They Do Things Differently There, or, the Contribution of British Historical Sociology

They Do Things Differently There, or, the Contribution of British Historical SociologyAuthor(s): John A. HallSource: The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1989), pp. 544-564Published by: Wiley on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/590888 .

Accessed: 28/08/2013 03:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and The London School of Economics and Political Science are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The British Journal of Sociology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 152.15.236.17 on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 03:11:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lonschool

http://www.jstor.org/stable/590888?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


They do things differently there, or, the contribution of British historical sociology

This paper has a clear and decided thesis: contemporary British historical sociology is cognitively high-powered and of immense importance for sociology as a whole. A novelty of the exposition that is more or less dictated by this claim is the specification of intellectual advance. Contemporary historical sociology is not, in other words, another research programme promising to deliver the goods at some future date: instead it is actually possible to point to sustained achievements which have implications for core concerns of the discipline. My characterisation of this recent work gains by initial consideration of the sense of history of previous periods of British social science; this procedure will highlight the contentious nature of parts of the argument. But I do not claim that all is sweetness and light; the essay ends with some anxious reflections, sadly of an all-too-familiar kind.

Some definitional matters need to be dealt with at the start. The term historical sociology is used broadly to include comparative as well as historical studies. What is important about all such studies is concentration on societies where, in L. P. Hartley's phrase, 'they do things differently'; this approach is held to be necessary not just if we are to generalise but also so that we can properly understand ourselves. Secondly, a distinction will be made between a general sense of the past and the practice of historical sociology. One obvious way to underline the difference is by insisting that all sociologists, though with greater or lesser degrees of self-consciousness, possess the former; differently put, if historical sociology is a discrete speciality, it has a unique capacity to speak to fundamental presuppositions of most practising sociologists. Finally, it must be admitted that it is not always possible to separate British historical sociology from developments elsewhere; scholars, after all, can be as much members of the society of their peers as citizens of their nation states. In general, there is a British flavour to the developments discussed here, but external influences on occasion did play crucial enabling roles for British development a process which may be about to be reversed. More generally, similar findings have

The British Journal of Sociology Volume 40 Number 4

John A. Hall



The contribution of British historical sociology 545

sometimes been made by scholars elsewhere at roughly the same time; we shall have cause to note a few cases of such serendipity.

1 77S1974, OR, FROM ADAM SMITH TO PERRY ANDERSON

It has properly been pointed out that sociology was created by the emergence of 'modern societies' whose precise physiognomy has thereafter been the central preoccupation of the subject. Certainly this viewpoint, so flattering to the pretensions of historical sociology, is supported by the work of the Scottish moralists. As sociology has come to be seen in terms of the classical trinity of 'Marx, Weber and Durkheim', the contribution of these thinkers has correspondingly been neglected. This is highly regrettable, for two reasons. First, it is not really possible to understand classical sociology without appreciating this tradition. For most sociology is best interpreted as a critical reaction to the nature and theory of capitalist society - as the negative connotations of such key concepts as 'alienation', 'anomie' and 'disenchantment' suggests. This is not to argue that mainstream sociology was usually politically either reactionary or revolutionary, although that was sometimes the case; but the desire to control and abate the forces of capitalism was absolutely central to the discipline. At first sight, the sociological viewpoint of the Scottish moralists key figures both-in empiricist and capitalist theory - seems completely opposed to this. However, second thoughts suggest that the difference may not be so great. Most obviously, some key figures, most notably Adam Ferguson, dissented from the optimistic belief of Smith and Hume that a society of wealth could replace one of virtue. More important still, recent scholarship has made it quite clear that the leading figures themselves did not endorse the market without qualification.l Smith, for example, felt that progress in Europe had in part resulted from a pre-existing skilled populace, that is, from people with sufficient 'human capital' to be able to live within market society, not least as the result of the early spread of literacy; his thought as a whole has considerable room for state intervention, notably in education and military training, so as to ensure that such human capital continues to be created.2 The second reason why neglect of the Scottish moralists is unfortunate is even simpler, namely that their ideas are exceptionally powerful. Much has quite properly been made recently of the subtleties of their advocacy of capitalism, that is, their favouring money making for the pragmatic reason that it would help to control other more harmful passions.3 More generally, their work is made relevant by the brute fact that, for better or for worse and despite multifarious sociological predictions, we distinctively still live within capitalist society. More particularly, the Scottish moralists



546 John A. Hall

contributed a great deal to debates concerning the rise of the West. This is not simply to praise Smith's own account in Book Three of The Wealth of Nations; rather the very way in which development has come to be seen in Smithian terms, as a development in the natural course of things unless blocked by irrational and predatory rule. This particular approach is still the subject of very lively debates indeed.4

This initial and glorious moment of British sociological understanding was followed by a certain decline in the age of Victorian confidence: a rather vacuous sense of'history as progress' took the place of historical sociology. The character of this decline can be further examined by distinguishing, in a slightly exaggerated manner, between the literary imagination and a more abstract and moralistic science of society. It is well known that the reaction to capitalist theory and social organisation that bred sociology on the continent produced instead in Britain that particular flourishing of the literary imagination so strikingly chronicled by Raymond Williams's Culture and Society, 178F1950. But Williams's account of such varied figures as Carlyle, the novelists of the 1840s, Arnold, Ruskin and Morris suffered from one great weakness: it failed to admit that it was only describing the minority tradition. The major tradition remained that of political economy and empiricism. It has properly been noted that the key task of this school in the Victorian years was that of integrating the working classes into the high- minded political discourse of the middle classes.5 If that concern distinctively dates this school, it is none the less important to stress that its tradition of empirical inquiry has been Britain's fundamental gift to intellectual endeavour in general, and to British sociology in particular. Nevertheless, this school was far less aware of historical and comparative issues than were the Scottish moralists. Perhaps the locus classicus justifying this statement is Mill's Representative Govern- ment. The initial interest shown there in other cultures quickly fades before a moralising prescription that was never finally grounded, as Mill had promised it would be, by the 'science of ethology' that was to form the cornerstone of his whole oeurre.6 This amounted to a placing of hope above analysis a tendency which Noel Annan argued, in a classic but curiously titled lecture on 'The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Social Thought', was sufliciently general to curtail sociological studies in Britain. 7 The deleterious consequences of this development can be particularly clearly seen in the Fabians. Admittedly, these thinkers differed from Mill in an elitism which was an end in itself and not just a means towards a genuinely liberal and contentious society. None the less, the moralism and puritanism so clearly seen in their plans for Poor Law reform received no philosophical justification and were highly question-begging as a result.8




If Mill did not ground his prescriptive theory successfully, most nineteenth-century British social thought felt that this had been achieved by means of the theory of social evolution.9 But the belief that other societies were merely more lowly placed on a single ladder of human experience, though comforting for notions of universal human rationality, became, especially given the nature of the rise of Imperial Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, ever less tenable. With the exception of Marx, most such theorists contented themselves with the intellectually facile task of specifying stages rather than of explaining the manner in which transitions were made between them. The vacuousness into which evolutionary theory had fallen led to Sidgwick's famous attack on Hobhouse: morality, Sidgwick insisted, should not be read off any historical pattern given that no 'is' can create an 'ought'.'° This intervention of the philosophers was exceptionally unfortunate: instead of a reinvigorated sociology, British thought was given an injunction against sociology that naively ignored the certain fact that not every moral option is realisable in every historical circumstance. These sociological limitations of mainstream British thought were fully apparent in the inter-war years in Leonard Woolfrs decent but hopelessly provincial After the Deluge, a curious combination of Fabian politics and liberal hopes.l Only Keynes and Tawney- the former as keen to control political passion by money-making as had been the Scottish moralists, the latter partially able to escape some limitations of middle-class moralising by active participation in a social movement

offered cogent new avenues of analysis, albeit for social thought in general rather than for sociology in particular.

In the twentieth century sociology has flourished in the wake of war. One particular reason for this has been the leavening effect given by the work of exiles and emigres. In a brilliant essay, Anderson pointed out that more middle-class, indeed 'white' exiles had dominated British intellectual life.l2 There may well be some truth to this in general, but it makes little sense of the rather small contingents the first of which included Karl Polanyi and Karl Mannheim, the second Stanislav Andreski, Ernest Gellner, Moses Finley and Norbert Elias whose work contributed to British historical sociology: the families of these thinkers had not lost large estates, and their initial contribution was, arguably, leftist in orientation. More generally, the fundamental re-thinking of social institutions entailed by defeat in war has been responsible for giving sociology a central place in most continental European societies. In contrast, British success in war, by seemingly confirming the worth of existing social institutions, has tended to privilege a particular version of history at the expense of sociology. 13 None the less, modern British sociology owes almost everything to the generation that went to university in the years immediately after the ending of



John A. Hall 548

the Second World War. This generatation certainly shared hopes of general social reconstruction prevalent on the continent, and it pioneered a native sociology fully possessed of a sense of history. It may well be the case that the intellectual historian of the future will be forced to argue that crucial opportunities that would have confirmed the importance of this native sociology and, more particularly, of its historical sociology were sometimes not seized: thus schools of thought developed neither around David Glass nor around the historically and comparatively informed London School of Economics department of the 1950s and 1960s, despite the very considerable talents of particular individuals, perhaps most notably those of Ronald Dore and Ernest Gellner. Nevertheless, this native sociology did have significant achievements to its credit, and this makes some attempt to spell out its sense of history the more necessary. Much highly valuable work was done, in the shadow of Tawney, in establishing the ways in which individual life chances were affected by social class. If the great single contribution was that of T. H. Marshall, striking empirical studies were provided by sociologists such as David Lockwood and Joe Banks.l4 The basic sense of social structure shown by such scholars led to early and relatively complete immunity to Parsonian normative functionalism, as in the critical essays of Ron Dore, David Lockwood and John Rex. Mainstream American ideas did not, in other words, dominate even at the maximal period of its state's hegemony. Somewhat to the contrary, Britain proved to be a receptive audience for the earliest historical sociologists, that is, for the work of Reinhard Bendix, Marty Lipset, Neil Smelser, Barrington Moore, Gerhard Lenski and C. Wright Mills. However, the fact that most British sociologists felt themselves to be securely in possession of a view of social development meant that historical sociology itself did not particularly thrive, as was evidenced by Dore's important work, itself of course an exception to the generalisation j ust made, being considered a mere speciality. Key assumptions shared with such practitioners of history from below as Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Richard Hoggart, with whom relations were quite close dominated analysis: it was sociologically on the cards that the labour movement had the capacity to establish a more progressive society, albeit one in which the state would take on new tasks of social welfare rather than somehow wither away. The general viewpoint, in other words, was one which combined Tawneyite sympathies with a Webbian respect for expertise; it can be said at once that the group was to lose much cogency in the 1970s as different members felt forced to emphasise either one of these influences at the expense of the other. None the less, until that time progressive politics and social processes seemed united; most of these figures voted for the Labour Party. This was a striking and noble




vision. The question with which we must, at least in part, be concerned, is, however, whether nobility was at the expense of sociological acuteness - that is, whether hope dominated analysis.

WHO'S WHO IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY

Three groups can be distinguished in contemporary British historical sociology. I am not in possession of full or secret histories explaining the origins of each group; however, some factors that were important are obvious, whilst others are amenable to guesswork. The first two groups have very specific agendas of their own; only the members of the third group would consider themselves to be historical sociologists tout court. In addition, it is worth noting that links with other academic disciplines- above all, international relations and history, and more particularly economic history have become extremely important: these disciplines provide both material and audience for much recent historical sociology.

If evolutionary theory in British social thought was made redundant by events, its actual demise was at the hands of Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown. These thinkers outlawed explanations of institutions as 'survivals' from the past on the entirely meritorious ground that we needed to explain what it was about current social structure that made a particular survival attractive and 'functional' for modern purposes. The strength of this approach can be seen in the way in which it differed massively from that of Talcott Parsons; it was sensibly extremely suspicious about the power of'values' in society, tending indeed sometimes to a quite crude view in which ideas were seen as the mere reflection of basic patterns of economy and power. The weakness of this approach, however, was its militant dislike of history.l5 But once the negative assault on facile e.olutionism had been accomplished, there was no inherent reason why historical material could not be considered again with the benefit of a firm sense of structural constraint; in fact, the Annales school of French historians was involved in precisely this task. The pioneer of the historical turn of British social anthropology has been Jack Goody, but he has been ably abetted in Cambridge by Alan MacFarlane and Ernest Gellner and elsewhere by such unclassifiable figures as John Peel.

The range of material addressed by the historical anthropologists includes the nature of the state in pre-industrial periods, comparative studies of production techniques, analyses of literacy and the resulting tensions within the world religions and attempts to distinguish the nature both of European and English 'uniquenesses'. But perhaps the very best work done by this group has consisted in anthropological reflections on the peculiarity of the European



550 John A. Hall

pattern of family, marriage and inheritance. This has been made possible by their close co-operation with the second group, the SSRC/ESRC sponsored Cambridge group concerned with historical demography, whose discoveries in this area are of undoubted fundamental and lasting importance. Not every member of this group works in Cambridge but most do, and even John Hajnal and Tony Wrigley both commuted from Cambridge to LSE at least, until Wrigley's recent move to a research fellowship in Oxford. Positively, the members of this group have established that the NW European pattern of marriage and kinship was unique in being nuclear and highly sensitive to Malthusian pressures; the latter factor crucially helps us understand why multiplying mouths did not eat up development in European history, that is, why a 'take-offn into sustained growth was possible. Negatively, the findings of this group have destroyed many deeply held beliefs about the supposed communal solidarities of pre-industrial society. But despite the fact that Wrigley and Schofield's The Population History of England, 1541-1871 is an undoubted classic, it is still the case that many of the implications of this school's findings have yet to be worked out properly. l6 Coody's The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe is a first attempt to theorise how the pattern emerged, but we still need much more guidance as to the relation between this family pattern and economic development in the late medieval and early modern period.l7 The group itself has been very circumspect in its general theorising, and this has allowed Emmanuel Todd to write a pair of completely excessive books on this subject; they amount to a sort of revenge of the Left Bank on all-too-cautious British

. .) empiricism. 10 The third group is itself diverse. It is principally comprised of

academics, although Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson stand out from that rule. However, the scholars involved come from diverse backgrounds: Keith Hopkins and Garry Runciman were trained as classicists, but thereafter became historical sociologists Keith Hopkins being very specifically a sociologist of Rome; others, notably Salvador Giner, Nicos Mouzelis and Gian Poggi, were from the continent; more generally, many had first degrees in Modern History. None the less, there is a measure of coherence in this group, and I have sought to emphasize it by drawing attention to the publication in 1974 of the first two volumes of Perry Anderson's analytic history of the West. Other scholars with similar interests include Colin Crouch, Michael Mann, Bryan Turner, Anthony Smith, Paul Hirst, John Urry, Nicholas Abercrombie, Scott Lash, Derek Sayer, Ian Roxborough, Martin Shaw and Paul Corrigan. This group owes its measure of unity to it being a generation in conflict with its predecessors, that is, with what it considered to be the 'soft leftism' of the Webbian/Tawneyite consensus. This




pejorative label will be considered later. But it is as well to stress immediately that this conflict was by no means complete. Such genuine visceral conflict did and does characterize the American scene: the remarkable and pristine emergence of historical sociology there results from a combination of distrust for the American state due to participation in the Civil Rights Movement and in opposition to the Vietnam War and a consequent awareness of the diminishing returns of Parsonianism.l9 In Britain, the scholars in question were part of a less anodyne consensual tradition, and their generation experience led them rather to seek to realise pre-existing political commitments; this task felt particularly urgent as the result of very considerable distaste for the behaviour of the first two Labour governments of Harold Wilson. But equally important was the impact of French structuralist marxism. As is well-known, this particular French 'flu could prove to be debilitating: it encouraged political elitism, notably in those early essays of Anderson's which seemed to imply that regrettable absence of revolutionary zeal on the part of British workers would be remedied by the efforts of New Left Review, and it was prone to dreadful formal obscurantism, as in the theoretical labours of Hindess and Hirst.20 It was perhaps the example of Barrington Moore that meant that Anderson avoided the latter pitfall, thereby lending contemporary historical sociology that air of reality which has so helped purge sociology of the theoretical extravaganza that marked the late 1960s and early 1970s indeed I think the principal contribution of historical sociology has been to divert attention away the investigation and analysis of our concepts to that of reality itself.

If there is a sense in which the first two groups distinguished ultimately form a single kinship-anthropological group, it is as important to realise that the third group gained cohesion only over time. Initially there was much fierce argument between those who held marxism, especially in its Althusserian form, to be true and those who wished to add to or complement the famous theory of history. At the present time, it seems fair to say that the no-holds- barred marxists Corrigan, Sayer, Hirst, Shaw, even Mouzelis have liberalised in such a way as to lend both cohesion and intellectual force to this generational cohort. It has been generally accepted that the French structuralist marxists had brought to the fore the need to distinguish and to specify the interactions of polity, economy and ideology, each of which is deemed, at least on occasion, to operate according to an autonomous 'logic' of its own. The fact that Anderson's own professedly marxist work was found to be very unsatisfactory because it constantly depended upon the introduction of ideological and political factors the importance of the Church as the transmission belt for the classical legacy, the collapse of Eastern European states for geopolitical reasons, and so



552 John A. Hall

on aided this realisation.2l Here was a strong incentive to theorise fully the exact ways in which ideological and political factors affect the historical record. The result of this, best seen in the most important work of contemporary British or, indeed, world historical sociology, Michael Mann's ambitious and ongoing attempt to rewrite sociological theory in his Sources of Social Power, is entirely positive.22 We already know much more than we did, in particular about the state and its geopolitical role, as causal agents of social change; this has on occasion allowed for a new look at traditional sociological concepts such as that of class, albeit the intention here has not been less to refute or abandon earlier work than to complement and complete it.

SUBSTANTIVE RESULTS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES

There is not sufficient space here to outline or to comment upon all the substantive work that has been done by modern British historical sociologists. A principle of selection is correspondingly necessary. Attention will be given to work whose implications most clearly change both key concepts of sociology and sociological theory as a whole. Even here, attention will be selective: no mention, for example, will be made of Ernest Gellner's exciting sociology of the emergence of rationality, although the implications of this work has profound ramifications for the current popularity of rational choice theory, especially in the USA.23

The most impressive substantive results of recent British historical sociology concern pre-industrial society and the conditions for the exit which NW Europe made from that agrarian world; these results are now easily available in the brilliant codification they have received at the hands of Patricia Crone, a noted historian of Islam.24 We can best approach these findings by insisting that Durkheim was of course quite wrong to have a binary model of the division of labour; this excluded the complex hierarchical division of the classical agrarian civilisations. What mattered for the self-maintenance of such civilisations was the cohesion of the various elements of the elite soldiers, priests and intellectuals that stood on top of various communities of peasant producers almost entirely bereft of the means of communication with each other. Such agrarian communities were not normally the subject of proselytising efforts on the part of the elite, nor were their affairs regulated by the state: survival and order depended very much on participation in self-help groups, the pre-eminent of which was that of extended kinship links. The secret of stable rule in such circumstances was that of preventing horizontal communication of any sort, that is, the prevention of linkages rather than the encouragement of mobilisation.




Such civilisations make a mockery of our notion of 'society': stability resulted precisely from norms not being shared by every member contained within the bounds held together by political or, as in the cases of Islam, Hindu India and Latin Christendom, by ideological might.25

It is now absolutely clear that the institutional complex of Europe differed very considerably from this ideal type of an 'agro-literate polity'. The political fragmentation consequent on the Fall of Rome together with the absence of militarily powerful tribesmen whose presence is perhaps the key to understanding the development of Islam and the maintenance of its unique character thereafter meant that various national states grew up organically: such states emanated from society and were not simply excrescences imposed upon it by superior military force. This was very much the result of full feudalism in combination with a religious power eager to maintain its own autonomy. The paradox of the situation, however, is that that greater co-operation symbolised by the presence of Standestaat by no means indicated that European states were weak. Very much to the contrary, they were long lasting not least because the absence of extended kinship bonds reduced the self-help capacities of the people-and in continual interaction with their societies, principally in order to tax them sufficiently in order to survive in the 'asocial' society of international state competition: a social pressure also well understood by French and American social scientists.26 In developmental terms, this type of state proved an exceptionally favourable shell for emergent capitalism: it was strong enough to protect property but not, due to the presence of other competing states, so monolithic that it could afford to stifle it. But our understanding of European development has been improved not just by rethinking the importance of politics, of realising that development was aided by a helpful political shell. There probably remains some truth to the Weberian insistence on the impact of the Protestantism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. None the less, most recent work has argued that European dynamism was in place well before the fifteenth century, and this stands as a decisive refutation of both Marxist and Weberian theories of European development.27 On this basis the contribution of ideology to social change has been reinterpreted. The Latin Christian Church aided development both through its own material services, most notably in monasticism, and as the principal creator of the plural state system.28 More fundamental still, the church served in Durkheimian fashion as the normative cement for early European medieval society, albeit in so doing it was creating social order rather than simply, as Durkheim believed, reflecting it.29 This appreciation of the nature of ideological power is a useful complement to the mainstream intellectualist, Weberian mode of thought, although it



554 John A. Hall

must be stressed that this approach does have empirical application.

Finally, it is as well to stress that political and ideological enabling

factors would have mattered little, as Adam Smith realised, but for

the presence of human material ready to exploit opportunity. The

legacy of 'the Germanic mode of production' was a sizeable section

of free peasants, hungry for land, individualistic, and sensitive to

Malthusian pressures, whose activities contributed massively to

economic development. European development then depended on a very curious concat-

enation of circumstances, and this suggests an improved way of

understanding social evolution.30 It is 'normal' to try and adapt to

circumstances. By this standard, the civilisations which did not

develop were successes, and Europe which, unable to maintain a

fixed identity, was the failure. It is very important indeed to put

things in this manner since it helps us escape from teleology. It also

makes us realise that Parsonian theory is a powerful tool in

comprehending much of the historical record precisely because many

civilisations were 'systems' which found ways in which, despite

much sound and fury, to preserve their basic structure. Theories of

change apply especially and for obvious reasons to the Western

tradition. In turning to the modern world, we can begin by stressing key

changes that have been made, by American as well as by British

historical sociologists, in our understanding of class as an agent of

historical change. Two arguments are of especial importance.

Firstly, it is necessary and possible to draw up a scale along which

the very different levels of militancy of national working classes

before 1914 can be placed.3l At one end of such a scale stands the

working class of the USA, never attracted to organised socialism

although possessed of occasional anarchist leanings; at the other end

stands the only really revolutionary working class of recorded

history, that of Tsarist Russia in its last days. If the capitalist mode

of production imposes a shared set of socio-economic conditions,

then it can obviously not explain such variation. In fact, high levels

of class militancy result from exclusionary political practices on the

part of old regimes; in a different formulation, the more liberal a

polity, the less likely it is to be threatened by class war.32 Thus

Britain stands fairly close to the liberal end of the scale: a sense of

class loyalty and solidarity, at least amongst men, and not of full-

blooded class consciousness was the result of some shared struggle

for citizenship rights against a state that was only occasionally

exclusionary.33 The key Tocquevillian insight in this finding is that

political injustice is a more effective agent of fundamental class

mobilisation than is economic inequality created and maintained by

capitalist production; the presence of a liberal state ensures that

class struggles diffuse through civil society rather than occasioning




fundamental social change. Social change cannot be understood, in other words, without appreciating the role of the state. NIuch more work needs to be done in order to explain why different elites adopted such diverse strategies, and this work will certainly often be related to the history of capitalism there probably being, for instance, a relationship between late development and political exclusion, albeit that does not, I believe, explain the behaviour of the Tsarist autocracy before 1914.

To insist that social movements are in part generated by politics rather than by socio-economic conditions is to severely dent the expectations of the post-war generation of British sociologists. A second important finding about class, implicit in concentration to this point on the importance of national working classes, undermines expectations that the labour movement will be the source of progressive social change quite as much. Marx had believed that the working class would be as transnational as the capitalist class, and this expectation was generally maintained until the onset of war in 1914. Obviously, the fact that workers fought for their states, with greater and lesser degrees of conviction, is of enormous importance; it explains both the continuing ability of capitalists to outflank workers and why the logic of geopolitical conflict has so shaped the history of the modern world. The point particularly to be stressed is that the greatest changes that the twentieth century has seen in the situation of the working class has been the result of geopolitical events as the 'reconstructed' working classes of the two Germanies would surely attest!34 In the West, we have lived since 1945 in a world of, to use the useful phrase of the American international relations scholar John Ruggie, 'embedded liberalism' in which the extreme left and right of inter-war politics have been ruled out of court.35

A theoretical conclusion forced on us by these findings is that classical sociology's concept of'society' is as useless for understanding the modern world as it was for accounting for the historical record.36 Our position is properly conceptualised by insisting that nation states in the modern world swim inside the larger societies of capitalism and geopolitical rivalry. The exact relations between these two larger societies are extremely complex, and much work still needs to be done to understand them: they are the province of no single discipline, although much excellent work in this area is now done under the label of'international political economy'. There is little truth to a hard version of any economistic theory blaming war on the needs of capitalism for the very blunt reason that geopolitical rivalry preceded the emergence of industrial capitalism. None the less, the emergence of a new economic giant, such as Germany in the late nineteenth century, does cause problems for world order, and there is every reason to believe that sociologists will



556 John A. Hall

be able to contribute towards comprehending them. International relations theory is naturally limited by the key assumption of realism according to which states react to each other as do billiard balls. Despite the large measure of truth to this viewpoint, sociologists are beginning to make a vital contribution by specifying the manner in which particular actors dominating particular nation states perceive external threats. On the basis of such inquiries, it may prove possible to refine our understanding of state power and to establish whether non-liberal old regimes are particularly bellicose.37 Sim- ilarly, sociologists are well placed to contribute to our understanding of the differential capacities of diverse national states to swim within the larger sea of capitalist society. For if certain regularities about that society as a whole or, more precisely, about the particular version of that society created and now fitfully maintained by the hegemony of the USA can be understood, it is definitely the case, pace Wallerstein whose work was largely responsible for encouraging this line of inquiry, that this larger society constrains rather than controls what happens within particular nation states. Goldthorpe's collection of essays on Order and Conf ict within Western European Capitalism is a pioneering international contribution within this area.38 Further research is likely to enable us to theorise the nature of the social portfolios that allow some societies to adapt more flexibly to the ever increasing pace of international economic change. The recent work of Ronald Dore, most notably Flexible Rigidities and Taking Japan Seriously, is clearly of quite exceptional importance, not least because it points to ways in which our own national society may have to adapt in order to survive.39

One danger of the quest for relevance imposed by cuts on British universities is that sociologists may become concerned with effects of social change such as unemployment rather than with their actual causes. The promise of contemporary British historical sociology's concern with the interaction of class and nation is that this fate will be avoided, and the central theoretical issues of the subject correspondingly be addressed and advanced. I have deliberately highlighted the ways in which contemporary understanding im- proves upon previous assumptions only to encourage debate and certainly not to denigrate previous scholars without whose contribution the most recent work would probably not have been possible, nor to deny the excellent and necessary empirical work that now 'traditional' understandings still produces; further words of caution about the charge of 'soft leftism' will follow at the end of the next section.40 It is also as well to own up to smoothing over certain differences between a very diverse set of scholars. The stress of a Michael Mann on the importance of the outcomes of geopolitical outcomes is likely to mean little to a Peter Laslett, self-professedly concerned to argue that political change is superficially concerned




with the forces with which he is concerned; equally, I have argued against the complete abandonment, in the light of the discovery that working-class militancy is occasioned by political exclusion, of the notion that social pressure from class forces, particularly from the middle class, can never have social evolutionary consequences.4'

AN EXPLANATION OF BRITISH DECLINE

Perhaps the crucial test of the significance of historical sociology is its ability to improve the understanding of its own national society. My contention in this section is that contemporary British historical sociology passes this test with flying colours. In one sense, this achievement is scarcely surprising. The post-war sociologists did not write about decline for the brute reason that they believed that Britain could still lead the world, not least in terms of its achievements in social policy. Those hopes now seem amazingly distant, and attention correspondingly has to be on the question of decline. None the less, the most recent explanations do stand somewhat opposed to the basic sociological assumptions of the post- war generation of scholars.

Britain's rise to power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century resulted from a coalition between the old regime and newer social groupings. Expansion was in the traditional geopolitical interest as well as much applauded by newer middle-class elements; a key factor allowing for this coalition was the state's possession of naval rather than armed forces. Significantly, this expansion was made possible, as John Brewer has strikingly shown, by the presence of an exceptionally strong state, in which high levels of taxation, made possible by the class coalition, combined with an exceptionally flexible financial system to allow for remarkable geopolitical conquests.42 Interestingly, this coalition became some-what strained in the mid-nineteenth century as many liberal middle-class elements genuinely sought to replace hegemony with inter-dependence; but the desire for a liberal revolution was curtailed, and Britain accordingly remained capable, largely through skilful diplomacy, of meeting the German challenge in two world wars.43 However, the sheer cost of these wars debilitated Britain. Relative decline was always inevitable given the rise of Germany and USA; the dramatic nature of that decline, however, was occasioned by geopolitical events. But the question that modern British historical sociology has concerned itself with is the extent to which institutional patterns have played a part in accentuating that decline. Differently put, given that Britain's relative decline was inevitable and given that it was sudden, was it absolutely necessary that the decline should go so far that Britain should sink, in other words, so very far below the



558 John A. Hall

level of France, Germany and Italy? Three explanations for decline have received much discussion in

recent years. The most long standing one accepts the conception of class at the back of the minds of the post-war generation of British sociologists a curious fact given that the argument came to be embraced right across the political spectrum. In this view, decline is the result of the militancy of the British working class. In its most sophisticated form, this thesis has stressed that such militancy was absolutely negative: it sought to preserve liberties that had been won, above all that of not responding flexibly to international market competition. Very much in the spirit of this argument has been the insistence, interestingly opposed by Keith Middlemass, that Britain should be placed on the low end of any corporatism scale: the British working class was born prior to industrialisation, saw its task thereafter more in terms of spending than of creating wealth and in any case lacked a powerful central organisation capable of disciplining its own members so as to deliver its part of a corporatist bargain.44 This theory was as important to the governments of Harold Wilson as it has been to those of Margaret Thatcher, and it has had similar appeal across the political spectrum occupied by academics.

I think the same is true of the second theory in question, best termed the dangers of the aristrocratic embrace. First fully formulated by Perry Anderson, this theory received its most striking statement from the American historian Martin Weiner in English Culture and the Decline ()f the Industrial kStirit; as most British sociologists know all-too-well this treatise was accorded canonical status in 'the Thatcherite revolution', i.e. it was included in the list of books that Sir Keith Joseph insisted that his civil servants read.45 The nub of the theory lies in a perceived historical change. Early industrial England is held to be the preserve of the character-type familiar from Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that is, orderly, disciplined, inventive, hard-working, puritanical and individualist. At some unspecified point most convincingly, perhaps, the repeal of the Test Acts in 1868 this bourgeois culture is held to have lost its ascendancy over that of the upper classes. Just as the range of a George Eliot is reduced to the mere defence of a class in Evelyn Waugh, so British industry moves from figures such as Isambard Brunel to William Morris and, indeed, to Laura Ashley. The incompleteness of the victory of the British middle classes has, it is held, been much strengthened by victory in two world wars. One effect of such victory was the continuation of elite interest in an imperial role, first on its own account and then through pursuit of the Polybian strategy of the special relationship with the USA.46

The third explanation for British decline is the one produced by




contemporary British historical sociology. The bare bones of the theory were laid down by the international political economy scholar Susan Strange in her superlative Sterling and British Poliey and by the remarkable American historian Bernard Semmel in Imperialism and Social Reforms; however, the fullest statement of the thesis has been offered by Geoffrey Ingham in Capitalism Divided? with an important corollary best explored in W. D. Rubinstein's Men of Wealth.47 The contribution of this thesis can be outlined best by beginning negatively, that is, by spelling out its implicit criticisms of the two approaches already outlined. Distrust is shown to the assertion that the British state's autonomy has been limited by a militant but defensive working class for the most obvious of reasons. The British political elite had unquestioned authority for at least the two decades after 1945; it did nothing of any significance to turn British society around.48 Equally importantly, studies of industrial productivity and investment have cast considerable doubt on that version of the thesis stressing the refusal of British workers to produce efficiently: where investment levels have been sufficiently high, in comparative terms, the productivity of British workers has been second to none. Perhaps still more stinging criticism has implicitly been addressed to the Weiner thesis. The process of gentrification he describes is something of a European staple, and is clearly as present in the novels of Thomas Mann as in those of his British counterparts. But the crucial point that is made is slightly different. Whilst Sheldon Rothblatt demonstrated some time ago that sons of businessmen who attended Oxford and Cambridge at the turn of this century did not return to industrial pursuits, it would be vastly mistaken to imagine that this somehow represented a retreat to simpler, anti- industrial pursuits.49 Rubinstein has shown convincingly that the rich in Britain have overwhelmingly been those with land and those who work in the City of London. It has been and still is economically irrational to go into British industry when Merchant Banks are able to pay vastly more. The positive side of the thesis follows from this. British capitalism was commercial before it was industrial, and it remains so today. This perhaps explains its continuing interest in free trade, its insistence on protecting sterling, abstention from the European Monetary Sytem and the current refusal to allow full investigation of a European central bank. Furthermore, it is the fact that money is made principally through short term transactions that explains the low level of domestic industrial investment. All-in-all, British industry suffered most after 1945 from stop-go policies necessitated by the overvaluation of sterling; the decisions to have sterling at that level were made by the political elite, and were clearly in the interests of the Holy Trinity of British politics, that is, the City, the Treasury and the Bank of England.



560

This last thesis is powerful, and it has also become generally accepted as Perry Anderson's recent conversion to it demon- strates. It would, however, probably be a mistake not to accept measures of truth from the two earlier accounts, especially as it is possible to specify the ways in which they do make sense.50 Thus it would be idle to deny that the British working class became, in reaction to decline, militant, and in so doing severely limited the powers of the state from the late 1960s until the assaults.of Margaret Thatcher and changes in the occupational structure severely diminished its power. Similarly, it would be churlish to deny that Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time whose long sneer against Widmerpool echoes that of Petronious's Satyricon against Trimalchio gives us an unrivalled portrait of ruling-class degeneracy. Differently put, success in war did make the British political elite particularly sleepy, and in ways which had important social effects. The decision to maintain the sterling area and to stay out of Europe was taken quite as much for reasons of prestige as due to pressures exerted by the City; even now the continuing militarism of the British state means that 55 per cent of research and development money in Britain goes to war research economic madness in a country which necessarily has short production runs. In summary, what is needed is an account which weighs and then blends together all three factors.

This is a good moment to digress in order to consider an extremely vexed but crucial question. Contemporary historical sociology is to be commended for 'telling it like it is', that is, for allowing certain 'facts' to overcome some of the traditional hopes, entertained by many in the immediate postwar generation, that the Labour Party could be a progressive political force. None the less, it is worth asking whether their labelling of the work of the previous generation 'soft leftist' should be accepted. There is some truth to the matter: thus Tawney was often too prone, as in his books on China, to imagine that education would lead to social reform a tendency that perhaps derived from insufficient appreciation of state power.5l But Tawney was by no means politically naive, and there is in any case everything to be said prescriptively for 'softness' if that term denotes a concern to combine equality with democracy.52 Although very complex matters of theory and practice are involved, it is worth asking whether any political consequences flow from recent research findings; even admitting that empirical results are different from political choices, one should surely expect some relationship between the two. It is tempting to speculate at this point about individuals to note, for example, the consistency with which Perry Anderson seems to hate his own class rather than to appreciate the achievements of the British labour movement and to contrast this with the genuine pathos at the heart of Michael Mann's

John A. Hall




work. But a few more general conclusions suggest themselves. Perhaps the most important is that national societies which do succeed in capitalist society seem, despite the notable diversity of much of their political economies, to share a stress in the provision of a social infrastructure adequate to create labour educated enough to respond flexibly to world market conditions. Just because Adam Smith so clearly rules externally, most successful states have, despite disclaimers, packages of internal policies that can very loosely be termed Keynesian, that is, they refuse to leave everything to the market internally, and this even when they do withdraw from particular industries. This is worth stressing precisely because it suggests that the historically meritorious realisation of Margaret Thatcher's government that British society has to swim, like it or not, inside capitalist society has not been matched by policies which are likely, despite present claims, to lead to general renewal for British society. It is, of course, no accident that the question of efficiency is here given such central attention: given that the working class is unlikely to be much of a political agent and given the importance of elite decisions, it seems sensible, at least to me, to spell out clearly that national success within capitalist society may allow, even need, a measure of progressive politics. The best route to progressive practice may yet be Smithian in kind, that is, to stress those social changes needed to compete inside capitalist society ratheie than to naively try to escape from it.53

CONCLUSION

In his philosophically-informed history of sociology, Enlightenment and Despair, Geoffrey Hawthorn seems to suggest that the pretensions of sociology to explain the world should now be placed at something of a discount.54 Whilst I agree that initial promise was followed by terrible intellectual decline, my argument has been diametrically opposed to his. On the one hand, Hawthorn fails to note extraordinary signs of rebirth. These can be summarised by thinking again of the Scottish moralists. Most obviously, a return has been made to their concerns, and a recovery of a sense of reality has gone along with this. But it is important to stress that we are now advancing beyond Smith. Despite the title to Smith's greatest work, he had little appreciation of the impact of nation states on the character and history of capitalism; this economism was of course absorbed wholesale by Karl Marx. Modern historical sociology is beginning to explain the complex interactions of capital and nation. One suspects its best work is yet to come. On the other hand, I would insist that we cannot afford despair because there is so much we desperately need to understand. Would the renewal of the British



562 John A. Hall economy necessitate changing the status of the City of London? Given the rise of the East-Asian NICs and the consequent collapse of dependency theory, is this not the moment at which a systematic understanding of non-European 'routes to the modern world' could be achieved? What exactly will happen to the current world political economy given the relative decline of the USA? These are vital questions, and we need much work to answer them. The final comment that has to be made is provincial and depressing. The recently appointed Chairman of the ESRC seems to me correct to say that Britain excels in historical sociology.55 Will this reputation be maintained? In the USA some of the questions noted are being addressed by international political economy? a subject that has been created in the last fifteen years. The shrinking of British universities has meant that few scholars in this field have been appointed in Britain, to our subsequent long-term loss. Accordingly, it is very noticeable that many of the questions noted are now being most fully addressed in the USA; it is there, to give a single example, that the application of the mobilising effects of political exclusion has been extended to peasant societies, particularly in brilliant work by Jeff Goodwin.56 Another factor is of equal importance. Attempts to measure 'the brain drain' have hitherto been quantitative. This is a great mistake. What matters more than numbers is the removal of scholars, especially if they are young, whose work is leading to rethinking of key concerns of the discipline. UCLA may benefit from having Michael Mann, Perry Anderson and John Brewer but their gain is our loss; and to these names one can add those of Ron Dore, Bryan Roberts, Bryan Turner, Paul Corrigan, Michael Cook, Derek Sayer, Gian Poggi and Salvador

,) .

olner.

(Date accepted: April 1989) John A. Hall

Departments of Sociology The Universities of Harvard and Southampton NOTES

1. The literature of the Scottish Enlightenment is enormous. The most helpful general discussion available is I. Hont and M . Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue, Cambridge, Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1983. 2. Smith's views on this matter run throughout his work, and they are directly ascribed to him by Dugald Stewart in his 'Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith. L1.D.', in A. Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects,

1 985. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980,

especially p. 313. 3. A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capital- ism before Its Triumph, Princeton, Prince- ton University Press, 1977. 4. J. Baechler, J. A. Hall and M. Mann, (eds), Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988. 5. P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 6. S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow, That noble science of politics,




Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 153.

7. London, Athlone Press, 1960. 8. S. R. Letwin, The Pursuit of

Certainty, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1965.

9. J. Burrow, Euolution and Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966.

10. On Hobhouse, see S. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981. Hobhouse's reaction to the First World War amply j ustifies the charge that social evolutionism became vacuous. Although at the time it drove him to complete despair, he soon came to regard it as a mere hiccup in the process of rational social development; what remained missing was a sociological appreciation of the causes and impacts of war.

11. New York, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1931.

12. P. Anderson, 'Components of the National Culture', in A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn, (eds), Student Power, London, Penguin, 1969.

13. One reason for scepticism about Margaret Thatcher's promise to completely change British society is the reactionary policy being developed in regard to the manner in which history is to be taught in schools.

14. T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development, New York, Anchor Books, 1965; D. Lockwood, The Black-coated Worker, London, Allen and Unwin, 1958; J. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood.

15. E. Gellner, Ca?lse and Meaning in Social Science, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.

16. London, Edward Arnold, 1981. 17. Cambridge, Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1983. 18. The Explanation of Ideology, Oxford,

Basil Blackwell, 1985; The Ca?lses of Progress, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987.

19. T. Skocpol, 'An "Uppity Genera- tion" and the Revitalisation of Macro- scopic Sociology', paper delivered to the American Sociological Association, September, 1986.

20. B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-

Capitalist Modes of Production, London, Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1975.

21. An important discussion of Anderson's work in this respect was P. Hirst, 'The Uniqueness of the West', Economy and Society, vol. 5, 1975.

22. Volume One: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

23. E. Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book, London, Collins, 1988.

24. P. Crone, Pre-lndustrial Societies, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.

25. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1983, makes this point particularly well.

26. J. Baechler, The Origins of Capital- ism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1975; C . Tilley (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975.

27. A. MacFarlane has made this point repeatedly, perhaps most clearly in The Origins of English Indiuidualism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978.

28. On the contribution of monasticism, see R. Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986; on the Church and the states system, see J. A. Hall, Powers and Liberties, London, Penguin, 1986.

29. Mann, So?lrce of Social Power, op. cit., chs 10 and 11.

30. P. Crone, Pre-lnd?lstrial Societies, op. cit., passim.

31. M. Mann, 'Citizenship and Ruling Class Strategies', Sociology, vol. 21, 1987.

32. D. Geary, E?lropean Labo?lr Protest, 184S1945, London, Methuen, 1984, especially p. 60.

33. R. McKibbin, 'Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?', English Historical Review, vol. 99, 1984.

34. Mann, 'Citizenship and Ruling Class Strategies', op. cit.

35. J. G. Ruggie, 'International regimes, transactions and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order', International Organisation, vol. 30, 1982. Cf. C. Maier, In Search of Stability, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1988.

36. Mann, So?lrces of Social Power, op.



564 John A. Hall

ism and Social Reform, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press; Men of Property, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1981.

48. S. Blank, 'Britain: The Politics of Foreign Economic Policy, the Domestic Economy and the Problem of Pluralistic Stagnation', in P. Katzenstein, (ed.), Between Power and Plenty, Madison, Uni- versity of Wisconsin, 1978. Cf. P. Hall, Governing the Economy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.

49. S. Rothblatt, The Revol?ltion of the l)ons, Cambridge, Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1981, and Tradition and Change in English Liberal Ed?lcation, London, Faber and Faber, 1976.

50. The most recent intervention in an ongoing debate is that of M. J. Daunton7 ";Gentlemanly Capitalism" and British Industry', Past and Present no.l22, 1989.

51. This criticism of Tawney's work on China is well made in R. Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1973.

52. J. A. Hall, 'The Roles and Influ- ence of Political Intellectuals: Tawney vs Sidney Webb', British Jo?lrnal of Sociology, vol. 28, 1977.

53. I have tried to make this case in Liberalism, London, Paladin, 1988.

54. Cambridge, Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1985.

55. R. Yarde, 'Newby's Balancing Act, Times Higher Ed?lcational S?ltplement, 16.9.88.

56. sStates and Revolutions in the Third World', Harvard Ph.D., 1988.

cit., ch. 1. 37. We need, in other words, to

examine the claims made in M. Doyle, 'Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs', Philosophy and P?lblic Affairs, vol. 12, nos 3 and 4, 1983.

38. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984.

39. Flexible Rigidities, London Ath- lone Press, 1986; Taking Japan Serio?lsly, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1988.

40. I have in mind here particularly continuing work on social mobility, class and educational opportunity.

41. 'Classes and Elites, Wars and Social Evolution: A Comment on Mann', Sociology, vol. 22, 1988.

42. J. Brewer, The Sinews of War, London, Hutchinson, 1989.

43. B. Semmel, Liberalism and Caval Strategy, Winchester (Mass.), tinwin Hyman, 1985.

44. A good account of current thinking about corporatism is C. Crouch, 'Sharing Public Space', in J. A. Hall, (ed.), States in History, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986. Middlemass presents his case in Ind?lstryn, Unions and Govern- ment, London, Macmillan, 1983.

45. Cambridge, Cambridge tiniver- sity Press, 1981.

46. It seems likely that Harold Mac- millan was the begetter of this strategy. See his remarks to Richard Crossman during the war, as reported in A. Horne, Harold Macmillan, Fol?lme One, New York, Viking Press, 1989, p. 160.

47. Sterling and British Policy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971; Imperial-



Documents

They Do Things Differently There, or, the Contribution of British Historical Sociology