third party was involved, an employer. Articles of indenture were usually signed by the father of the apprentice and his son’s employer, rather than with ‘practitioners’ themselves, that is, skilled workers and their unions. In practice, however, union representatives and members took a great interest in apprentices, as some of the empirical research cited above has demonstrated. Their

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number and payment were routine subjects of collective bargaining with employers. And while employers might require apprentices to attend ‘day release’ courses at local technical schools, or even create company schools for them, most of their training was de facto both practice-based and practitionercontrolled since day-to-day responsibility for them rested with skilled workers. Once we recognize the enduring appeal of this alternative form of further education for all classes, many of the well-known and well-documented historical peculiarities of English schools and universities become comprehensible: why, for instance, many of the free grammar schools formed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries disappeared and had to be re-suscitated or re-established in the early-twentieth, why the newly-created civic universities in the nineteenth-century industrial cities languished for decades for want of students, why English universities as a whole remained elitist and non-vocational until their sudden transformation over the past two decades, why the provision of secondary education in England long lagged behind so many less wealthy societies, why free grammar school places remained unoccupied in the interwar years, and why technical education remained a ‘missing stratum’ of the English educational system.177 In the present context, however, the traditional preference of English people, of all classes, for practice-based, practitioner-controlled post-school education is important for only one reason: it is one of the most powerful agencies of class socialization imaginable. To begin with, it diverted young men from the path of individual betterment provided by schools and universities, reduced in other words the chances that they might rise out of their class rather than with it. During the years when young men entered both adulthood and the labour market and their adult identities were being formed, they were instructed not only in the technical requirements of their jobs, but also in the jurisdictional and status claims of the occupation they hoped to enter, and current practitioners could convey to them by their example the appropriate manners and demeanour when dealing with neighbouring occupations, both inferior and superior. They were also necessarily inducted into a network of colleagues and acquaintances, to some of whom they were likely to incur obligations, and therefore also a sense of loyalty to the professional association or union, as well as to the class, to which, as a matter of course, they were learning to belong. Practice-based, practitioner-controlled training arrangements of organized occupations seem therefore to have been a powerful means by which class attitudes and loyalties were reproduced and reinforced among the English people.178 What other agency could or compete with them in national coverage? What other agency can explain the loyalties and moral sentiments that classes must elicit if they are to endure? Class consciousness did not, after all, arrive from space, like some malignant spore that happened to settle on the English people. It was something more than a free-floating spirit, something more substantial than the butterfly of an opinion caught

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in the net of a passing pollster. It must have had some concrete associational and institutional moorings beyond the family, some human agents in civil society who organized to construct class barriers, class distinctions and class stereotypes, and human messengers who passed on class values and obligations at work and play, in formal meetings and casual conversation. Professions and trade unions are much the most likely candidates, indeed the only candidates. Who and where are their rivals? What other collective associations have had as long a history, and have organized as effectively across England? What other associations could have had a comparable impact at an impressionable age? What other associations have been able to socialize their members as continuously, or define the division of labour as effectively, or locate their class position as indelibly, or exercise as much influence over working lives? What other associations and institutions, one might finally ask, have distinguished the English as sharply from the Russians, the French and the Americans?

What’s in a name? Laissez faire versus laissez gouverner Up to this point, while referring frequently to the relationship between the state and civil society in England, and explaining how it has contributed to the formation and continuation of three classes, we have declined to give it a name. One reason for this hesitation was that this relationship has assumed a rather different complexion according to time and circumstance. In White’s account of the early forms of ‘self-government at the king’s command’, it often verges on conscription. English judges long looked on juries in the same manner, that is to say, they saw them not as public-spirited representatives of the community, but as subjects conscripted to perform a function for the state. They therefore did not hesitate to harangue, and even punish them, if they did not decide as expected. Over the first half of the seventeenth century, the sovereign and the inns of court, the primary organized interest in civil society, plainly had quite conflicting views of the nature of their relationship. James I and Charles I issued what they thought were orders, which the inns received as advice. If one traces that relationship, or the relationship between the state and other professions it seems at times to be one of collaboration and partnership, at other times indifference, and at still others, of suspicion and antagonism. It is therefore difficult to think of a single term that could do justice to the various forms that it has taken. Spokesmen, theorists, and partisan ideologues give names that stick to political phenomena, and this relationship had no place or need for any of them, since it was long taken for granted as the normal English way of doing things. After remaining anonymous for all this time, one may reasonably wonder whether we should worry now about giving it a name. The answer is that that we should, for without a name, it is bound to be known by that which it most closely resembles, its look-a-like, laissez faire.

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Keynes defined laissez faire as ‘a doctrine that, whether on divine, natural or scientific grounds, State Action should be narrowly confined and economic life left, unregulated so far as may be, to the skill and good sense of individual citizens actuated by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world.’179 But this would be a very misleading and inaccurate description of the relationship between the state and civil society we have been discussing, and hence, if it is not distinguished from laissez faire and appropriately named, there will be endless confusion. To begin with, it will be clear that the relationship we are referring to is much older than laissez faire. It assumed its distinctive character during the early formation of the English state, and was central to the disputes of the revolutionary era, that is to say, long before anyone had coined the phrase, or recommended a policy of laissez faire. It was the original, implicit, takenfor-granted, habitual relationship between the state and civil society in England, while laissez faire is a comparatively ‘modern’ economic doctrine, which defined a desirable relationship, not between the state and civil society as a whole, including legal, religious and educational institutions, but between the state and individual economic actors. Moreover, the ancient, habitual relationship presupposed rather different roles for both the state and for civil society than the doctrine of laissez faire. It assumed that the role of the state was to empower organized, representative groups of known, even named, persons, within civil society, whom it trusted to use the monopoly powers granted to them in the public interest. The state did not suppose, or wish, to promote competition between such chartered groups. Indeed, if competing groups of applicants claimed to represent some body of practitioners, neither of them were likely to obtain any state support. Newly-organized occupations, aspiring to be recognized as a profession, were routinely opposed on the grounds that their application infringed their monopoly of existing ones in some respect. In 1831, the first Law Society was finally granted a charter under the rather clumsy title of the ‘Society of Attorneys, Solicitors, Proctors and others not being barristers practising in the Courts of Law and Equity in the United Kingdom’, just in case the unwary might confuse the newly-chartered profession with the legal practitioners long-established in their inns of court. Hence, petitioners had first to negotiate a consensus or near-consensus, both amongst themselves and with already established professions, about the boundaries of the jurisdiction within which they hoped to be granted monopoly powers. The state might then recognize their title and jurisdiction, and grant such powers as it deemed appropriate, to enable them to train and licence future practitioners and to regulate existing practitioners. Obviously, since it was granting them a monopoly, it did not expect them thereafter to compete with anyone. On the contrary, it seems to have expected them to bring some order both to their own occupation and to society as a whole, by ethical restraints on their members’ competitiveness.

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Clearly, it would be confusing and absurd to describe this relationship, entailing the empowerment and trust of groups of named individuals, as laissez faire. Proponents of laissez faire doctrine sought the very opposite, that the state should not empower or place its trust in any particular group, however honourable and worthy, but should instead place its trust in the mechanism of the market, and in the self-interest, and ‘skill and good sense’ of unnamed and unknown individuals, ‘actuated’, as Keynes put it, ‘by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world.’ The one thing that the two forms of relationship seem to have in common is that both assume that ‘he governs best who governs least’, and that the state’s proper stance is ‘hands off’, but that said, there remain considerable differences in their view of the role of the state immediately before it takes its hands off. In the habitual relationship, the state had to evaluate carefully the arguments, representativeness, and trustworthiness of the claimants, and then to decide the jurisdiction and powers that might be appropriately granted to them. All being well, no further state action would then be required, unless the chartered body demonstrated it was not worthy of the trust placed in it. Under the doctrine of laissez faire, the state had only to dismantle any form of protection and regulation that it might previously have erected, and thereafter had to leave the market to decide between the claimants and to determine the division of the labour between them. The doctrine of laissez faire is, however, ambiguous about whether any further state might be required. Dicey noted long ago that, if literally applied, and the state took no further action, it would not lead to competitive markets at all, but to regulation by informally-organized groups of businessmen, so that if the state really wished to maintain competitive markets, it would be involved in continuous regulation of economic activity to ensure it remained competitive. We may therefore distinguish an active laissez faire policy to refer to a state which, like the American, takes steps to continuously preserve market competition, and to passive laissez faire to a state which does not. Observing that the latter more accurately described the way British labour relations had evolved, Kahn-Freund coined the term laissez faire collectivism, that is, a state that left organized groups in civil society to behave as they wished. However, for our purposes it seems preferable to find a term which distinguishes the ancient, habitual relationship between the English state and the collective actors of civil society to which we have referred more emphatically from its look-a-like. Perhaps laissez-nous règler nos affaires nous-mêmes, or laissez-nous nous gouverner. Laissez gouverner will do. Once we have distinguished the two relationships in this manner, we are better able to trace their contrasting histories without becoming tied up in knots. Clearly, many English institutions, like the jury, the inquest and other summonses and ‘assemblings’ that interested White, owed their autonomy to laissez gouverner, not to laissez faire. Similarly, the self-government

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of the inns of court, of the guilds and companies in London and other cities, of the more ancient public schools, of the Royal College of Physicians, and the universities, derive from the ancient habit of laissez gouverner, not from the doctrine of laissez faire. At a certain point, in the late eighteenth century, however, the ancient, habitual relationship of laissez gouverner and the economic doctrine of laissez faire began to co-exist, and their complex and subtle interrelationship commenced. Initially, it seems safe to say, the doctrine of laissez faire was only found credible and appealing, and only became orthodox opinion, because the pre-existing habitual relationship between the state and civil society of laissez gouverner provided some support for it. Much the same seems to be true of the official economic doctrines of other countries we have been examining. No one supposes that the economic doctrine of mercantilism persuaded French kings strictly on its intellectual merits, or that the ideology of socialism attracted Russian intellectuals simply because it was a demonstrably superior form of economic and social organization. The way was prepared for both of these doctrines by the pre-existing relationship between the state and civil society in the two societies. And so it was with laissez faire in England. 180 However, while the doctrine initially depended on the support of the habitual relationship of laissez gouverner, there was no reason to expect they should thereafter invariably coincide. Many of the corporate institutions established after the rise of the doctrine of laissez faire, would seem to have continued to draw on the traditional habitual response of laissez gouverner. Thus the continual chartering of new, self-governing professions through the nineteenth century can hardly be attributed to laissez faire, since it only continued a practice long-established before laissez faire had been thought of. And though the continued growth of the public schools has sometimes been attributed to the doctrine of laissez faire, it likewise seems to have owed more to the traditional relationship between the state and civil society. As it happened, virtually every notable proponent of the doctrine of laissez faire in the nineteenth century made an exception of education, and acknowledged that this was a legitimate function, even a duty, of the state, which suggests, since this consensus was long ignored, that in this area at least the habit was much stronger than the doctrine.181 The state’s attitude towards trade unions also seems to have been informed more by the habitual and traditional laissez gouverner than by the doctrine of laissez faire. In 1814, as we have seen, Parliament repealed the 1563 Statute of Artificers, which meant that the relationship between organized labour and the state reverted to that which obtained before the 1563 statute. It seems odd to call this reversion to pre-Statute practice a triumph of laissez faire, though that is how it is often portrayed. Derry, the historian of the unsuccessful campaign for re-enactment of the Statute, would have none of it. He pointed out that such ‘economic doctrines … were not particularly

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emphasized in the debates.’ In the end, he thought ‘… the Act of 1814 did not owe its inception to the adoption by Parliament of a coherent new economic policy, but was the child of an age of political chaos and governmental ineptitude.’182 Ten years later, in 1824, when the Combination Laws were all repealed, state policy might then reasonably be said to have been informed by the doctrine of laissez faire, though only in the passive sense of the term, since no measures were taken to prevent the trade unions from organizing as they wished. Thereafter they survived in a legal limbo, subject only to random and capricious prosecution for the common law offences of conspiracy or restraint of trade. In 1871, however, the state reverted decisively to its habitual laissez gouverner, for the Trade Union Act of that year gave unions ‘unconditional, unlimited freedom to combine’ and an unusual and privileged legal status whereby agreements of a trade union, although lawful, were not legally enforceable should damages be sought by an employer or a disgruntled member, for their breach. In 1875, this privileged status was confirmed by the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, which altogether exempted trade unions from prosecution for criminal conspiracy, no matter what they did.183 When in 1901 the House of Lords, to most observers’ surprise, decided that a trade union was liable for damages for picketing and persuading employees of the Taff Vale Railway Company to break their contracts with the company, the government immediately appointed a Royal Commission. Against the advice of the majority report, the new Liberal Government decided, in 1906, to give trade unions complete immunity for torts ‘alleged to have been committed by or on behalf of the trade union.’ Dicey was shocked, and claimed that ‘it makes a trade union a privileged body exempted from the ordinary law of the land. No such privileged body has ever before been created by an English Parliament.’184 Even the trade unions most devoted friends, such as Sydney and Beatrice Webb, were astonished.185 Nonetheless, over the next 60 years, Parliament continued to reaffirm the immunities of trade unions whenever they seemed threatened.186 How are we to explain this consistent policy? There is, one might first observe, no evidence that it was the result of sustained and irresistible union pressure. And it clearly has little to do with laissez faire, but by reference to laissez gouverner it becomes intelligible. One may infer that over the years since the repeal of the Combination Laws during which trade unions had been left in a legal limbo, their public image as potentially dangerous conspiracies had been replaced by one which saw them as law-abiding representative bodies. As a result, Parliament was willing to grant them immunities in 1871, similar to those already granted to the professions, universities and other chartered bodies, to confirm these immunities in 1875 and reinforce them after they had been challenged by the courts, in 1906. Dicey might in all candour have pointed out that there were other privileged bodies ‘exempted from the ordinary law of the land’, most

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notably the corporate bodies of his own profession, the four inns of court.187 Trade unions were not, therefore, ‘uniquely privileged’. They were, in fact, being treated like the professions, and on matters in which they and their members were intimately involved, similarly came to have a considerable influence on government attempts to define the public interest.188 Drawing a clear distinction between the habitual, collectivist, relationship between the state and civil society, and the doctrinal, individualist, market-oriented one, is thus indispensable for analytical purposes. It enables us to see how the doctrine of laissez faire was checked, qualified and circumscribed by the more ancient commitment to laissez gouverner. Earlier in the investigation, we encountered one striking example of the interplay between the two, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. When the British belatedly decided to inaugurate a competition policy by establishing this body after World War II, they were evidently influenced more by the traditional laissez gouverner relationship than by the doctrine of laissez faire, or hoped somehow to reconcile the two. They therefore attempted, as Wilks has shown, to preserve market competition by industrial ‘self-regulation’ rather than by adopting an active laissez faire policy of rigorous and punitive state intervention to maintain competitive markets like the Sherman Antitrust Act in the United States. Not surprisingly, many foreign observers were completely baffled, and failed to see how the MMC could be called a competition policy at all.189 The most important contribution that the distinction between laissez faire and laissez gouverner brings to the analysis of social and political events comes, however, at the very end of the period under review. After the election of Mrs Thatcher’s first government in the spring of 1979, the inherent contradictions between the two were recognized for the very first time, and her governments made no attempt whatever to reconcile one with the other. They rejected altogether the habitual, collectivist assumptions of laissez gouverner and imposed policies inspired by unqualified and undiluted laissez faire. From our point of view, it is the former, the rejection of laissez gouverner, which is the more important, since that entailed the termination of the long collaboration between the state and civil society, and therefore the dismantling of the corporate structures on which classes had long depended. However, before examining these events, we need to pause to test our explanation of the formation and endurance of England’s classes.

9 Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity of the Argument

The theory may be tested in time-honoured ‘whodunnit’ manner, by seeing how well it can provide answers to frequently asked questions about classes in England, those with which we began, but also others that have arisen along the way.

Why didn’t an intelligentsia emerge in England? In both Russia and France, we have encountered class-like formations of intellectuals, both of which had a considerable degree of self-consciousness and of public recognition. In England, it was far more difficult to do this. The nearest counterparts of the Russian and French intelligentsia were, I suppose, the early Fabians, the Bloomsbury ‘group’, or the Cliveden ‘set’, but these were tiny, exclusive, ephemeral groups of writers and thinkers, rather than nationally-recognized strata or classes, and they disappeared when their members moved house or died. This is not, of course, to say that England never had any intellectuals. Like every other industrializing society, it had an ever-increasing number of individuals who had an advanced education, earned their living by their brains rather than their hands, and who were interested in the world of ideas, and might therefore be reasonably described intellectuals.1 In England, however, such people never formed an identifiable and self-conscious collectivity, alienated from the state and from the society around them. Moreover, they seldom claimed to be the conscience of the nation, and rarely received any special respect or status by virtue of their intellectual activities. This lack of public recognition of, and respect for, intellectuals was noticed by foreign observers. In his Notes on England, written between 1860 and 1870, Taine repeatedly commented on the contrast between the high position accorded writers, distinguished journalists and artists in Paris, and their insignificant position in England where, he thought, they ‘remain in the second rank’, except for ‘a handful of the most distinguished, such as Stuart Mill, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray and Tennyson.’ He concurred 275

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with Stendhal’s jibe that ‘Intelligence and talent lose twenty five per cent of their worth on arrival in England.’2 Annan’s study of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ in nineteenth-century England was less concerned with this lack of respect for intellectuals than with the other side of the coin, that is, intellectuals’ lack of estrangement from the society around them. A paradox, he thought, ‘has puzzled both European and American observers of English life: the paradox of an intelligentsia which appears to conform with rather than rebel against the rest of society.’3 Other observers have put the point in rather different ways, but even those who seem about to disagree with him, end up by not doing so.4 Heyck, for instance, argued that ‘from a nominalist point of view … if a social class is real, then it is only so in the minds of people at a given time and place’, and by this criterion he thought the ‘intellectuals’ in late Victorian England had emerged as a social class, since, in his view, the late Victorians clearly thought of them as such. However, he went on to say, ‘if a social class manifests itself in organizations, ideology, formal and informal social links and political action, all rising from common relation to the means of production, then the answer is not so clear.’ Whilst late Victorian English intellectuals had ‘many formal and informal social links amongst themselves, mainly as a result of their common association with the universities, they also had almost as close social connections with the ruling class – the landowners, the upper-middle class and the professions – as with each other.’ In the end, he suggested, it would be ‘most reasonable to think of them much as one thinks of the professions – separate from the ruling class in some ways, but very much a part of it in others’. And intellectuals were definitely not, in his view, independent political actors, since they were always allied with one of the three major parties.5 From this somewhat convoluted argument, I conclude that Heyck thought that English intellectuals did not have a distinctive collective identity and were rather congenially integrated with the society around them. Collini seemed anxious to tell the British that they have been deluding themselves in thinking that they have had few intellectuals but after comparing them with French intellectuals, he also decided that they have, after all, been a much less well-defined, recognizable and self-conscious social formation, and that Britain had ‘by and large no … tradition of political intervention by intellectuals conscious of their collective role.’6 In nineteenth-century England, intellectuals relied on their personal connections with the traditional elite, and these personal ties, common in the mid and late Victorian years, continued ‘deep into the twentieth century.’ Their confidence was based on these social links rather than on their intellectual credentials per se. In France, by contrast, intellectuals, had more ‘confidence that intellectual activity was highly regarded by society in general and that there existed within that society a smaller but still substantial, audience responsive to one’s public statements.’ This audience, moreover ‘has been to

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some extent conscious of a degree of isolation from society at large, constituting a sub-culture with its own institutions and forms of life.’ French intellectuals who ‘signed a manifesto or wrote an article or addressed a public meeting’, could therefore ‘expect support and perhaps even success.’7 Our earlier consideration of intellectuals in Russia and France suggests three social preconditions for the formation and recognition of a distinct collectivity or class of intellectuals: first, a political regime lacking popular legitimacy, second, a growing body of educated people without other forms of association, and third, a civil society unable and unused to organizing and speaking for itself, enabling intellectuals to see themselves, and present themselves, as its authentic voice. If we can now show, without inserting any ad hoc arguments and variables, that the weakness or absence of these same preconditions in England provides an explanation of why English intellectuals never formed a class comparable to those of Russia or France, our explanation of the process of class formation will have passed one preliminary test. The first precondition, the deficit of legitimacy of political institutions, is the most difficult to assess comparatively, but it is probably reasonable to say that British political institutions never suffered from a deficit of legitimacy on quite the same scale as those of Russia or even France. Intellectuals could therefore support reform within the existing political system, and, as Aron, Heyck, Annan and others argued, participate in it rather than being collectively alienated from it, like their Russian, and to a lesser extent their French counterparts.8 Nonetheless, one may recall that British political institutions did not rest on anything near universal manhood suffrage until 1884 at the earliest, and British society sufficient social and economic problems to disturb any intellectuals’ conscience – monumental inequalities, along with mass illiteracy, ill health, squalid housing, poverty and cruelty – which British governments had failed to solve or even address. If the other two preconditions had been present, it is reasonable to suppose that an intelligentsia would have emerged in England, but they were not. In both respects it differed sharply from Russia and France. England did not have a civil society that was unable to organize or speak for itself, so it would have been a trifle presumptuous, even absurd, for intellectuals to claim authority to speak for others who had to suffer in silence. Their best opportunity to do so came with exposés of the working conditions of many semi- and unskilled workers in the late 1880s and early 1890s who, as we have seen, had long been ignored by the unions of skilled workers. Cardinal Manning, the Webbs, G.D.H. Cole and various other sympathetic intellectuals offered their support, and were briefly identifiable as an embryo intelligentsia. Semi- and unskilled workers, however, soon found their own leaders and gifted spokesmen, and formed their own trade unions. Intellectuals therefore had no further collective role in the labour movement, and could only contribute to it as individual members

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of the Labour Party. England’s long-standing traditions of freedom of association and freedom of speech had, in other words, deprived intellectuals of any standing or authority as representatives of mute masses. Those traditions also meant of course that, unlike both Russia and France, the growing body of educated people were not without other forms of association. All those engaged in any form of intellectual employment or engaged in any kind of intellectual pursuit formed their own specialized associations, at a much earlier date, and far more frequently, than their counterparts in Russia or France. Millerson’s list of associations leaves one wondering if there was any kind of specialized knowledge, or any kind of intellectual interest, that was not organized. Novelists and playwrights are the only ones that come to mind, but they had their own platforms and arenas. Everyone with intellectual interests in England could affiliate with someone of like interests. As it happened, the great wave of professionalization in England and Wales at the end of the nineteenth century, when dozens of new occupations sought to emulate the self-government of the two ancient professions, and asserted their collective identity and social role, coincided almost exactly with the emergence of an intelligentsia in both Russia and France, when these two countries had only one organized self-governing profession apiece, their advocates. Both of these states had in fact mobilized expert knowledge for their own purposes in centralized, state-sponsored academies before allowing specialists in civil society to spontaneously define their own fields and organize as they wished. These academies had responsibility for the development of all branches of knowledge, and therefore had a mission that transcended that of any groups of enthusiasts and specialists, and any disciplinary demarcations that they might have spontaneously devised. The intelligentsia in both Russia and France sometimes appear to have been inspired by a similar sense of obligation to society at large, especially when the actions of the state were found to be less deserving of their allegiance. They might therefore be seen as civil society’s informal alternative to the state-created, state-honoured, statepaid intellectual elite, though not infrequently disaffected members of these elites transferred their allegiance to civil society’s shadow ‘academy’.9 There was one comparable supra-professional official body in England, the Royal Society, which had been chartered, interestingly enough, by Charles II who, as we have seen, had no love for independent, intermediate bodies, and hoped to subordinate them all to royal authority. It is interesting to speculate what role the Royal Society might have assumed had Charles’s brother been able to complete his quo warranto campaign, and had every professional body been made subject to royal control. The fact is, however, that after the Glorious Revolution, the Royal Society could not perform the supervisory role of its Russian and French counterparts, and did not remotely compare with them in authority, prestige, scale, funding or full-time personnel. It was a voluntary society, among other voluntary learned societies and professional bodies, and competed with them in the task of evaluating

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and recognizing contributions to knowledge, and honouring their leading exponents. It had rather more prestige than other professional associations perhaps, and was certainly more inter-disciplinary, but it was not the acknowledged arbiter or pinnacle of scientific or cultural endeavour. The coincidence between the rise of an intelligentsia in Russia and France, and the mass mobilization of English professions prompts one to suggest that England had no intelligentsia because it had self-governing professionals, and that intellectuals and self-governing professionals are in fact alternative social formations. They may co-exist, as Russian and French advocates demonstrated, but they seem to have a zero-sum relationship. As professions organize, they necessarily reduce the scope for the formation of a class of intellectuals, since within the jurisdictions they have organized and regulated, they do not acknowledge the claims or competence of any outsiders, whether it be state officials or vaguely qualified or wholly unqualified allpurpose intellectuals, and consider themselves the only experts. Professionals are necessarily committed to the specialization and differentiation of knowledge, and their members are inclined to rate communication with each other, through their own meetings and journals, with their own agendas, debates and controversies, in their own private languages, more highly than any dialogue with the general population. More importantly, they also define and inculcate their own service ethics, and do not expect the state or the church, or any outside body to provide one for them. It follows that if professionals are extensively organized, they must undermine support for the trans-professional or supra-professional collectivity of intellectuals, and for any mission or service ethic that might inspire and unite them. Professional associations also undermine the formation of an intelligentsia in a number of other ways. Having been granted the freedom to organize, professionals could hardly remain as entirely estranged from the existing political and social order as intellectuals were, since the grant of a royal or parliamentary charter demonstrated some degree of state and public recognition of their own expertise. Self-government seems to have the same consequences everywhere. However rotten and illegitimate the existing social order might be, it could not be all bad, since one little bit of it, their bit, was acceptable, and even admirable. Professionals (and craftsmen) may support the revolutionary transformation of the rest of society, but they commonly resist the transformation of that little bit of it for which they themselves have been granted responsibility.10 Professionals also restrict the range of subjects on which intellectuals can claim to speak with any authority, and create multiple alternative arenas of discussion, but their final decisive blow against an intelligentsia is that they deprive intellectual leaders of followers, of audiences and of a rank and file. The experience of both Russia and France suggested that an intelligentsia requires an ample supply of educated people who will listen and take them seriously. Those with somewhat uncertain prospects of future employment

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seem to be particularly appreciative of their pronouncements. In England, the practice-based admission and training procedures of self-governing professions restricted the number of such people at source, and reduced the uncertainties of finding employment in the future. O’Boyle found that, over the first half of the nineteenth century, there was far more unemployment among those trained to enter the French legal, medical and other professions than among their equivalents in England, and as a result, in her view, England had less to fear from the ‘fatal unrest… of an intellectual proletariat.’11 In the inter-war period, a similar contrast between relative stability of British intellectual life and the turbulence and unrest on the continent attracted much attention. Kotschnig sought to explain the contrast by pointing out that, over the period from 1914 to 1934, England had – in proportion to its population, to its rate of literacy, and to its level of economic development – disproportionately few university students. It also had, by comparison with continental Europe, very low rates of professional unemployment and overcrowding, and never produced ‘the pools of unemployed intellectuals or would-be professionals’, which he thought elsewhere posed a constant ‘threat to the established order’.12 O’Boyle attributed the difference between France and Britain in the nineteenth century simply to Britain’s faster rate of economic growth. Kotschnig argued that in the inter-war period of the twentieth century there were ‘no pools of unemployed intellectuals or would-be professionals’ in England, because ‘the knowledge of incipient overcrowding spreads quickly and causes a decline in the number enrolling in that subject.’13 By contrast, our explanation is exactly the same for both periods, and simply refers back to the practitioner control of entry to and training for the professions that we discussed earlier. In the mid-nineteenth century, French professional schools and universities admitted and graduated students without regard to their employment prospects, whereas in England the majority of entrants to the professions were not trained at universities at all, but by apprenticeship, so practitioners of all kinds were able to monitor and control admission to their own professions. It was still the same in the inter-war period. Most would-be professionals in England at the time did not, as Kotschnig put it, ‘enrol’ in any subject, or indeed go to any university. What they did was to serve a pupillage, take articles, or serve some kind of apprenticeship, and practising professionals could therefore respond to ‘incipient overcrowding’ by declining to accept them.14 There is, of course, a time lag between the decision to accept a pupil and his or her eventual employment, so it is unlikely that this mechanism worked with such precision that it alone prevented the emergence of unemployed professionals. However, it had one other characteristic which is relevant in this context, in that it obliged every would-be professional to arrange their articles or pupillage by themselves, and gave them little opportunity to assemble with fellow students scattered across the country. They were not

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therefore in any kind of ‘pool’, and were not available to serve as the rank and file of an intelligentsia. In France, physical proximity, especially the congregation of students around the intellectuals’ citadel, the educational institutions on the left bank of the Seine, seems to have been an important element of both their self-consciousness and their wider social recognition. In Russia, intellectuals were not clustered to quite the same extent, though those in other cities seem to have depended considerably on their spiritual links with Moscow and St. Petersburg. In England, by contrast, there was no comparable physical or spiritual concentration. London was the headquarters of their own profession of course, and the postal address of the body which set and marked the written part of their examinations. On the great day when they qualified, they might perhaps visit the capital to be admitted to their profession, but by then it was rather late to be spellbound by some celebrated intellectual. Throughout their tedious intervening years of articles, the would-be professionals in England had little opportunity to share with others their thoughts on matters that would normally interest intellectuals, such as the general malaise of the country, of the world, or the human predicament, or for that matter, to worry much about their future employment prospects. If they did worry about such things, they worried alone. They were, after all, already engaged in obtaining intensely practical knowledge about their chosen field, already partly integrated into a professional work setting, and had reasonable prospects of future employment, since principals usually accepted some responsibility for finding a position for their pupils if they could not employ them themselves. Moreover, articled clerks had already begun to establish one essential requirement for any kind of professional practice: a network of future colleagues and clients. Their anxieties could not therefore become part of a collective protest, as they might have done if they had been studying together, and worrying together, at a university, listening to the pronouncements of some intellectual luminary.15 In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that intellectuals in England should, as Collini observed, be less well-defined, less recognizable and less self-conscious than in France, and that they should fail to find an audience responsive to their public statements. French intellectuals tended, he explained, to work more often through ‘groupings which formed around ideological nodes’, and as a result, ‘the shapers and exponents of ideas’ have ‘a correspondingly more prominent role in the political culture.’ Their perspectives were, he added, ‘universal, abstract and programmatic’. By contrast, the perspectives of English intellectuals were, ‘local, historical and qualitative.’ They focused on ‘the condition of England’, meaning the adverse consequences of industrialization. Their concerns were the ‘loss of community’, ‘duty’ and ‘the building of character’.16 All of these, one might note, were exactly the concerns that were likely to resonate, and have a particularly strong appeal, in a society with well-organized professions.

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In sum, our explanation of class formation that has rested on the relationship between the state and civil society seems to pass this first test, since it enables us to provide a reasonable explanation of the non-appearance of a class of English intellectuals comparable to those in Russia or France. It is not perhaps an especially severe test since there are no rival explanations.

Why were trade unions not interested in class warfare? The second test is to explain the non-ideological and non-combative nature of the English trade unions, or at least their reluctance to take part in militant struggle on behalf of their class. They were the first to organize, the first to establish a national federation, which, bar a few expulsions, has remained unified throughout its history, the first to establish a successful political party, and they repeatedly demonstrated their power and combativeness at the workplace. They declined, however, to convert their organizational unity and muscle into class action on the streets. They were class conscious, as the formation of the TUC and the Labour Party showed, but evidently had little wish to embark on a class struggle outside Parliament and were seldom receptive to intellectuals inspired by a vision of a classless society, who urged them to do so. They infuriated Marx and Engels, and continued to infuriate intellectuals ever after, who recognized that they were the only organized bodies who might plausibly challenge or threaten the existing social and political order, but instead preoccupied themselves with what appeared to them to be petty shopfloor issues. Anderson, a spokesman for the New Left in the 1960s, remarked, with some desperation, ‘at whichever level one chooses to look, the same fundamental paradox reappears. In Britain, the working class has generated over 150 years a massive, adamantine class consciousness. But it has never developed into a hegemonic force.’17 Perhaps the first, and maybe also the last, word of explanation is that they were committed to parliamentary methods within their own unions, within the TUC, and within the Labour Party, and within Parliament itself. It would have been rather odd, and would have required some very special provocation, for them suddenly to adopt the ideals and methods of French unions. They rarely appear to have done so, but it is, one must admit, extremely difficult to document their ‘class actions’. Marx warned against ‘the vulgar mind that confuses trade disputes with class struggles’, but failed to give the criteria by which one might distinguish one from the other. Official statistics do not of course make any such distinction. If we make the rather debatable assumption that bloody and deadly labour confrontations were more likely to be class conflicts, then it would seem that Britain was almost devoid of class conflict, since it has had rather little violence and few fatalities in its labour disputes.18 And if we also consider public order offences, which class conflicts would presumably generate, then we would probably come to the same conclusion. Most public order offences,

Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity of the Argument 283

in nineteenth-century England at least, related to ‘ethnic’ conflicts, to Ireland, and not to class at all.19 Trade unions’ class actions commonly took the quieter form of an appeal for help from their ‘brothers’ either by a sympathy strike or by ‘blacking’ the supplies of the employer with whom others were in dispute, and class action was therefore intertwined with the defense of trade interests. Help was given on the understanding that any favour rendered would be reciprocated at a later date. As soon as the crisis had passed, each union’s members returned to the defence of its own trade interests. For much of the time, therefore working class membership and solidarity was as passive and dormant as that of the middle class, and only became active in an emergency, when the state or employers provoked collective action across trades and unions. Commentators of the left sometimes talk up the amount of conflict and protest in Britain, so the ‘Invergordon mutiny’ in 1919, for instance, as polite and respectful as a mutiny can be, seems one step short of the Aurora turning her guns on the Winter Palace.20 Most, however, have recognized the British labour movement presents something of a problem if the working class were supposed to be desperately longing to overthrow the capitalist system, or if one supposed that class consciousness and action must inevitably take a revolutionary form. Both Marx and Lenin realized that, in Britain at least, the organization of labour did not automatically lead on to class struggle. When he wrote What is to be done? Lenin had already given up on trade unions. ‘Class political consciousness’, he wrote, ‘can be brought to the workers only from without, that is only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.’21 In his later years he would apparently spit out the words ‘trade unionism’ in English to express his contempt, for narrow, selfish unionism that failed to recognize its higher duties to its class or perform its anointed historical role. Anderson thought that it was because the English working class came into existence prematurely, that is before socialist thinkers, like himself presumably, were ready to guide it in the proper direction.22 Once we acknowledge the occupational base of trade unions, and the enduring primacy of defining and protecting a trade, as our explanation has done, one may better understand the nature of English workers’ class consciousness, and why it seldom prompted barricades on the streets and violent public protests. All organized occupations, professions as much as trade unions, have had limited and specific goals, which did not require the overthrow of any other class, or of the existing social order, and did not require a classless workplace. They were not really ‘going’ anywhere, other than to improve their position relative to other occupations. The primary goal of most English unions, most of the time, was simply to establish and maintain a respected position within an existing occupational hierarchy. Their combativeness was therefore directed against employers and

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managers who wished to reorganize the workplace to their members’ disadvantage, or against other occupations that trespassed on their longestablished jurisdictions. In these two respects, they could be extremely combative, and while the former sometimes took a class form and required class solidarity, both were really in defence of the collective property rights established by their predecessors. The occupational basis of trade unionism also enables us to explain the exceptional organizational unity of the British labour movement, about which there can be little doubt. It developed just one central organization, not six or seven competing ones like the French, nor three or four like the American. It also successfully created just one political party, not multiple parties like the French, nor did it offer its support to different parties like the American. Only the Soviet labour movement was still more unified, but their uniformity we have decided was that of the graveyard. Few historians of class have sought to try and explain this unity, but the trade basis of union organization enables us to do so. If trade unions are organized as trades there can be only two kinds of inter-union competition and dispute, or perhaps one, since they are really two sides of the same coin: first, ‘demarcation’ disputes about which occupation and which union a particular kind of work properly belongs to; and second, their corollary, ‘jurisdictional’ disputes about the union which should properly recruit the workers who perform this kind of work. Such disputes could, of course, be quite bitter and long-running, especially as new technologies emerged, and especially among occupations whose members might belong to diverse unions as a result of the muddying of the principle of occupational organization at the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, however tricky in practice, most of these disputes were, in principle at least, arbitrable. In the great majority of cases, they were in fact arbitrated, by the TUC itself, by procedures codified at its Bridlington Congress in 1938.23 Occupation therefore provides a basis, and a principle, on which independent unions can live together reasonably amicably, each recruiting workers within their own defined jurisdiction. Once such a principle has been recognized and established, working class organizational unity is feasible. The French and American union movements, by contrast, had and have no such agreed principle of organization, and never devised anything comparable to the Bridlington procedures.24 Their disputes were not therefore arbitrable. Questions such as ‘To which union does this work belong to?’ or ‘Which union ought to recruit these workers?’ became meaningless in both countries. As a result of the absence of any accepted principle of organization, their unions have been engaged in continuous internecine competition for much of their histories. French unions had an additional source of competitiveness because they were committed to furthering the interests of the working class, and there is no principle to which one might appeal to determine what those interests might be at any particular time. How, for

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instance, is one to determine what might have been the interests of the French working class with respect to the October Revolution in 1917? Or the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939? Or the Marshall Plan in 1945? The ‘interests of the working class’ in the face of such events, can only be a matter of speculation and opinion, and inevitably therefore must provoke considerable intra-union or inter-union debate and competition. If a working class was meant to unite on the basis of its supposed common class interests, then it is reasonable to say that working class unity has never been anything but a mirage. The continuous fragmentation of the political groups on the left everywhere only confirms the point. The leaders of such groups have to continuously persuade members and potential members that they have somehow or other correctly identified ‘the interests of the working class’, even though any turn of events, or any turn of a page, might sow seeds of doubt. As a result, fortuitous events and the finest doctrinal points repeatedly divide them. The occupational interests and concerns of British trade unions are, by contrast, concrete and constant, and familiar to every working member of the trade. They therefore offer much less scope for bitter disagreements that threaten union solidarity. Their leaders’ interpretations of the significance of unfolding political events in the wider world are neither here nor there, and their political ambitions remain their private concern. A two-way comparison of British and French unions therefore suggests that class unity is more likely when class consciousness is passive and parliamentary or, as Anderson put it, ‘adamantine’, and impossible if it is committed to revolutionary action.25 A working class cannot, it seems, be both united and revolutionary. French trade unions decided to transcend the trade loyalties of workers in the belief that once rid of these divisions, a unified and revolutionary working class would then emerge. Their subsequent history proved they were wrong, and the history of the British labour movement as a whole showed that trade loyalties and divisions provided a more secure foundation for class unity. The competitiveness of the American unions, did not of course spring from the same ideological source as the French, since only the Knights and the Wobblies hoped to organize the entire working class and claimed to be acting in its interests. From its founding in 1883 to the breakaway of the CIO in 1932, the AFL accepted occupation as the proper basis of union organization, and over that period survived without splinter groups or defections, and with a disputes procedure similar to that of the TUC.26 However, from the moment they abandoned the trade or occupational base of union organization, American unions have been engaged in more or less continuous competition with one another, like the French. Although for some two decades the CIO finally reconciled with the AFL, it had itself had several major defections in the interim. Moreover, once the NLRB started to apply diverse criteria to define bargaining units, such as plant, division

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or employer, unions started to recruit promiscuously, chasing members wherever they might be found, organizing whoever might be included in a bargaining unit that the NLRB defined, and conflict therefore became endemic even within the re-united AFL-CIO. Such conflicts may, it is true, be arbitrated by votes of workers themselves in representation elections organized and then enforced by the NLRB, but these elections never finally establish a principle, or even finally settle a particular case. The loser may, and usually does, return to fight another day, so the competition is permanent. A three-way comparison therefore suggests that the fundamental factor explaining the distinctive organizational unity and class solidarity of British unions has been their determination to maintain the trade basis on which they were originally founded, despite amalgamations of allied trades and the emergence of ‘industrial’ and ‘general’ unions. They knew better, it seems, than Marx, Engels and countless other intellectuals who urged them to transcend their original form of organization in favour of one that might better enable them to mobilize as a class. The trade basis of English unions also explains their reluctance to engage in class struggle on the streets, a strategy which the French comparison suggests would only have undermined their class unity and eliminated their participation as a class in democratic political life.

Why didn’t public ownership reduce class consciousness? The idea that property ownership and market relations create classes, and promote class conflict had one practical policy corollary of worldwide impact, namely the belief that public ownership, by eliminating the capitalists who expropriated the surplus value of the workers’ labour, would also eliminate classes and inaugurate a new spirit in employment relationships. This proposition has been the foundation of socialism across the world. It was long enshrined in the Constitution of the Labour Party, and was one of the factors that encouraged post-war Labour Governments to nationalize large sectors of privately-owned industry in Britain. It was not the only factor by any means, since British nationalization measures were usually preceded by reports which made a case on technical and investment grounds. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that public ownership attracted enthusiastic support, both within the affected industries and beyond, because it was thought it would improve work relationships, and help to create more egalitarian, more democratic, more harmonious, and perhaps even classless, workplaces. In the event, there were no indications that nationalization in Britain improved employment relationships in Britain a jot. McKibbin noted that ‘labour relations … in those industries nationalized by the Attlee government were no better under public than private ownership.’ He cited the findings of fieldworkers who had spent years in mining areas after national-

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ization who claimed they could give ‘scores of examples … of the prevailing idea among workers that any suggestion emanating from management, since it is designed for greater profit, is likely to be an underhand attack’ and so ‘coincidence of interests is unthinkable.’27 The idea that public ownership might improve labour relations or ameliorate class differences soon passed from public and scholarly consciousness. No student of class, even if they supported public ownership, as many of them did, ever sought to demonstrate its superiority on these grounds, or even bothered to compare the two sectors to justify their convictions. If anything, public sector employees seem to have been at the forefront of labour conflicts through all the post-war decades in Britain, and they remained so in the climacteric of the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979 that brought Mrs Thatcher to power, and in the coda of militant trade unionism, the miners’ strikes of 1981 and 1984.28 The initial hopes invested in public ownership should not, however, be simply dismissed as misplaced, since they pose another puzzle, and therefore another opportunity to test the theory of class formation presented earlier. Why, we may ask, did nationalization not have a beneficial impact on class relationships? Why was it that, even though capitalist expropriators were eliminated, employment relationships often seemed more rancorous, and disputes more common? Can our theory provide a reasonable explanation? Committed supporters of nationalization were not entirely unaware or unembarrassed by disputes in the public sector. Their practised explanation was that as nationalized enterprises remained a minority within a market system, they were necessarily forced to operate on the same principles as the private enterprises around them. They remained, as Miliband once put it, ‘islands of socialist virtue in a sea of capitalist greed’.29 But, surely, the islands should have given some hint of their ‘socialist virtue’ rather than having to wait until the sea finally disappeared? In any case, by this explanation, labour relations should only have been as bad as those in the private sector, not, as often seemed to be the case, worse. Why should this be? One answer to this question is to point to the distinctive employment conditions of public enterprises, which are in certain significant respects similar the world over. Public enterprises everywhere have been more favourably disposed to unions than private employers, and therefore have higher rates of unionization, which in turn has meant that public employees are better organized to protect their interests by strike action. Other things being equal, they have therefore been likely to have higher rates of labour unrest and strikes. Public enterprises everywhere have also politicized the normal employer-employee relationship to some degree, and therefore encouraged employees to make demonstrations in public against the government to resolve their grievances. Moreover, governments have often been tempted to use the public sector that they directly controlled as an instrument of economic policy. In Britain, in the late 1960s and through the 1970s,

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governments wishing to control inflation often imposed tighter limits on public employees’ pay settlements than they could persuade private employers to impose on their employees. Perhaps we need look no further than these three special conditions to explain the poorer industrial relations of the public sector. There are no satisfactory comparative statistics to determine whether we need to do so. If, however, we decide to look further, the explanation of the way classes were formed in England given earlier helps to identify some distinctive characteristics of public ownership in Britain, including some that probably exacerbated labour relations, and entrenched, rather than reduced, class relationships and attitudes. To begin with, our account of the distinctive traditional laissez gouverner relationship of the state and civil society in Britain throws some light on the peculiar form of public ownership, which all British governments, Liberal, Conservative and Labour, assumed to be the right and proper, namely the public corporation. There was nothing inherently socialist or democratic about this form of nationalization. It did not, for instance, empower employees or the public in any new way, as many post-war French public enterprises sought to do, nor did it involve the wider communities they served, in the manner of the Tennessee Valley Authority.30 The public corporation may most plausibly be seen as yet another example of the way in which the British state imitated and adapted organizational forms created by civil society for its own purposes. Self-governing professions are public corporations’ nearest organizational kin, and nationalization in Britain was an attempt to transfer something of the then-admired professional form of self-government to industrial and service settings. All of the British public corporations were granted monopolies, and sheltered from market forces, by being required only ‘to break even taking one year with another’, rather than to make profits. They were expected to provide a service to the people of Britain, not to conquer world markets. They were also given certain vague moral goals in the public interest. The most explicit were those expected of the BBC, which was required to ‘inform and educate’ the population, and only then to ‘entertain’ it. In the others, the governing boards were left to define the public interest, and were free to cross-subsidize their activities as they saw fit in pursuit of it.31 After their appointment, the members of their boards were, to a remarkable degree for public bodies, allowed to be self-governing. Arrangements for subsequent parliamentary, administrative or public accountability or scrutiny of their activities were minimal, or non-existent. When things started to go downhill, new forms of accountability had to be invented ad hoc, though the only form of accountability which really mattered by then was that to their banker of last resort, H.M. Treasury. In the present context, however, their most important characteristic was the requirement placed on them to adopt best practice in labour relations. This meant that their boards gave free rein to the collective aspirations of

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all kinds of staff, not only professional, semi-professional, white collar, skilled, semi- and unskilled manual staff, but managerial staff as well. They encouraged, even obliged, their employees to join the union or professional association appropriate to their occupation and status. They thus became totally-organized enterprises, not as employees of the enterprise in the Japanese manner, but in the traditional British manner as members of occupations, or kindred groups of occupations. Every single occupation was organized, and every single employee was encouraged to find the association or union appropriate to their occupation. Even the chairmen of nationalized enterprises formed their own little club or ‘trade union’ to negotiate their pay and conditions with the government.32 The National Health Service may serve as an illustration of the outcome. In 1979, when Dyson and Spary attempted to describe its collective bargaining procedures, it had well over a million employees and had recognized 43 associations and unions for collective bargaining purposes, which covered all the professional, white collar and manual occupations in the service.33 Their jurisdictions were not entirely settled. Shortly before Dyson and Spary began their study, for instance, the consultants organized in the Hospital Consultant Staff Association had merged with the Junior Hospital Doctors Association to form the British Hospital Doctors Federation. Alongside, and partly overlapping with these associations, was the British Medical Association, which was itself a federation of occupational associations, internally divided into a series of so-called ‘craft committees’ for hospital consultants, junior medical staff, general practitioners, which often negotiated with each other, as well as with the Department of Health and Social Security. Beneath these associations for doctors, there were more than a dozen semi-professional associations for physiotherapists, radiographers, midwives, health visitors, nurses and others, and then various associations for managerial and administrative staff, including two multioccupational unions, the Association of Technical, Managerial and Supervisory Staffs, the National Association of Local Government Officers, and a number of others which catered for single occupations, such as the Guild of Medical Secretaries. At the top of the manual workers in the service, were a cluster of unions – the lineal descendants of the original TUC ‘new model unions’ – representing the skilled electrical, engineering and building workers, and beneath them four large multi-occupational unions, the National Union of Public Employees, the Confederation of Health Service Employees, the Transport and General Workers Union, and the General and Municipal Workers Union. These were the lineal descendants of the ‘new’ unions and organized semi- and unskilled workers such as nursing auxiliaries, catering, laundry and maintenance workers. In such a dense, complex, self-organized network there was, of course, a degree of overlap and dual membership, of friction and competition, of

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movement and unresolved boundaries. The process of inventing, organizing and locating occupations in response to the growth of technology and knowledge, which had been a central theme in British industrial history, had not come to an end. Originally, surgeons and apothecaries had both been manual occupations, but through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they both ascended – apothecaries assuming the name of general practitioners – to become professions and core members of the middle class. In the NHS in 1979, another example of this process was still unfolding. Ambulance personnel had previously been recruited by the four multioccupational unions (NALGO, NUPE, COHSE, T & G), presumably because they looked like van drivers, but these were being challenged by an outsider, which was not among the 43 recognized bodies, the Association of Professional Ambulance Personnel. This association argued that unions had failed to recognize or further the distinctive skills and collective interests of ambulance personnel, and was trying to organize them as a profession. A few years later it claimed to have recruited about 5,000 of the 17,000 engaged in this kind of work, both manual and non-manual, from all levels of the service other than chief and deputy chief.34 Public enterprise in Britain, it is clear, provided the perfect environment for occupational organization, and occupational self-government. Although the NHS looked new, indeed was new in certain respects, it remained internally an extremely traditional form of organization. Ever since its formation, it had augmented the professional autonomy of both medical practitioners and of all its other employees. Public funding never entailed continuous managerial supervision or lay intrusion and accountability. NHS consultants were able to work in much the same manner as their nineteenth-century predecessors, who donated their time to charitable hospitals, with the added advantage that they were able to draw a regular salary while continuing with their private practices. The NHS also settled the long-disputed division of labour between consultants and general practitioners, rescued the latter from the unwelcome supervision of friendly societies and insurance funds, and provided them both with secure, non-competitive work jurisdictions. Judging by the Griffiths report, which initiated Mrs Thatcher’s attempts to reform the NHS, many other occupations, from top to bottom of the service, had established a similar degree of corporate autonomy. In a widely quoted phrase, Griffiths suggested that ‘if Florence Nightingale were carrying her lamp through the corridors of the NHS today she would almost certainly be searching for the people in charge.’35 He derided the unique form of ‘consensus management’ which had emerged, and which required an input from elected representatives of every significant occupation in the service. He compared it to ‘a “mobile”: designed to move with any breath of air, but which in fact never changes its position, and gives no clear indication of direction.’36 There is no reason to think that this corporately-organized internal structure was unique to the NHS. All nationalized industries were similarly

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favourably disposed to unionization of their employees, and on the same occupational basis.37 In a sense, they all might be said to have enabled both professions and trade unions to realize their fundamental goals, that is, to recruit all the members of their occupations, to maintain their practice-based training arrangements, to establish their jurisdictions at the workplace, and to establish a considerable degree of collective self-government within them. Thus the notion that nationalization involved a transfer from private to public ownership is somewhat misleading. Many of these enterprises were transferred, under public auspices, from one form of private ownership to another, that is, from the private ownership of individual shareholders to the collective private ownership of well-organized occupational groups. If we accept that organized occupations were also the constituent units of classes, it becomes rather easy to explain why the labour relations of public enterprises should be no better, and often worse, than those of private industry, and why they were never thought to have mollified or lessened class conflict. Their problems were due, not to the ‘capitalist sea’ around them, but to the plethora of professional associations and trade unions within them, which stabilized and institutionalized a hierarchy of organized occupations, thereby solidifying class consciousness and class distinctions, and facilitating strike action in defence of the collective interests of any disgruntled occupation. Pay may have been their most common cause, but they were also about relativities and status that had been disturbed, precedents that were not respected, and aspirations that were not recognized. They were, in other words, traditional trade disputes, which sometimes assumed a class colouration, rhetoric and form. The prelude to the Thatcher era, ‘the winter of discontent’ of 1978–1979, was a simultaneous revolt by numerous occupations in public services, including many from the NHS, whose class consciousness had been aroused because they had all simultaneously been subjected to government pay restraint during a period of inflation. Trades then combined to provoke class action – English style.

How could class consciousness be combined with high rates of mobility? A fourth puzzle arises from the evidence of comparative rates of social mobility presented at the very beginning of the investigation which showed that England had higher rates of social mobility than some societies who considered themselves classless. How could this be? Common sense and longstanding sociological wisdom alike suggest that class sentiments and class solidarity derive from, and thrive on, low rates of mobility. Indeed, one suspects that it was the persistence of class sentiment in Britain that led many sociologists to assume that it must have a distinctively low rate of social mobility, and to talk as though its rates of mobility were low, even after the comparative evidence repeatedly suggested they were not.38

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Few sociologists, it seems safe to say, have thought that class consciousness might be combined with high rates of mobility, though 40 years ago, Turner argued that the rate of mobility might be of no consequence one way or the other, for even if the rates of social mobility in the United States and England were exactly the same, the ‘sponsored’ form of mobility in England, meaning mobility by grammar school selection at an early age, socialized the upwardly mobile in the manners and behaviour of a different class, while Americans were upwardly mobile merely as a result of an educational ‘contest’ continuously open to everyone and involving no such class re-socialization. As a result, Americans were, in his view, less inclined to think that they had left one class and entered another.39 More recently, Savage raised the question whether class formation needed to be based on ‘a static attachment to a fixed position’ and considered the possibility that class sentiment might survive despite high rates of mobility.40 Between these two sceptical voices, however, the notion that class sentiments survived because mobility was low was firmly entrenched in sociological wisdom.41 Before considering how the theory of class formation presented earlier copes with this counter-intuitive combination of high rates of mobility and strong class sentiment, it has to face up to a preliminary, tricky problem. If England, as has been argued, had uniquely well-organized, self-governing occupations, one probable consequence would be high rates of occupational inheritance, since well-organized occupations usually have welldefended barriers to social mobility for unrelated or unconnected outsiders. Cumulatively, such barriers should lead, ceteris paribus, to lower overall rates of social mobility than in other countries. But the evidence we have considered indicates that it didn’t. A possible explanation is that the professions and manual occupations were expanding at such a rate that even though they favoured self-recruitment, there were plenty of opportunities for other entrants with no family ties to an existing member, and that these opportunities combined with others elsewhere in the economy, beyond the control of well-organized professions and crafts, either through the educational system, or through entrepreneurship, management, and other unorganized or newly-organized occupations might have compensated, or more than compensated, for the relative closure of the professions and skilled trades. Ishida’s comparative study of Britain, Japan and the United States supports this explanation, for while he confirmed that it was indeed ‘more difficult to enter ‘professional (and petty bourgeoisie) and skilled work in Britain than in the other two countries’, and that barriers to professional work contrasted particularly sharply with the ‘weak self-recruitment’ and ‘openness of the professional class’ in the U.S., he also found that overall Britain generally was a rather mobile society when compared with both the U.S. and Japan.42 Other avenues of mobility must therefore have compensated for the barriers to mobility presented by professions and skilled workers on mobility, though

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Ishida did not identify or examine them. Müller’s finding, mentioned earlier, that Britain had the most open university system in Europe, is one possibility. Granick’s evidence on the very high rate of mobility from English factory floors into management is another.43 For want of evidence we can say no more on this preliminary puzzle, and answering the main test question – how could England have had more class solidarity than elsewhere when it also had comparatively high rates of mobility? – soon runs into similar difficulties. Nevertheless, one can suggest a possible answer with the help of Whittaker’s studies of nine British and nine Japanese machine tool plants in the late 1980s. At one point, he focused on the relationship between the machine tool operators and the draughtsmen or programmers who wrote the programs for their machines, a crucial relationship in the present context, since it crosses the collar and class line. He found that virtually all the British programmers were former operators who had been promoted from the shopfloor, while only one of the nine Japanese plants promoted any of the programmers from the shopfloor – a finding that is entirely consistent with the studies mentioned earlier showing the higher rate of mobility in Britain from the shopfloor than in Japan. However, Whittaker also found that, in Britain, the two occupations, operators and programmers, had a marked ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ attitude towards one another, while the Japanese did not. One of Whittaker’s operator informants in Britain told him – ‘Most of the one’s who’ve gone over were useless on machines. Sometimes I think that’s all they wanted to do – go over into a white collar job. It’s definitely an Us and Them situation.’44 Here then is a specific instance of the counter-intuitive phenomenon under examination, namely, higher, much higher, rates of mobility in Britain combined with a greater sense of antagonism between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’.45 How can this be explained in terms consistent with our theory? We may begin by recalling that we have argued that occupations in Britain had a greater degree of solidarity than occupations elsewhere, and that trade or occupation long remained the fundamental principle of union organization however ‘general’ or ‘industrial’ the union might appear to be. We may therefore infer that a British workers’ identity was more likely to be closely tied to membership of an occupation than their Japanese counterparts, whose company-based solidarity is legendary. The ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ stereotypes and antagonism are therefore, we may suggest, the corollary of this stronger occupational group affiliation and loyalty. However, since many, indeed virtually all, of the British programmers were ex-operators, we must also infer that their original occupational identities were not indelible, and that once promoted to programmers they were effectively re-socialized in membership of their new occupation, and came to think of themselves as programmers, hence enabling their ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ attitudes to be combined with high rates of mobility.

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This stretches one’s credulity a little. No one doubts the socializing power of the practice-based training of the established professions, which routinely change accents, dress, manners, values and lifestyle of their new entrants. ‘Cor blimey barristers and doctors are hard to find. But that is initial career entry socialization into established professions. In this instance, we are referring to numerous mid-career transfers into the then rather new occupation of computer programmers. The idea that this occupation could re-socialize midcareer entrants to consider themselves as ‘Us’, and their former colleagues as ‘Them’, is an altogether more astonishing phenomenon. Whittaker’s field studies referred, however, only to a single industry, and we do not have enough studies of similar mid-career mobility across collar and class lines to know how common such re-socialization may be, or under what conditions it might leave class distinctions intact, as in the case of these programmers, and in what conditions it might erase them. The theory cannot therefore be said to have passed this fourth test, though it did not fail it either. There is simply insufficient comparative evidence. Wright’s data showing that Sweden had both higher social mobility and higher class consciousness than the United States points in the same direction, and suggests that trade unions or professional associations were engaged in the class re-socialization of adults, but this was one of ‘anomalies’ that he declined to explore.46

Why did classes in England form a unique system? When comparing American and British responses to questionnaires that asked respondents to identify their own class, we have observed that researchers could, by presenting a fixed choice, make Americans describe themselves as working class even though, left to themselves, they seldom described themselves as such. No researcher has ever sought to discover whether we might also force them to refer to the American ‘class system’, though the term long came spontaneously and frequently to the lips of the English. They used it without, however, feeling any need to explain what was systemic about their classes. One guesses that they felt it was ‘a system’ because classes had a certain comprehensiveness, symmetry and stability, and they could therefore place most people relative to it. Sociologists have also often used the term ‘class system’, though similarly without ever trying to identify its systemic properties. Marxists might perhaps claim they do so, since they suppose that everyone would, eventually, to belong to one or other of two main classes, and that these would be locked in a perpetual class struggle, which is certainly a system of a sort, albeit only an imaginary one. Empirical research which makes use of occupational prestige scales also conveys a sense of a national system, since every occupation is conscientiously given an ordinal position, and subsequently a class position. This can hardly be said, however, to explain

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what is systemic about the class system, since the inclusion of every occupation, and everyone somewhere or other is simply a product of the way sociologists have chosen to rank and categorize occupations. This class system is a figment of sociologists’ imagination, created with the stroke of a pen or computer key. Can this explanation, which claims to have identified political events which allowed civil society to create the institutional structures on which real classes have long depended, do any better? This is its final test. It has the best chance of doing so, if it considers the system from a distance and over the long run, and identifies characteristics shared by the aristocracy during its long decline, and by the contemporaneously expanding and organizing middle and working classes. There are five. The first is the common, rather ancient, point of origin of the three main classes. Although they began to form at differing periods of medieval and post-medieval history, their modern forms all critically depended on events in the winter of 1688–1689, which simultaneously halted royal or state regulation and interference in the affairs of Parliament and local government, in the government of the professions and of city companies, and authoritatively settled the relationship between the state and civil society on which all three classes subsequently depended. Ancient corporate forms were able to become modern classes because of these revolutionary events. The second characteristic is that all three classes, each in their own time, organized their own national corporate ‘headquarters’: Parliament itself long being that of the aristocracy and gentry, professional bodies being that of the middle class, while ‘new model’ unions, the Trade Unions Congress and later the Labour Party were that of the working class. Each are, it may be noted, among the oldest forms of organizations of their kind in the world, if not the oldest, and all have remained in continuous existence ever since their formation. Class distinctions therefore have peculiarly deep roots in the experience of the English people, and the longevity and co-existence of all three ‘headquarter’ institutions not only suggests that their class system was unique, but also that the three classes were compatible as a system. The three classes also resembled one another, in that their corporate activities long remained, for the most part, outside the law, a third systemic characteristic. The privileges of the ruling aristocracy and gentry were dependent on an unwritten constitution, while those of the middle class centred on the rights, privileges and immunities granted to professions. Those of the barristers’ inns of court remained, like those of Parliament, entirely unwritten, while those of the other professions rested on charters, but these were for the most part loosely-worded, and seldom, if ever, litigated.47 The main corporate bodies of the working class, trade unions, were similarly organized outside the law, initially because magistrates long tended to turn a blind eye towards the journeymen’s societies, and later by the ‘immunities’ granted by the state, which, apart from occasional

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interruptions by the courts, were accepted by employers, and apparently by public opinion. Although the three classes had this fundamental extra-legal characteristic in common, the nature of their relationships with the state, as we have already observed, differed greatly: the aristocracy’s was personal, that of the middle class was handled by those who could plausibly claim to be representatives of the practitioners of a single profession, while that of the working class was handled by representatives of many occupations acting in concert, en masse, or even as a class. The three classes therefore had their own distinct histories. The personal relationships of aristocracy and gentry were interrupted, and eventually destroyed, by the advent of parliamentary democracy, by the creation of political parties, and the organization of local government, though vestiges of the personal nature of this relationship could still be observed in 2002/3 when the Blair government was removing most of the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords. The state’s relationship with the professions, the organized core of the middle class, was relatively tranquil, though they were the subject of occasional parliamentary criticism, and legislation was not always what a particular profession requested. They were, however, seldom subjected to legislation or regulation of which they altogether disapproved, until that is, the Thatcher era, when the rights of their representative governing bodies were suddenly overruled, in the name of the representative government of the entire nation, but this will be discussed later. The interruptions of the trade unions’ activities were more serious, and some have already been mentioned: the numerous combination laws in the eighteenth century against specific trades in specific cities, and then the general Combination Laws of 1799–1824, prompted by the fear that the French Revolution might spread to England. Thanks to the Glorious Revolution, however, there was no state machinery by which these laws could be enforced effectively, and enforcement largely depended on private prosecutions by employers, which were cumbersome, costly, unpredictable, and therefore rare.48 These laws did not, moreover, have much affect on collective association amongst workers since some union activities, such as the national campaign to lobby Parliament between 1812–1814 remained perfectly legal.49 Trade unions’ activities were again interrupted, as we have seen, by the surprising Taff Vale decision in 1901, until that was reversed by Parliament in 1906. They then continued to enjoy their immunities until their temporary suspension by the legislation of the Heath government in 1971, but these were restored in 1974, and only finally terminated by the Thatcher Government’s Industrial Relations Act in 1982. The fourth systemic characteristic of English classes was that members of all three classes were property owners, though the nature of their property, and their title to it, varied. The aristocracy’s was the simplest, and most familiar, being a legal title to the possession and use of land and other

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property, with or without conditions attached. Many members of the professions were freehold property owners in exactly the same sense, but as members of a profession they claimed possession of another kind of property, a work territory or jurisdiction to which they were entitled as a result of the efforts of their predecessors who had created it and bequeathed it to them. Their charters, one might add, seldom defined this intellectual property precisely, and its boundaries therefore often had to be defended by the vigilance of their members against trespassers and other claimants. Members of the middle class, one might therefore say, were property owners in two senses, privately in the simple, physical sense with freehold title, and in an intellectual sense with a collective title. Until quite recent times, most skilled workers owned property only of this second intellectual type, the collective property of their trade or mystery. The campaigners for the re-enactment of the Elizabethan Statute in 1812–1814 eloquently put the case for statutory recognition of it. ‘The apprenticed artisans have collectively and individually, an unquestionable right to expect the most extended protection from the Legislature, in the quiet and exclusive use and enjoyment of their respective arts and trades, which the law has already conferred upon them as a property, as much as it has secured the property of the stockholder in the public funds: and it is clearly unjust to take away the whole of the ancient established property and rights of any one class of the community, unless, at the same time, the rights and property of the whole commonwealth should be dissolved, and parcelled out anew for the public good.’50 This compelling argument fell on deaf ears, and skilled workers’ collective property never therefore received any legal recognition. Thereafter, it was sometimes contested by employers, and liable to be obliterated by the random strokes of technological innovations. It was therefore much the most insecure title of the three, and social scientists have often been inclined to ignore it altogether. However, the evidence presented earlier comparing English workplaces with those of other countries suggests that employers and managers were less inclined to do so, and that without any help from the law or from charters, many, many groups of English workers successfully established and enforced their collective property rights.51 Their fifth and final shared, systemic characteristic of the three classes was by far the most important: they each had their own notions and codes of honour. Without reference to such notions, it is difficult to explain how class loyalties and obligations could have been passed from one generation to another, or how they could inform the lives and manners of the English people for so long. If class sentiments had rested merely on economic selfinterest, as many class theories suggest, the collective institutions of all three classes would surely have disintegrated in apathy or disarray, rather like trade associations, as the economic prospects of one segment of their membership diverged from those of another. But as we have already observed, they didn’t. They continued over immense periods of time, during which they

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defined the English social and political landscape. One may therefore infer that they each instilled in their members the sense of loyalty and obligation that enabled them to endure as a system. Orwell, somewhat grudgingly perhaps, admitted that classes had a moral dimension. ‘The essential point about the English class system’, he observed, ‘is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money, and it is useless to say that the middle class are “snobbish” and leave it at that. You get no further if you do not realize that snobbishness is bound up with a species of idealism….’52 The ‘species of idealism’ that sustained each class was embodied in their codes of honour. That of the aristocracy is probably the best known, since it became the stuff of historical legend and romance, of poetry, novels, movies and television dramas. It was bound up with a family name and estate, entailed obligations to a surrounding community, or public service at the national level, and a disdain for certain kinds of work deemed dishonourable, especially trade. No doubt it included a fair amount of flummery, make-believe and trivial matters of precedence, though the aristocracy is hardly alone in these respects. Sometimes it was for real, and involved the highest stakes. Lord Cardigan did actually lead the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death, and since we know that a large number of sons of the aristocracy died in World War I, we may infer that a good number accepted the obligations of their rank rather than using it to shirk the risks and dangers to which their dependents and inferiors were exposed.53 The aristocratic code of honour is probably easier to recognize than that of other classes precisely because it has, over such a long period, been passing into history, and it therefore seems quaint, curious and anachronistic. One reason, one may add, why it is difficult to recognize the various elites that displaced them as a class is that they appear to be driven more by career imperatives than by any equally recognizable and distinctive code of honour that might have united them as a class. The codes of middle and working class honour both outlived those of the aristocracy. Middle-class codes of honour were enshrined in professional rules of etiquette or ethics, often remained unwritten, and were therefore rather exclusive, arcane and sometimes incomprehensible. Even their own clients, relatives and friends often failed to understand them, and sometimes still do. Why, for instance, should barristers, as a matter of honour, have declined to be retained directly by their clients, or be reluctant even to speak to them, except in the presence of their solicitor? Why should professionals prefer not to enter multi-disciplinary partnerships, or not to hear criticisms of colleagues from their clients, or hesitate to discuss their fees? Outsiders have always been rather sceptical and dismissive of these notions of honour, and inclined to sympathize with Lord Melbourne’s comment ‘I don’t like the middle class. The higher and lower classes, there’s some good in them, but the middle classes are all affectation and conceit, and pretence and concealment.’54 Professionals nonetheless continue to this day to spell

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out conscientiously how every member of their profession ought to behave, frequently at some cost of their economic or career prospects, and there do not seem to be any reasonable grounds for dismissing their efforts, as many critics and social theorists have done, as mere ‘affectation and conceit and pretence’ rather than a code of honour.55 The codes of honour of trade unions and of the working class have received least public recognition, and even more surprisingly, academic recognition. Indeed in their case the gap in comprehension reached Grand Canyon proportions. They were commonly expressed in strike action, though since the days lost through strikes in 2005–2006 were the lowest since figures were first recorded, one has to cast one’s mind back to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Employers who then faced sympathy strikes, or journalists and academics who editorialized about the crippling economic effects of demarcation and jurisdictional disputes, or politicians who were trying to resolve a labour dispute that hinged on ‘a point of principle’, were more inclined to see short-sighted, pig-headed selfish intransigence, rather than any sense of honour. Even historians and sociologists committed to the study of class formation and class struggle seldom pay much attention to them, though one imagines that it was only the self-sacrifice, altruism and courage of working people fighting for their rights which inspired them to write their books in the first place.56 The honour of their worker-subjects, however, remains sub-text. There is no theory of class of which self-sacrifice, courage and honour are integral parts. Class solidarity is supposed to arise from common economic interests, and class struggle supposed to be in response to economic exploitation. Such notions have obscured the sense of honour that was commonly involved. There are, however, episodes in the history of labour relations when money or employment was plainly not at issue, and a sense of honour provides much the most plausible explanation of workers’ behaviour. A number of examples of such actions occurred during World War II, when fear of unemployment could hardly have been great.57 Parker thought about half of the 2,200 reported stoppages during the war involved wage disputes, and attributed the other half to ‘dissatisfaction with working arrangements, disciplinary decisions or disputes about the type of tradesmen to be employed on particular jobs.’ Although collectively-agreed ‘Relaxation of Customs Agreements’ allowed employers to reorganize skilled work until the cessation of hostilities, and although disputes were subject to compulsory arbitration, some skilled workers nonetheless responded to any perceived threat to their trade, much as if they were its wartime custodians, fighting on behalf of colleagues serving in the armed forces. In August 1944, for example, 2,000 engineering operatives in Glasgow came out on strike to support their demand for the dismissal of one employee who had not served an apprenticeship. In November 1944, boilermakers in several shipyards came out on strike against the use of an imported American ‘plane

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burner’ by semi-skilled workers, claiming that, as a ‘burning tool’, it properly belonged to their members. They refused to handle the work completed by the semi-skilled workers to whom some Tyneside employers had assigned jobs using this machine.58 Given the importance of their work for the invasion of Europe still in progress, the First Lord of the Admiralty intervened to try and persuade the men to return to work. His appeal was ignored, and the government eventually decided to force the 136 men directly involved by legal action. When proceedings opened, 4,500 boilermakers came out on strike in sympathy with their colleagues. The dispute was finally settled some two months later, in mid-January 1945. Other people’s honour, however, is rarely comprehensible, often damnably inconvenient, seldom more so, one imagines, than in this instance. These wartime examples, however, may be considered instances primarily as defences of the honour and collective property, of a trade rather than of a class. But in England the honour of one trade commonly entailed sympathy for that of another, and this mutual respect was the foundation not only of its unified trade union movement but also of the solidarity of the working class as a whole. Flanders’ study of the productivity negotiations at an English oil refinery, conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, showed how trade and class honour were inextricably interwoven.59 At the centre of his account were seven skilled worker unions, six of which had well-defined, customary jurisdictions. As a result, some of them declined to accept any face-to-face orders from managers, or from anyone not of their trade, and managers were therefore obliged to make ‘requests’ to their charge hands, much as if they were dealing with independent contractors. This is, of course, one further instance, in an advanced technological work setting in the mid-twentieth century, of the claim made repeatedly by workers in the earliest days of the industrial revolution who had, as we have already observed, often behaved as if they were self-employed professionals.60 Those early factory workers were, in their turn, only upholding the claim made by small masters and journeymen of the companies of the City of London between 1649–1660, that no outsider or ‘stranger’ could have any standing or authority in trade matters. Esso’s refinery managers were mid-twentieth-century ‘strangers’. Since the skilled unions at the refinery had declined to recruit any white collar workers, they had necessarily created a class division between blue collar workers and white collar staff and management. This became still more marked when they came together to ‘face’ management collectively in the negotiations about the proposed productivity agreement which was intended to change many of their traditional working practices and was the main subject of Flanders’ study. In this context, they instantly forgot all of the issues that had provoked friction between them in the past, and together formed a craft union council, whose chairmanship rotated amongst the seven.61 They also united with the much larger number of semi- and

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unskilled workers organized by the Transport and General Workers Union. The ‘working class’ at the refinery was therefore internally stratified, and separately organized, but united when they faced management, and even though some of management’s proposals were intended to divide the workers by offering financial benefits to some at the expense of others, their unions never broke ranks.62 Class membership evidently had obligations, and when facing management at least, the semi- and unskilled workers accepted them, and rejected management proposals that would have been in their own economic interest. Management’s main aim was to control the division of labour at the refinery by introducing multi-craft supervision, multi-craft flexibility, and by installing meritocratic promotion ladders, so that ‘mates’ could be promoted to skilled worker status. In most respects, they failed. In the early stages, it became clear that the craft unions would not relax any of their demarcation rules despite generous financial incentives and guarantees of job security. Union negotiators encountered a hostile reception from their members for even taking part in negotiations on this subject. Curiously, the strongest resistance came from the welders who were the most insecure and poorest-organized of the trades at the refinery. In many industries, they were not recognized as a skilled trade at all, and at the refinery they had no union of their own, and were scattered among three of the seven craft unions. Even though some of the other craft workers could easily perform their work, and some had been specifically trained to do so, their negotiators nevertheless made only the most trivial concessions in this area, in evident sympathy for the rights of their struggling, fellow craftsmen. For a trial period only, the other craft workers agreed they ‘might heat, cut, chamfer pipes and use the Mueller machine during periods of shutdown.’ However, they insisted that before doing this, the welders’ shop steward would, on every occasion, have to be consulted, a point of etiquette worthy of the inns of court. When management continued to push for more inter-craft flexibility in subsequent negotiations, it provoked still more hostility, expressed in overtime bans, a work-to-rule, and several mass meetings. Management’s offer of a hefty wage increase, in return for increased flexibility during shutdown, provoked considerable resentment among craftsmen. The curious feature of their stand, Flanders observed, was that, in practice, craftsmen often accepted intercraft flexibility during shutdowns of their own free will. They also permitted some flexibility to help supervisors whom they liked and respected, ‘to reward “good” supervisors’ as one of them put it. However, flexibility of their own free will was one thing, being forced to do it, and being offered money to persuade them to accept managers’ right to tell them when to do it, was evidently something else, something dishonourable. During the negotiations the realization that these workers had a sense of obligation to other workers, unnamed and unknown, and not employees of

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the refinery, slowly dawned on one manager. Thinking out loud to his colleagues, he remarked, ‘Supposing in a firm demarcation was relaxed, and it meant that the same number of people went further. That firm then expanded and might take on less new labour … for the other man who failed to get a job, it would be bad. So it was not right to say that less demarcation would be bad “for us”. It would be bad only in so far as we were part of the man who did not get the job. Putting it another way, demarcation rules were insisted upon in order to get a job for another man. If that was the case, it should be made clear … Demarcation was only of benefit to another person who was not involved in the situation.’63 This manager had evidently seldom contemplated acting for the benefit of another person who was ‘not involved in the situation’, but skilled workers routinely did so. They clearly felt obligations to fellow members of their trades working in other companies, even to those who had retired from it, and even perhaps to those who were still to enter it. The idea that mates might advance to skilled status was rejected by craftsmen out of hand. Even though they worked with craftsmen every minute of the day, mates had not ‘served their time’ and that was the end of it, a decision that mates apparently accepted without complaint. Oddly enough, management was, however, able to obtain the skilled unions’ agreement to phase out mates altogether, though only out in return for guarantees of increased employment of members of their own trades in the future, and on condition that it never entailed either compulsory redundancy for their mates or any upgrading, even if mates were suitably trained.64 In this instance, therefore, the interests of persons ‘not involved in the situation’, that is members of the six trades elsewhere, were clearly compelling, and took precedence over those who were rather more ‘involved’, their mates, though the interests of the latter were not entirely ignored. Management tended to assume, as anyone would, that since semi- and unskilled workers were not distinguished by their trades, and all belonged to the same union, they would be easier to deal with. However, the diffusion of trade ideals, the process of inventing quasi-crafts among semiand unskilled workers, which had been an integral part of the creation of the English working class, was evidently still continuing during these negotiations. One example of several emerged towards the end of the negotiations, when attention turned to the least skilled workers in the refinery. Management rather casually proposed to assign them all, at higher rates of pay, to four new categories, by far the largest of which was that of ‘cleanerlabourer’. As the name suggests, this was to include several different kinds of existing cleaners along with labourers. The cleaners, however, deeply resented the idea that they should perform all kinds of cleaning work, and that they should be merged with labourers. Whatever management might have thought, they saw themselves as divided into three distinct occupations: mechanical cleaners who considered themselves the aristocrats of

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the non-craft world and declined to work with the tank cleaners, who for their part looked down on the general cleaners, who in turn distinguished themselves from mere labourers. The idea that cleaners could invest meaning and honour in a trivial distinction between two kinds of non-skilled work had evidently never crossed the managers’ minds, but they were forced to acknowledge it since the resentment of all three groups was one of the factors that led the Day Branch of the Transport and General to vote against their proposals as a whole. The mechanical and tank cleaners’ sense of honour rested on the tiniest sliver of expertise, so tiny that it had not even been noticed by managers rearranging work assignments. At first glance, it is hardly to be compared with that of the skilled workers, let alone with the etiquette or codes of ethics of professionals, while the sense of honour of proud aristocrats’ stately homes set in rolling acres is of another world. But were they in the end so very different? Was there not a common thread of honour running through them all? And was it not this common thread that made these three classes parts of an enduring and integrated class system?

10 A Brief Reply to Orwell

Having traced the way in which classes emerged, flourished, and formed a system in England up to 1979 in a manner which enables us to distinguish them clearly from the classes of Russia, France and the United States, and having tested this version of events, as best we might, by providing plausible answers to FAQs about their peculiarities, we may at long last turn to answer Orwell directly. Perhaps I may do so in the conversational manner in which he first made his claim. Well, Eric, we must first observe that we haven’t looked at every other country, so we still cannot say whether England was ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun’ or not. However, we have collected evidence of classes in three other societies, and though experts on each of them would doubtless say we have merely skimmed the surface of it, it seems sufficient to draw some conclusions, and to respond to your assertion. Now and then you suggested that classes sprang from inequalities of wealth, income and opportunity, but I did not take that to be your considered view. It is in any event a poor argument, and gives us no reason to think England was any more class-ridden than anywhere else. Inequalities of wealth in England were, it is true, still massive when you were born, but they declined continuously throughout your lifetime, and ended up no greater, and probably less than those in the United States. Income inequalities also fell continuously, making England one of the more egalitarian capitalist societies. Inequalities of opportunity also seem to have been no greater than those in many other societies, and by some measure were considerably less. In particular, manual workers in England had greater chances of rising from the shopfloor into management than workers elsewhere. However, I infer from your remarks about the way class had shaped your own identity that you considered class as something far more deeply embedded in English psyche and culture than mere differences in income levels, as something ubiquitous and inescapable, a constant, pervasive, and predictable point of reference in English lives, so that a great many of their institutions were defined by it, and a great many, perhaps all, of their personal 304

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relationships coloured by it. If this is what you meant by class-ridden, you were on far stronger ground, and the English evidence we have examined suggests you were right. The other three societies have had fewer enduring and definable classes, and they never constituted a ubiquitous system comparable to that of English classes. While several classes formed or began to form in Russia towards the end of the old regime, it seems to have had only one enduring class, and that was a forerunner of the ruling class that you observed during its Soviet prime, and which appears to have continued after the fall of the Soviet regime. Numerous classes have emerged in France. Its working class has long dominated public perceptions and discussions of class, but beyond its heroic struggles on the streets of Paris and other cities there must be some doubt whether it has ever been a permanent associational or institutional presence in the ordinary lives of French workers. It certainly never formed part of a durable system because the middle class never created an enduring set of institutions that permanently distinguished their way of life and their manners from those of the working class. Indeed many of those in nonmanual and professional occupations who might have affiliated with the middle class preferred to identify with the working class, during its ecstatic moments of protest at least. They formed their own classes amongst themselves only in relatively recent times and when the working class had already passed its high point. In the United States we could only find pockets of class and intermittent surges of working class solidarity and consciousness. Most of the time most Americans seem to have thought, as they still think, that they belong to the middle class, which has no distinctive class institutions and is not easy to distinguish from any class that might be either above or below it. In England, by contrast, we found three enduring, organized and pervasive classes. We had little difficulty in identifying the distinctive corporate institutions of each of them, along with their distinctive, codes of honour. They did not rise and fall simultaneously – the aristocracy had already begun its long decline when the ascent of the middle and working classes commenced, but aristocratic institutions, titles and its manners nonetheless continued long enough to allow new elites to be assimilated into it, and to enable England’s classes to form more of a coherent system than those in the other three countries. Until 1979 at least, England might therefore reasonably be said to have been, as you put it, ‘more class-ridden’. But why? You didn’t say why, and left only a few cryptic clues. Your account of how Napoleon and Snowball established the rule of the pigs at Animal Farm was one, and the stratification of Oceania in 1984 between inner and ordinary party members and proles might have been another, for you strongly implied that political power was decisive in institutionalizing class distinctions, rather than the market forces. You also pointed out that the traditions of the England’s upper middle class ‘were not to any extent commercial but mainly military, official and professional’, and therefore suggested that

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their relationship with the state, and political events and decisions were more important than their place in the market. In all four societies we found support for this idea. Political events and decisions affected those who actively created and organized classes and the organized collectivities that brought them together, held them together, and disseminated their ‘sense of honour’, their distinctive notions of ‘good and evil’, and of the ‘pleasant and unpleasant’. Market forces usually seem, if anything, to have been undermining them, an idea you hinted at in 1984. Only proles, you told us, dealt on the free market. If they were to endure and pass on their values and institutions from one generation to the next, classes required organized social support. The evidence we examined suggests that they got much more of it in England, primarily as a result of a distinctive, long-established relationship between the state and civil society which allowed organized interests in civil society greater freedom than elsewhere to run their own affairs. As they did so, they constructed and maintained their classes. The roots of this distinctive relationship between the state and civil society might be traced back a long way, to the very beginnings of the formation of the English state after the Norman Conquest, and it evolved over centuries without being greatly altered or disturbed by revolution, by industrialization, by mass democracy, or even by the socialist policies of the Labour government that you witnessed. For want of a better term, we called it laissez gouverner. The aristocracy pioneered and defended it, and for a long time were the only ones to benefit from it. Having definitively secured their corporate rights against royal intervention during the Glorious Revolution, they were able to use Parliament as a club where they could discuss, define and protect their own class interests. Much later on, they were, as you know, slowly and painlessly displaced by the representatives of other classes. You did not live to see the completion of this process. It still isn’t quite over. The less commonly observed fact, however, is that the middle class, and eventually the working class, also benefited from this revolution, for though both of them only emerged in large numbers later on, as a result of industrialization, their first corporate institutions were alive and well during it. Over time, the aristocrat-dominated Parliament took a rather benign, laissez gouverner attitude towards them. Barristers were left to govern themselves in their inns of court, physicians in their Royal College, and the host of other newly-organized non-manual occupations that emerged in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries were granted similar self-governing powers. As these professions imitated one another, they tacitly recognized a certain parity and solidarity amongst themselves, and their etiquette, ethics and manners cumulatively defined not just an upper middle class as you thought, but to varying degrees the entire middle class, since dozens of other non-manual occupations followed in their footsteps, formed similar corporate institutions, harboured similar aspirations and pretensions, and

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similarly sought to distinguish themselves from their inferiors, and especially those performing manual labour. In so doing they cumulatively erected class distinctions and barriers that all English people came to learn and live by. Their ‘inferiors’ meanwhile, after escaping from the control of their guild masters, organized independently and extensively as journeymen societies. Since Parliament declined to recognize and protect them in the same way as the professions, and the courts often treated their attempts to enforce their corporate rights as conspiracies, they long remained informal and local. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, their trade union successors finally benefited from laissez gouverner, were formally granted legal immunities comparable to those of the professions, and went on to organize a considerable proportion of workers, both industrially and politically, as a class. Both before and after this legal recognition, English employers came, with varying degrees of willingness, to accept the rules workers themselves devised and enforced in their workplaces. English workers therefore obtained a degree of de facto self-government in their workplaces much greater than that of their counterparts in the other three countries. This self-government was the foundation of their class solidarity and helped to institutionalize class distinctions firmly and extensively. Both the middle and working classes of England were therefore founded on the voluntary but strong and enduring workplace associations of professions and trades. Both kinds of association were able to control the training of their new recruits and therefore able to socialize them in the manners and codes of honour appropriate to their class. Both were also able to collectively shape and police the division of labour around them, and could therefore define and uphold class distinctions in their daily work routines. Since both formed national associations, they carried such distinctions across the length and breadth of the country. Not everyone belonged to one or other kind of association of course; indeed a majority of nonmanual and manual workers belonged to neither, but the visibility of their corporate institutions ensured that everyone in England could place themselves relative to them. Whenever any group of English workers, nonmanual or manual, organized to defend their common interests they almost invariably followed in the path of one or the other, though a few white collar occupations were never quite sure which model they ought to follow. None of the other three states we have considered were so obliging to organized interests in their civil societies, so their landowners, professions and trades never had similar opportunities to contribute to the formation of classes. Inspired by their revolutionary ideals, all three of these societies prevented landowners forming a hereditary aristocracy, and though one was revived and lingered for a while in France, that is obviously one class that was unique to the English. In Soviet Russia, there could, as you realized, be no classes other than the ‘inner party’ or nomenklatura since no

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interests in civil society were allowed to organize. There were, therefore, only official categories, or ‘non-antagonistic’ classes, as the regime called them, which were not really classes at all having no institutions or voice of their own. Five classes emerged in France, and one relied, like the nomenklatura, on its position within the state. None of the other four, however, have had an enduring organized base in civil society comparable to that of English classes. Classes in the United States have similarly lacked any enduring organized base in civil society. Early state governments, and the federal government, were reluctant to support institutions, or grant privileges or benefits which might have helped organized interests in civil society to form classes. Higher educational institutions were one outstanding example. They were marketdriven and market-differentiated at a relatively early point, rather than state-sponsored and could offer opportunities for individual betterment to an ever-expanding proportion of the population, which as time passed far outshone the appeal of collective betterment offered by an organized working class. Moreover, while sympathetic to almost every kind of voluntary association, the American governments would not tolerate those that exercised powers that infringed the constitutional rights of non-members. Hence the early state legislatures refused to allow exclusive English-style self-governing professions to continue. On similar grounds, they also got rid of lifetime career civil servants. The federal government copied them, and later outlawed regulatory trade associations. Corporate groups that might have contributed to the formation of a middle class of professionals and businessmen were therefore weakened or disappeared. Skilled worker unions were left to fend for themselves, but against aggressive employers, who were, in sharp contrast to their English counterparts, fortified by a deep conviction that the jurisdictional and self-governing claims of these unions infringed their constitutional rights as private property owners. For about 15 years, from 1932 to 1947, the federal government provided unions with legal protection resembling that which English trade unions had long enjoyed, and during that period American workers came as close as they ever came to forming a class. But the federal government, ostensibly to protect their rights, also entangled them in complex legal procedures, and reserved for itself the right to decide the basis on which workers should be allowed to organize and negotiate. The working class then disappeared, even from its stronghold in New York City. In all three of these societies, therefore, political decisions prevented classes building on the solidarity, loyalty and proprietorial interests that wellorganized professions and trades commonly generate. In England, these were the citadels of the middle and working classes. They were also their schools, passing on to their new entrants through the practice-based and practitioner-controlled training they maintained, the values, manners and distinctive codes of honour of their respective classes, and providing

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permanent points of reference and aspiration for less organized and still unorganized occupations. In the other three societies, organized occupations were neither citadels nor schools. They did not constitute enduring self-governing associations that controlled the admission or training of newcomers. Nor were they able to regulate the division of labour at their workplaces, which was more likely to be determined by the state, or by employers and managers, which meant it was more responsive to market forces. They therefore had less opportunity to demarcate and reiterate class distinctions during their daily work routines. Hence the classes that have emerged in these societies have tended to be partial, ephemeral and asymmetrical, rather than parts of a stable all-embracing class system. They lacked both the historical continuity and ubiquitous coverage of those in England, and therefore made fewer couplings and affiliations with institutions beyond the workplace. In brief, Eric, this is how I would explain why the English have been more ‘class-ridden’ than the Russians, French and Americans. My explanation is, you will no doubt have noticed, not without its ironies, for it turns out that English freedom and the English class system were intimately related, indeed two sides of the same coin. As they were securing their freedom and their self-government, the English were also constructing their classes. You were, at the end of the day, rather ambivalent about what you called ‘this class breaking business’, describing it as ‘a wild ride into the darkness’. I am not quite sure, therefore, how you will greet the news that, over the past 25 years or so, England’s unique class formations have begun to crumble, a process that began in 1979, which is why we stopped the preceding investigations at that point. But that process also had its surprises and ironies since it did not occur, in a way which you, or anyone else, anticipated. Socialist ideals had nothing to do with it. And the middle class did not learn, as you hoped they might, to respect the ‘egalitarian warmth and solidarity and decency’ of the working class. Nor did they forget their ‘aitches’ and pretensions, and become part of the working class. Change came from an altogether different direction, and it did not inaugurate an era of equality. If anything, inequalities increased as classes crumbled. We will wrap up our investigation by trying to unravel this somewhat puzzling train of events.

11 The Class System Comes to an End

An explanation of the decline of the English class system is implicit in the preceding explanation of its formation, for if it is true that classes have been created by political events and decisions, and have depended on the collaboration between the state and civil society, then it follows that political decisions that significantly altered that collaboration and exposed the corporate institutions that have maintained classes to market forces must necessarily have threatened the class system. The reforms introduced by the three Thatcher governments over 11 years between 1979–1991 did both of these things. A review of them is therefore also an explanation of the decline of the class system. It also provides a last chance to test the argument by comparing it with explanations of class as the product of material inequalities, since as we noted at the very beginning these reforms were accompanied by the abrupt reversal of the century-long trend towards equality in the distribution of property and income. If material inequalities had ever been prime determinants of classes, then we might expect class consciousness to have increased during and after these reforms.

The themes and finality of Thatcher’s reforms For clarity and brevity’s sake, we may distinguish the four major themes in these reforms that are critical in the present context. In reality, they were concurrent, implemented incrementally, interwoven with one another, as well as interdependent in their effects. We will, therefore, be systematizing policies that unfolded untidily, often fortuitously, and some only became visible under the Major and Blair governments which followed. Summarizing them in this manner will, however, enable us to see their cumulative effect on the past collaboration between the state and on civil society, and on the classes which they had together formed over the preceding three centuries. The first theme was privatization in all its varied forms, amongst which we may include not only the best-known – the conversion of nationalized 310

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enterprises into publicly-traded joint-stock companies, but also the sale of council houses to their tenants, the private tendering for public services previously assumed to be an integral part of local government, as well as the semi-privatization of the civil service by means of so-called executive agencies, since these agencies were expected to perform tasks previously performed by central government departments as if they were privatelyowned companies subject to the discipline of the market. Privatization might also be said to have extended still further, and to include the creation of quasi-markets within the public services. General practitioners and hospitals were required to compete for public funds against one another. Universities were invited to made competitive bid for public funds to supply specified educational programmes in the manner of defense contractors. Schools were similarly required to compete in national league tables. Institutions of further education providing vocational training were to bid for ‘contracts’ to provide the kind of education their customers, meaning local businessmen, required. All these quasi-markets fell short of real markets of course, since there was, ultimately, only one buyer: the central government. But the pretence of making these actors and institutions behave as if they were no longer performing a public service and merely private actors in the market, had real consequences, and may therefore be seen as another form of privatization. These varied forms of privatization attacked the class system in a number of ways. When public corporations went private, the peculiarly supportive environment they had provided for unions and professional associations of all kinds was immediately threatened, along with the collective property rights, and the collective bargaining procedures that their employees had usually established. The sale of their shares, along with the sale of council houses, broke through distinctions which had hitherto helped to define classes, and helped to create a nation in which everyone came to understand property ownership in exactly the same conventional sense, rather than in the mystical senses of property owned by the nation as a whole, or of that defined by the collective jurisdictions of their profession or trade. One of Mrs Thatcher’s significant electoral achievements was to recognize that many skilled workers were already homeowners, already more attached to their private property than to the collective defense of any property they might own as members of their trades, and that she could therefore appeal to them as to other private property owners. The sale of council houses increased the number of workers who were open to this kind of appeal. Making professionals compete in quasimarkets similarly undermined their sense of being collectively responsible for, and having ownership rights in, a particular work jurisdiction. In the end, therefore, all these forms of privatization encouraged everyone to think that were equally isolated market actors. The second major theme of her reforms was a series of enactments that brought the ‘immunities’ of trade unions to an end, made their internal

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governance and their actions in the furtherance of trade disputes subject to the law.1 The cumulative effect of these reforms was to reduce considerably the power of unions and to precipitate a sharp decline in their membership, from just under a half of the labour force in 1979 to just under a third in 2002.2 The three most significant reforms were: first, the abolition of the closed shop which had obliged employees to belong to a union before or after employment, and which many observers reckoned to be the foundation of union power; second, the outlawing of mass pickets which had previously provided a dramatic and visible demonstration of union power and solidarity; and third the prohibition of sympathy strikes and other kinds of secondary action, such as the ‘blacking’ of the goods of an employer involved in a dispute which had long been one of the most visible and unambiguous expressions of class solidarity.3 One indication that these measures undermined collective obligations and collective solidarity is the subsequent rapid increase in the number of employees who pursued their grievances as individuals before industrial tribunals.4 These tribunals were formed in 1964, and applications to them reached a level of about 30,000 in the late 1970s and actually dropped during the 1980s, the Thatcher years, most probably as a result of the extended recession, but the number of applications then started a rapid ascent to over 79,000 by 1998. In that year, they were renamed employment tribunals, and over the following three years, the rate of increase of applications accelerated to about 130,000 in 2001/2002.5 Although unions may represent applicants before them, these tribunals offered an alternative to the traditional collective methods of handling grievances through shop stewards and union officers. The X formed by the intersection of the continuous decline in union membership since Mrs Thatcher’s first year in office, and the fluctuating, though nonetheless startling, overall climb in the numbers resorting to these tribunals marks a fundamental transition in employment relationships: away from means of redress that relied on collective support and collective action, away from union or class solidarity, and towards individual solutions. They also offered the possibility, never contemplated by traditional collective procedures, of a substantial financial windfall to the individual ‘victim’ of unfair dismissal or discriminatory or other unfair action by an employer. The third major theme of her reforms, implemented more or less continuously over the entire 11 years of her three governments, was the attack on the professions. Doctors, nurses, schoolteachers, academics, military officers and civil servants and other professionals in the public service were the first targets. Since they were public employees, they could be controlled without further legislation and the public debate it entailed. Self-employed private practitioners did not, however, escape. The two legal professions were covered by the Courts and Legal Services Act of 1990, the last major piece of legislation of the Thatcher era.6

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These attacks on the professions usually began by pouring scorn on the ideals and ethics that had previously governed their corporate institutions and rules by suggesting that the special status they had enjoyed was undeserved, and that their motives were no higher or more ethical than those of businessmen and other employees. It then drew the inescapable conclusion that they should henceforth be treated in the same manner.7 The special relationship with the state they had long enjoyed under the unwritten constitution was thereby repudiated, and the laissez gouverner assumption that they could be trusted to set and enforce standards of performance, and to regulate themselves was rejected.8 The reforms were based on the assumption that the most trustworthy and reliable form of regulation was the market, which was also the only reliable measure of the worth of any kind of work. The latter was a deadly blow to the self-esteem of most professions in England, since much the most plausible explanation of why they established their corporate institutions in the first place is that they did not accept that the market could ever provide an acceptable assessment of their worth. They were now obliged to accept it. Self-regulation was not even second best. Wherever market regulation was not feasible, the reforms proposed that professionals should be regulated by the state rather than by their own corporate institutions. Selfemployed professionals were therefore forced to abandon many of their ethical rules, and obliged to think of themselves as entrepreneurs or tradesmen, subject like the others to state regulation. The funny quasi-markets invented to persuade salaried public sector professionals that they were in a marketplace have been mentioned, but where they could not be installed, or where they proved unworkable, professionals were subject to central state control, and to managerial controls that were common, or thought to be common, in manufacturing industry. Incentive and bonus payments, performance-related pay were therefore used to increase their productivity, just as it had, supposedly, increased the productivity of other workers. Professions, in short, were dishonoured, and no longer to be trusted to define or defend the public interest which was, henceforth, to be defined exclusively by the government, with the advice of management consultants rather than professional bodies.9 One may observe the consequences in any professional setting one cares to examine. Harrison and Ahmad documented the decline in clinical autonomy of physicians as a result of the creation of quasi-markets in 1991, and the imposition of clinical guidelines and clinical audits. They observed the displacement of purely professional goals, so that ‘it has increasingly become the case that doctors must adopt a managerial perspective if they are to progress within the profession.’ They described contemporary British medical care as ‘scientific-bureaucratic’: ‘scientific’ because it still relies on an externally-generated body of research knowledge, but ‘bureaucratic’ because ‘it is implemented through bureaucratic rules … namely clinical

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guidelines.’ These changes, they pointed out, have nothing whatever to do with much-touted post-Fordist forms of management which are intended to allow far greater local discretion and autonomy, but on the contrary ‘introduce to medicine the central Fordist notion of ‘one best way’.10 The fourth theme was the replacement or reform of practice-based, practitioner-controlled vocational training. One commentator, looking back at vocational education before these reforms, described it as a ‘jungle’ in which there were ‘about 500 awarding bodies and about 6,000 different qualifications.’11 It was a jungle, however, almost entirely of civil society’s own making over many, many generations, though in 1964 the state had begun to intervene to prevent ‘free riding’ employers escaping their obligations to train apprentices for their trade and industry. The Labour Government of the day sought to encourage, fund and co-ordinate civil society’s efforts by establishing statutory tripartite Industrial Training Boards. These were empowered to organize training in their industry, and could impose a compulsory training levy on all firms within it.12 The Thatcher governments abolished most of these boards, and launched a succession of initiatives to devise a substitute for apprenticeship, the Training Opportunities Scheme (TOPS), the Youth Opportunities Scheme (YOPS), the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI), and Technical Enterprise Centres (TECs).13 In 1986, the government suddenly decided that it should henceforth regulate and control all vocational training by means of a newly-created National Council of Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ). This council was empowered to categorize and approve the required vocational skills of the entire labour force, including the professions. The one thing all these initiatives had in common was that they were all state-controlled and state-managed. They excluded trade unions altogether from any part in the design, administration or accreditation of the training of manual workers, and made professional bodies measure, record and formalize the training given to their new entrants. They were predicated, in other words, on the new relationship between state and civil society.14 The NCVQ itself was a particularly startling innovation, since the British state had never previously, of its own initiative, provided or authenticated a single educational or training credential, but overnight, this new state agency was empowered to review, inspect, criticize, categorize and authenticate all of the 500-odd voluntary, private and professional arrangements that provided vocational credentials. Civil society’s jungle was to be cleared.15 As it set about the task, practice-based practitioner-controlled training was inevitably found to be inadequate, which was not surprising since it had often rested on a personal relationship between practitioner and beginner, was largely undocumented, undefined, and as rigorous or casual as the practitioner cared to make it. It was therefore replaced by scheduled hours

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of formal school-based and practical training that could be provided by a variety of teachers and employers and completed when the student accumulated a required number of certified credits. The intention, of course, was to improve the quality, meaning the technical content, of the training provided, and to obtain training ‘outputs’ that could be counted, but the effect was to weaken, if not eliminate, the informal socialization that rules and notions of occupational honour which had accompanied vocational training in the past. Where the original apprenticeship had provided an extended simultaneous socialization into craft, trade union and class, the ‘new apprenticeship’ did not require any personal relationship between generations at all, since the apprentice selected his or her own ‘package’ of skills, and accumulated vouchers and credits at various workplaces and schools without incurring any obligation to any existing practitioners. It certainly did not lead inevitably to membership of a union or of a class. Reviewing progress up to 2002, one commentator noted that the attempt to resuscitate this old institution in a new form suffered from ‘weak employer engagement and commitment’, and the ‘lack of a regulatory role for trade unions in the governance of apprenticeships.’16 As a result, it lacked shopfloor credibility and legitimacy. These four major reforms cannot plausibly be attributed to any underlying, global economic process. They were, it is true, provoked and justified by four decades and more of economic failure, and by Britain’s widelyrecognized inability to create manufacturing enterprises that performed as effectively as those elsewhere. They were sometimes defended as being necessary in an increasingly global economy, but this is to say that they were provoked by a political interpretation of the reasons for Britain’s economic failure, and a political interpretation of the needs of a global economy, not that they were the result of blind economic global forces. A fuller account of them would, no doubt, point out how the way was prepared for three of them – privatization being the exception – by earlier governments. Among the more important preliminaries to reform of the professions, for instance, were the investigations and reports of various public agencies, such as the National Board for Prices and Incomes in the late 1960s, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in the 1970s, and later the Office of Fair Trading.17 They were joined by private pressure groups, most notably, the Consumer’s Association.18 Together they had begun to define the public interest in the provision of professional services, and had invariably found it to be sharply at odds with that provided by the professions themselves. Since their criticisms of the deficiencies of the professions were often supported by research (which the professions had seldom conducted), and since these agencies had no identifiable vested interest, their versions of the public interest had considerably more authority and credibility than those offered by representatives of the professions. They therefore helped to discredit the idea that professions might be

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trusted to speak for the public interest, and began to redefine them as especially selfish and powerful vested interests. Failures of their disciplinary procedures, of which there were a considerable number, further discredited the professions’ claims about the virtues and merits of self-regulation. Trade unions were, meanwhile, making themselves immensely unpopular by wildcat strikes, culminating in the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–1979, which contributed greatly to Mrs Thatcher’s first electoral success. The way was therefore prepared for the Thatcher governments to reform them both. A fuller account would also, no doubt, point to certain economic trends, for which her governments can hardly be held responsible, and which preceded and assisted the passage of her reforms. Manufacturing industries had been the heartland of the institutional complex – apprenticeship, high union membership and multi-union workplaces – that had been central to the formation of the working class. Although the service sector had created its own version of these institutions, apprenticeship and unions had never had time to become as well-entrenched in them. But the decline of manufacturing firms in the Midlands and North had begun long before Mrs Thatcher was elected. The OECD reported that the United Kingdom ‘had the largest drop (in manufacturing employment) of any country, losing nearly three million jobs at a steady rate from 1970 to 1986, whereupon the level stabilized.’19 The distinctive ‘British system of mass production … within which, to a large extent, labour regulated itself’ had already shown its inability to compete with other systems elsewhere. Mrs Thatcher’s reforms might therefore be said to have been working with, rather than against the grain, and a potential source of organized opposition had been weakened before she was even elected. Another contributory factor was the surge in direct inward investment by foreign companies. During many of the Thatcher years Britain had the highest rate of direct inward investment per capita of any industrial economy, and about 20% of British manufacturing came to be foreign-owned.20 The foreign threat to the class system was never, of course, overt and explicit. No foreign firm ever openly announced that it wished to dismantle it, but they often adopted employment policies and career structures at odds with those of customary British practice, and did not share the assumptions on which that system’s survival rested. How could Japanese or American managers support English-style apprenticeships? Or even understand the notion of a ‘free rider’ in this respect? Their own domestic systems of vocational training had long since left every employer to train employees as much or as little as they wished, so they were all ‘free riders’. And why should they accept the legitimacy of collective self-regulation on the factory floor? One might as well have expected them to start playing cricket. The oil refinery studied by Flanders, discussed earlier, was Americanowned, and it suggests that blissful ignorance was more common than the

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conscious rejection of normal English practice. The negotiations that were the subject of his study were prompted by the American parent company noticing, after many years, that its English subsidiary had much lower productivity than one of its closely comparable American-based refineries. Although there were no American managers permanently at the site, the English subsidiary, had deliberately departed from common English practice in a few respects. It had opted out of the employers’ association for the industry, for instance, and therefore out of industry-wide agreements, which is why the productivity negotiations were possible in the first place. There was also some casual assimilation of American practices. Flanders thought that the policy of involving line management in personnel affairs had ‘gone much further … than is usual in British industry’, and that the absence of ‘formal trappings of a strict hierarchical authority and wellobserved status distinctions’ among management, and the ‘free use of Christian names, and lack of deference to superiors may well have American origins or reinforcements’. When, however, American approaches were thought to clash sharply with normal British procedures they were rejected or ignored. One American consultant, for instance, horrified English managers with his suggestion of an ‘opener’ to the negotiations. ‘Why not cut back wages to show we mean business?’ He was supported by another American who asked, ‘Why not just stop having craftsmen’s’ rates?’ They were silenced by their English colleagues, and thereafter appeared throughout the negotiations, like the chorus of a Greek play, to voice their incomprehension and wonder at the reactions of the English skilled workers. In this instance, therefore, most ‘foreign’ practices seem to have been rejected, but research elsewhere shows that (some) foreign-owned multinationals were able to impose different work practices in their English plants. One manager who had moved from British-owned and managed car manufacturing firms to work for Ford in the early 1960s observed that ‘The world of Ford … is so utterly and completely different; we are not talking about Ford vs BMC or Ford vs Standard Triumph, we are really dealing with the difference between earth and the planet Mars.’21 When Japanese car firms began to establish themselves on greenfield sites they also were from another planet, and introduced fundamentally different employment and working relationships, such as company-specific training, competitive teams which ignored trade distinctions, and representation by a single union.22 Foreigners probably made the greatest impact, however, on the institutions not of the working class but at the other end of the class system – in the City of London on the supposed successors to the aristocratic ruling class. They had begun to do so some time before Mrs Thatcher became prime minister.23 At the end of 1960s there were just 77 foreign banks in the City, and by 1976 there were 298. However, they began to undermine

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the City’s way of life and institutions only after one of Mrs Thatcher’s first reforms, the removal of exchange controls in 1981, and after repeated threats by the Office of Fair Trading prompted the City to reform its own working practices in the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of October 1986. American banks took the lead in rejecting the City’s traditional working practices. They devised the new products, adopted aggressive marketing techniques, and introduced new employment policies within the square mile, such as ‘poaching’ of staff, ‘touting’ for new business, 70-hour working weeks, and gigantic annual bonuses. Other foreign banks felt obliged to adopt these American practices along with the British, and the City was therefore rapidly transformed from being one of the most traditional English working environments into the epitome of the modern and the ‘global’. By the end of the 1990s, it was, Kynaston observed, ‘no longer British either in ownership or character and had been converted into something akin to Wall Street.’24 In this new internationalized environment, school, regimental and class background were meaningless, and were, if anything, merely targets of banter and ridicule. However, it seems unlikely that a fuller account, which gave due attention to all these earlier contributory factors and events, to the reforms of the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments, to the impact of foreigners, and to global economic changes would end up without giving priority to the political events and political decisions of the Thatcher era. The centralization of the Crown Prosecution Service, the abolition of ITBs, the creation of the NCVQ, the creation of numerous regulatory bodies OFSTED, OFWAT and so forth were political choices, not responses to economic circumstances. The reforms of trade unions did not spread by some inexorable economic necessity or technological logic from the private sector to the government and the public sector. Just the reverse. Throughout the years of industrial relations reform, business sought to restrain the government and urged it to halt further legislation, and continued to do so long after Mrs Thatcher had resigned.25 No surveys located strong anti-union sentiment among disgruntled employers and managers to which the Thatcher governments felt obliged to respond.26 Most employers did not rush to take advantage of the legislation to de-recognize unions, or assert managerial prerogatives, and continued, for some years at least, to prefer their customary practices.27 The most common employer response, according to the authoritative series of WIRS surveys, was not to de-recognize unions and end collective bargaining, but to raise the proportion of companies reporting ‘an initiative to increase employee involvement’ by means of committees, representation, briefings, quality circles and incentive or ownership schemes.28 As an employer, the government did not, therefore, follow the private sector, but behaved as it imagined private employers ought to behave, or were behaving. Having long been the most sympathetic towards unions,

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the public sector rapidly transformed itself into the least sympathetic, and on a number of occasions, it simply ignored trade unions, and imposed its preferred terms and conditions on its unhappy employees without any negotiations. Most of the new more ‘flexible’, short-term, part-time forms of employment introduced in the 1980s were to be found in the public sector, not the private sector who were supposed to have inspired them.29 Politics must therefore be given priority in any explanation of these reforms. The successive blows against the institutions that had maintained class distinctions and sentiments were politically inspired and justified – the product of political will and of fortunate political circumstances. If global economic trends had been important, it would be rather easier to find similar reforms elsewhere, but with the exception of the privatization of public enterprises, which anyway followed rather than preceded the British, it is not easy to do so. Jenkins reasonably observed that the British were moving in exactly the opposite direction of most European countries, centralizing when they were struggling to decentralize.30 Politics was, we may conclude, as decisive at the end of the class system, as it had been at the beginning. Classes did not, and could not, of course, disappear overnight. The dismantling was piecemeal and progressive, not of a dramatic, violent, extralegal kind that might have erased memories or broken the habits and language of a lifetime. Trade unions and professional bodies have not disappeared, though they have unobtrusively become service organizations or consultancies for their members, and no longer collegial communities capable of upholding distinctive class codes of honour.31 All the many other extra-workplace institutions shaped over generations by class were not suddenly reconstructed. Class continued to be used as a synonym for inequalities of income, power and status; and market researchers social scientists, pollsters, census bureaux continued to find it useful to divide the population into categories of some kind which they called classes. Attempts to discover new classes also continued, in the hope of finding one that can capture media attention and the public imagination in the way ‘Sloan Rangers’ once did.32 One group of sociologists decided to reinterpret class as an ‘individuated process’, not particularly important in people’s lives, entailing no collective membership, loyalties and institutions, but merely a benchmark of social evaluation.33 In this sense, class will surely live for ever. If, however, classes are seen as larger cultural collectivities which have shaped and distinguished lives of those who belong to them, whose boundaries are widely recognized and provide invidious reference points of conduct with corporate institutions that socialize young men and women into distinctive notions of class honour and manners, and associations that disseminate and defend their class interests, they have been in irreversible decline for two decades and more. All kinds of apprenticeship and informal

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practice-based, practitioner-controlled training that socialized newcomers into the distinctive codes of ethics and honour of their class have declined, and no new corporate institutions have appeared to perform their vital class-making, class mobilizing, and class-reproducing functions. Privatization has eliminated the most supportive environment for trade union membership. Trade union reform has lessened the chances of any kind of collective action, and altogether removed the opportunities for workers to demonstrate their class solidarity by secondary action. Reform of the professions has loosened all manner of collegial ethical restraints and obliged self-employed professionals to consider themselves simply as market actors and entrepreneurs, and publicly-employed ones to behave as if they too were in a market. The codes of honour of the middle and working classes are becoming as quaint and nostalgic as those of the aristocracy, perhaps already are. In 1985, one miner who knew that his own pit had been ruined by the strike he supported, observed, ‘There’s nothing for us here … but the strike is about other pits and other jobs.’ The union’s branch president added, ‘I try to instil in them that it is not their union to break … We only borrow the union. It belongs to our fathers and sons.’34 One may be reasonably sure that the decline is irreversible because neither of Mrs Thatcher’s two successors showed the least inclination to reestablish the traditional relationship between the state and civil society, or to restore powers to either professions or trade unions.35 They have had no electoral incentives to do so. Mrs Thatcher’s three successive election victories had shown that these reforms had few, if any, electoral costs. Professions and trade unions had no electorally decisive popular support. The balance of power between state and civil society had never become an electoral issue, except perhaps as a by-product of ethnic politics of Scotland and Wales because an English-dominated and London-based state was withdrawing powers from their civil societies. It seems highly improbable that some future government will decide to renationalize industries, to restore the immunities of professions and trade unions, or allow strikes to once again assume a class dimension, or force universities and colleges of further education to hand back to practitioners the vocational training responsibilities they have assumed. Consultants’ participation in the business of government shows no sign of declining. On the contrary, it increased massively under the Blair governments.36 Most important of all, both Mr Major and Mr Blair were committed to creating a mass system of higher education, and thereby expanding the opportunities for individual betterment that long ago helped to frustrate the formation of an American class system. Is it likely that it will be halted or reversed by Mr. Brown or any of his successors? Classes have therefore been left with few firm institutional moorings, the House of Lords and public schools may continue to make a modest contribution to them, as will the ‘estates’ or ‘tenant-managed organizations’ of local councils, and one or two trade union leaders who intermittently

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claim they are engaged in class struggle, plus a handful of sociologists. These hardly seem sufficient to maintain the entire system. One of Mrs Thatcher’s most decisive blows against class was to make no reference to it. Cannadine noted that ‘she was determined to drive the language of class off the political agenda of public discussion … The word class hardly ever appeared in her speeches … Politics, she insisted, “was not a matter of class, and class warfare was an outmoded Marxist doctrine which had incited social conflict where it would not otherwise have existed.”’ After leaving office, she continued in the same vein. ‘The more you talk about class – or even about classlessness, the more you fix the idea in people’s minds.’ She preferred the language of the customer and consumer, and the voter.’ John Major was backsliding, in her view, by even mentioning his ambition to create a classless society.37 Four successive electoral defeats also persuaded the Labour Party to abandon its class appeal and rhetoric. The omission of the word class from their vocabulary was so abrupt and uniform, that one must infer that it was in response to a decision at the highest level of the party. A longitudinal study of the party’s grassroots over the years 1990–1999 showed a large shift away from the belief in the importance of ‘class struggle between labour and capital, particularly among new members.’38 If political leaders decline to use the term ‘class’ to refer to collective entities with a common fate and condition, and if, as seems to be the case, neither their constituents, the media, academic researchers nor union leaders oblige them to do so, then it is difficult to see how class can serve any longer as a significant reference point in political and social life. Sartori’s argument that political parties do not simply reflect or express pre-existing class differences, but define, articulate, and therefore create them, has been emphatically vindicated.39 Even he might have been surprised, however, that they could also help to destroy classes simply by ceasing to refer to them. The demise of the British class system not only provided a final test of the argument that has informed the entire investigation, but also provides further corroboration of one of the conclusions we drew from our examination of classes in Russia, France and the United States, namely, that market forces are a solvent of class institutions. Evidence from these three societies suggested that classes were best formed when the state and civil society acted in concert, and when either of them was unwilling to do so, classes were not formed successfully, because the other became, by its inaction, a silent ally of class-destroying market forces. So it has proved repeatedly in the English case. Having collaborated for more than 300 years with civil society, thereby enabling classes to be formed and to flourish, the state suddenly ended the collaboration during the Thatcher era, switched sides as it were, and forced large sectors of civil society to accept and live by market forces. It thereby sealed the fate of the class system, which now has to

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depend on organized groups in civil society alone. Market forces meanwhile continue their normal routine – the perpetual creation of new inequalities. We can all be spectators of the phenomenon, since it is being played out, with full media coverage, in many English sports. All of them were previously insulated from market forces in various ways by their amateur selfgoverning bodies which permitted little inequality between players or teams, and everybody knew their class coupling. Now, as they have been opened to market forces, they are all becoming, or trying to become, classless and national, while the inequalities between the outstanding and merely average clubs and players reach monumental proportions.

The hidden injuries of classlessness The demise of the class system has not been quite as exhilarating as many had predicted and hoped. There was no climactic struggle between classes, no stirring call to arms, no mass meetings, no proclamations. No incorrigible diehards appeared to defend the doomed ancien régime. The system was disassembled piece-by-piece rather than overthrown, and by the wrong leader and the wrong party in the service of the wrong ideals. Having crusaded for so long on behalf of the working class, we all came to assume that the destruction of the class system was the Left’s historic task, and that if it ever happened, it would be their triumph. They already seemed to have one hand on the trophy. We were therefore looking in the wrong direction. Moreover, the leader of the governments that did most to destroy it never explicitly proclaimed her intention. The class system was so much collateral damage, a victim of reforms primarily intended to increase the sway of market forces, and never itself the primary target, so it hardly warranted congratulations or celebrations. Orwell seems to have been alone in wondering whether ‘a classless society doesn’t mean a beatific state of affairs … perhaps it means a bleak world in which all our ideals, our codes, our tastes – our ‘ideology in fact – will have no meaning.’40 Everyone else seems to have agreed that class was an unmitigated evil, and therefore only counted its costs. Only a brave soul would have tried to assess its benefits. Bauer might, in fairness, have observed that the British ‘obsession’ with class he complained about was accompanied by continuous redistribution of wealth and income, by widening of access to universities, by the creation of the NHS, and by unequalled opportunities for shopfloor workers to be promoted into management. Which leads one to wonder, whether the ‘obsession’ might not merely have accompanied these things, but to some degree at least have been responsible for them. Trow observed that ‘a culture is defined in part, by what it feels guilty about’, and it is possible that, haunted by the belief that class was their country’s great sin, the British may have made disproportionate, guilt-

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ridden efforts to try and counteract it, such as universal health care, and grants to enable poorer students to attend university.41 The obsession or myth also carried an implicit warning, even a threat. It heightened and legitimated political concern and political action to try and reduce class inequalities. It may also have generated some sense of obligation. The more philanthropic or socially-minded responses that the British usually gave to opinion questionnaires about government welfare and redistributive policies may have been prompted by class sentiments, that is by a sense that there are classes of people toward whom one cannot expect quite as much as one would from oneself or one’s peers, and to whom one cannot apply quite the same standards. Correspondingly, the more ‘selfish’ American responses to such questions seem to arise from an instinctive and pervasive egalitarianism, from a deep sense that everyone, providing they have had an opportunity to obtain an education, is in fact equal. Such inequalities as may subsequently arise between them must therefore be the result of their merit and effort, and no class or classes of people therefore deserve special treatment or sympathy from the state. However that may be, it seems likely that once the myth has been dispelled and the language of class has fallen into disuse, political support for redistribution and equality will decline. This is hardly a rash prediction, since it has long since been overtaken by events. Little, it now seems, can be done or need by done, to mobilize sentiment against inequalities, however offensive and unjust they may appear. Classes were once thought as the great enemy of equality, and classlessness was seen as synonymous with equality. We now have to recognize that classes may all along have been an ally of equality, and fighting for it without them may prove to be an uphill task. The English must now, it seems, simply learn to behave like other classless societies, and live with innumerable finely-graduated, continuously-invented ad hoc status distinctions, – residential, occupational, recreational – rather than broad and profound class divisions that mark different ways of life with distinct notions of honour. They must also learn to tolerate severe inequalities of wealth and income, like those found in the United States, or perhaps inequalities of mobility opportunities like those found in Japan, and maybe both.42 A question remains, the question raised by Orwell’s remark. How are the English changing as the long-standing reference points and loyalties of class disappear from their lives? No social science theory offers much help in answering it, and other classless societies can give only rough indications, since none of them had created anything like Britain’s class system, or experienced the kind of reforms that brought it to an end. Perhaps one may turn first to Mrs Thatcher’s own predictions and expectations. These were, not unnaturally, selective and incomplete, and never, for reasons mentioned, referred directly to class, but she certainly had a vision of the consequences of her reforms, and these are a starting point.

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As her quotation of St. Francis’s words, ‘where there is discord may we bring harmony’, on accepting office indicated, she clearly intended to reduce industrial warfare, and over the longer run at least, seems to have succeeded in this respect. After the climactic industrial disputes that marked her early years of office, the number of days lost through strikes fell sharply and has remained very low.43 She may also have been successful in creating a more ‘entrepreneurial culture’ – another declared goal, though the evidence is not beyond dispute since studies of the rate of entrepreneurship are not longitudinal, and do not allow a before/after comparison. During her years in office, self-employment nearly doubled as a percentage of the labour force from 7% to 13%, though a large proportion of these newly self-employed were only concerned with employing themselves, rather than behaving like real entrepreneurs and creating enterprises that would employ others.44 Recent evidence suggests, however, that the climate for entrepreneurship is significantly more congenial in contemporary Britain than in France or Germany, and that the British are more likely to embark on entrepreneurial endeavours than inhabitants of those two countries.45 Moreover, the relaxation of professional ethics, and the extension of market forces within most professional jurisdictions must, it seems safe to say, have provided scope for new kinds of legal, medical and academic entrepreneurship. Advertising for personal injury claimants bombards television viewers nightly, and the ‘compensation culture’ is, after all, one form of entrepreneurial endeavour. The Thatcher reforms, however, had other consequences which she did not dwell on, and they are no less important, and perhaps more important, in shaping classless Britain. In trying to pin them down, we face a problem familiar to every analyst of the Soviet Union, of distinguishing the consequences of the goal from the means adopted to achieve it, that is, of distinguishing the consequences of socialism from the consequences of the particular way the Bolsheviks sought to create it, or the conditions under which they had to create it. Here, we would like to distinguish between the consequences of classlessness, and the consequences of the particular means by which the Thatcher governments dismantled the structures that had held it in place. Sovietologists never solved their problem, and I do not think we can solve its British counterpart. In the end, it may not matter. Socialism in Russia was what the Bolsheviks created, and classlessness in Britain is what the Thatcher, Major and Blair governments have cumulatively created. I will answer the question by identifying three closely interrelated and defining features of classless Britain, taking advantage of such clues as comparison with our other societies has to offer. To begin with the least contentious: Britain has become a much more centralized society. Mrs Thatcher liked to boast that she was ‘getting the state off our backs’. The sale of shares in the public corporations provides

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the best, and perhaps only, support for this claim, though one must observe that the original architects of these corporations intended them to be freestanding independent entities, like the BBC, not a part of the apparatus of the central government. It was only their financial problems that made them dependent on central government, and her privatization measures were intended as much to rid the Exchequer of the perennial problems public corporations presented as to liberate the average taxpayer and citizen from central state control. In every other respect, her reforms entailed an increase in the powers of central government, at the expense not only of local government, but also of self-governing professions and trade unions. Accounts of the growth of democracy in Britain focus on the national government. Local government may be mentioned in footnotes and postscripts, but the miniature forms of representative government created by professions and trade unions are never mentioned at all. Why should they be? They were after all a part of civil society rather than of government. However, since they exercised powers that were elsewhere the functions of government, or required statutory support and confirmation, we might, for a moment, take a broader view, and include them as part of the polity. If we do so, we may notice that one of the peculiarities of British political development is that representative governments in the workplace were established before a democratic political system at a national or local level. Indeed, it may be that Britain was able to establish a national mass democracy in its famously cautious, evolutionary manner precisely because organized groups in civil society had already created mini-representative governments which could protect the immediate interests of large proportions of the potential electorate rather more effectively than the House of Commons was ever likely to do. All governments, prior to Mrs Thatcher’s, respected the sovereignty of these ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics’.46 Her governments by contrast took the view that Charles II had been right after all, when he, or his counsel argued against the City of London in 1685 that ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics all over the Kingdom’ are not ‘conducive to good government’. They therefore behaved as if seeking to retrieve powers carelessly ceded by their predecessors over many generations. In rapid succession, she and her ministers served their own writs of quo warranto against the professions, usually prefaced by critical reports such as that on the civil service by a director of Marks and Spencer’s, about the NHS by a director of Sainsbury’s, about the universities by a director of Reed Paper.47 Primary and secondary schools provide a startling first example of centralization. Schoolteachers, once responsible only to themselves, or their heads, or more distantly to their local education authorities were ordered to teach a nationally-prescribed curriculum and were held accountable to central government, via flying visits of state inspectors, and continuous series of tests which provided national league tables of the performance of

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their pupils. The Secretary of State also assumed the right to interfere in the performance of any school that he and his officials deemed unsatisfactory, by turning the national media spotlight on what they believed were the worst, by despatching so-called ‘hit squads’ to deal with them, and by installing so-called ‘super-heads’ to replace the existing head teachers. Universities surrendered their autonomy with little protest. The academically-controlled University Grants Committee previously responsible for distributing public funds was replaced by a state agency, the Higher Education Funding Council responsible to the Secretary of State for Education. University charters were summarily rewritten by a team of judges, so-called commissioners, drafted for the purpose. Hence a step that had provoked the opposition to James II, and had had critical consequences for the development of American education when Dartmouth College resisted the attempts of the State of New Hampshire to rewrite its charter, passed with barely a squeak of dissent. Communications to the universities from the UFC, and later the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFC) then came, as Trow observed, ‘in the form of announcements of public policy, followed up by letters to the institutions specifying what they were to do to comply with them.’48 Universities were also subjected to state audits of both their teaching and research standards, and like schools, given grades that were published in league tables. If we leave aside public schools, it seems doubtful whether any educational system in the developed world is now as centralized as the English. English observers used to relish telling a story, which they expected would provoke horror and amazement, about the French Minister of Education who could look at his watch and tell what every child in France was being taught at that particular moment. Apart from the public schools, the English have now concentrated power still more decisively, since the funding and control of elite institutions in France was never the responsibility of the Minister of Education. More ironically still, the sort of control now exercised by the HEFC over individual university departments, rather than universities as corporate entities, reproduces the lines of command that Napoleon’s Imperial University established over each faculty. It is now foreign observers who tell stories that provoke horror and amazement about English education. One measure of the significance of any reform is to contemplate how past generations might have responded to it. In the case of education, they would surely wonder if they were in the same country. The Royal Commission on the Universities of 1850–1852 was preceded by many years of discussion to overcome the objections of those at both universities who thought that examination by ‘any power extraneous to the university’ would be ‘illegal’ and ‘in violation of their just and ancient rights’. The then prime minister, Lord John Russell, made repeated assurances of ‘the voluntary nature of the Commission.’, but even so many dons declined to co-operate with it. After it reported, the new prime minister, Palmerston,

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wrote to the chancellors of the two universities asking them ‘what aid they may desire from parliament in the form either of prohibitions, of enabling powers, or of new Enactments.’49 We know from the debates and protests surrrounding the reform of primary schools in the early twentieth century, that the idea that the people of Cornwall, or Leicestershire or Yorkshire were somehow incapable of themselves deciding how to run their schools, and that a minister in London, along with his officials and ‘hit squads’ should decide for them, would have been a shocking one. There is even a marked contrast with government policies only a few decades ago. When in 1964, the first Wilson government sought to be rid of selective secondary schools, it declined to impose any solution on local authorities, and grammar schools and the 11-plus selection examination therefore continued in a number of counties. The Thatcher governments, by contrast, had no inhibitions about imposing anything and everything on local authorities, schools and universities. Sometimes, it is true, as if embarrassed by the vast range of new powers it was accumulating, these governments permitted a degree of nominal and conditional decentralization by means of independent-sounding institutions such as trusts, boards and councils. Schools were, for instance, provided a means of escaping from local government control, either by so-called ‘local management’, or by means of ‘grant-maintained’ schools, which Mrs Thatcher herself wanted to call ‘independent state schools’ and by ‘trust’ schools. However, these independent-sounding bodies got local government off their backs only to come firmly under the control of the central government’s Department of Education. Hospitals were likewise allowed to opt for independence as ‘trusts’ which also sounded independent, but in 1993 the former director of personnel at the NHS observed, ‘the view one hears on all sides from trusts is that central control is tighter than for the past 20 years.’50 These were all bogus forms of decentralization, because none of these institutions were allowed to be financially independent of central government, and the voluntary-sounding bodies were often headed by spoilsmen, all of whom owed their appointment to ministerial patronage.51 These are Potemkin institutions, and provide about as much evidence of a vibrant civil society as the cardboard villages Count Potemkin constructed to impress Catherine the Great with the prosperity and vitality of the Crimea. The Blair governments imitated the Thatcher governments in this respect, as in so many others, so it is no wonder that there was some scepticism about its so-called ‘foundation’ hospitals in the NHS, which were supposedly to be free of control from the Department of Health.52 The second defining characteristic of classless Britain is that it has become more hierarchical. This followed, of course, from centralization which necessarily required instruments of management and control, though at first glance, it may seem a somewhat odd, and even paradoxical outcome. The class system was supposed to be the embodiment of a hierarchical society,

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and classlessness synonymous with equality. However, the barriers and social distance between middle and working class occupations, always coexisted with collegial and egalitarian intra-occupational and intra-class relationships, since both professional associations and trade unions diffused and distributed power at the workplace, as the evidence from English workplaces presented above copiously demonstrated. Most of the Thatcher reforms, by contrast, were specifically dedicated to destroying this kind of collegiality and diffusion of power, and making British workplaces rather more hierarchical and managed. She might have better described her reforms not as ‘getting the state off our backs’ but as ‘getting our colleagues of our backs’, and installing supervisors, managers, and state regulators of various kinds in their place. In the private sector, trade union reforms worked to this end in two ways, first, by reducing the chances of spontaneous collective action to resist managerial control over their members at the workplace. English workers were finally obliged to submit to the forms of discipline and control to which American, French and Japanese workers had long become accustomed – methods which, as the skilled worker-sociologist Rayton put it, ‘take your freedom away, take your conscience from you’. Their second effect was that, even while the powers of trade unions relative to employers were decreased, the powers of full-time union officials over their lay shopfloor representatives and members were increased. Unofficial ‘lightning’ strikes, were very common in the 1960s and 1970s, and union officials had felt obliged to make them official retroactively, ‘on the nod’. Such strikes had been widely condemned for many years for the damage caused to British industry, but whatever that may have been, there can be little doubt that they were an emphatic expression of union democracy. The Thatcher governments’ industrial relations reforms made it financially ruinous for a union, or its members to ignore the procedures required by law, and thereby substantially reinforced the power of both union officials over their lay members. ‘Lightning’, direct democracy thereby came to an end, and union members and officials had to follow the more conventional legallydefined rules of representative democracy. Grunberg’s account of his return, after the first five years of ‘Thatcherism’, to a car manufacturing plant at Ryton which he had first studied just before Mrs Thatcher’s election brings out the effects particularly sharply, though they may have been exaggerated in this case because it was an Americanowned company and his visits coincided with a period of high unemployment, and a change of management direction within the company, which had previously accepted British working practices.53 Nonetheless, it illustrates rather clearly the potential of the new laws. Management had, he observed, launched ‘a sustained attack on workers’ shopfloor power’, had refused to compromise during a three-month strike, and refused thereafter to tolerate lightning stoppages as it had in the past. It no longer granted

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shop stewards time for union business and assigned them to normal jobs, ‘thus reducing their ability to circulate freely in the plants and to concentrate on workers’ grievances.’ It had also instituted ‘direct lines of communication to workers with briefings by foremen during work time (while meetings called by stewards were timed and deducted from the men’s pay) … ‘. Management had also begun ‘to ignore stewards, refusing to meet with them directly, and forcing them to negotiate with foremen and direct line supervisors.’ Manning arrangements, which in the past were negotiated with stewards, were transmitted to supervisors, and thence to the men, and ‘only given to the stewards out of courtesy.’54 Successive Workplace Relations (WIRS) surveys suggest that this was a somewhat exceptional case, in private industry at least, though at least one other volume car manufacturing firm made a similar assault on shopfloor self-regulation.55 However, it is in the public sector, where the government also wielded the powers of an employer, that the construction of managerial hierarchies is most clearly visible. Responsibilities formerly diffused among professionals and semi-professionals were assigned to designated managers who were given appropriate status, authority and rewards to supervise their former colleagues. Civil servants were encouraged to forget their policy-advising function, to abandon the notion that they were independent guardians of the public interest, and instead became managerial subordinates of their ministers who they were expected to serve rather than advise, and to establish command structures to ensure their subordinates worked as efficiently as the private sector.56 Chairs of university departments were taken aside and told to ‘manage’ their junior colleagues. Headmasters previously primus inter pares were similarly converted into managers, and former colleagues became their subordinates. One of the more striking examples of the construction of hierarchies were to be found in the health services. Hospital consultants previously ‘lords unto themselves’ were required in 1990 to negotiate a ‘job plan with their general managers’, which would be the basis of their future contracts. These set out their main duties and responsibilities, and proposed ‘a work programme for a typical week’. The tone of the recommended form of contract was peremptory and imperative: ‘You will be expected to work with local managers … You are expected to observe the units’ agreed policies and procedures ….You will devote time to this activity on a regular basis’ etc. etc. Moreover, the day to-day management of these contracts was transferred from the regional health authorities, where they had been lodged since the founding of the NHS to prevent any local interference with consultants’ clinical autonomy, to their direct managerial supervisors in the district health authorities.57 An analogous line management logic was applied to nurses, who constituted about half of the entire NHS workforce, and were an extraordinarily diverse collection of near-professions and semi-professions, differentiated

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and stratified by their training, their qualifications, their specialties and places of work. Although they had always been formally subject to the overall supervision of consultants and hospital administrators, this was seldom exercised directly, and both consultants and administrators deferred to the authority of the matron who was herself, invariably, a former nurse. Nurses also had many professional characteristics. They were primarily trained on the job, had a strong sense of their own jurisdiction and responsibilities, and high rates of membership in one or other professional association or trade union. Over many years, their professional status had been gradually and somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. ‘Consensus management’, which had been witheringly dismissed in the Griffiths Report, was in fact something of a triumph for them, the successful culmination of a long struggle for professional status. Shortly after the publication of this report in October 1988, their struggle was brought to an end. Every kind of nurse, from aides and auxiliaries, enrolled and registered nurses, hospital and district nurses, ward sisters, midwives and teaching staff, each of which had previously developed their own grades and career paths, were assigned to one of nine letter grades of a uniform national scale. Ward sisters, for instance, who had previously been jointly responsible for the running of a ward had to compete for the single grade G permitted for each ward, since only one of them could be a ‘ward manager’, and satisfy the requirements of being in charge with ‘continuing responsibility.’58 The construction of all these new hierarchies was accompanied and legitimized by a militant assertion of managerial ideology, resting on the claim that there is a special kind of expertise in organizing and controlling other people’s work, that its principles are known and may be acquired in management schools, and that this expertise entitles those who possess it to decide how any type of work may be best performed, irrespective of the manager’s own prior expertise and experience. This ideology was first enunciated by Frederick Winslow Taylor at Midvale Steel, Pennsylvania, at the end of the nineteenth century. He made extravagant claims on its behalf, and the enthusiastic reception given his ideas by employers and managers in the United States turned him into the first management guru. His ideas were also warmly received in France and Japan, as well as by the new rulers of Soviet Russia.59 In Britain, they were decisively and repeatedly rejected.60 British manufacturing industry had long preferred a functional type of authority, similar to that found in both professions and crafts, in which the authority of superiors is specific and delimited, and rests on greater experience and expertise in the specific tasks they were expected to supervise.61 It is this view of managerial authority that explains the selfregulation on the shop floor documented earlier, and explains why, as we noted earlier, British industry consistently had a high ratio of skilled to unskilled workers when compared both with the United States and France.

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It seems unlikely that this new assertive style of management emerged spontaneously from British manufacturing industry, since it continued, and even accelerated, its long, uninterrupted decline during and after the Thatcher years. It can hardly therefore have been much of a force for change. One British service industry may have made a distinctive contribution; mass retailing, since directors of two of the then leading retailers had written the reports preceding public sector reform, and retail trade was probably the industry with which Mrs Thatcher was most familiar, as are the rest of us. However, the most important source of inspiration seems to have been management consultants, and ultimately therefore, manufacturing and service industries in the United States since, whatever their nationality, consultants have relied almost exclusively on evidence from this source. Mrs Thatcher and the ministers in the cabinets did not share the traditional British antipathy to the methods of scientific management. Although it was nearly 100 years since they were first formulated, they greeted them like some-newly-discovered panacea. Presumably, they were persuaded, via the No. 10 Policy Unit, and by their favoured consultants, Coopers & Lybrand, though they were never mentioned in her memoirs. In any event, with all the enthusiasm of late converts, they imposed the methods of scientific management comprehensively across the public sector. National census data on the sudden rise in the number of managers in Britain provides a rough measure of the transition. In the earliest decades in which the number of managers have been recorded, Britain always languished at the bottom of international league tables, but over the decade of the 1980s, it zoomed to very near the top.62 And since the government now controlled higher education, management suddenly became an academic craze. There was no opportunity for universities to debate or define its academic merits, or to perform the ‘counter-cyclical’ role that David Riesman had urged.63 The number of universities teaching this new expertise exploded, as they stampeded to get their share of the public funds that it brought their way.64 Government therefore created the demand for managers, and with the compliance of universities that it now controlled, arranged the supply, redirecting over a very short time the minds, careers and ambitions of a generation, bringing to mind Rousseau’s observation that in the end we are all what governments make of us. The newly-constructed managerial hierarchies of control imposed across the public sector all of course led back to the relevant ministries in Whitehall, which then had the task of making sense of the massive inward flows of information they generated, and managing this vast ensemble, or acting as if they were managing it. Since neither civil servants nor ministers had much experience of managing anything, they necessarily had to rely heavily on their consultants for ideas and reassurance. Their consultants, however, did not tell them that they similarly lacked expertise in the one

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major area that this new kind of centralized public sector required above all others: managing professionals. They therefore resorted to the methods that had been devised to measure and improve the performance and productivity of manual and routine service workers, and applied them to all the hospitals, schools, universities, police forces, prisons, courts, and old people’s homes in the land. Extravagant as his claims sometimes were, Taylor never contemplated applying his methods to the management of professional tasks, let alone the simultaneous management of all the public services in a country. No management consultant could possibly have had any experience of such a thing, since it existed nowhere in the United States.65 The closest parallels were therefore with the Soviet Union, which had sought over the seven decades of its existence, to manage an entire economy from the centre. Over those decades the peculiar limitations and pathologies of their efforts had slowly come to be recognized, by insiders as well as outsiders: political manoeuvring to manipulate the measures set, and after they had been determined, changing behaviour to conform precisely with the measure, and ignoring everything that was not measured, and falsifying their reports of their own true resources and capabilities. Rewards flowed to those who best knew how to manipulate the measures and trumpet their achievements, and it was in everyone’s interest to be economical with the truth. Russia was thereby converted into a nation of dissemblers, with an all-powerful but misinformed centre surrounded by a conspiracy of misinformation or silence. Planned goals were in fact being fulfilled and over-fulfilled to the very last days of the regime.66 Gorbachev’s glasnost was probably less a concession to popular opinion than a final desperate attempt by Soviet leaders to discover the true facts about their economy. As long as the work being done was simple, straightforward, and unidimensional, like shovelling ore which Taylor first measured, or like the tasks the Soviet managers encountered in the early stages of industrialization, such management controls seemed to work. The moment it was applied to multidimensional tasks, where several criteria of good performance may be applied simultaneously, or where the criteria might shift during the performance of a task, or to tasks that required the co-ordination of several different kinds of expertise, the quality of the product or service was distorted and deteriorated. The Soviets themselves seem to have recognized the problem, and relaxed or removed these controls in industries that they thought to be absolutely vital to their physical survival, most notably aviation and military hardware.67 Ideological considerations, however, precluded the relaxation of control over the rest of the economy, and the Soviets therefore struggled for many decades to solve the problem of incorporating technological innovations, dependent on highly qualified R&D personnel, into normally planned production. Had they been able to solve this problem, the Soviet Union, it seems safe to say, would be with us still.

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Thatcher and her ministers, of course, only sought to impose centralized command management on the public sector, not on the entire economy, so the resemblance is only a partial one. Nevertheless, within the public sector their reforms were in some respects even more ambitious than those of the Soviet Union, since they were imposed on services that had long depended on highly qualified personnel, with strong professional identities and long traditions of self-government, and who had in the past themselves been trusted to define the standards to which they ought to work. There is no reason to suppose that as these professionals have been subjected to centralized command management that they have escaped its pathologies. On the contrary, there is evidence from a number of directions that they are already quite far advanced. Higher educational institutions, for instance, plan, rehearse, and conspire ahead of their audits.68 On the basis of analogy with the divisions of a large multi-divisional industrial firm whose departments have ‘outputs’ that can be planned, the government expects all university departments to have ‘plans’. Academics therefore devote time and skill to preparing them, knowing that they are a calculated and time-consuming deceit, and have little or no bearing whatever on how they or any of their colleagues subsequently work.69 Only items that are measured receive any attention. Thus tutorials, which were once considered the most important and distinctive part of English university education, the jewel in their crown, were never mentioned in any government directive, and accordingly were allowed to fall by the wayside, except perhaps at Oxford and Cambridge. The pedagogical pros and cons of doing so were never even discussed. None of those subject to this academic command management could ever publicly refer to any deterioration in teaching standards, since that would have been to betray one’s colleagues, and put at risk the incentive payments the government offered. In the Soviet manner, the government claimed, all the while, that standards were improving, and devised an authentically Soviet statistic (one that can be manipulated to show success in whatever it purports to measure) to support its argument: the rising proportion of first and upper second-class degrees. Trow, a most sympathetic foreign observer, expressed his astonishment. After noting, in the Dainton Commission’s report, that over 23 years from 1972/1973 to 1995/1996, that ‘the average amount of recurrent income per student had fallen by two thirds’, and after personally witnessing ‘impoverished libraries, student/ staff ratios that have doubled or tripled from the norms of the 1970s, long deferred maintenance of capital plant, more students working rather than reading, and the loss of valued colleagues due to early retirement,’ he was amazed to note that ‘neither academics or vice-chancellors complained about any serious decline in standards.’ Indeed ‘many vice-chancellors claim that standards and performance are higher than ever.’70 This is surely a remarkable achievement and surpasses any of those of the Stakhanovites

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in Russia. It makes one wonder the ‘heights that might be scaled’ if the cuts were to continue indefinitely. The private comments of academics, of course, told quite another story, so there is now a sharp contrast between what is said publicly, and what is said privately, a schizophrenia that was of course endemic in Soviet Russia. School teachers have found it more difficult to prepare for school audits and the unannounced visitations of inspectors, but they have taken other steps to defend themselves from instant judgements of OFSTED inspectors. Just as Soviet managers declined to improve their products lest it affect the output by which their performance was assessed, so English teachers have been found directing their students away from more difficult core subjects to peripheral subjects, where passing marks are easier to obtain. Many teachers claimed that cheating had become ‘institutionalized’ in both secondary and primary schools, especially in coursework, with teachers helping pupils with their examined work. By 2006 it had become so widespread that coursework examinations were abolished.71 A few teachers have been found disclosing the questions in written examinations to their students, or in some cases amending their pupils’ completed exam papers.72 NHS hospitals have been found doing similar things. Since their performance is measured by the length of their waiting lists, they reduced them by concentrating on the simpler cases, or by reassigning patients to the list if they fail to keep an appointment, or by keeping two lists.73 Only three out of 41 NHS Trusts produced ‘completely trustworthy’ figures of waiting lists according to an Audit Commission report in 2003, though it found hard evidence of deliberate misrepresentation in only three of the remaining 38. Ambulance services are evaluated by their response times, and a survey by the Commission for Health Improvement found that accurate figures were ‘very rare’. While it accused only a few of deliberate falsification, misrepresentation was apparently common – indeed the norm. Only three were found to have produced accurate figures, while the others had in various ways manipulated the timing apparatus or the records. In the best Soviet manner, some ambulance services were found to have responded to emergency calls even before the calls had been made.74 Analogous performance measures, clear-up rates, or response rates or numbers of police per inhabitant were used to evaluate the police, which seem to make police stations peculiarly reluctant to record any crimes that are difficult to solve.75 News items detailing various scams of this kind in public services are now routine. British public services may have had less experience than the Russians at the arts of confusing the command centres of the state, but they have evidently been learning fast, and proving themselves no less adept. As in the Soviet Union, the government’s predictable response has been to make an example of the few unfortunates who happen to have been discovered in the act. The headmaster who had corrected what he called the

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‘silly mistakes’ of his 11-year old pupils in an examination received a threemonth prison sentence.76 The NHS chief executive has ‘warned that the misreporting of figures was inexcusable and carried serious consequences’. He meant of course, serious consequences for the perpetrators, overlooking those for his own attempts to manage the service. As in the Soviet Union, little attention has been paid to the effects of managerial methods which give every performance-rated subordinate an incentive to conceal the true situation, or to understand why hospitals, schools, universities, and law firms, previously of good character, would want to start presenting false information about themselves. The conspiracy of silence has probably been less successfully maintained in Britain than it was in the Soviet Union, partly because there are more whistle-blowers and more media outlets, partly because cross-societal comparative research provides periodic reality checks, and also no doubt because of the professional integrity of those carrying out the audits. Nonetheless, there must now remain a doubt in every superiors’ or observers’ mind about the reported ‘achievements’ of any British public service. In the future, we may safely predict enormous improvements, by all the official indices, in Britain’s educational achievements, its scientific research, its education, its health care, its legal services, its policing, which few in the service will ever publicly deny. Just as centralization required the construction of managerial hierarchies of control, so both also entailed the replacement of trust, and of internalized collective ethics transmitted informally across generations, by explicit rules, controls, incentives and sanctions. This necessarily followed from the attacks on trade unions and professions since both were repositories and resolute defenders of collegial customs and precedents. To the Thatcher governments these customs and precedents were no more than restrictive practices, those of the professions being rather more cleverly camouflaged than those of unions. In handling both, Mrs Thatcher assumed that fiveyearly parliamentary elections, cross-wired though they invariably are with numerous unrelated issues, gave her governments the right to interfere in professions’ and unions’ domestic affairs. In fact, she often seemed to assume that she herself could better represent the opinions of rank and file professionals and trade unionists than the leaders of their own collective bodies and might therefore appeal over their heads to liberate the rank and file from their collective constraints imposed on them. Once professionals and trade unionists were free to behave as rational economic actors, they could then be offered the same incentives, rewards and punishments as are offered in every free market, and public services could then be managed as efficiently and economically as the private sector to the ultimate benefit of the taxpayer. The logic was impeccable, provided one accepted the assumption that the public services like the National Health Service, legal aid, universities

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and schools, the armed forces, the police had never benefited in the past from any distinctive kind of professional ethic or commitment, and had only suffered from the restrictive practices which the indolent, unambitious, status-conscious majority imposed on their more energetic and entrepreneurial colleagues. Whether her assumption was correct is not easy to determine, for just as no one had been able to measure the past contribution of professional ethics to any of these services, no one has measured what the effect of debunking them, and persuading consultants, general practitioners, civil servants, teachers, solicitors and others that they ought to maximize their own individual financial rewards might be on the administration, or the cost, of their services. Hard evidence is rare, though in one instance her assumption has been shown to be false. While hospital consultants’ salaries have increased sharply, their productivity has fallen markedly.77 The effect on the class system which is our present concern, is somewhat easier to observe since the displacement of professional goals that was long familiar to Sovietologists has become common in contemporary Britain. Doctors, teachers, professors, judges and others, who always fancied that they might run things somewhat better than their colleagues, but had previously been restrained by professional etiquette, have been liberated from their primary professional role by financial incentives and become managers and superiors of their former colleagues. They no longer, therefore, have to abide by and defend collective norms but as subordinate agents of the state, may now instruct their former colleagues. Even the most highly organized skilled workers were not immune to the same incentives and prospects. One such case occurred in the early years of the Thatcher era at the same Fawley oil refinery which we discussed above. In the original negotiations, management had offered first-line supervisors managerial status and conditions in the hope that they would then control the work of their former colleagues as senior management wished. Skilled workers, however, had insisted that their supervisors must remain members of their union, and therefore, even though they might formally be managers, would have to abide by, and respect the customary rules of their trades. At the time, the workers seem to have won. Supervisors remained union members, though management did not include them in any collective bargaining agreements. Over the following two decades, however, Esso management evidently found this compromise to its advantage, for in 1974, it decided to offer the same conditions to 130 warehousemen, and four years later to the 70 craftsman fitters who maintained automated computercontrolled equipment. Both accepted, and management evidently obtained more direct control over the working practices of these two occupations.78 To their astonishment, in 1982, three years into the ‘Thatcher era’, the Boilermakers, the ‘impregnable fortress of craft unionism’, requested the same deal, and thereby declared their willingness to abandon their trade rules, in return for a toehold on the managerial ladder, and the rewards,

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status, opportunities and risks it entailed. In so doing, they were also, of course, abandoning their obligations to members of their trade ‘not involved in the situation’ which had been so important to them in the original negotiations, as well as their obligations to their negotiating allies in other trades at the refinery, and to other members of the working class at the refinery. After recovering from their shock, management agreed, though like the earlier deals with warehousemen and craftsman fitters, this ‘devil’s bargain’, as the deal came to be called, aroused considerable dismay and resentment among other workers at the refinery. When, shortly afterwards, management announced that welders were to be similarly converted, the entire refinery immediately came out on strike, and momentarily generated something close to class solidarity in this corner of Hampshire, often known as the ‘graveyard of unionism’.79 From a class point of view, it was a last hurrah. Shortly thereafter, industrial relations legislation made such strikes impossible. Similar devil’s bargains were observable in many professions and trades, though seldom as spontaneous and voluntary as the boilermakers’ seems to have been. In other cases, there was usually some form of duress, as there was in the ‘Big Bang’, the City of London’s devil’s bargain. In the public sector, the bargains were always imposed. Like that of the boilermakers, they involved the exchange of corporate self-regulation for the chance of increased incomes. General practitioners or their practices were rewarded according to the number of patients they saw or diagnostic tests they administered. Professors were given merit payments to distinguish them from their less deserving colleagues, and their departments rewarded for the number of first-class honours and PhDs they awarded, or the number of their students, or the number of articles their members published, or the number of grants they received, and school teachers for the examination results of their pupils. Cumulatively, these devil’s bargains helped to define contemporary classless Britain, and distinguish it from its more class-ridden predecessor, where both professional and manual occupations had sought to prevent external assessment of the quality of their work, and worked to collegial standards of conduct which they had absorbed during their practice-based training, and which they were subsequently entrusted to enforce on each other. No doubt, as critics frequently observed, the trust was often misplaced, but the merits or demerits of regulating work by one means or the other are not here the issue, and anyway would require detailed and difficult analyses of specific cases. Here, we only wish to note how the subordination of civil society’s ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics’ by a highly centralized state imposing managerial controls, has undermined the internalized and collectively enforced ethics common in class-conscious England and replaced them with competitive measures of individual performance which any customer, manager, or minister, can understand and reward.80

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A final question about Orwell’s ‘wild ride into the darkness’ ‘The fact has got to be faced’, Orwell observed, ‘that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. … Perhaps’, he went on, ‘this class breaking business isn’t so simple as it looked! On the contrary, it is wild ride into the darkness, and it may be that at the end of it the smile will be on the face of the tiger.’ We have now, however, had a little time to become accustomed to this ‘darkness’ and to discern some at least of its features, as I have tried to show. One may still reasonably wonder, however, what its impact might be on England’s social order as a whole. This not an easy task because there is no available theory or historical baseline against which we might assess and understand England’s social order. The English have never been particularly interested in identifying its peculiarities, being something they have rather taken for granted. Almost all of the comparative research cited earlier to document the distinctive form of their workplace relationships was the work of a foreign scholar. Economists are ill-inclined, and ill-equipped to identify a country’s institutional and cultural peculiarities, and sociologists have been preoccupied by theories of capitalist, or industrial or Fordist, or modern or post-modern or post-Fordist societies as a whole, and then with ‘globalization’. None of these are much help when we try to detect and understand the full impact of classlessness. If one were to try to construct a makeshift marker, one would have to begin with some well-recognized facts. England’s governmental institutions are among the oldest on the planet, and it is the only country whose constitution remains unwritten. It is the only society whose police are generally unarmed, the only one whose trade unions enjoyed ‘immunities’ and operated outside the law for more than a century, and settled their disputes with employers without written agreements. Its industrial enterprises were long distinguished from others by low levels of managerial supervision, and its governments regulated them with minimal resort to the law. Until the Thatcher reforms, its universities were the most autonomous in the world, and its professions assumed powers that were elsewhere subject to state regulation, and often allowed to organize their practices, or the services in which they worked, more or less as they wished. By any impartial calculation, these things indicate that England was once a high trust society, probably the highest trust society of all. We may next add three more reasonably well-established historical facts, first, that England has been a society where the authority of the parents and the ties of the extended family have long been weak, where religious institutions have long been in decline, and where formal educational provision has been, relative to its wealth, backward.81 Hence it has probably relied rather less than many other societies on three traditional pillars of social order – family, church and school. There may be other modern societies

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which also have depended as little on one or other of these three pillars, but if one were somehow or other able to devise an aggregate score, it seems likely that England would be found among those societies that has depended on them least. England’s social order therefore poses something of a conundrum, since it was also long distinguished by a low-level of violent social conflict and public disorder despite appalling social conditions and inequalities which, until the Second World War at least, might, in the eyes of some observers, including Orwell, have provoked a revolution.82 I have no intention of trying to unravel this puzzling, counter-intuitive combination. However, the present investigation prompts speculation about one strand within it, namely how far the corporate institutions that maintained order in their workplaces might have contributed to the wider social order. Jenkins, the most eloquent and perceptive analyst of the centralization of power during and since the Thatcher era and its behavioural consequences, focused his attention on the decline in the autonomy of local hospitals, neighborhood schools, women’s institutes, trades’ councils, police stations and parish councils.83 However, these institutions could not possibly have exercised as much influence on English social life as professions and trade unions which were responsible for so many school-leavers as they entered the labour force, and thereafter exercised a continuing influence on them through their working lives. The educational and economic merits or demerits of these institutions are not here at issue. The only question here is whether by authorizing the old to teach and discipline the young to be reliable, to accept responsibility, to treat others with respect, and to behave themselves as their elders deemed right and proper as a condition of becoming a member of their trade or profession, they might have contributed to England’s social order more generally. If they did, it follows that as the authority of these corporate institutions have been discredited and weakened, we might expect some dislocation and disturbance in the existing social order. One of its traditional props has been dislodged, and since there is no sign that either the family and church were simultaneously coming to play a more important role in their lives, a disproportionate burden was inevitably, and rather suddenly, imposed on schools and the police. A few straws in the wind lend support to this line of argument, though they fall far short of proof. One very general indication of some kind of social dislocation was the findings of an ICM poll in 2004 that some 51% of the British population wished to emigrate, to ‘relocate in search of a better life abroad’, because ‘they do not like the way Britain has become.’84 One of the grounds mentioned by respondents was the increasing level of crime. Some years earlier England and Wales had in fact topped a study of rates of crime reported by victims in 11 industrial societies, had become the European leader in the number of juveniles arrested and sentenced, and was imprisoning a higher proportion of her citizens than most EU

340 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State

countries, all of which also seem consistent with the view that there had been some kind of dislocation of an accepted social order, especially at the point where among young men enter the labour force, for it is they who disproportionately commit crimes and receive custodial sentences.85 Two of the six measures used to rank the well-being of children in 21 industrial countries in a 2007 UNICEF report, namely ‘family and peer relationships’, and ‘behaviours and risks’ point in the same direction. Britain was last on both.86 In recent times, professional work settings appear to have had particular difficulty in maintaining order. In the past, professionals seem to have been able to rely some deference from their clients, who were therefore inclined to trust and follow their advice. Successive governments have, however, sought to replace deferential clients with critical customers who would evaluate the services offered, and complain whenever they thought them less than adequate. In recent years, some ‘customers’ have done so violently. Since there are no historical statistics, one cannot demonstrate a transition, and can only wonder whether there were too few violent attacks on professionals in the past to obtain recognition and documentation as a social problem. In 2001–2002, the National Audit Office (NAO), found there were 95,500 physical attacks on NHS staff, principally on nursing staff, though it suspected that this was below the true figure, since more than a third of those in accident departments went unreported. Subsequent national surveys of NHS staff supported their suspicion. In 2006, 12% of NHS staff reported violence or physical abuse from patients or their relatives over the preceding 12 months, which would mean – if each of these had been attacked only once – the true figure would be well over 100,000.87 The authors of the NAO report attributed this violence to ‘higher patient expectations’ and ‘frustrations due to increased waiting times’, or ‘waiting room rage’ as one newspaper dubbed it.88 Some reports suggest an analogous phenomenon of ‘classroom rage’. The Teacher Support Network for England estimated – by extrapolating from a Scottish survey – there had been some 85,000 incidents of verbal and physical abuse of teachers in 2002 which it attributed to ‘the way the professional role of teachers has been diminished in recent years.’89 A more recent, representative survey from Scotland suggested that the problem might be less serious than first thought, since ‘only’ 4% of Scottish teachers reported ‘physical aggression’ towards them ‘once or twice a week’.90 Nonetheless, there is clearly a problem, albeit of unknown dimensions, in England, since teachers’ unions have welcomed initiatives to bring police into schools.91 One further straw in the wind is that post-Thatcher governments felt it necessary to address problems of social order that were not previously considered matters of public policy. This started in 1993 with Mr Major’s ‘back to basics’ initiative. It is time, he said, to get back ‘to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accept responsibility for

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yourself and your family’, adding ‘and no shuffling it off on the state.’92 But whereas he hoped that the government might encourage civil society to mend its ways, his successor, Mr Blair, asserted a greater role for the state, launching in 2006 with much fanfare and media moments a ‘respect agenda’, which incorporated a host of ad hoc measures initiated over previous years, all of which had progressively extended the summary powers of the police to deal with ‘unacceptable behaviour’ of various kinds, such as abusive language, truancy, ‘gangs hanging around outside’, loud music, graffiti, littering, spitting, hooliganism, ‘yobbish’ and ‘unruly’ behaviour.93 The widespread intuition that the state was advancing further into matters that had hitherto been left to families and to civil society prompted widespread references to the ‘nanny state’. In this investigation we have considered the ‘little commonwealths and little republics’ that the English had established in so many work settings, primarily as nurseries of class, but if we were to consider them solely as lesser forms of government, then they may well deserve recognition as quiet but effective instruments of social order, with their own long-established and well-enforced ‘respect agendas’. By sharply reducing their influence, recent governments have therefore not only undermined the class system, but simultaneously launched the English into what is for them an unfamiliar experiment, Orwell’s ‘wide ride’, in which social order must depend less on civil society, and more on the state, and in particular on two professions it has centralized and subjected to its managerial control – teachers and the police.

Notes Chapter 1

An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery

1 p.208, George Orwell, ‘England your England’, pp.192–224, in England Your England and Other Essays, Secker & Warburg, London, 1953. 2 p.170, David Cannadine, Class in Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998. 3 Rosemary Crompton et al., eds, Renewing Class Analysis, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. 4 p.149, Mike Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, Open University Press, Buckingham, 2000. 5 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998. 6 James G. March, Lee S. Sproull and Michael Tamuz, ‘Learning from Samples of One or Fewer’, pp.1–13, Organization Science, Vol. 2, No. 1, Feb. 1991. 7 p.2, Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, Vol. 1, Ambition, Love, Politics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973. 8 pp.130, 189, 210, ibid. 9 p.115, ibid. 10 pp.1, 42, 787, ibid. 11 Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Summit, New York, 1983; Jilly Cooper, Class: A View from Middle England, Corgi, London, 1980. 12 pp.30–2, Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class, Morrow, New York, 1990. 13 England has grown over the past century relative to the other countries of the British Isles, especially Ireland and least relative to Scotland. In 1891 77% of the total population of Great Britain lived in England and Wales, nearly 13% in Ireland as a whole, and nearly 11% in Scotland. p.123, Table 36, RegistrarGeneral, Great Britain, Census of England and Wales, Vol. 4, General Report, HMSO, London, 1893. 14 pp.100, 102, R.R. Alford, Party and Society: Anglo-American Democracies, Rand McNally, Chicago, 1963. The index ‘was computed by subtracting the percentage of non-manual workers voting for “Left” parties from the percentage of manual workers voting for “Right” parties.’ 15 pp.780, 782, 784, Reeve D. Vanneman, ‘U.S. and British Perceptions of Class’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 85, No. 4, Jan. 1980. The italics are Vanneman’s. 16 p.113, David L. Weakliem and Anthony F. Heath, ‘The Secret Life of Class Voting: Britain, France and the United States since the 1930s’, pp.97–136, in Geoffrey Evans, ed., The End of Class Politics? Class Voting in Comparative Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. 17 Utilizing cross-European voting data in the 1960s, von Beyme similarly found Britain the best example of a country ‘in which class conflict is more dominant than religious, language or regional differences’, but noted that while class voting was more common in Britain than in central and south eastern Europe, it was less common than in Scandinavia. pp.278, 288–9, Klaus von Beyme, Political Parties in Western Democracies, trans by Eileen Martin, Gower, Aldershot, c. 1985. 342

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In their analysis of voting in 20 societies over the post-war period, Nieuwbeerta and De Graaf found the U.S. and Canada had the lowest levels of class voting, and Britain, along with Scandinavia, the highest. p.31, Paul Nieuwbeerta and Nan Dirk De Graaf, ‘Traditional Class Voting in Twenty Post War Societies’; pp.23–49, in Evans, 1999, op. cit. p.30, Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice et al., How Britain Votes, Pergamon, Oxford, 1985. By 1992, it had returned to the level of 1935. Reproduced p.57, Masao Watanabe, ‘Class Differences and Educational Opportunities in Japan’, pp.49–71, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 29, 1997. For instance, in 1978 42% of a sample of chief executives in six continental European societies agreed with the statement: ‘The average British manager is too conscious of his social class to be able to motivate his workers.’ p.21, Chief Executive Monthly, March 1978. More recently, a survey of opinion in 13 countries found 30% ‘strongly disagreed’ with the statement that ‘Britain was a classless society’. pp.80, 84, Robin Ratcliffe, Through Other Eyes 2: How the World Sees the United Kingdom, British Council, London, 2000. James A. Davis, ‘British and American Attitudes’, pp.88–114, British Social Attitudes: The 1986 Report, Gower, Aldershot, 1986. p.127, Geoffrey Evans, ‘Class conflict and inequality’, pp.123–42, International Social Attitudes: the 10th BSA Report, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1993. pp.130, 133, ibid. p.139, ibid. The other third called themselves middle class. pp.7–9, Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, A Class Act: the Myth of Britain’s Classless Society, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1997. p.3, ibid. W. Müller and W. Karle, Social Selection in Educational Systems in Europe, ISA Research Committee on Social Stratification, Madrid, 1986; quoted p.266, A.H. Halsey, A.F. Heath, J.M. Ridge, Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and Education in Modern Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. ‘British industry is more open than that of any of the other three countries …. alone of the four countries, the man without higher education or family connections is still not weeded out at the start of the managerial-career race … Managerial promotion above plant level is not predetermined by educational or class criteria.’ pp.293, 315, David Granick, Managerial Comparisons of Four Developed Countries: France, Britain, United States and Russia, MIT, Cambridge, 1972; David Granick, Equality of Promotional Opportunities in British Industry, Aims of Industry, 1979. Hiroshi Mannari, Japanese Business Leaders, University of Tokyo, 1974. pp.104–27, 153, 179, 192, Hiroshi Ishida, Social Mobility in Contemporary Japan: Educational Credentials, Class and the Labour Market in a Cross-National Perspective, Macmillan, London, Stanford, 1993. p.124, Youseff Cassis, Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. pp.11–38, Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1959. p.575, Thomas Fox and S.M. Miller, ‘Occupational Stratification and Mobility’, pp.574–81, in Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds, Class, Status and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, 2nd Edition. The fourth country in their comparisons was the

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Netherlands. The main point of this study was to show that aggregate mobility rates might hide considerable differences in rates between different classes. Britain, for instance, had the lowest rate of mobility into the elite. Followed by Hungary, Ireland and Poland. pp.195, 372, Robert Erikson and John Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: Class Mobility in Industrial Societies, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992. In total mobility, England and Wales seemed almost always to be the median case over the birth cohorts from 1905 to 1945, though always ahead of Germany. p.78, ibid. pp.220–1, P.H. Lindert, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Income and Wealth Inequality’, pp.212–31, in Y.S. Brenner, Hartmut Kaelbe and Mark Thomas, eds, Income Distribution in Historical Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. p.220, ibid. Robert J. Lampman, The Share of Top Wealth-Holders in National Wealth, 1922–1956, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1962. pp.95, 147–8, W.D. Rubinstein, Wealth and Inequality in Britain, Faber & Faber, London, 1986. p.22, Edward N. Woolf, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can be Done About It, A Twentieth Century Fund Report, New York, 1995. p.33, A.F. Shorrocks, ‘U.K. Wealth Distribution: Current Evidence and Future Prospects’, in E. Woolf, ed., International Comparisons of the Distribution of Household Wealth, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987. He went on, it must be said, to cast a sceptical eye on the way these data were collected, and to advise caution when interpreting them, but he did not reject them. Tivey calculated that 23.2% of the labour force was employed in nationalized industries, but his figure excluded the National Health Service, the BBC and other public bodies. p.13, Leonard Tivey, Nationalization in British Industry, Jonathan Cape, London, 1966. Dunleavy and Husbands give a figure of 24% for both nationalized enterprises and public services in 1961, rising to 31% in 1982. The latter rose as the former fell. p.21, Patrick Dunleavy and Christopher T. Husbands, British Democracy at the Crossroads: Voting and Party Competition in the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, London, 1985. p.65, Harold Lydall and John B. Lansing, ‘A Comparison of the Distribution of Personal Income and Wealth in the United States and Great Britain’, pp.43–67, American Economic Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, March, 1959. In 1972, 32% of respondents in a national random sample were found to live in council houses. p.44, Heath et al., 1985, op. cit. p.69, Jeffrey G. Williamson, Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality?, Allen & Unwin, Boston, 1985. which was ‘combined with a more unequal distribution of wealth, the latter being rather more marked than the former.’ pp.64–7, ibid. p.52, Watanabe, op. cit. p.26, A.B. Atkinson, The Economics of Inequality, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983. p.149, Rubinstein, op. cit. pp.69–71, Andrea Brandolini and Nicola Rossi, ‘Income Distribution and Growth in Industrial Countries’, pp.69–106, in Vito Tanzi and Ke-young Chan, eds, Income Distribution and High-Quality Growth, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998. J. Fritzell, ‘Income Inequality Trends in the 1980s: A Five Country Comparison’, Luxembourg Income Study, Working Paper 73, 1992. A number of other studies, coming to the same conclusion that income increased sharply in the 1980s, are

Notes to pages 14–20 345

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to be found in A. Goodman, P. Johnson and S. Webb, Income Inequality in the U.K., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. p.113, Heath and Weakliem, op. cit. such as Jilly Cooper, whose work has already been mentioned; Noel Annan, who in his 1990 memoirs referred to class as ‘the referent in English society which supplies so many clues to English behaviour’, and eloquently demonstrated the point in discussing ‘our age’, meaning all those who came of age and went to university between 1919 and 1951. p.319, Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1990; Paxman decided that ‘the English are class-obsessed’. p.154, Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, Michael Joseph, London, 1998; Epstein argued that ‘The English had a stricter class system, and one that lasted for a longer period than any other.’ p.206, Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2002; and Ferdinand Mount claimed that ‘Britain stands nearly alone in maintaining to this day so sharp a division between the Uppers and Downers’, as he called its two present-day classes. p.316, Ferdinand Mount, Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain, Short Books, London, 2004. p.77, Vol. 1, George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970. quoted p.162, George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell, Minerva Press, London, 1966. Breen and Luijkx reported ‘a widespread tendency to greater fluidity in the eleven countries they compared’, but added that ‘Britain is the sole clear exception to this.’ p.73, Richard Breen and Ruud Luijkx, ‘Social Mobility in Europe between 1970 and 2000’, pp.37–73, in Richard Breen, ed., Social Mobility in Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. As for example Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class, Sage, London, 1996. Gunn and Bell thought that ‘By the 1990s it became possible to speak of the end of the middle classes as a recognizable entity … the concept of middle classes becomes meaningless when the institutions, way of life and values which defined the group no longer pertain.’ pp.224, 228, Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, Phoenix, London, 2002. Peter Bauer, Class on the Brain: The Cost of a British Obsession, Centre for Policy Studies, London, 1997, 1st Edition, 1978. pp.5–9, ibid. pp.22–4, ibid. Stein Ringen, ‘The great British myth: why the claims of continuing class inequality fail to take account of social change’, pp.3–4, The Times Literary Supplement, January 23rd, 1998.

Chapter 2

Lessons from Comparative Theories

1 Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Anatomy of the Communist System, Praeger, New York, 1957; Milovan Djilas, Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism’s Self-Destruction, ed. by Vasilije Kalezié, trans by John Loud, Knopf, New York, 1998. 2 For an explicit statement to that effect see his review of Jack Common’s, The Freedom of the Streets, p.336, Vol. 1, Orwell, The Collected Essays, op. cit. 3 ‘The Closed Circle of the Privileged’, pp.145–66, Djilas, 1998, op. cit. 4 pp.174–202, ibid.

346 Notes to pages 20–23 5 Mikhail Gorbachev ‘A Speech on the Tenth Anniversary of the coup of 16th August 1991’, BBC Monitoring, 16th August 2001, reported in Russia Weekly, 17th August 2001. 6 Most notably in Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, trans by Eric Mosbacher, Doubleday, New York, 1984. Other Soviet accounts are discussed below. 7 One of the more important non-Russian accounts is that in Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991, Free Press, New York, 1994, since he showed that the history of the class was integral to the history of the regime. See also Martin Malia, ‘The Nomenklatura Capitalists: who’s running Russia now?’, The New Republic, May 22nd, 1995; Reddaway and Glinski are mildly critical of Djilas though only because they thought he did not sufficiently acknowledge the nomenklatura ‘as both a sociological and a cultural entity’, and they constantly refer to it thereafter. pp.103–4, 266–7, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy, U.S. Institute for Peace, Washington, D.C., 2001. A[o]slund argued that the nomenklatura obstructed not only Gorbachev’s restructuring but also many post-Soviet reforms. pp.44, 151, Anders Åslund, Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 8 pp.159–62, 177–8, 193–6, Jaroslav Krej˘ cí and Pavel Machonin, Czechoslovakia, 1918–92: A Laboratory for Social Change, St. Martin’s Press, Basingstoke, 1996. Starski’s analysis of socialist Poland’s ruling class was remarkably similar to that of Djilas, though quite independent of it. See ‘The Making of the Class of State Owners’, pp.13–24, Stanislaw Starski, Class Struggle in Classless Poland, South End Press, Boston, 1982. 9 p.136, Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1959. 10 pp.82, 115, 305, 312, ibid. 11 The idea that civil society was founded on private property ownership may be traced back to Rousseau’s Discourse of the Origins of Inequality published in 1755. Novak is one of many contemporary observers who assume that business corporations were its first organized bodies. p.16, Michael Novak, The Future of the Corporation, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. 1996. 12 pp.11, 148, 150–68, Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order: Social Stratification in Capitalist and Communist Societies, Paladin, St. Albans, 1972. He argued that it was different from the dominant class of capitalist societies because it is ‘continually replenishing itself from below’, and therefore ‘melts over and spills into the people.’ 13 The sentence continues ‘…but only at the cost of creating a system of political domination, which has altered the character of social exploitation rather than necessarily diminishing it.’ p.294, Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, Hutchinson, London, 1973. 14 pp.148–50, Parkin, op. cit.; p.232, Giddens, op. cit. 15 p.46, John H. Goldthorpe, in collaboration with Catriona Llewellyn and Clive Payne, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. 16 Stratification and inequalities had been copiously documented, even by Soviet sociologists. Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard B. Dobson, ‘Social Stratification and Sociology in the Soviet Union’, pp.114–85, Survey, Vol. 88, No. 3, Summer, 1973. It was confirmed by later research such as Gordon Marshall, Svetlana

Notes to pages 23–25 347

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Sydorenko and Stephen Roberts, ‘Intergenerational Mobility in Communist Russia’, pp.1–27, Work, Employment & Society, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1995. p.87, Walter Müller, Paul Lüttinger, Wolfgang König and Wolfgang Karle, ‘Class and Education in Industrial Nations’, pp.61–89, in Max Haller, ed., Class Structure in Europe: New Findings from East-West Comparisons of Social Structure and Mobility, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y., 1990. pp.109, 147, Giddens, op. cit. Neither Parkin nor Giddens therefore spent much time discussing politics in capitalist societies. Giddens formally acknowledged the role of political power, and his notion of ‘structuration’ provided an opportunity to demonstrate its significance. He made nothing of it. The ‘mediate factor’ prompting structuration, in his view, was the rate of social mobility, and ‘the proximate factors’ were the division of labour, authority relationships in the workplace and consumption patterns. pp.107–12, Giddens, op. cit. Raynor, for instance, suggested that the sense of class unity was encouraged by Pitt’s introduction of income tax, by the Great Reform Act, by the campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and by the reform of the Civil Service in 1870. pp.16–21, John Raynor, The Middle Class, Longmans Green, London, 1969. Gunn and Bell also emphasized the importance of the Great Reform Act, which ‘institutionalized the division between middle and working classes, and of the movement against the Corn Laws. They also gave ‘a central role in the creation of middle class identity’ to the disabilities under which Non-Conformists suffered, to the evangelical movement within the Church of England, and to ‘a whole new set of institutions … created in the course of the nineteenth century which helped the middle classes define who they were: the professions.’ pp.8–20, 45–7, Gunn and Bell, op. cit. The apolitical legacy of later sociological theorists is trenchantly dissected in Malia’s post-mortem on the failures of sociological theories of Soviet society. Martin Malia, ‘From Under the Rubble, What?’ pp.89–106, Problems of Communism, Vol. XLI, Jan.–Apr. 1992. He went on to explain that ‘the concept of class within these two streams of thought share a number of important features’, and reasonably added that ‘inside every left-wing Weberian there is a Marxist struggling to stay hidden.’ pp.29–35, Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997. One such example is his observation that ‘the laws and measures’ of the French Second Republic ‘made the attack and resistance general, the talking point in every cottage; they inoculated every village with the revolution, they made the revolution a local matter and a matter for the peasants.’ Marx’s italics, p.119, Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, in David Fernbach, ed., Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, Vol. 2, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973. pp.24–5, Dahrendorf, op. cit. p.139, ibid. Djilas confessed that he was no exception to the general rule. ‘I still had recourse to the Marxist standpoint and methodology … I was only capable of revealing the incongruities of Communist realities with the help of visions, prognostications, and pledges culled from Marxist holy writ.’ p.4, Milovan Djilas, The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class, trans by Dorian Cooke, Methuen, London, 1969. Giddens mentioned a number of variations between capitalist societies, such as the differing political contexts of their industrialization, the varying reactions of traditional land-owning elites to it, and differences in the degree of white collar unionization, but these are obiter dicta, and he did not demonstrate their

348 Notes to pages 25–31

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theoretical significance or their part in his theory of class ‘structuration’. pp.146–8, 164–7, 188–92, Giddens, op. cit. p.243, ibid. Thirteen years later, Dahrendorf’s critique elicited a polite half-apology from Djilas, who explained that the phrase ‘the new class’ should be taken as no more than a conditional and conditioned term for the new privileged strata in the so-called socialist countries…., p.6, Djilas, 1969, op. cit. pp.221, 232, 242, Malcolm Hamilton and Maria Hirszowicz, Class and Inequality in Pre-Industrial, Capitalist and Communist Societies, Wheatsheaf, Brighton, 1987. His work was similarly dismissed in a later text. pp.152–6, John Scott, Stratification and Power: Structures of Class, Status and Command, Polity, Cambridge, 1996. Fiona Devine, Social Class in America and Britain, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1997. For some examples see Neville Kirk, ed., Social Class and Marxism: Challenges and Defences, Scolar, Aldershot, 1996. pp.149–50, Savage, 2000, op. cit. Neville Kirk, Labour and Society in Britain and the USA, 2 vols, Vol. 1, Capitalism, custom and protest, 1780–1850, 1994; Roger Fagge, Power, Culture and Conflict in the Coalfields: West Virginia and South Wales, 1900–1922, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996. p.339, Alex Inkeles and Peter H. Rossi, ‘National Comparisons of Occupational Prestige’, pp.329–39, in Bendix and Lipset, 1967, op. cit. p.318, Robert Hodge, Donald Treiman and Peter Rossi, ‘A Comparative Study of Occupational Prestige’, pp.309–21, ibid. pp.5–6, Donald J. Treiman, Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective, Academic Press, New York, 1977. London companies over the period studied were drawn from the trade of the company’s name, and their orders of precedence therefore resembled occupational prestige scales, except that they were real social entities, not artificial statistical constructs. Michael Burrage and David Corry, ‘At Sixes and Sevens: Occupational Status in the City of London from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century’, Vol. 46, No. 4, American Sociological Review, 1981. Ishida, op. cit. On the grounds that both had great economic inequalities, that both lacked the legal, social and customary barriers between classes that were found in Eastern and Western Europe, that both had familiar, non-deferential manners, and that both shared a commitment to equality of opportunity. pp.311–31, Walter D. Connor, Socialism, Politics and Equality: Hierarchy and Change in Eastern Europe and in the U.S.S.R., Columbia, New York, 1979. Müller et al. made a similar effort but were stymied by the fact that they continued to work with nine societies. op. cit. Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997. p.545, ibid. pp.122, 523, ibid. Instead he scored their responses to various questions about capitalism to discover ‘whether the average person in that location is ideologically closer to the working class, the capitalist class or an ideologically neutral position between these two poles’, and then fill all 12 class ‘locations.’ He did this at some cost in consistency since he had already rejected ‘gradational’ notions of class in favour of those that define class ‘relationally’, that is ‘by virtue of the social relations

Notes to pages 31–36 349

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which link it to other class locations’. Attitude scores, however, are ‘gradational’. pp.30, 415, ibid. p.57, ibid. p.111, ibid. pp.130–42, ibid. p.67, ibid. pp.431–8, ibid. pp.429, 431, 437–40, ibid. These variations are summarized in a single superb graphic on p.234, ibid. p.200, ibid. pp.200, 214, 216–17, 230, 233, ibid. At one point, he says that his ‘empirical categories… can be interpreted in a Weberian or hybrid manner’, so that ‘readers who are resolutely unconvinced about the virtues of understanding classes in terms of exploitation can still engage the empirical analyses of this book as investigations of classes differentially situated with respect to life chances in the market.’ p.37, ibid. pp.73, 429, 512–16, ibid. p.429, ibid. The issue is doubly interesting since he also found that Sweden’s higher class consciousness was combined with a higher rate of mobility across the property barrier than the U.S. He examined public employment at some length, though not from this point of view. pp.430–8, 459–87, ibid. He had no reason to address Djilas’s argument directly, since there were no socialist or post-socialist societies in his study, and no ruling classes. In passing, he acknowledged that ‘classes may exist in non-market societies’, and claimed that this also was entirely consistent with Marxist class analysis. pp.35–6, Wright, op. cit.

Chapter 3 Them?

What are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves

1 Schumpeter put these points better than anyone else. ‘Class members behave toward one another in a fashion characteristically different from their conduct toward members of other classes. They are in closer association with one another; they understand one another better; they work more readily in concert; they close ranks and erect barriers against the outside; they look out into the same segment of the world, with the same eyes, from the same viewpoint, in the same direction.’ pp.107–8, Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, New World, New York, 1971. 2 ‘By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness, I do not see class as structure, nor even a category, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.’ p.9, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Victor Gollancz, London, 1965. 3 However, the most startling evidence that there is no necessary connection between the level of inequality and class sentiment is the study of Machonin, completed in Czechoslovakia, shortly before the Prague Spring of 1968. He found that despite severe compression of income differentials between nonmanual and manual workers, with a mean differential of 1 to 1.5 or less, lifestyle

350 Notes to pages 36–44

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and cultural differences were still manifest. pp.127–8, 179–80, 204–5, Krej˘ cí and Machonin, op. cit. pp.12, 185, 187, 196, Crompton et al., op. cit. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans by Barbara and Robert North, Methuen, London, 1954. p.15, Giovanni Sartori, ‘The Sociology of Parties: a critical review’, in Otto Stammer, ed., Party Systems, Party Organizations and the Politics of the New Masses, Institute of Political Science, Free University, Berlin, 1968. p.169, Cannadine, op. cit. Others have come to the same conclusion. Vanneman, for example, observed that the ‘sharper class division in British (versus American) politics owes more to the structure of the party system than to the consciousness of the voters… we ought to seek explanations of political behaviour directly in the dynamics of political institutions.’ p.785, Vanneman, op. cit. His questionnaire is reprinted pp.211–18, in T. Bottomore and M. Rubel, eds, Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971. p.124, Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, International Publishers, New York, 1963; pp.24–5, Dahrendorf, op. cit. Charles E. McClelland, pp.101–2, ‘Escape from Freedom? Reflections on German Professionalization, 1870–1933’, in Rolf Torstendahl and Michael Burrage, eds, The Formation of Professions, Sage, London, 1989. Novak is one of many who mistakenly assumed that business corporations were the first collective institution of civil society. p.16, Michael Novak, The Future of the Corporation, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., 1996. It was the ‘national character’ of tramping that caused concern which surfaced in Parliament in 1794, though it had then been ‘in existence for perhaps a century’. pp.164–5, John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry, Croom Helm, London, 1981. Rule’s italics. I will give just two British examples from dozens of others that might be given from many countries. In the eighteenth century cutlery, file and paper trades, Rule observed ‘combinations of workers … had brought contesting masters’ associations into being’, and in paper manufacture ‘well-established unionism had produced a counter-organization of employers’. pp.168, 174, ibid. In his comparison of British and Swedish employers in the late twentieth century, Fulcher decided that it is ‘to the character of the two countries labour movements that we must turn for an explanation of the differences in their national employer organization.’ p.310, James Fulcher, Labour Movements, Employers, and the State: Conflict and Co-operation in Britain and Sweden, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991. a point that Bourdieu formally acknowledged, but found it difficult to act on. Another victim, one might say, of economic determinism. Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans by Lauretta C. Clough, Polity, Oxford, 1996. The website of the IMA is www.investmentuk.org As may be judged by some of their websites, the Association of Pension Fund Managers and others, all of which are listed on the IMA site, ibid.; p.46, Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Savage, for example, concluded that an analysis by deciles of income and property of the U.K. population ‘point unambiguously to the existence of a very small class who earn their wealth from property, and a much larger class who predominantly rely on income from their labour. He also concluded that, since

Notes to pages 44–50 351 the gap between the median incomes of ‘associate professionals’ and ‘skilled workers’ is greater than that between any other two occupational categories, there is ‘some kind of a broad class division between managers, professionals and administrators and white collar or manual workers. However, he himself later showed considerable dispersion around these median incomes, which increased between 1976 and 1990 when ‘the elite within every manual occupation earned more than the average professional employee.’ pp.51–2, 67, Savage, 2000, op. cit. Through the hero of Coming Up for Air, Orwell described a road in the suburbs ‘a prison with cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-a-weekers quake and shiver. Every one of them with a boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like a nightmare and his kids sucking his blood like leeches.’ cited p.87, Gunn and Bell, op. cit. Kirk succinctly reviewed many of the social distinctions that have been identified within the British working class. pp.214–19, Neville Kirk. Change, Continuity and Class: Labour in British Society, 1850–1920, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998; Raynor decided that ‘whatever else the middle class is, it is certainly not monolithic’, and much of his work is devoted to identifying differences within it. p.7, Raynor, op. cit. For him, these two approaches are of equal merit, and reconcilable. pp.492–6, Wright, op. cit. pp.39–42, 257, Goldthorpe et al., op. cit. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000. He later identified a fundamental divide between professionals and managers within ‘the educated class. ‘Bitter at the Top’, New York Times, June 15th, 2004. It included scientists and engineers, professors, poets, novelists, artists, actors, designers, architects, think-tank researchers, programmers. pp.68–72, Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, Basic Books, New York, 2002. Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, Cornell University Press, Itaca, N.Y., 2000. pp.62–114, Mount, op. cit.

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Chapter 4 1 2 3

4

Class Formation in Two Russias

p.86, Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, Penguin, London, 1977. p.119, Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth Century Nobility, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, New York, 1966. In 1845, Nicholas I responded to pressure from the hereditary nobility, and granted it only to 5th chin of the civil service. Ranks 11 and 13 were seldom used, and number one reserved for the Foreign Minister, so there were in practice only 11 ranks. p.347, Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1961; p.64, Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899–1919, Fontana, London, 1992. p.21, Helju Aulik Bennett, ‘Evolution of the Meanings of Chin: An Introduction to the Russian Institution of Rank Ordering and Niche Assignment from the Time of Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks to the Bolshevik Revolution’, pp.1–43, California Slavic Studies, Vol. 10, 1977.

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p.286, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. Although there are no measures of the rate of self-recruitment, one may reasonably infer, from the appointment and promotion procedures, and from family links among civil servants that it must have been high. pp.203–4, 208, 216, Dominic C.B. Lieven, ‘Russian Senior Officialdom under Nicholas II’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 32, 1984. pp.281–3, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. p.9, Sir Donald MacKenzie Wallace, Russia, Cassell, London, 1913, first published, 1877. They fit Schumpeter’s definition of a class to a tee. See fn 1, p.349, supra. p.411, Marc Raeff, ‘The Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial Russia’, American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, 1979. p.286, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. pp.65–8, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.; p.209, Lieven, op. cit. p.287, ibid. Lieven referred to ‘a great division’ between provincial civil servants and those in Petersburg. p.210, Lieven, op. cit. For statistical documentation of the differences in their ranks, salaries, and education see pp.227–8, 242–7, Walter M. Pintner, ‘Civil Officialdom and the Nobility in the 1850s’, pp.227–49, in Walter M. Pintner and Don K. Rowney, eds, Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, Macmillan, London, 1980. 49% of his sample of provincial officials had only elementary education. p.247, ibid. pp.231–6, 243–5, ibid. pp.114, 134, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. pp.241–2, Pintner, op. cit. pp.112–13, Wallace, op. cit. A telling measure of their contrast with the English is the proportions of land they each owned. In England in 1874, the landed elite owned ‘at least 55%’ of all land while all state and para-state bodies, including the Church, together owned a mere 3%. In 1887 the landed elite owned about 14% of all land in Russia while peasants owned 33% and the state 47%. pp.3, 6, David Spring, ‘Landed Elites Compared’, pp.1–24, in David Spring, ed., European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1977. pp.345–6, Blum, op. cit. pp.173–4, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. Peter and several of his successors sought, unsuccessfully, to stop this custom. pp.377–9, Blum, op. cit. pp.375–85, ibid. pp.347–50, ibid. Moon discusses the evidence, which shows considerable regional variations, but he is in no doubt that a very large majority of villages did not have a resident landowner. p.205, David Moon, The Russian Peasantry: The World the Peasants Made, Longman, London, 1999. pp.352–3, Blum, p.211, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. pp.354–5, Blum, op. cit. Pipes noted the despair of Speranskii, one of Alexander I’s advisers who wanted the Russian dvoriane to become something like the English nobility. In 1818, he complained that the ‘nobles run away from elections to the Assemblies, and soon it will be necessary to convoke them using gendarmes in order to compel the nobles to take advantage of their rights.’ p.183, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.

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pp.45, 83–95, Roberta T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1982. pp.112, 119, Raeff, op. cit. pp.160–72, Wallace, op. cit. p.165, ibid. p.176, Theodore Taranovski, ‘Nobility in the Russian Empire: some problems of definition and interpretation’, pp.314–18, Slavic Review, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer, 1988. p.115, ibid. Becker similarly suggested that as a collectivity, the nobility were no more than ‘a legal fiction’ and ‘no longer a social reality’. p.171, Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia, Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, 1985. Becker estimated that the United Nobility represented the 12% or so of the nobility whose families owned substantial quantities of land. He described them as a new land-owning class emerging from within the old noble estate. p.162ff ibid.; for a breakdown of members of the State Council, p.351, Manning, op. cit. p.255, Daniel T. Orlovsky, ‘High Officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1855–1881’, pp.250–82, Pintner and Rowney, eds, op. cit. It has remained a problem for later researchers. p.238, Pintner, p.260, Orlovsky, op. cit. pp.251–2, ibid.; pp.303–15, Don K. Rowney, ‘Organizational Change and Social Adaptation: the pre-revolutionary Ministry of Internal Affairs, pp.283–315, in Pintner and Rowney, op. cit. For other evidence on the decline in the proportion of noble landowners in senior ranks in the second half of the nineteenth century pp.25–9, Manning, op. cit. Even before Alexander II’s reforms, some 21% even at the highest levels, in the councils of the tsar were commoners, and they were found ‘in much larger numbers in important positions in the ministries where there was much de facto power.’ p.239, Pintner, op. cit. A commitment to meritocratic principles therefore co-existed with patronage and favouritism, as Lieven showed pp.220–3, op. cit. pp.210–14, Walter M. Pintner, ‘The Evolution of Civil Officialdom 1755–1855’, pp.190–226 in Pintner and Rowney, eds, op. cit. In the past, former officers had looked down on office work, as if it were semi-retirement after the rigours of military service. p.272, ibid. For the mid-century mobility between the capital and provinces see pp.227, 247–8, Pintner, op. cit. The differences were still stark but the provincial officials were at least, as Pintner put it, ‘being disciplined to the principles of bureaucratic form and function.’ p.227, ibid. p.38, Manning, op. cit. pp.194–6, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. pp.208–11, ibid. p.212, ibid. pp.212–15, ibid. Merchants complained about serf traders, but the latter enjoyed protection under their masters. By the early nineteenth century there was no substantive difference in rights of peasants and merchants who wished to engage in manufacturing or trade. pp.282–98, Blum, op. cit. pp.415–27, Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1982; pp.215–17, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.

354 Notes to pages 57–61 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

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53 54 55 56

57 58 59

60

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62 63 64

p.21, Rieber, op. cit. pp.418–21, ibid. p.424, Rieber, op. cit. The failure of Peter’s and Catherine’s attempts to create artisan guilds meant that much of Russia’s proto-industrialization was by handicraft or kustar production by enserfed peasants. pp.301–3, Blum, op. cit. pp.xxv, 134–9, Rieber, op. cit.; Henry Rosovsky, ‘The Serf Entrepreneur in Russia’, pp.207–33, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Vol. VI, 1954. pp.3, 22–3, Rieber, op. cit. pp.272–3, ibid. pp.272–7, Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907–February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990. Roosa’s work on the only national business association, the Association of Industry and Trade, led to a similar conclusion. Ruth AmEnde Roosa, Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: The Association of Industry and Trade, 1906–1917, edited by Thomas C. Owen, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y., 1997. pp.415, 423–4, Rieber, op. cit. Since the regime never passed any general law of incorporation, all corporations were created by special laws or decrees. Entrepreneurs therefore necessarily had to maintain personal relationships with state officials. Thomas C. Owen, The Corporation under Russian Law 1800–1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. pp.526–7, Blum, op. cit. for authoritative reviews of the debates about its origins see pp.508–10, ibid.; pp.213–14, Moon, op. cit. and it varied considerably by time and place pp.524–5, Blum, pp.202–6, 227–36, Moon, op. cit. According to the 1858 census, just before emancipation, there were 51.5 million serfs, a majority of whom, 52%, were state serfs, while 42% were personally owned by noble landlords, and the remainder belonged to the court and the church. p.99, Moon, op. cit. pp.199, 231–5, ibid. pp.289–92, 299–301, 471–3, Blum, op. cit. To compensate for the reduction in the supervisory powers of their masters, the police powers of the communes, renamed ‘village societies’, were increased in certain respects. pp.598–9, Blum, pp.228–9, Moon, op. cit. Their resistance is analysed in Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999. After failing to find any binding precedents or principles in the decisions of the volost court on his own or any other estate, one contemporary lawyer concluded that ‘Our one hundred million peasants lived, in their everyday life, without law.’ pp.115–16, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. p.97, ibid. After emancipation contiguous communes were linked together to form ‘townships’ or volosti. p.599, Blum, op. cit. Alan Kimball, ‘The Village Kabak as an Expression of Russian Civil Society, 1855–1905’, www.uoregon.edu 2002. His study was based on some of the 2,000 replies in the archive of amateur mass observation of rural life instigated by Prince Tenishev in the late 1880s.

Notes to pages 61–66 355 65

66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81

82

83 84 85

Kimball pointed out that priests, merchants, money-lenders and professionals, as well as officials, tax-collectors and policemen, were as likely as peasants to make use of the kabak. ibid. pp.551–7, Blum, op. cit.; pp.237–81, Moon, op. cit. ‘Russian peasants were only one group among several involved in the revolts, and usually a minority.’ p.242, ibid. p.352, ibid. pp.147–9, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. pp.149–50, Manning, op. cit. pp.164–5, 207–12, 239–43, ibid. This level of peasant representation was anticipated in the mistaken belief that a duma dominated by rural representatives would be more tractable. pp.157–8, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. for an outline of these events pp.533–7, ibid. p.346, Blum, op. cit. pp.122–40, Raeff, 1966, op. cit. pp.140–7, ibid. Pipes pointed out that the word is ‘a clumsy Latinized adaptation of the French Intelligence and German intelligenz which in the first half of the nineteenth century came to be used to … designate the educated, enlightened, “progressive” elements in society.’ He gave examples of the use of die intelligenz in Austria and Germany in 1849, and then added that the ‘word entered the Russian vocabulary in the 1860s and by the 1870s became a household term around which revolved a great deal of political discussion.’ pp.251–3, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. For an overview of their emergence George Fischer, ‘The Intelligentsia and Russia’, pp.252–74, in Cyril Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Change Since 1861, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1960. pp.262–5, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. pp.138–41, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. pp.4–8, ibid. for a detailed account of both, see Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973. The most striking example was the refusal of Mensheviks and others to support workers who had organized to resist the Bolsheviks when they began to construct a police state, on the grounds that this would risk a restoration of autocracy. pp.561–2, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. pp.5-6, Martin Malia, ‘What is the Intelligentsia?’ pp.1–18 in Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia, Columbia University Press, New York, 1961. Other observers have conveyed this idea in slightly different terms. Labedz, for instance, thought that ‘it was the attitude towards the existing order that was the decisive factor’ in its formation, plus ‘its education, its way of life, and a general sense of affinity with the Western cultural community.’ pp.48, 65 Leopold Labedz, ‘The Structure of the Soviet Intelligentsia’, pp.63–79, ibid. p.16, Malia, 1961, op. cit. Magnificently documented in Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials Under the Last Three Tsars, Praeger, New York, 1953. pp.235–6, 245–8, Galai, op. cit. A substantial proportion of the 600 or so societies Bradley identified in Moscow prior to the Revolution were related to emergent professions. Joseph Bradley,’ Voluntary Civic Culture and Obshchestvennost in Moscow’, pp.131–48, in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and

356 Notes to pages 66–71

86 87

88 89 90

91 92 93

94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

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James L. West, eds, Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1991. pp.22–6, 48–9, Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981. pp.28–51, 155–62, Robert Eugene Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1979. S.P. Turin, From Peter The Great To Lenin: A History of the Russian Labour Movement With Special Reference to Trade Unionism, Frank Cass, London, 1968. p.494, Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime 1919–1924, Fontana, London, 1995. pp.107–9, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. Lenin should probably be counted among the sceptics, since at the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922 he denied that Russia had ever had a ‘proletariat’ in Marx’s sense, and suggested most factory workers at the time were what we could call ‘draft dodgers’. pp.452–3, 704, ibid.; pp.6–15, Richard Pipes, Three Whys of the Russian Revolution, Vintage, New York, 1997. pp.5–7, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. pp.24, 41–2, ibid. pp.31, 64, Reginald E. Zelnik, ‘On the Eve: Life Histories and Identities of Some Revolutionary Workers’, 1870–1905’, pp.27–66, in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1994. Heather Hogan, ‘Class Formation in the St Petersburg Metalworking Industry: From the “Days of Freedom” to the Lena Goldfields Massacre’, pp.85–112, in Siegelbaum and Suny, eds, op. cit. pp.172–8, 489, McKean, op. cit. pp.401–3, ibid. pp.233, 268, 411, 424, ibid. pp.225–6, 405, ibid. pp.188–9, 225–6, 405, ibid. pp.192–4, 406–29, ibid. pp.225, 227, 232, 263, 414, ibid. pp.401–2, 409–11, ibid. pp.148–53, Rule, op. cit. At one point he referred to it as in a transition stage of a hereditary proletariat, which reversed during the war as the employment of peasants, refugees and women increased. p.480, McKean, op. cit. My italics. Perlman strongly, and persuasively, argued that the intelligentsia only acquired credibility and adherents because the imperial regime crushed organized labour. pp.36–49, Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement, Macmillan, New York, 1928. p.157, Dimitry Pospielovsky, Russian Police Trade Unionism: Experiment or Provocation?, Weidenfield & Nicolson, London, 1971; pp.163–72, McKean, op. cit. p.156, Pospielovsky, op. cit. He quoted a number of Social Democrats to support this conclusion. pp.22–5, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. pp.406–9, 491–2, McKean, op. cit. See also p.36, R.B. McKean, ‘Between the Revolutions: Russia 1905–1917’, New Appreciations, 40, Historical Association, London, 1998.

Notes to pages 72–74 357 110

111 112

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119 120 121 122 123 124

125

For a contrary view of February 1917 see James D. White, ‘The Russian Revolution of February 1917: The Question of Organisation and Spontaneity’, New Perspective 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1997. We have Lenin’s word for it. pp.447–8, Pipes, 1995, op. cit. Pipes gives the proportions of ex-tsarist officials in Sovnarkom and five commissariats. The lowest was 48.3% in that of the Interior. Ibid.; p.62, T.H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979. After the Bolsheviks used force to disperse the Constituent Assembly, workers spontaneously organized to express their opposition. So-called ‘plenipotentiaries’ of Petrograd factories held regular meetings, formed a Council, organized strikes, and demanded the freedom of assembly and of the press, as well as the reconvening of the Assembly. There were a variety of other workers’ ‘councils’, ‘conferences’ and ‘assemblies’ and similar movements in other towns. pp.558–65, Pipes, 1995. The most vivid testimony is to be found in ‘Extraordinary Meeting of Delegates of the Factories and Workshops of Petrograd’, No. 1–2, 18th March 1918, in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, ed., Material from Documents of the Time, trans by Shirley-Anne Hardy, mimeo. Jonathan Grant, ‘The Social Construction of Philately in the Early Soviet Era’, pp.476–93, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Vol. 37, No. 3, July 1995; pp.107–11, Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999. The fate of the kabak or village pub, ‘the secular soul of rural life’ in Kimball’s phrase, would also be interesting in this context, but I have been unable to find any study of it under the Soviet regime. Pipes thought that there was ‘a direct line of succession’ between the dvorianstvo, the service nobility, and communist apparatchiks. p.97, Pipes, [1992] 1977, op. cit. pp.206, 293, Malia, 1994, op. cit. pp.440–8, 461–2, Pipes, 1995, op. cit. see Voslensky, op. cit. Another insider, a former procurator, has provided much information about the segregation and the privileges of the nomenklatura. Olimpiad S. Joffe, Soviet Law and Reality, Martinus Nijhoff, Amsterdam, 1985. Its leading members, in the late 1980s, are listed in Albert Loren Weeks, The Soviet Nomenklatura: A Comprehensive Roster of Soviet Civilian and Military Officials, Washington Institute Press, Washington, D.C., 1987. For details see pp.159–63, Mervyn Matthews, Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite Life-Styles under Communism, Allen & Unwin, London, 1978. pp.213, 221, Voslensky, op. cit. pp.337–8, Malia, 1994, op. cit. The other being his proposed cuts in military expenditure. pp.25–8, Andrei Sakharov, My Country and the World, Vintage, New York, 1975. pp.3–4, 61–3, 174, Donald R. Kelley, The Politics of Developed Socialism: The Soviet Union as a Post-Industrial State, Greenwood, Westport, 1986. p.3, Introduction, T.H. Rigby and Bohdan Harasymiw, eds, Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia, Allen & Unwin, London, 1983. p.722, Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘From Soviet Nomenklatura to Soviet Élite’, pp.711–33, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 5, July 1996. There are numerous websites documenting the activities of contemporary chinovniki.

358 Notes to pages 74–78 126

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131 132 133 134

135

136 137

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139 140 141 142

Filtzer notes that after Yeltsin’s triumph in 1991 directors began to organize as a class via the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, though he was less than impressed by its effectiveness. pp.82–93, 220, Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev’s Reforms, 1985–1991, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Privatizing the Russian Economy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1997. Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. pp.41–60, M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivisation, Norton, New York, 1968. p.428, Alex Inkeles, ‘Rethinking Social Welfare: the United States and the U.S.S.R. in Comparative Perspective’, pp.383–457, in Gail W. Lapidus and Guy E. Swanson, eds, State and Welfare USA/U.S.S.R., Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1988. p.119, Christopher M. Davis, ‘The Organization and Performance of the Soviet Health Service’, pp.95–142, in Lapidus and Swanson, op. cit. p.124, Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996. pp.285–6, Pipes, 1995, op. cit. The best general survey, by a mile is pp.282–336, ibid. For an analysis of three institutions which played a major part in this Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1997. The deadening conformity of intellectual life has been described in dozens of studies. Lyons, an American communist émigré to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, entitled his account ‘Culture in a Straitjacket’. See Eugene Lyons, pp.465–73, Assignment in Utopia, Harrap, London, ca 1938. He also gave an account of the treatment of one inadvertent dissident of the day. pp.246–9, ibid. p.66, Labedz, op. cit. Lampert’s study shows that even the technical specialists whom, one imagines, were the most naturally cohesive set of occupations within the entire intelligentsia, had little opportunity to develop any kind of collective consciousness or corporate institutions, even after they found some favour with the regime. Nicholas Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State: A Study of Managers and Technicians 1928–1935, Macmillan, London, 1979. Hayward thought Ilya Ehrenburg was, at the time, its most powerful and influential spokesman. pp.117–19, Max Hayward, ‘The Thaw and the Writers’, pp.111–21, in Pipes, 1961, op. cit. Pipes pointed out that ‘the Soviet Monthly Novy Mir sought, with a fair measure of success, to revive the fat journal’s political role as a critic of the status quo’. p.265, Pipes, The best general survey is Pipes, 1997, op. cit. p.139, Marshall S. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980. p.54, Richard Pipes, ‘The Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia’, pp.47–62, in Pipes, 1961, op. cit. p.129, David Lane, Soviet Society Under Perestroika, Unwin Hyman, Boston, 1988. Jay B. Sorenson, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917–1928, Atherton Press, New York, 1969.

Notes to pages 78–80 359 143

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Bolshevik leaders often argued that the true workers had given their lives in the Civil War and that they were now left with ‘scum’, ‘malingerers and all kinds of casual elements.’ pp.452–3, Pipes, 1995, op. cit. Leon Trotsky, ‘The Role and Tasks of Trade Unions’, in Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1975. For a helpful documented commentary by Maurice Brinton on the disputes about the role of trade unions see libcom.org/library/Bolsheviks pp.376–7, V.I. Lenin, On Trade Unions, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970. For an overview of the kind of unions that thereafter emerged see Joseph Godson, ‘The Role of Trade Unions’, pp.106–29, in Joseph Godson and Leonard Schapiro, eds, The Soviet Worker: From Lenin to Andropov, St. Martins, New York, 1984. For an early euphoric account see pp.734–55, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, Vol. 2, Longmans Green, London, 1935. For his own ghosted account see Aleksei Grigor’evich Stakhanov, The Stakhanov Movement Explained, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1939. Kotkin had described such initiatives in steel plants in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. He suggested that many workers enthusiastically embraced the new self-identity that they offered. pp.278–97, Stephen Kotkin, ‘Coercion and Identity: Workers’ Lives in Stalin’s Showcase City’, pp.274–310, in Siegelbaum and Suny, op. cit. Siegelbaum, who conducted the most thorough investigation to date, was in no doubt that they were state-managed, that they intensified antagonisms within an already fractionalized workforce, fed upon the individualistic consciousness among workers and intensified competition among workers. pp.298–99, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the U.S.S.R., 1935–41, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988. Some sources, such as www.cyberussr.com, suggest that the Soviets themselves acknowledged it was state-managed, but I have been unable to locate an authoritative reference. On the bogus nature of vstrechny plans in the 70s see p.277, Hedrick Smith, The Russians, Sphere, London, 1976. pp.135–6, Lane, op. cit. Willis thought that ‘to be a worker or peasant carries little status’ and distinguished between ‘a public show, in which the worker and peasant are all important, and a private, more real one, in which they are not.’ p.67, David K. Willis, Klass: How Russians Really Live, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1985. for some details David Rousset, ed., Coercion of the Worker in the Soviet Union, Beacon Press, Boston, 1953; Thomas B. Smith, The Other Establishment: An InDepth Study of What Individual Life is Really Like in Communist-Controlled Countries, Regnery Gateway, Chicago, 1984. Kevin Murphy, ‘Opposition at Local Level: A Case Study of the Hammer & Sickle Factory’, Europe-Asia, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2001. Kenneth M. Straus, Factory and Community in Stalin’s Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1997. An American worker’s observations of unions at the time suggest they would have been wholly incapable of performing any role on behalf of the working class. pp.29, 34–6, 84, John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1942, (1973 reprint).

360 Notes to pages 80–84 156

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161 162 163 164

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Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992; pp.82–93, Filtzer, 1994, op. cit. For a survey of attempts to organize strikes and form independent unions see Nancy Gidwitz, ‘Labor Unrest in the Soviet Union’, pp.25–42, Problems of Communism, Nov.–Dec., 1982. These regimes, of course, were accepted by the world as real regimes, so why should the working class not be accepted as a real working class? The answer is that the criterion for recognition of states is merely that they exercise powers usually exercised by states. The criterion for recognition of classes is that members feel they belong to it, and give evidence of shared interests and concerns. pp.130–3, S.A. Smith, Workers Against Foremen in St. Petersburg 1905–1917, pp.113–37, in Siegelbaum and Suny, eds, op. cit. Sarah Ashwin, Russian Workers: The Anatomy of Patience, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999. In Filtzer’s account, they were less supine and patient, but he nonetheless argued that the proletariat was still in the process of its historical re-formation, which would hardly be necessary if the working class had existed in the Soviet Union. Filtzer, 1994, op. cit. Blasi et al., op. cit. pp.36–7, Pospielovsky, pp.312–14, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. 1st December 1971, quoted p.107, Godson, op. cit. Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941, Princeton University, Princeton, 1978; more briefly pp.12–22, Lampert, op. cit.; p.70, D.D. Barry, ‘More Equal than Others: the legal basis for awarding Honors in the U.S.S.R.’, in Law After Revolution, William E. Butler, Peter B. Maggs and John B. Quigley, eds, Oceana, New York, 1988. This was yet another continuity with the Table of Ranks. Graduates had then been placed in rank twelve, those with masters in rank ten, and those with doctorates in rank eight, irrespective of whether they entered state service or not. p.394, Henn-Jüri Uibopuu, ‘The administration of universities in Russia and its impact today’, pp.375–95, in D.D. Barry et al., eds, Law and the Gorbachev Era, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1988. It was reproduced in the Collection of Laws of 1892, which identified four sosloviia: the nobility, the clergy, the urban and rural populations. pp.16–17, Gregory L. Freeze, ‘The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History’, pp.11–36, American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1, Feb. 1986. p.36ff, Frieden, op. cit. p.22, ibid. Rieber agreed. ‘However indistinct the modified soslovie system appeared, it exercised a powerful influence on social life in Russia up to the revolution of March 1917, especially among the merchantry, nobility, and the peasantry … many traditional social distinctions rooted in the soslovia lived on in the daily activities and outlook of a very large part of the population.’ p.xxiv, Rieber, op. cit. pp.130, 136, 171, Elise Kimerling Wirstschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, 1997. Blum drew a similar contrast between pre-Petrine and Petrine Russia. The sovereigns of Russia had long maintained that all of their subjects, nobles, townsmen and peasants alike existed to serve the state. To achieve their goal

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of universal service they assigned each class in society a specific role, charged it with specific obligations, and demanded that each of their subjects be a member of one of these classes. However, they were hampered by an inefficient governmental organization. Some of their subjects remained outside the recognized social categories, in the interstices of the social order, and sheltered by the anonymity of their classlessness they lived as free men. By contrast, he thought Peter had ‘devised machinery to register each of his subjects as a member of an established social category.’ pp.414–15, Blum, op. cit. This was one reason they did so well in the elections for the First State Duma. Peasants had substantial proportion of votes in the landowners’ curia. p.210, Manning, op. cit. p.144, Lampert, op. cit. pp.232–3, David R. Shearer, Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926–1934, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1996. Garnsey concurred. ‘In the Soviet Union labour allocation and payment structures are determined in part by market forces’ and ‘market situation is relevant to the benefits enjoyed by members of various occupational groups.’ p.631, Elizabeth Garnsey, ‘Growth Strategy, Competing Interests, and the Soviet Occupational System’, pp.629–41, in Anthony Giddens and David Held, eds, Classes, Power & Conflict, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982. p.125, Karl-Eugen Wädekin, The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973. For their later history Stefan Hedlun, Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union, Routledge, London, 1989. For an account of the activities of tolkachi see pp.207–30, Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1957. p.101, Willis, op. cit. Grossman, however, pointed out that about one-half of the total Soviet population, and one-quarter of the urban population resided in privately-owned property, and suggested that the black economy was not confined to lesser service occupations but involved ‘a vast and varied set of activities.’ p.25, Gregory Grossman, ‘The “Second Economy” of the U.S.S.R.’, pp.25–40, Problems of Communism, Sept.–Oct. 1977. Katz estimated that in 1959 some 10% of the Soviet labour force were self-employed. p.76, Zev Katz, Soviet Dissenters and Social Structure in the U.S.S.R., Center for International Studies, Cambridge, Mass., 1971. Arkady Vaksberg, The Soviet Mafia, trans by John and Elizabeth Roberts, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991. Willis makes the same point that money was less important than privilege, status and access: these are the really valuable commodities, the hidden currency of the Top Class, and the Rising Class of Soviet society. pp.92–3, Willis, op. cit. Over the years 1991–1994 between 18% and 43% of various politicaladministrative elites came from outside the nomenklatura, but 59% of a 100-member sample of the business elite. p.728, Kryshtanovskaya and White, op. cit. In their study of Novosibirisk, Hughes and John drew a similar contrast between ‘the successful elite adaptation strategies of former party apparatchiki who dominate local administrative power’ and a ‘new, younger more innovatory’ economic elite. James Hughes and Peter John, ‘Local elites and transition in Russia: adaptation or competition?’, pp.673–85, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2001.

362 Notes to pages 87–94

Chapter 5 France 1

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Civil Society as Adversary and Collaborator in

‘a rather self-serving passion’ in Noiriel’s view since observers usually referred to it to support their own social projects. pp.21–3, 67, Gérard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the 19th & 20th Centuries, trans by Helen McPhail, Berg, Oxford, 1990; p.55, Christophe Charle, Histoire sociale de la France au XIXe siècle, Éditions de Seuil, Paris, 1991. p.170, Noiriel, op. cit. pp.589, 601, Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, Norton, New York, 1978. pp.56–77, Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848, Transaction, 2001. The ‘revolutionary proletariat’ was also on average some ten years older than the ‘bourgeois’ forces, and therefore more of them were married with children. p.186, ibid. p.215, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. p.69, Christopher Johnson, ‘Patterns of Proletarianization: Parisian Tailors and Lodève Woolens Workers’, pp.65–82 in John M. Merriman, ed., Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth Century Europe, Holmes & Meier, New York, 1979. pp.70–1, 81, ibid. Ronald Aminzade, ‘The Transformation of Social Solidarities in Nineteenth Century Toulouse’, pp.85–106 in Merriman, op. cit. p.87, ibid. His argument at this point is not helped by the fact that all seven of the strikes he discussed were conducted by single-trade mutual benefit societies. However, there were 89 other mutual benefit societies in the city and they may well have behaved in the manner he suggested. pp.89, 91, ibid. It did not, however, itself immediately live up to this goal, since it organized by trade, and during its first public demonstration they assembled and marched under their trade banners. ibid. pp.94, 96–7, ibid. p.102, ibid. The changes he documented were a ‘growing capital concentration’, an ‘increased division of labour’, ‘a decline in worker’s collective control over the production process and labor market’, and the ‘growth of putting out, or “sweated” production.’ pp.98–102 ibid. p.103, ibid. p.77, W.H. Sewell, ‘Social Change and the Rise of Working Class Politics in Nineteenth Century Marseille’, pp.75–109, Past & Present, No. 56, November 1974. p.78, ibid. p.102, ibid. p.73, Johnson, op. cit. pp.87–9, Aminzade, op. cit. p.100, Sewell, op. cit. p.65, Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France 1830–1871, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993. p.273, Robert Tombs, France 1814–1914, Longman, London, 1996. pp.22–4, 54, Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, edited by J.P. Mayer, Meridian Books, New York, 1959.

Notes to pages 94–101 363 24 25

26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33 34

35

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38 39

40

cited p.78, A.J.P. Taylor, Revolutions and Revolutionaries, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1980. pp.20–6 Tombs, op. cit. The six acts of it were: fomenting revolution, mass disorder in Paris, government response, popular offensive, choosing a revolutionary government by acclamation, occupying ministries. The metaphor was proposed p.211, Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970. pp.46, 121ff Marx, ed. Fernbach, op. cit. Marx’s italics. Limitations on the right to vote, to be nominated for political office, to serve on juries or in the National Guard, and the limitations on the freedoms of speech, assembly and association are summarized pp.186–7, Andre Jardin and Andre-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction 1815–1848, trans by Elborg Forster, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. pp.274–8, Tombs, op. cit. P.H. Amann, Clubs in Encyclopaedia of Revolutions, www.ohiou. edu pp.324–37, P.H. Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in 1848, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975. pp.156–9, Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, Vol. 1: The Age of Artisan Revolution 1815–1871, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992. pp.292, Tombs, op. cit.; pp.151–2, D.L. Hanley, A.P. Kerr and N.H. Waites, Contemporary France: Politics and Society Since 1945, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984. W.H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980. p.95, Sewell; p.72, Johnson, op. cit. Violent disputes between various federations of compagnonnages still occurred in the early nineteenth century. pp.219–20, 230–1, Cynthia Maria Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1994; p.86, Aminzade, 1979, op. cit. It had already been proclaimed in articles 3 and 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in August 1789, and the decret d’Allarde in March 1791, and was reiterated in the Constitution of 1791, the Constitution of Year 1 (1793) and in the Constitution of Year III (1795) for which see pp.34, 82, 102, Jacques Godechot, ed., Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789, Garnier Flammarion, Paris, 1979. p.4 David Rappe, Histoire des Bourses du travail http://increvablesanarchistes.org Rappe himself describes them as ‘un instrument total de lutte de l’organisation à la révolution en passant par l’education ouvrière’, as ‘foyers d’agitation constante’, as ‘un centre de résistance, de revendications et d’actions ouvrières’ and as ‘un ferment de désagrégation révolutionnaire de la société établie, de l’ordre social en place.’ pp.4–7 ibid. The entire paragraph is indebted to this spirited blog. For an illuminating account of their mentalités through the turn of the century see F.F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of its Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970. it is reprinted on www.fondation-besnard.org Only two described themselves as workers; an ouvrièr agricole and an ouvrièr mécanicien. Two described themselves as employé. The remainder only named their industry such as bâtiment, textile, or voiture, mineur, or metallurgie. ibid. Their officers, activities and membership are documented in Les Associations professionelles ouvrières, Direction du Travail, 4 vols, Paris 1899–1904; for their contribution to strikes pp.90–1, 146–8, Noiriel, op. cit.

364 Notes to pages 101–105 41

42

43

44

45

46 47 48

49

50

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52 53

‘appears’ is the critical word. Most standard accounts find it difficult to document, but Friedman estimated that it climbed from 5% of industrial wage earners in 1889 to 23% in 1914, but after the peaks mentioned it appears to have sunk to a very low level. p.41 Gerald Friedman, State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1876–1914, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1998. pp.148–9 Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830–1968, Cambridge University Press, London, 1974. They described postwar membership figures ‘a disaster area’. ibid. Most observers agree membership was volatile, and that the numbers claimed were invariably unreliable. Ministry of Labour survey ‘Mythes et réalités de la syndicalisation en France’, Thomas Amossé, Premières informations, premières syntheses, DARES, October 2004, n°44–2. First, in 1919 about the Russian Revolution, which led to the formation of Confédération Général du Travail Unitaires, second in 1939 about the Soviet invasion of Poland, and third, in 1947 about the Marshall Plan, which led to the formation of the Confédération Général du Travail-Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO), ibid. For a succinct account pp.26–38, Hubert Landier, Les Organizations Syndicales en France, Collection Cadreco, Paris, 1982. After looking at these and numerous other disagreements Shorter & Tilly exclaimed ‘how dreary is this tale of rupture and division.’ p.171, op. cit. For an example of a corporatist breakaway see the Union Corporative des Charpentiers-Toiliers, formed in 1921 which survived ‘until the 1930s’ pp.624–30, Edward H. Lorenz, ‘Two Patterns of Development: The Labour Process in the British and French Shipbuilding Industries 1880–1930’, pp.599–630, Journal of Economic History, 1984. p.170, Shorter and Tilly, op. cit. pp.295–6, Tombs; pp.131–6, Friedman, op. cit. For one example see John Stirling and Jeff Bridgford, ‘British and French Shipbuilding: the industrial relations of decline’, pp.7–16, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1985. The Luxembourg Commission was an assembly of representatives of all the organized trades convened by the Provisional Government in the Palais de Luxembourg to discuss their grievances. After 1906, governments wondered whether the bourses were aiding the integration of workers with the regime or alienating them from it. They then began to cut their financial support, to close branches, sometimes reopening them with less militant staff. As an independent institution, the bourses had disappeared before the outbreak of war, though the CGT continued to occupy their premises and receive grants for some of their educational activities. Rappe, op. cit. The laws are summarized pp.210–11, W. Rand Smith, Crisis in the French Labour Movement: A Grassroots Perspective, Macmillan, London, 1987. They were by no means all new. Several attempts had previously been made to define legally the rights of unions and employees in the workplace. pp.154–5, 216–18, ibid. Jean-François Amadieu, ‘Labour-Management Co-operation and Work Organization Change: Deficits in the French Industrial Relations System’, pp.61–92, New Directions in Work Organisation, OECD, Paris, 1992. Amadieu mentioned a number of other factors to explain the absence of collective bargaining. ‘Three quarters of the labour force’, he observed ‘still worked in firms

Notes to pages 105–107 365

54

55 56

57 58

59

60 61

62 63 64 65

66

67

of fewer than 50 employees and these are very reluctant to cede any of its right to manage.’ The ‘steep hierarchies, and highly formalized procedures’ typical of French management, and the ‘vast array of legally-required substantive rules’ were, he thought, contributory factors. p.72, ibid. In France, 9% of the labour force in 1997 belonged to unions, while 90% were covered by union agreements. By comparison, in Britain the respective proportions were 33% and 26%, in the United States 14% and 11%, and in Japan 24% and 25%. pp.237–8, 248, World Labour Report, 1997–8. ILO, Geneva, 1997. European Industrial Relations Observatory On-line, www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/ 2002/10/feature/TN0212101F.html Section 2.1, Para 1.18, Catherine Vincent and Elif Aksaz, EMIRE (European Employment and Industrial Relations Glossary) ibid., and www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/2005/03. Christian Dufour, Questionnaire for EIRO comparative study on changes in the national collective bargaining systems since 1990 – the case of France, ibid. Apart from the ‘bourgeoisie as a whole’, the ‘ordinary’ bourgeoisie, and the ‘two great interests within the bourgeoisie’, landed property and capital, he identified a ‘republican’, an ‘industrial’, a ‘commercial’, a ‘parliamentary’, a ‘big’ and a ‘democratic-republican petty’ bourgeoisie. Marx, ed. Fernbach op. cit. p.281, Tombs, op. cit. He noted that by the early twentieth century there were a range of employer associations, but ‘most did little more than organize an annual dinner.’ p.290, ibid. p.280, ibid. Zeldin began by saying ‘Nothing is more difficult to define than the bourgeoisie’, referred to its ‘deep fragmentation’ and then illustrated at length the impossibility of identifying its distinctive values. pp.11–22, Zeldin, op. cit. For Maza, it was ‘a critical counter-norm’, the ‘quintessential other’, a scapegoat rather than social reality, and comparable in some respects to French views of ‘the Jew’ and ‘the American’. pp.193–4, Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003. Jules Fabre, Le Barreau de Paris, Delamotte, Paris, 1895; Lucien Karpik, Les Avocats Entre l’Etat, le public et le marché, Gallimard, Paris, 1995. F. Foiret, Une Corporation Parisienne Pendant La Révolution, Champion, Paris, 1912. Ezra N. Suleiman, Private Power and Centralization in France: The Notaires and the State, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987. There are five administrative grands corps: the Conseil d’État, Cour des Comptes, Inspection des Finance, Corps Préfectural, and the Corps Diplomatiques, and two technical ones, the Corps des Mines, and the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, though the latter were not confined to their original missions. Jean Petôt, Histoire de l’Administration des Ponts et Chaussées, 1599–1815, Paris, 1858; Andre Guillermé, Corps à Corps sur la route: les routes, les chemins et l’organization des services au XIXème siècle, Presse de l’ Ècole des Ponts et Chaussées, 1984. pp.359–61, Patrick J. Harrigan, ‘Secondary Education and the Professions in the Second Empire’, pp.349–71, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 17, No. 3, July 1975. For a superb account of their position relative to other engineers see Terry Shinn, ‘From “corps” to “profession”: the emergence

366 Notes to pages 107–111

68

69

70 71

72 73

74 75

76

77

78

79

and definition of industrial engineering in modern France’, pp.188–208, Robert Fox and George Weisz, eds, The Organization of Science and Technology in France, 1808–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980. Two, Ponts et Chaussées and Mines, were formed under the ancien régime, six during the revolution, including the Écoles Normales Supérieures in 1791, and the École Polytechnique in 1794, one under the First Empire, five during the 36 years of the Restored and July Monarchies, three under the Second Empire, 33 under the Third Republic, eight under the Fourth, and five, so far, under the Fifth. pp.133–5, Bourdieu, op. cit. pp.86, 215–17, 277, John Weiss, The Making of Technological Man: The Social Origins of French Engineering Education, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982. By 1914 one quarter of its membership were non-centraliens. pp.194–6, 204, Shinn, op. cit. pp.176–91, Michael Burrage, Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. pp.88–99, Robert Fox, ‘Science, the university and the state in nineteenth century France, pp.66–145, VIII, Science Industry and the Social order in PostRevolutionary France, Variorum, Aldershot, 1995. State intervention appears to have created a similar conception, and a similar lack of professional solidarity in le corps enseignement du second dégre, the teachers of public secondary schools. For an overview pp.181–205, Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Les Professeurs de l’Enseignement Secondaire: Un Métier De Classes Moyenne, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Paris, 1987. pp.70–7, Fox, op. cit. Robert Fox, ‘The Savant Confronts his Peers: Scientific Societies in France 1815–1914’, pp.241–82 in Robert Fox, ed., The Culture of Science in France 1700–1900, Variorum, Aldershot, 1992, and ‘Learning, Politics and Polite Culture in Provincial France: The Sociétés Savantes in the Nineteenth Century’. pp.543–64, ibid. George Weisz, ‘The politics of medical professionalization in France, 1845–1848’, pp.1–30, Journal of Social History, Vol. 12, 1978. In the twentieth century their associations, although receiving state subsidies, have remained weak, and rather quarrelsome. see pp.139–47, 152–5, David Wilsford, ‘Physicians and the State in France’, pp.130–56, in Giorgio Freddi and James Warner Björkman, eds, Controlling Medical Professionals: The Comparative Politics of Health Maintenance, Sage, London, 1989. Carlos Ramirez, ‘Expertise, profession, institution: the emergence of a professional identity: accounting practitioners in France 1920–1939’, Working Paper, Sociology Department, LSE, 1998. Associations were formed in Liverpool and London in 1870, Manchester in 1871, Sheffield in 1877 and after together forming a national society their members applied for a charter which was granted in 1880. For chronology and sources pp.284–5, Derek Matthews, Malcolm Anderson and John Richard Edwards, The Priesthood of Industry: The Rise of the Professional Accountant in British Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998. They tried to organize as an independent profession, but were also divided by their dependence on the state, and they efforts came to naught. pp.114–37, David Van Zanten, Designing Paris: The Architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc and Vaudoyer, MIT, Cambridge, 1987. Christophe Charle, ‘Academics or Intellectuals? The Professors of the University of Paris and Political Debate in France from the Dreyfus Affair to the

Notes to pages 111–116 367

80 81 82 83 84

85

86

87

88 89

90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97

98

Algerian War’. pp.94–116, in Jeremy Jennings, ed., Intellectuals in Twentieth Century France: Mandarins and Samurais, St. Martin’s Press, London, 1993. p.211, Stefan Collini, ‘Intellectuals in Britain and France in the Twentieth Century: Confusions, Contrasts and Convergence?’, pp.119–225, ibid. Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society, trans by Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge University Press, 1987. pp.39–83, ibid. pp.93–4, 142–3, ibid. The distinctively French character of this class was corroborated at about this time by Humblet. In a comparison of the steel industry in France, Britain and Belgium, he observed that in France alone, ‘awareness of the distinctiveness of the management function, and the need to defend the material and social advantages of the members … shows itself in independent managerial unionism whose success is incontestable.’ pp.355, 358, J.E. Humblet, ‘A Comparative Study of Management in Three Countries’, pp.351–60, The Sociological Review, New Series, November 1961. The rise and decline of the former is analysed in Jean Ruhlmann, ‘Comment Défendre Les Classes Moyennes?’, pp.117–26, Jean Garrigues, ed., Les Groupes de Pression dans la vie contemporaine en France et aux États-Unis de 1820 à nos jours, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2002. p.85, Suzanne Berger, ‘Regime and interest representation: the French traditional middle classes’, pp.83–101, in Suzanne D. Berger, ed., Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism and the Transformation of Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. After failing to identify any corporate life in the bourgeoisie of an earlier era, Maza came to a similar conclusion. p.204, Maza, op. cit. pp.86–8, ibid. Specifically, the associations which represented peasants and farmers, notably, the Fédération National des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles declined, while specialist producer and interest groups prospered. p.90, ibid. The prehistory and history of which is reviewed in Sylvie Guillaume, ‘La CGPME: un autre groupe patronal, de Matignon à Grenelle’, pp.143–53, in Garrigues, ed., op. cit. p.98, ibid. pp.99–100, ibid. such as Alexandre Wickman et Sophie Coignard, La Nomenklatura Française: Pouvoirs et privileges des elites, Belfond, Paris, 1986; Michel Schifres, L’Enaklatura, J.C. Lattés, Paris 1987; Saint-Guillaume, Le gaspillage des élites: confessions d’un nomenklaturiste français, Laffont, Libertés, Paris, 2000. Mattei Dogan, ‘Is there a Ruling Class in France?’ pp.17–90, in Mattei Dogan, ed., Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power, Brill, Leiden, 2003. p.69, ibid. pp.70–4, ibid. pp.29–30, ibid. Perhaps I have been overly influenced by Nathan Leites, The Rules of the Game in Paris, trans by Derek Coltman, Chicago, 1969, but the more conventional narrative in Philip Williams, Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic, Longman, London, 1958, does not lead to a radically different conclusion. p.66, Dogan, op. cit.

368 Notes to pages 116–120 99 100 101

102 103

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107 108

109

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111 112

113 114

115 116

for the steady decline of advocates pp.95–8, Yves-Henri Gaudemet, Les Juristes et la Vie Politique de la IIIe République, Presses Universitaires, Paris, 1970. p.38, Dogan, op. cit. p.199, Aram J. Kevorkian, Confessions of a Francophile, 1980–2000 Taderon Press, Reading, 2002. Kevorkian wittily and perceptively commented, for some 20 years, on French political life, and in particular on what he called the ‘functionary class’. He credited this observation to his barber. p.156, Martin Shapiro, Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1981. Some empirical evidence about this practice is obtainable from Thierry Dimbour and Marion Paoletti, ‘Radiographie des parlementaires cumulants en Gironde’, May, 2005, http://c6r33.free.fr and from Julien Dewoghélaëre, Raul Magni Berton and Julien Navarro ‘“Cumul des Mandats” in Contemporary French Politics. An Empirical Study of the XIIe législature of the Assemblée Nationale’, March 2006, http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr Both sources suggest that legislative attempts to restrict the practice in 2000 and 2003 have had little impact. See also p.124, Kevorkian op. cit. p.34, Dogan, op. cit. p.63, ibid. Dogan’s figures would come as no surprise to Bauer who discussed and documented the separation of wealth and power in France. pp.100, 283–6, Michel Bauer avec Bénédicte Bertin-Mouriot, Les 200: Comment devient-on un grand patron? Seuil, Paris, 1987. p.81, Dogan, op. cit. The theoretical possibility of such a class formation was famously sketched by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay of Education and Equality, Penguin, Harmonsworth, 1961. However, he expected that, in due course, it would become hereditary. This, and more comparative evidence of this kind, is to be found in John U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England 1540–1640, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1957. For a brief account of its predecessors, and the development of its marketing techniques, see pp.2–25, William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996. Frederick B. Artz, The Development of Technical Education in France 1500–1850, Society for the History of Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1966. Meyers provides examples both of the state unilaterally assuming responsibility, and of the voluntary surrender of private training facilities. pp.138–50, Frederic Meyers, Training in European Enterprises, Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969. In the latest OECD comparison of 45 countries it is, however, just surpassed by the Czech Republic. p.44, Education at a Glance, Paris, 2005. pp.126–7, Charles Sumner Lobingier, pp.114–34, ‘Napoleon and his Code’, Harvard Law Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, 1918; Esmein similarly concluded that the Code of Commerce was ‘scarcely more than a revised and amended edition of the ordonnances of 1673 and 1681.’ p.127, A. Esmein, A History of Continental Criminal Procedure, Murray, London, 1914. Charles E. Freedeman, Joint-Stock Enterprise in France 1807–1867, N. Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1979. The state was simultaneously involved in the exchanges on which their shares were traded. pp.45–51, John C. Coffee, Jr. ‘The rise of dispersed ownership:

Notes to pages 120–126 369

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118 119 120 121

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123 124

125 126 127 128

129 130 131 132

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the roles of law and the state in the separation of ownership and control’, pp.1–79, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 111, No. 1, 2001. pp.2, 9, 18, 20–3, 26–7, 29–31, Daniel F. Muzyka, et al., The Climate for Growth Entrepreneurship in Europe, INSEAD, Paris, 2000; pp.14, 18, 21, 32, 48–9, Benchmarking Enterprise Policy: Results from the 2002 Scorecard, European Commission, Brussels, 2002.http://europa.eu.int p.217, Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain and France in the Railway Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. p.134, ibid. pp.132, 136, ibid. Private owners were, it is true, somewhat freer on the ‘lines of local interest’, though even these were under the control of the local prefects. Private lines on private property also needed ministerial approval. pp.115, 132–4, 157, ibid. Donald Reid, The Miners of Decazeville: A Genealogy of De-Industrialization, University Press, Harvard Cambridge, Mass., 1985. Herrick Chapman’s State Capitalism and Working Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry, University of California, Berkeley, 1991. pp.82–7, Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power, Oxford University Press, London, l965. Pierre Puaux, Les Chambres de commerce et d’industries, Harmattan, Paris, 2003 and Philippe Lacombrade, ‘L’Assemblée des presidents des Chambres de Commerce: naissance d’in contre-pouvoir, 1899–1914’, in Garrigues, op. cit.; JeanPierre Daviet, ‘Trade Associations or Agreements and Controlled Competition in France, 1830–1939’, pp.269–95, in Hiroaki Yamazaki and Matao Miyamoto, eds, Trade Associations in Business History, University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo, 1988. p.273, ibid. He gave examples from the textile, glass, aluminium, iron, steel, mining, electrical equipment and chemical industries. Adrian Jones, ‘Illusions of Sovereignty: Business and the Organization of Committees in Vichy France’, Social History, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1986. p.130, Shonfield, op. cit. pp.43–6, Jonah D. Levy, Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society & Economy in Contemporary France, Cambridge, Harvard, 1999. For fuller details pp.129–39, Michel Durupty, Les Entreprises Publiques, Vol. 1, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1986. pp.46–51, Levy, op. cit. pp.51–66, Levy, op. cit. The remaining partly-privatized state sector is listed in the website of the Agence des participations de l’État www.ape.minefi.gouv.fr p.57, Michel Bauer, ‘The Politics of State-Directed Privatisation: the case of France 1986–1988’, pp.49–60, West European Politics, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1988, cited by p.67, Levy, op. cit. Fabrice Demarigny, ‘Independent Administrative Authorities in France’, pp.164–79, in Giandomenico Majone, ed., Regulating Europe, Routledge, London, 1996. The Commission de la Concurrence could permit agreements between firms if it thought they were conducive to economic progress. However, the Minister of Economics controlled the actions of the Commission, and as Demarigny coyly concluded, ‘the sociological proximity of members of the Council to the administration … is not to be doubted.’ p.179, ibid. p.57, Levy, op. cit.

370 Notes to pages 126–130 135 136 137 138

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pp.134–5, 166–8, 222, ibid. The following account is drawn from L’Experience Française du Minitel: Leçons Pour le Commerce Electronique, OECD, Paris, 1998. pp.19–20, ibid. It had earlier established compatibility in the other direction, that is, access to Minitel for PC users via ‘emulation boards’ and later for all internet users. It can therefore be consulted via minitel.fr or minitel.com In the year 2000 there were still five million terminals in use. ‘Reports of Minitel’s death are an exaggeration’ according to Brad Spurgeon, ‘Minitel Hangs on in the Internet Age, p.6, International Herald Tribune, 14th March, 2001. on www.service-public.fr pp.207–9, Jean Chesnais, ‘France’ in Richard R. Nelson, ed. National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993. p.33, Philippe Mustar, ‘L’entrepreneur Schumpeterien a-t-il jamais existe?’, Annales des Mines, Mars, 1994. The PD-G of one large French company, Jeumont-Schneider, strongly objected to political interference, and later reported his conversation in the Elysée with President Pompidou. ‘And do you know what M. Pompidou had the audacity to tell me? That Ambrose Roux (president of the state-owned Compagnie Générale d’Electricité) would like to merge Alsthom with Jeumont … That he, the President of the Republic would like to see negotiations begin to effect this desire, so that France will have only one giant enterprise in the field of electrical materials.’ p.121, Roger Prioret, Les Français Mystifiés, Grasset, Paris, 1973 cited p.262, Ezra N. Suleiman, Elites in French Society: The Politics of Survival, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1978. The PD-G in question was, however, Belgian, and it may be that a Frenchman would have found the President’s advice more palatable. This merger did not in fact take place, though Jeumont-Schneider later merged with another French electrical company, Framatome. pp.71–2, 128–30, Shonfield, op. cit. pp.133–4, Bourdieu, op. cit. No one seems to agree on how many there are. Ardagh observed that ‘140 lay claim to the rank’, p.150, John Ardagh, France in the 1980s, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1982. Dogan suggested that ‘approximately 160 schools with about 40,000 students are considered as grandes écoles’. p.46fn, Dogan, op. cit. Specifically it mentions ‘une formation longue polyvalente et généraliste, de 5 à 6 ans après le bac’, and ‘une coopération très étroite avec les milieux économiques, pour la formation, la recherche, l’innovation et la valorisation de produits nouveaux.’ www.cge.asso.fr pp.191–2, Shinn, op. cit. He mentioned a couple of other examples of schools formed as a result of private or semi-private initiatives. p.198, op. cit. for a general survey see Christophe Charle, pp.1115–37, ‘Le Pantouflage en France (vers 1880–vers 1980)’, Annales Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 5, 1987. pp.107–9, Maurice Levy-Leboyer, ‘Innovation and Business Strategies in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century France’, in Edward C. Carter et al., Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century France, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1976. Over the years 1880 to 1955, on average about 30% of inspecteurs des finances moved into the private sector, and about the same proportion of the corps des mines, though the percentage rose over the twentieth century p.229, Suleiman, 1978, op. cit.

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166 167 168 169

170

pp.142–4, Pierre Birnbaum, Les Sommets de l’état: essai sur l’elite du pouvoir en France, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1977. pp.183–4, Granick, 1972, op. cit. Most of the ‘non-prestigious’ were in the textile, food and paper industries, and appear to have defined themselves by their reluctance or inability to recruit graduates of the grandes écoles. pp.198, 232–5, ibid. pp.119–21, Dean Savage, Founders, Heirs & Managers: French Industrial Leadership in Transition, Sage, London, 1979. p.181, Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot, 1987, op. cit. p.70, ibid. p.182, ibid. The full list of the 25 firms in this heterogeneous sector is given on pp.278–9, ibid. In 1995 Bauer et al. reported that just over half of all chief executives, in all industrial sectors, came from grandes écoles, pp.70–1 M. Bauer, Bertin-Mouriot and P. Thobois, Les No. 1 des 200 plus grandes entreprises en France et en Grande Bretagne, Paris, CNRS/Boyden, 1995. p.300, Bourdieu, op. cit. His italics. pp.322–30, ibid. pp.211, 219, Charles Kadushin, ‘Friendship Among the French Financial Elite’, pp.202–21, American Sociological Review, Vol. 60, 1995. ENA is the École nationale d’administration, now perhaps the most illustrious grande école. Suleiman reported that in 1975 over 60% of the directors of the largest (public) banks in France were former inspecteurs des finances, though what they knew of commercial banking mystified many observers. p.117ff, Suleiman, 1978, op. cit. Bauer and his colleagues found that 80% of the chief executives of banks had attended these grandes écoles. pp.87–8, Bauer et al., 1995, op. cit. Financial institutions were the most popular destination for enarques between 1960 and 1990. p.30, Michel Bauer avec Benedicte Bertin-Mourot, L’ENA: Est-elle une business school? Études sociologiques sur les Énarques devenus cadres d’entreprise de 1960–1990, L’Harmittan, Paris, 1997. pp.65–7, Pierre Birnbaum et al., La Classe Dirigeante Française: dissociation, interpenetration, intégration, Presses Universitaire de France, Paris, 1978. He provides flow charts of inter-sectoral pantouflage. pp.87–108, Lenard R. Berlanstein, Big Business and Industrial Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France: A Social History of the Paris Gas Company, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. p.110, ibid. p.111, ibid. pp.122, 199, 206 ibid. Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, University of Chicago, 1963. His finding were repeatedly corroborated by Berlanstein’s research on gas workers at the beginning of the century. pp.230, 308ff, Berlanstein, op. cit. pp.38–47, 52–3, 128–39, Jacques Henri Horovitz, Top Management Control in Europe, Macmillan, London, 1980. p.96, ibid. p.93, ibid. The British boards were more collegial, an average of 69% of board members being ‘insiders’, i.e. executives working in the organization, while in most of the French companies ‘the chief executive (Président Directeur Général) is the only one to sit on the board of directors, which is one further reason why many decisions go up to his office.’ pp.84, 94, ibid.

372 Notes to pages 134–140 171 172

173 174 175 176

177

178 179 180 181 182 183

184 185

186 187 188 189 190

191

192

193 194 195

pp.112, 124, ibid. Tori Ishii et al., Engineers, Organization and Innovation: Training Systems and Organization of Technical Skill in Japanese and French Firms in the Electronics and Chemicals Industries, Japan Institute of Labour, Tokyo, 1995. p.48, ibid. pp.38, 41, ibid. p.57, ibid. However, initial educational qualifications determined career opportunities rather less comprehensively than in the chemical company. About a quarter of all engineers and managers had been internally promoted. There was also an administrative division between personnel. Technicians and supervisory staff, along with manual and clerical staff, were managed at local level, while engineers and managers were managed from head office. p.38, ibid. p.81, ibid. pp.48, 167, 195 ibid. pp.82–4, ibid. p.195, ibid. pp.84, 195, ibid. Dogan claimed that the sequence of ‘periodical beheadings’ and ‘elite circulation’ that included 1814, 1830, 1848 and 1945 continued during the Fifth Republic, in 1968, 1981, 2002, but gave no evidence to support this argument. p.69, Dogan, op. cit. The mini-peaks of pantouflage following elections or changes of government hardly seem to qualify pp.4–5, Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot, 1997, op. cit. pp.103, Bourdieu, op. cit. The socialization of a corpsard is described pp.146–69, Bauer, 1987; and pp.188ff, Weiss, op. cit. for an account of the regime at one school at the turn of the century pp.33–4, F. Fichet-Poitrey, Le corps des ponts et chaussées: du génie Civil à l’aménagement du territoire, Paris, 1982; A. Brunot and R. Coquand, Le corps des ponts et chaussées, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris, 1982. p.56, Dogan, op. cit. for some examples pp.49, 81, ibid.; pp.124–7, Bourdieu; pp.176–84, Suleiman, 1978, op. cit. pp.45–8, 142–3, ibid. pp.184–5, ibid. The schools were, he thought, ‘both different and interdependent … both in competition and complementary, and involved in increasingly long and complex circuits of legitimating exchanges.’ p.386, Bourdieu, op. cit. Suleiman observed that graduates of elite grandes écoles ‘rarely … find their way into foreign multinational enterprises.’ p.240, Suleiman, op. cit. His informants led him to think that it was a matter of choice on their part rather than indifference on the part of foreign companies. In 2005, when PepsiCo was rumoured to be preparing a bid for Danone, a French yoghourt company, the Prime Minister and his fellow ministers rushed to defend ‘one of our national treasures’. Danone was already 42% foreignowned, and 24% of its shares were held by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ funds. ‘France faces up to foreign ownership of industrial treasures,’ Agence France Presse, 24th July, 2005 and www.tblonline.com Baromètre trimestriel, Les Echos, 2005. pp.244, 255, Bauer, 1987, op. cit. p.54, ibid. pp.78, 82–3, ibid.

Notes to pages 141–144 373

Chapter 6 1

2

3 4

5

6

7 8

9

10

11

Civil Society Acts Alone in the United States

The 102 settlers of the Plymouth Colony agreed to ‘combine ourselves into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and … frame such just and equal laws … as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience’ www.plimouth.org For a discussion of this and other cases pp.167, 173, 308 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973. In 1632, Charles I granted George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, ownership and absolute authority over the inhabitants of the more than 10 million acres that became Maryland. However, his absolutist aspirations were no more successful than those of his royal patron. p.29, Eric Labaree, America’s NationTime 1607–1789, Norton, New York, 1972. pp.67–82, 158, ibid. Understandably, the myth is celebrated every 4th July. President George W. Bush constantly reiterates it. In his Independence Day address in 2002, for instance, he claimed ‘And all Americans … can draw a straight line from the free lives we lead today to that one moment, when the world changed forever. From that day in 1776, freedom has had a home, and freedom has had a defender. (Applause.)’ www.whitehouse.gov The bequest was, however, in stock, which subsequently proved worthless. David Madsen, The National University: Enduring Dream of the United States of America, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1967. Sheldon Rothblatt and Martin Trow, ‘Government Policies and Higher Education: Britain and the United States 1630–1860’, in C. Crouch and A. Heath, eds, The Sociology of Social Reform, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992. The federal government was similarly reluctant to assert a central co-ordinating role over scientific research and remained so until World War II. See A. Hunter Dupree, ‘Central Scientific Organization in the United States’, pp.261–77, in Norman Kaplan, ed., Science and Society, Rand McNally, Chicago, 1965. His argument rested, however, primarily on states’ rights grounds. B. Zorina Khan & Kenneth Sokoloff, ‘Patent Institutions, Industrial Organization and Early Technological Change, 1790–1850’, pp.292–313, Maxine Berg & Kristine Bruland, Technological Revolutions: Historical Perspectives, Elgar, Cheltenham, 1998. pp.20–39, 117–37, Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage, from property to democracy, 1760–1860, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1968. In the colonies, Williamson estimated that between 50% and 75% of white adult males could vote, though ‘some communities exceeded this proportion and some fell below.’ While the suffrage was substantially broadened in the wake of the revolution, only one state, Vermont, introduced universal manhood suffrage without any tax or property qualification whatever. pp.38, 135–6, ibid. For the rapid transition from special to general laws of incorporation in various states see Edwin Merrick Dodd, American Business Corporations Until 1860, with special reference to Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1954. p.vii, Abram Chayes, Introduction, John P. Davis, Corporations: A Study of the Origin and Development of Great Business Combinations and of their Relation to the Authority of the State, Capricorn, New York, 1961.

374 Notes to pages 144–149 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27

28

pp.28–31, Donald Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War, Columbia University, New York, 1932. pp.3–4, Martin Trow, ‘Latent Functions of Continuing Education’, Paper presented at Hässelby Slott, Stockholm, May 1987. p.12, ibid. p.74, Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study, published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1960. p.98, ibid. p.49, ibid. Education, however, never became a legally-enforceable civil right, except under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, meaning a right to education equal to that being provided to others. John C. Eastman, ‘When Did Education Become a Civil Right? An Assessment of State Constiutional Provisions for Education 1776–1900’, pp.1–34, American Journal of Legal History, Vol. XLII, 1998. For examples of the educational provisions in the constitutions of five states, plus that of the Northwest Ordinance, and the support from several of the founding fathers see pp.210–32, Robert H. Bremner, Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, Vol. 1 1600–1865, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1970. Bremner pointed out that while ‘nearly all state constitutions committed the state to the support of education’, they were ‘permissive rather than mandatory, authorizing rather than requiring…’ p.230, ibid. pp.86–92, David L. Madsen, Early National Education 1776–1830, Wiley, New York, 1974. p.461, Bremner, op. cit. pp.251–67, Jürgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America 1890–1940: A Social Political History in International Perspective, trans by Maura Kealey, Sage, London, 1980. pp.134–8, J.S. Fuerst, ‘Public Housing in the United States’, pp.134–52, J.S. Fuerst, ed., Public Housing in Europe and America, Croom Helm, London, 1974. Jack Katz, Poor People’s Lawyers in Transition, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1982. pp.173–94, DeMott, op. cit. The proposition, echoing the 15th and 19th amendments to the Constitution, proposed that ‘The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group, on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.’ The continuing campaigns may be tracked by numerous websites, such as CADAP, Californians Against Discrimination and Preferences, Pacific Legal Foundation to Support 209, the Center for Individual Rights et al. The same prediction has, of course, often been made before see for example the section ‘Affirmative Action: The Last Stage’, pp.34–63, The Public Interest, No. 130, Winter 1998. p.123, Robert M. McIver, The Web of Government, Macmillan, New York, 1947. Alford pointed out that parties might, nonetheless, be ‘viewed by voters as representing different social classes’ and cited survey data to support the point. p.100, Alford, op. cit.

Notes to pages 150–155 375 29 30 31 32 33

34

35

36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45

The evidence about post-revolutionary attacks on the organized bar is reviewed pp.233–57, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. pp.215–76, William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1972. pp.300–46, Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Public Administration 1829–1861, Free Press, New York, 1954. pp.98–101, Evan Haynes, The Selection and Tenure of Judges, The National Conference of Judicial Councils, Washington, 1944. for an account of the ‘withering of establishments’ and ‘the rise of democratic religious movements’ through the early decades of the republic see pp.59–122ff, Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1989. Over the period 1760–1840 the self-recruitment rate rose among graduate members of the Suffolk bar (i.e. Boston) from 38% to 55%, and among nongraduates from 55% to 63%. pp.172–5, Gerard W. Gawalt, The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts 1760–1840, Westport, 1979. The best documented case is the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois, to which Lincoln belonged in the late 1830s. pp.23ff, 168–71, John P. Frank, Lincoln as a Lawyer, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1961. p.5, G.W. Pepper, Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, Philadelphia Law Association, Philadelphia, 1895; pp.207–9, Gary Nash, ‘The Philadelphia Bench and Bar 1800–1860’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, pp.203–20, Vol. 7, 1965; pp.151–2, Lawrence Friedman, A History of American Law, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973. p.258, Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989. pp.255–7, ibid. p.297, ibid. pp.189–90 ibid. He briefly noted that public policies were favourable to ‘the class interests of urban middling folk’, and mentioned ‘toleration and support for business enterprise, low taxation, improvement of urban services’ such as mass transit and sidewalks. p.255, ibid. pp.290–6, ibid. pp.96–113, Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service, Row, Peterson, Evanston, Ill., 1958. Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in Europe, A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin No. 6, New York, 1912; Albert Z. Reed, Training for the Public Profession of the Law, Bulletin No. 15, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, New York City, 1921. Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Report of the Investigation into Engineering Education, 1923–1929, 2 vols, Pittsburgh, 1934. J. Richard Woodworth, ‘Some Influences on the Reform of Schools of Law and Medicine, 1890 to 1930’, Sociological Quarterly, 14, 1973. In 1900 all medical societies had together recruited under one-third, by 1910 ‘half the physicians in the country’ were members of the AMA, and by 1940 two-thirds. By 1971, however, this had fallen to 50% and by 1981 to 48% of male and 27% of female physicians. pp.109–10, 273, 427, Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Basic, New York, 1982. The AMA declined to give more recent figures.

376 Notes to pages 155–157 46

47

48

49 50

51

52 53

54

55

56 57 58

For an example from one state, Theodore J. Schneyer, ‘The Incoherence of the Unified Bar Concept: Generalizing from the Wisconsin Case’, American Bar Foundation Journal, Vol. 14, 1983. pp.237–9, Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility an the American Engineering Profession, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1971. The dependence of most engineering societies on business is explained. pp.1–19, ibid. Significantly, the only association of licensed engineers, the National Society of Professional Engineers, was the most cohesive and durable engineering association, and was also the one that was most free of business influence. p.239, ibid. pp.315–62, Van Riper, op. cit. pp.273–6, 347–52, ibid. For exclusive recognition and collective bargaining agreements which included blue, white collar and professional civil servants see Union Recognition in the Federal Government, United States Civil Service Commission, Washington, D.C. 1968; pp.20, 30, Collective Bargaining Agreements in the Federal Civil Service, Late 1971, Bulletin 1789, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C. 1973. In 1930 the ABA claimed 17% of all judges and practising lawyers were members. It now claims 50%. www.abanet.org, p.129, Esther Lucille Brown, Lawyers and the Promotion of Justice, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1938; fn 45, supra. Evidence to support this proposition, especially by comparison with England, is examined below p.260, infra, fn 148–50. For the high proportion of university-trained managers see Charles Handy, The Making of Modern Managers: Management Education Training and Development in the USA, West Germany, France, Japan and the U.K., NEDO, London, 1989. For measures of the low level of technical training among manual workers see D. Blanchflower and L. Lynch, ‘Training at Work: A Comparison of U.S. and British Youths’, Discussion Paper No. 78, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, 1992; Exhibit 23, ‘Aggregate Analysis’, pp.1, 8 ‘Synthesis’ McKinsey Global Institute, Driving Productivity and Growth in the U.K. Economy, Washington, D.C. 1998. p.439, Arthur Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency: A Comparative Study of Industrial Life in England, Germany and the United States, Longmans Green, London, 1906. Kaelbe’s collection of unmatched, non-random samples from the early industrial period led him to suggest that ‘higher education among business leaders seems to have been more frequent in the three European countries than in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century’. However, his later, fuller evidence led him to add that ‘the proportion … with higher education seems to have increased more rapidly in the U.S. than in the three European countries.’ p.418, Hartmut Kaelbe, ‘Long-term changes in the Recruitment of the Business Elite: Germany compared to the U.S., Great Britain and France since the Industrial Revolution’, pp.404–23, Journal of Social History, Spring, 1980. The low proportion of skilled workers is documented below. p.260 infra. p.8, Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class, Preface to the American Edition, 1892, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953. p.77, Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Norton, New York, 1996. The high rates of labour violence are documented though the comparisons with other countries remain impressionistic. p.380, Philip Taft and Philip

Notes to pages 157–161 377

59

60

61

62 63

64

65 66

67 68 69

Ross, ‘American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character and Outcome’, pp.281–395, Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds, The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Praeger, New York, 1969. A comparison of civil strife in various nations between the years 1961–1968 found that there was more participation in violent protests, and more injuries suffered as a result, than in other countries, especially than the United Kingdom, pp.579, Ted Robert Gurr, ‘A Comparative Study of Civil Strife’, pp.572–625, ibid. The societal factors he lists are the absence of feudalism, a liberal tradition which included many socialist values, individualist and anti-statist values, the high standard of living, the political isolation of those with low incomes, higher upward social mobility and higher geographic mobility, and the consequences of being a multi-ethnic and multi-racial immigrant society. The political factors are the early extension of the suffrage, the two-coalition party system, its readiness to steal the thunder of third parties, and repression. pp.84–8, Lipset, 1996, op. cit. pp.11, 231, John H.M. Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study of Class Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830–1924, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2000. Lazerson went so far as to say ‘not until after 1870 did schools touch the mass of Americans. Only Massachusetts had passed a compulsory attendance statute during the antebellum period and that had been infrequently enforced.’ p.xiv, Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971. p.227, Laslett, op. cit. p.276, Martin Trow, ‘Class, Race, and Higher Education in America’, pp.275–93, Gary Marks and Larry Diamond, eds, Reexamining Democracy, Sage, London, 1992. This entire argument has been heavily influenced by Trow’s sparkling essay. By 1947, for instance, United States Dept of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, GPO, Washington, DC, 1975. One only has to consider accounts of early organized labour in the United States alongside any of the standard accounts of their British counterparts to realize that educational opportunity was fundamental to the former from an early date, and a marginal issue for the latter. See, for instance, any or all of the contributors to John R. Commons, et al., eds, History of Labour in the United States, Vol. 1, Macmillan, New York, 1918–1935. The reason for this difference will be clear from the discussion on pp.268–9, infra. Tables 607, 648. The figures are for 2004. U.S. Census Bureau, op. cit. For examples, on racial distinctions, see Edna Bonacich, ‘Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Race Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation, pp.34–51, American Sociological Review, 41, 1976. An example of the argument that’ ethnic divisions … created barriers between groups of workers, restricting possible avenues of cooperation’ is Walter Korpi and Michael Shalev ‘Strikes, Industrial Relations and Class Conflict in Capitalist Societies’, pp.164–87, British Journal of Sociology, 30, 2, 1979. pp.330–4, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans by Henry Reeve, Vol. 1. Vintage, New York, 1945. for some of it see pp.273–9, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. Marshall’s account of the way in which it infiltrated into the union movement, despite the declared opposition of the national leadership of the AFL, is

378 Notes to pages 161–164

70

71 72

73

74

75

76

77

78 79 80 81 82

83

one telling illustration. Ray Marshall, ‘Black and White Blue-Collar Workers and Unions’, pp.176–203 in Sar A. Levitan, ed., Blue Collar Workers: A Symposium on Middle America, McGraw Hill, New York, 1971. ibid.; Herbert Hill, ‘Racial Barriers in Union-Apprentice Programs’ in Alan F. Westin, ed., Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America, Basic Books, New York, 1964. pp.178–80, Marshall, op. cit. p.122, S.M. Lipset and W.S. Schneider, The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor and Government in the Public Mind, Free Press, New York, 1983; p.58 Zweig, op. cit. However, since the overall rate of unionization among blacks in 2004 was only 15% vs 12.2% for whites, it seems unlikely that this has translated into higher rates of union membership in comparable jobs. Table 648, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2006, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, D.C. 2006. Race certainly undermined the solidarity of San Francisco and Oakland longshoremen throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, according to the memoirs of one of them. He gave, however, little evidence to suggest that it displaced class solidarity. pp.96–113, Reg Theriault, The Unmaking of the American Working Class, New Press, New York, 2003. p.566, Herbert G. Gutman, ‘Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919’, American Historical Review, June, 1973. He is supported by Marshall who argues that ‘white ethnics’ at least, ‘have given strong support to the American labour movement.’ p.176, op. cit. pp.176–81, Richard Schneirov and Thomas J. Suhrbur, Union Brotherhood, Union Town: The History of the Carpenters’ Union of Chicago, 1893–1987, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1988. Initially union leaders shared the employers’ view pp.201–16, Victor R. Greene, The Slavic Community on Strike: Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania Anthracite, Notre Dame, Illinois, 1968. He gives examples of the importation of immigrants as strikebreakers. pp.97–9, ibid. pp.225–6, Laslett, op. cit. In 1870 Marx made a similar point about the English. ‘England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps. English proletarians and Irish proletarians. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class.’ p.506, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Britain, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953. p.215ff, William Kornblum, Blue Collar Community, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1974. pp.210–11, ibid. p.270, David Halle, America’s Working Man, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984. pp.251–2, 295, Blumin, op. cit. pp.312, 328–30, Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II, New Press, New York, 2000. This post-1965 wave is also, of course, post the Civil Rights Act 1964, and it is likely that granting legal redress for racial discrimination against unions as well as employers may have raised the salience of ethnic identities. pp.18–21, Milton Cantor, ed., American Workingclass Culture: Explorations in American Labor and Social History, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1979. Several other contributors to his volume provide supporting evidence. See also David Montgomery, ‘The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in

Notes to pages 164–169 379

84 85 86

87

88

89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103

104 105 106

the Kensington Riots of 1844’, pp.44–74, Peter N. Stearns and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds, Workers in the Industrial Revolution: Recent Studies of Labor in the United States, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, N.J., 1974. pp.17–18, James Holt, ‘Trade Unionism in the British and U.S. Steel Industries, 1880–1914: a comparative study’, Labor History, 1977. pp.47–51, Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1990. They were formed in Philadelphia and Boston and elsewhere for brief accounts of them all see Helen L. Sumner, ‘Citizenship’, pp.169–334, Commons, op. cit. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004, first published in 1984. pp.172–216, 236, ibid. One may observe that this early failure to form a working class party poses a challenge to Mink’s argument which she did not address. pp.113–42, ibid. pp.223–4, ibid. p.299, ibid. pp.219, 220, 234, ibid. Wilentz does not consider the possibility that they did not meet the fate of the Workingmen’s Parties precisely because they were able to represent the working class without trying to organize all of it. pp.55, 233–5, ibid. pp.xii–xiv, Thompson, op. cit. pp.16–18, Wilentz, op. cit. Like Thompson, he also paid little heed to Marx’s warning that ‘only the vulgar mind confuses trade disputes with class conflict.’ pp.219, 237, 242–3, ibid. pp.52, 253, ibid. pp.18–19, ibid. He found it difficult to make up his mind. While New York was the ‘centre of working class action and labour radicalism in the industrializing Republic’, the ‘classic scenes of industrial capitalist growth were to be found elsewhere’. While it ‘remained the focal point of the American economy, it was also an immigrant metropolis’, and for ‘millions of Americans, New York was becoming an alien, menacing, almost un-American place.’ p.389, ibid. Over the same period Philadelphia workers seem to have been considerably less class conscious, more inebriated, but also more attracted by temperance and religious movements. Bruce Laurie, ‘“Nothing on Compulsion”: Lifestyles of Philadelphia Artisans 1820–1850’, pp.91–120, in Cantor, op. cit. pp.377–80, Wilentz, op. cit. pp.254, 334, 350, 364, 383–6, ibid. p.72, Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1993. pp.12–13, Engels, 1953, op. cit. p.78, Voss, op. cit. The Knights were even the beginnings of an international union, since some assemblies were also formed in England. p.88, Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: Industrial Workers of the World, Eyre and Spottiswode, London, 1967. It also had the support of a struggling,

380 Notes to pages 169–175

107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114

115 116

117 118

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

129 130 131

proto-industrial American Railway Union formed by Eugene Debs, and of the American branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers of Great Britain, both of which had been expelled from the AFL. p.64, ibid. www.iww.org In 1920, the IWW claimed to have 41,600 members p.84, Wolman, op. cit. pp.28–33, 126, Wilentz, op. cit. Bakers may have been an exception p.232, ibid. pp.406, 413, ibid. At several points Wilentz emphasizes the contribution of immigrants. pp.352–6, 373, 364, ibid. pp.232–5, Voss, op. cit. p.386, Wilentz, op. cit. However, he had earlier decided that ‘What finally … wrecked the union movement was neither official repression, nor political cooptation but dearth and economic collapse.’ By dearth he meant, the failure of the wheat crop in the summer of 1836. p.294, ibid. p.232, Voss, op. cit. p.20, Robert E. Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2000. Dubofsky is almost alone in questioning this common view. He emphasized the IWW’s ‘internal deficiencies’, such as its failure to sign or respect collective bargaining agreements, and to explain how ‘it would achieve its new society.’ What support it enjoyed was, he thought, due to its success in obtaining immediate improvements in members’ working conditions, not to its vision of a classless society. pp.480–4, Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall All Be All: A History of the International Workers of the World, Quadrangle, Chicago, 1968. p.85, Leo Wolman, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880–1923, National Bureau of Economic Research, New York, 1924. Morgan O. Reynolds, ‘An Economic Analysis of the Norris-LaGuardia Act, the Wagner Act, and the Labor Representation Industry’, pp.227–66, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. VI, Summer-Fall, 1982. p.44, Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? Trying to be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back, Plume, New York, 1992. pp.3–74, Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1960. p.233, Statistical Abstract of the United States. 81st edn, U.S. Dept of Commerce, Washington, D.C., 1960. pp.52, 55–7, Freeman, op. cit. pp.99, 104, ibid. pp.33, 43, 66–8, ibid. pp.26, 41–7, ibid. pp.32, 52, 337, ibid. p.26, ibid. pp.272, 325, ibid. p.272, ibid. This, of course, adds further support to the idea that the city’s class consciousness had been continuously replenished from Europe. Post-1965 immigrants were largely non-European. pp.303, 312, 330, 332, ibid. p.327, ibid. In 2004, New York State had 6% of the U.S. labour force, but 12.9% of its union members. Tables 581, 649, U.S. Census Bureau, op. cit.

Notes to pages 175–178 381 132

133

134 135

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The AFL-CIO claimed absolute numbers of union members increased slightly between 2000–2001, from 12.9m to 13.2m. Report of the Executive Council, AFL-CIO, 2002, but the Census Bureau did not register it. The Bureau of Labour Statistics reported increases in absolute numbers in several years in the 1990s, but the density of membership consistently declined. pp.43–5, Jelle Visser, ‘Union Membership Statistics in 24 Countries’, Monthly Labour Review, January, 2006. Canadian union density has always exceeded that of the United States, apart from the period 1938–1958, which roughly coincides with the period when the American was receiving the unqualified support of the Federal Government pp.89, 96–108, Lipset, 1996, op. cit. p.44, Geoghegan, op. cit. The Wagner Act required the NLRB to base its definition of an appropriate unit by ‘a community of interest among workers’, but after Taft-Hartley it could not consider ‘workers’ wishes alone. Management personnel and record-keeping practices were also relevant, so units could be defined by a great variety of criteria. pp.40–7, William B. Gould, IV, A Primer on American Labor Law, 3rd ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993. Though such restraints were imported to England via one-union Japanese car plants in the 1980s. James A. Gross, Broken Promise: The Subversion of U.S. Labor Relations Policy, 1947–1994, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1995. Levitt estimated that it had an annual turnover of more than $1 billion and consisted of more than 10,000 highly paid anti-union consultants and attorneys, the former averaging about $1,000–$1,500 per day and the latter between $300–$700. Martin Jay Levitt with Terry Conrow, Confessions of a Union Buster, Crown, New York, 1993. The decline of opinion poll approval ratings is documented in Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘North American Labor Movements: A Comparative Perspective’. pp.438–42, Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century, ICS Press, San Francisco, 1986. Edelstein and Warner devised 20 measures to compare union democracy, in 51 American and 31 British unions over the years 1946–1960. The British emerged as more democratic, usually substantially more democratic, by 19 of them. pp.87–113, J. David Edelstein and Malcolm Warner, Comparative Union Democracy: Organization and Opposition in British and American Unions, Allen & Unwin, London, 1975. pp.138, 209, 279, Gross, op. cit. Though as he points out, they mainly exposed corruption in one union, but he thought that ‘labor unions came to mean Teamsters’. p.138, ibid. However, for some earlier cases see pp.621–5, Galenson, op. cit. pp.78, 199, 220, Lipset & Schneider, op. cit. For an account of how corruption discredited New York City’s labour movement see pp.313–16, Freeman, op. cit. While successive samples of Americans have been decidedly less favourable to all forms of government intervention to reduce inequalities than the British, the striking exception has been government action to increase ‘opportunities for young people to go to college. In this respect, Americans have always exceeded the British by a considerable margin. p.111, Davis, 1986, op. cit. p.159, Stanley H. Ruttenberg, ‘The Union Member Speaks’, pp.154–75, in Levitan, op. cit.

382 Notes to pages 178–185 146 147 148 149 150 151

152 153 154 155 156

157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166

167 168 169 170 171 172

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p.221, Lee Rainwater, ‘Making the Good Life: working class family and lifestyles’, pp.204–29, ibid. pp.5, 8, Geoghegan, op. cit. pp.366–7, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Culture Conflicts, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1937. pp.444–9, ibid. pp.27–34, ibid. p.28, ibid. A union organizer’s account of his failure demonstrated the adverse consequences of the competition between AFL and CIO unions, pp.28–34. ibid. p.359, ibid. pp.455–8, ibid. pp.459–60, ibid. pp.42–4, ibid. T. Caplow and B. Chadwick, ‘Inequality and Lifestyles in Middletown, 1920–1978’, pp.366–78, Social Science Quarterly, 60, 1979. For another followup, in a ‘reality’ documentary film in 1990, see ‘Seventeen’ www.frif.com and pp.253–60, DeMott, op. cit. p.viii, James West, Plainville U.S.A. Columbia University Press, New York, 1945. p.115, ibid p.133, ibid. pp.113, 119, ibid. p.128, ibid. pp.192–4, ibid. p.223, ibid. pp.223–4, Art Gallaher, Jr. Plainville Fifteen Years Later, Columbia University Press, New York, 1961. pp.210–11, Paul W. Kingston, The Classless Society, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000. James Davis, ‘Achievement Variables and Class Cultures: Family, Schooling and Job, and Forty-nine Dependent Variables in the G.S.S.’ pp.569–86, American Sociological Review, 47, 1982. pp.211–12, Kingston, op. cit. pp.68, 79, 211, ibid. Richard Centers, The Psychology of Social Classes, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1949. M.R. Jackman and R.W. Jackman, Class Awareness in the United States, University of California, Berkeley, 1983. K.L. Schlozman and S. Verba, Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political Response, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1979. The British seem to have had less difficulty in ‘correctly’ assigning themselves or others to the class that sociologists suppose they belong to. G. Evans, ‘Class conflict and Inequality’, in R. Jowell, et al., eds, International Social Attitudes: The 10 th British Social Attitudes Report, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1993. See also the discussion of this and other reports in pp.99–100, Devine, op. cit. 8% of blue collar workers identified themselves as working class in response to an open question and 50% as middle class. p.91, Kingston, op. cit. p.32, James Coleman and Lee Rainwater, Social Standing in America, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978. pp.90–4, Kingston, op. cit.

Notes to pages 185–192 383 176 177

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183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193

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p.204, Halle, op. cit. In not one of dozens of verbatim quotes of his worker informants and colleagues is the term ‘working class’ ever used. Nonetheless nearly half the autoworkers surveyed in a new Detroit suburb in the late 1950s were ready to identify themselves as working class and to distinguish themselves from non-manual workers. pp.80–90, Bennett Berger, Working Class Suburb: A Study of Autoworkers in Suburbia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1960. p.379, Commons, op. cit. The New York Working Men’s Party appears to have been a fair cross-section of the population of the city, apart from lawyers, towards whom, like Halle’s informants, it was particularly antagonistic. p.142, Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class: A Study of the New York Workingmen’s Movement, 1829–1837, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1960. see ‘Knights of Labor’ www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk. pp.40–1, Erik Olin Wright, ed., The Debate on Classes, Verso, London, 1989. Edward N. Woolf, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can be Done About it, Twentieth Century Fund, New Press, New York, 1996. pp.158–61, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Vintage, New York, 1990. Nelson Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1963. pp.108–11, ibid. Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago and Los Angeles, Urbana, Ill, 1982. p.9, ibid. p.11, ibid. pp.717–18, ibid. pp.714–15, ibid. p.728, ibid. pp.728–30, He had in mind, among others, the wars between Gould and Fisk, and Rockefeller and Morgan. ibid. Despite the misleading title of E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1979. Philadelphia’s distinctiveness came out most strongly in his Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership, Free Press, New York, 1979. While noting resemblances with the clans, schools, clubs and social registers of Boston, he argued that the two cities were culturally ‘poles apart’, and contrasted Philadelphia’s ‘atomized’ upper class unfavourably with its cohesive Boston counterpart. pp.32–50ff, ibid. pp.207–29, Blumin, op. cit. The muckraking contributions to Robert S. Allen, Our Sovereign State, Vanguard Press, New York, 1949 suggest that in states where a single industry was overwhelmingly important, some state governments were dominated by economic interests for long periods, and political and economic elites thereby covertly integrated. A kind of ruling class might therefore be said to have emerged, but since these relationships were illegal, they were also unstable and did not seek or obtain public recognition or acceptability. As a result, West Point became anxious to demonstrate the openness of its recruitment, and its contribution to the infrastructure of the civilian economy.

384 Notes to pages 192–195

197 198

199 200 201 202

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pp.106–24, Stephen E. Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1966. The stereotype stuck nonetheless, as numerous Hollywood westerns testify. p.59, William Letwin, Law and Economic Policy in America: The Evolution of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Random House, New York, 1965. for the popular opposition to banks along the eastern seaboard in the late 1820s see pp.218–19, 276–8, 330, Sumner, op. cit. Hammond’s classic text is more useful for legislative reaction to protests across the union rather than an analysis of the protests themselves. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1957. The distinctive way in which electoral pressures affected the development of American banks also emerges in Richard H. Tilly, ‘Banking Institutions in Historical and Comparative Perspective: Germany, Great Britain and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’, pp.189–209, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 145/1, 1989. pp.81–3, Letwin, op. cit. p.85, ibid. p.92, Letwin, op. cit. The legal manoeuvres of corporations, the feeble enforcement efforts, and the prevarications of the U.S. Supreme Court in the years immediately following the passage of Sherman’s Act are described pp.113–14ff, Letwin, op. cit. A.D. Neale and D.G. Goyder, The Anti-Trust Laws of the United States of America: A Study of Competition Enforced by Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, 3rd edition. A landmark report of ‘Nader’s Raiders’ claimed that the FTC had been unduly influenced by the lawyers of auto companies, tire manufacturers and others, but made no claims of improper links with company executives. Their main criticisms were of the FTC’s lax and slow detection and enforcement procedures, the politicisation of its appointments, and its unwillingness to ask Congress for powers and funds appropriate to its mission. Edward F. Cox, Robert C. Fellmeth, John E. Schulz, The Nader Report on the Federal Trade Commission, R.W. Baron New York, 1969. For critical reviews of various ‘capture’ theories see pp.52–66, 98–111, Michael D. Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy, Little Brown, Boston, 1987; pp.69–72, Larry N. Gerston, Cynthia Fraleigh and Robert Schwab, The Deregulated Society, Brooks Cole, Pacific Grove, 1988. Ronald Brickman, Sheila Jasanoff, Thomas Ilgen, Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1985. In 1961 seven GE executives were jailed, and 23 received suspended sentences. The firm was fined and subject of a large number of triple damage compensation suits from those affected. Their story is told in John G. Fuller, The Gentlemen Conspirators: The Story of the Price-Fixers in the Electrical Industry, Grove Press, New York, 1962. Further sources on the case are discussed pp.148–66, Dominick T. Armentano, Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure, Holmes & Meier, New York, 1990. p.150, Thomas J. Watson Jr and Peter Petre, Father, Son & Co. My Life at IBM and Beyond, Bantam, New York, 1990. p.150, ibid. pp.3–28, Leverett S. Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration, Brookings, Washington, 1935.

Notes to pages 195–198 385 210

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pp.162, 212, 459, 528, ibid. For a review of the pros and cons for organized labour see especially pp.527–31, ibid. For a review of the cons see Bernard Bellush, The Failure of the NRA, Norton, New York, 1975. pp.166–8, Lyon, op. cit. Membership of about one code authority in four was determined by a trade association. p.206, ibid. pp.260–9, ibid. There was a similar failure of compliance with the labour provisions of the Act. pp.452–61, 528, ibid. pp.180–90, 210, 227, 249–52, ibid. ibid; for an account of Henry Ford’s refusal to collaborate with other automobile manufacturers, as well as the Federal Government pp.77–83, 94–5, Sidney Fine, The Automobile under the Blue Eagle: Labor, Management, and the Automobile Manufacturing Code, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1963. Congressional opposition to the NRA was also gathering strength. pp.705–15, Lyon, op. cit. pp.181–206, Robert A. Kagan, Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001. The NRA does not appear to have left any enduring legacy of association among businessmen. ‘Of the 800 trade associations formed between 1933 and 1936 only 275 were still active by the time of American entry into the Second World War.’ p.296, David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America, Basic Books, New York, 1989. pp.255–73, Kagan, op. cit. In 2001, Vogel was surprised to notice the emergence of a number of regulatory policies in which European standards are now stricter than their American counterparts. His notable examples were GM crops, growth hormones for cattle, and animal protection. pp.5–7, David Vogel, ‘The New Politics of Risk Regulation in Europe’, Discussion Paper No. 3, Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics, 2001. One has still to see, however, whether this tougher regulatory stance applies to large European as well as to large American companies. pp.25–6, 81, Lynd & Lynd; p.81, West, op. cit. p.89, G. William Domhoff, State Autonomy or Class Dominance?: Case Studies on Policy Making in America, Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1996. pp.91, 97, ibid. p.167, Kingston, op. cit. pp.342–4, E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, Vintage, New York, 1964. pp.20, 124–5, David T. Stanley, Dean E. Mann, Jameson W. Doig, Men Who Govern: A Biographical Profile of Federal Political Executives, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. 1967. The proportion rose to 25% when all private schools are included, though it then became uncertain whether we were still referring to an elite, since ‘all private schools’ included parochial Catholic schools and those of other religious denominations. pp.21–3, 126, ibid. pp.36, 132, W. Lloyd Warner et al., The American Federal Executive, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1963. They did not try to identify the contribution of private secondary schools which suggests that they did not consider them significant. His governmental elite included the president, senior advisers, the vicepresident and cabinet secretaries, deputy and assistant secretaries in all executive departments, congressional committee chairpersons, and ranking minority members, House and Senate party leaders, justices of the Supreme Court,

386 Notes to pages 198–200

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members of the Federal Reserve Board, and Council of Economic Advisers. In all, they totalled 227, to which were added 59 persons of comparable authority in the armed services. p.12, ibid. Between 57% and 67% of those in his four samples had attended college, and of these between 32% and 16% had been undergraduates at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, but the ‘the proportion of those attending these prestigious private schools was declining.’ pp.168, 174, Granick, op. cit. p.154, Thomas R. Dye, Who’s Running America? Institutional Leadership in the United States, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976. pp.133, 142, Thomas R. Dye, Who’s Running America? The Bush Restoration, 7th Edition Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 2002. His italics. The sample size has increased from 5,778 to 7,314 in the seven editions of his work, but his conclusions have changed hardly at all. p.10, ibid. Dye thought a stronger case might be built on another of his findings – that about 30% of all American elites in his surveys had come from an upper class family background – but he was still not persuaded. p.151, ibid. p.32, Donald Matthews, The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers, Doubleday, New York, 1954. pp.211–13. Dye, 1976, op. cit. However, he also pointed out that a quarter of the governmental elite had previously held high corporate positions – a kind of mobility for which there is no French counterpart – while ‘nearly 40% of the corporate elites have held government jobs’, a much lower percentage than that recorded in the studies of the French business elite cited above. ibid. pp.137–45, 212, ibid. pp.30, 136, Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, Stanley Rothman, American Elites, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996. Their sample of about 1,800 was divided into 12 elites. Of the half whose fathers’ occupation was classified, one-third were blue collar and two-thirds white. p.26, ibid. Trow observed that he could ‘never remember hearing a California legislator demand that a university increase access for the sons and daughters of working class families’, and noted that while a recent OECD report treated ‘education and stratification’ and other familiar European categories, they could not include any comparative data of this kind about Californian higher education because ‘our statistics are simply not collected that way’. They were more concerned with the fate of ethnic minorities. p.597, Trow, 1992, op. cit. Tom Wolfe observed ‘Any fool sociologist could tell you there are only two objectively detectable social classes in America: people above the bachelor’s degree line – i.e. people who have graduated from four year colleges – and people below it, who haven’t.’ quoted p.69, Epstein, op. cit. pp.30–1, Matthews, op. cit.; pp.120–1, Roger H. Davidson and Walter J. Oleszek, Congress and its Members, 9th ed., CQ Press, Washington, D.C., 2004. Congressional Research Services Reports www.firstgov.gov. Dye recorded a similar decline in the political elite as a whole during the Reagan presidency, and even more so during Clinton’s. p.81, Dye, 2002, op. cit. Of 1,000 CEOs surveyed in 1987, 11.7% were lawyers and 8.1% had practiced as lawyers p.131, Tom Priest and R.A. Rothman, ‘Lawyers in Chief Executive Positions: A Historical Analysis of Careers’, Work and Occupations, Vol. 12, 1985. Tocqueville, of course, first suggested that since American businessmen had few common ties with one another a new aristocracy was more likely to emerge on the bench and bar.

Notes to pages 200–204 387 238

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The classic case is the opposition from lawyer-legislators in the state assembly of New York to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the flagship of the revived profession, when it attempted to obtain a charter in 1870. p.45, E. George Martin, Causes and Conflicts: The Centennial History of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 1870–1970, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1970. Antagonisms and suspicions between lawyers in bar associations and lawyers in the legislature often surfaced in arguments over ‘integrated’ (i.e. mandatory, official) bar associations. pp.73–4, Dayton David McKean, The Integrated Bar, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1963. Michael Useem, ‘The Social Organization of the American Business Elite and Participation of Corporation Directors in the Governance of American Institutions’, pp.553–72, American Sociological Review, Vol. 44, August, 1979. pp.561–2, ibid. For some reason, ordinary members as well as directors or board members were included in this last category. p.192, Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K., Oxford University Press, New York, 1984. pp.71–99, 107–9, 154, 250, G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America, Random House, New York, 1970. He elaborated and reiterated these arguments or variants of them in a succession of subsequent books. a conclusion that is not based on a thorough study of all his works. Henry Berger, Organized Labor and American Foreign Policy, pp.193–213, in Irving Louis Horowitz et al., eds, The American Working Class: Prospects for the 1980s, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, N.J. 1979. pp.194–5, ibid. p.197, ibid. Berger pointed out that the power base of the president, George Meany, was among the building trades, and in all probability they were more sympathetic to the official position of the AFL-CIO, which may therefore not have been quite so unrepresentative as it appeared. ibid. On social issues, Silk and Vogel observed, organized labour is highly sympathetic to business, ‘more ally than adversary’ p.165, Silk and Vogel, 1976. As noted earlier, Illinois miners in the 1890s and post World War I shared many of the goals of their Scottish counterprarts but when it came to all-out socialist collectivist measures, such as the nationalization of the industry, …the American colliers were far more hesitant than their British counterparts’ and hence less likely to embrace a left-wing political party that advocated collectivist goals.’ pp.232–4, Laslett, op. cit. p.103, Davis, 1986, op. cit. While Halle’s worker-informants frequently criticized the unfairness of the distribution of rewards in the United States, they had no notion of an alternative political or economic system, and never expressed the wish that capitalism itself should be replaced. pp.219, Halle, op. cit. unless we assume that this ruling class is so powerful that it has determined the opinions of the most Americans, while only Domhoff and a handful of other independent-minded thinkers were able to escape their influence. There seems no good reason to make such an assumption. p.103, Davis, 1986, op. cit. p.145, Fuerst, op. cit. By contrast 42% of the British thought it was a government responsibility to reduce income differences. p.25, Jowell et al., op. cit. One kind of government

388 Notes to pages 204–213

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action has, however, always been more popular among Americans – to increase ‘opportunities for young people to go to college’. see fn 144, supra. p.302, Coleman and Rainwater, op. cit. p.177, Jackman and Jackman, op. cit. Gordon Marshall, ‘Some remarks on the study of working class consciousness,’ in D. Rose, ed., Social Stratification and Economic Change, Hutchinson, London, 1988; Davis, 1986, op. cit.; T.W. Smith, ‘Inequality and Welfare’ in R. Jowell, British Social Attitudes: Special International Report, Gower, Aldershot, 1989. p.290, Vogel, 1989, op. cit. p.291, ibid. This conversation may well, however, be an example of Polsby’s law that ‘famous sayings migrate to famous mouths.’ This remark has also been attributed to Lord Beaverbrook. p.72, Epstein, op. cit. p.297, Halle, op. cit.

Chapter 7

Interim Conclusions from Three Societies

1 Mann came closest to doing so when he argued that ‘revolutionary potential is greatest in situations of uneven economic and social development, when the Capital-Labour contradiction may be reinforced by other social conflicts.’ However, he did not go on to compare the ‘unevenness’ or ‘contradictions’ of capitalist societies, and instead located ‘the major determinants of contemporary class consciousness outside the necessary structure of capitalism itself.’ He is hardly, therefore, an alternative. Michael Mann, Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class, Macmillan, London, 1973. As noted earlier, Wright’s explanations of the differences in class formations in various industrial societies are entirely political. pp.33–4, supra. 2 The declining interest in class analysis, and especially in materialist explanations of class, is illustrated by many of the contributions to David J. Lee and Bryan S. Turner, eds, Conflicts of Class: Debating Inequality in late Industrialism, Longmans, London, 1996. 3 Aage B. Sorensen, ‘Toward a Sounder Basis of Class Theory’, pp.1523–58, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 6, May 2000. 4 His fourth example ‘talented sportsmen’, seems to be of marginal importance in this context. 5 Daniel J. Doyle, ‘Cocoa and Class in British Popular Press Advertising’, pp.11–39, Thomas J. Edward Walker, ed., Illusive Identity: The Blurring of Working Class Consciousness in Modern Western Culture, Lexington, Lanham, 2002. 6 pp.270–9, Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1957; pp.224–30, Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1995. 7 Wright, for instance, found that ‘the marriage market’ undermined property and class barriers. One might even cite Marx himself, since as Wright pointed out, he thought that classes might well build on ‘traditional ascriptive forms of oppression and inequality’ which would be destroyed by the market. p.541, Wright, op. cit.

Chapter 8 1

Re-examining the English Mystery

Albert White, Self-government at the King’s Command: A Study in the Beginnings of English Democracy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1933.

Notes to pages 213–216 389 2

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Sayles rather sniffily objected to the term ‘self-government at the king’s command’, and thought it may be ‘seriously misleading’, because what they did was done ‘in obedience to instructions from the king, and nothing was done in the sphere of local government by county courts, hundred courts, knights of the shire or borough officials without his direct order or ultimate sanction.’ He failed, however, to document what he called the ‘rapidly increasing host of civil servants’, or to provide any comparative measure of its magnitude, or to explain how the king could sanction, or even know, what was being done in his name by nobility, jurors, coroners, knights, free holders and chartered bodies across the land. pp.437–8, G.O. Sayles, The Medieval Foundations of Modern England, Perpetua, New York, 1961. pp.97–9, Michael Briddick, ‘The Early Modern English State and the Question of Differentiation, from 1550 to 1700’, pp.92–111, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Vol. 38, No. 1, January 1996. pp.111–26, M.L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984. p.113, ibid. So far as I can discover, no general histories of these events treat them as a defining moment in the relationship between the state and civil society, but see pp.232–59, J.H. Sacret, ‘The Restoration Government and Municipal Corporations’, English Historical Review, Vol. XLV, April, 1930; Michael Landon, The Triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics 1678–1689, University of Alabama, Alabama, 1970. They are certainly not remembered or celebrated as a revolution. The tercentenary passed by unnoticed, apart from a perceptive, and tactful, speech to both houses of Parliament by HM the Queen. This was the ninth item on the main BBC Radio News that evening. It was printed in full in The Times, of the following day, July 21st, 1988. However, since Scotland and Ireland were centres of support for James II, this was plainly not a revolution that could be celebrated throughout the British Isles. They were the Earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire and Danby, Lords Lumley and Russell, Henry Compton, the suspended Bishop of London, and Henry Sidney who wrote the letter, which is reprinted pp.313–14, Stuart E. Prall, The Bloodless Revolution: England, 1688, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1985. a self-deception that is superbly explored in Howard Nenner, By Colour of Law: Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England 1660–1689, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1977. pp.78–84, W.L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite, Macgibbon & Kee, London, 1965. More than two-thirds of Salisbury’s cabinet in 1895 was aristocratic, as was that of Derby in 1852, though Grey’s, the cabinet that actually initiated the Great Reform Act in 1832, was the most aristocratic of all, with only one commoner. p.210, Walter L. Arnstein, ‘The Survival of the Victorian Aristocracy’, pp.203–57, Frederic Jaher, ed., The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1973. p.704, David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1990. They were, as Cannadine observed, unique among the aristocracies of Europe in that they were never ‘the victims of civil war, armed invasion, proletarian revolution or military defeat.’ p.703, ibid.

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25

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By the House of Lords Act 1999, which came into effect in 2002. Proposals for further reform including the removal of the remaining hereditary peers, may be found on www.dca.gov.uk/constitution/holref More of a part than other aristocracies according to some observers. p.13, Spring, op. cit.; pp.95–6, 261, Paul. H. Wilken, Entrepreneurship: A Comparative and Historical Study, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1979. p.328, Guttsman, op. cit. The best raw data to measure its role in this respect is to be found in Andrew Roth with Janice Kerbey, Lord on the Board, Parliamentary Profiles, London, 1972. Roth guessed that ‘probably a third of Britain’s millionaires are in the House of Lords’, and seemed more impressed by their cosmetic function for companies. p.viii, ibid. Crewe’s recent study is more concerned with the House of Lords corporate culture, and pays little attention to class. Emma Crewe, Lords of Parliament: Manners, Rituals and Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005. pp.94–5, R.H. Tawney, Equality, Allen & Unwin, London, 1931. p.54, Board of Education, The Public Schools and the General Education System, 1944. About 22% of the Labour Government of 1945, 34% of that of 1951, 45% leaders of business and industry, 62% of both judges and bishops, around 80% of the Conservative governments of 1951–1960, and 86% of ambassadors, were from public schools, as were 31% of the ‘scientific directorate’, 40% of the ‘governors of culture and the arts’, and 56% of ‘government committee men’. pp.336–53, Guttsman, op. cit. He presented only the raw data from his own, and other non-random samples he had found, which was not always complete or commensurate. He also used the broadest definition of public schools. see p.220 infra. The percentages are mine. pp.84–9, John Fidler, The British Business Elite: Its Attitudes to Class, Status and Power, Routledge, Kegan & Paul, London, 1981. Leslie Hannah, ‘Education, Opportunity and Business Leadership’, A lecture to celebrate the launch of the Foundation for Manufacturing and Industry, The Guildhall, November 1993. mimeo. His figure was, however, not far below that of Guttsman 30 years before. fn 19, supra. The Headmasters’ Conference dates from a meeting convened by the headmaster of Uppingham in 1872. New members are elected by existing ones, hence it is a co-opted elite of independent schools. In 1963 it had 196 members, and by 2006 some 250. p.3, Graham Kalton, The Public Schools: A Factual Survey, Longmans Green, 1966; www.hmc.org.uk p.237, McKibbin, op. cit. Sakharov told how selected Komsomol members who had graduated from university were lavishly wined and dined at the best restaurants, and entertained in every way. They were then asked ‘Would you like to live like this the rest of your life? If so, go to the VPSh, meaning the Higher Party School, graduation from which guaranteed even the minimally gifted person, a second secretaryship of a regional committee.’ pp.26–7, Sakharov, op. cit. pp.44–5, Edward C. Mack, Public Schools and Public Opinion 1780–1860: An Examination of the Relationship between Contemporary Ideas and the Evolution of an English Institution, Methuen, London, 1938. pp.100–9, Rupert Wilkinson, The Prefects: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition, A Comparative Study of the Making of Rulers, Oxford University Press, 1964. In his words the public school was ‘a citadel against the material-

Notes to pages 221–226 391

27 28

29 30

31

32

33 34 35

36 37

38 39

40 41 42

ism and selfishness generated by the new capitalism of the Industrial Revolution.’ pp.91–2, ibid. see pp.67–73, Orwell, 1968, op. cit.; Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory, Secker & Warburg London, 1961. Their analysis was part of the National Child Development Study (NCDS). This cohort was subject to five follow-up surveys between 1965 and 1991. pp.86–8, 96, Anthony Heath and Sin Yi Cheung, ‘Education and Opportunity in Britain’ pp.71–101, in Yossi Shavit and Walter Müller, eds, From School to Work: A Comparative Study of Educational Qualifications and Occupational Destinations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997. Sam Aaronovitch, The Ruling Class: A Study of British Finance Capital, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1961. Tom Lupton and C. Shirley Wilson, ‘The Social Background of “Top Decision Makers”’, pp.30–51, Manchester School, Jan 1959. Guttsman’s evidence supported them on many of these points, see especially columns 8 and 9, p.336, op. cit. Anthony Sampson, The Anatomy of Britain, 1962; Richard Whitley ‘Commonalities and Connections Among Directors of Large Financial Institutions, Sociological Review, Nov. 1973. Scott showed that in 1904 there were a large number of interlocking directors between financial institutions, but ‘these had produced no substantial links with enterprises involved in manufacturing industry.’ There were, however, closer links at local level. The national links increased by 1938, but by 1976 had fallen back again, so ‘a separation of City financial interests and other business interests was still apparent.’ His measures for 1988 were ‘very similar to those found for 1976’, and revealed ‘a structural separation between two network positions, a dominant position occupied by the large financial institutions and a subordinate position occupied by the industrial and retailing concerns.’ pp.163–8, John Scott, ‘Transformations in the British Economic Elite’, pp.155–73, in Dogan, ed., op. cit. pp.169–92, Ken Roberts, Class in Modern Britain, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001. ‘The Rich List’ www.timesonline.co.uk p.37, James B. Christoph, ‘Higher Civil Servants and the Politics of Consensualism in Great Britain’, in Mattei Dogan, ed., The Mandarins of Western Europe: The Political Role of Top Civil Servants, Wiley, New York, 1975. pp.188–92, Dennis Kavanagh and David Richards, ‘Prime Ministers, Ministers and Civil Servants in Britain’, pp.175–96, Dogan, 2003, op. cit. As noted above, Dye found that a quarter of the American governmental elite had previously held high corporate positions, and that ‘nearly 40% of the corporate elites have held government jobs.’ fn 228, p.386, supra; in 1967 Stanley et al. found that over the five administrations from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson 24% had come from business, though 64% had come from private employment of all kinds. Lawyers were the other largest group. p.34, Stanley, Mann & Doig, op. cit. p.50, Christoph, op. cit. p.176, Kavanagh & Richards, op. cit. They pointed out that in the past 50 years, only two former civil servants had achieved high political office, one being Harold Wilson who was a wartime civil servant. ibid. p.174, Granick, op. cit. pp.90, 187, Fidler, op. cit. pp.218–26, ibid.

392 Notes to pages 226–231 43

44

45

46

47

48

49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56

57

They felt Labour was closer to unions, and the Conservatives to the City, while they themselves were unloved by either party. However, 28% of them made donations to the Conservative Party, and a further 29% also gave to various propaganda organizations in favour of free enterprise. p.228, ibid. Fulcher’s comparison of the organization of Swedish and British employers strongly corroborated this point, since one of its major themes was the ‘weakness of national employer organization in Britain.’ He attributed the failure of corporatist policies in Britain in the 1970s to the fact that ‘employer organizations have lacked the organizational capacity to perform such a role.’ pp.309ff, Fulcher, op. cit. pp.231–4, Fidler, op. cit. This is sharply at odds with the impression created by Useem, though his arguments may reasonably be ignored since he declined to confront, or even mention, Fidler’s much more convincing data. pp.187–92, Useem, op. cit. pp.28–9. Frans N. Stokman and Frans W. Wasseur, ‘National Networks in 1976; A Structural Comparison, pp.20–44, in Frans N. Stokman, Rolf Ziegler and John Scott, Networks of Corporate Power: A Comparative Analysis of Ten Countries, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1985. pp.268–9, 276, Rolf Ziegler, ‘Conclusion’, in Stokman et al., op. cit. One might add that a much higher degree of clustering and centralization were found in the small countries in the study, such as Austria, Belgium and Finland, than in Britain, France or the United States. Guttsman was persuaded that British elites were interconnected, that what he called ‘pluralists of power’ were common, and he presented sociograms, an early form of network analysis, to illustrate their ‘peregrinations’. However most of these peregrinations were through advisory committees of one sort or another, and for some reason, he neglected to provide a sociogram of the economic elite. He did not present any comparative evidence. pp.359–67, Guttsman, op. cit. Oliver Macdonagh, Early Victorian Government, 1830–1870, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1977. Stephen Wilks, In the Public Interest: Competition Policy and the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999. p.149, ibid. pp.110, 149, 164, ibid. David Vogel, National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Protection in Britain and the United States, Cornell, Ithaca, 1986. He found a similar contrast in the regulation of occupational health and safety, consumer protection and financial markets. pp.195–225, ibid. Margaret B.W. Graham, ‘R&D and Competition in England and the United States: The Case of the Aluminum Dirigible,’ pp.261–85, Business History Review, 62, Summer, 1988. John Hendry, Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1989. pp.243–4, David Coates, ed., Industrial Policy in Britain, Macmillan, London 1996. Policies towards agriculture and the military were excluded from this conclusion. F.M.L. Thompson perceptively observed that ‘Only once in the nineteenth century was there a possibility of an antielite, with a class basis, and that was when the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League were poised for a general attack on the aristocratic monopoly. Even then, the width of the objectives in

Notes to pages 231–234 393

58 59

60 61 62

63

64

65

66 67

68

69 70

administrative, political and social reconstruction probably vastly exceeded the width of support, so that the rapid collapse after 1846 of any prospect of a middle class elite peddling a general bourgeois ethic comes as little surprise.’ p.37, F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Britain’ pp.22–44, in Spring, op. cit. pp.29–30, 148, R.H. Gretton, The English Middle Class, Bell, London, 1919. There were 48 of them. Henry Havard, and Marius Vachon, Les Manufactures Nationales: Les Gobelins, la Savonnerie, Sévres, Beauvais, Paris, 1889; for the foundry at Indret http://boisseau, and the drapery at Montolieu www.manufacture.nl/Frans/histoire In 1791, when the Constituent Assembly sought to liquidate these offices, it received 45,000 claims for compensation. p.309, Doyle, op. cit. The best general account is William Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1913. Her words were ‘Since I was queen, yet did I never put my pen to any grant but upon pretext and semblance made me, that it was for the good and avail of my people generally, though a private profit to some of my ancient servants, who have deserved well; but that my grants shall be made grievances to my people, and oppressions, to be privileged under color of our patents, our princely dignity shall not suffer it … and those varlets, lewd persons, abusers of my bounty, shall know I will not suffer it.’ p.161, ibid. Elizabeth’s speech of 1601, and James I’s Act of 1624 are reprinted pp.325, 337, George Burton Adams and H. Morse Stephens, Select Documents of English Constitutional History, Macmillan, New York, 1908. Root suggested that Elizabeth made every effort to avoid favouring one individual or group, where the Stuarts made no secret of their personal favourites. p.351, Hilton L. Root, ‘The Redistributive Role of Government: Economic Regulation in Old Régime France and England’, pp.338–69, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Vol. 33, No. 2, April 1991. For the former, including the one or two that survived the interregnum, see pp.131–44, and for the latter pp.144–71, Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during the Puritan Revolution, 1640–1660, Routledge, London, 1930. p.53, Robert H. George, ‘The Charters Granted to English Parliamentary Corporations in 1688’, pp.47–56, English Historical Review, Vol. lv, January, 1940; p.124, Landon, op. cit. pp.110–11, ibid. The trial, the circumstances leading to it, the legal merits of the arguments are examined pp.28–54, Jennifer Levin, The Charter Controversy in the City of London 1660–1688, Athlone, London, 1969. pp.353–8, Sir George Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Vol. 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964; pp.120–4, Cecil Wall, H. Charles Cameron and E. Ashworth Underwood, A History of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, Vol. 1, 1617–1815, London, Oxford University Press, 1963. However, several provincial cities continued the struggle after the City of London’s defeat. pp.124–42, Landon, op. cit. For the extensive purges in the Society of Apothecaries following the surrender of their charter pp.101–5, 336–9, Wall et al., op. cit. For the new charter proposed for the Barber-Surgeons see p.96, Jessie Dobson and R. Milnes Walker, The Barbers and Barber-Surgeons of London, Blackwell, Oxford, 1979. Provisions of several other new charters are examined, pp.47–53, George, 1940, op. cit.

394 Notes to pages 234–238 71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79

80 81

82 83

84

85 86 87

For James II’s moves against the universities pp.183–203, David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955; pp.87–91, Levin, op. cit. The fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford refused to elect the royal nominee as their president in 1687, and further sanctions were therefore imposed on them. pp.438–43, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. p.48, George, 1940, op. cit. p.228, Davis, 1961, op. cit. p.93, Levin, op. cit. 2 W&M c8 pp.171–3, The Statutes of the Realm, Vol. 6, Printed by Command of His Majesty George III, London, 1819; p.58, Levin; pp.448–50, 469, Adams and Stephens, ed., op. cit. pp.104–9, 175–82, 291–2, Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts: 1590–1640, Longman, London, 1972. pp.183–4, Geoffrey Millerson, The Qualifying Associations, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964. The way English solicitors realized each of these goals is traced in Michael Burrage, ‘From A Gentleman’s To A Public Profession: status and politics in the history of English solicitors’, pp.45–75, International Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol. 3, No. 1/2, March 1996. Northcote had earlier been Gladstone’s private secretary. Trevelyan was head of the Treasury. The analogy with the ancient professions seems to have been commonplace among civil servants themselves at the time. See the remarks from their Gazette in 1853 quoted p.98, A.P. Donajgrodzki, The Home Office, 1822–1848, Oxford University Press, 1972. Their professional association retains its original name, the First Division Association, see its website www.fda.org.uk for a full explanation and documentation of this hostility until the modest beginnings of formal training in 1963 see pp.111–54, Geoffrey K. Fry, Statesmen in Disguise. The changing role of the Administrative Class of the British Home Civil Service, 1853–1966, Macmillan, London, 1969. Learning by doing has been noted by many observers p.47, Frank Dunnill, The Civil Service: Some Human Aspects, Allen & Unwin, London, 1956; p.37, Hugh Heclo and Aaron Wildavsky, The Private Government of Public Money: Community and Policy Inside British Politics, Macmillan, London, 1974. As in every profession, collegial trust appears to have been a primary ethical ideal. The ‘one inescapable theme in virtually every interview we conducted is the vital importance participants place on personal trust for each other’ p.15ff, Heclo and Wildavsky, op. cit. for references and a discussion of this notion p.178, Kavanagh & Richards, op. cit. Like the ancient professions, they also resisted resort to external legal intervention to resolve internal disputes about employment conditions. In 1961 the Plowden Committee found that they were so concerned with policy advice that they did not have much time for management. In 1968 the Fulton Committee observed that they ‘tended to think of themselves as policy advisers to the people above them rather than as managers of the administrative machine below them.’ both quoted p.195, Gavin Drewry and Tony Butcher, The Civil Service Today, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988.

Notes to pages 238–242 395 88 89

90

91

92

93

94 95

96 97 98

99

pp.45–9, Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, London, 1993. Apart from the examinations, from which there were many exemptions, the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms do not appear to have been a decisive transition towards bureaucracy as Weber defined it. Stephen’s account of the ‘little commonwealth’ and ‘pure democracy’ of the Treasury in 1848 leaves the impression that they might be better described as a transition from a rather lax of gentlemen’s club to one with somewhat more stringent admission requirements. p.45, Henry Parris, Constitutional Bureaucracy: The Development of British Central Administration Since the 18th Century, Allen & Unwin, London, 1969. For sterotypes of the backgrounds, personality types and behaviour of each class see pp.50ff, Dunnill, op. cit. For a full listing, along with their separate career paths and representative associations pp.185–90, Vol. 1, pp.409–99, Vol. 4, Factual, Statistical and Explanatory Papers, Committee under the Chairmanship of Lord Fulton, The Civil Service Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1968. For details see the website of the British Computer Society www. bcs.org.uk. p.618, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. Another example is the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Its royal charter, granted in 2000, and its code of ethics, are reproduced on its website www.cipd.co.uk In the concluding chapter of the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon for which see http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm For an example of the former comparison pp.32–4, Robert Robson, The Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, London, 1959, and for many of the latter J. Stuart Anderson, Lawyers and the Making of English Land Law, 1832–1940, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992. Grant Jordan, Engineers and Professional Self-Regulation: From the Finniston Committee to the Engineering Council, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992. Ad hoc cross-professional comparisons are to be found in the histories of most professions. They were permanently institutionalized in the pay review bodies such as those of the National Board of Prices and Incomes in the late 1960s. For some information of current practices see www.ome.uk.com/review George V. Taylor, ‘Noncapitalist wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, Vol. lxxii, 1967. pp.62–4, 99–102, 134, Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution, Paladin, St. Albans, 1971. For an account of one exceptionally durable one, the Worsted Committee of Yorkshire, formed in the 1770s and still in existence in 1965, see pp.405–37, Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries: From Earliest Times to the Industrial Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965. A 1997 study left the impression that trade associations in Britain were numerous but overlapping, competitive and very poorly organized by comparison with their German counterparts, which performed many more functions and had much greater authority over their members. R.J. Bennett, ed., Trade Associations in Britain and Germany: Responding to Internationalisation and the EU, AngloGerman Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society, London, 1997. In his overall measure of the backgrounds of the ‘rising new men’ of the political elite over the years 1868–1955, Guttsman found 25 in the general category, ‘banking, commerce, entrepreneurs and managers’, versus 78 professionals. There were also 29 union officials, 2 workers, and 11 ‘rentiers’. p.169,

396 Notes to pages 242–249

100

101

102 103

104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Guttsman, op. cit. Since the new elite was dominated by professionals, it is perhaps not surprising that it preserved the titles of the old. Despite their collegial ethic, all professions seem to relish titles. along with some of the landed gentry. pp.10, 17, 67, 105, 242, 315, pp.97, 239, 314 Richard H. Trainor, Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area, 1830–1900, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. Comparing his work with more economically diverse regional capitals he suggested ‘manufacturers were highly influential’ but did not dominate local elites ‘except in the starkest factory or mining towns.’ p.379, ibid. Some of these, Hoggart pointed out, ‘may, if they are known as individuals, escape being defined as one of “Them”’. A general practitioner, for instance, ‘if he wins his way by his devotion to his patients, is not, as a general practitioner, one of “Them”’, but ‘he and his wife as social beings are.’ A parson ‘may or may not be regarded as one of “Them”, according to his behaviour.’ pp.72–3, op. cit. E.P. Thompson, op. cit. His final example, from 1549, was the last such general legislation until the Combination Law of 1799. p.10, Godfrey I.H. Lloyd, The Cutlery Trades: An Historical Essay in the Economics of Small-Scale Production, Longmans, London, 1913. pp.185, 224, George Unwin, The Guilds and Companies of London, Cass, London, 1963 (1st edition 1908). pp.217, 220, ibid. p.228, ibid. p.220, ibid. Burrage and Corry, op. cit. For a brief overview of the protests in eight companies, pp.193–240, James, op. cit. In all, they involved four livery companies, and ten industrial guilds. For a more detailed account of the protests in one livery company pp.112–22, Thomas Girtin, The Golden Ram: A Narrative History of the Clothworkers’ Company, 1528–1958, London, 1958. p.339, Unwin, op. cit. Lloyd, op. cit. p.79, ibid. though it is not on Levin’s list pp.109–12, Levin, op. cit. pp.115–21, ibid. By 1786, there were also 52 friendly societies not based on any particular trade, pp.239–42, ibid. pp.123–4, ibid. p.247, ibid. p.124, ibid. p.253, ibid. p.263, ibid. pp.282–3, ibid. The Nottinghamshire framework knitters first looked for protection to the Needlemakers’ Company in London, presumably because some of them had ties with it. Being disappointed by the Company’s efforts, they formed the Stockingmakers’ Association, which survived for some three years. pp.61–77, William Felkin, A History of Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures, Strange, London, 1867. Rule reported combinations among the journeymen of the Masons and Painter Stainers Company in London in 1750 seeking to preserve the exclusiveness of their trades in defiance of their masters p.189,

Notes to pages 249–254 397

122 123 124 125 126 127

128

129

130

131 132

133

134 135 136

Rule, op. cit. The rules of the union of calico printers in Lancashire bore a marked resemblance to those of the City of London Company, and we may reasonably infer direct continuity. p.295, H.A. Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy, Allen & Unwin, London, 1962. The earliest trade society among London compositors developed out of an association of journeymen belonging to the decrepit Stationers’ Company. pp.1–13, A.E. Musson, The Typographical Association: Origins and History up to 1949, Oxford Univesity Press, London, 1954. p.168, Rule, op. cit. pp.152–6, ibid. pp.156–8, ibid. p.164, ibid. For a critical evaluation of their argument, see pp.149–51, Rule, op. cit. Lujo von Brentano, On the History and Development of Guilds and the Origin of Trade Unions, Trubner, London, 1870. Trade unions, in his view, did not develop directly out of the guilds, but were on the contrary a response to their breakdown, and attempted to retrieve the old order or create a new one modelled on the old. Apart from the works of Turner, Lloyd and Rule already cited, see R.A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism, Allen & Unwin, London, 1979; C.R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations 1717–1800, Croom Helm, London, 1980; R. Price, Masters, Unions and Men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, as well as many histories of particular trades, such as pp.17–60, Ted Brake, Men of Good Character: A History of the National Union of Sheet Metal Workers, Coppersmiths, Heating and Domestic Engineers, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1985. Hundreds of these are reproduced in John Gorman, Banner Bright, Allen Lane, London, 1973. A few of them, temporarily at least, included Marx and Lenin, a fair reflection perhaps of the influence of Marxist or Soviet inspired socialism on the British labour movement. T.K. Derry, ‘The Repeal of the Apprenticeship Clauses of the Statute of Apprentices’, pp.67–87, Economic History Review, III, 1931–1932. The following paragraphs are entirely indebted to this essay, though for another account that does not differ in essentials pp.63–7, Brake, op. cit. p.76, op. cit. Tilly thought that such movements began at a later date, and gave credit to middle class reformers that properly belongs to working men. Charles Tilly, ‘Britain Creates the Social Movement’, pp.21–51, James E. Cronin and Jonathan Schneer, eds, Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain, Croom Helm, London, 1982. Thompson, however, mentioned it en passant but is preoccupied with other emerging forms of protest and suffering that he thought were more modern. Why he did not feature it as a nationally organized class movement, which by his standards it certainly was, and as one of the great innovative achievements of the English working class, is puzzling. It would not, however, have fitted well into his implicit timetable of the ‘making of the English working class’. p.253, Thompson, 1965, op. cit. p.86, Derry, op. cit. p.127, Dobson; see also p.177, Rule, op. cit. Clive Behagg, ‘Controlling the Product: Work, Time, and the Early Industrial Workforce in Britain, 1800–1850, pp.41–58, Gary Cross, ed., Worktime and

398 Notes to pages 254–260

137 138 139 140

141

142

143

144 145

146

147

148 149

150

151 152 153

Industrialization: An International History, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1988. p.46, ibid. p.268, Lloyd, op. cit. Turner evidently found it difficult to grasp the content of their ‘skill’. pp.164–5, Turner, H.A. op. cit. pp.66–72, 209, Judith Vichniac, The Management of Labor: The British and French Iron and Steel Trade Industries, 1860–1918, JAI, Greenwich, 1990; and Holt, op. cit. Edward H. Lorenz, ‘Two Patterns of Development: The Labour Process in the British and French Shipbuilding Industries 1880–1930’, pp.599–630, Journal of Economic History, 1984. pp.229, 234, Duncan Gallie, In Search of the New Working Class: Automation and Social Integration within the Capitalist Enterprise, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978. Pierre Dubois, ‘Workers Control over the Organization of Work: French and English Maintenance Workers in Mass Production Industry’, pp.347–60, Organization Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1981. Dwight Rayton, Shop Floor Democracy in Action: A Personal Account of the Coventry Gang System, Industrial Common Ownership Movement, London, 1992. Many of his comments suggest that the gangs were formed by skilled craftsmen, but he gave no breakdown of their skill composition, or of their links with the unions, other than to say they were loyal members. Wayne Lewchuk, American Technology and the British Vehicle Industry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. It was further corroborated by a case study of a metal-working factory in the same area, even though its authors were persuaded it was ‘atypical’. Hugh Scullion and P.K. Edwards, ‘Craft Unionism, Job Controls and Management Strategy: Premier Metals, 1955–1980’, in M. Terry and P.K. Edwards, eds, Shopfloor Politics and Job Controls: The Post-War Engineering Industry, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988. British automobile workers seldom resisted new production technology per se. ‘In our research’, he noted, ‘we have uncovered very few cases of labour resisting the introduction of new production techniques in the motor industry.’ Sometimes, of course, they entailed the introduction of new work relationships. pp.73, 101, 131, 141, ibid. p.183, ibid. pp.503, 511, 517, Leon Grunberg, ‘Workplace Relations in the Economic Crisis: A Comparison of a British and French Automobile Plant’, pp.503–29, Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1986. pp.627–9 Leon Grunberg, ‘The Effects of the Social Relations of Production on Productivity and Workers’ Safety: an ignored set of relationships’, pp.621–34, International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1983. The French plant was, however, larger, had more advanced facilities and machinery, and a higher proportion of immigrant workers. S.R. Timperley, ‘A Study of a Self-Governing Work Group’, pp.259–80, Sociological Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1970. p.269, ibid. Skilled are ‘craftsmen, foremen and kindred workers’. Unskilled are ‘operatives and kindred workers’ p.139, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, 1975, op. cit.; p.417, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1984; p.413, 1995; p.395, 2003, Washington, D.C.

Notes to pages 260–264 399 154

155

156

157

158

159

160 161 162

163

164

Table 19, Census 1961, HMSO 1966; Table 29, Census 1971, Economic Activity HMSO, 1975; Table 17, p.548, Economic Activity, Great Britain, Census 1981, HMSO, 1984; p.535, Census 1991, OPCS and Reg-Gen Scotland, HMSO, 1994, Table S132, p.40, Census 2001, National Report for England and Wales, Pt. 2. TSO, London, 2002. Foremen have been included with skilled workers to try and preserve comparability with the U.S. Roughly comparable, that is, if qualifiés and non-qualifiés may be taken as equivalent to skilled and non-skilled Qualifiés et non-qualifiés Population Active Emploi et Chomage Depuis Trente Ans Les Collections de l’insée, 123D, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques, Nov 1987. pp.92–7, David Marsden, A Theory of Employment Systems: Micro-Foundations of Societal Diversity, Oxford University Press, PLACE, 1999. In the U.S. they are collected by grades on job ladders, in Japan by rank, age or length of service, and in France by a mix of the knowledge required, autonomy, responsibility and complexity of a job. This point is repeatedly made by Perkin. ‘Even the most class conscious of industrial disputes’, he observed, had a ‘professional dimension to them.’ p.466, Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, Routledge, London, 1989. H.J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour-Saving Inventions, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1962; S.N. Broadberry, The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850–1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997. He concluded ‘that purposive collective association (particularly of labour) is not a by-product of industrial capitalism – and thus … an artificial or contrived imposition on a supposed state of natural competitiveness – but the result of a separate and continuing impulse to associate, the expression of which was only interrupted and modified by the economic revolution.’ p.295, Turner, op. cit. pp.317–26, Truant, op. cit. Tom Mann quoted p.10, Richard Hyman, The Workers’ Union, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971. Hyman pointed out that although the new unions began their organizing campaigns in the late 1880s, they ‘only came into their own’ and secured substantial membership in mass production and hitherto weakly-organized industries in the years preceding World War I. pp.259–61, Richard Hyman, ‘Mass organization and Militancy in Britain; Contrasts and Continuities’ pp.250–65, Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Han-Gerhard Husung, ed., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880–1914, Allen & Unwin, London, 1985. It has often been suggested that it was precisely because the Transport & General, under the shrewd leadership of Ernest Bevin, created an internal structure that provided a large degree of autonomy for the ‘trade groups’ within it, even though it was recruiting semi and unskilled workers, that it became the largest union in the country after the First World War. pp.5–8, H.A. Clegg, General Union: A Study of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, Blackwell, Oxford, 1954. For another example Sir William Richardson, A Union of Many Trades: The History of USDAW (the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers), USDAW, Manchester, 1979. Arthur Marsh and Victoria Ryan, Historical Directory of Trade Unions, 3 vols, Gower, London, 1982, 1983, 1987.

400 Notes to pages 265–267 165 166

167 168

169

170

171 172

173

174

175

Edelstein and Warner, fn 140, p.381, supra. The strange notion that workers are incapable of displaying any class solidarity unless they abandoned their trade solidarity seems to be deeply embedded in labour history, and along with it a decided prejudice against craft unions. For a rare exception see Antoine Joseph, Skilled Workers’ Solidarity: The American Experience in Comparative Perspective, Garland, New York, 2000. On the premise that ‘workers are organized as a class whenever they are organized as workers’ he argued that the American Federation of Labor in the Gilded Age was a class organization pp.65, 173–4, ibid. Marsh & Ryan, op. cit. Millerson, op. cit.; Nigel Harris, Professional Codes of Conduct in the United Kingdom: A Directory, Mansell, London, 1989; Patricia Millard, ed., Associations and Professional Bodies of the United Kingdom: An Alphabetical and Subject Classified Guide to over 3600 Organisations, Gale Research International, New York, 1994, 13th ed., or perhaps the list of chapters granted by the Privy Council since 1231 on www.privy-council.org.uk Michael Burrage, ‘School versus Practice-based education: a comparison of three modern societies’ in Sheldon Rothblatt and Björn Wittrock, eds, The European and American University since 1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992. for a vivid account of the guild roots of their preference pp.95–100, Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life 1660–1730, Methuen, London, 1989. pp.225, 229, Harold Perkin, ‘The Recruitment of Elites in British Society Since 1800’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 12, No. 2 Winter, 1978. pp.303–4fn, Erickson and Goldthorpe, op. cit.; pp.20, 26, 37, Yossi Shavit and Walter Müller, ‘The Institutional Embeddedness of the Stratification Process: a comparative study of the qualifications and occupations in thirteen countries’, pp.1–48, Shavit & Müller, op. cit. Their data referred, however, to the 1970s. Kynaston noted ‘an attitude of suspicion’ towards graduates in the City of London, at least until recent times see pp.423, 787–9, David Kynaston, The City of London, Volume 4: A Club No More, 1945–2000, Chatto & Windus, London, 2001. Beevor noticed it in the British army pp.102–3, Anthony Beevor, Inside the British Army, Corgi, London, 1993. At least one-third of the heirs of the ‘founder-entrepreneurs’ of notable British firms between 1880–1980 were trained by apprenticeship. Two-thirds of the founders had themselves been trained in this way. pp.38–9, Christine Shaw, Patterns of Success: Twentieth Century Entrepreneurs in the Dictionary of Business Biography, Discussion Paper No. 114, Centre of Economic Performance, London School of Economics, 1993. Copeman’s analysis of the careers of 90 business leaders in 1966 found that 19 had served a craft apprenticeship, another 18 had served practice-based professional articles, 32 had begun as messenger or office boys, clerks or undefined trainees and assistants, usually at the age of 15 or 16. Only 23 had university degrees. p.21, George Copeman, The Chief Executive and Business Growth: A Comparison of the United States, Britain and Germany, Leviathan House, London, 1971. p.209, British Labour Statistics Yearbook, 1969, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1971. In absolute numbers, 1966 was the peak year for apprentices and 1968 for ‘apprentices plus other trainees’. p.25, Howard F. Gospel, The Decline of Apprenticeship Training in Britain, Discussion Paper No. 189, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, 1994.

Notes to pages 267–276 401 176

177

178

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180 181 182 183 184 185

186

187 188

189

see especially pp.428–38, Shadwell, op. cit.; P.L. Robertson, Technical Education in the British Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Industry, 1863–1914, Economic History Review, 27, 1974; Robert J. Bennett, Howard Glennerster and D. Nevison, Learning Should Pay, BP Educational Services, Poole, 1992. All these points cannot be documented here. However, the least well-known, the ‘problem’ of early leaving pre- and post-World War II, was examined in Early Leaving: A Report of the Central Council for Education (England). Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1954. It included data on those at grammar and other schools who had the academic ability to continue to A-levels and therefore to university, but preferred to enter a professional or manual apprenticeships. pp.50–5, ibid. One reason for thinking that the grandes écoles have been significant agents of class formation in France is that much of the training they provide is in fact practice-based and practitioner-controlled. p.13, John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez Faire, Leonard & Virginia Woolf, London, 1927. He traced its origins in France to the late seventeenth, or more probably, mid-eighteenth century. pp.18–19, ibid. which necessarily means parting company with Keynes’ exclusively intellectual account of the origins of the doctrine. pp.46–8, Arthur J. Taylor, Laissez-Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain, Macmillan, London, 1972. pp.85, 87, Derry, op. cit. The provisions of both acts are analysed in C.G. Hanson, Trade Unions: A Century of Privilege? Occasional Paper, 38, Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1973. p.16, ibid. Sidney Webb had signed the majority report, and with his wife later described the act as giving ‘an extraordinary and unlimited immunity, however great may be the damage caused, and however unwarranted the act, which most lawyers, as well as employers, regard as nothing less than monstrous.’ p.17, ibid. for instance, the Trade Disputes Act of 1927 outlawed political strikes, but was repealed in 1946. Similarly, the House of Lords decision in Rookes v. Barnard in 1965, which allowed employers to sue for intimidation was reversed by the Trade Disputes Act of the same year. p.18, ibid. But then he would doubtless have replied that the inns of court were not created by an act of Parliament. Hanson shows ‘that in the late 19th and early 20th century the trade unions had extraordinary success in persuading parliament to legislate in their favour contrary to advice it received.’ p.8, op. cit. p.90, Tom Sharpe, ‘British Competition Policy in Perspective’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1985.

Chapter 9 Argument

Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity of the

1 George Eliot used the term ‘intellectuals’ as early as 1852. However, it is clear that she did not have precise collective referents, and she was herself a decidedly ‘unattached’ intellectual. Sheldon Rothblatt, ‘George Eliot as a Type of European Intellectual’, pp.47–65, History of European Ideas, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1986. 2 pp.196, 208, 214, Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England 1860–1870, trans by Edward Hyams, Thames & Hudson, London, 1957.

402 Notes to pages 276–283 3 p.285, N.G. Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, pp.243–87, in J.H. Plumb, ed., Studies in Social History, Longmans Green, London, 1955. 4 pp.199–226, Collini, op. cit. 5 p.237, T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, Croom Helm, London, 1982. 6 p.210, Collini, op. cit. 7 pp.212–13, ibid. Aron anticipated several of these points in his wider cross-societal comparison 40 years earlier, which remains the best comparative analysis of intellectuals to date. He placed Britain between France, the ‘paradise’ of intellectuals, and the United States, which he thought was their ‘hell’. pp.203–35, Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Secker & Warburg, London, 1957. 8 English intellectuals were, Aron observed, ‘no less attached to parliamentary institutions than conservatives.’ p.229, ibid. 9 A point which Charle gave some emphasis. In England ‘Il n’existe pas …de véritable académie susceptible de fixer une norme, d’attribuer des récompenses à la literature vivante et de servir de repoussir aux novateurs. … Le marché reste donc la principale instance d’évaluation et hiérarchisation.…’ pp.228–9, Christophe Charle, Les Intellectuels en Europe au XIXe Siècle: Essai d’histoire comparée, Seuil, Paris, 1996. 10 Le Chapelier’s attempts to persuade the journeymen carpenters and other craftsmen in Paris that their corporate bodies were inconsistent with revolutionary ideals has been noted, but most lawyers repeatedly declined to accept that revolution entailed any change in their own institutions. For French, American and English examples see p.632, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. 11 Lenore O’Boyle, ‘The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe 1800–1850’, pp.471–95, Journal of Modern History, XLII, December 1970; ‘The Middle Class in Western Europe 1815–1848’, pp.826–45, American Historical Review, 71, 1966. 12 p.174, Walter M. Kotschnig, Unemployment in the Learned Professions: An International Study of Occupational and Educational Planning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1937. 13 ibid. 14 Between 1934–1939, when the solicitors’ profession appeared to be overcrowded, the Law Society raised the standards of its examinations and their members halved the number of articled clerks. p.183, Brian Abel-Smith and Robert Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts: A Sociological Study of the English Legal System 1750–1965, Heinemann, London, 1967. 15 The same factors were still present in the late 1960s and are the most plausible explanation of the fact that the student protests in Britain were less militant, violent and extensive than those in other societies. p.109, Colin Crouch, The Student Revolt, Bodley Head, London, 1970. 16 pp.212–14, Collini, op. cit. 17 p.39, Perry Anderson, ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’, pp.11–52, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, eds, Towards Socialism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1965. For Marx and Engels’ criticisms see for example pp.28, 523–4, and elsewhere in their articles and correspondence. Marx and Engels, 1953, op. cit. 18 pp.631–2, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. 19 p.323, J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870, Longman, London, 1979. The largest popular protest in the 19th century, one might remember, resulted in no fatalities at all. p.124, David Goodway, London Chartism 1838–1948, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1948.

Notes to pages 283–289 403 20 This bias is, or was, deeply embedded in British labour history. One young labour historian, Robert Neville, in the course of research for his PhD, had to investigate disturbances in Featherstone during the 1893 lockout when, according to local myth, ‘troops marched in with drums beating and shot down 60 miners.’ He found that 26 troops entered the town, and that two miners had been accidentally shot and killed, and that the union leadership had been deeply concerned to prevent violence. Once they heard of his findings, the local branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, vetoed any further co-operation with him. He appealed for support to all the most distinguished labour historians in the land, but they refused to help him in any way. In disgust, he left academic life. John Crossland, ‘When the redcoats came to Featherstone’, p.10, The Times, 15th August, 1984. 21 p.111, Lenin, op. cit. The italics are Lenin’s. 22 ‘Socialism only became available’, he observed, ‘after 1850 just at the moment when the working class movement was at its lowest and least receptive ebb.’ p.35, Anderson, op. cit. 23 Jane Elgar and Bob Simpson, ‘A Final Appraisal of Bridlington?’: An Evaluation of TUC Disputes Committee Decisions 1974–1991’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 32:1 March, 1994. The title is interrogatory because the authors wondered whether legislation in 1993 might not mean the end of these voluntary procedures. It didn’t. 24 though prior to the formation of the CIO, the AFL had a comparable domestic disputes procedure. n 26, infra. It was the refusal to accept the rulings of the AFL’s Committee of Industrial Organization, which led to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organization. 25 Gallie’s comparison of oil refineries illustrates the contrast. The French workers were far more militant, but organizationally weak, while the British had considerable organizational strength, but displayed little or no class militancy. pp.291–318, op. cit. 26 Some examples of its rulings affecting the building trades are given pp.514–18, Galenson, op. cit. 27 p.141, McKibbin, op. cit. He was referring to Nigel Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is our Life, Heinemann, London, 1956. 28 There do not appear to be any longitudinal comparisons of public and private sectors, but the data strongly suggests that the former were more strike-prone through the 1980s and early 1990s. pp.144–6, Rachel Bailey, ‘Public Sector Industrial Relations’, pp.121–50, in Ian J. Beardwell, ed., Contemporary Industrial Relations: A Critical Analysis, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. 29 p.288, Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, Allen & Unwin, London, 1961. 30 For a brisk account of the ‘syndicalist’ post-war nationalizations in France and comparisons with Britain pp.32–9, 96–105, Mario Einaudi, Maurice Byé and Ernesto Rossi, Nationalization in France and Italy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1955; a detailed case study pp.70–5, 76–84, 88, 102, Robert L. Frost, Alternating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946–1970, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1991; Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966. 31 These and related points are explored in Michael Burrage, ‘Nationalization and the Professional Ideal’, pp.253–72, Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 2, May 1973. 32 The history of this informal grouping has never been told but they sometimes surfaced in the press. p.19b, ‘Chairmen of Nationalized Industries to meet

404 Notes to pages 289–295

33

34

35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

43 44

45

46

47

Chancellor’, The Times, January 6th, 1973; p.2a, ‘Chairmen to meet Ministers’, The Times, January 9th, 1973. Roger Dyson and K. Spary, ‘Professional Associations’, pp.145–76 in Nick Bosanquet, ed., Industrial Relations in the National Health Service – The Search for a System, King Edwards Hospital Fund, 1979. It was formally established in 1981. It continues, as a minority association, to the present day. See www.apap.org.uk Its current General Secretary, Mark Weatherhead, a working paramedic, was kind enough, during a tea break, to review its present circumstances and major problem – the hostility of established unions. NHS Management Inquiry, Team Leader: Roy Griffiths, Mimeo, October 1983. pp.16–19, Philip Strong and Jane Robinson, The NHS – Under New Management, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1990. With the significant exception of the BBC, which assumed that it invented the occupations of all its staff, and therefore formed a house union, the Association of Broadcasting Staff. Once television came along, this assumption was clearly inaccurate, and it was therefore engaged in long-running disputes with trade unions of the film industry, most notably my own former union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians. Saunders is the only British sociologist to draw the conclusion from mobility data that Britain is ‘one of the less unequal social orders the world has witnessed’. He went on to observe that British sociologists are ‘loath to believe that the class system is not as rigid as they had hitherto supposed.’ He did not, however, suggest why this should be so. pp.42, 79–83, Peter Saunders, Social Class and Stratification, Routledge, London, 1990. R.H. Turner, ‘Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System’, American Sociological Review, pp.855–67, Vol. 25, 1960. pp.82–4, Savage, 2000, op. cit. It is riveted into Giddens’ theory of ‘structuration’. fn 18, p.347, supra. pp.187–93, Ishida, op. cit. In the Fox and Miller’s study cited earlier, Britain had lower equality of opportunity into the ‘elite’, which apparently included most higher professional occupations, but higher equality of opportunity for entry to skilled ‘strata’. p.580, op. cit. fn 28, p.343, supra. Whittaker did not give the union membership of these two occupations, but the rancour between them seems to have been greatest in the British plant that had nine unions. He himself thought that to explain this contrast we should ‘look to aspects of (Japanese) employment relations – common orientation programme and recreation, common payment and promotion systems, communications and “company consciousness” – and possibly to a propensity to be less openly critical of people.’ pp.81, 148–51, D.H. Whittaker, Managing Innovation: A Study of British and Japanese Factories, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. The same combination seems to have occurred to Granick. Having documented the egalitarianism and openness of big business in Britain, he immediately added that ‘Of course, there is no intention to argue that class consciousness is weak in British society…’ but he does not pursue this surprising combination. p.178, Granick, 1979, op. cit. Elsewhere he appeared to subscribe to the conventional view that high rates of mobility create ‘some uncertainty in class consciousness.’ pp.498, 512–16, Wright, op. cit. Millerson pointed out that with respect to their disciplinary proceedings ‘Normally, courts cannot intervene in the proceedings…’. p.173, Millerson, op. cit.

Notes to pages 295–312 405

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

The relative absence of legislative interference in the affairs of the bar until 1990, is a constant theme of Burrage, 2006, op. cit. but see especially pp.539–40, ibid. p.176, Rule, op. cit. p.177, ibid. p.78, Derry, op. cit. For superlative comparative documentation of this point see Lorenz; Dubois op. cit. p.115, George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962, first published, 1937. pp.73–4, M.L. Bush, op. cit. p.215, Arnstein, op. cit. see Harris’ collection of 509 contemporary professional codes. op. cit. Sykes explained how many of the so-called restrictive practices in the printing industry unions were intended to uphold the equality, unity and solidarity of members, but then decided that the ultimate cause of these moral sentiments was the conflict of their economic interests with those of their employers. A.J.M. Sykes, ‘Unity and Restrictive Practices in the British Printing Industry’, pp.239–54, Sociological Review, Vol. 8, 1960. H.M.D. Parker, Manpower: A Study of War-Time Policy and Administration, History of the Second World War, Vol. VII, H.M.S.O., Longmans Green, London, 1957. pp.462–4, ibid. Allan Flanders, The Fawley Productivity Agreements, Faber, 1963. see Behagg’s accounts, pp.254–6, supra. This is hardly, of course, an unusual phenomenon. It resembles the ‘tribal’, regimental loyalties of the British Army, which are only forgotten in the face of the enemy. Or the rivalry between brothers in China described by Freedman. ‘The members of a lineage struggle amongst themselves for scarce resources of land and honour, but they stand shoulder to shoulder when they are confronted by another lineage.’ p.159, Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwantung, Athlone, London, 1971. This kind of simultaneous collective negotiation by several unions is, one might notice, extremely rare in either France or the United States. p.96, Flanders, op. cit. One of the seven unions, the electricians, agreed to upgrading, but only in limited numbers, 12 to be precise, and under strict conditions. They then put forward the counter-proposal that the remaining 260 of their mates be organized as ‘a class of second-grade craftsmen’, who would perform ‘an agreed list of easier electrical jobs’. Their less intransigent position was probably due to the fact that that their union already included some mates as members, and was, Flanders pointed out, more ‘industrial’ than any other craft union. pp.109–10, ibid.

Chapter 11

The Class System Comes to an End

1 The most notable pieces of legislation were the Employment Acts 1980 and 1982, the Trade Union Act 1984, and the Wages Act 1986. They are described in Charles Hanson, Taming the Trade Unions: A Guide to the Thatcher Governments Employment Reforms, Macmillan, London, 1991. 2 See the labour relations pages of www.ons.gov.uk Four government-funded national (WIRS) surveys, each with samples of more than 2,000 enterprises and

406 Notes to pages 312–314

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

more than one million employees, provide longitudinal comparisons of union activities before, during and after the Thatcher years. W.W. Daniel and N. Milward, Workplace Industrial Relations in Britain: The DE/PSI/ESRC Survey, Gower, Aldershot, 1983; N. Milward and M. Stevens, British Workplace Industrial Relations 1980–1984: The DE/ESRC/PSI/ACAS Surveys, Gower, Aldershot, 1986; N. Milward et al., Workplace Industrial Relations in Transition: The DE/ESRC/PSI/ACAS Surveys, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1992; Mark Cully et al., Britain at Work; as depicted by the 1988 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, Routledge, London, 1999. In 1962, some 39% of all trade unionists were covered by closed shop agreements. W.E.J. MacCarthy, The Closed Shop in Britain, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1964. In 1980, five million employees were covered by such arrangements. In 1990, only a half a million were covered, and by 1998, about 2% of workplaces reported that employees had to be union members in order to get or keep their jobs. See WIRS, 1999, op. cit. Simon Burgess, Carol Propper and Deborah Wilson, ‘Explaining the Growth in the Number of Applications to Industrial Tribunals 1972–1997’, Employment Relations Research Series No. 10, Department of Trade and Industry, London, 1998. Though the gross figure hides considerable fluctuations by cause. pp.23–5, Department of Trade and Industry, Moving Forward: Report of the Employment Tribunal System Taskforce, HMSO, London, 2002, www.dti.gov.uk In recent times, new procedural rules have reduced the numbers of claims they have heard. ‘Industrial tribunal cases down by 28%’, Jonathan Moules, Financial Times, 29th April 2006. For an overview of the Thatcher governments’ policies on seven professions see Michael Burrage, ‘Mrs Thatcher against deep structures: ideology, impact and ironies of an eleven-year confrontation’, Institute of Governmental Studies Working Papers, University of California, Berkeley, June 1992. The corrosive effects of the ethos of her era on the British Army, to whom she owed so much, emerge intermittently in pp.xxii, 114, 480, Beevor, op. cit. Mrs Thatcher herself did little to disguise her contempt for civil servants. ‘She doesn’t think that clever chaps like us should be here at all,’ said one of Hennessy’s informants. ‘We should be outside, making profits.’ Another complained of being ‘told by politicians that they don’t want whingeing, analysis or integrity…’ that we must simply ‘do as we are told.’ Civil service methods were ‘repeatedly compared unfavourably with the superior methods of private business.’ Ministers constantly reminded them that ‘they have several friends in the private sector who could do the job in the morning with one hand tied behind their back…’ pp.169–73, Patrick Cosgrave, Thatcher: The First Term, Bodley Head, London, 1985; p.633, Peter Hennessy, Whitehall, Pimlico, London, 2001. For similar views in her own words, pp.45–9, Thatcher, op. cit. Most bluntly in the green papers that preceded the reform of the legal professions, especially the first. Lord Chancellor’s Department, The Work and Organization of the Legal Profession, Cmnd 570, HMSO, 1989; Contingency Fees, Cmnd 571, HMSO, 1989; Conveyancing by Authorized Practitioners, Cmnd 572, HMSO, 1989. As Kavanagh and Richards observed, ‘she thought that civil servants’ role should be to serve ministers and not their own perception of the public interest.’ p.181, op. cit. pp.138–9, Stephen Harrison and Waqar i.U. Ahmad, ‘Medical Autonomy and the U.K. State 1975 to 2025’, Sociology, pp.129–46, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2000.

Notes to pages 314–318 407 11 P. Thompson, ‘The Meaning of Vocational Qualifications’, Education & Training, May/June 1989. 12 In a few cases, however, employers put up strong resistance, and those boards survived. The best general survey of the reform of vocational training is by Catherine Bush, From Voluntarism to Regulation: Awarding Bodies in English Education and Training: A Case Study of City and Guilds, Occasional Paper No. 10, Institute of Education, University of London, 1993. 13 Many observers at the time were convinced that these schemes were not intended to provide a substitute for the training provided by the ITBs, but simply to prevent the problem of youth unemployment becoming an electoral liability. For a particularly insightful and informed analysis of YOPS and YTS versus traditional apprenticeship see pp.8–24, Peter Cappelli, ‘Youth Apprenticeship in Britain: Lessons for the United States’, Industrial Relations, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1996. 14 A negotiator of the Royal Institute of British Architects called the NCVQ ‘the most serious threat to the professions in their chartered existence.’ The vocational qualifications it proposed were ‘designed to render professionals redundant and their professional institutes obsolete.’ Peter Smith, ‘NVQ peril for professions’, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 24th February 1995. 15 After 17 years of these initiatives and schemes, the Major Government backtracked in its final months, rediscovered the merits of apprenticeship. It inaugurated a ‘modern apprenticeship’. This was, however, also to be state-administered. In the Education Act of 1997, it also replaced the NCVQ with a less intrusive Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. 16 p.4, Jonathan Payne, ‘Government seeks to expand and revitalize modern apprenticeships’. European Industrial Relations Observatory On-line, www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/2002/10/feature/UK0210105F.html This site includes a full review of recent reports, legislation and government action on ‘modern’ apprenticeships. 17 For a discussion of the reports of the Prices and Incomes Board in 1967, 1969, and 1971 of the Monopolies Commission, 1970, 1974, and 1976 see Michael Zander, Legal Services for the Community, Temple Smith, London, 1978; Director General of Fair Trading, Restrictions on the Kind of Organization Through Which Members of Professions May Offer Their Services, Office of Fair Trading, London, 1986. 18 The first mention of solicitors in Which? is p.112, ‘Solicitors’ Charges’, February, 1977. Thereafter solicitors appeared frequently see p.584, ‘Solicitors’ Negligence’, October, 1977; p.297, ‘Solicitors’, May, 1978; p.258, ‘Solicitors’ Charges’, April, 1978; p.338, ‘Solicitors as Investment Advisers’, June, 1978; all in Which? Consumers’ Association, London. 19 p.105, OECD Documents, Scoreboard of Indicators, OECD, Paris, 1994. 20 Foreign Direct Investment (WIR 2006 data) http://stats.unctad.org 21 quoted p.245, Jonathan Wood, Wheels of Misfortune: The Rise and Fall of the British Motor Industry, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1988. 22 For a case study see Philip Garrahan and Paul Stewart, The Nissan Enigma: Flexibility at Work in a Local Economy, Mansell, London, 1992; a general survey, Nick Oliver and Barry Wilkinson, The Japanization of British Industry: New Developments in the 90s, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992. 23 p.789, Kynaston, op. cit. 24 p.739, ibid. 25 Business leaders’ general lack of enthusiasm for her trade union reforms is evident from her own account of them. pp.105–6, Thatcher, op. cit. Thereafter they

408 Notes to pages 318–323

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28 29

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33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

remained lukewarm see ‘Managers warn on union reform’, Financial Times, 11th Nov, 1991. Sir John Harvey-Jones, the former chief executive of ICI, later remarked that ‘though he had crossed their path in the past, trade unions … did much to check corporate excess. If trade unions did not exist they would need to be invented.’ While “some adjustment” had been necessary, the pendulum had swung too far against unions. As a result … it has been possible … to treat people in a way no sensible, sensitive businessman would.’ p.3, The Independent, 15th March, 1995. Martin Taylor, chief executive of Barclays, observed that ‘British capitalism’s rejection of social values and reaction against earlier collectivist excesses has gone too far. Too much individualism is bad for too many individuals.’ p.24, Financial Times, March 16th, 1995. This is the conclusion of the WIRS study, op. cit. though Disney et al. detected an increase in unfavourable attitudes to trade unions. p.17, Richard Disney, Amanda Gosling and Stephen Machin, What has happened to union recognition in Britain?, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper, No. 130, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1993. pp.308–11, A. Pollert, ‘The “Flexible Firm”: fixation or fact’, Work, Employment & Society, pp.281–316, Vol. 2, Sept. 1988. For an account of an American-owned firm that, most definitely, took advantage of the legislation see pp.328–9, infra. p.178, Milward et al., 1990, op. cit. For empirical data to support this see pp.181–7, Bernard Casey, ‘Survey Evidence on Trends in “Non-Standard” Employment’, pp.179–99, in Anna Pollert, ed., Farewell to Flexibility?, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991. pp.253–7, Simon Jenkins, Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalization of Britain, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1995. For contemporaneous French efforts to decentralize see pp.134–5, Levy, op. cit. Some of the new managerial and consultancy functions of professional bodies are described in Jeff Watkins, The Future of U.K. Professional Associations, Cheltenham Strategic Publications, Cheltenham, 1996. For examples of the invention of classes for marketing purposes see www.businessballs.com or ‘The Fish Can Sing’s Guide to Britain’s New Middle Classes’, www.classof2004.co.uk Mike Savage, Geoff Bagnall and B. Longhurst, ‘Ordinary, ambivalent and defensive: class identitites in the North of England’, pp.875–92, Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2001. Jonathan Foster, ‘Why Cortonwood is doomed to die’, p.7, The Observer, Sunday, 24th February 1985. Their support for her policies, as well as that of Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, is comprehensively documented in Jenkins, 2006, op. cit. Jill Sherman et al., ‘Labour’s Army of Consultants adds 1p to income tax’, The Times, 2nd May 2006. p.175, Cannadine, op. cit. pp.60–1, Patrick Seyd and Paul Whitely, New Labour’s Grassroots: The Transformation of the Labour Party Membership, Palgrave, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002. fn 6, p.39, supra. p.148, Orwell, 1937, op. cit. He went on to observe that while Americans are remarkably free of guilt about class, or ethnic relations, they feel intensely guilty about race relations. Trow, 1992, op. cit. Germans evidently believe that nationalism was their country’s great sin, and have therefore turned themselves into the least overtly nationalist and most European country of Europe.

Notes to pages 323–327 409 42 though recent evidence on the latter is ambiguous. In a survey carried out in 1990 Marshall found that mobility had increased in recent years. G. Marshall, A. Swift and S. Roberts, Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997. Heath reported that men born after 1940 were more likely to be upwardly mobile than those born before 1900. Anthony Heath, ‘Social Mobility’, in A.H. Halsey, ed., Social Trends in British Society, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000. However, in a comparison of a cohort born in 1958 with a cohort born in 1970 Blanden et al. found inter-generational mobility had fallen markedly, and was the lowest of the six industrial societies they studied. Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin, Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, 2005. In their comparison of nine societies, Müller et al. observed that societies which have ‘a lower degree of credentialism’, England being their foremost example, ‘also show signs of a lower degree of class inequalities of educational opportunities.’ p.88, Müller et al., op. cit. There is a real possibility, therefore, that as England moves away from practice-based training and qualifications and ‘widens’ educational opportunities, class inequalities in education will increase. 43 Joanne Monger, ‘Labour disputes in 2004, Labour Market Trends, Vol. 113, No. 06, 2005, www.statistics.gov.uk Fewer days were lost in strikes in 2005 than in any year ‘since records began nearly 200 years ago.’ The Times 17th Feb. 2006. 44 Hakim argued that this was not simply a response to unemployment, since surveys almost always reported ‘positive aspirations … for the independence and autonomy of freelance work or running their own business.’ But then they would, wouldn’t they? pp.200–3, Catherine Hakim, Social Change and Innovation in the Labour Market, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998. 45 pp.2, 9, 18, 20–3, 26–7, 29–31, Muzyka et al., op. cit. 46 Central governments were, in fact, usually far more respectful towards them than they were towards local government, which they knew was a relatively late and insecure addition to the British political system. 47 For the first and second of these see pp.30–1, 47, Thatcher, op. cit. 48 pp.17–18, Graham Zellick, Universities and the Law: The Erosion of Institutional Autonomy, University of London Press, London, 2001; p.4, Martin Trow, ‘American Perspectives on British Higher Education under Thatcher and Major, Working Paper, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, 1995. The decline of academic self-government as a whole over the Thatcher and Major years is described in pp.135–55, Jenkins, op. cit., and updated pp.120–4, 177–9, Simon Jenkins, Thatcher’s Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts, Allen Lane, London, 2006. 49 pp.134–5, A.I. Tillyard, A History of University Reform: From 1800 A.D. to the Present Time, Heffer, Cambridge, 1913. 50 p.18, The Times, July 8, 1993. 51 There can however, be little doubt that Mrs Thatcher herself, her advisers and ministers believed they were making schools more ‘independent’ and ‘selfgoverning’. See the brilliant analysis in pp.128–33, Jenkins, 1995, op. cit.; pp.570–8, 590–7, Thatcher, op. cit. 52 Press reports suggested that Whitehall will ‘lose control over all England’s hospitals’ to an independent regulator, who will have power to check their accounts, approve all their major financial decisions, and most importantly, ‘set down the key services that individual foundation trusts must supply.’ The regulator can stop hospitals ‘luring staff from other NHS institutions with higher pay offers’ and ‘can even replace entire boards of governors.’ This independent regulator

410 Notes to pages 327–331

53 54 55

56 57 58

59

60

61 62

63 64

will, however, be appointed for an initial fixed five-year term. ‘Milburn to give up control of hospital coffers’, p.10, The Times, March 14th, 2003. p.511, ibid. p.514, Grunberg, op. cit. Michael Edwardes, appointed chief executive of British Leyland in 1978, decided to end what he described as the ‘mutuality’ between employer and workers, drastically curtailed the rights of shop stewards, fired their convenor, and installed, without negotiation, an incentive payment system. Michael Edwardes, Back From the Brink: An Apocalyptic Experience, Collins, London, 1983. pp.187–8, Kavanagh and Richards, op. cit. Health Circular HC(90)16, Department of Health, May 1990. pp.65–88, Jenkins, op. cit. Government spokesmen sometimes defended regrading on the grounds that it provided ‘a career structure’ for clinical nurses, meaning a career up a bureaucratic ladder. Nurses evidently saw it differently. In its ‘election manifesto’ of 1992 the Royal College called for ‘a clinical career structure’ and wanted to see that ‘nurses who go into management retaining a clear role in clinical work with patients.’ A Manifesto for Nursing and Health, Royal College of Nursing, London, 1992. see Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement, California, 1980; William M. Tsutsui, Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in the Twentieth Century Japan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992. The unwillingness of British managers to make use of scientific management methods has been documented on numerous occasions. Most of the 68 reports of the Anglo-American Productivity Council, compiled by teams of employers, managers and trade unionists who visited American firms between 1946 and 1952 make this point. Their findings were summarized by Graham Hutton, We Too Can Prosper: The Promise of Productivity, Allen & Unwin, London, 1953. In 1970, a study of 24 West Midlands engineering and metalworking firms found ‘very low levels of … the use of analytical techniques and productivity measurement.’ p.400, N.A. Dudley, ‘Comparative Productivity Analysis Study in the United Kingdom West Midlands Engineering and Metalworking Industries’, International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 8, 1970. A 1983 survey of work study in British industry noted ‘the overall low usage of all the techniques of work study, particularly in small to medium-size firms … A high proportion of production operations managers have learned about work study and proceeded to ignore it.’ pp.301–2, Keith G. Lockyer et al., ‘Work Study Techniques in U.K. Manufacturing Industry’, Omega, 11, 1983. A comparative study of the automotive components industry in 1992, pointed out that ‘British engineers were particularly weak in work and method study.’ p.84, Christopher Carr, ‘Productivity and Skills in Vehicle Component Manufacturers in Britain, Germany, the USA and Japan’, National Institute Review, February, 1992. There are many more reports of similar import. Hence the extensive promotion from the shopfloor, and the ‘chimney stack’ managerial career patterns noted by pp.174–8, Granick, op. cit. See the figures collated by pp.304–8, Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. In 1971, managers were 3.7% of the British labour force, by 1990 they were 11%. David Riesman, Constraint and Variety in American Education, Doubleday, New York, 1958. though the full impact was felt after she left office. In 1980 1.5% of all university undergraduates were taking a business or management degree. In the year she

Notes to pages 331–335 411

65

66

67 68

69 70 71

72 73

74 75

76

left office, 1992, this had risen to 4%, and by 2004–2005 to over 13%. pp.18–19, University Statistics 1980, Vol. 1 Students and Staff, UGC, Cheltenham, 1982; pp.27–8, University Statistics 1992–3, Vol. 1 Students and Staff, UGC, Cheltenham, 1993; www.hesa.ac.uk. although they had been applied extensively, but unsuccessfully, in American schools in the 1920s. Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962. For an example see Gennadi Pisarevsky, Soviet Economy: The Strategy of Intensification, Novosti Press, Moscow, 1987. The only economic problem that the author admitted to was that the annual rate of growth had slowed to 3%, but he added quickly that ‘the Soviet people are accustomed to other growth rates.’ p.10, ibid. pp.132–42, Robert Lewis, Science and Industrialisation in the U.S.S.R.: Industrial Research and Development 1917–1940, Macmillan, London, 1979. The analogy is amusingly adumbrated in Ronald Amann, ‘A Sovietological View of Modern Britain’, lecture delivered at University of Edinburgh, December 1995, and extensively discussed in Andrew Ryder, ‘Reform and U.K. Higher Education in the Enterprise Era’, Higher Education Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1996. The differences between the departments of industrial firms and universities are cogently explained in pp.19–20, Trow, 1995. pp.10–11, ibid. It amounted, as Trow pointed out, to commending the governments’ policies. Tim Miles, ‘Record GCSE Grades Fixed’, Evening Standard, 23rd August, 2001; Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Widespread cheating devalues school tests’, Guardian Unlimited, 28th October 2002, http:// education.guardian. co.uk Warwick Mansell, ‘Schools’ cheating culture exposed’, p.1, Times Educational Supplement, 20th May 2005. His report went on to say that teachers thought it was ‘widespread’. ‘Head is jailed for altering 11-plus papers’, p.1, The Times, 8th March 2003. summarized in p.6, The Daily Telegraph, March 5th, 2003. In July of the same year, the chairman of the British Medical Association complained that ‘a targetdriven Government had created a climate of fear and deception that distorted medical practice and forced the honest to lie.’ He received a standing ovation. p.8, The Times, July 1st, 2003. www.chi.nhs.uk pp.89–109, Jenkins, op. cit. Five officers in Luton were found to have offered favours to remand prisoners for confessions to crimes that they did not commit that improved their clear-up rate. ‘Officers quit in favours probe’, 15 May 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england My own repeated efforts to have a London police station record a credit card fraud tend to corroborate the view that the recording has itself become suspect. So far as I could establish, this station recorded crimes informally and formally, and only the latter, one imagines, appear in official statistics. He was charged with 14 offences, and asked for 140 more to be considered. The judge said the case was so serious that an immediate custodial sentence was required. ‘If others were to act in a similar fashion, then the whole system would be immediately and utterly destroyed.’ The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority investigated 96 allegations of similar malpractice during the year, and annulled the results of the examinations in seven schools. The Times, 8th March 2003, op. cit. In another case the headmaster of a school at the lower end of the league tables was reprimanded by the professional conduct committee of the General Teaching Council after he had allowed pupils more than the allotted time,

412 Notes to pages 335–340

77

78 79 80

81

82 83

84

85

and encouraged them to re-read their answers, saying to some, ‘Do you really mean this?’, Evening Standard, 7th May 2003. See Pay Modernization: A New Contract for NHS Consultants in England, National Audit Office, London, 2007, www.nao.org.uk Sir Alan Craft, president of the Royal Academy of Medical Colleges, explained to incredulous members of the Health Committee of the House of Commons on 18 th May 2006 that this was because consultants have been compelled to curtail their voluntary contributions to the NHS to conform with its new contractual arrangements and managerial systems. The opportunities for similar declines in the productivity of other hospital staff are considerable, since the actual working time of a majority of them routinely exceeds their contractually paid working hours. See p.10. National Survey of NHS Staff 2005, www.healthcarecommission.org.uk pp.160–4, Bruce W. Ahlstrand, The Quest for Productivity: A Case Study of Fawley after Flanders, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. pp.165–72, ibid. There is no general survey of the spread of performance-related pay. A survey conducted by the Institute of Personnel Development in 1997 reported a ‘deep and rapid growth of performance pay systems’ over the past 15 years, but it fell well short of being a national survey. Institute of Personnel Development, Performance Pay Trends in the U.K., London, 1999, www.cipd.co.uk On the peculiarities of its family structure see pp.190–1, 195, Alan MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978; Jill Kirby, Broken Hearts: Family Decline and the Consequences for Society, Centre of Policy Studies, London, 2002, www.cps.org.uk Kirby’s comparative data showed Britain was ‘the divorce capital of Europe’ in 1998, and also ‘top of the table for lone parenting’. More recent evidence, however, suggests it may have lost the top spot on both counts. In church attendance and belief, Britain is about average by European standards, but Europe as a whole is, Davie pointed out, exceptionally secular by world standards, and especially its Protestant North. pp.9–10, Grace Davie, Europe – the Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World, Darton Longman & Todd, London, 2002. pp.631–2, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. For a typically robust statement of his views see his response to Mr Blair’s ‘respect agenda’. Simon Jenkins, ‘All this drivel does is bring Basra closer to our doorsteps’, p.25, The Guardian, 11 January 2006. He seems, however, to be no less hostile to self-governing corporate institutions of doctors, teachers, nurses, police and others. Mr Blair’s ‘respect agenda’ is described below. in an ICM poll on behalf of BBC-2 www.overseas-emigration.co.uk The wish to emigrate was, therefore, marginally higher than the 51% found among adolescents in Arab countries in the Arab Human Development Report 2002, United Nations, New York, 2003. ‘England and Wales top crime league’, pp.1, 6, The Guardian, Monday, May 26th, 1997, gave preliminary results from the International Crime Victimisation Survey of the experience of crime in 11 countries during 1995, which showed ‘that England and Wales have a worse crime record than the United States or other industrialized countries’, including Northern Ireland. The final results from 19 countries confirmed this report. See http://ruljis.leidenuniv.nl/group/jfcr/www/ icvs/data The report of the Sixth United Nations Survey on Crime and Criminal Justice Systems covered 37 societies, and found that England and Wales were among world leaders in burglary, motor vehicle and petty crimes through the 1990s, though only average in serious violence, and below average in homicides.

Notes to pages 340–341 413

86 87 88 89

90 91 92

93

Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and North America, HEUNI, Helsinki, 2003. For data on the exceptionally high proportion of young people arrested and sentenced in England and Wales see pp.4–5, Gemma Buckland and Alex Stephens, Review of Effective Practice with Young Offenders in Mainland Europe, European Institute of Social Services, Canterbury, Kent, 2001. For the numbers incarcerated see Roy Walmsley, ‘World Prison Populations List’, Research Findings, No. 88, Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, London, 1999, www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds England and Wales are not, however, above the OECD average in the number of adults imprisoned, OECD Factbook, Paris, 2006. pp.27–33, UNICEF, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, Innocenti Research Centre, Florence, 2007. These surveys are reproduced on www.healthcarecommission.org.uk, op. cit. pp.15, 32 National Audit Office, A Safer Place to Work, London, 2003, DT 27th March, 2003. www.teachersupport.co.uk The Scottish survey had reported 5,412 ‘incidents’ in 2001–2002, 71% of which included physical violence. www.Scotland.gov.uk/stats. Both the estimate and the report have, however, been removed from these websites. See, however, ‘Review of School Violence Figures’, 27 January 2004 and ‘Large Rise in Attacks on Teachers’, 31 March 2006 news.bbc.co.uk; ‘Survey reveals half of respondents have suffered physical abuse by pupils’, 23 February, 2007, www.teachersupport.co.uk Respondents were 433 teachers, who responded to a web page invitation. p.35, Anne Wilkin et al., Behaviour In Scottish Schools, Scottish Executive, Edinburgh, 2006. Tony Clark, Safer School Partnerships: Police in Schools, NFER, London, 2004. www.johnmajor.co.uk Jenkins dated this concern with the private lives of British citizens from the Thatcher governments, but gave no examples. p.189, op. cit. See ‘Give respect: get respect What is it?’ on the website of the Labour Party www.labour.org.uk

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Index

Academies in France & Russia 278 Advocates in France 106–8 in Russia 65–6, 83 Affirmative action 148–9 Afro-Americans 148, 160–2 Alexander II, tsar of Russia 60, 64, 72, 82–3 Aluminium development in U.S. v. U.K. 229 Amann, P.H. 96–7 Ambulance personnel in England 290, 334 Aminzade, Ronald 89–90, 92 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 161–2, 168–9, 171–7, 180–1, 203, 285–6 Amiens, Congress of (1906) 100–2 Anderson, Perry 282–3 Annan, Noel 276 Antitrust (U.S.) 172, 193–4, 211, 274 see also Market regulation Apprenticeship England 247–56, 267, 280, 299, 314–19 France 115 U.S. 145–6, 157, 170 Arendt, Hannah 141, 216 Aristocracy England 17, 28, 213–19, 231–2, 243, 295–307 Russia 49–58, 63–4, 70–3 the U.S. 149–50, 182, 188–90 Auroux, laws (France 1982–1983) 104–5 Australia 3, 6, 13 Baggage handlers in England 259–60 Bailyn, Bernard 145–6 Baltzell, E. Digby 190, 197 Bauer, Peter 16–17, 322 Bauer, Michel 125, 131, 139 BBC 288, 325

Behagg, Clive 254–5 Berger, Suzanne 113–15 Berlanstein, Lenard 133 Birnbaum, Pierre 132 Blair, Tony 217, 296, 320, 324, 327, 341 Blanqui, Auguste 87, 95, 97 Blumin, Stuart 153, 163, 191 Bolsheviks 63–9, 72–7, 81–2 as managers of stratification 71–81 Boltanski, Luc 112–13 Boston (U.S.) 165, 186, 189–91 Bourdieu, Pierre 42, 129, 131–8, 222 Bourgeoisie & bourgeoisies France, absence of class of 4, 31–2, 88, 106 creation of classes in lieu of 111–15, 209, 241 petty, research category of 31–2 Russia, attempts to create 56–8, 209 Bourses du travail 99–101, 104, 172 Brentano, Lujo von 250 Bureau des parties casuelles 119, 232 Cadres 111–13, 209 Canada 6, 33, 160, 175 Cannadine, David 1, 39, 216, 321 Capitalism as basis of classes 30–4, 188 as engine of inequality 44 alongside slavery 161 struggles against 90, 167–9 under socialism 85 v. socialism 22–5 see also Car production, Markets, Strikes, Workplaces Caplow, Theodore 182 Car production 257–8, 317, 328–9 Catherine the Great of Russia 50, 52–3, 57 Centers, Richard 185–7, 205 Centralization in England 324–7 Charle, Christophe 110–11 446

Index 447 Charles II, King of England 215, 233–4, 242, 278, 325 Charleston (U.S.) 151, 189 Charters American 143–5, 152 English 215, 232–6, 295–7, 326 Chavez, Cesar 177 Chicago, Ill. 162–3, 168–9, 189 Chin & Chinovniki 50–5, 70, 209 see also Civil servants, Russia Christoph, James 224–5 Civil servants England 218, 225, 228–9, 237–8, 329, 332 France 4, 116–17, 121–3, 128–9, 131–2 see also grands corps Russia 50–5, 59–60, 64, 69–72 U.S. 150–1, 156, 198 Civil societies as agents of class formation 38–45 defined 36 relationship with state England 213–16, 231–5, 262–9, 274, 288–306, 310–27 France 87–93, 105–15, 123–4, 139–40 Russia 63–71, 82–6 U.S. 141–50, 156–64, 176, 193, 211 relationship with state compared 277–82, 306–8 and revolution 208–10 Class & classes agents of formation 36–45 conclusions about 207–13, 304–10 cross-national data about 6–14, 30–5 definition of 35–6 honour of 106, 152, 237, 297–303 identification of 45–9 overlooked 46–7 system of 294–304 see also Aristocracy, Bourgeoisie, Cadres, Intelligentsia, Markets, Middle Class and Working Class Classlessness England 321–4, 328 Russia 22–3, 29, 36, 82–4 U.S. 8, 153, 160 Clayton Act 1914 (U.S.) 172, 193

Clubs England 222–3, 226, 248–9, 263 see also journeymen and trade societies France 94–7 Russia 66, 73 U.S. 166, 170, 174, 189, 191, 197 Coke, Sir Edward 234 Collini, Stefan 111, 276, 281 Combination Laws 1799–1824 (U.K.) 250–4, 273, 296 Committee of Industrial Organization (U.S.) see Congress of Compagnonnage 89, 98, 262 Company formation England & France 120–1 U.S. 143–4 Comparative analysis methods 1–6, 26–30 surveys 6–14, 30–4, 204 see social mobility, workplaces, passim theories 19–34 Competition see markets Computer development in U.K. 230 programmers 293–4 see also Minitel Confédération Générale des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises 115 Confédération Général du Travail (CGT) 100–2, 169 Conféderation Général des Cadres (CGC) 112–13 Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) 162–5, 171–5, 177, 179–80, 203 Cooper, Jilly 5 Coventry 257–8 Crozier, Michel 133 Cumul des mandats 117 Dahrendorf, Ralf 21–2, 24 Dartmouth College 144, 326 DeMott, Benjamin 5, 148 Deprofessionalization American 150–3 French 106 Derry, T.H. 253, 278 Devil’s Bargains in England 337 Dicey, A.V. 271, 273 Djilas, Milovan corroboration of 20–1 rejection of 21–8, 33–4 theory of new class 19–21, 76

448 Index Dobbin, Frank 121–2 Dogan, Mattei 115–19, 129, 138–40 Domhoff, G. William 197, 201–4 Doyle, Daniel 212 Dubois, Pierre 257 Duverger, Maurice 39 Dvorianstvo, service nobility see Aristocracy Russia Dye, T.R. 198–9 Dyson, R. 289 Ecole Centrale 107, 129, 131 Ecole des hautes études commerciales (HEC) 129–30 Education and class dissolution in the U.S. 159, 177–8, 268, 308 and class formation 23, 38–40 England 219–25, 266–9, 292, 311, 325–7, 331–3, 338 France 129–32, 135–8, 281 Russia 63, 73–7, 82 U.S. 142–7, 154–9, 177–8, 184, 196–200, 211, 308 see also grandes écoles, private schools, public schools and universities Elites, integration of England 213–17, 219–31 France 107–8, 115–28, 131–2, 137–40 Russia 25, 74, 86 U.S. 143, 189–202 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 233 see also Statute of Artificers Engels, Friedrich 88, 157, 168, 187 Entrepreneurs as agents of class formation 42–3 England 224, 240–4, 258, 313, 320, 324 France 120–1, 126–8, 131–3, 241 Russia 54–5, 58, 84, 240 U.S. 144, 189–90, 241 Erickson, J. & Goldthorpe, J. 11 Ethnic differences, conflicts & discrimination England 283, 320 Scotland 162 U.S. 148, 154, 159–67, 171–5, 181, 189–90 Exceptionalism, American 8, 157–64

Fawley (Esso) see oil refineries Federal Trade Commission (U.S.) 193 Fidler, John 225–6 Fifth French Republic 114–19, 125–8, 137, 209 Flanders, Allan 317 see also oil refineries Flexner, Abraham 154 Fonctionnaires see civil servants, France, and grands corps Freeman, Joshua 163–4, 174–5 Freeze, Gregory 83 Frontier thesis 159–60 Fussell, Paul 5 Fuerst, J.S. 147, 204 Gallaher, Art 183 Gallie, Duncan 256–7 General Trades Union (GTU) of NYC 165–71, 186 Geoghegan, Thomas 173, 178 Giddens, Anthony 22–3, 25 Gingembre, Léon 115 Gladstone, William 237 Glorious Revolution 1688–89 214–16, 231–2, 235, 242, 247, 262, 278, 296, 306 Gorbachev, Mikhail 20, 77, 332 Graham, Margaret 229 Grandes écoles 107–8, 110, 129–35, 138, 220, 241 Grands corps 107–8, 116, 122, 129–32, 137, 139–40, 219 Granick, David 10, 29–30, 130–1, 225, 267, 293 Gretton, R.H. 232 Griffiths, Roy, report of 290, 330 Gross, Neal 176–7 Grunberg, Leon 258–9, 328–9 Gutman, Herbert G. 162 Guttsman, Wilhelm 218–20 Harris, Nigel 266 Haywood, ‘Big Bill’ 169–70 Headmasters’ Conference, England 220 Heath, Anthony 7, 221 Hendry, John 230 Heyck, T.W. 276 Hill, Joe 169 Hoggart, Richard 212, 244 Horovitz, Jacques Henri 133–4 House of Lords 217, 219, 231, 273, 296

Index 449 IBM 194 Immunities of trade unions & professions in England 273, 295–6, 307, 311, 320, 338 Industrial organization see Workplaces Industrial Policy in Britain 227–30 in France 119–28 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 169–71, 285 Injunctions (U.S.) 173 Inns of Court 42, 232–5, 266, 269, 272, 274, 295 Intelligentsia in Russia 22–3, 54–5, 63–70, 75–7, 277–82 Intellectuals in England 275–82 in France 4, 104–11, 276–82 Ishida, H. 29–30, 292–3 Ishii, T. 131 Jackman, M.R. & R.W. 185, 187, 204 Jackson, Andrew, President of the U.S. 143, 150, 198 Jaher, Frederic 189–90, 201 James I, King of England 233, 269 James II, King of England 215, 234–5, 239, 242, 326 Japan 10, 13, 262 collective bargaining 105 social mobility in 10, 26, 28–9, 32–3, 292 workplaces in v. France 135–6 v. England 293, 316–17 Jenkins, Simon 319, 339 Johnson, Christopher 88–90, 98 Johnson, Robert 66–7 Journeymen & journeymen societies England 42, 244–56, 295, 300 France 89, 98–9 U.S. 165–7 see also Trade Societies & Unions Kabak (pub) 61 Kadushin, Charles 132 Kahn-Freund, Otto 271 Kavanagh, Dennis 224–5 Keynes, J.M. 270–1

Khrushchev, Nikita 74, 77, 85 Kimball, Alan 61 Kingston, Paul 184–5, 197 Knights of Labor 168–71, 186, 285 Kocka, Jürgen 147 Kotschnig, Walter 280 Labour Party (U.K.) 264–5, 278, 282, 286, 295, 321 Laissez faire 204, 269–74 Laissez gouverner 269–74 Laslett, John 158, 162 Lawyers England 234 see inns of court & solicitors France see advocates Russia see advocates U.S. 141, 150–5, 176–7, 186, 194, 200 Le Chapelier, loi (1791) 98 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 39, 78, 82, 157, 283 Letwin, William 192 Levin, Jennifer 235 Levy, Jonah 125–7 Lewchuk, Wayne 258 Lipset, S.M. 10, 157, 177 Lloyd, G.I.H. 246–8, 255 Lodéve 88–90 London, City of Big Bang of 1986 325 financial elite in 222, 317–18 guilds & professions in 42, 232, 281 journeymen organizations in 245–9 occupational prestige in 29 protests during revolution 246 quo warranto case against 252–3 revolution in 233–42 Lorenz, Edward 256 Los Angeles 189 Lyon 96–7 Lynd, R.S. & H.M. 179–82 Mack, Edward C. 220 Magraw, Roger 96–7 Major, John 310, 320–1, 324, 341–2 Malia, Martin 65 Mannari, Hiroshi 10 Manning, Roberta 54–5, 62

450 Index Market forces as determinants of classes 22–3, 37 as solvents of classes 210–12, 305–6 insulation from see Nationalization & Professions organized by professions and unions in England 41, 44–5 Markets England 223, 310–22, 338 France 89, 114, 123–6, 133, 139 Russia 56, 60, 84–6 U.S. 145–56, 175, 187, 192, 196, 211, 308 Market regulation by states England 228–30 France 126 Soviet Russia 83–6 U.S. 192–6 Marsden, David 261 Marseille 90–3, 98–9 Marsh, Alan 264, 266 Marx, Karl attempted resuscitation of 30–4 on class formation 40–2 debates with 19–25 on England 2, 265, 282–3 on France 87–8, 94, 106, 239 Matthews, Donald 199 McKean, Robert 58, 68–70 McKibbin, Ross 2–5, 16, 220, 286 Merchants in England 232–3, 248 in Russia 56–9, 62 Middle class England formation of 231–40 honour of 298–9 solidarity of 266 France absence of 106, 111–13 substitutes of 114–15 U.S. disbanding of 150–3 fleeting appearance of 152–3 vagueness of 154–6, 181, 185 Middletown (Muncie, Ind.) 179–82, 196 Miliband, R. 287 Millerson, Geoffrey 266, 278 Minitel (France) 126–7

Monopolies England 227–8, 232–3, 270–1, 289 France 122–5 Russia 56–7 U.S. 191–2 see also Antitrust Monopolies & Mergers Commission (MMC) U.K. 228–30 Mustar, Philippe 127–8 Müller, Walter 9 National Audit Office (U.K.) 340 National Health Service (NHS) (U.K.) 38, 290–1, 325–30, 334–5 National Recovery Act 1932 (U.S.) 173, 180 National Labor Relations Board (U.S.) 176–7 National Recovery Administration (NRA) (U.S.) 194–6, 205 National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) (U.K.) 230 Nationalization American attitudes 203 England 12, 286–8 public corporations as chosen form of 288–91 France 122–5 Neale, A.D. 193 New class see Djilas, nomenklatura New York City 150, 163–8, 174–5, 184, 189–91 Nicoud, Gèrard 114–15, 241 Nixon, Richard 156, 203 Nomenklatura 20–1, 28, 73–4, 85–6, 210 v. elites in England 219–23 v. fonctionnaires in France 115, 118, 139–40 Norris-LaGuardia Act 1932 (1932) 172–3, 176, 180, 195 Northcote-Trevelyan Report (1854) 237–8 Nurses, England 289, 312, 329–30 O’Boyle, Leonore 280 Occupational prestige measures of 26–30 Office of Economic Opportunity (U.S.) 147–8 Oil refineries 300–3, 316, 336–7 Orlovsky, Daniel 55

Index 451 Orwell, George (Eric Blair) on class in England 1, 6–11, 14–16 on classlessness 322, 338, 341 on his own class 221 on Soviet Russia 19–20 Palmerston, Lord H. 326 Pantouflage 121, 128–36 & pantoufleurs U.S. version of 193 Paris Chamber of Commerce 129 Commune 1871 87, 92–5 Gas Company 133 intellectuals 275 June Days 1848 88 workers in 91–2, 95–6, 98–100 Parkin, Frank 22–5 Patents in Britain v. U.S. 143 Peasants France 4 Imperial Russia beginnings of class formation 62–3 commune legend & reality 59–60 obstacles to class formation 60–2 Soviet Russia as official category 74–5 Pelloutier, Fernand 100 Perkin, Harold 267 Peter the Great of Russia 49, 52, 56–8, 63 Philadelphia 150–2, 165, 168, 190–1 Pipes, Richard 50–3, 61, 67–8, 77 Place, Francis 250 Plainville (U.S.) 182–3, 196 Political parties as agents of class formation 19–21, 39 as expressions of class interest 39 England 7, 216 see Labour Party France 97, 116 Russia 54, 62, 64, 67, 69, 74–5 see Bolsheviks U.S. 149, 153, 164, 187, 192 Polsby, Nelson 188–9, 193, 202, 227 Poujade, Pierre 114, 241

Practice-based, practitioner-controlled training 266–9 see apprenticeship, vocational training Présidents directeurs-généraux (PD-Gs) 131–2, 136 Private schools U.S. 197–8 Privatization England 310–11, 320, 325 France 125–6 Russia 74, 86 Professions & professionalization agents of class formation 40–2 v. entrepreneurs 240–4 v. intelligentsia 105–11, 275–82 England attacks on self-government of 233–4 change in work settings 340 ethics of 298–9, 313, 324, 336 mass mobilization of 236–9 practice-based training of 266–7, 279–81 reform of 312–16, 320, 325, 329–36 France impact of revolution on 106 post-revolutionary development of 107–10, 113, 211 Germany 41 Russia 65–6 U.S. colonial professions 141 later development of 153–6, 200 post-revolutionary attacks on 150–3 Public housing and class formation 38 England v. U.S. 12 U.S. 147, 174, 204 Public ownership see Nationalization Public schools American 146, 153, 197 English 219–22, 231, 241–2, 320, 326 Quo warranto, writs of 247, 278, 325

215, 233–4, 239,

Raeff, Marc 49, 51, 53, 63–4 Railways, France v. England & U.S. 121–2

452 Index Rayton, Dwight 257–8 Reed, Albert Z. 154 Reform Act (U.K.) 1832 218, 232 Respect agenda, U.K. 341 Revolution & civil society 208, 306–7 American, distinctive characteristics of 142–3 English Glorious 1688–89 88–9, 215–16, 232–5, 242 Puritan 1642–49 214–15, 246 French of 1830 93 of 1848 88, 90–4, 96, 106 Great Revolution 1789–1799 as social capital & script 93–5, 99–105 National Revolution 1940 112, 123 and see Paris, Commune Russian of 1905 54, 62, 66, 71 of 1917 67–8, 71–2, 82 Ringen, Stein 17 Roberts, Ken 223–4 Rouen 92 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 331 Royal Commission on Universities 1850–52 (Eng) 326–7 Royal Society (U.K.) 278–9 Rule, John 249–50 Ruling class, attempts to identify England 217–31 France 115–40 Russia 49–51, 55, 72–4, 81, 305 see Djilas & Orwell U.S. 187–206 see also Aristocracy in England, Integration of elites, Nomenklatura Ruttenberg, Stanley 178 St. Etienne 92, 121, 126 Sale of Office in England & France 119 see Monopolies, England 232 Sartori, Giovanni 39, 321 Savage, Dean 130–1 Savage, Mike 26, 37, 292 Scientific Management England 330–1 France 256

Sewell, W.H. 90–3, 98–9 Shadwell, Arthur 157 Sheffield 246–8, 255 Sherman, John (Senator) 192 & Sherman Act 172, 193–6, 204, 274 Shonfield, Andrew 122–4, 128–9, 132 Skilled workers 42 England 28, 248, 251–7, 263–8, 289, 292, 297–302, 328, 336–7 France 88–91, 99–101, 119 ratios to unskilled compared 260 Russia 66–9 U.S. 156–7, 164–5, 172, 180, 184, 308, 311 Slavery in U.S. 148, 159–61, 164 Smith, Adam 261 Smith, S.A. 80 Smith, W. Rand 104 Social mobility comparative studies of 9–11, 21, 26–30, 33–4 in England & Britain 16–17, 267, 291–4 in France 107, 115–18, 130 in Russia 23 U.S. 187–91, 197–200 Social order in England, pillars of 338–9 Socialist-Revolutionaries (Russia) 62, 74–5 Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (U.S.) 154 Solicitors (England) 236, 239, 243, 266–7, 270, 336 Soslovie, sosloviia (estates) 58, 83–4 Stalin 73, 77, 80, 82, 118 Stanley, David 198 States as agents of class formation & dissolution 36–8, 209–10, 304–10 see Civil society and passim Statute of Artificers 1653, England 248, 251–4, 272, 297 Stendhal (Beyle, M.H.) 276 Stevens, Thaddeus 46 Strikes England (& Britain) 244, 249–50, 255, 259–61, 283, 287, 299–300, 312, 316, 320, 324, 328, 337 France 89–93, 100–4, 111–12 Russia 68–70, 78, 80–1

Index 453 Scotland 299 U.S. 161, 165–71, 173–6 Sunday Times, ‘Rich List’ 224 Sweden 11–12, 31–4, 294 Table of Ranks 49–52, 58, 65–6, 73–4 Taine, Hippolyte 275 Tawney, R.H. 219 Taylor, F.W. 330 Technical training England preference for practice-based 266–9 reform of 314–15 see Apprenticeship France, pioneer of school-based 119 in U.S. scarcity of 156–7 Temperley, S.R. 259–60 Tennessee Valley Authority 288 Thatcher, Mrs & her governments 7, 13, 16, 44, 125, 230, 274, 287, 296, 310–38 Thompson, E.P. 36, 44, 46, 166–7, 244, 250, 263 Tocqueville, Alexis de on France 1848 94 on U.S. 160, 187, 205–6 Toulouse 89–90, 92 Trade societies & unions as agents of class formation 39–41 England 244–54, 263–5, 272–3, 282–6, 288–303, 311–12, 314–20 France 96–105, 109, 123–4 Russia, Imperial 66–72 Soviet 77–8 U.S. 162–8, 172–6, 180–6 Trade union transition elite to mass England 263–4 France 99–101 Russia 77–8 U.S. 165, 172–9 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 263–4, 282–5, 289 Traugott, Mark 88 Tribunals, industrial & employment in U.K. 312 Trow, Martin 142, 145, 322, 326, 333 Turner, Frederick Jackson 159–60 Turner, H.A. 255–6, 261 Turner, R.H. 292

Union des Chefs des Entreprise (UN-ICER) 115 United Nobility 54 Universities England 215, 222, 234, 268, 273, 276, 281, 311, 325–7, 331, 338 France 130, 137 Russia 22, 64, 70, 76 U.S. 144, 151, 154, 159, 198–9, 202 Useem, Michael 201 Vichniac, Judith 256 Vichy regime 110, 112, 123 Vocational training see Apprenticeship, Technical Training Vogel, David 204–5 Wagner Act 1935 (U.S.) 173–5, 176, 180 Watson Thomas Sr & Jr 194 Webb, Sydney & Beatrice 250, 273, 277 West, James 182–3 White, Albert 213, 269, 271 Whittaker, D.H. 293 Wilentz, Sean 165–71, 174 Wilkinson, Rupert 220–1 Wilks, Stephen 228–30 Williams, Raymond 212 Williamson, Jeffrey 13 Wobblies see the IWW Working class American absence of enduring class institutions 179–87 surges of solidarity and consciousness 164–79 British, research on 7–11 English compared with middle class 262–9 early organization of 244–51 separates from middle class 251–4 French adapts revolutionary form of action 99–105 predates industrialization 87–93 social capital of 93–9 of Imperial Russia beginnings of 66–72 of Soviet Russia absence of class characteristics 77–81 compared with predecessors & successors 80–1

454 Index Workingmen in U.S. v. working class 186 Workingmen’s parties (U.S.) 149, 165 Workplaces English & French compared 132–4, 254–62 English & Japanese compared 293 French & Japanese compared 135–6

peculiarities of English 258, 260–2 Wright, Erik Olin 24, 30–4, 46, 187, 294 Zeldin, Theodore 4 Zemstva 54, 62, 64–5, 70, 83 Ziegler, Rolf 226 Zola, Emile 110 Zubatov, Sergei 71, 81