The impotence of the British middle classes

Larry Siedentop

Despair lies everywhere under the surface of British life today. It gives rise to bouts of cynicism, aggression and a stunning lack of interest in the outside world. That despair is caused by the rapid erosion of a traditional social order by a social revolution. Faced by such a revolution, the British people at times seem to prefer not to have society at all, if they cannot have their traditional one with its familiar toles.

One sort of ambition has died. But it has not been replaced by another. The Pride which seemed so British in the nineteenth century — and which was traced to an aristocratic social structure by French observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville — has been eroded, without being replaced by the type of pride which Tocqueville believed to be necessary in a society (such as France) which has rejected aristocracy. In 1835 Tocqueville noted in his diary: The French wish not to have superiors. The English wish to have inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The English man lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

Using Tocqueville's ideas, it is tempting to suggest that Britain today is suspended mween two social conditions — and that Much of its malaise comes from the absence of an intelligible framework for Individual ambition. What should a man do? No one knows. It now seems odd to say that a man should behave as his station requires. On the other hand, thrusting ambition is still thought to be suspect,. In the early Sixties, Britain seemed to have found a 'middle way' between aristocratic and democratic attitudes — betWeen a corporate and an individualist Conception of society. But that middle Way has turned into a pis alter. The unintended consequence of looking for a middle way has proved to be moral confl!sien. Individuals no longer know what they are expected to do for themselves, t or what will be done for them. What ..;ocqueville called 'the Democratic Itevolution' has stalled. We have lost the advantages of an aristocratic social con ition, without gaining the advantages of a dernocratic social condition. What is a social revolution? To what extent has Britain had one? These are questions which English thought is ill equip to answer. Here arguments 7ockut change tend to be 'political or economic' but not 'social'. 'Social' questions often strike English thinkers as too diffuse and embarrassing. Three centuries of stability have resulted in questions • about the 'direction' of social change being posed less often in England than in France, where violent revolutions have drawn attention to underlying social changes. Stability has made it possible for English political and economic theories to disregard questions about the types of social organisation and class conflict.

Today Britain is paying the price for eschewing general ideas about social change. There is no widely understood framework for discussing where we are, where we have been and where we may be going. In the absence of such a framework, discussion tends to be slipshod and inconclusive. In Britain it is possible for a mere change of fashion or government (e.g. the Attlee victory of 1945) to be spoken of as amounting to a' social revolution.

In fact, social revolutions are not made of such stuff. They are made of changes which are deep-seated and cumulative; new habits and customs arising from changes in occupation and the distribution of property, education and mobility; and, perhaps above all, new ideas about social relations. These changes in what the French call les moeurs provide the theme of the most subtle of all French accounts of social change, Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Democracy in America was published more than 130 years ago. Yet Tocqueville's account of the transition from what he calls 'aristocratic' society to `democratic' society throws a surprising amount of light on the present condition of English society: it reveals what might be described as an incomplete social revolution.

Tocqueville uses 'aristocratic' and 'democratic' to refer not merely to forms of government but to types of society. In his view, an aristocratic society is defined by inequality of basic rights and conditions — the castes of feudal society being an extreme form — while demo cratic society is marked by relative equality of rights and conditions. The fixed social positions of the former create a powerful, self-confident elite resting on a permanently subordinated class. The dislodging of individuals from fixed positions in a democratic society (or atomisation, as it is called) releases individual ambition and raises expectations; it creates anxiety, competition and social mobility. While the first type of society is associated with subsistence agriculture, the latter is associated with the growth of a market economy. Above all, Tocqueville was impressed by one thing — the 'irresistible' movement of Western societies away from the first condition and towards the second during the last six hundred years. But he also noticed that, within this larger pattern, there were important differences in the pace of change in different nations. In particular, he was struck by the plight of a nation which has lost the advantages of an aristocratic social condition without gaining the advantages of a democratic social condition — which has lost the proud, powerful elite of the former without developing the general robustness of the latter. Anyone trying to understand the condition of England today must, I think, start at that point.

A striking change has occurred in outsiders' comments on English society during the last century. In the eighteenth century European visitors were generally struck by the openness of English society. England seemed to them a more advanced society than their own. Why? Because although the social hierarchy ('aristocracy') was still sharply defined, there was open social mobility. Unlike continental aristocracies, the English aristocracy had not degenerated into a caste. In England a gentleman could be made as well as born. The original feudal class based on conquest and birth had fused with a new aristocracy based on wealth. Eurpean observers (at least those with liberal inclinations) were delighted by the way the English upper classes constantly renewed themselves by recruiting from below, and spoke of the genius of English institutions — for they both acted as a spur to ambition and defused demands for revolutionary change. This is a far cry from the comments of foreign observers today. Instead of being described as advanced, English society is more often described as quaint, oldfashioned or class-bound — depending on the prejudices of the observer. Erudite visitors delight in finding a survival of the ancien regime (behind a facade of socialism) in this corner of Europe. Yet social mobility in Britain has certainly not been reduced. It is still perfectly possible to make money and move up the social ladder. Why, then, have comments on English society been turned upside down in the last century?

To answer that question it is necessary to consider what has not happened in England as well as what has happened. And it is here that Tocqueville's model of social change is helpful. Tocqueville wrote for a France which had undergone an incomplete social revolution — a country in which wealth and power had been redistributed to a crucial extent, but in which older class feelings and animosities retained a dangerous importance.

Something like this plagues Britain today. As far as material changes are concerned, the life of the majority of the British .people — like their European counterparts — has been transformed. Domestic conveniences, cars, leisure and foreign travel have ceased to be luxuries and become 'needs'. Of course, the absolute level of British consumption has fallen behind that of the continent in the last decade. But how important is that? Perhaps less important than the fact that income differentials between the middle classes and the manual working classes have sometimes narrowed to vanishing point in England during the last decade — in contrast to the continent where the middle classes have kept far ahead. Thus, if income and consumption are the test, social distances have contracted rapidly in Britain of late.

But what if a subjective rather than a material test is applied? Here the story is different. There has been change, but not to the same extent. The chief characteristic of an aristocratic society remains — that is, a fairly strong sense of being fixed in a social poSition. The typical English conception of society remains a corporate one, the image of a hierarchy of classes essentially different one from the other.

Despite evidence of creeping embourgeoisement, the corporate conception of society remains powerful. The ideologies of the two major parties would hardly make sense apart from it. It is as if the two parties would find the world too bewildering without the old class identities and loyalties to play upon. What would become of party rhetoric without the possibility of pillorying 'our rich oppressors' or patronising 'the working classes'?

Undoubtedly, the sense of having a fixed social position has some favourable consequences, such as providing stability and keeping anxiety at bay. (Could other Western European countries have survived a period of economic contraction as Britain has done, with so little commotion?) But the disadvantages are now greater. Indeed, the weakness of the individualist drive — what Marxists would call bourgeois ideology — is costing Britain dear. For that is the reason why Britain has not developed the economic impulse which might be expected from the wider spread of education, income and opportunity.

The middle classes in Britain have ceased to be 'carriers' of an individualist conception of society. They have absorbed aristocratic values. And, as the middle classes have ceased to be commercial in spirit, they can no longer infect the rest of society with that spirit. Thus, the absence of a powerful middle class ethic, an essentially individualist view of society and its future, has prevented the working people of this country from developing a new set of attitudes and standards. Quasi-aristocratic attitudes in the middle class imply the permanent subordination of another section of society. In consequence, the middle class no longer has a conception of society to offer others which does not in principle exclude some. What is striking about post-war Britain is that there is no vision of a better future open to a//. By contrast, the ubiquity of that vision in Western Europe is startling. It is a rather sordid vision — of a second house, a second car, a second holiday, etc. But it is all the more powerful for that. In Britain, on the other hand, the delights of an aristocratic life continue to haunt the imagination (and advertising), exciting some by the prospect of superior status, reminding many of a permanent inferiority in status. Is it surprising that many working people feel alienated from a system which so wounds their dignity?

Why have the middle classes here ceased to be 'carriers' of an individualist conception of society? Why have the British middle classes, once thought to be the most powerful and confident in Europe, become so impotent? Again, Tocqueville's model suggests an answer. The key lies in a different pattern of class conflict from that on the continent. In France the bourgeoisie had to destroy a caste society and seize power by violent means. The political education of the middle classes was thus in a much tougher school. In order to destroy aristocratic privilege, they had to appeal to the principle of equality (of opportunity, at least) in a way that the English middle classes were not forced to do. Power and wealth, rather than permanent differences of status marked by accent and manners, became the object of their ambitions. The very openness of British society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to a different result — to the middle classes assuming quasi-aristocratic attitudes and accepting a more corporate conception of society. That renunciation of individualist attitudes was no doubt strengthened by the need to govern an Empire and by the foundation of schools turning out an Imperial elite. In any case, there followed a partial collapse or failure of middle class values and ideology which is basic to an understanding of the condition of Britain today. It is the chief reason why the individualist movement here has been contained, if not reversed.

That is why neither major party has been able to commit itself fully to an individualist outlook. Those liberals in the Labour Party who are strongly committed to personal freedom on many issues still run up against a party ideology which gives priority to class solidarity. At times, over an issue like the closed shop, the Labour Party seems dedicated above all to preserving the old class identities.

The Conservative Party, on the other hand, commits itself strongly to economic liberalism, to the defence of a market economy, but fails to commit itself unequivocally to social liberalism. The Conservatives neglect to explore the preconditions of competition, the social and educational reforms necessary to create a sense of opportunity which prevents anY group in society feeling that it is permanently excluded from full participation in the system. That is the Achilles' heel of Conservatism today. It is due to the survival of a corporate conception of society, which fosters in some that sense of exclusion from the full benefits of the system which has been the great source of Socialist support. If the economic consequences of the survival of a corporate conception of society — and the alienation it breeds — are bad, the political consequences threaten to be far worse. Just as the French bourgeoisie acquiesced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the growth of centralised royal power, ill order to destroy their local aristrocratic oppressors, so the British working class, has acquiesced in the centralisation 0' power during the twentieth century in order to destroy what it sees as social privilege — the middle class masquerading as an aristocracy. In both cases the hatred of privilege temporarily blinded a important section of society to the dangers of an excessive concentration a power. But whereas in France the attack on aristocratic privilege drove the French middle classes to develop a fiercely individualist outlook, in Britain the attack on middle class privilege is preventing 111.e working class from developing the inch" vidualist attitudes which it might otherwise have embraced. Thus, the tacit alliance between the upper and middle classes which underlay the great English achievement of the eighteenth and earlY nineteenth centuries — a society more open than a caste society — gradually created attitudes in the middle class which are now the chief obstacle to social progress.

Unless the middle classes learn to sacrifice their quasi-aristocratic attitudes, their interests will continue to suffer; They will continue to foster a sense 01 exclusion in the working class which has led to economic decline and might even' tually destroy English liberty. We would then be left with the worst possible social outcome — a society in which class idell' tities have ceased to correspond economic facts, but are still powerful enough to prevent cooperation on the new, individualist model. Tocqueville sensed the danger: Thus we have abandoned whatever good things the old order of soeictYd could provide but have not profite from what our present state can offer; we have destroyed an aristocratic soe" iety, and settling down complacent-1Y among the ruins of the older building: we seem to want to stay there like rha` forever.

That is the dilemma Britain faces today: on the one side, pride without means; on the other, envy without energy.