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. They had

4 to be responsive to public opinion, as largely represented by a middle class acting under the influence of evangelical and/or utilitarian impulses. Here too, if Pierre Rosenvallon is right in his book onLe Moment Guizot, Halévy was drawing on an established French line of thinking. Rosenvallon has argued that French liberals of the post-Guizot type placed great emphasis on the state of public opinion, or, as they sometimes put it, the state of public morality. They saw it as an essential restraint on authoritarian styles of governance. Opinion in this sense took precedent over anything connected with mere suffrage politics; it served much the same purpose in politics that the market served in the case of economics. England, on this view, through its voluntary associations, many of them based on self-reliance and philanthropy, met the conditions for a liberal, competitive, and hence dynamic regime. Here too was the kernel of Halévy’s ‘theory of progress in a modern state’. We no longer believe that the aggregation of doctrines and thinkers Halévy assembled under the term philosophic radicalism, the mixture of Benthamism and political economy he was the first to put together, was such a homogeneous or, indeed, such a persistently influential public philosophy in England during the nineteenth century. But Dicey and generations of those cultivating what Anna Gambles has rightly called the Whig-radical teleology are more responsible for creating this impression than Halévy himself. England in 1815contains less of this than his first book, and the account he gives there of the creation of an administrative state, operating under democratic auspices and controlled by a powerful body of public opinion, is informed by a larger perspective that brings us back to another persistent theme in French commentary on England. I would call it a ‘sociological’ perspective, as Halévy did himself on one occasion, except for his reservations about French positivism and Durkheimian sociology, largely because, in common with Marxism, he did not feel they allowed sufficient play to the intellectualist, individualist, and voluntarist aspects of political activity and social change. Contrary to Marx and Engels, Halévy thought that nineteenth-century England provided conclusive disproof of the materialist interpretation of its history.

5 Tocqueville’s visits to England in the 1830s had led him to drop his original assumption that aristocracy was doomed to perish in the face of the equalising tendencies of democratic society. Mid-century observers such as Léon Faucher, a free-trading liberal in the Cobdenite or Bastiat mould, continued to make great play of the persistence of aristocratic power in a dynamic society that, unlike post-revolutionary France, remained essentially a society of ranks. Taine actually came to believe, Burkean fashion, in the inherent qualities of leadership which the practical-minded English aristocrat brought to public life. Hence too, incidentally, the fascination exerted on French minds by the English concept of a ‘gentleman’: how had this French word come to have a meaning in England when there was nothing that could be described by the same term in France? Halévy handles the same theme with greater penetration, largely due to the commitments that came with his combined task as historian of doctrines and institutions. But the problem remains the same: how did English society, with its class structure and all the class conflict generated by a highly unequal distribution of property and rapid industrialization, how did it manage to create those modern institutions that enabled it to foster ‘voluntary obedience’ and discipline. Here was the clue to living with the consequences of industrialisation without succumbing to the French diseases: bureaucratic centralism and Caeserism, whether exercised by the socialist Left or the legitimist and militaristic Right. All that this familiar recital may prove is that left-inclined liberals with Halévy’s formation were bound to join a long line of French liberal anglicistesin becoming

Anglophiles. He once joked that the happiest solution was to enjoy the benefits of life in England despite disliking the English. He occupied the role of their interpreter with considerable dedication up to his death in 1937, by which time pan-European events and the rise of what he termedsocialistes d’Etat --such as he correctly diagnosed his friends, the Webbs, to be -- led him to believe that even England no longer possessed the means to overcome what he called the ‘era of tyrannies’. Whatever defects we might find in Halévy’s work today, I wonder if he provides us with agenda items that are worthy of further elaboration. Does this French mirror still offer any

6 insight into the peculiarities of British economic experience, despite the fact that it does not to give priority to the purely economic dimension? If I have read some of the work of later contributors to this colloquium correctly, those that stress the political or cultural dimensions of British economic debate, I am hoping for a positive answer.

Bibliography

Emil Boutmy

Psychologie politique du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1900. Translated by J. E. C.

Bodley asThe English People; A Study of their Political Psychology, London, 1904.

M. Léon Faucher (1803-54)

Études sur L’Angleterre in 2 volumes, Paris, 1845, 2ndedn., 1856.

Èlie Halévy (1870-1937)

‘La Naissance du Méthodisme en Angleterre’, Revue de Paris, 15 Aout-1 Sept, 1906.

Translated as The Birth of Methodism in England by B. Semmel, Chicago, 1971.

La Formation du Radicalisme philosophiquein 3 volumes, Paris, 1901-4. Translated by M.

Morris as The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, with all the notes drastically cut, London, 1928.

Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle; L’Angleterre en 1815, Paris, 1912. Translated by E. I. Watkin and D. A Barker with an introduction by R. B. McCallum, London, 1924, revised, 1949, second impression, 1960.

Élie Halévy: Correspondance, 1891-1937edited by H. Guy-Loe with a preface by Francois Furet, Paris, 1996.

Max Leclerc

L’Éducation des classes moyennes et dirigeantes en Angleterre, avec un avant propos parM. Émil Boutmy, Paris, 1894.

Les Professions et la Société en Angleterre, Paris, 1894.

7 Paul Mantoux (1877-1956)

La Révolution Industrielle au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1906. Translated as TheIndustrial

Revolution in the Eighteenth Century; An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory

System in England, 1928, new and revised edition with a preface by T. S. Ashton, London, 1961. 16 impressions up to 1983.

A travers l’Angleterre contemporaine, Préface de M. Gabriel Monod, Paris, 1909. Essays on Mafeking Day, Jingoism, Olive Schreiner, treated as an African voice during Boer War, municipal socialism in London, the rise of the Labour Party. education and the state in Britain, and recent transformations of the British constitution.

La crise du Trade-Unionisme, in collaboration with Maurice Alfassa, Paris, 1903. English edition, New York, 1971.

Notes sur les comptes-rendus des séances du Parlemant anglais au XVIIe siècle, conservés aux archives du Ministères des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, 1906.

Le Socialisme a l’oeuvre (in collaboration with A Berthod, G Fréville, A. Landry, G. Renard, and F. Simiand), Paris, 1907.

Hippolyte Taine (1828-93)

Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 5 volumes, Paris, 1892 Translated by H. Van Laun in 4 volumes, Edinburgh, 1871 and reissued in London, 1920.

Notes sur l’Angleterre, Paris, 1872. Translated asNotes on England, numerous editions, the latest translation and edition being that of Edward Hyams, London, 1957. Based on visits made in 1861 and 1862, with another visit in 1870.

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