English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century: G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century: F. M. L. Thompson. Both from series “Studies in Social History”, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, 40s. 310pp., 45s. 368pp. respectively.

“The so-called monarchical and aristocratic elements of the English Constitution can maintain themselves only because the bourgeoisie has an interest in the continuation of their sham existence; and more than a sham existence neither possesses today”, wrote Engels in 1844. Britain was indeed a fully capitalist country by the time he was writing, and it had been an essentially bourgeois country for about one hundred and fifty years before that The countryside was not left aside by this development—on the contrary, a capitalist transformation of agriculture had preceded the Industrial Revolution and had long since expelled feudalism as a mode of production from the agrarian scene. Nevertheless, the aristocratic element was still there in 1844. In some sense the landowners still constituted the ruling class of the new industrial nation, they still dominated politics, the Church, and the Army, still represented and interpreted the State and its laws throughout rural England, and exercised a powerful ascendancy over the minds of the bourgeoisie. Perhaps there was a sham side to the existence of this hereditary governing elite, since its aristocratic way of life reposed upon a solidly bourgeois basis of capitalist grounh rent and its economic interests were in large measure identified with the farther general development of the whole capitalist system— fundamentally, they were a part of the system and not at odds with it like a genuinely feudal aristocracy. Nevertheless, it was wrong to reduce the existence of the class to this sham and to see in it nothing but a deliberate fraud and disguise, an instrument of bourgeois rule. To do this is to misunderstand seriously the very character and evolution of the English bourgeoisie itself, and some of its present dilemnas.

The elite really did govern. The agrarian hierarchy of peers, gentry and farmers had a robust, autonomous existence throughout the two centuries in which English capitalism rose to its zenith and preserved much of its power into the era of imperialism. A decisive collapse did not occur until after the First World War, when— according to F. M. L. Thompson—as much as one quarter of England must have changed hands in a few years, in the greatest transfer of land since the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. This long aristocratic tutelage deeply affected English bourgeois society. In this “most bourgeois of all nations”, the counterpart of the “bourgeois aristocracy” to which Engels refers in a well-known letter to Marx in 1858 was nothing less than a sort of aristocratic bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie which accepted the political, social and cultural hegemony of the landowners as a condition of its own existence. This acceptance stamped upon society at large certain aspects of the pseudo-feudal agrarian hierarchy. In the latter was preserved a whole world of social relations, an archaic web of deference and respect, of fixed status and established convention, of personal and paternalistic authority matched by vassal-like subordination, a world—says Thompson—“in which each man knew his place and acknowledged his superiors, who were superior by reason of their style, authoritative manner and air of gentility and who were acknowledged as such because they claimed the rights of their social position with selfassurance.” These are indeed precisely the “feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” which the Communist Manifesto refers to, the “motley feudal ‘ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’ ” and which it was the historic ‘task of the bourgeoisie to destroy, “leaving no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cashpayment’ ”. One of the many great paradoxes of English history is that the peculiar English agrarian order permitted the preservation and consolidation of such ties upon a renewed basis. And through the hegemonic position of the landowning class in bourgeois society, they were actually integrated into that society itself—so that, in the most bourgeois of all nations, class relations and class consciousness generally assumed an archaic hierarchical form, into the real bourgeois nexus of relations was integrated a false nexus of grotesque obsessions and prejudices, a mystifying pseudo-aristocratic order where all individuals and classes knew their places and had natural superiors and inferiors. Loving a Lord and abhorring egalitarianism—that “ruling passion of men” in truly democratic ages and nations, as De Tocqueville observed—the English bourgeois was so used to being ruled by an elite that he could conceive no other method of government. When the Lords could no longer rule because of the general decline of the landowning class, “gentlemen” had to govern instead. When the country houses could no longer produce the required superior beings, an artificial “Establishment” had to be invented to perpetuate the fine old traditions. Special factories to produce leadership, style, authoritative manner, gentility, and so forth, had to be set up, the Public Schools. The workings of crude bourgeois democracy had at all costs to be tempered by the influence of discrete paternal authority.