IDEAS
Communism may be dead in all but a few precincts of the world, but many of its founder's ideas live on. One of the more noxious, George Watson thinks, is the theory that classes are the funda- mental units of a society. Here, he makes the case for another idea advanced by an unjustly neglected pre-Marxian thinker.
by George Watson
here was once a professor of not been reprinted since 1806. In 1923 the law named John Millar. Born noted German economist, Werner Som- in Scotland in 1735, he went bart, called it astonishing and one of the to Adam Smith's lectures on best and most complete of sociologies, and moral philosophy and then, wondered why it had dropped from view. finding his own religious con- In fact, it was not widely celebrated even in victionsT too weak for a clerical career even its own century. Neither Boswell nor John- by the tolerant standards of the Enlighten- son discussed it. Yet it was probably the ment, took to the law. In 1761 he became a first book in Europe to be devoted entirely professor at the University of Glasgow, to the theory of social difference, and al- where he is said to have been among the most the only one in the Western world be- first to lecture in English rather than Latin, fore the present century. acquiring a reputation as an orator in his Millar's invisibility since his death in university and beyond. His private life was 1801 is faintly surprising. He belonged, as a as uneventful as academic lives often are, Scot, to a modest nation but not, as a law- but in the 1770s, as a militant Whig, he yer, to a modest profession. His book went openly supported the American Revolu- into several editions in his lifetime, with im- tion, and a dozen years later the French, provements, and was translated into Ger- and he opposed the slave trade. man a year after it first appeared, and a He also wrote a treatise on social differ- year later into French. There was a Basel ences, which appeared in 177 1 as Observa- edition in the original English in 1793. But tions Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in 19th-century Continental theorists such as Society and in later editions came to be Karl Marx seldom if ever mentioned it, known as The Origin of the Distinction of though David Ricardo owned a copy and Ranks. A work by a professor still in his John Stuart Mill and his father James are thirties, it plainly owed something to the known to have admired it. Yet it can teach French philosophe Montesquieu and to Da- us something today, since it seems to be vid Hume, who, though a Tory, was a close widely assumed, even by anti-Marxists, that friend. The book is not now famous and has modem theorizing about social difference,
WQ WINTER 1993 and even social history itself, began in the 1840s with Marx and Friedrich Engels. "We are all Marxists now," a professor of classics remarked recently at an in- ternational conference, meaning no more than that ancient historians nowadays are interested above all in social history. The misappre- hension is widespread. Soon after the fall of communism in 1989, for example, an arti- cle entitled "Premature Ob- sequies?" in History Today (April 1991) by Christopher Hill, the octogenarian Brit- ish historian, argued that Marxism is immortal even if An idea whose time is past? The Marxian vision of social reality, the Soviet system was not, little more nuanced than this 19th-century cartoon, still reigns. being con~~~tuall~indis- pensable to historians. The argument has made them because they relate to wisdom become a convenient bolthole for ex-party and power." Every human and physical members and can be unthinkingly ac- variation, Montesquieu argued, represents cepted, at times, even by the nonpolitical. A an ultimate uniformity, every change an ul- myth is being born, and it has two aspects: timate consistency in human nature. An- that social difference is always and neces- thropology, here in its infancy, did not en- sarily the same as social class, and that the- tail the view that morality is a human ories of class began with Marx. These are invention or that it exists only relative to enormous assumptions. I want to argue time and place. Moral laws are given, like here that one can be interested in the the- physical laws, in the Enlightenment view, ory of social difference without being inter- and individual beings and communities can ested in class at all-by rejecting, indeed, get them right or wrong. Millar believed theories of class-and that the theoretical that too. Though his book is a study of the issue was at least a century old in modem diversity of human customs, occasionally Europe when Marx began to write about it invoking Arabs, American Indians, and in the 1840s. Marx was a latecomer to the even Congolese, its preface boldly restates debate about social difference and knew he the foundation doctrine of humanism: Hu- was, and the debate was not improved by man nature is "everywhere the same." He his intervention. is a disciple of Montesquieu's doctrine that diversities of sex, wealth, government, and n 1748, exactly a century before the the arts only illustrate the deeper unity of Communist Manifesto of Marx and Eng- the human condition. From the perspective I els, Montesquieu's The Spirit of Law ap- of a post-Marxist age like our own, how- peared, a comparative study of human soci- ever, his argument has a wider significance. ety that drew excited attention to the ways Millar believed in rank rather than in social institutions differ according to pe- class, in "subordination," as he and his riod, custom, and climate. Montesquieu master Adam Smith often called it, rather was not a moral relativist, though this did than in vast and potentially hostile con- not save his book from the papal index. In glomerations like bourgeoisie and proletar- fact his first chapter insisted that the laws of iat. Such polysyllables do not figure in his life are God-given: "He acts according to book. Five years after Millar's Origin of the the laws of the universe because He knows Distinction of Ranks appeared, Adam Smith them; knows them because He made them, introduced a chapter on the subordination
WQ WINTER 1993 MILLAR OR MARX?
of ranks into his Wealth of Nations (1776). again, is more subtle than class in the sense The debate about the theory of social differ- that it admits of more than one defining ences had already opened in Scotland with factor-birth and property, and above all Adam Ferguson, a professor of philosophy status-whereas class tends to divide into at the University of Edinburgh and another rich and poor, with the poor as agents of Whig, who published his Essay on the His- change. The contrast is highly paradoxical. tory of Civil Society in 1767. Like Millar's One expects intellectuals to hold complex after it, Ferguson's book was promptly views, on the whole, the uneducated to translated into German and, rather more hold simple ones; and no doubt class theo- tardily, into French. In the 18th century ries can be made to look complicated, es- Scotland led Europe in the study of society: pecially if they are dignified with the jargon anthropology and sociology together. These of the Hegelian dialectic and fitted out with three books are about the ancient, medi- polysyllabic talk about consciousness and eval, and modem all in one, at once com- reification. But the real effect of class when parative and analytical, factual and theoret- it began to replace rank during and after ical, and they do not recognize any the Napoleonic wars, in the writings of separation between anthropology and its Saint-Simon (1 760-1 825) and Marx, was unborn rival. not to subtilize but to simplify. An ignorant Nor do they engage in the modern de- idler silently identifying a stranger's proba- bate about social class, for the simple and ble rank by his dress, gestures, and accent, easily forgivable reason that their authors for example, is performing an act of identi- had not heard of it. The sociology of the fication far subtler than the historian who Scottish Enlightenment was about social in- concludes that the Spanish Civil War was equality or the subordination of ranks-the ultimately a struggle between the bourgeoi- factors that cause such subordination and, sie and the proletariat. The real charm of in turn, cause it to change. That establishes class to the intellectual mind of the 19th the point that it was (and is) possible to take and early 20th centuries, one sometimes an intelligent and even theoretical interest feels, was that it was easy and portable. in social difference without being inter- Intellectuals may sometimes like things to ested in class at all, as Marx was one day to look complicated, but they also like them understand the term. to be simple. The most seductive combina- tion, one suspects, would be to look com- he theory of rank represents as large plicated and be simple at the same time. a gap as any there is between the The interest of Millar's argument of T world of assumption familiar to our 1771 has been largely obscured in our own times and the world of the Enlighten- times, not because it is obscure in itself but ment. Rank differs from class in more ways because Millar could not know, or be ex- than one. It is various-perhaps infinitely pected to know, that a counter-theory was various-representing society as something about to be launched. That leaves the writ- like a pyramid with many steps, each subor- ings of the Enlightenment looking a trifle dinate to another; class implies, or came to bland; nor would the views of Millar and imply, no more than two or three vast his peers on prehistory, untouched as they groups condemned, in its extreme Marxian are by recent archaeological discoveries, version, to class struggle or civil war. There excite the respect of any living scholar. are other divergences. Rank was and is a Millar was not an original thinker and did popular and originally nontheoretical view not claim to be one. Oddly enough, some- of social difference, in the sense that the thing similar, in a mildly qualified form, uneducated can readily believe in it or take could be said of Marx and his theory of it for granted, as the scenes before Agin- class. It is strange that this should have court in William Shakespeare's Henry V been overlooked, because he was a pedan- vividly illustrate. By contrast, class was first tic German and conscientious in giving his and last a doctrine for intellectuals. Rank, sources. His theory of class was never ex-
George Watson, a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, is the author of Politics and Literature in Modem Britain (1977), The Idea of Liberalism (1985), and British Literature since 1945 (1991).
WQ WINTER 1993 52 MILLAR OR MARX?
pounded in its final form, and belongs to constancy-in-flux of human nature; for those portions of Das Kapital left incom- Saint-Simon and Marx, its profound incon- plete at his death in 1883. But enough has stancy. Consciousness itself, Marx believed, survived to make his position clear, and it is had been profoundly changed both by feu- confirmed by a letter of March 1852, in dalism and by the Industrial Revolution, which he denied having discovered either and socialism would change it again. Man the theory of class or the class war-his is not now what he was, and is about to contribution having been rather to show become another thing again. That argu- how classes are linked to phases of produc- ment between the humanism of the tive development, and how the coming Enlightenment and the relativism of its suc- class war must inevitably lead to a dictator- cessors will not easily be settled, but the ship of the proletariat.* collapse of communism might be since there have been no said to have left thegame such class wars in industrial drawn, for the moment, in states, the second propo- the humanist's favor, in- sition has not exactly sofar as the return of worn well, and the first the free market in is persuasive only in Eastern Europe may part and by means of imply that con- elaborate interpre- sciousness was not, tation. Like others after all, pro- that come to foundly and per- mind, Marx was manently altered mostly unoriginal by socialism, and when he was that a human in- right and original stinct for individ- when he was ual self-advance- wrong. He was ment can survive right in acknowl- even three-quar- edging his intel- ters of a century lectual debts, of deep freeze. however, and The question is what matters is plainly too vast to that he should have be settled by a sin- been wholly aware gle instance, or even that the theory of class a set of instances. The was not his invention. revival of humanism in The Enlightenment recent years is nonethe- view of social difference less notable after a century had this in common, at and more of dogmatic rel- least. with such 19th-cen- ativism in the fashion of tury views as Saint-Simon's Marx, Nietzsche, and and Marx's, that it was fun- John Millar Freud. In Beast and Man damentally a theory of his- (1978), for example, Mary tory. Millar's book, for example, treats pre- Midgley, a British philosopher, persuasively history and the first creation of settled argued that anthropologists and sociolo- societies. But history for the two camps gists in our time have tended to see only points in opposite directions. For Montes- differences because differences were all quieu and his followers it illustrated the they were looking for. The humanistic doc- trine of the unchanging human heart may, *"No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of in the endl be less absurd than We have classes in modem society or the strussle between them. been latelv encouraged to suvvose. Long before me the bourgeois hi~torian~haddescribed the There are other contrastshere. Though historical development of the class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes," Marx had read and even fleet- wrote to Georg Weydemeyer. ingly mentions the Congo, neither he nor
WQ WINTER 1993 MILLAR OR MARX?
Montesquieu, in an age before archaeology of unequal ownership. The doctrine of the and anthropological field work were born, economic base is already apparent. (Mon- shows much acquaintance with any evi- tesquieu had already hinted at it, though dence beyond the textual or with worlds not as a universal law.) Ferguson was quite beyond the classical ages of Greece and clear, like Millar after him, that social and Rome and the intervening epoch of Euro- economic institutions commonly underlie pean feudalism. As seen from the present, political change. His chief emphasis lay on their evidence is thin. Marx, too, was a clas- the institutions of justice-statutes, the judi- sicist by education, but his range was wider, ciary, courts of law, and the like-which, as especially in his later years when, as his in Adam Smith, presuppose private prop- notebooks show, he took a passionate inter- erty and largely exist to guarantee property. est in a variety of Third World topics (as Property comes first, and only societies in they would now be called) such as Ameri- which there are rich as well as poor, in that can Indians, and a keener interest in theo- view, can sustain forms of justice, civil lib- ries of race than his modem admirers have erties, and the civilized arts. Inequality of cared to acknowledge. These speculations, condition is in no sense a matter for regret. and those of Engels concerning primitive In fact it is out of property, and the laws communism, are not now much respected that protect it, that liberty is finally born. by anthropologists, being based on fanciful "Liberty.. .appears to be the portion of and largely discredited sources, but for polished nations alone," Ferguson wrote- good or ill they make the Marxist mix a nonreversible proposition, one may be richer, historically and geographically, than sure, since Ferguson was aware that France the Enlightenment view. in 1767 was polished but not free. The most provocative contrast between the two traditions, however, lies in the sim- his is an interesting argument to our ple fact that the luminaries of the Enlight- generation, now emerging from the enment saw wealth rather than poverty as T assumption that private wealth is so- an agent of change, and change for the bet- cially conservative in its effects. Ferguson ter. They wrote like Whig magnates. Since and Millar believed the reverse; so did the world, with the death of socialism, is Adam Smith. Liberty, in their view, and the now returning by leaps and bounds to that very search for liberty, need rich men, and opinion, the Enlightenment view now pos- not a few of them. And since not everybody sesses an interest beyond the merely curi- can be rich, one may say that liberty needs ous. Four years before Millar, Adam Fergu- inequality of condition in order to seek and son in his Essay had considered the achieve equality before the law. The less subordination of ranks required of any set- there is of one equality, they might have tled and peaceful society as necessarily agreed, the more there is likely to be of the based on an earlier and existing accumula- other. All political advances arise out of in- tion of private wealth. Such wealth, he be- equality, they believed, and George Orwell's lieved, was utterly essential to the civilizing contention in Animal Farm (1945) that task of turning brutal warlords into the rul- equality of condition, or rather the search ers of settled and prosperous states, and for it, naturally leads to despotism is one must precede it: "Before this important they would no doubt have been happy to change is admitted, we must be accus- endorse. tomed to the distinction of ranks; and be- Like the ancient historians he read, fore they are sensible that subordination is Millar was aware that wealth can corrupt. requisite, they must have arrived at un- Nonetheless it can lead naturally to de- equal conditions by chance." mands for civil rights by the rich against In other words, the highly desirable goal their rulers, whether Stuart or Bourbon, of a settled society can be based only on an and sometimes, as after 1689, to liberty it- existing ownership of property, where some self. Echoing Ferguson's point about pol- have more and others have less or none. ished nations, Millar wrote: Thus political power in peaceful states, as under England's Whig constitution of 1689, The farther a nation advances in opu- is likely to be an effect rather than a cause lence and refinement, it has occasion to
WQ WINTER 1993 MILLAR OR MARX?
employ a greater number of merchants, threaten a hereditary caste or privileged of tradesmen and artificers; and as the nomenklatura than a competitive system. lower people, in general, become thereby more independent in their circum- t is now time to return to Christopher stances, they begin to exert those senti- ments of liberty which are natural to the Hill, that Marxist survivor in an age of mind of man, and which necessity alone I disillusion. He left the British Commu- is able to subdue. nist Party in 1957 in protest against the So- viet invasion of Hungary the previous year, Necessity here means dire poverty. So the and his independent credentials have been most natural effect of private wealth, unassailed for more than 30 years. But in- though not an inevitable effect, is political dependent Marxism, too, may now be un- radicalism: a limited monarchy, for exam- der threat, or deserve to be. What 1989 ple, as opposed to tyranny, perhaps even a demonstrated, Hill argues in History Today, republic, and extensions of suffrage. Just as was not the death of Marxism but of the poverty tends to acquiesce in despotism, as Communist parties. I believe and hope that in slave states, so private wealth tends to be it signaled both, though the death of an ab- radical, obliterating memories of a "former straction is admittedly harder to certify state of servitude," enfeebling traditional than that of a person or party. It will evi- authority by creating a sense of indepen- dently take more than an Enlightenment dence and weakening hereditary influ- thinker like Millar, or even Montesquieu, to ences. Wealth is a necessary, though not a overturn Hill's case. But that is less because sufficient, cause of progress. "Money be- the case is strong than because, in certain comes more and more the only means of important respects, it is nebulous. Consider procuring honors and dignities," Millar re- this passage from Hill: marked without regret, as if the prospect of California were nothing to worry about. During the past century many Marxist The worry about new wealth began ideas have been incorporated into the later. Some 30 years after Millar, William thinking of historians, including those Wordsworth, by then an ex-revolutionary, who regard themselves as anti-Marxists. That society must be seen as a whole; that complained in his sonnet "0 Friend!" politics, the constitution, religion, and lit- (1802) that "The wealthiest man among us erature are. . . related to the economic is the best," as if this were a shocking in- structure and development of that soci- fringement on the status of old families; ety; that there are ruling classes: all these and Jane Austen's novels can be deprecat- are now commonplace. ing about the vulgarity of new riches that conveniently ignore their origins. It is easy They were also commonplace before Marx to forget that conservative interests were was born. They were known to anyone who once critical of competitive wealth-creation had read Montesquieu, Ferguson, Millar, and the commercial spirit, and for good and Adam Smith, and not all of them were reason. Charles Dickens, a radical, pro- wholly unfamiliar to Aristotle, Hobbes, and foundly admired the active commercial Locke before them. Professor Hill simply spirit-Daniel Doyce, the lively engineer- has not read enough if he imagines that inventor in Little Dorrit (1857), illustrates Marx was the first to see society as a the point-and indeed no one has ever whole-Thomas Macaulay did that in the shown what, in its social effects, is likely to famous third chapter of his History of Eng- be conservative about competition. By the land, which appeared in 1849, the very year early years of the 19th century, as a Tory, Marx settled in England-or that Marx in- Wordsworth found the commercial spirit vented the concept of a ruling class, or that vulgar, which perhaps at times it is. Fergu- he was the first to link political and artistic son, Millar, and Adam Smith saw it as the advances to the economy. Marx neither in- engine of civilization as well as of social vented the doctrine of the economic base change, and it is an argument worth reviv- nor claimed to have done so. ing. As Yeltsin's Russia may yet show, no A lack of reading may seem an imperti- economic system is more likely to allow nent charge to make against scholars. But the poor and the unconnected to rise and that is to misunderstand the direction in
WQ WINTER 1993 . . MILLAR OR MARX?
which lives are lived. Even eminent schol- edged. In fact he was proud of it. The 20th ars, after all, often form their dogmatic century has usually preferred to ignore his opinions, sometimes for life, before they sources, ancient and modern. Although have read a word of the matter, and later Marx was idolized for decades behind a reading can be partial and omissive. The wall of barbed wire and venerated for even late Moses Finley, a historian of antiquity, longer by earnest spirits outside the wall, once explained that his lifelong dedication his footnotes were neglected and his to Marxism began when, as a freshman at a sources unread. Those sources were often New York college, he heard Marx ex- explicitly antipopular, openly favorable to pounded in what proved to be for him an the rich, and unavoidably ignorant of the irreversible revelation. At the time he had new conditions created by the Industrial not so much as heard of Marx. It is possible Revolution. No wonder, then, if the Enlight- for highly intelligent beings to be con- enment, which candidly believed in private verted, and permanently converted, by au- wealth as an agent of progress, was written thors of whom they have read nothing. In out of the script after Marx's death. one of his last books, Politics and the An- There is a danger of perpetuating a large cient World (1983) Finley deplored the vul- myth of intellectual history. The academia gar habit of calling all class analysis Marx- of the English-speaking world may soon ist, since (as he said) it was as old as come to look like a sort of Masada of im- Aristotle. Not everyone is so scrupulous. A penitent Marxism. Christopher Hill, for ex- German professor of similar sympathies ample, writes that "Jack Hexter is the once told me it would be wrong to imply doyen of anti-Marxists, but when he tells us he was unacquainted with the writings of that Shakespeare's Richard 11 is about prop- Marx and Engels, since he had read The erty. . . his approach is manifestly Marxist." Communist Manifesto (1848) more than But is it? There is a river in Macedon, as a once. The Manifesto is a pamphlet, not a Welshman says in another of Shakespeare's book, and Marx and Engels were prolific plays, and a river in Monmouth. In his Poli- authors, but he plainly thought that a suffi- tics Aristotle called it a merely accidental cient answer. Marxists are not just ignorant feature of oligarchies to be ruled by a few, of the world. They are often ignorant of of democracies to be ruled by the many. Marx. His base too was economic: "The real point of difference is poverty and wealth." So t may seem strange that so many mod- perhaps J. H. Hexter is an Aristotelean, em historians are content to talk as if though I suspect he is better left to speak I social theory were an innovation of the for himself. 1840s. But there may be an explanation. Ar- Or perhaps both Hill and Hexter are istotle, when he spoke of the struggle be- Millarists, and should be invited to read his tween rich and poor, was making the richly book and tell us. More than two centuries antidemocratic point that the poor only ago Millar believed that property defined want democracy in order to expropriate power and directed where it would go, and the wealth of the rich; the Scottish Enlight- rank has worn far better as a theory than enment, for its own high-minded reasons, class. If we could make the invisible Scot was also actively in favor of inequality and visible again, along with his sources among private wealth. These are arguments that the philosophes and his Scottish contempo- have not usually recommended themselves raries, we might liberate ourselves from to historians in a democratic and even something more than the tyranny of com- egalitarian age. Victorian socialism did not munism that Hill, like others, discovered 40 deny its intellectual origins, and Marx's years too late. We might liberate ourselves debt to Aristotle was one he often acknowl- from an obsession with class.
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