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An Angliciste View of English Civil Society1 Donald Winch An Angliciste View of English Civil Society1 Since I shall be painting rapidly with a very broad brush, let me try to express the nature of my conclusion at once, bland though it will seem without more detailed painting. If, God forbid, I were writing an application for a research grant I would couch it in a language that has once more become fashionable. I would claim that I was investigating those features of ‘civil society’ which some acute foreign observers felt had helped to stabilize, even to legitimize the social and political tensions associated with Britain’s emergence as the world’s leading industrial, imperial, and financial power. Alternatively, I could employ another language by speaking ofmentalités, where use of French is not so much fashionable as a mark of the plain fact that this approach goes back at least as far as Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, elements of which can be found in the work of all those I shall be mentioning, from Guizot and Tocqueville on to Hippolyte Taine and Halévy. What was it about the English mentality or character, and the institutions that nourished it, that could account for British political stability and economic success, let alone their more unpleasant habits? Fortunately, I do not have to say much aboutmentalitéshere because Roberto Romani has just completed a book dealing with the question of national character at large.2 If my knowledge of the historiography of economic history had been better than it is, I might have chosen to focus on a younger friend of Halévy, another normalien, Paul Mantoux, whose book on The Industrial Revolution first appeared in 1906. As youwill see from my bibliography, Mantoux had also written on another of Halévy’s main interests as teacher and researcher, the history of socialism. In adopting the ‘civil society’ approach, however, Halévy suits my purpose better. First, because his links, intellectual and institutional, with an earlier generation ofanglicistesare more obvious; and secondly, because the publication of his correspondence in 1996, with an excellent introduction by Francois Furet, makes it possible 1 This discussion paper was written for a colloquium held at the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge in 2001. It was meant to stimulate discussion on the peculiarities of British economic development, the results of which appeared later in the collection of essays edited by Patrick O’Brien and myself as The Political Economy of British Historical Experiencec, 1688-1914, a work published as part of the centenary celebrations of the British Academy in 2002. 2 Roberto Romani, National character and public spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914, Cambridge, 2002 1 to assemble a detailed account of what led him to write his two most important works: his first books on the growth of philosophic radicalism and, secondly, his uncompleted history of the English people, where the first volume on England in 1815will have to be my sole example. Readers of these two classic, though by no means unchallenged, works will not need to have read the correspondence to appreciate the questions that interested their author, and the substantial, if not complete, novelty of his answers at the time they were written. But we do learn there that at one time he hoped to call his history, ‘a theory of progress in the modern state’; and that in gross summary form his conclusion was going to be as follows: the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, partly provoked by early industrial crises, explained the temperate character of political liberalism in England during the nineteenth. It had preserved England from revolution and prevented the bifurcation of party allegiances in the French manner, one centring on revolution, the other on reaction. In other words, evangelical revival had helped England to reconcile rampant economic individualism with those democratic pressures released by the French revolution. Halévy also claimed that his conclusions on methodism in particular were novel, though, ironically, he was forced to give up the idea of expanding these into a separate study when he found that two other French scholars were ahead of him on this trail. What has indeed become known as ‘the Halévy thesis’ has been much misunderstood, partly because the articles in which he first outlined it were sketchily programmatic -- the defect too of Max Weber’s equivalent exercise published at much the same time. Briefly, I think Halévy’s argument can best be understood as his equivalent to Tocqueville’s observations on the role of religion in American life. It was the capacity to sustain a multiplicity of disciplined sects or voluntary associations that gave vitality to English civil society, thereby moderating the extremes engendered by the spirit of industrial civilization and secular scientific rationalism. The victory of dissenting forms of protestantism over Anglo-Catholic and free-thinking tendencies in the eighteenth-century gave England something that was entirely missing in France. Taine had made similar observations on English protestantism in his history of English literature and in the notes he made on England 2 after visiting Manchester and Liverpool, where he was impressed by the private institutions of self-governance and philanthropy, while not being blind to the worst aspects of urban industrial living conditions. Halévy was at least half protestant himself, though his anti-clericalism made him less sympathetic than Taine was to anything connected with the established Church in England. It is no accident, as we used to say in more determinist times, that some earlieranglicisteswere full-blooded protestants: Say, Constant, Guizot, and another less well-known figure, Emil Boutmy, who was important in a more direct way to Halévy. Even Taine, an anti-clerical French catholic, acting with the advice of hisprotegé, Boutmy, had his children educated as protestants. More significantly, Boutmy, with the support of Taine and Guizot, became the founder and first director of the institution in which Halévy taught the whole of his life, theEcole Libre des Sciences Politiques. Better known as Science Po, this institution was founded in 1872 in the wake of the Paris Commune and defeat at the hands of Bismarck. It was an attempt to improve the quality of the French civil service by providing a practical training forhauts fonctionnairesthat included business administration and political economy, as well as the subjects taught by Halévy, the history of England and the history of socialism in Europe. The fact that it was libreunderlined the desire of the founders not to follow the normal French pattern in making education subject to a centralized and highly bureaucratic state – one of the persistent defects of French life that had preoccupied Constant and Tocqueville. (That, incidentally, is one of the themes of the studies of English education mentioned in the bibliography by another product of Sciences Po, Max Leclerc.) Although, in turn, Science Po became a model for Sidney and Beatrice Webb when founding the London School of Economics, possibly through their friendship with Halévy, the borrowing was originally Anglo-French rather than Franco-English. Why? Because the French founders hoped that it would foster a practical and pragmatic public service ethic of the kind that English society nurtured, so to speak,au naturel, through its private universities and schools, and through those voluntary associations which relieved the state of many functions. 3 But all this belongs to the last quarter of the century, when English institutions had been reformed, democratized, and accommodated to mature industrial society. It mayhave been his admiration for parliamentary democracy on the English pattern during this period that first drew Halévy, a philosopher, to devote the rest of his life to English history. But as historian it was essential for him to explain the earlier part of the journey, when a corrupt and far from democraticancien regimehad been transformed by methods that avoided the reversals and reversions typical of French experience. Put schematically, Halévy needed to provide a theory of the progress of a modern state to accompany his diagnosis of the crucial role played by religion in the formation of civil society. For this purpose he returned to his first work on England, the book on philosophic radicalism: it provided him with the second element in that ‘compound of Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism’ with which he brought the first volume of his history to a close. Compound is how it was expressed in the history, but it is impossible not to be aware of the dialectical frame of reference, the evidence, if I may descend to mentalités, of Halévy’s French education and argumentative tastes. In miniature, it is encapsulated in some of his attempts to describe the English character to his friends. Taking Gladstone as an example, he described him as a typical Scottish Celt, adding that it explained ‘the singular mixture of religious exaltation and imperturbable coolness that characterised the English race as a whole’. Here was the clue to the mixture of sentiment and rationality he later equated with Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism in the society at large. The messy compound is more true to life than the dialecticalidée maitresseof his book on the philosophic radicals, which centred, rather dubiously as it now seems to us, on an unresolved conflict or contradiction between a belief in a spontaneous harmony of interests, typically associated with a competitive free market economy, and a harmony that had to be engineered, in the classic Benthamite fashion, by means of a bureaucratic state run by experts. In his history of the English people he paid more attention to the nature of the political regime within which such experts worked. The emphasis there was on the paradoxes of an ‘open’ governing class operating within a ‘mixed’ constitution that deprived them of the powers of a repressive bureaucratic state.
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