Library:The Modern World-System/Volume 4

Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914

PREFACE: ON WRITING ABOUT THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM

This is the fourth volume in a series whose first volume was published in 1974. The overall work was conceived as a multivolume analysis of the historical and structural development of the modern world-system. Each volume was designed to stand by itself but was also intended simultaneously to be part of the singular larger work. This poses some problems both for the author and for the reader. I think it might be useful to the reader for me to spell out how I have approached these difficulties, not all of which were apparent to me when I started out. I do this in the hope that it makes my intentions and methods more clear to the reader.

Each volume, and each chapter within a volume, has a theme and tries therefore to establish a point. The whole book is simultaneously historical/diachronic and structural/analytic/theoretical. This is in accord with my epistemological premise that the much-vaunted distinction between idiographic and nomothetic epistemologies is outdated, spurious, and harmful to sound analysis. Social reality is always and necessarily both historical (in the sense that reality inevitably changes every nanosecond) and structural (in the sense that social action is governed by constraints deriving from the historical social system within which the described activity occurs).

If, however, one tries to describe reality over a large space and a long time (say, the modern world-system as a whole from its inception in the long sixteenth century [1450–1640] to today and tomorrow), one encounters the elementary difficulty that one cannot do everything at once. So I decided to take the story forward more or less chronologically, introducing structural aspects of the modern world-system when they first occurred or became evident in a significant way. There seemed to me no point in discussing, in a volume largely devoted to the long sixteenth century, structural issues that became salient only in the nineteenth century.

But equally, it did not seem to be useful to discuss, in a volume largely devoted to the nineteenth century, structural issues that had already been discussed in the first volume and whose characteristics had not significantly changed in the intervening centuries. Since, however, my views on when a phenomenon such as “industrialization” first occurred is somewhat different from the one argued by many other analysts, readers might not locate it in the volume in which they expect to see it discussed. I have tried to make clear, as I have proceeded, the logic of my choices.

So, let me first say how I decided to handle chronology. When I wrote volume 1, I said in my introduction that I would divide the overall work into four epochs, to which I gave specific dates in that introduction. Volume 1 sought to cover the long sixteenth century, defined as running from 1450 to 1640. However, when I came to write volume 2, I saw immediately that the story I wished to tell did not start in 1640 but rather, more or less, in 1600 and ran, more or less, to 1750. I put these years in the subtitle. I had now adopted, quite deliberately, the concept of overlapping long periods, a concept I continued in volumes 3 and 4. But this meant, of course, that I could not reach the present in merely four volumes, as I had thought in 1974.

The concept of overlapping time periods turned out to be crucial for my analyses. For time boundaries are of course fairly arbitrary and can be justified only in terms of the immediate issue that one is treating. The story of Dutch hegemony in the world-economy (chapter 2 of volume 2) may be thought to have started in 1600 (or even earlier) but definitely was not over in 1640 and is not really part of the story of the long sixteenth century. It belonged in volume 2, devoted to the consolidation of the European world-economy in the seventeenth century—again, more or less.

Furthermore, this raises the question of when one should seek to enter structural notions into the text. There was, at least in my opinion, no hegemonic power in the sixteenth century. It would have been out of place to introduce the concept, therefore, in volume 1. The Dutch were the first hegemonic power in the modern world-system. It is also true that they were not the last. But the concept of hegemony was not discussed within the context of Great Britain's assuming that role, nor will it be in the context of the assumption by the United States of that role. The concept, as such, once discussed, was taken for granted, and reference, when appropriate, was made to it without reviewing the logic of the concept. The theoretical debate had already taken place.

The chronology of each chapter follows its own internal logic as well, provided only that it stays somewhat within the parameters of the chronological limits of the volume. A good example of this is found in volume 3. Whereas the overall volume presumably ends in the 1840s, chapter 3, on incorporation, goes to 1850 (according to its title), and actually somewhat beyond. On the other hand, chapter 4, on the settler decolonization of the Americas, goes from 1763 to 1833.

Since I cannot presume that the reader of this volume will have read the three previous volumes, I believe it would be useful to resume the diachronic/theoreti-cal story that I have heretofore told. Should readers of this volume feel that I have failed to discuss something that they think ought to have been included in it, perhaps they will discover that it is something I have extensively treated previously. For example, most books devoted to the nineteenth century will discuss—indeed, discuss at length—the so-called industrial revolution. I have treated this as chapter 1 of volume 3 and see no point in repeating this in volume 4, especially when I wish to tell a different kind of story about the nineteenth century.

So let me start by summarizing what I think is the overall argument of each of the successive volumes. Volume 1, defined as covering the long sixteenth century, is the story of the creation of the modern world-system and the creation of some of its basic economic and political institutions. Volume 2 is the story not of refeudalization but of the consolidation of the European world-economy in a period running from 1600 to 1750; it seeks to explain how capitalists in different zones of the world-economy responded to the phenomenon of overall slow growth. Volume 3, defined as running from 1730 to the 1840s, is the story of the renewed expansion—both economic and geographic—of the capitalist world-economy. Volume 4, which I think of as running from 1789 to 1873/1914, is devoted to the creation (and only at this late point) of a geoculture for the modern world-system, a geoculture largely fashioned around and dominated by what I am calling centrist liberalism.

I have said that the various chapters make successive theoretical points. In volume 1, I discussed in chapter 1 why and how the modern world-system emerged from the medieval prelude. I later considered this chapter inadequate to its theme, and elaborated the argument considerably in an essay first published in 1992.¹ The key chapter of volume 1 is chapter 2, in which I outlined the concept of an axial division of labor that leads to the construction of different zones in the world-economy—the core, the periphery, and the semiperiphery (this last being a concept I added to the core/periphery distinction that had been put forward by Raúl Prebisch). I also made the case that this was the construction of a capitalist world-economy, the form that was taken by the modern world-system, and that initially this capitalism was constructed in the agricultural arena, with different modes of labor control for different zones of the world-economy.

Chapter 3 analyzed the creation of the states within the modern world-system and the role played therein by the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth century. Chapter 4 elaborated the distinction between a world-economy and a world-empire, and why the attempt by Charles V to create a world-empire was a failure. Chapter 5 looked at the core zones of the nascent world-economy and analyzed why strong state structures were established there, and the role that class played in this process. Chapter 6 looked at the peripheral zones and analyzed why their state structures were weak. It further elaborated the distinction between peripheral zones inside the world-economy and external arenas—that is, zones that remained outside the axial division of labor of the capitalist world-economy.

Volume 1 set the basic argument of the overall work in place, and concluded with a theoretical reprise that summarized and conceptualized the concrete empirical transformations described in the rest of the volume. During the long sixteenth century, and indeed for some time thereafter, the capitalist world-economy existed in only a part of the globe—essentially, western Europe and parts of the Americas. The rest of the globe was not yet part of this historical social system and therefore not subject to its rules and constraints.

If volume 1 went against the common argument that there was nothing we could call “modern” or “capitalist” before the late eighteenth century, it also argued with the position of those who said that there was a beginning of capitalism in the sixteenth century but that capitalism had a big setback in the seventeenth century. See the very extensive literature about the “crisis of the seventeenth century.” I treated this literature in the introduction to and chapter 1 of volume 2. I wished to argue that the so-called crisis was not at all a setback but a normal B-phase (or downturn) of the world-economy, one that advanced rather than disrupted capitalist development.

Chapter 2 dealt, as we have already indicated, with Dutch hegemony and the general patterns that explain why and how one country becomes hegemonic—for a while. Chapter 3 explored what happens when a hegemonic power first begins to decline. Empirically it dealt with English and French aspirations to be the successor state. Chapter 3 discussed how peripheral zones cope with a B-phase and why “turning inward” is not anticapitalist but survivalist. Chapter 4 was the first serious discussion of the characteristics of a semiperiphery; the role that semiperipheries play in the life of the modern world-system; and the distinction between those that are “rising” and those that are “declining.” Chapter 6 dealt with the continuing Franco-British rivalry in the period after there was no longer a significant political role for the Dutch. It described the lead that was taken by Great Britain and why this lead was the result not of more advanced economic structures (the usual argument) but of the fact that the British state, for various reasons, was stronger than the French state (contrary to the usual argument).

If the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is widely recognized as a period of economic and geographic expansion of the capitalist world-economy, credit is usually given to something called the “industrial revolution”—and often to something called the “first industrial revolution,” which presumably occurred in England. Analytically, I thought this conception was weak on two grounds. One is that there were not, could not be, separate “industrial revolutions” in different countries. If there were any such thing, it had to be a phenomenon of the capitalist world-economy as a whole. And second, although what happened in that period did indeed reflect an upward blip in the mechanization and the value output of world production, it was no more significant than several previous and several subsequent blips. This is what chapter 1 sought to demonstrate.

Chapter 2 took up the story of the French Revolution. The voluminous literature on this “event” is currently divided between the adherents of the social (or classical) interpretation that had been so prominent for a long time and those of the liberal (or revisionist) interpretation that gained so much force in the last third of the twentieth century. My contention was that both interpretations are wrong, since they both focused attention on phenomena said to be internal to France and on the kinds of changes that occurred in the French state and economic structures. The argument of this chapter was that the French Revolution was a part of, a consequence of, the last phase in the British-French struggle for hegemonic succession—one that was won, of course, by Great Britain—and that the changes internal to France as a result of the Revolution were far less fundamental than is usually contended.

One of the outcomes of this Franco-British struggle was the second great geographic expansion of the capitalist world-economy, in which four large zones were incorporated into the axial division of labor: Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Indian subcontinent, and West Africa. The key argument is about what happens to a zone, previously in the external arena, when it becomes incorporated as a peripheral zone of the capitalist world-economy. The transformations of both the political and economic structures in the four zones, starting from very different existing structures before incorporation, seem to have brought the four zones to all having more or less similar structures as a result of incorporation.

Finally, chapter 4 dealt, for the first time, with the concept of formal decolonization—why it occurs and why it is linked to the emergence of a new hegemonic power. But I argued also that the decolonization of the Americas was a “settler” decolonization and not a reassumption by the indigenous peoples of control of their own lives. The one exception was Haiti, and I tried to show here why and how Haiti was isolated and largely destroyed economically precisely because it was not a settler decolonization.

When I came to volume 4, which I had intended to be the story of the “long” nineteenth century, I faced two problems. As we move forward chronologically, the geography of the world-system widens, which expands the amount of material to be considered. But the amount of scholarly literature, even about a single country, has expanded at least arithmetically and probably geometrically. This poses a real problem of reading time and of difficulties of synthesis. This is my perhaps feeble excuse for having taken so long to produce volume 4. (The other part of the excuse is that, as time went on, I became more involved in many other intellectual activities that competed with the time available to me to write volume 4.)

The second problem was to decide what would be the central theme of this volume. Given my previous analyses, it could not be the industrial revolution—nor could it be the creation of a capitalist system, since I believed that this had occurred earlier. It was also not the great democratic revolution(s), of either the French or the American variety, since I thought that the role of both kinds of revolutions was quite different from that most often ascribed to them. I decided that the key happening was to be located in the cultural consequences to the modern world-system as a whole of the French Revolution. I conceived of this as the creation of a geoculture for the world-system—that is, a set of ideas, values, and norms that were widely accepted throughout the system and that constrained social action thereafter.

As the reader will see, I consider that the French Revolution had legitimated the concept of the normality of political change and the idea that sovereignty lay not with the sovereign but with the people. The consequences of this pair of beliefs were manifold. The first was the creation, as a reaction to these newly widespread concepts, of the three modern ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism. The argument of the volume as a whole is that centrist liberalism was able to “tame” the other two ideologies and emerge triumphant in the course of the century. This then took the form of privileging the creation of liberal states, first of all in the two strongest states of the time—Great Britain and France. It took further form in stimulating the creation, and limiting the impact, of the major kinds of antisystemic movements (a new concept treated here). It is here that I treat the advances permitted by the concept of citizenship, and the illusions concerning the extent of these advantages. And finally, it took the form of encouraging and constraining the formation of the historical social sciences. The story as a whole runs from 1789 to 1914, or perhaps, one should better say, from 1789 to 1873/1914.

It took me a while to realize that this emphasis meant that three stories I intended to tell in this volume should be postponed to volume 5. They were the scramble for Africa and the rise of movements of national liberation; the U.S.-German economic and political rivalry for succession to Great Britain as the hegemonic power, and the ultimate triumph of the United States; and the incorporation of East Asia, its peripheralization, and its resurgence in the late twentieth century.

All three stories had their start somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century. But one could not reasonably tell these stories as though they ended somehow in 1914. The nineteenth-century story was integrally linked to its continuation in the twentieth century. The year 1914 was not a turning point for any of the three stories per se. The essential part of each story was located in a sweeping curve of rise and decline, or decline and rise. In any case, I decided that each of these stories was a story of the “long” twentieth century, a story of America's century and not Britain's century. So I beg the reader's indulgence and patience.

If volume 5, as I project it now (but this may change in the writing), will go from 1873 to 1968/89, there will have to be, if I can last it out, a volume 6, whose theme will be the structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy and whose parameters would go from 1945/1968 to somewhere in the mid-twenty-first century—say, 2050. And then, I feel, we will be into a totally new situation. The modern world-system will have seen its definitive demise, ceding place to a successor or successors yet unknown, unknowable, and whose characteristics we cannot yet sketch.

Centrist Liberalism as Ideology

The French Revolution…is the shadow under which the whole nineteenth century lived.

—GEORGE WATSON (1973, 45)

In 1815, the most important new political reality for Great Britain, France, and the world-system was the fact that, in the spirit of the times, political change had become normal. “With the French Revolution, parliamentary reform became a doctrine as distinct from an expedient” (White, 1973, 73). Furthermore, the locus of sovereignty had shifted in the minds of more and more persons from the monarch or even the legislature to something much more elusive, the “people” (Billing-ton, 1980, 160–166; also 57–71). These were undoubtedly the principal geocultural legacies of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period. Consequently, the fundamental political problem that Great Britain, France, and the world-system had to face in 1815, and from then on, was how to reconcile the demands of those who would insist on implementing the concept of popular sovereignty exercising the normality of change with the desire of the notables, both within each state and in the world-system as a whole, to maintain themselves in power and to ensure their continuing ability to accumulate capital endlessly.

The name we give to these attempts at resolving what prima facie seems a deep and possibly unbridgeable gap of conflicting interests is ideology. Ideologies are not simply ways of viewing the world. They are more than mere prejudices and presuppositions. Ideologies are political metastrategies, and as such are required only in a world where political change is considered normal and not aberrant. It was precisely such a world that the capitalist world-economy had become under the cultural upheaval of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period. It was precisely this world that developed the ideologies that served during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as both the handbooks of daily political activity and the credos justifying the mundane compromises of such activity.

Was the French Revolution inspired by liberal ideology, or was it rather the negation of liberal ideology? This was a central theme of the French (and worldwide) debate during the bicentennial of 1989. The question, however, is perhaps not very meaningful, because liberalism as an ideology is itself a consequence of the French Revolution, and not a description of its political culture.¹ The first ideological reaction to the French Revolution's transformation of the geoculture was in fact, however, not liberalism, but conservatism. Burke and de Maistre wrote about the Revolution immediately, in the heat of the events, in books that have remained founts of conservative ideology to this day. Of course, the concepts preceded the terms. The term conservative apparently first appeared only in 1818,² and the noun liberal was probably first used in 1810.³

Conservative ideology has been deeply tied to a vision of the French Revolution as the exemplar of the kind of deliberate political change that disrupts the slow-moving evolution of “natural” social forces. For conservatives, this disruptive process had a long and dubious heritage:

The French Revolution was but the culmination of the historical process of atomization that reached back to the beginning of such doctrines as nominalism, religious dissent, scientific rationalism, and the destruction of those groups, institutions and intellectual certainties which had been basic in the Middle Ages. (Nisbet, 1952, 168–169)

Conservative ideology was thus “reactionary” in the simple sense that it was a reaction to the coming of what we think of as modernity, and set itself the objective either of reversing the situation entirely (the hard version) or of limiting the damage and holding back as long as possible the changes that were coming (the more sophisticated version). The conservatives believed that, by imposing their “rational,” deductive schema on the political process, the partisans of revolution (or reform; it makes little difference in the conservative dogma) create turmoil, undo the wisdom of the ages, and thereby do social harm.

Like all ideologies, conservatism was first and foremost a political program. Conservatives knew full well that they had to hold on to or reconquer state power, that the institutions of the state were the key instrument needed to achieve their goals, When conservative forces returned to power in France in 1815, they baptized this event a “Restoration.” But as we shall see, things did not really go back to the status quo ante. Louis XVIII had to concede a “Charter,” and when Charles X tried to install a true reaction, he was ousted from power and in his place was put Louis-Philippe, who assumed the much more modern title “King of the French.”⁴

The ideal solution for conservatives would have been the total disappearance of movements reflecting liberal impulses. Barring that—it did not happen in 1815 and came to be recognized as utopian after 1848—the next best solution was to persuade legislators of the need for utmost prudence in undertaking any political change of great significance. The continuing political strength of conservatism would be located in the popular wariness that multiple disillusions with reforms would repeatedly instill in the “sovereign people.” On the other hand, conservatism's great weakness has always been that it was essentially a negative doctrine. “[Conservative doctrine] was born in reaction to the French Revolution….[I]t was thus born counterrevolutionary.”⁵ And counterrevolution has been in general even less popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than revolution; it is a label that has been an albatross for conservatives.

Conservatives felt, nonetheless, that they had an unassailable case. The greatest objection conservatives had to the French Revolution was the belief espoused by its partisans and theoreticians that all was possible and legitimate through politics. Conservatives argued, instead, for an organic conception of society, and the “radical inadequacy of the political as a final account of man.”⁶Conservatives supported the state insofar as it incarnated authority, but suspected the central state insofar as it might legislate. The consequence was a penchant for localism, in part because notables had greater strength at local levels and partly because inherently less could be legislated at that level.⁷To be sure, this antipolitical bias was not universal among those who were “counterrevolutionary”; it was merely dominant. Henry Kissinger makes a very cogent distinction between Burkean conservatism (which is what I have been describing here as conservatism) and the conservatism of Metternich:

To fight for conservatism in the name of historical forces, to reject the validity of the revolutionary question because of its denial of the temporal aspect of society and the social contract—this was the answer of Burke. To fight the revolution in the name of reason, to deny the validity of the question on epistemological grounds, as contrary to the structure of the universe—this was the answer of Metternich. The difference between these two positions is fundamental….

It was this rationalist conception of conservatism which imparted the rigidity to Metternich's policy….

It was thus that the Enlightenment retained deep into the nineteenth century its last champion, who judged actions by their “truth,” not by their success.⁸

Success. This was the clarion call of the liberals. But success in what? This is the key question we must address. Liberalism as an ideology, as opposed to liberalism as a political philosophy—that is, liberalism as a metastrategy vis-a-vis the demands of popular sovereignty, as opposed to liberalism as a metaphysics of the good society—was not born adult out of the head of Zeus. It was molded by multiple, often contrary, interests. To this day, the term liberalism evokes quite varied resonances. There is the classic “confusion” between so-called economic and so-called political liberalism. There is also the liberalism of social behavior, sometimes called libertarianism. This melange, this “confusion,” has served liberal ideology well, enabling it to secure maximal support.

Liberalism started ideological life on the left of the political spectrum, or at least on the center-left. Liberalism defined itself as the opposite of conservatism, on the basis of what might be called a “consciousness of being modern” (Minogue, 1963, 3). Liberalism proclaimed itself universalist.⁹Sure of themselves and of the truth of this new world-view of modernity, liberals sought to propagate their views and intrude the logic of their views within all social institutions, thereby ridding the world of the “irrational” leftovers of the past, To do this, they had to fight conservative ideologues, whom they saw as obsessed with fear of “free men”¹⁰—men liberated from the false idols of tradition.

Liberals believed, however, that progress, even though it was inevitable, could not be achieved without some human effort, without a political program. Liberal ideology was thus the belief that, in order for history to follow its natural course, it was necessary to engage in conscious, continual, intelligent reformism, in full awareness that “time was the universal friend, which would inevitably bring greater happiness to ever greater numbers” (Schapiro, 1949, 13).

After 1815, liberal ideology presented itself as the opponent of the conservative thrust,¹¹and as such was considered by conservatives to be “Jacobinical.” But as liberalism gained momentum, support, and authority as an ideology, its left credentials weakened; in some respects it even gained right credentials. But its destiny was to assert that it was located in the center. It had already been conceptualized in this way by Constant¹²in the eighteenth century. It was institutionalized as the centrist position in the nineteenth century. And it was still being celebrated as the “vital center” by Schlesinger (1962) in the mid-twentieth century.

To be sure, the center is merely an abstraction, and a rhetorical device. One can always locate oneself in a central position simply by defining the extremes as one wishes. Liberals are those who decided to do this as their basic political strategy. Faced with the normality of change, liberals would claim a position between the conservatives—that is, the right, who wanted to slow down the pace of normal change as much as possible—and the “democrats” (or radicals or socialists or revolutionaries)—that is, the left, who wanted to speed it up as much as possible. In short, liberals were those who wished to control the pace of change so that it occurred at what they considered to be an optimal speed. But could one really know what is the optimal speed? Yes, said the liberals, and their metastrategy was precisely geared to achieving this end.

Two emblematic figures arose in the development of this metastrategy: Guizot and Bentham. Guizot was a historian, a man of letters, and of course a politician. Bentham was a philosopher and an advocate of concrete legislative action. In the end, the eyes of both of them were focused on the state. Guizot himself defined modernity as “the substitution in government of intellectual means for material means, of ruse for force, Italian politics for feudal politics” (Guizot, 1846, 299). He said it began with Louis XI, and this may be so. But even if it were so, it became fully institutionalized only in the first half of the nineteenth century, precisely when Guizot was in the government of France.

Guizot sought a way to mute popular sovereignty without returning to the divine right of kings. He found it by claiming the existence of an “irresistible hand” of reason progressing through history. By arguing this more political version of the Smithian “invisible hand,” Guizot could establish, as a prior condition for the exercise of the right to popular sovereignty, the possession of “capacity,” defined as the “faculty of acting according to reason.”¹³Only if suffrage were limited to those having this capacity would it then be possible to have a “scientific policy” and a “rational government.” And only such a government would eliminate the triple menace of “the return of arbitrary government, the unloosing of popular passions, and social dissolution” (cited in Rosanvallon 1985, 255–256; see also 156–158). The reference to science is not casual, but fundamental. Manning (1976, 16, 21, 23) develops the links between liberal ideology and Newtonian science. He shows the derivation of what he argues are the three principles of liberal ideology from Newtonian thought: the principle of balance, the principle of spontaneous generation and circulation, and the principle of uniformity. First, the stability of the world “depend[s] upon its constituent parts remaining in balanced relationships.” Second, “any attempt to transform the self-moving society into the directed society must necessarily destroy the harmony and balance of its rational order.” Third, “we may expect democratic institutions to materialize in human societies whenever they reach the appropriate level of development, just as we may expect any physical phenomenon to materialize given the principle of its sufficient condition for its occurrence.”

In short, Guizot supported neither Louis XVI (or Charles X) nor Robespierre, for neither was a rational choice. And of the two, Guizot (and his epigones) probably worried about Robespierre and Rousseau more. “What is still generally called ‘liberalism' in the beginning of the nineteenth century was an attempt to conceive of politics against Rousseau. Revolutionary terror was the child of political voluntarism (artificialisme); everyone agreed with that analysis“ (Rosanvallon, 1985, 44).¹⁴

Guizot's reputation faded, sullied no doubt by his increasingly conservative role in the July Monarchy, and is only today being resuscitated by France's political neo-liberals. But Bentham's reputation as Great Britain's quintessential liberal has never ceased to be asserted (and acclaimed).¹⁵Guizot's triple menace was equally there for the Benthamites, of course, but they were perhaps even more adept at countering it.¹⁶It was the great French Anglophile and liberal Elie Halevy (1900, iii-iv) who pointed out how Bentham took a starting point actually not too different from that of Rousseau but had it end up not with revolution but with classic liberalism:

England, like France, had its century of liberalism: the century of the industrial revolution across the Channel was the equivalent of the century of the French Revolution; the utilitarian philosophy of the identity of interests that of the juridical and spiritualist philosophy of the rights of man. The interests of all individuals are identical. Each individual is the best judge of his own interests. Hence we ought to eliminate all artificial barriers which traditional institutions erected between individuals, all social constraints founded upon the presumed need to protect individuals against each other and against themselves. An emancipatory philosophy very different in its inspiration and in its principles but close in many of its practical applications to the sentimental philosophy of J.-J. Rousseau. The philosophy of the rights of man would culminate, on the Continent, in the Revolution of 1848; the philosophy of the identity of interests in England in the same period in the triumph of Manchesterian free trade concepts.

On the one hand, for Bentham, society was the “spontaneous product of the wills of its individual members [and therefore] a free growth in which the State had no part.” But at the very same time—and this is crucial for Bentham and liberalism—society was “a creation of the legislator, the offspring of positive law.” State action was therefore perfectly legitimate, “provided the State were a democratic State and expressed the will of the greatest number.”¹⁷

Bentham shared Guizot's penchant for scientific policy and rational government. The state was the perfect, neutral instrument of achieving the “greatest good of the greatest number.” The state therefore had to be the instrument of reform, even of radical reform, precisely because of the triple menace:

Bentham and the Benthamites…were never complacent about the condition of England. They were “Radical Reformers,” and they worked hard at their reforms: by working out detailed blueprints for them; by propaganda, agitation, intrigue, conspiracy; and if truth be told, by encouragement to revolutionary movements up to—but not beyond—the point where resort to physical force would be the next step.¹⁸

We come here to the heart of the question. Liberalism was never a metastrategy of antistatism, or even of the so-called nightwatchman state. Far from being contrary to laissez-faire, “the liberal state was itself a creation of the self-regulating market” (Polanyi, 1957, 3). Liberalism has always been in the end the ideology of the strong state in the sheep's clothing of individualism; or to be more precise, the ideology of the strong state as the only sure ultimate guarantor of individualism. Of course, if one defines individualism as egoism and reform as altruism, then the two thrusts are indeed incompatible. But if one defines individualism as maximizing the ability of individuals to achieve self-defined ends, and reform as creating the social conditions within which the strong can temper the discontent of the weak and simultaneously take advantage of the reality that the strong find it easier than the weak to realize their wills, then no inherent incompatibility exists. Quite the contrary!

Great Britain and France had been precisely the two states where relatively strong state machineries had already been created between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. But these states did not have a deep popular legitimacy, and the French Revolution had undermined what legitimacy they had. Nineteenth-century liberalism set itself the task of creating (re-creating, significantly increasing) this legitimacy and thereby cementing the strength of these states, internally and within the world-system.

Socialism was the last of the three ideologies to be formulated. Before 1848, one could hardly yet think of it as constituting a distinctive ideology. The reason was primarily that those who began after 1789 to think of themselves to the left of the liberals saw themselves everywhere as the heirs and partisans of the French Revolution, which did not really distinguish them in the first half of the nineteenth century from those who had begun to call themselves “liberals.”¹⁹Even in Great Britain, where the French Revolution was widely denounced and where “liberals” therefore laid claim to a different historical origin, the “radicals” (who were more or less the future “socialists”) seemed at first to be merely somewhat more militant liberals.

In fact, what particularly distinguished socialism from liberalism as a political program and therefore as an ideology was the conviction that the achievement of progress needed not merely a helping hand but a big helping hand, without which achieving progress would be a very slow process. The heart of their program, in short, consisted in accelerating the course of history. That is why the word revolution appealed to them more than reform, which seemed to imply merely patient, if conscientious, political activity and was thought to incarnate primarily a wait-and-see attitude.

In sum, three postures toward modernity and the “normalization” of change had evolved: conservatism, or circumscribe the danger as much as possible; liberalism, or achieve in due time the happiness of mankind as rationally as possible; and socialism/radicalism, or accelerate the drive for progress by struggling hard against the forces that were strongly resisting it. It was in the period 1815–1848 that the terms conservatism, liberalism, and socialism began to be widely used to designate these three postures.

Each posture, it should be noted, located itself in opposition to something else. For conservatives, the target was the French Revolution. For liberals, it was conservatism (and the ancien regime, whose revival the conservatives were thought to seek). And for socialists, it was liberalism that they were rejecting. It is this fundamentally critical, negative tone in the very definition of the ideologies that explains why there are so many versions of each ideology. Affirmatively, as a positive credo, many varied, even contradictory, propositions were put forward within each camp, each affirming itself as the true meaning of the ideology. The unity of each ideological family lay only in what they were against. This is no minor detail, since it was this negativity that succeeded in holding together the three camps for 150 years or so (at least until 1968).

Since ideologies are in fact political programs to deal with modernity, each one needs a “subject,” or a principal political actor. In the terminology of the modern world, this has been referred to as the question of sovereignty. The French Revolution asserted a crystal clear position on this matter: against the sovereignty of the absolute monarch, it had proclaimed the sovereignty of the “people.”

This new language of the sovereignty of the people is one of the great achievements of modernity. Even if for a century thereafter there were lingering battles against it, no one has since been able to dethrone this new idol, the “people.” But the victory has been hollow. There may have been universal agreement that the people constitute the sovereign, but from the outset there was no agreement about who were the “people.” Furthermore, on this delicate question none of the three ideologies has had a clear position, which has not stopped their supporters from refusing to admit the murkiness of their respective stances.

The position that seemingly was least equivocal was that of the liberals. For them, the “people” was the sum of all the “individuals” who are each the ultimate holder of political, economic, and cultural rights. The individual is the historic “subject” of modernity par excellence. One can credit the liberals at least with having debated extensively this question of who this individual is in whom sovereignty is located.

Conservatives and socialists ought in principle to have been debating this issue as well, since each proposed a “subject” quite different from the individual, but their discussion was far less explicit. If the “subject” is not the individual, who, then, is it? It is a bit difficult to discern. See, for example, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (in White, 1950, 28):

The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs.

If one didn't know that this was a text attacking French revolutionaries, one might have thought it was intended to denounce absolute monarchs. The matter becomes a bit clearer if we look at something Burke stated almost two decades earlier (1926 [1780], 357): “Individuals pass like shadows; but the commonwealth is fixed and stable.”

Bonald's approach was quite different, because he insisted on the crucial role of the Church. His view shares, however, one element common to all the varieties of conservative ideology: the importance they confer on social groups such as the family, guilds (corporations), the Church, the traditional “orders”—which become for the conservatives the “subjects” that have the right to act politically. In other words, conservatives gave priority to all those groups that might be considered “traditional” (and thus incarnating continuity) but rejected identifying conservatism with any “totality” as a political actor. What has never in fact been clear in conservative thought is how one can decide which groups incarnate continuity. After all, there have always been arguments around contending royal lineages.

For Bonald (1988 [1802], 87), the great error of Rousseau and Montesquieu had been precisely to “imagine…a pure state of nature antecedent to society.” Quite the contrary, “the true nature of society…is what society, public society, is at present.”²⁰But this definition was a trap for its author, because it so legitimated the present that it virtually forbade a “restoration.” Precise logic, however, has never been the forte or main interest of conservative polemics. Rather, conservatives were concerned to issue warnings about the likely behavior of a majority constituted by adding up individual votes. Their historical subject was a far less active one than that of the liberals. In their eyes, good decisions are taken slowly and rarely, and such decisions have largely already been taken.

If conservatives refused to give priority to the individual as historical subject in favor of small, so-called traditional groups, socialists refused to do so in favor of that large group that is the whole of the people. Analyzing socialist thought in its early period, G. D. H. Cole (1953, 2) remarked:

The “socialists” were those who, in opposition to the prevailing stress on the claims of the individual, emphasised the social element in human relations and sought to bring the social question to the front in the great debate about the rights of man let loose on the world by the French Revolution and by the accompanying revolution in the economic field.

But if it is difficult to know which individuals constitute the people, and even more difficult to know of what “groups” the people are constituted, the most difficult thing of all is to know how to define the general will of the whole people. How could one know what it is? And to begin with, whose views should we take into account, and how?

In short, what the three ideologies offered us was not a response to the question of who the appropriate historical subject is, but simply three starting points in the quest for who incarnates the sovereignty of the people: the so-called free individual, for the liberals; the so-called traditional groups, for the conservatives; and the entire membership of “society,” for the socialists.

The people as “subject” has had as its primary “object” the state. It is within the state that the people exercises its will, that it is sovereign. Since the nineteenth century, however, we have also been told that the people form a “society.” How might we reconcile state and society, which form the great intellectual antinomy of modernity?

The most astonishing thing is that when we look at the discourses of the three ideologies in this regard, they all seem to take the side of society against the state. Their arguments are familiar. For staunch liberals, it was crucial to keep the state out of economic life and to reduce its role in general to a minimum: “Laissez-faire is the nightwatchman doctrine of state” (Watson, 1973, 68). For conservatives the terrifying aspect of the French Revolution was not only its individualism but also and particularly its statism. The state becomes tyrannical when it questions the role of the intermediate groups that command the primary loyalty of people—the family, the Church, the guilds.²¹And we are familiar with the famous characterization by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1976 [1848], 486):

[T]he bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

These negatives views of the state did not stop each of the three ideologies from complaining that this state, which was the object of their critique, was out of their control and said to be in the hands of their ideological opponents. In point of fact, each of the three ideologies turned out to be in great need of the services of the state to promote its own program. Let us not forget that an ideology is first and foremost a political strategy. Socialists have long been under attack for what has been said to be their incoherence in that most of them, despite their antistatist rhetoric, have always striven to increase state activity in the short run.

But were conservatives more seriously antistatist? Were they regularly opposed to achieving reforms by state action? Not at all, in reality. For we must take into account the question of the “decline of values,” which conservatives have seen as one of the central consequences of modernity. To reverse the perceived current decadence of society, to restore society to the purer state in which it existed before, they have always needed the state. It has been said of one of the great English conservatives of the 1840s, Sir Robert Peel, that “he believed that a constitution issuing in a strong executive was essential to the anarchic age in which he lived” (Gash, 1951, 52). This comment in fact applies more generally to the practice of conservative politicians.

Note the way in which Halévy (1949, 42–43) explains the evolution of the conservative position vis-à-vis the state during the “Tory reaction” in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century: The analysis is limpid. Conservatives were always ready to strengthen the state structure to the degree necessary to control popular forces pushing for change. This was in fact implicit in what was stated by Lord Cecil (1912, 192): “[A]s long as State action does not involve what is unjust or oppressive, it cannot be said that the principles of Conservatism are hostile to it.”

In 1688 and in the years following, the King regarded himself, and was regarded by public opinion, as the Sovereign. It was always to be feared that he would make his sovereignty absolute, and the independence of his authority enjoyed by all the powers of the State constituted a deliberate limitation of the prerogative, a system of constitutional guarantees against royal despotism. At the opening of the nineteenth century it was the people who in America, in France, in England even, had asserted, or were about to assert, the claim to be supreme; it was therefore against the people that the three powers now maintained their independence. It was no longer the Whigs, it was the Tories who supported institutions whose significance had changed, while their form remained the same. And now the King presided over the league formed by the three powers for the defence of their autonomy against the new claimant for sovereignty.

The analysis is limpid. Conservatives were always ready to strengthen the state structure to the degree necessary to control popular forces pushing for change. This was in fact implicit in what was stated by Lord Cecil (1912, 192): “[A]s long as State action does not involve what is unjust or oppressive, it cannot be said that the principles of Conservatism are hostile to it.”

Well then, did not at least the liberals—champions of individual freedom and of the free market—remain hostile to the state? Not at all! From the outset, liberals were caught in a fundamental contradiction. As defenders of the rights of the individual vis-à-vis the state, they were pushed in the direction of universal suf-frage—the only guarantee of a democratic state. But thereupon the state became the principal agent of all reforms intended to liberate the individual from the social constraints inherited from the past. This in turn led liberals to the idea of putting positive law at the service of utilitarian objectives.

Once again, Halévy (1950: 99–100) clearly pointed out the consequences:

The “utilitarian” philosophy was not solely, nor even perhaps fundamentally, a liberal system; it was at the same time a doctrine of authority which looked to the deliberate and in a sense scientific interference of Government to produce a harmony of interests. As his ideas developed, Bentham, who as a young man had been an advocate of “enlightened despotism,” was converted to democracy. But he had reached that position by what we may call a long jump, which carried him at a bound over a number of political doctrines at which he might have been expected to halt—aristocracy, a mixed constitution, the balance of powers, and the doctrine that the statesman's aim should be to free the individual by weakening the authority of the Government and as far as possible dividing its powers. In Bentham's view, when the authority of the state had been reconciled by a universal or at least a very wide suffrage with the interests of the majority there was no further reason to hold it suspect. It became an unmixed blessing.

And thereupon, the conservatives became now the upholders of the genuine liberal tradition: the old system of aristocratic self-government, with its unpaid officials, against a new system of bureaucratic despotism administered by salaried officials.

Is it possible, then, to think that Benthamism was in fact a deviation from liberalism, whose optimal expression is to be found rather in the classical economists, the theoreticians of “laissez-faire”? No, because we shall see that, when the first Factory Acts were passed in Great Britain, all the leading classical economists of the time supported the legislation—a phenomenon spelled out (and approved) by none other than Alfred Marshall (1921, 763–764), the father of neoclassical economics. Since that time, the great bureaucratic state has never stopped growing, and its expansion has been sponsored by successive liberal governments. When Hobhouse wrote his book on liberalism as an answer to that of Lord Cecil on conservatism, he justified this expansion in this way: “The function of State coercion is to overcome individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association of individuals within the State” (1911, 146).

No doubt the justifications that each ideology invoked to explain its somewhat embarrassing statism were different. For socialists, the state was implementing the general will. For conservatives, the state was protecting traditional rights against the general will. For liberals, the state was creating the conditions permitting individual rights to flourish. But in each case, the bottom line was that the state was being strengthened in relation to society, while the rhetoric called for doing exactly the opposite.

All this muddle and intellectual confusion involved in the theme of the proper relation of state and society permits us to understand why we have never been entirely sure how many distinct ideologies came into existence in the nineteenth century. Three? Two? Only one? I have just reviewed the traditional arguments that there were three. Let us now look at how one can reduce the three to two.

It seems clear that in the period from the French Revolution to the revolutions of 1848, the “only clear cleavage” for contemporaries was between those who accepted progress as inevitable and desirable, and thus “were globally favorable” to the French Revolution, and those who favored the Counter-Revolution, which took its stand against this disruption of values, considering it as profoundly wrong (Agulhon, 1992, 7). Thus the political struggle was between liberals and conservatives; those who called themselves radicals or Jacobins or republicans or socialists were regarded as simply a more militant variety of liberals. In The Country Parson (Le Curé de village), Balzac (1897 [1839], 79) has a bishop exclaim:

Miracles are called for here among an industrial population, where sedition has spread itself and taken root far and wide; where religious and monarchical doctrines are regarded with a critical spirit; where nothing is respected by a system of analysis derived from Protestantism by the so-called Liberalism of to-day, which is free to take another name tomorrow.

Tudesq reminds us (1964, 125–126) that in 1840 a Legitimist newspaper, l'Orleanais, denounced another newspaper, Le Journal de Loiret, as a “liberal, Protestant, Saint-Simonian, Lamennaisian paper.” This was not completely wild, since, as Simon notes (1956, 330): “[t]he Idea of Progress, in fact, constituted the core and central inspiration of Saint-Simon's entire philosophy of thought” (cf. Manning, 1976, 83–84).

Furthermore, this liberal-socialist alliance has roots in liberal and egalitarian thought of the eighteenth century, in the struggle against absolute monarchy (see Meyssonier, 1989, 137–156). It continued to be nourished in the nineteenth century by the ever-increasing interest of both ideologies in productivity, which each saw as the basic requirement for a social policy in the modern state. “Both Saint-Simonism and economic liberalism evolved in the direction of what we call today economic rationalisation” (Mason, 1931, 681). With the rise of utilitarianism, it might have seemed that the alliance could become a marriage. Brebner speaks with sympathy of the “collectivist” side of Bentham, concluding (1948, 66), “What were the Fabians but latter-day Benthamites?” And he adds that John Stuart Mill was already in 1830 “what might be called a liberal socialist.”

On the other hand, after 1830 a clear distinction began to emerge between liberals and socialists, and after 1848 it became quite deep. At the same time, 1848 marked the beginning of a reconciliation between liberals and conservatives. Hobsbawm (1962, 117) thinks that the great consequence of 1830 was to make mass politics possible by allowing the political triumph in France, England, and especially Belgium (and even partially in Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal) of a “moderate” liberalism, which consequently “split moderates from radicals.” Can-timori, analyzing the issue from an Italian perspective, thinks that the question of a divorce was open until 1848. Until then, he notes (1948, 288), “the liberal movement…had rejected no path: neither a call for insurrection nor reformist political action.” It was only after 1848 that a divorce was consummated between these two tactics.

What is crucial to note is that after 1848 socialists stopped referring to Saint-Simon. The socialist movement began to organize itself around Marxist ideas. The plaint was no longer merely poverty, susceptible to repair by reform, but the dehu-manization caused by capitalism, whose solution required overturning it completely (see Kolakowski, 1978, 222).

At this very time, conservatives began to be conscious of the utility of reformism for conservative objectives. Sir Robert Peel, immediately following the Reform Bill of 1832, issued an electoral manifesto, the Tamworth Manifesto, which became celebrated as a doctrinal statement. It was considered by contemporaries as “almost revolutionary,” not merely because it announced the acceptance of the Reform Bill as “a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question,” but because this position was announced to the people rather than to Parliament, which caused a great “sensation” at the time (Halevy, 1950, 178).²²

In the process, conservatives noted their convergence with liberals on the importance of protecting property, even though what interested them about property was primarily the fact that it represented continuity and thus served as the foundation for family life, the Church, and other social solidarities (see Nisbet, 1966, 26). But beyond this practical convergence, there was the concrete menace of real revolution—a fear they shared, as Lord Cecil noted (1912, 64): “For it is an indispensable part of the effective resistance to Jacobinism that there should be moderate reform on conservative lines.”

Finally, we should not entirely neglect the third possible reduction of three to two—conservatives and socialists joining hands in opposition to liberals—even if this seems the least likely theoretically. The “conservative” character of Saint-Simonian socialism, its roots in Bonaldian ideas, has often been noted (see Manuel, 1956, 320; Iggers, 1958a, 99). The two camps could come together around their anti-individualist reflex. Equally, a liberal like von Hayek denounced the “socialist” character of the conservative Carlyle's thought. This time, it was the “social” side of conservative thought that was in question. Lord Cecil (1912, 169) did not in fact hesitate to declare this affinity openly:

It is often assumed that Conservatism and Socialism are directly opposed. But this is not completely true. Modern Conservatism inherits the traditions of Toryism which are favourable to the activities and the authority of the State. Indeed Mr. Herbert Spencer attacked Socialism as being in fact the revival of Toryism.

The consequence of liberal-socialist alliances was the emergence of a sort of socialist liberalism, ending up with two varieties of liberalism. The conservative-socialist alliances, more improbable, were originally merely passing tactics. But one might wonder whether one might not think of the various “totalitarianisms” of the twentieth century as a more lasting form of this alliance, in the sense that they instituted a form of traditionalism that was both populist and social. If so, these totalitarianisms were yet another way in which liberalism remained center stage, as the antithesis of a Manichean drama. Behind this facade of intense opposition to liberalism, one finds as a core component of the demands of all these regimes the same faith in progress via productivity that has been the gospel of the liberals. In this way we might conclude that even socialist conservatism (or conservative socialism) was, in a way, a variant of liberalism—its diabolical form. In which case, would it not be correct to conclude that since 1789 there had only been one true ideology—liberalism—which has displayed its colors in three major versions?

Of course such a statement has to be spelled out in historical terms. If during the period 1789–1848 there was a great ideological struggle between conservatism and liberalism, conservatism failed in the end to achieve a finished form, as we shall see. After 1848, liberalism would achieve cultural hegemony in the world-system and constitute the fundamental core of the geoculture. In the rest of the long nineteenth century, liberalism dominated the scene without serious opposition. It is true that Marxism tried to constitute a socialist ideology as an independent pole, but it was never entirely able to succeed. The story of the triumph of liberalism in the nineteenth century is the theme of this volume.

Constructing the Liberal State, 1815–1830

[The French Revolution] overthrew or terrified the princes, disconcerted the philosophers, changed the form of problems.

—ELIE HALÉVY (1901A, 276)

During the half-century following the French Revolution from the fall of the Bastille to the final collapse of English Chartism, the danger of revolution was never entirely absent from any European country.

—FRANK O. DARVALL (1934, 304)

Great Britain and France fought a long battle for hegemony within the capitalist world-economy from 1651 to 1815.¹ It was only in 1815 that Great Britain at last won its definitive victory. At once, and with a celerity that is remarkable, the two countries entered into a tacit but very profound alliance in the effort to institutionalize a new political model for states located in the core zones (or aspiring to locate there). This model was that of the liberal state, which was a key element in the legitimation of the capitalist world-economy in the era of popular sovereignty.

The alliance between Great Britain and France was based not only on the fact that they faced somewhat comparable internal pressures but also on the fact that they needed each other in order to achieve this end. They needed each other for mutual support and learning in the construction of the model, to be sure. They needed each other also to maintain a geopolitical balance in their mutual inter-est.² But most of all, they needed to present a common standard to the rest of he world in order more effectively to sweep away alternative models and turn all eyes toward theirs. Thus began the complicit although quite often less than totally cordial entente. The crucial period for this process ran from 1815 to 1875, after which the model was firmly established and would remain so for at least a century, enabling the capitalist world-economy to maintain a certain structural stability amid the very stormy turmoil to which it would be subjected. Still, on the morrow of Waterloo there seemed to be very few advocates of the liberal state in places of power, even in Great Britain and France. Indeed, the very term did not yet exist.

Construction of the modern state, located within and constrained by an interstate system, had been a constituent element of the modern world-system from its beginnings in the long sixteenth century. The concern of rulers had been to strengthen the state in two ways: to strengthen its authority—that is, its capacity to make efficacious decisions within its frontiers; and to strengthen its world power—that is, its capacity to impose its will on other states and diminish their possibility of doing the converse. There had long been much debate about the proper distribution of decision making within the state: how much of it should be concentrated in the head of state as sovereign, how much shared with legislative bodies. For three centuries, however, the debate remained one of distribution of power among branches of government. It is true that in 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in the name of “we, the people”, but it was not at all clear (even to the signers of this declaration) how seriously one was to take the idea of popular sovereignty, and what its implications were. For the world-system as a whole, it was “the French Revolution [that] let the genie out of the bottle. After 1789 it was impossible to keep political debate within a privileged circle of propertied interests” (Evans, 1983, 66). The French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath made the concept of popular sovereignty one with which every government in the modern world had to come to terms, and none more so than the governments of the two rivals for hegemonic power. The question in 1815 was whether 1789–1815 was merely a sort of revolutionary interlude, to be interred by a “Restoration” and a “Tory reaction,” or whether the concept of popular sovereignty would have an enduring political impact. To the surprise of the restorers of global order, it was an idea that had taken deeper root than they had realized. They could not inter it, whatever they wished. The specter that haunted the notables³ was that of democracy. The distinction between the liberal state and democracy was, in Max Beloff's words, “the most important distinction in nineteenth-century politics.”⁴ Democracy, in nineteenth-century usage, meant taking popular sovereignty seriously. The notables were not, and have never been, ready to do that. It was the realization of this new reality that would give birth to that extraordinary invention of the nineteenth century—the political ideology.

In 1789, no one really knew what transferring sovereignty from the monarch to the people really meant. They thought it had something to do with limiting the arbitrary power of the executive authority associated with the concept of an absolute monarch. And so it did, but that done, there was still the need to find a legitimation for the decisions of passing coalitions of sundry political leaders. Taking seriously the slogan of popular sovereignty has seemed ever since to all those with effective political power to be threatening, to suggest the unpleasant prospect of submission to the vagaries of uninformed capricious masses. The problem for the notables, therefore, was how to construct a structure that would seem to be popular and in fact was not, but would nonetheless retain the support of a significant proportion of the “people.” That would not be easy. The liberal state was to be the historic solution.

In 1815, looking back on the long adventure from 1789 to 1815, in terms of internal social tensions in France and Great Britain, what did one see? Michel Vovelle (1993, 7) said of an essay of his about the French Revolution that it would be pretentious to entitle it “the birth of a nation” and that instead, “more modestly,” he would call it “the discovery of politics.”⁵ But is this different? What else do we mean by a nation except that within which the pursuit of politics by its nationals is considered to be legitimate? In a profound sense, the sovereignty of the people is a concept that incarnates the legitimacy of politics. And therefore the debate about the implementation of this concept is a debate about the limits of the political—not only about who may be involved and how they may be involved, but also about what matters are subject to the collective decision of the nation. France, in this sense, had a rude beginning as a nation. But so did the rest of Europe. For, in effect, “the invader” Napoleon “with his ideas of emancipation and social liberation…spread the concept of the nation” (Ponteil, 1968, vii)⁶ and spread with it France's rude beginnings. The question for France, as for all the other new nations, became what difference the politics of a nation would make for the lives of ordinary people, as opposed to their lives when politics did not exist and decisions were subject to the intrigues of a court. It was intended to make a profound difference. Still, there are those who would come to view the Revolution, as did Elton (1923, 7), as having been “primarily a movement for order; a movement against chaos.” In that case, one could say of Napoleon (but not only of him) “indifferently that he ‘organized the ancien régime' or that he consolidated the Revolution: for the two processes were identical” (Elton, 1923, 69).

In terms of the politics of the period following 1815, there were two main political legacies of the revolutionary-Napoleonic era. One was the image of the Terror, which informs French and world politics to this day—a Terror that is inextricably associated in the minds of many with democracy. For a long time, the Terror was in fact the chief argument the notables used against the extension of the suffrage. “In the name of this experience, men like Louis Guizot or Benjamin Constant refused the extension of political rights to the needy classes” (Donzelot, 1984, 21–22). The second legacy, which was intimately tied to the first, was the unceasing drive to seek to exclude the lower strata from the political arena of the nation entirely.

The story was not really very different in Great Britain. We often think of absolutism as having disappeared in Great Britain much earlier than in France. But in fact it is only at this very time that the king's power to make and unmake ministries—that is, to control the executive—was undone in practice. The French Revolution, it is true, drew a modest amount of support at first from the so-called English Jacobins, but they were relatively fainthearted, “eschew[ing] revolutionary means” (Thomis and Holt, 1979, 11).⁷ Rather, as Evans says (1983, 23), “it may seem bizarre, and it is certainly too simple, to argue that [it was] Pitt the Younger [in office from 1783 to 1801] who destroyed the powers of the monarchy, but the observation contains a grain of truth.”⁸

The period of the revolutionary-Napoleonic wars was a period of repression of the working class in Great Britain. There were the Anti-Combination Acts of 1799–1800. These were, of course, not totally new. There had been such laws as early as 1339, but they had been largely neglected. George argues that these were, too.⁹ Indeed, she argues (1936, 177), the acts were “in practice a very negligible instrument of oppression.” But if so, one must wonder why Pitt bothered, and the answer of course it that they were passed “principally against the background of Jacobin agitation” (Evans, 1983, 158), an agitation we have already noted to have been exaggerated by the government of the time.

It was less the immediacy of the threat to order than the fear that a serious threat might be in gestation. Clearly, there was an ideological message being conveyed to the urban workers, who were beginning to take too seriously the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The message became more concrete with the notorious Peterloo Massacre of 1818, but from the point of view of the authorities, the events that led to Peterloo were in fact merely the culminating acts of a steady stream of civil disobedience going back to 1789, which had by 1818 given Manchester “a particular reputation for turbulence in the eyes of contemporaries” (Read, 1958, 93). Particularly perturbing to the notables was the fact that the character of the protest movements was changing. Local food riots, still the dominant mode of protest in the late eighteenth century, had ceased to be the preferred form. Rather, popular movements were becoming “national in scope and acquiring organization….[They were] increasingly identified [after 1800] with the new industrial districts” (Thomis and Holt, 1977, 29). The Luddites, despite the fact that their slogans were seemingly backward-looking, because anti-industrial in tonality, alarmed the notables not because they seemed to be against progress or for the violence in itself but primarily because of their demonstration of the “remarkable capacity for organization within working-class ranks.”¹⁰ As a consequence, the Luddites united both Tory and Whig against “working-class Jacobinism” (Thomis, 1970, 174).

It is not accidental that this period of affirmation of popular sovereignty and therefore of nationalism led directly to the attempt to justify the exclusion of the working class from the right to participate, on the excuse that they were not yet prepared for it. The upper strata were willing to sacrifice even their own hedonism in order to validate this argument. The eighteenth-century aristocratic culture in England had been “expansive, bucolic, and roistering,” permitting lavish entertainment, licentiousness, and alcoholism. The turn of the nineteenth century was the epoch of the rise of the Evangelicals, preaching “regularity, self-discipline and moderation in personal habits” (Evans, 1983, 46). The notables began to change their own behavior (institutionalized later as Victorianism), thereby allowing the Evangelicals to make working-class conversion implicitly become the gateway of resocialization, before whose conclusion there could be no thought of extending political rights or social acceptance.

The demand was paternalistic, to be sure. But we must see that it was merely the replacement of a more expensive form of paternalism by a less expensive form. The same period was the one in which the Elizabethan social security system (wage regulation, poor laws) was being repealed as “anachronistic and impractical”:

By the end of the French Wars paternalism sanctioned by legislation was dead; relations between masters and men were defended “objectively” by market forces. A decade before the frontal attack on tariffs, it was the first triumph of the new political economy and a talisman for the new age. (Evans, 1983, 44)

This demand of a prior resocialization, a transformation of the “moral order,” as a way of postponing participation in the political rights that went with popular sovereignty was voiced not only in relation to Great Britain's working classes but also as a requirement for the unwashed, dangerous classes of what we would today call the Third World or the South. The same Methodists who led the evangelical thrust internally were the first Christian group to organize (in 1787) “a regular system of foreign missions” (Halévy, 1949a, 1:446).¹¹ This was also the moment of the rise of the abolitionist movement. There were of course many economic as well as humanitarian motives behind the pressure within Great Britain for the abolition of both slavery and the slave trade.¹² However, what we note here is the cultural message. Wilberforce's first bill had been introduced in 1789. At this time, the anti-slavery movement had a substantial “radical following” and was profiting from the general revolutionary upheaval. But the Jacobin phase of the Revolution “divided [British] abolitionist ranks” and provoked a “counter-revolutionary mobilisation,” which set back the movement. Ten years later, the abolitionist movement was able to revive within a much more conservative climate, precisely because it was seen as “not so much the most urgent, as the least controversial reform that could be undertaken” (Blackburn, 1988, 147, 295). This conservatization of the message can best be understood within the context of the major change in British attitudes toward their “subject races” that was occurring at just this time. As Bayly (1989, 7) notes:

Between 1780 and 1820,…Asians, Eurasians, Africans and even non-British and non-Protestant Europeans were widely excluded from positions of authority in government [in the colonies], while steps were taken to decontaminate the springs of British executive power from the influence of native corruption. Ironically, the growing and orchestrated contempt for Asian, African and even European subordinates was derived in part from the very same humanitarian drives which saw the abolition of the slave trade and the beginnings of the moves for the emancipation of the slaves. It was morally necessary to bring slaves back from social death into civil society. But if so, the hierarchy of civil society must be closely defined both through institutions and by an ideology which derived from the idea that cultures attained “civilisation” by stages of moral awakening and material endeavour. The “discovery” of the urban poor and the criminal classes in [Great] Britain were part of a very similar project and undertaken by the same civil and religious agencies.¹³

Great Britain and France had been precisely the two states where relatively strong state machineries had already been created between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. But these states did not have a deep popular legitimacy, and the French Revolution had undermined whatever legitimacy they had had. Nineteenth-century liberalism set itself the task of creating (re-creating, significantly increasing) this legitimacy and thereby cementing the strength of these states, internally and within the world-system.

Of course, Great Britain and France did not find themselves in quite the same economic situation in 1815. Indeed, in some ways their economic conditions had come to be sharply in contrast. By the end of the Napoleonic wars,

Britain had been made safe from invasion and had developed productivity, technical skills, and financial strength. Instead of a debtor, it had become practically the sole creditor country in the world. In the course of a long and exhausting struggle, France, then the greatest power on the continent of Europe, and its reluctant allies, had been cut off from the expanding overseas world and impoverished. (Condliffe, 1951, 203)¹⁴

To be sure, the end of the Napoleonic wars ended Great Britain's “abnormal [wartime] development in agriculture, shipbuilding, and in the re-export trade,” and these branches went into a “severe and chronic depression” (Rostow, 1942, 18).¹⁵But Great Britain simply placed a greater emphasis on domestic investment in the period 1815–1850, making what Rostow (1942, 22) terms an “incredibly easy” adjustment.¹⁶

The gap in industrial production between Great Britain and its neighbors on the Continent grew bigger.¹⁷ But then the gap with France (and Belgium, and perhaps some others) began to close, such that, somewhere between 1835 and 1850, it virtually disappeared.¹⁸ Nonetheless, Great Britain would continue to be dominant in world trade (i.e., trade beyond northwestern Europe) for another quarter century at least,¹⁹ a dominance Great Britain would maintain by its loans of capital abroad.²⁰ “[T]he contribution made by foreign trade and foreign investment to the consumption levels attained by British families” (O'Brien and Keyder, 1978, 63) essentially explains the higher standard of living that Great Britain was to maintain over France throughout the nineteenth century, despite the rough parity of the two countries in per capita domestic commodity output.

Thus, the conventional view of early nineteenth-century Great Britain as the “workshop of the world”²¹ is coming under a certain amount of sniper attack. Already in 1934, Darvall (1934, 12) had argued that “England in 1811 was still largely a rural and agricultural country.”²² This theme was renewed by Samuel (1977, 19) some forty years later:

The most complete triumph of the machine was in the cotton trade of industrial Lancastershire. Elsewhere its progress was more halting, and there were major sectors of the economy…where down to the 1870s steam power made very little impression at all….Even in textiles, the progress of mechanisation was uneven.²³

If mechanization was less widespread and advanced than our conventional imagery has it, how then did Great Britain achieve its remarkable industrial growth? Recent scholarship is even questioning how remarkable it was, or at least whether the growth was quite as great as previous scholars (such as Walther Hoffmann, Phyllis Deane, and W. A. Cole) had led us to believe. By recalculations based on occupational data of the 1841 census, Harley (1982, 267; see also 285) concludes that this growth was “a third lower” than they had asserted for the period 1770–1815. And Bairoch (1962, 318, 323) asserts that the rate of growth in the nineteenth century of Great Britain (also of France and the United States) was less than 2 percent per annum. Bairoch calls our impression that it was higher “a great exaggeration” having its origin at a time when the 1930s theory of slow growth in mature economies was very influential, and which consequently led to backward overestimates.²⁴

Still, it would be dangerous to go to the other extreme and lose sight of Britain's relative strength. The revisionist analyses enable us to see Britain's weaknesses despite her strength, and therefore the political dilemmas that the government faced even at this time of relative strength in the world-economy. The basic problem for the core countries in the period 1815–1873 was that growth led to a decline in prices,²⁵ and in particular a decline in industrial prices relative to prices of raw materials (Markovitch, 1966, 228–229). From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, cost control for producers focused on the large role of wages in the total price. A combination of repression and mechanization was used to reduce these costs, successfully. These techniques had in fact succeeded too well. For this had the negative consequences of both stimulating political turbulence and leading to the relative decline on the world market of industrial prices. It was only by means of the creation of the liberal state that this dilemma was overcome and capitalist producers in the core zones could benefit from a restored internal order and a return to favorable terms of trade. The key mechanism utilized by the liberal state was a shift in the central focus of cost control from the domestic front to the periphery—a process incarnated in the colonial expansions of the last third of the nineteenth century.

But until that happened, Great Britain in particular, and western Europe in general, had to live with the dilemmas of deflation, particularly acute from 1815 to the late 1840s. Wage-workers were hurting, since wage levels went down both absolutely and relatively.²⁶ Agricultural producers were hurting, since there was a “steady fall in English wheat prices in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century” (Fairlie, 1969, 105).²⁷

Were even British industrialists doing all that well? We have already noted that their initial edge as of 1815 over western Europe, a quite significant one, seemed to fritter away by 1850, not to mention the emergence of Germany and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The profitability of British industry risked being ephemeral. Alternatives needed to be secured, and were. If British hegemony in the world-system served to create any long-lasting economic advantage, it did so by making possible the remarkable growth in British foreign investments, “one of the most important facts of British economic development in the nineteenth century and by no means a minor one in world affairs” (Imlah, 1952, 222).

France, of course, seemed, especially to the industrialists, to be in even more difficult straits. France did, to be sure, have a few advantages. Its technical education, thanks to the Revolution and Napoleon, flourished and was considered to be the best in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. It could export its technical and commercial expertise (see Cameron, 1957a, 245–246; 1961). And its industrial base did steadily expand, as we have seen. Still, it has long been thought that France's industrialization, and hence its competitive edge in the world market, had been impeded by the slow growth of the population, and by the particularly large role of small as opposed to large industry.²⁸ This view has been challenged by Nye (1987, 650, 668), who has argued that small size was in fact a “rational response to prevailing economic conditions and in no way hampered the process of French industrialization,” since “by any standard the returns to scale [were] rather low.” And Gille (1959b, 163) has argued that there was more large industry than has been thought. Indeed, he locates the birth of large-scale capitalist industry in France in precisely the period 1815–1848.

Did not, however, Great Britain and France take opposite stances on the crucial question of free trade in the world-economy? The answer is less evident than we have been led to believe. In the first place,

[i]n 1815, [Great] Britain was still a protectionist power and the state played an important role in directing foreign trade and overseas expansion. Tariff protection was extended not only to agriculture but also to [Great] Britain's growing manufacturing industries. Severe restrictions were placed upon the emigration of skilled labour and the export of machinery. (Evans, 1983, 12)

In the second place, quite aside from government protection, British industries were “riddled with price-rings or equivalent arrangements, often only on a regional basis but sometimes on a national basis” (Cain, 1980, 20). In the third place, British industrialists, including those in Manchester, were not at all unequivocally in favor of free trade. As late as the 1840s, free trade “was seen as a weapon in [the] commercial war [with other countries], and when it did not seem to answer [the needs of winning this war] it was not supported” (Evans, 1983, 20).²⁹

And finally, Imlah (1949, 307–309) observes that British protectionism was at “its worst” in its last years:

It was so much more severe in its effects after the Napoleonic Wars than in the preceding infant period of British industrialism that it constituted virtually a new system….

Tested by real [i.e., not “official”] values, British customs duties at the end of the eighteenth century were very moderate….The compelling problem [which explained the considerable rise in customs duties in the early nineteenth century] was revenues.

Imlah argues that these duties were sufficiently severe that, by reducing imports significantly, they affected the purchasing power of potential customers. And since international trade was essential to Britain's economic health, her “fiscal system [was throwing] her international economy out of balance.”³⁰

Perhaps some of this protectionism was for show; it was surely not all strictly enforced.³¹ But it tarnishes the image of the centrality of free trade in British policy, at least before 1850, especially when we put it in relation to the reality, and not the theory, of French protectionism. French tariff rates were in fact “substantially lower” than British rates for the whole period 1800–1840, despite the perception that the opposite was true. Nye (1991, 25; 26, table 1; 42) explains this misperception triply: by the attention the world has given Repeal of the Corn Laws; by the fact that analysts took into account only certain industries instead of the pattern of the economy as a whole; and by the fact that the British tended to talk free trade while the French tended to talk protectionism, even under Napoleon III. But, Nye says, in fact “the traditional stories of free trade counterpoising a liberal [Great] Britain against a protectionist France, reluctantly dragged into a world of more enlightened commercial policies, must now be seen as false.” Indeed, Imlah, himself a great believer in the economic merits of free trade, explains (1958, 123) the deficiencies of Great Britain's economic performance during this period precisely by the relative absence of free trade:

In many respects the first half of the nineteenth century should have been bonanza times for British trade. The technical efficiency of her increasingly mechanized industries, the possibilities of developing demand at home and abroad for her coal and for her machinery, both more freely exportable after 1825, the potentialities of her merchant marine and business services and the demand for her capital created an opportunity with few parallels in economic history. The opportunity was not finally realized under the high protectionism of the postwar years.³²

This false contrast between Great Britain and France³³ is the background against which we should review another revisionist discussion—that concerning the presumed slowness of industrialization of France,³⁴ or the asserted “lateness” of “take-off” in France.³⁵ O'Brien and Keyder (1978), running a series of comparisons of Great Britain and France for the period 1781–1913, found the following: Per capita domestic commodity output was roughly equal. Wage levels were markedly lower in France, but since fewer persons were wage-workers, this tells us little about average level of earnings. British labor productivity was higher, which was offset by the allocation of a larger share of France's potential labor to agricultural and industrial production.³⁶ British agricultural productivity was higher, which the authors attribute not to greater efficiency but to better land endowment and greater allocation of land to animal-intensive agriculture.³⁷ In industry, French labor productivity was higher, the British not catching up until the 1890s, although there was less mass industry. In conclusion, O'Brien and Keyder (1978, 198) criticize any suggestion of a “relative backwardness” of France, seeing its economic choices as no doubt different but equally rational; indeed, they go further and say that they are “inclined to see a more humane and perhaps a no less efficient transition to industrial society in the experience of France.”³⁸ The impact of this revisionism has been strong, such that even those who wish to insist on British “superiority,” like Crouzet, are reduced to “nuancing” the views of the revisionists and to insisting that French economic achievements in the nineteenth century were “creditable, but not more.”³⁹ Crafts (1984, 59, 67), who undertakes to demonstrate that “the revisionist interpretation [of French economic performance in the nineteenth century] exaggerates French achievements,” nonetheless seems forced to conclude, after indicating his various reservations, that “even if all the above points are accepted, it is true that French economic performance looks substantially better than was once thought.”⁴⁰

Both Great Britain and France, then, as of 1815, sought to concentrate the worldwide accumulation of capital within their frontiers, and how well they did so was only in part a function of the strength of their respective industrial enterprises. It was also very much a function of their ability to restrain the costs of labor, to ensure the constancy of external supply, and to obtain adequate markets for their production. And this was more a political task than a matter of improving their respective economic efficiencies, which on a world scale were rather high for both. The operative role of the states was therefore crucial, but their use was a delicate matter, since the states could wreak damage as well as ensure advantage. The states had to be tamed, manipulated, and directed rationally. The politics of the next sixty years was to center around this effort to “rationalize” the role of the state—that is to say, to fine-tune the structure of the state so as to maximize the possibilities of increasing the “wealth of the nation” and, especially, of those who accumulated capital within its frontiers.

This process began at the interstate level. From September 18, 1814, to June 9, 1815, Europe's monarchs and foreign ministers met in Vienna to decide the peace that was supposed to govern Europe—what would come to be called the Concert of Europe. In the middle of this long conclave, Napoleon returned from Elba for a “Hundred Days,” but then was defeated, finally and definitively, at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. It is always harder to achieve consensus about peace than about war. Its objectives are more long-term, and more multifold; hence they divide the peacemakers. It was only Great Britain that had been unremittingly opposed to France (and from a time predating Napoleon). Austria, Russia, and Prussia had had a checkered history over the period of the wars. Great Britain was therefore the prime winner of the 23-year-long series of wars (which might better be considered a single war) as well as the 150-year-long struggle for hegemony in the world-system. She had every reason to be calm, balanced, and forceful. She wanted to be certain, of course, that France could never again rise to challenge her. But after the failure of the Hundred Days, this could not have seemed too big a problem. What was probably more on Lord Castlereagh's mind was how to prevent the other three great powers from expanding their power unduly, especially since they did not fully share Great Britain's political worldview—nor, of course, her economic interests.

On the one hand, now that French military power had been broken, Great Britain needed to worry only about Russian military strength and possible expansionist ambitions. In twentieth-century language, there were only “two superpowers,” although in fact there was no real possibility of a military confrontation between them.⁴¹ Castlereagh's real problem was that he had a rival in the construction of political order, Prince Metternich, who used his diplomatic skill and the fact that he represented the political sensibilities of the “eastern” trio—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—to counterbalance Great Britain's world strength. The assessment of Henry Kissinger (1973, 5) is that Castlereagh “negotiated the international settlement” but that it was Metternich who “legitimized it”:

Castlereagh, secure in the knowledge of England's insular safety, tended to oppose only overt aggression. But Metternich, the statesman of a power situated in the center of the Continent, sought above all to forestall upheavals.⁴²

I'd say myself that Metternich tried to impose a certain form of legitimation, which was not really to the taste of Great Britain, and that Great Britain would in fact eventually prevail. In any case, it would soon become evident that Metternich could not forestall too much.⁴³

It was, however, clearly in Great Britain's immediate interest (not to speak of her long-term strategy) to restore France to a position where she could serve as a potential ally in the politico-diplomatic struggles (even if France would occasionally resent the role of being a junior partner). Indeed, one could argue that France was the great victor of the Congress of Vienna, in that “the most striking feature of the post-Napoleonic peace settlement was, beyond doubt, the leniency showed toward the vanquished power” (Schenk, 1947, 45).⁴⁴ This is usually, and with some justice, attributed to Talleyrand's ingenuity. One shouldn't, however, underestimate the role of Great Britain's understanding of what it would take to stabilize a non-Napoleonic regime in France. A secret report written (by M. Gallars) in April 1816 to the British ambassador in Paris (Sir Charles Stuart), and conveyed in turn to Lord Castlereagh, indicates exactly what the British feared:

The general upheaval caused by the revolution still subsists in the spirits because authority, which had been so long placed in vile hands, has lost its majesty which had been the basis of confidence and respect;…[and] because religion has lost all its control over that class of men who, lacking a suitable education, do not know the laws of morality and cannot be intimidated by the fears of hell and of the scaffold. (Cited by Schenk, 1947, 49)

Because of these fears, the British, even ultra-Tories like Wellington, were on the side of the more moderate advisers around Louis XVIII, for fear that a full reactionary dose of medicine would be refused by the “patient,” who might thereupon “relapse into his old left-wing revolutionary illusion” (Schenk, 1947, 130–131).⁴⁵Nothing Great Britain could do could more enhance the authority of Louis XVIII than France's diplomatic rehabilitation.

In fact, France's rehabilitation served Great Britain's ability to exercise its hegemony. Castlereagh's somewhat simplistic formulas—Nicolson (1946, 155) speaks of his dream of an “ideal equilibrium, calculated almost mathematically in terms of population and power”—were eventually softened and improved by Talleyrand's “more realistic conception,” which enabled Talleyrand (and thus the British as well) to confront the world with “lucidity, elasticity, and speed.” So it was that France was admitted to the inner circle. The so-called Quadruple Alliance forged at Vienna in 1815 was replaced by the Quintuple Alliance (or Pentarchy of Great Powers) at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. As Dupuis (1909, 165) notes, this changed everything:

The entry of France in the European Directory seemed to increase the latter's strength and authority; in reality, it weakened them….The French peril faded away into the haze of the past; it would now become easier to express differences of opinion or pursue contradictory interests.⁴⁶

Metternich had of course a quite different vision from that of Great Britain. In September 1815, the three monarchs of the “east”⁴⁷ signed the document that became known as the Holy Alliance—the pledge to work together to maintain the status quo in Europe, if necessary by intervention in countries threatened by revolution.⁴⁸ Great Britain did not join the signatories. The Prince Regent excused himself on the grounds that, constitutionally, he needed a minister to cosign. He contented himself with endorsing the “sacred maxims.” Castlereagh declined to pass the document on to his government on the grounds that it was “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense” (Weigall, 1987, 111; see also Ruggiero, 1959, 93). But Metternich was anything but a mystic. He was merely a true believer in the ancien régime, as can be seen clearly from his Memoirs, when he discusses the movements for change in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain:

In all four countries the agitated classes are primarily composed of wealthy men—real cosmopolitans securing their personal advantage at the expense of any order of things whatever—paid State officials, men of letters, lawyers and the individuals charged with public education….This evil may be described in one word: presumption. (Cited from 3:465, 467, in Boyle, 1966, 832–833)

Great Britain was strong enough to ignore presumption. “When Castlereagh opposed revolution, it was not, as with Metternich, because it was ‘unnatural' but because it was unsettling” (Kissinger, 1973, 32, 35). He continues: “Revolutions, although undesirable, are not [for him] an actual danger.” There seemed to remain for Great Britain no obstacle for “the only major expansionist interest” it had—that of trade and investment (Hobsbawm, 1962, 134). Gash (1979, 282) calls Great Britain “a satiated power.” It therefore sought, and could well afford merely to seek, “influence without entanglement” (Evans, 1983, 196–203).⁴⁹ With “pragmatic pacifism” (Polanyi, 1957, 5), Great Britain “knew how to get the most out of her preponderance” (Renouvin, 1954, 131).

One way to do this was to concentrate not merely on world commerce but on becoming the supplier of public loans to other states. Such loans were largely a Rothschild monopoly for a generation, and tended to be “loans in support of revolution rather than legitimacy”—that is, loans to Latin America, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The offerings on the stock exchange thus “appealed to that blend of political idealism and commercial strategy which was the dominant tone of British public opinion.” In turn, the securities on these loans (reaching some 750,000 between 1815 and 1830) represented an “accumulation of assets readily negotiable abroad,” proving to be a currency available for “financing the corn trade” (Jenks, 1927, 44–45, 61–62).⁵⁰

A structure of hegemony in the world-system could not be stable unless the home front was secure, and as of 1815 Great Britain was in trouble. The combination of a growing population, expanding urban and industrial zones, and the severe postwar slump represented “an aggregate of social evils which took half a century to bring under control” (Gash, 1979, 2). The essential choice in budgetary terms for the government was whether it would emphasize reduction of expenditures, including social expenditures, and opening the economy maximally, or the more cautious and protectionist policies advocated by the majority of the supporters of the Tories in power. “In fact, [the government] oscillated between the rival policies” (Halévy, 1949b, 46).⁵¹

Although this was the moment of the so-called Tory Reaction, the British variant of conservative ideology was relatively “enlightened” from the beginning, albeit sometimes grudgingly. To be sure, Toryism emphasized the “sense of harmony of the society” (Brock, 1941, 35).⁵² The question is how much this meant in practical terms. For Halévy (1949a, 199), the Tory Reaction amounted, when all is said, to very little. The political passions exploited by the Tory leaders, the catchwords so frequently on their lips, differed in no essential point from the mass of sentiments and commonplaces that had composed the Whiggery of sixty years earlier.⁵³ And Brock (1941, 35, 76) dates the marginalization of the old, or High, Tories, “who resisted reform wherever it appeared,” from the ministry of Lord Liverpool (1812–1827, but especially in its reorganized version after 1822). He calls this ministry “the first of those nineteenth-century governments which, without being called ‘reforming,' may certainly be called ‘improving.' “⁵⁴ It was less that the conservatives thought that improvement should be slow than that they thought it should not be consciously planned or intellectually constructed; it should simply emerge as the quiet consensus of wise men.⁵⁵

The immediate problem with such a tactic was that, in a time of economic distress, the patience of the working classes sometimes proved to be limited. It is rather difficult to implement improvement as quiet consensus amid social disorder. Before Great Britain could launch the improvements, the governments felt, therefore, that they needed to bring the disorder under control, and the route they chose was repression. The war years had already not been without repression of social unrest, from that of the English Jacobins in the 1790s (see Thompson, 1997) to that of the Luddites in 1811–1812. In 1815, peace brought the provocative adoption of the Corn Laws (precisely those that were to be repealed with such commotion in 1846). These laws produced “a petitioning movement of unprecedented scale” (Stevenson, 1979, 190).⁵⁶ In 1817, the so-called Pentrich Rising of hand-loom weavers (not quite a revolution, but so it seemed to some at the time) led to the suspension of habeas corpus and the hanging of the leaders.⁵⁷ A mass meeting of some sixty thousand people in Manchester in August 1819 in St. Peter's Field, Manchester (following similar meetings in Birmingham, Leeds, and London), triggered a panic reaction, which has come to be called the Peterloo Massacre. (This sardonic play on Waterloo has become irrevocably engraved in the manuals of history.) The state responded to its own panic by creating “Eleven Martyrs” and passing “Six Acts,” and increasing the size of the military establishment (ten thousand troops and two thousand marines) (see Read, 1958, 186–189).⁵⁸ Finally, in February 1820, the Cato Street Conspiracy to blow up the entire Cabinet was exposed by its agent provocateur, and five persons were hanged. How are we to appreciate this period of disorder? Brock (1941, 1) claims that it “remains the one period during the nineteenth century in which a revolution could have taken place.”⁵⁹ This seems a bit of unfriendly hyperbole. By contrast, Thomis and Holt (1979, 124) draw the conclusion about the “revolutionary threat” that “the most abiding impression” it leaves is that of the “weaknesses” of “a purely working-class movement with no middle-class involvement.”⁶⁰ Perhaps so, but in any case, one can agree with White (1973, 192) that, as a result, “with Peterloo, and the departure of Regency England, parliamentary reform had come of age.” The quiet consensus of wise men would be that the combination of repression followed by reform (but not the one without the other) was the best guarantee of long-term political stability.

This is all the more clear when one remembers that upheaval was not limited to Great Britain. It was Europe-wide in 1819–1820. Metternich reacted by promoting intervention in Naples and Spain at the Congress of Troppau in 1820. As we have already seen, the British Cabinet formally rejected this idea, despite the “increasing sympathy” that Tory supporters felt for Metternich, in the light of their own sense of insecurity “in their control over the masses of the people” (Webster, 1925, 176–177). Cooler heads saw that the day was already won and that it was now time to move on from repression to reform, or at least to improvement.

France in many ways initially suffered less popular discontent from the postwar slump than did Great Britain. Perhaps it was the fact that the French were so involved in the reconstruction of the government apparatus. Perhaps it was the legacy of revolutionary structures despite the fact that France was supposed to be living a Restoration. Perhaps it was the greater need to restrain a group of “Ultras” that quickened the pace of the liberal center. Perhaps, most of all, it was the excessive presumption of the “Ultras,” which may have distracted attention from social issues.

Napoleon might even be said to have been the one who launched the restructuring. In his Hundred Days, he was “converted to liberalism.” Faced with a Louis XVIII who had proclaimed a liberal constitution in the Charter, he told the Chamber of Peers two weeks before Waterloo: “I have come to inaugurate the constitutional monarchy” (Suel, 1953, 180). What his “messianic reappearance” from Elba did in fact accomplish was to cloud over the image of Napoleon as tyrant and reestablish his image as revolutionary. He thereby ensured a legacy. “The three nations which dominated the revolutionary tradition of the early nineteenth century—France, Italy and Poland—were precisely those in which the cult of Napoleon was most developed” (Billington, 1980, 129).

The king in 1814, not yet certain of his throne, sought support in the center. Not wishing to concede in principle the concept of popular control, he instead edicted a Charter that guaranteed a large number of the “popular” gains of the Revolution: equality before the law, in taxes, and in military service; freedom of expression and religion (although Catholicism would once again be the state religion); maintenance of Napoleon's Civil Code; continuity of titles and ranks accorded in the previous regime; security of the properties that had been confiscated and sold under the revolutionary procedures; and above all, continuity of the centralized state. Of course, one element in this compromise was the fact that, politically, the first restoration was effectuated with the connivance of many of Napoleon's leading supporters, who had bargained for their own continuity in posts (see Zeldin, 1959, 41). But it is important to note that, although some of these same persons compromised themselves with the king during the Hundred Days and were thereafter purged—in some cases, hanged—in the White Terror of the second Restoration, the Charter remained. It obviously reflected more than a circumstantial arrangement; it was a political choice.

To the dismay of the king, the first parliamentary elections brought in an ultraroyalist assembly—the disciples of de Maistre, Bonald, and Chateaubriand. Within a year, the “moderates” loyal to the preferences of the king found themselves in a parliamentary minority. And France entered into the ironic situation in which ultraroyalists, those who stood for “tradition made into a system and put forward as policy,”⁶¹ a tradition of which the monarchy was a pillar, stood at cross-purposes with the incarnation of this pillar of tradition. The king dissolved this assembly and managed to get one that was somewhat better for him, but the struggle would go on until 1824, when the ultraroyalists got a major boost with the succession of Louis XVIII's brother as Charles X. However, this definitive right-ward turn would of course lead directly into the July Revolution of 1830.

The crucial, definitive battle over the creation of the liberal state was fought not in Great Britain—where, as we have seen, it had won out even within the Tory party by the 1820s—but in France, where the Legitimists fought hard and unremittingly during the Restoration to achieve what they thought the ouster of Napoleon ought to have signaled: the restoration of a privileged aristocracy and a privileged Church—that is, in their view, “the destruction of equality!” (Elton, 1923, 103). So, when they found themselves under the authority of a king who wished to govern rationally and moderately—that is, in the center—because he was aware that the real problem was how to channel popular sentiment that could no longer simply be ignored as unworthy of notice, the Legitimists turned against the king, and therefore tradition. Already in 1817, Bonald (cited in Mellon, 1958, 102–103) observed clearly what was happening:

We who call ourselves Royalists want royalty to be affirmed by legitimacy; if then, we begin to act somewhere like Leaguers, we must be excused—even praised—since it is because we think that royalty is being opposed to legitimacy, and that we are right to serve [royalty] against itself.⁶²

The Legitimists self-destructed. On the one hand, they came to be in favor of an authoritarian state, which is not the same as being in favor of an absolutist one, since it implies a populist, or at least antielitist, tonality.⁶³ At the same time, “their attachment to absolute monarchy and divine right [their effort to serve royalty against itself] led them to oppose the constitutional monarchy and become partisans of parliament” (Ruggiero, 1959, 174).⁶⁴ Worse yet, they turned to an extension of the suffrage, thinking that a middle-class suffrage could be diluted by a “traditionalist” peasant suffrage. And in so doing, they further emphasized the role of parliament. Louis Blanc, writing in 1841 (1:73), was lucid:

What does it matter to history what the Chamber of 1815 intended? Their legacy is what they did. It is they who proclaimed the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of the legislature, and thus it is they who unknowingly laid the foundations of the syllogism out of which, after fifteen years of struggle, 1830 represents the conclusion drawn….[The result of Louis XVIII dissolving the Chamber was that] those who called themselves ultra-royalists were dismayed, and those who called themselves liberals applauded. It should have been the other way around.

It is therefore no surprise that it was these same Legitimists who by 1840 were forming the first organized political party in France.

The Legitimists gave the opening to the liberals, allowing them to appropriate the Revolution (and even Napoleon) for true tradition, dissociating themselves in the process from the Revolution's overly democratic overtones.⁶⁵ The Revolution had been virtuous, but had gone wrong by deviating from its original liberal intent, said Guizot⁶⁶ and other liberal historians (a theme Furet would revive in the late twentieth century), but “with the Charter, it became possible to complete the catechism—the Revolution is over and has triumphed.” In that way, “the Liberals become the true royalists, the Ultras the true revolutionaries” (Mellon, 1958, 47).⁶⁷Mellon calls this reading of the history of the French Revolution “a milestone in the development of European Liberalism.” Thereby, the liberals were deradicalized, and were distinguished in their own minds, and more and more in the minds of others, from “democrats.” Liberalism became a term linked with a moderate status quo.⁶⁸ It lost its “partisan meaning by being semantically dissolved into a general qualifier of various French ‘achievements' after 1789” (Marichal, 1956, 293). And with that, it could shift from representing opposition to Napoleonic despotism to continuing the Napoleonic experience:

Liberalism as the practice of government derived from the same matrix as Napoleonic administration, with the single and practically restricted exception of elected representation as a check on arbitrary rule. Like the Napoleonic functionaries, liberals were convinced that they embodied social and economic progress, were favorable to science and technology, and proclaimed rational, utilitarian principles as the basis for a superior and neutral administration. The continuity between the Napoleonic experience and liberalism was accentuated by the strong defense of the former imperial administrators against the legitimist claims of some Restoration monarchies, as well as by their leading role in statistical propositions to resolve social problems. (Woolf, 1991, 242)

Once liberalism had thus cast off its radical associations, both in Great Britain and France, it was launched on its technocratic, reformist path. For the British government at the time, the most urgent problem to solve was that of money. Actually, W. Cooke Taylor said in 1851 that Great Britain had three urgent problems to solve after 1815—”cash, corn, and Catholics“—but note that he put cash first. In 1797, because of economic difficulties resulting from wartime expenditures and a weak military position, Pitt suspended “cash payments” on the notes of the Bank of England “temporarily,” thus preserving its bullion reserves⁶⁹ but also “precipitating a controversy that continued for over three-quarters of a century” (Fetter, 1965, 1). To be more exact, there were two controversies. The resumption marked the culmination of the so-called bullionist controversy, and this in turn led to a second controversy, that between the so-called Banking School and the Currency School.⁷⁰ The bullionists took fright in 1809–1810 at inflationary pressures, which they attributed to excessive issue of notes; they preached the remedy of convertibility. The antibullionists argued that the problem could not be solved by a change of monetary policy, since it was the result of the extraordinary pressures of wartime and would pass. The compromise was to put off resumption until peacetime. At that point, however, acute deflation set in, and considerable opposition emerged to any tightening of credit, which resumption amounted to doing.⁷¹It was in large part at this point a controversy between those (such as the leaders of the cotton industry) who emphasized Great Britain's foreign-exchange position, which a gold standard would enhance, and those who worried about maintaining the prices of agricultural products,⁷² who were not only the large landowners but the “little man” as well.⁷³

How much place there should be for the “little man,” once Peterloo had shown the stiff backbone of the government, was a question that absorbed more and more public concern in Great Britain. The underlying cause of popular discontent, it was evident, was “distress,” and the existing institutions of relief were clearly insufficient to keep the working classes from “resorting to disturbances” (Darvall, 1934, 199).⁷⁴Despite the fact that Peterloo had been an effort to intimidate the working classes, and did intimidate them up to a point, the governing classes were fearful of their increased social power.

The debate between liberals and conservatives (better language than Whigs and Tories, or even radicals and Tories) was not over whether there existed a “problem” to be resolved. It was, rather, over how it could best be resolved. The liberals looked to legislation empowering experts, whereas the conservatives looked to a vague entity called “interests.”⁷⁵ The timid beginnings of the legislative approach were made nonetheless under a Tory government in 1817 with the Poor Employment Act, which provided work on canals, roads, and bridges. The act represented “a significant new departure” in that it “implicitly acknowledged” an obligation to help the “little man” in a time of depression (Flinn, 1961, 92).⁷⁶ To the timid legislative effort we must add the pacifying elements of Methodism, emigration, and empire. The role of the Protestant sects in ensuring the political stability of Great Britain has long been argued.⁷⁷ Wilmot Horton's proposals to encourage emigration as a solution to poverty has been termed a policy of “shoveling out paupers.”⁷⁸And emigration was in turn linked to empire.

The keynote of British policy in the period immediately following 1815 seems to have been caution. They were cautious about lifting protectionist structures. They were cautious about resuming cash payments. The same caution could be seen vis-à-vis the colonies and the mercantile system. The liberal political economists were anti-imperial in principle,⁷⁹ but there was opposition to any “sudden overthrow of the existing system.” Here, as everywhere else, the liberals hedged their bets. Yes, a free market, but not at the expense of the accumulation of capital. The modifications eventually came, although “it seemed to free-traders that the old system, like Charles II, was an unconscionable time a-dying” (Schuyler, 1945, 103).

The liberals were prudent even in their teaching about colonies. The liberal economists were in general very worried about the decline of profits. Wakefield drew the conclusion that colonies were a partial answer to the shortage of profitable investment opportunities. James Mill (cited in Winch, 1963, 398), though he accepted the strictures of Ricardo in general, did concede: “If colonization was an economic necessity for Britain, then it would require government support.”⁸⁰Wakefield developed a “new, liberal conception of empire,” with a properly Benthamite justification for efficient and self-financing colonies.⁸¹ The colonies in the Regency empire were thus indeed different from the earlier colonies, as Harlow (1953) has argued. They became “an extension of social change overseas, an example of social imperialism” (Bayly, 1989, 252–253).⁸²

Social change overseas for the British in practice meant colonization by the British when it was an economic necessity for them, and decolonization of other countries' colonies when it was economically useful for the British. For an insular people, without Napoleonic universalist pretensions, the world had suddenly become their oyster. “Ever since 1815 England had been sending out her swarms over the entire Globe“—as tourists, as emigrants, as colonizers, and as romantic revolutionary supporters (Halévy, 1949b, 126–127).⁸³ Great Britain, after a long period filled with both hesitations about and encouragement of the settler independence movements of Latin America, finally came down decisively in 1823 in opposition to any European country other than Spain sending troops there to quash these movements; this was recognized as the definitive moment in the struggle.⁸⁴ For Great Britain was ready to fight here, as it had not been ready to fight in opposition to French intervention in Spain itself in 1820.⁸⁵ This is of course what one expects of a hegemonic power, and how such a power asserts itself—by making implicit threats that it expects will not be called, but also by knowing when it is not quite strong enough to issue ultimatums.⁸⁶ Having thus successfully maneuvered the European states into a do-nothing position, “Canning eventually obtained the chief credit among South Americans” (Temperley, 1925b, 53), and thus Great Britain secured her status as the standard-bearer of liberty despite the obvious economic self-interest that was at play.

This readiness of Great Britain to play the role of limited supporter of independence movements was extended to the Balkans/Ottoman Empire as well, most particularly in the case of Greece. Public opinion in Great Britain was torn between a disdain for autocracy, seen as somehow not quite civilized, and a prudent desire not to become too entangled. “Influence without entanglement” is how Evans (1983, chap. 21) describes British foreign-policy aims in Europe at this time. Another way to describe these aims, however, is to say that their primary objective was the slow eating away of the Holy Alliance by embarrassing it where its principles were most shaky. The case of Greece offered a golden opportunity. The Greek revolution started in the wake of, and at the same time as, others in Europe in 1820–1822. In the case of the others, Great Britain, as we have seen, disapproved “passively” of intervention. The Greek uprising, however, had the special characteristic of being an uprising of Christians against a Moslem empire, and in particular an uprising of Orthodox Christians. Metternich might remain unmoved, but it was harder for the Tsar of All the Russias. Even then, Alexander hesitated, but Nicholas, who acceded to the throne in 1825, was ready to join Great Britain, and then France, in forcing the issue,⁸⁷ which was ultimately fully to be resolved only in 1830.

In Great Britain and elsewhere, on the one hand, the Greek uprising was the cause of the radicals:

Greece…became the inspirer of international liberalism and “philhellenism,” which included organized support for the Greeks and the departure of numerous volunteer fighters, played a part in rallying the European left wing in the 1820s analogous to that which support for the Spanish Republic was to play in the later 1930s (Hobsbawm, 1962, 145).⁸⁸

But, on the other hand, Greek nationalism served as a wedge that the British government could use to undermine what remained of the Holy Alliance. If from “monstrous portent” still in 1822 the Holy Alliance had become a “thing of contempt” by 1827 (Temperley, 1925a, 474), it was primarily because of the Greek revolution. “[T]he prime artisan of this ruin [of the Holy Alliance] was George Canning” (Weill, 1931, 68).⁸⁹

The ambiguous role of the Greek revolution—both archetype of nationalist revolution for the later “springtime of the nations,” and crucial pawn in the British struggle to strengthen its hegemonic hold on the world-economy; ergo both myth of the radicals and excuse for clever maneuver by the Tories—precisely reflects the ambiguities of romanticism. For Greece became the prime inspirer of European romanticism, even as the good classicists of Europe celebrated the rationality of the ancient Greeks. Romanticism “comes of age between 1780 and 1830.” It was naturally associated with the French Revolution, since romanticism had to do with “creating a new society different from its immediate forerunner” (Barzun, 1943, 52). Thus it was individualist, voluntarist, and poetic. It stood for a liberation of the imagination. But precisely because it wanted a liberation of the imagination, and rejected the limitations of the present. But at the same time it was “also the love of the past, the attachment to old traditions, the curiosity for epochs when the peoples, suffused [bercés] with legends, created naive poetry, a bit childish, but sincere and spontaneous” (Weill, 1930, 215).

Thus, although romanticism involved spontaneity and hence could sanction revolution, it was strongly opposed to any universalistic tone in revolution, particularly as this had been incarnated in the Napoleonic imposition of the universalist project on unwilling peoples.⁹⁰ For that reason, a radical, rationalist revolutionary like Blanqui considered romantics to be the enemy. When Blanqui, the great practical revolutionary of the nineteenth century, had finished fighting in the revolution of 1830, he burst into the editorial room of the paper on which he had worked. Standing in the doorway, he flung down his rifle and shouted with young enthusiasm [surely a romantic quality!] to the elderly journalists sitting there: “Enfoncez, les romantiques!”—“That finishes the Romantics.” For him, the Revolution for which he had just risked his life was not primarily the victory of republican workers over their oppressors; what first occurred to him was that the ornate romantic style of Chateaubriand, the idealisation of the Middle Ages, fake Gothic and the aping of feudalism, would all now disappear in favour of a purer classical style, which would model itself, in writing, drama, and architecture, on the noble tradition of Republican Rome. (Postgate, 1974, 97)

Nonetheless, says Barzun (1961, xxi), “romanticism is populist…even when the Romanticist, like Scott or Carlyle, preaches a feudal order.” Perhaps Hobsbawm (1962, 306) best catches the overall tone:

[T]hough it is by no means clear what romanticism stood for, it is quite evident what it was against: the middle. Whatever its content, it was an extremist creed. Romantic artists or thinkers…are found on the extreme left…, on the extreme right…, leaping from left to right…, but hardly ever among the moderates, or whig-liberals, in the rationalist centre, which indeed was the stronghold of “classicism.”⁹¹

Where, then, does Greece fit in terms of this all too malleable concept? Here, Bernal's [1987, 1991] important work on the conceptualization of the ancestry of Europe comes in. He points out that Renaissance thinkers had seen Egypt, not Greece, as “the original and creative source,” and that both Egypt and China had maintained “a high reputation for [their] philosophy and science, but above all for [their] political system” (Bernal, 1987, 16) until precisely the time of the French Revolution, at which point, led by Romantic thinkers, the focus shifted to Greece:

By the end of the eighteenth century, “progress” had become a dominant paradigm, dynamism and change were valued more than stability, and the world began to be viewed through time rather than across space. Nevertheless, space remained important for the Romantics, because of their concern for a local formation of peoples or “races.”…Real communication was no longer perceived as taking place through reason, which could reach any rational man. It was now seen as flowing through feeling, which could touch only those tied to each other by kinship or “blood” and sharing a common “heritage.” (Bernal, 1987, 28)

And this is exactly why Egypt had to be cut out of the line of anteriority for Europe. For eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable that “Greece—which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood—could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites” (Bernal, 1987, 28). Greece represented, was made to symbolize, the line between Europe and the outer world, the Orient, the lands of barbarism. Nationalism was acceptable, even desirable, within the zone of “Europe” (especially if protesting against a non-Christian imperial entity)—hence, both White settlers in Latin America and Greeks could have British support against “autocracy“—but this had nothing to do with what was appropriate in distant cultural climes like India.

The existence of more conservative and more revolutionary forms of romanticism correlates with a split in both time and place. In time, the romanticism that was nurtured against the universalism of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period was dominant in the earlier years, and in the core countries. Circa 1830, it gave way in Italy, Germany, and Poland, following in the footsteps of Greece, to a “romanticism of progress,” which became “an important factor in the movements of national liberation” (Renouvin, 1954, 19). But in the core, and especially in Great Britain, it remained identified “with tradition and with the maintenance of authority in church and state,” as opposed to the “revolutionary or semi-revolutionary character” it had on the Continent (Seton-Watson, 1937, 40).

Romanticism served British hegemony well. It undermined the Holy Alliance, which, as we have already noted, was quite rationalist and universalizing. It undermined the vestiges of the revolutionary-Napoleonic tradition. It encouraged a reorganization of the geopolitical space in Europe (and the Americas), which served Great Britain's immediate economic interests and its ability to maintain and reinforce its hegemonic order. And it drew a clear line between Europe and the outer world, creating a basic justification for imperialism and racism—both so crucial to the geopolitics and geoculture of the post-1789 world. Of course, it was a loose cannon and could not always be controlled. So romanticism would also eventually become part of the undoing of the British hegemonic order, but not until this order was undermined by the economic and political transformations of the last third of the nineteenth century.

It was of great help to the British that France's internal evolution went in tandem with this grand schema. As in Great Britain, so in France, the period after 1815 had “brought neither prosperity nor abundance for the working classes,” but rather unemployment, worsened by internal migration toward the large urban centers (Ponteil, 1968, 285).⁹² Socially, the gulf between the workers and the urban bourgeoisie was enormous.⁹³ The rights of the workers to organize were strictly limited to mutual aid societies under police surveillance.⁹⁴ There was worker unrest in Lyon in 1817, in which the workers raised the tricolor cockard, an event that the prefect of the Rhône attributed to contagion from the news about uprisings in England (as well as the rebellion of the Americas and the plot in Lisbon).⁹⁵ Still, a liberal like Guizot could say in 1820: “I do not despair of obtaining the support of the masses (saisir les masses), especially with regard to the political institutions.”⁹⁶

The mid-1820s, however, created a serious inflammation in the political process. At the very moment that Liberal Toryism was taking hold in Great Britain, Charles X, by the accident of the king's premature death, came to power in France in 1824 and began to implement his particularly reactionary views. This led to strains with the British, strains with large segments even of the pays légal at home, and strains with the working classes. In addition, the accession of Charles X coincided with an economic downturn that began in 1825 and greatly intensified in 1829. The combination of political sclerosis and economic troubles tends to be explosive, and led directly into the revolutionary atmosphere of 1830 (see Bourgin, 1947, 203; and Gonnet, 1955, 250–280).

Instead of seeking to moderate his policies and appease some of the malcontents, Charles X asserted his authority all the more arbitrarily.⁹⁷When 221 deputies found the courage to send him a public address, asking him to respect the rights of the legislature, he saw this, not incorrectly, as the defense of the essential principles of the French Revolution, as upheld in the Charter of Louis XVIII, and he ignored the plea. This was in a sense Charles X's last chance. “If there was a revolution in 1830, it was a revolution that had been provoked.” Charles X issued a repressive press decree on July 26. The deputies temporized; a crowd of workers acted. This crowd was composed neither of the “desperate and dispossessed” nor of the “substantial middle class” but “largely of men from skilled crafts, reasonably mature in years” (Suel, 1953, 188).

Was this then the revolution that Buonarroti, Europe's “first professional revolutionary,” was hoping for when, “on the eve of the Revolution of 1830, he actually prayed for the triumph of reaction” (Eisenstein, 1959, 49)?⁹⁸ Not really. It was a three-day popular revolution—July 27–29, les Trois Glorieuses—which was quickly captured by Restoration liberalism and resulted in the July Monarchy, with Louis Philippe, who was prepared to call himself not King of France but King of the French. Thiers said: “Without the Duke of Orléans…we could never have contained this rabble” (cited by Dolléans, 1947, 42). Against the Ultras, who had still hoped to truly restore some version of the ancien régime, the July Monarchy legitimated a liberal version of the French Revolution. “By the Revolution of 1830, the assault upon the Revolution of 1789 was finally defeated” (Elton (1923, 88).⁹⁹

The workers would rapidly realize that, “in terms of the economy and the social structure, the Revolution [of 1830] had brought about no change whatsoever” (Bourgin, 1947, 205).¹⁰⁰ If the workers were disillusioned, the Ultras were nonetheless dismayed. On August 7, 1830, Chateaubriand (cited in Béneton, 1988, 56–57, n. 3) made a speech in the House of Peers refusing to support Louis-Philippe: “A useless Cassandra, I have wearied the throne and the fatherland with my disdained warnings; all that remains to me is to sit down on the debris of a wreckage that I have so often predicted.” And big businessmen were unsure whether they should applaud or not, fearing simultaneously “reaction,…the Legitimists, [and] social revolution by the masses” (Price, 1975b, 6).¹⁰¹

Finally, the British were also hesitant to applaud at first. In fact, in the weeks immediately following the revolution, the “menace of war hung heavily over France” (Pinkney, 1972, 303). The tricolor, the Marseillaise, the reorganization of the national guard all made the Holy Alliance states shudder; they even began to fear renewed French aggression. But the British government, under none other than Wellington, the spokesperson of the more conservative Tories, hastened to recognize the new government. And by October, so had everyone.

Why did the British move so rapidly? No doubt it helped that Louis-Philippe was both a “sincere admirer” of Great Britain's parliamentary institutions and a partisan of an alliance with Great Britain (see Guyot, 1901, 579). No doubt it was a clever move by Louis-Philippe to recruit the well-known exponent of these two views, Talleyrand, as ambassador to Great Britain, symbolizing that Great Britain was the country whose support “it was most important for [Louis-Philippe] to win” (Guichen, 1917, 186).¹⁰² And no doubt the British had many reasons to be annoyed with the foreign policy that Polignac had conducted for Charles X. In particular, they were most unhappy about the implications of France's invasion of Algeria early in 1830, especially when they realized that Charles X saw in it virtually a revival of the Crusades.¹⁰³ At a moment when Great Britain had succeeded in constraining the Holy Alliance, Charles X seemed to be upsetting the apple-cart.¹⁰⁴ Great Britain had been restrained from acting directly against him because of the strong support France was receiving from the other European powers, and from Russia in particular.¹⁰⁵ Now, however, it could hope for better from Louis Philippe, as indeed would turn out to be the case.¹⁰⁶

But with all the hesitations, the fact is that the July Revolution succeeded. That is, the liberal state was installed—in its primitive form, at least. One hundred years later, Benedetto Croce (1934, 101–102) could look back at what he called the “July sun” and exult:

With [the July Days] all European absolutism was morally defeated and, on the contrary, European liberalism, which was struggling and bridling in depression, became an example of how to face the enemy in extreme cases; a proof that in this way victory is certain; an aid in the fact itself that a great power had reached the plenitude of liberty; and ground for confidence in revolutions soon to come.

As Croce indicates, the Revolution of 1830 was to be contagious, spreading most immediately to neighboring Belgium and Italy, but then also to Poland. “The peoples of Europe emerged from a long apathy. The Holy Alliance was shaken” (Rudé, 1940, 413).¹⁰⁷ Of the three revolutions, that of Belgium was the only successful one, and for good reason. It was the only one that fit into the project to create and consolidate the liberal state in the core countries of the world-economy. The Italian uprising of the Carbonari was supported by the more radical elements in France and various parts of the Parti du mouvement under the leadership of Lafayette. They organized the Volontaires du Rhône to come to the aid of Piedmont (and incidentally annex Savoy). They were. however. in part foiled by the French authorities themselves.¹⁰⁸ For the new French government wanted merely to contain Austria; and Charles-Albert, king of Piedmont, wanted the Austrians out but the liberals held in check. So in the end it was the liberals who lost out (see Renouvin, 1954, 73–75). As for Poland, the revolution there was suppressed without too much difficulty. The link between it and the revolution in France was spiritual but not more.¹⁰⁹ The French were very far away and neither able nor prepared to do anything.

Belgium was another story entirely. Belgium had never been an independent state, but in the long period between the Revolt of the Netherlands and the French Revolution, it had been a somewhat autonomous administrative unit first under Spanish, then Austrian rule. During this period, agriculture had flourished,¹¹⁰but industry thrived there as well, particularly following the “thirty-two years of prosperity” [1748–1780] under Prince Charles. The prince's deputy, the Count of Coblenz [1753–70], known as “the Colbert of the Low Countries,” instituted a protectionist policy (Briavoinne, 1839, 7, 86–90), which resulted in “dazzling” growth between 1765 and 1775,¹¹¹ growth that continued steadily from that point on.¹¹²One of the advantages the Austrian Netherlands had over the United Provinces at that time was its combination of high population growth, low wages, and a skilled labor force.¹¹³ One result was that Belgium was introducing industrial machinery almost as fast as England.¹¹⁴

France annexed Belgium in 1795. The main centers of industrial production—cotton in Ghent, wool in Verviers and Eupen, and heavy industry in Liège and Hainault—all underwent a further “remarkable expansion” in the French period (Mokyr, 1974, 366).¹¹⁵ There seem to be two main reasons: “integration with a huge protected and unified area of 30 million customers” (Crouzet, 1964, 209), and transformation of the social structure—the removal of internal barriers to trade (customs, tolls), the abolition of guilds, civil equality, reform of codes and tribunals, and the abolition of feudal rights (see Wright, 1955, 90).¹¹⁶ The two together seem to have worked splendidly, as everyone seems to agree: “brusk acceleration,” the moment of a Rostovian “take-off,” “total transformation,…[and] the moment of decisive expansion” are the phrases used (Lebrun, 1961, 555; Devleeshouwer, 1970, 618; Dhondt, 1969, 42, 44).¹¹⁷ This was already the view of the Belgian analyst of the time, Natalis Briavoinne (1839, 113):

The political events [of the French period], a unified civil legislation and, more relevant, the complete reorganization of the tribunals, [and] improved commercial institutions all underlie a remarkable momentum in Belgium as in France; but Belgium is the country which reaped the earliest and greatest benefits.

After Waterloo, Belgium was integrated into the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Local opinion was not consulted. This reunion (after 250 years of separation) was greeted with hostility in Belgium by both main groups of the population: by the democrats, strong in Wallonia, who wanted a parliamentary system; and by the Catholics, strong in Flanders, who were wary of being under a Protestant monarch without a prior pact to defend their religious rights (see Ponteil, 1968, 17). The immediate economic effect was negative, in part because of the general world economic downturn, and in part because of the contraction of the market for their goods.¹¹⁸ In terms of policy, the central debate was about tariffs, between Dutch merchants who survived on open entrepôts and were much more concerned about Hamburg than about Manchester,¹¹⁹ and Belgian industrialists. who were seeking protection against British competition.¹²⁰

King William was primarily concerned about holding his enlarged kingdom together and servicing the enormous state debt.¹²¹ In fact, the tariff quarrel subsided. The Belgians did better than the Dutch and became less protectionist. This became in turn part of the problem, because the Europe-wide downturn after 1825 created a pool of unemployed proletarians precisely in Belgium, who became “ready to receive revolutionary ferment” (Demoulin, 1938, 369).

Thus, the July Revolution in Paris had an immediate resonance in Belgium. It revived the always latent thought of possible reunion with France that animated some of the Walloon bourgeoisie. It revived the discomforts of the Catholics with Dutch Protestant overrule. But it needed a spark. Even if, as some argue, the August 25 uprising was inspired by “agitators arriving from Paris,” they needed “troops,” and the troops were to be found only among the unemployed workers (Harsin, 1936, 277). This was a “popular revolt,” preceded by a social malaise, marked by Luddism and some violence.¹²² But here, too, as in the case of the July Revolution, the uprising was quickly recuperated by middle-class forces and was transformed into a national, liberal revolution (see Demoulin, 1950, 152).¹²³

Unlike the situation in France, there was no strong Ultra party in Belgium, precisely because Catholics were not in power. This made Belgian Catholics more open to the version of Catholic liberalism that Lamennais had pioneered in France, but which he could not really manage to turn there into a primary social force.¹²⁴To be sure, the Vatican itself was very legitimist, and therefore very reserved about Belgian liberal nationalism, but “the policy of Rome was one thing and the behavior of the Belgian clergy another” (Demoulin, 1950, 143).¹²⁵ Walloon anticlerical liberals were willing to make concessions to the (largely Flemish) Catholics to win their support on the national question.¹²⁶

The issue quickly became not the status quo versus a change, but simply the form of the change. There were three possibilities: separation of the Netherlands and Belgium, but under a king coming from the House of Orange; reunion with France; or independence, with a king selected from elsewhere. The chances of the Prince of Orange, King William's son, were wrecked by the king's bombardment of Antwerp on October 27, which the Belgians saw as a way of aiding Dutch merchants against them. On the other hand, reunionist sentiment was never all that strong, and in any case had very powerful opposition outside Belgium. And both Orangism and reunionism had a very powerful enemy within—the Church, which saw the House of Orange as Protestant, and France as too anticlerical.¹²⁷

But the internal social compromise would have been insufficient to carry the day had not Belgian independence served the larger needs of both Great Britain and France. The Holy Alliance had hoped that Great Britain would not rush to recognize the new regime as it had done with Louis-Philippe. They hoped that British commercial links with Holland might induce them to take a hard line. They assumed as well that Great Britain would fear renewed French expansionism (see Guichen, 1917, 172 and passim).¹²⁸ They failed to understand the dynamism of the emerging British-French model, and how an independent Belgium, industrialized and liberal, would in fact consolidate it. “The idea of the ‘liberal alliance' [was] from the 1830s on a constant theme of liberal journalism in London and Paris” (Lichtheim, 1969, 42).The French proclaimed the principle of “nonintervention” to dissuade the Prussian troops from intervening at the end of August, and got the British to concur.¹²⁹ “The confident relations of Great Britain and France in the first days of October 1830 were of paramount importance in keeping the peace” (Demoulin, 1950, 127)¹³⁰ and permitted thereby the declaration of independence by the National Congress on November 18. On November 24, the congress excluded all consideration of a king from the House of Orange. But at the very moment that Russia was mobilizing to send troops, the Polish insurrection broke out on November 29. The tsar was in effect restrained twice from intervention. Earlier, the opposition of Grand Duke Constantine and Foreign Minster Count Nesslerode had delayed action. They had counseled prudence, the grand duke fearing the decimation of the Polish army, his “private domain.” And now the Polish uprising definitively “saved Belgium from intervention and perhaps Europe from war” (Guyot, 1926, 64). Indeed, the very mobilization by the tsar was itself an element in the Polish uprising, the Polish officers fearing decimation (see Morley, 1952, 412–414).¹³¹ On January 15, 1831, Lafayette said: “Gentlemen, the war has been prepared against us. Poland was to form the advance-guard; the advance-guard has turned against the main army” (cited in Morley, 1952, 415).

The Polish uprising thus marked the end of all possibility of Russian intervention against Belgium. To be sure, it did Poland itself little good. When Great Britain's prime minister, Lord Grey, received the Polish envoy, Prince Leon Sapieha, at the beginning of 1831, the latter reminded him of a pamphlet he had written on behalf of Poland. “Grey said he had not changed in principle; but in view of the existing danger that the French would be driven by public opinion to annex Belgium, Britain must have an ally capable of counteracting such a move. This could only be Russia” (Betley, 1960, 89).

The cynicism was de rigueur. It does, however, confirm the crucial difference between Belgium and Poland—the role that Belgium, but not Poland, could potentially play in consolidating the British-French model. Buonarroti at least was clear as to what had happened: Belgium, under the king finally chosen, Leopold I, had joined Great Britain and France to constitute the “bulwarks of that constitutional monarchy based on a parliamentary system and the broad consent of the middle classes,” which he denounced as the “Order of Egoism” (Eisenstein, 1959, 86). Metternich was equally clear. In a letter to Count Nesselrode, he wrote: “My most secret thought is that old Europe is at the beginning of the end….New Europe, on the other hand, is not yet at its beginning. Between the end and the beginning there will be chaos” (cited by Silva, 1917, 44).

Evans (1983, 200) calls this the “natural watershed in the history of European diplomacy“—autocracies in the East, liberal constitutionalism in the West.¹³²It served as the material basis for that new cultural concept, the “West,” which was developed precisely in the period between 1815 and 1848, in part by Auguste Comte, in part by various Russian theorists who looked longingly and in frustration at this “specific form of civilization” (Weill, 1930, 547). The concept of a West that was militarily strong and economically dominant, and which laid claim to the banner of individual freedom against an economically backward, “unfree East,” would become the pattern for the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What Belgium had over Poland was its geographical location in northwestern Europe, combined with an already developed industrial base. It could therefore be included in the expanded core; indeed, it was needed as part of the enlarged locus of high-technology production required by a growing world-economy.¹³³ Belgium would recover quickly from its transitory economic difficulties caused by the turbulence of a political revolution,¹³⁴ to be sagely governed by a king who would set himself the objective of “working at the Franco-British entente” (Ponteil, 1968, 327).

With France and Belgium in secure hands, Great Britain could make its own political adjustments with some ease. The story of reform started in fact not in 1830 during the Whig government of Lord Grey but in 1829 when the Duke of Wellington was presiding over a Tory government that was the nearest thing Great Britain had to an Ultra regime. The issue was not the enfranchisement of the urban middle classes but the “emancipation” of the Catholics. The question of Catholic emancipation had been under parliamentary discussion since 1778, when the penal laws were abrogated.¹³⁵ It was originally a question of extending civil rights to a minority—one element in the gradual liberalization of the political system. The Act of Union in 1800, however, complicated the issue. Once Ireland was juridically incorporated into the United Kingdom, extending Catholic rights could be seen as “the necessary completion” of the act. But it could also be seen as a way station to its reversal, one element in a possible decolonization of the British Empire.

At the same time, two other elements entered the picture. The first was the Protestant revival of the eighteenth century, which, although it was itself placing pressures on the Anglican Establishment, added a strong voice, which was “on the whole opposed to [Catholic] emancipation” (Hexter, 1936, 313). The second, which went in the other direction, was the French Revolution. Opposition to the Revolution led to a change in how Catholics were viewed in Great Britain: “Catholicism, no longer a soul-devouring ogre, was a virtuous Atlas, propping the tottering world against the onslaughts of a godless sansculottism” (Hexter, 1936, 301).¹³⁶

Still, it was undoubtedly the Irish lower classes who forced the issue, and their actions reflected not an urge for integration into the British political system but the beginnings of a popular Irish nationalism:

It was rather that in Catholic emancipation [the Irish lower classes] foresaw vaguely the satisfaction of many desires, the expropriation of the Protestant landlords, and the division of land among themselves—in a word, the restitution to Catholics of the soil that had belonged to their ancestors. (Halévy, 1949a, 191)

By 1829 the nationalism had taken hold sufficiently that Ireland seemed poised to rebel. “At least so it seemed to the Duke of Wellington” (Reynolds, 1954, 30).¹³⁷Required, he thought, to choose between emancipation and revolution, the Duke of Wellington—the Iron Duke, ferociously opposed to emancipation—”decided upon one of his strategic retreats. He wrung from the king permission“(Reynolds, 1954, 30)¹³⁸to put forward a measure for unqualified emancipation.

Emancipation was to change the life of the Irish lower classes far less than they had hoped.¹³⁹ No matter! Wellington's retreat had the consequence that “it made reform respectable” (Moore, 1961, 17), and at the same time it had the final twist of turning the British Ultras themselves into partisans of electoral reform. This was the same reaction that the French Ultras in the Restoration had had in the face of what they considered Louis XVIII's insufficiently autocratic stance. Wellington and Peel were seen by the British Ultras to have turned out to be unreliable. Since they had been supported by the representatives of the rotten boroughs, these Ultras now argued, “paradoxically, but not irrationally,” that only “a rational and widely-based electorate could be relied upon to rally round the ‘No Popery' flag” (Evans, 1983, 206).¹⁴⁰Wellington's timely retreat on Catholic emancipation ensured that there would be nothing like a July Days scenario, but the outcome turned out to be substantially the same, for it was equally the culmination of what were essentially parallel processes in both countries.

Catholic emancipation may have calmed things down in Ireland, but the failure of the harvest in England that same year revived the sense of turbulence. In the winter of 1830, unemployment in rural areas had become “widespread” and was followed by the failure of country banks, leading to agricultural riots (see Gash, 1935, 91). It was at this point, with new elections pending, that the July Revolution (the July Days) broke out. The reaction, as we have already noted, was mixed. The radicals were “triumphant.” They saw July 1830 as “the renewal of 1789.” The liberal center (the Whig aristocrats, the urban middle class notables) were hoping that the July Revolution would turn out to be “at once liberal and conservative, would in fact revive not 1789 or 1792 but 1688 and thus be a French tribute to the political wisdom of England” (Halévy, 1950, 5–6).

In any case, Wellington lost the election, which Halévy (1935, 53) sees as the “natural outcome of the fall of the last of the Kings of France.”¹⁴¹ Though July may or may not have hurt Wellington, we have already seen that Wellington was not in fact hostile to Louis-Philippe. As Louis Blanc (1842, 2:4) remarked at the time, if the Whigs embraced July as the “triumph of French liberalism,” the Tories did so because they were seeking to maintain the “supremacy…in Europe” of Great Britain:

The English aristocracy, like all aristocracies, is quite clairvoyant and coherent in seeking to accomplish its aims. It knew that, under Charles X, there was a serious possibility that France would take over the left bank of the Rhine and deliver Constantinople to the Russians. It knew that the Duke of Orleans was English in his tastes and inclinations.

The contagion of 1830 was clearly spreading. Still, reform might never have come, any more in Great Britain than in France or Belgium, had there not been a popular push. The new Whig government of Lord Grey reacted to the continuing agrarian disturbances by enforcing laws “with the utmost severity,” bringing the riots and the arson successfully to an end (Halévy, 1950, 15). Once the riots were under control, Lord Grey moved his reform bill. When it carried only most narrowly, Parliament was dissolved, and a stronger reform majority was returned. But when the House of Lords voted down the readopted reform bill in October 1831, urban disturbances began. The middle-class reform leaders, like Francis Place, struggled to remain in the lead. Place launched the famous slogan “To stop the Duke [of Wellington], go for gold.” This meant withdrawing private funds from the banks. The suggestion of armed resistance to a new Tory ministry was bruited, although “a revolution led by Francis Place would have been an incongruous phenomenon” (Evans, 1983, 211). Nonetheless, the threat worked. Wellington abandoned his opposition, the king promising Grey that, if need be, he would create new peers. “The test never came” (Thomis and Holt, 1977, 91, 98).¹⁴²

Both supporters and opponents of reform agreed that at that moment Great Britain had been “standing on the edge of a precipice of disorder” (Fraser, 1969, 38). Rudé asserts there was no English revolution in 1830 because there was no “self-conscious working-class movement” and because the occasional angers of the laborers “lacked solid middle-class support” (Rudé, 1967, 102). But is this the way to analyze what happened? In response to the boast that the 1832 reforms were accomplished “without an insurrection,” John Stuart Mill, writing in 1849 (p. 12), asks: “But was it without the fear of an insurrection? If there had been no chance of an uprising, would the House of Lords have waived their opposition, or the Duke of Wellington have thrown up the game in despair?”¹⁴³ The answer is almost surely not.

This does not mean, however, that the putative insurrectionaries accomplished their goals. For once again the process was taken in hand by the centrist liberals. The “primary purpose” of the Reform Bill was to “rally middle-class support round the aristocratic system” (Gash, 1979, 147).¹⁴⁴ The Whigs “made sure—to use their own language—that the ‘age of improvement' would not be suddenly transformed into an ‘age of disruption.' “ For this, they needed a bill, any bill, that seemed to include the middle classes in the polity.¹⁴⁵ Even John Bright, who wanted much more, would say: “If the bill was not a good bill,…it was a great bill when it passed” (Briggs, 1959, 259–260).

The reforms had some unanticipated consequences for British politics. “[Enfranchised Scotland and Catholic Ireland became powerful reinforcements for the Whig-liberal parliamentary strength” (Gash, 1979, 154). The Celtic fringe would be the bulwark first of Gladstone and Lloyd George, and then later of Labor. At the same time, the Conservatives could shift from being merely the “party of the Crown and the Peerage” to being the “party of England” (Halévy, 1950, 182). Still, it could be argued that it was as much by integrating the Celtic fringe as by integrating the middle classes that the reforms of 1829–1832 established the national liberal state in Great Britain.

In addition, by eliminating rotten boroughs, the bill weakened the power of the ministries vis-à-vis the individual members, who now needed to be responsive to their constituencies. This would be undone fifty years later by the development of centralized parties, which brought the members and their constituencies back under control. In the meantime, this weakening of an autocratic, if ministerial, center actually caused “dismay” to many radicals, liberals, and even Whigs, because they found new reform legislation often harder, not easier, to obtain. It was no longer sufficient to persuade a few men at the very top to make timely, essential changes. The interests of a much larger, but still quite narrow-minded, group had to be taken into account:

The fondness of the Benthamites for Wellington and Peel in 1829 and 1830 may, indeed, be extremely significant. If history followed a logical progression (which it never does), it might be argued that the first Reform Act did more to delay such measures as the Repeal of the Corn Laws than it did to accelerate them. (Moore, 1961, 34)

If the middle classes got less than they might have wanted, they did get honor, and they would be turbulent no more. However, all the working classes got, in Great Britain as in France, was “disillusionment” (Briggs, 1956, 70) and a weakened position for the next round of battle.¹⁴⁶

By 1830/1832, a liberal state governed by a liberal center had been fabricated in Great Britain, France, and Belgium—the three most industrialized states of the epoch. Collectively, the three formed the economic and cultural core of the world-system. The model of the liberal state was intended for their use and for the use of those others who were aspiring to achieve comparable prosperity and stability. The Holy Alliance and the Ultras in the core had been checked; indeed, they had been routed. The conservatives and the radicals had begun their de facto transformation into mere variants of centrist liberalism. If the Ultras were effectively neutralized, the insurrectionary revolutionaries had scarcely been able to achieve any political presence whatsoever, especially in the three model liberal states.

The machinery of the liberal state now needed to be developed. The process of electoral reform was still timid. But it had been launched, and it would roll on inexorably until it reached its peak as universal suffrage within a century. Suffrage was accompanied by the extension of civil rights to all citizens—even subjects, even residents. What had not yet quite begun was the second great pillar of the liberal state in its taming of the dangerous classes—state protection of the economically and socially weak. This process would be launched in the next period—that of the consolidation of the liberal states between 1830 and 1875.

The Liberal State and Class Conflict, 1830–1875

British state intervention was growing like a rolling snowball throughout the [nineteenth] century which most historians were inclined to characterize as one during which Government kept its hands off business.

—J. BARTLETT BREBNER (1948, 108)

[R]evolutions merely happen, they neither fail nor succeed.

—JOHN PLAMENATZ (1952, XII)

The struggle of the Orders suffuses or rather creates all this history….Facts don't just disappear because ministries and parties want them to or find it useful that they do so.

—FRANÇOIS GUIZOT (1820, 6)

During the first half of the nineteenth century, socialism as a concept was still not separate from “bourgeois democracy” as a concept or, as Labrousse (1949b, 7) says, “Jacobinism and socialism remained muddled in political life.” In some sense, it probably remained for at least a century thereafter that a full distinction of the two concepts did not exist. Nonetheless, liberalism (which seems to me a better locution than “bourgeois democracy”) and socialism began to have diverging trajectories as political options after 1830. Indeed, as Hobsbawm (1962, 284) argues:

Practical liberals…shied away from political democracy….The social discontents, revolutionary movements, and the socialist ideologues of the post-Napoleonic era intensified this dilemma [of relying upon the majority to carry out the dictates of reason] and the 1830 Revolution made it acute. Liberalism and democracy appeared to be adversaries rather than allies.¹

The concept of class and class conflict was not a contribution of socialist ideologues, much less of Karl Marx. It is a Saint-Simonian idea, developed and pursued by Guizot as part of the liberal project.² Saint-Simon's view of the class structure in the modern industrial world was that there were three classes: the property owners, the propertyless, and the savants. He saw the class conflict between the “industrials” (those who work) and the idlers as a transitional phase, to be superseded by a harmonious society of productive industrial classes under the aegis of the savants, a meritocratic vision in which the old aristocracy of birth would be replaced by an aristocracy of talent (Manuel, 1956; Iggers, 1958b).³For Guizot, the concept of class was an essential element in his efforts to “legitimate the political aspirations of the bourgeoisie” (Fossaert, 1955, 60).⁴

But in 1830, Guizot and his friends succeeded, as they were simultaneously succeeding in Great Britain,⁵ in establishing a form of middle-class rule “as a permanent juste milieu or golden mean between the extremes of revolution and reaction” (Starzinger, 1965, viii).⁶ The Chamber of Deputies on August 7, 1830, suppressed the Preamble to the Charter of 1814 “as wounding the national dignity by appearing to grant to Frenchmen rights which belong to them essentially” (Collins, 1970, 90). The liberals politically and the grande bourgeoisie socially had at last won their droit de cité.⁷

Since, in addition, this coincided with a period of accelerating economic and social change, the most urgent problems facing France and Great Britain had now become the “social problems” of industrialism, and especially those of the “new proletariat, the horrors of uncontrolled break-neck urbanization” (Hobsbawm, 1962, 207). Class conflict would therefore come to mean something different from what Saint-Simon and Guizot had had in mind. The Revolution of 1830 itself came at a moment of particular economic difficulty for the workers (high unemployment, unusually high wheat prices).⁸ It provided evidence of the utility of political uprising and served to stimulate workers' consciousness, a sense of having common interest “solely as proletarians,” a sense of the “dignity of the worker” (Festy, 1908, 330).⁹ The liberals perceived this change immediately. Thiers said in a statement to the Chamber of Deputies: “The day after the Revolution of July, we saw our duty to moderate it. In effect it was no longer liberty, but order which was in danger” (cited in Bezucha, 1974, 137).¹⁰

The next few years were to see worker unrest of a new intensity and quality in both France and Great Britain. It has been increasingly noted in the literature on strikes and workers' unrest how much of this activity was that of “artisans” as opposed to “workers.” Although the line is not always as clear as some seem to think, in general those referred to as “artisans” had more technical skills, higher real income, and more workplace autonomy than other kinds of workers. Many of these “artisans” were members of organizations that had been in existence long before the nineteenth century, and which functioned to advance the welfare of their members through social support and mutual help. The organizations were hierarchical and built around rituals.

These organizations were the only ones permitted at all in the periods when trade-union organization had been strictly forbidden,¹¹ and then only under the careful surveillance of the authorities. In the changing political situation after 1830, however, even mutual aid societies began to take on new roles, as Sée (1951, 2:199) pointed out: “Many of these societies served…to hide veritable resistance organizations, hostile to the employers; by creating auxiliary monetary reserves (bourses auxiliaires), they created funds to support the unemployed and strikers.”¹²Thus it could be, as Stearns (1965, 371–372) has argued, that such “artisans” were more likely to engage in strike action at this time than the “factory workers,” who, being in an even weaker position, were “almost totally quiescent.”¹³

The distinction made by many scholars between artisans and factory workers seems to be asserted primarily on the basis of differing workplace organization. But in fact the artisans were usually in “workshops,” which were not all that different in structure and even social organization from the rather small “factories” that existed in this era. I suspect the real difference was in the social origins of the two groups of workers. The “artisans” were males, and males who came for the most part from the immediate area. The “factory workers” were largely either women and children (Bezucha, 1974, 35) or “migrants,” which included both those who came from rural communities and workers speaking another language.¹⁴

The most dramatic expression of protest by the “artisans” was that of the canuts¹⁵ of Lyon, first in 1831 and then in 1834. The struggles began right after the July Revolution, and included machine destruction and eviction of “foreign” workers.¹⁶ The background to this was an eighteenth-century militancy of journeymen, which had erupted in 1786 in the so-called tuppenny riot (émeute de deux sous), in which the journeymen sought to obtain a fixed minimum rate for finished cloth. The ongoing turmoil continued up to the French Revolution and the enactment of the Loi Le Chapelier. Bezucha (1974, 11) concludes that “the French Revolution, in fact, broke the momentum created prior to 1789 and may have retarded the development of a workers' movement in Lyon.” In the years between 1789 and 1830, however, the relatively stable system of the compagnon had been replaced by a more “fluid one of piece-work laborers” (Bezucha, 1974, 46).

Levasseur (1904, 2:6) asks the questions, Why Lyon? Why 1831? His answer is that Lyon was living off a luxury industry, silk, which made it more “sensitive…to economic crises and political turmoil.” The immediate issue, as in 1786, was a minimum wage, which had been agreed to by the prefect but subsequently revoked by the central government. The first strike was relatively nonpolitical. But discontent continued. There was a strike in Paris in 1832. The atmosphere was more and more politicized, partly by the dissatisfaction of the working classes with the politics of the July Monarchy, partly (at least in Lyon) by the agitation of the Italian nationalist forces. Mazzini's aide-de-camp, General Romorino, was often in Lyon recruiting persons for their attempts to liberate Savoy and Piedmont (Bezucha, 1974, 122). On February 14, 1834, a general strike was called. It did not succeed. The local Republican party was divided in its attitude.¹⁷ A repressive law caused a further reaction by the workers in April, an uprising in which some three hundred were killed. This attempt came to be viewed as a “landmark in the history of the European working class” (Bezucha, 1974, 124). This time the repression by the authorities was definitive. There was a “monster trial” in 1835, which the government used “to get rid of the republicans.”¹⁸ Faced with the beginnings of a serious class struggle by the urban working class, the liberal state initially reacted as repressively as did its predecessors.

The story was not very different in Great Britain. The moral equivalent of the July Revolution was the Reform Bill of 1832. Great Britain did not know “three glorious days” of “revolution.” Instead, there was a parliamentary battle in which the revolution was “voted” in, on the crucial second reading in 1831, by a single vote. When, despite this, the bill was defeated in committee, Parliament was dissolved, and a pro-reform Parliament elected. At the time there was great awareness of events in France, and the possibilities of “worse” happening. Macaulay's speech on March 2, 1831, in favor of reform makes clear the reasoning of those who advocated it:

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve….Renew the youth of the State. Save property divided against itself. Save the multitude, endangered by its own ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest, and fairest, and most highly civilised country that ever existed, from calamities that may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible. The time is short. If this bill should be rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it ever remember their votes with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social orders.¹⁹

Macaulay's argument was heard. And, exactly as in France, once the middle strata had won their droit de cité, attention turned immediately to containing the claims of the working classes. Chartism, “much the most important movement of working men” (Evans, 1983, 215)²⁰ and a continuation of the old radical reform movement, was contemporaneous with and strongest during the great industrial depression from 1837 to 1843. It gained considerable notoriety and seemed a real menace to the authorities for several years. A large part of Chartist ranks were drawn from members of trade societies.²¹ But it also had support from middle-class radicals (Rowe, 1967, 85). The Chartist movement existed simultaneously with, and was in direct rivalry with, the free-trade movement of the Anti-Corn Law League. Halévy (1947, 9) raises the specter of a potential for “civil war.” Briggs (1959, 312) speaks of the two movements as representing “a contrast between two segments of a divided society.” Gash (1965, 2) says of the “Movement” (“a phrase borrowed from Continental politics”) that it “had an undeniable air of class war.”²²

However, Chartism, after flaring up, fizzled. As of 1843 it was on the decline. Partly, there wasn't enough social support in Great Britain for a movement that was primarily and overtly a workers' movement. Partly, the movement also could not agree on the degree to which violence was a legitimate weapon. And partly, there was the “Irish factor“: the working class in England was no longer just English, but English and Irish, and issues of Irish nationalism became intertwined with class issues. When Feargus O'Connor took the leadership of the Chartists, the confusion became too great, and the movement was “compromised.”²³ Perhaps most important of all, times got a bit better, and Sir Robert Peel's program of economic reform removed some of the discontent.²⁴ In the end, class warfare did not do much better at this time in Great Britain than it had in France.

The internal problems of Great Britain and France never became large enough that those powers could not concentrate attention on the geopolitics of the world-system. The July Revolution, repeated and confirmed by the independence of Belgium and the Reform Act of 1832, was to have an immediate effect on Europe. Whereas the relations of Great Britain and France between 1815 and 1830 had been correct, and those countries often found themselves on similar sides of world issues, the heritage of the two-century struggle for hegemony continued to ensure enough mutual suspicion to preserve a degree of distance. The July Revolution overcame that, affecting even the Tory government of Wellington before the Reform Bill was enacted. Europe now entered the era of the entente cordiale, a marriage perhaps not of love but certainly of reason, one that would survive all subsequent quarrels until at least 1945. The term itself was probably coined by Palmerston in 1831, although it did not come into official use until 1842 (Guyot, 1926, 220; Halévy, 1950, 3:73, n. 1). The geopolitical basis of the alliance was clear. “As a Liberal power, France was [after the July Revolution] in the nature of things the ally of Liberal England” (Halévy, 1950, 3:73).” ²⁵Great Britain could now pursue with greater ease its containment of absolutism in Europe and expand the circle of liberal states (Guyot, 1926, 88, 117).²⁶

But there were further motives. Great Britain and France faced the same internal problems, and even if France was not yet ready to embrace the free-trade nostrums of Great Britain, the entente cordiale seemed “in the eyes of democrats and socialists” as an “alliance of capitals” that was a “fait accompli” (Guyot, 1926, 302). Was this so wrong? Indeed, the two effects were not separate. In pressuring other powers to follow their example, Great Britain and France, with the entente cordiale, “discouraged the international revolutionary propaganda which counted on the divisions among the powers” (Guichen, 1917, 424–425).

Furthermore, 1830 launched a pattern that would discourage such propaganda even further. For France at least, 1830 served to restore France to a sense of world centrality and nationalist pride. It was not Guizot but the French socialist Louis Blanc (1844, 4:143–144) who would write:

The July Revolution…was more than the dénouement of a struggle against the Church and royalty; it was the expression of national sentiment that had been excessively repressed by the treaties of 1815. We were determined to shake off the yoke of these treaties and restore the European equilibrium.²⁷

One of the curious facts to note about the July Revolution was what happened in Algeria. Charles X's launching of the imperial venture had made Great Britain most unhappy, and Louis XVIII was ready to sacrifice it to appease the British. When, however, the French restrained themselves from direct intervention in Belgium, they felt they had done their share of pleasing the British, and simply continued the occupation, this time without British protest.²⁸ One reason clearly was its effect on worker unrest within France. The “floating” population of Paris, the potential revolutionaries, were being encouraged to settle in Algeria. Indeed, in 1838 Léon Blondel, a high civil servant in Algeria, could say with some confidence: “Africa is an element of order in France” (cited in Tudesq, 1964, 2:815).²⁹

The liberal states thus combined legitimating the political role of the middle classes (and thereby receiving from them legitimation in turn) and internal repression of working-class discontent with an entente cordiale between themselves to ensure their dominance in the geopolitical arena. This seemed to work at first. But it was fragile, as the European revolution of 1848 was to demonstrate. More would have to be done to secure a stable political framework for the capitalist world-economy in the post-1789 situation.

The fragility lay in the fact that the liberal concessions to the working classes were extremely limited, and this made it difficult for liberal governments, if they were not ready to go further, to surmount the disarray caused by periodic severe economic downturns. This was the case most notably in France, where the July Monarchy, and its liberal epigone, Guizot, had become more and more conservative as the years went by, in face of the festering social discontent. The economic crisis of 1847–1848, one of the “most violent” crises that had thitherto been known, hit France hard. Profits fell severely. At the height of the crisis, 75 percent of Paris industrial workers were laid off (Markovitch, 1965, 256; Sée, 1951, 2:143; Labrousse, 1976b, 3:983–984).

The government did not prove itself flexible. Furthermore, it had failed to notice that its major political mechanism, the vote censitaire, was backfiring by alienating the very group of small merchants whose support they had acquired in 1830 by lowering the cens. The problem was that, as taxes were lowered by the government, this very fact pulled these voters off the rolls, undermining not merely the political rights of this group but also their social standing,³⁰ and thus making them receptive to the agitation for suffrage reform. Meanwhile, among the working classes the very moderate Icarians of Étienne Cabet, who had been in the 1840s the major socialist voice—Christian, pacifist, legalist, nationalist, emphasizing class reconciliation—would now be squeezed out in the economic crisis and thereby yield place to more radical groups.³¹

The conservatization of the French regime contrasted with what was happening in the other liberal states. A liberal pope, Pius IX, had been elected in 1846, to the dismay of Metternich (Bury, 1948, 425). If Belgium remained “calm” in 1848, “it was because it had made its revolution, peacefully, in 1847” (Dhondt, 1949, 124). Similarly, the liberals and radicals had won their internal struggle against the Sonderbund in Switzerland in 1847, with the diplomatic support of the British but amid French hesitation (Halpérin, 1948, 1:157).³² Indeed, this was a moment of temporary breakdown of the entente cordiale.³³ At home, the British had handled well the Chartist challenge at the same time that Sir Robert Peel was steering through the Repeal of the Corn Laws,³⁴ such that the “specter of Communism”³⁵ passed them by as well. The crisis of 1847 “provoked no revolutionary disturbance” (Halévy, 1947, 181),³⁶ although the Irish had to pay the price for this.³⁷

Nonetheless, the weakening of the liberal project in France, one of the two pillar states, provided enough tinder for the revolutionary flame to be ignited throughout the nonliberal parts of Europe. To be sure, Metternich and the Austrians blamed the British, accused of being too liberal, for the uprisings,³⁸ but the blameis more legitimately placed at the feet of the French, who got cold feet and were not liberal enough. John Stuart Mill (1849, 7) was very severe on Louis-Philippe in assessing the causes of the February 1848 uprising in Paris, which was the beginning of the 1848 European revolution:

No government can now expect to be permanent unless it guarantees progress as well as order; nor can it continue really to secure order, unless it promotes progress. It can go on as yet, with only a little of the spirit of improvement; while reformers have even a remote hope of effecting their objects through the existing system, they are generally willing to bear with it. But when there is no hope at all; when the institutions themselves seem to oppose an unyielding barrier to the program of improvement, the advance of tide heaps itself up behind them till it bears them down.³⁹

The tide—that is, the European revolution of 1848—as all such great happenings, was made up of a mixture of movements and objectives. In France, it consisted essentially of the joining together of Europe's “first great proletarian insurrection” (Tilly, 1972, 228)⁴⁰ with the acute discontent of the left liberals who shared John Stuart Mill's view of the conservatization of the July Monarchy. Elsewhere in Europe, in states that were not as yet committed to liberalism, there were no proletarian insurrections; rather, there were liberal uprisings combined with nationalist uprisings. Two situations, with two solutions: Louis Napoleon handled the first; Palmerston, the rest.

The uprising of February 1848 illuminated the hopes of a “social republic,” a vague socialist utopia that would provide jobs to the unemployed and liberation to all those who suffered indignities and inequalities. Everyone put forward their claims: the “artisans,” who sought to restore their privileges and their mode of production;⁴¹ the peasants, who sought to reestablish traditional rights of collective usage;⁴² the women, who sought the extension of “universal” suffrage to include them;⁴³ the slaves, who sought abolition.⁴⁴ The pendulum was beginning to swing too far, and in June the forces of order under General Cavaignac reined in the unruly dangerous classes.⁴⁵ “Pitiful provisional government!” cried Labrousse (1948, 2). “It feared the social revolution as much as it did the counter-revolution.”⁴⁶

Cavaignac could repress; he could not relegitimize the state. Nor could the monarchs return; they had exhausted their credit. Into this void stepped Louis Napoleon, who sought to re-create a liberal, orderly, modern state and who, as Zeldin (1958, 6) puts it so well, “was not elected because he was [the] candidate [of the Party of Order], but…was their candidate because they saw he was bound to win.”⁴⁷ But what did Louis Napoleon represent? He represented, first of all, the Napoleonic tradition, which combined the legacy of the French Revolution, a commitment to scientific and industrial progress, and nationalism. During the 1840s, Louis Napoleon had been a sharp critic of the July Monarchy because he felt that, by distancing itself from progressive liberalism, it was “building on sand and would surely tumble.” And, unlike Guizot, he was aware that “with proper safeguards a democratic regime could be established without threatening the stability of the country.”⁴⁸

The liberals acted in 1848 just as they had in 1830. Dismayed by a regime that had become too rigid, too illiberal, they rose up and quickly won the day. Then, dismayed by the possibility that the lower strata would be able to take advantage of the situation and push things too far, they renewed their links with the political groups they had just ousted from power, because “the enemy, at present, is on the left” (Palmade, 1961, 25 5).⁴⁹ When Louis Napoleon made his coup d'état on December 2, 1851, the primary objective was to repress the left.⁵⁰ The secondary objective was, however, to constrain the ability of conservative forces to act other than through him.⁵¹ One can, if one wants, emphasize the Caesarist—the so-called Bonapartist—element in the regime.⁵² If one does, however, one risks missing the degree to which the outcome of the repression, which was both real and effec-tive,⁵³ was that of a centrist regime, oriented to capitalist expansion, constructing a liberal compromise⁵⁴—one led not by a classical liberal but by an enlightened conservative.

If the liberal center was once more secure in France, it had required a Bonapartist form, given the strength of working-class rebelliousness combined with the rigidity of conservative forces—a consequence of France's narrower margin of maneuver in the face of economic recession, as compared at this time with that of Great Britain. Elsewhere in Europe, however, the problem was not resecuring the liberal center but allowing it to emerge. It was the role of the hegemonic power, Great Britain, to keep this process, which of course it favored, from upsetting the geopolitical calm too much.

Outside France, the specter of Communism did not have a comparable social base. Nonetheless, it seemed real for the ruling elites, who found it difficult to distinguish between liberals and socialists. A French author, writing about Spain in the Revue des Deux Mondes in January 1848, just before the revolutions began, said:

I do not believe, I say again, that a revolution is possible, unless our government makes errors of which I think it incapable. But let us at least have no illusions. Let me be heard by those so imprudent as to excite the wrath of the people and so ambitious as to speculate on their fury! A revolution will not take place to the profit of a viewpoint, but to the profit of communism.⁵⁵

Similarly, Cantimori (1948, 1:279) argues that in northern and central Italy, “the fear of social revolution…was but a reflection of the fear of the ‘red specter,' of jacqueries, and of Communism, which all of European reaction felt.” The revolutions broke out everywhere, taking different local colors according to the history: in the Austrian empire (“nowhere…more virulent” [Vermeil, 1948b, 2:46; cf. Endres, 1948]), in Germany and in Poland, in northern Europe and in southern Europe.⁵⁶ And everywhere the liberal/nationalist “blues” and the much weaker “reds” soon parted company (Fejtö, 1948c, 2:441).⁵⁷ The radical elements were easily contained, but in the process, the gains of the centrist nationalists and liberals were limited.⁵⁸ Nationalism could of course be used both to promote liberalism and to contain it, depending on the circumstances.⁵⁹

Great Britain entered the picture, here to support the liberals, there to make sure they didn't go too far, everywhere to maintain a balance, and consequently its sway over the interstate system. In Spain, where the government prior to 1848 had been closely tied to that of Louis-Philippe, Great Britain supported attempts by the liberals in March 1848 to change the government of General Narvaez. Palmerston actually sent a formal letter on March 16 to the government, in which he permitted himself to say: “[T]he Queen of Spain would be acting wisely, in the critical state of affairs, if she restructured the government by enlarging the bases on which her administration rests, and appealing for the counsel of some of those who have the confidence of the liberal party” (cited in Quero, 1948, 1:328).⁶⁰

British intervention, if not directly successful, may have limited the repression. The British did better in Sicily, where they supported the insurgents against the Kingdom of Naples. Naples decided that her friend, Austria, was far off and otherwise occupied, and granted a constitution as demanded; in one fell stroke, “Italy [or at least Naples] found itself on the side of France, England, and Switzerland” (Cantimori, 1948, 1:265). Palmerston also asked the Austrians in 1849 to treat Hungary “with generosity,” to which request the Austrian ambassador in London replied that Austria would be “the sole judge” of how it would deal with the rebels (Fejtö, 1948b, 2:202). On the other hand, Palmerston declined to intervene with the tsar concerning Poland, fearing the encouragement it might give to the Irish movement (Goriély, 1948a, 2:277). In short, Palmerston's policy was very simple: “[H]is foreign policy…had no other goal than to turn to England's advantage the situation created by the revolutionary events” (Fejtö, 1948a, 1:35). In general, the policy was efficacious, even when the diplomatic intrusions were rejected.⁶¹

The European revolution of 1848 began as a threat to the world liberal regime that the hegemonic power, Great Britain—with the crucial aid of France—was establishing, but then became the crucible in which the dominance of liberalism in the geoculture was ensured. When Polanyi outlines in The Great Transformation (1957, 3) the four pillars of nineteenth-century civilization—the balance-of-power system, the international gold standard, the self-regulating market, and the liberal state—he says that “the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market.” If there was any moment in which this self-regulating market seemed to be functioning as close to its theoretical model as possible, it was in the years 1850–1873. And the crucial prelude to this moment of optimal operation of this principle was the Repeal of the Corn Laws in Great Britain in 1846. The story is worth reviewing in some detail.

The so-called Hungry Forties, coming in the wake of “the very real distress of the 1820s and 1830s,” permitted a coming together of interests between the working classes, who were concerned with the price of basic commodities, and the liberals, who were preaching the virtues of the market. They both could find a target in those monopolists whose practices ensured a high cost of living: the West Indian coffee and sugar interests; the East India Company, which controlled the tea trade; and above all the English landowners, whose grain production was price protected by the Corn Laws (Mellor, 1951, 14).⁶²

The political balance had begun to shift against continuing protection of grain. There had been a post-1815 grain glut in Europe because of the prior expansion of production due to military demands and the effects of the blockade, and this glut had served to justify the Corn Laws.⁶³But by the late 1830s the glut had ceased to exist. Industrial expansion had increased urban populations, and land was being converted to industrial crops as well as to animal husbandry (a normal shift in a period of Kondratieff downturn). “[N]orthwestern Europe became collectively deficient in bread grains” (Fairlie, 1965, 568).⁶⁴ The battle for repeal waxed strong, and its defenders were reduced to arguing a conservative position for its own sake. It is nonetheless interesting to note, since we have come to take the Repeal as a great defeat for the landed aristocracy, that opposition to repeal was far stronger among small tenant farmers than among large landowners.⁶⁵

Why then all the fuss, since fuss there was indeed? The answer is that, for both sides, “the Corn Laws were a symbol“—for those who favored repeal, of the new and progressive against the old and privileged; for those who were opposed, of the defense of the landed gentry, “without which there can be no steady mean between democracy and despotism.”⁶⁶ Into this symbolic battle, Sir Robert Peel devoted himself to the only objective worth achieving—not the triumph of the middle classes, but the triumph of the liberal state with the “perpetuation of the status of the landed classes in new technological conditions” (Moore, 1965, 651).⁶⁷When Peel, on May 15, 1846, won the day for Repeal on its third reading, he had two-thirds of the Conservative Party against him. It was a rare parliamentary alliance that carried the day.⁶⁸

Peel pushed Repeal through Parliament on two conditions or two considerations. The first was that the stick of repeal to force the extension of high farming techniques on British agriculture was accompanied by carrots that would ease the transition financially: a reduction of tariffs on grass and clover seeds; laws making it more difficult to return the urban poor to rural birth areas, thereby reducing the needed local levies; and “most important of all…the drainage loan,” which was designed to popularize high farming among tenant farmers by giving loans to the “settled estates,” thereby enabling the tenants for life to charge the estates with the costs of improvement (Moore, 1965, 5 5 4).⁶⁹ The second consideration was purely political. Peel wanted to make sure that Repeal was seen as a decision of Parliament in its wisdom, and not one in reaction to popular pressure. Peel refused to make repeal an issue in the general elections of December 1845. (It might in any case have deeply split his own party.) By forcing it through Parliament, and in a vote that crossed party lines, he made it “a victory over democratic agitation and the [Anti-Corn Law] League, and a proof that parliament put the general welfare above sectional interests” (Kemp, 1962, 204).⁷⁰

What did Repeal of the Corn Laws actually achieve? Two things, really. On the one hand, it ensured the reorganization of the axial division of labor in the world-economy, such that wheat production once again became a peripheral activity. The years following would see the rise of the United States and Canada in North America and of Russia and Romania in eastern Europe as great wheat exporters to western Europe, permitting an intensification of the industrial concentration in the western European zone.⁷¹ But this shift was done in such a way that large British landowners could make the financial transition to new sources of wealth.⁷²

On the other hand, it ensured the restructuring of British politics divided between a right-of-center Conservative Party and a left-of-center Liberal Party (eventually to be supplanted by a left-of-center Labor Party), both basically accepting the logic of centrist liberal politics. One may think of this as a victory for the middle classes, or just as easily as a concession by the aristocracy, “a timely retreat…from a forward position that had proved to be dangerous” (Kitson Clark, 1951b, 12).⁷³ The concept of Whigs and Tories, both coalitions of the eighteenth century, ceased to exist.

The initial advantage went to the Liberal Party because of the great split in Conservative ranks over Repeal.⁷⁴ But there now arose a new kind of conservatism, attuned to the normality of change, one that would regain power by “bas[ing] itself…squarely on the support and votes of the people” (Mosse, 1947, 142). Meanwhile, those Liberal Party members (radicals) who had wanted to associate their party with the working classes had lost out in favor of those who were more concerned with consolidating the state structure. As Briggs (1956, 72) said, “[W]hat the Reform Bill had decreed, the Corn Bill had realized.”

You will note that I did not list as one of the great results of the Repeal of the Corn Laws the enshrinement of the doctrine of laissez-faire. That is because there is more myth than reality in the doctrine of laissez-faire. As a result, it cannot be taken as the defining characteristic of liberalism, surely not the fundamental message of liberalism as the geoculture of the world-system. To be sure, the public posture was that, as John Stuart Mill put it so tersely, “every departure from laissez-faire, unless required by some greater good, is a certain evil.”⁷⁵ But the subordinate clause turned out to be a mighty big loophole. For example, in the very year of Repeal, 1846, in the debate on the Ten Hours Bill, Macaulay asserted that, although there was no economic justification for restricting hours, Parliament was required to take into consideration the social needs of women and children “who were incapable of entering into a proper contractual relationship with their employers” (Taylor, 1972, 44).⁷⁶ The simultaneity of the successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws—opposition to the high symbol of state interference in the economy—with the beginning of serious social legislation in Great Britain (and on the Continent) is strong evidence for Brebner's dictum (1948, 107) that what was really happening was not a shift to laissez-faire but a shift “from intervention by the state in commerce to intervention by the state in industry.” The classical economists and liberals were in fact aware of this and always took a nuanced position on laissez-faire, from Adam Smith to Bentham to Nassau Senior⁷⁷, as did even the great neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall.⁷⁸ The distinction between recognizing the “value” of laissez-faire and preaching it as an “absolute dogma” was fundamental to all the classical economists (Rogers, 1963, 5 35).⁷⁹ They were all aware that “one man's laissez-faire was another man's intervention” (Taylor, 1972, 12).⁸⁰

Still, Europe's liberals felt that the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a great event, which guaranteed economic progress.⁸¹ And, as is true of many such beliefs, the years immediately following seemed to provide the evidence. For the world-economy was now entering into another Kondratieff A-phase, the “golden age of prosperity” of the 1850s and 1860s, and “many contemporaries came to attribute this to the repeal of the Corn Laws“—a “reconciling myth,” according to Kemp (1962, 195). The years were particularly beneficent to the two key countries of the world-system at this time: Great Britain and France.

In Great Britain, this period has been labeled the “Great Victorian Boom” or, slightly more dramatically, the “High Noon of Victorianism,” one that “rested upon the balance between industry and agriculture” (Kitson Clark, 1962, 31, 57).⁸²It was a period during which British capitalists were doing so well that they primarily sought “to paddle their own canoes” (Clapham, 1932, 2:145), in the slang of the times. To be sure, they were obliged to do so, since Great Britain had become “an open market for nearly everything which she produced.” This posed no problem as yet, since at this point Great Britain's superiority in everything was clear: in commerce, in finance, and in industry—that is, in the making of “those things which were chiefly needed” (Clapham, 1932, 2:2, 12).⁸³

The 1850s marked the high point of growth in British exports. The export of cotton piece goods “just about doubled” in the decade, actually increasing even the rate of growth, which, Hobsbawm argues (1975, 30–31), provided “invaluable [political] breathing-space.” Cotton textiles were still central to British wealth, but this was the period in which metals and machinery moved to the fore as the leading industry, and with them the emergence of “bigger industrial units all along the line” (Clapham, 1932, 2:114). Great Britain was clearly on the road to becoming an industrial state. “The course was set” (Clapham, 1932, 2:22). For Great Britain, these were “buoyant years,” in which her economic dominance of the world-economy went “virtually unchallenged” and in which the new world of industry “seemed less like a volcano and more like a cornucopia” (Coleman, 1973, 7–8).⁸⁴Great Britain was comfortably hegemonic, but also complacently so, not always feeling she had to watch over every fluctuation of the world-economy.⁸⁵

Yet, we should not exaggerate. The voyage was “not half over.” Agriculture remained “by very far the greatest of [Great Britain's] industries” (Clapham, 1932, 2:22).⁸⁶ Church (1975, 76) believes that calling this period the “mid-Victorian boom” must be “severely qualified.” Yes, there was a price rise,⁸⁷ business expansion, and an improved standard of living, but the growth rate in production was not all that big, and 1858 saw the most profound downward business cycle of the century. Like all economic leaders, Great Britain was preparing its own fall. It was resistant to innovation. It was in1856 that Bessemer first read his paper on his use of air blasts to make quality steel more inexpensively, but his ideas would not be widely adopted until the Kondratieff B-phase.⁸⁸ The expansion of the world-economy was bringing in its wake further industrialization in the United States and various parts of Europe, making Great Britain's competitive position “steadily more difficult,” particularly because these countries indicated, with the significant exception of France, that they had “no intention of following Britain's example” in adopting free trade (Schlote, 1952, 43).⁸⁹ Indeed, Great Britain itself would eventually sour on free trade.⁹⁰

In this midcentury British glow, France seemed initially at a disadvantage because of the turmoil of 1848. Once again, its revolutions seemed to be hurting its economic development. But this time only most briefly, because the political solution to the turmoil—the populist authoritarianism of the Second Empire—served to resolve some of the political tensions precisely because this regime had made itself, as none had done before,⁹¹ the proponent and propellant of a leap forward of French economic structures, thereby consolidating the liberal core of the world-system.

The economic indicators were clear: Foreign trade tripled (Palmade, 1961, 193). The production of the means of production grew relative to the production of consumable goods (Markovitch, 1966, 322).⁹² There was a boom not only in domestic investment but also in foreign investment, such that by 1867 net income from external investments exceeded net export of capital. For Cameron (1961, 79), this meant that France had become “a ‘mature' creditor nation.”⁹³ And French public finances had become, along with those of Great Britain, “solid.” The public subscription to government loans “demonstrated the strength of savings and the abundance of capital which existed in the two countries” (Gille, 1967, 280).⁹⁴ In short, this was a time of economic glory for France as well as for Great Britain. This was “to the benefit, if not the credit, of the Second Empire,” but, as Palmade (1961, 127, 129) insists, “the externally favorable situation fell to a government firmly committed to taking advantage of it.”

Furthermore, it was a government that thought governmental action was essential to this economic expansion, one that did not consider, in the words of Napoleon III, that state action was a “necessary ulcer” but rather that it was “the benevolent motor of any social organism.” The intention nonetheless was to promote private enterprise thereby. Although the “primary concern” of the government was to “create as many [economic] activities as possible,” still the government wished to “avoid this grievous tendency of the state to engage in activities which private individuals can do as well as or better than it can.”⁹⁵ Furthermore, the public-works program of the government was directed not merely to aid industry, but to shore up the agricultural sector.⁹⁶ And behind this practice—”a precursor of technocratic Gaullist modernization“—was the objective of combating “political instability and class conflict” (Magraw, 1985, 159),⁹⁷ crucial for a regime that had emerged in the crucible of the Revolution of 1848.

This is where the famous Saint-Simonian link comes in. Actually, we should talk of the post-Saint-Simonians, those who had emerged out of the pseudoreligious phase under Enfantin and who retained only the “radical” spirit of Saint-Simon—rigorously modernist, technocratic, reformist, ultimately neither “socialist” nor “conservative” (as some have claimed) but essentially “liberal” in spirit, as became most clear in the Second Empire.⁹⁸ It was liberal in spirit because it combined the two key features of liberalism: economic development linked to social amelioration. For liberals, the two are obverse sides of the same coin. The Saint-Simonians affirmed “the primacy of the economic over the political sphere” (Blanchard, 1956, 60). But they also argued, in the 1831 formula of Isaac Péreire, that economic progress would bring about “an amelioration of the lot of the largest and poorest strata” (cited in Plessis, 1973, 86). This is of course why Napoleon III and the Saint-Simonians were “made for each other” (Weill, 1913, 391–92).⁹⁹ To be sure, the Saint-Simonians were “about the only intellectual group available to [Napoleon]” (Boon, 1936, 85). But also vice versa: the modernist sector of the bourgeoisie, the true liberals, “needed [Napoleon] to liberate themselves from the timidities of the well-to-do” (Agulhon, 1973, 234),¹⁰⁰ who had dominated the Party of Order in the July Monarchy. This is why Guérard (1943, chap. 9) called Napoleon III “Saint-Simon on horseback.”

It is in this period as well that banks came into their own as key agents of national economic development. In this, too, the credit must go to the post-Saint-Simonians (such as the brothers Péreire), who were “the first to realize the role of stimulus and coordinator that banks could play in economic life” (Chlepner, 1926, 15). But the story predates the brothers Péreire. From at least 1815 on, the biggest banks—notably the Rothschilds and the Barings—shifted their emphasis to long-term loans, first in negotiating and promoting loans to governments and second in sustaining large private enterprises. Since, as Landes (1956, 210–212) notes, were these banks to show “too voracious an appetite,” they could be undercut by competitors, they tended to form cartels. The Rothschilds in particular found their best profits in a tacit link with the Holy Alliance and were thus able to locate themselves in the principal money markets, which at that time were “more markets of demand than centers of money supply” (Gille, 1965, 98).¹⁰¹ Furthermore, the “favorite gambit” of the Rothschilds—the short-term emergency loan to a government in difficulty—was not necessarily an aid to national self-sufficiency. Cameron (1957b, 556) argues that such governments “rarely ever regained [their] independence” and compares the practice to a “habit-forming drug.”¹⁰²

The need, of course, was for more locally controlled sources of credit. Chlepner (1926, 19) reminds us that, before the Crédit Mobilier of the brothers Péreire, there were “predecessors” in Belgium—most notably the Société Générale, founded by King William in 1822. It was, however, only after Belgium marked its independence in 1831 with the enthronement of Leopold I that the bank became a major actor in economic development, primarily in the construction of railways. If this bank and the rival Banque de Belgique, founded in 1835, both went into relative hibernation after the financial crisis of 1838, they were even harder hit by the Anglo-French economic crisis of 1846–1847. With this in the background, February 1848 led to fear of revolution, fear of the loss of independence, and a “veritable financial panic” (Chlepner, 1926, 238; see also 1931), which caused the state to come to the aid of the bank and end the period of agitation. Belgium thus was able to avoid the revolutionary upsurge and could then move to a more truly liberal system, eliminating the semiofficial character of the Société Générale in 1851.¹⁰³

The banking controversies in Great Britain, previously discussed, created a situation in which the banks were unable to play a direct role in promoting economic growth. These controversies culminated in the Bank Act of 1844, whose objective, from Peel's point of view, was primarily to “make more solid the foundations of the gold standard” and secondarily to remove the use of gold as an internal political weapon (Fetter, 1965, 192).¹⁰⁴ Perhaps Great Britain could afford, better than other countries, not to have a banking policy that would promote economic growth. Cameron (1961, 58–59) calls this “inefficient” but notes that “paradoxically,…the very obstacles placed in the way of a rational banking and monetary system stimulated the private sector to introduce the financial innovations necessary for realization of the full benefits of technical innovations in industry.”

What the British state had promoted by its failures—an adequate supply of credit for the midcentury economic expansion—the French state under Napoleon 111would create deliberately. The decree of February 1852 authorizing the formation of mortgage banks, the Crédit Foncier of Émile Péreire being one of the first, provided the financial underpinning for the reconstruction of Paris by Haussmann. “[F]rom a laggard, France became a leader and innovator in mortgage credit” (Cameron, 1961, 129).¹⁰⁵ The Rothschilds were not happy. James de Rothschild argued that this change in structure would concentrate too much power in untried hands. It seems a case of the pot calling the kettle black.¹⁰⁶ In any case, the rise of the great corporate banks of the Second Empire took the monopoly away from what had been called the haute banque, a “powerful group of private (unincorporated) bankers” (Cameron, 1953, 462). But the haute banque had not provided sufficient credit to French business enterprises.¹⁰⁷

Toward the end of the Second Empire, in 1867, the largest of the new banks, Crédit Mobilier, failed. The Rothschilds, however, were still there, and are still there today. Nonetheless the liberal state, by its intervention, had changed the worldwide credit structure of modern capitalism: “[T]he banking system of every nation in Continental Europe bore the imprint of French influence” (Cameron, 1961, 203).¹⁰⁸ The creation of larger numbers of banks oriented to the international market may have diminished the power of the haute banque. This was not necessarily a great virtue for the weaker state structures in tight financial situations. Jenks (1927, 273) discusses the perverse effect of greater competition in the field of loans to governments:

[C]ompetition simply augmented the risks of marketing the loan in the face of efforts of the unsuccessful banker to cry it down….What the competition did encourage, however, was the pressing of more money upon frequently “bewildered” borrowers….In a word, the loan business was monopolescent.¹⁰⁹

The collapse of Crédit Mobilier gives credence to this analysis. It formed part of a sequence that led to the drying up of loans to weak governments and hence the accentuation of what was to become the Great Depression after 1873.¹¹⁰

The liberals had achieved what they had hoped to achieve in midcentury. The long upswing of the world-economy and the actions of the governments of the core zone—in particular, of Great Britain and France—secured a steady process of worldwide relocations, until at least the end of the twentieth century. We may call this the “strong market,” one of the three pillars of the liberal world order that was to be the great achievement of the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were two further pillars for a liberal world order: the strong state, and the strong interstate system. It is to the process of securing them that we now turn.

The absolute monarchies had not been strong states. Absolutism was merely the scaffolding within which weak states sought to become stronger. It would only be in the post-1789 world-system's atmosphere of normal change and popular sovereignty that one could build truly strong states—that is, states with an adequate bureaucratic structure and a reasonable degree of popular acquiescence (which in wartime could be converted into passionate patriotism). And it was the liberals, and only the liberals, who could construct such states in the core zones of the world-system. Bureaucratic growth was the essential pendant of economic growth, at least of economic growth at the scale that capitalists now hoped for and that was now technologically possible.

Of course, the construction of a strong bureaucratic state was a long process that had begun in the late fifteenth century. Resistance to such construction is what we really mean when we refer to an ancien régime, which of course existed quite as much in Great Britain as in France, as indeed it did throughout Europe and most of the world. What we may call generically Colbertism was the attempt to overcome this resistance by taking real power from the local level and concentrating it in the hands of the monarch. It was at best partially successful. Jacobinism was nothing but Colbertism with a republican face. It died in its original form in 1815. After 1815, it would be liberalism that took up the battle to create a strong state. Whereas Colbertism and Jacobinism had been brutally frank about their intentions, the fact that liberals refused to acknowledge that building the strong state was their intention—in many ways, their priority—was perhaps precisely why they were able to succeed better than the Colbertists and the Jacobins. Indeed, they succeeded so well that the enlightened conservatives took up this same objective, largely effacing in the process any ideological distinction between themselves and the liberals.

Of course, there are many reasons why capitalists find strong states useful. One is to help them accumulate capital;¹¹¹ a second is to guarantee this capital.¹¹² But after 1848, capitalists fully realized, if they had not before, that only the strong state—that is, the reformist state—could buffer them against the winds of worker discontent. Péreire put his finger on it: “The ‘strong' state became the welfare state of large-scale (grand) capitalism” (cited in Bouvier, 1967, 166). Of course, “welfare state” here has a double connotation—the welfare of the working classes to be sure, but the welfare of the capitalists as well.

We think of Victorian Great Britain as the locus of antistatism in its heyday, and it is quite true that “in general, [most Englishmen] were suspicious of the State and of centralization” at this time (Burn, 1964, 226).¹¹³ But in the jostle of conflicting interests between those (largely the “liberals”) who wanted the state to cease propping up the agricultural interests and those (largely the “conservatives”) who were inclined to favor local and more traditional authority, combining it with a rhetoric of social concern for the poor,¹¹⁴ it was easy for the latter to find compensation for every victory of free commerce by pushing forward some project of state intervention in industry. Brebner calls it the “mid-century dance…like a minuet“: parliamentary reform in 1832, the first Factory Act in 1833; Peel's budget in 1841; the Mines Act in 1842; Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; the Ten Hours Bill in 1847. “The one common characteristic [of the political initiatives of 1825–1870] is the consistent readiness of interested groups to use the state for collectivist interests” (Brebner, 1948, 64, 70).¹¹⁵

Before 1848 much of the argument among the middle classes for state social reform had been based on “widespread philanthropic enthusiasm and the uneasy conscience…at the spectacle of the poverty in which the workers were condemned to live” (Halévy, 1947, 218). However, the revolutions of 1848, which Britons could not help but feel they had averted by the beginnings of social intervention, added to mere guilt a sense of the political importance of reformist legislation.¹¹⁶ Thus it was that, at the very height of the classical age of English liberalism, “the growth of the central government was staggering” (Katznelson, 1985, 274).¹¹⁷ These foundations of modern government may have been, as Evans (1983, 285) said, “laid in the teeth of a gale.”¹¹⁸ But Gladstonian liberalism was “a restless, reforming creed” (Southgate, 1965, 324), albeit without the least semblance of any commitment to economic equality.

The origins of Gladstonian reformism were in Benthamism, as we have seen.¹¹⁹The result was the so-called administrative revolution, which transformed the functions of the state in the direction of a “new and more or less conscious Fabianism” (MacDonagh, 1958, 60).¹²⁰ Bit by bit, “the disciples of Smith and Ricardo [came to promote a series of] social reforms which brought a strong paternalistic state” (Roberts, 1958, 335). And then, in the last twist, English liberalism redefined in this fashion “found a complementary expression in the Conservative Party which…actually realized certain Liberal principles which the other…was in danger of obscuring” (Ruggiero, 1959, 135).

The situation in France was remarkably similar. There, too, laissez-faire had become “the dominant watchword.” But there, too, “practice was rather different from theory.” And there, too, “those in power were conscious of the industrial factor in the world struggle for preponderance, peaceful but then tending to become warlike” (Léon, 1960, 182).¹²¹ And there, too, the nineteenth century was the century in which the strong state was constructed. To be sure, this creation had been and would continue to be a continuous process—from Richelieu to Colbert to the Jacobins to Napoleon to the monarchies censitaires to the Second Empire to the Third Republic to the Fifth.¹²² But in many ways the Second Empire marked a crucial step forward. Or perhaps the way to put it is that the Second Empire marked the locking in of the structure by laying the basis for popular acquiescence. Louis Napoleon was able to do this because, as Guizot (cited in Pouthas, 1983, 144) said, with what sounds like grudging admiration, he incarnated at one and the same time “national glory, a revolutionary guarantee, and the principle of order.”¹²³

What Napoleon III instituted was a welfare-state principle from the top down. The Second Republic had brought the “social question” to the fore of the agenda, arguing that the sovereignty of all the people contrasted with, was belied by, the “tragic inferiority in the conditions of some of the people.” From this observation, two conclusions seemed possible: a definition of popular sovereignty that would lead to “unlimited political power,” or an “absolute rejection of political authorities (pouvoir)” that risked making society “ungovernable” (Donzelot, 1984, 67, 70). Bonapartism represented the former definition, without ever forgetting that it had to use the power to provide a response to the “social question.”

In his first decade in power, Napoleon III repressively reestablished order, used the state to build public works and modernize the banking system, and concluded the 1860 free-trade treaty with Great Britain. In this period, Napoleon III was primarily concerned with creating an “environment favourable to industrial capitalists,” and therefore one in which the working class was “held in check” (Kemp, 1971, 181).¹²⁴Once this was assured, he would then turn to integrating the working classes into the political process. He became quite popular with the workers in the years after 1858. They were years of great prosperity, years of political reform, years in which France was supporting oppressed nationalities in Italy and elsewhere. A pro-Bonapartist workers' group came into existence (Kulstein, 1962, 373–375; also 1964). In this atmosphere, there was a growing competition among republicans, royalists, and Prince Napoleon for the favor of the workers. They were all encouraging cooperatives on the grounds that such organizations were not “incompatible with the free economy in which they all believed” (Plamenatz, 1952, 126).¹²⁵

In various ways, Napoleon III sought to “become closer to the new social left” (Duverger, 1967, 156).¹²⁶ In 1864, he legalized trade unions and strikes, which constituted, in the words of Henri Sée (1951, 2:342), “an act of major importance in the social history of France.”¹²⁷ Indeed, the regime used its attempt to “ameliorate the conditions of the workers and the needy” as a central theme of its propaganda, boasting of its “cradle to the grave” assistance to the needy (Kulstein, 1969, 95, 99).¹²⁸ What Napoleon III, as the first among the “democratic Bonapartists,” sought was a program that would “render the masses conservative…by giving them something to conserve” (Zeldin, 1958, 50). In this way, he made it possible to complete the project of transforming France into a liberal state—a project that would be consecrated in the constitution of 1875.¹²⁹ Furthermore, France was not only a liberal state but a national state, and it was France that had sealed the identification of the two in nineteenth-century Europe.¹³⁰

The third pillar of the British/liberal world order was a strong interstate system. Metternich's Holy Alliance had not been considered a step in that direction, since the oppressive interference had tended to stir the nationalist pots while trying to keep the kettle tops pinned in place—a sure remedy for further revolutions, as 1848 would show. Or so both the British and the French thought. What the British wanted, as the hegemonic power and the strongest actor in the world-economy at this time, was as much free trade as possible, which meant as much as was politically possible, with the least need for military expenditures. The British wanted to have their way without having constantly to use too much force to impose their way. In short, they wanted stability and openness to the degree that it served their economic interests. Of course, in some sense this objective was not new. But in midcentury the British were in a position to be more honest about it and for a short time to profit highly from the fruits of such a policy. To be sure, as Cunningham (1908, 869) noted:

It may be pointed out with some truth that the system of unfettered intercourse was opportune for England, because she had reached a particular phase of development as an industrial nation, but that it was not equally advantageous to countries in which the economic system was less advanced.

And this was because, as Musson (1972b, 19) has argued, free trade is in fact simply one more protectionist doctrine—in this case, protectionist of the advantages of those who at a given time are enjoying greater economic efficiencies.¹³¹

Nor should we forget that, to the extent that one may argue that free trade prevailed in the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth century, or at least among European powers, it was at most a story of the midcentury Kondratieff A-period, 1850–1873. “The nineteenth century began and ended in Europe…with restrictions of international trade” (Bairoch, 1976a, 11),¹³² quite severe restrictions—the Continental Blockade at the one end and the multiplicity of protectionist tariffs at the other.

It was only slowly that Great Britain itself had been won over to the merits of free trade. The political economists in the Board of Trade believed that the adoption of the Corn Laws in 1815 had been the stimulus to the Zollverein, which worried them doubly. It furthered the development of competitive manufacturing in the German states, and it also tended to cut the British off from using these states as the “excellent smuggling bases” into Prussia, Bavaria, Austria, and Russia that they had previously been (Clapham, 1930, 1:480–481; Kindleberger, 1975, 33–34).¹³³In the 1830s, the worries about competitive manufacturing grew.¹³⁴ These worries, plus the internal considerations previously discussed, account for Peel's actions in the 1840s. Peel, let us remember, was not a free-trade ideologue; he was no Cob-den. He was, in Schuyler's apt image (1945, 134), “a reformer on the installment plan, disinclined to push theories to their logical limit.”¹³⁵

The strongest theme of free trade in Great Britain—or, let us say, the theme that assembled the widest band of public opinion behind it—was what might be called the theme of “liberal interventionism.” Free trade for the British was a doctrine that was intended to prevent other governments from doing anything that might hurt British enterprise. In this sense, one might regard the antislavery (and anti-slave-trade) movement as the first great success of liberal interventionism. We have previously discussed the degree to which the British abolitionist movement was predicated on economic considerations (Wallerstein, 1989, 143–146).¹³⁶ What we wish to note here is the degree to which the antislavery movement provided a model of liberal reformism—a point underlined by Blackburn (1988, 439–440):

In acutely troubled times anti-slavery helped middle-class reformers to highlight their socio-economic ideals….[Anti-slavery] furnished a model of legislation dictated by general policy rather than particular interests. It justified state intervention in regulating the working class contract, while sanctifying the contract itself. The advocates of emancipation presented it as furnishing an economic stimulus via market expansion. The free worker was also a consumer.¹³⁷

The same liberal belief in the legitimacy of state-led reformism was applied to free trade. The forced transformation of India, from being an exporter of cotton textiles to being an exporter of raw cotton, permitted British cotton manufacturers to embrace free trade unreservedly, once the British state had “secured Lancashire against any threat of Indian competition in the markets of Europe” (Farnie, 1979, 100).¹³⁸ Palmerston told Auckland on January 22, 1841: “It is the business of Government to open and secure the roads for the merchant” (cited in Platt, 1968b, 85).¹³⁹ Applying this logic even to European states, a Whig M.P. in the parliamentary debate of 1846 could describe free trade as a beneficent principle whereby “foreign nations would become valuable Colonies to us, without imposing on us the responsibility of governing them.”¹⁴⁰This sense of imposing beneficence could lead to (was based upon?) the “quasi-religious” belief that cotton manufacturing was more vital to the “social regeneration” of civilization than the fine arts dear to John Ruskin, as one R. H. Hutton argued in 1870: “If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton-mill, then, in the name of manhood and morality, give us the cotton-mill” (Farnie, 1979, 87–88).¹⁴¹

Free trade was free-trade imperialism, in the phrase made famous by Gallagher and Robinson (1953, 2–3, 11, 13), but their crucial qualification should always be borne in mind: “British policy followed the principle of control informally if possible, and formally if necessary.” It was apparently necessary even in the mid-century free-trade years (that preceded the acknowledged colonial scramble of the last third of the nineteenth century) to occupy or annex a long series of colonies, to the point that, far from being an era of “indifference,” this period might be thought of as the “decisive stage” in British overseas expansion, permitting a combination of commercial penetration and colonial rule such that Great Britain could “command those economies which could be made to fit best into her own.”¹⁴² Although intervention was considered somewhat distasteful, it rapidly became legitimate whenever there seemed to be a danger to the routes to India, or “an alarming threat” to the British position in the world-economy that was thought to be caused by “unfair” activities of rival trading powers (Platt, 1968b, 32).

Despite the entente cordiale, and despite the de facto collaboration of Great Britain and France in imposing a liberal world order, France was quite reluctant to abandon an overt protectionism. France had done so briefly in 1786, with unhappy results (Wallerstein, 1989, 87–93). In the post-1815 period, Great Britain remained protectionist, as did France, albeit a little more intensively so.¹⁴³ When Great Britain moved toward free-trade protectionism, the French stood firm, for reasons that seemed quite cogent to them, as this 1845 speech by a French industrialist to his peers makes clear:

Gentlemen, pay no attention to the theories that cry out, freedom for trade. This theory was proclaimed by England as the true law of the commercial world only when, following a long practice of the most absolute prohibitions, she had brought her industry to so great a level of development that there was no market within which any other large-scale industry was able to compete with hers.¹⁴⁴

Indeed, in the early 1840s France was trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to create a customs union with neighboring states in order to strengthen its industrial position vis-à-vis Great Britain.¹⁴⁵

It may therefore seem surprising that the greatest success in Europe of Great Britain's free-trade diplomacy of midcentury was the signing of the so-called Chevalier-Cobden treaty—the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1860, a treaty that “represented the most significant trade liberalization agreement of the nineteenth century” (O'Brien and Pigman, 1992, 98). What happened?

The treaty affected all the most important industries. France ended her prohibitions and limited the ad valorem duties, which were to be replaced within six months by specific duties. Great Britain agreed to let in nearly all French goods free, with the notable exception of wine. Coal would be exported duty-free from both countries. But since Great Britain was an exporter and France an importer, this was in reality a British concession—one that aroused much opposition in Great Britain. Furthermore, the treaty contained a most-favored-nation clause, which meant that, to the degree that France would enter into reciprocal tariff-cutting arrangements with other European countries, Great Britain would automatically benefit. Each new treaty in turn containing the same clause, there cumulated rapidly a general reduction of tariffs such that “for a decade or so…Europe came as close as ever to complete free trade until after World War II” (Cameron, 1989, 277).¹⁴⁶

British free-trade diplomacy had always centered on France. France was of course a major trading partner, but, even more important, France was the country with which Great Britain had the greatest and most persistent deficit in the balance of trade (Bairoch, 1976a, 46).¹⁴⁷ Every previous attempt since 1815 by Great Britain to negotiate a treaty with France had failed. The negotiations had been in fact halfhearted on both sides because the terms discussed had always involved strict reciprocity, and no doubt above all because the French government had “lacked the power to control the protectionist Chambers” (Dunham, 1930, 101).¹⁴⁸ What had changed was the desire of Napoleon III to consolidate a liberal state. Just as, after repression of revolutionaries, he would move a decade later to the recognition of trade unions, so after a decade of state-led strengthening of the French economy, he would move forward to the Treaty of 1860. He could do this effectively precisely because he did it in secret, by virtue of his authoritarian powers. One day in a letter to his minister of state, Achille Fould, Napoleon III simply announced the treaty. It was immediately branded a “new coup d'état of Napoleon III” (Bairoch, 1970, 6).¹⁴⁹

What mattered in Napoleon III's negotiation of this treaty was not the economic change it brought, but the cultural meaning. Signing the treaty represented the full commitment of France to the concept of the liberal state. In economic terms, it was “the culmination, not the start of the opening of the French economy” (Mokyr and Nye, 1990, 173). It was at most a move from an openly protectionist system to a “moderately protectionist regime” (Rist, 1956, 943; cf. Coussy, 1961, 3).¹⁵⁰ What were its consequences economically? Dunham (1930, 1–2) claims that it revived “moribund French industries…by the salutary pressure of foreign competition.”¹⁵¹ But Bairoch (1972, 221) is not persuaded that there were economic benefits to France. Rather, he says “the liberalization of trade substantially slowed down [French] economic growth.”¹⁵²

In general, free trade was supposed to serve Great Britain well, and both its supporters and its enemies have tended to agree that, from a British point of view, it was “a success from the very beginning [1846]” (Imlah, 1950, 156). But there have come to be skeptical voices about how well it worked even for Great Britain: skepticism about the economic advantages,¹⁵³ and skepticism both about the degree of real support it had within Great Britain and about how influential the “free-traders” were.¹⁵⁴ So, says Redford (1956, 11), the great events of 1860—the Anglo-French treaty and Mr. Gladstone's budget—may have had, probably did have, “less practical effect” than previously thought, but “they made a splendid coping-stone to the free trade edifice.”

Still, quibbling over the degree of economic advantage to the one or the other party in the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce may make us lose sight of the effort to construct an international order that would sanctify liberalism as the European ideology. We talk of the period 1815–1914 as the Pax Britannica. In fact, this is a deceptive way of describing it. It was actually a period of constant colonial wars, “some not so very ‘small' as [some] are wont to call [them]” (Gough, 1990, 179–181).¹⁵⁵ For the creation of the liberal-national state was also and necessarily the creation of the liberal-imperial state.

To be sure, world conditions between 1815 and the 1870s favored “a more relaxed policy” of Great Britain toward the periphery. These were “halcyon days” for British trade. And the myth of “Little England” was a good way of denying the imposition of “informal empire” (Galbraith, 1961, 39–40).¹⁵⁶ Furthermore, Burn (1949, 222–223) argues that, as part of what he calls Great Britain's “liberal equipoise,” it was crucial to direct the angers of the populace outward: “The instinct for violence was also being diverted abroad….The English were by no means a pacific people, but they satisfied themselves by thinking of what ought to be done or what they would do to rebellious Sepoys, riotous negroes, Russians or Frenchmen or, in 1861, Americans.” This diversion was not merely a matter of social psychology but of social mobility. Job opportunities in the colonies took “some of the sting” out of early nineteenth-century radicalism.¹⁵⁷

In theory, liberal ideologists were opposed to colonialism on the grounds that it constituted an infringement on human freedom.¹⁵⁸ But this was very theoretical. In practice, British liberal (and socialist) economists and commentators had an evolving and increasingly favorable concept of British imperial rule over “barbarians” (which term did not include the White settler colonists), although there were a few moments (1780–1800, 1860–1880) when they were rather skeptical.¹⁵⁹Even as strong a proponent of the self-determination of nations as John Stuart Mill intruded a criterion of “fitness.”¹⁶⁰ India was of course the centerpiece of the British imperial project. It was not at first merely, even perhaps primarily, a matter of free-trade imperialism but of revenues, as Bayly (1989, 10) rightly insists.¹⁶¹And when the free-trade group successfully worked to eliminate the East India Company entirely from the picture, they did so in a way that contributed to “the strength and the endurance of Britain's imperial connexion with India” (Moore, 1964, 145).

French liberalism was no less oriented to the imperial state. After all, for Saint-Simon, as for so many other believers in “the certainty of human progress,” the “East” was thought to be still in the “childhood” of this progress (Cole, 1953, 1:41).¹⁶² Louis de Bougainville had already made a tour of the Pacific, starting from St.-Malo on December 15, 1766. on a trip that had brought him to Tuamolu, Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and the Moluccas. It was, however, only after 1796 that missionaries and merchants began to show some interest in the Pacific. Beginning with Charles X's incursion into Algeria, and continuing under Louis-Philippe, France “constantly enlarged its overseas domain” (Schefer,1928, 430).¹⁶³

The July Monarchy evinced an economic concern to maintain order on whaling vessels in the Pacific. It was at this point that the entente cordiale almost disintegrated into warfare because of acute British-French rivalry in the so-called Pritchard affair of 1843. In 1838, the French had made a treaty with Tahiti. In 1840, the British had beat the French out by annexing New Zealand (Jore, 1959, 1: 186, 213). France “took her revenge” in 1842 by taking over the Marquesas and establishing a protectorate over Tahiti as well as sending missionaries to New Caledonia. It was just then that Great Britain, by the Treaty of Nanking, “opened” China (Faivre, 1954, 9, 338; Jore, 1959, 1:200–207, 213, 224; 2:81–106, 165–171, 181–353).

The climax of the rivalry occurred in Tahiti. Though the British “acquiesced” over the Marquesas, they were more unhappy about Tahiti. In 1842, the French arrested the British consul in Tahiti, one Pritchard. In 1843, C. V. Lord Paulet sought to place Hawaii, which the French also coveted, under a British protectorate. Passions rose on both sides. But then both sides pulled back. Guizot and Aberdeen agreed to calm the waters. The French voted an indemnity to Pritchard. Both Pritchard and the French consul in Tahiti, Moerenhout, were replaced. There would be no French protectorate over the Wallis Islands or New Caledonia, nor would there be a British protectorate over the Gambia (in West Africa). Both powers agreed to recognize Hawaii as an independent state (Faivre, 1954, 496–497; Jore, 1959, 2:385–387).

There were a number of reasons for this mutual withdrawal from the precipice. There was an upsurge of agitation in Ireland. And the United States was entering the picture. Great Britain and the United States were in active dispute over the Canadian Pacific border. The convention of the Democratic Party in the United States had proclaimed the slogan of “54°40' or Fight.” U.S. Secretary of State Webster had extended the Monroe Doctrine to Hawaii. Both the British and the French felt that the possible gains to be derived from their continued colonizing did not outweigh the damage to be done to their alliance—so essential to their mutual objectives. They were both determined not to let such an incident recur, as well as to maintain the status quo in the Pacific. They thus both decided to “veiller au grain' (or “look out for squalls,” in the old mariner's expression) (Jore, 1959, 2:388).¹⁶⁴

The importance for world order of this reassertion of the entente cordiale became clear in the 1850s with the Crimean War. Basically, the war was about Russia's long-standing attempt to expand its territory, power, and influence southward into the zone controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Since the British (and the French) were equally desirous of controlling the economic flows of this zone, and the British were in fact well into the process of turning the Ottoman Empire into being very dependent on them, the two powers decided to make it militarily clear that the Russians had to concede priority to the British. The war was thus, in Polanyi's words (1957, 5), “a more or less colonial event.”¹⁶⁵ Since the British were indeed the hegemonic power and commanded the support of the French (and of course the Ottomans), “Palmerston's war” could not but be a military success. Russia was forced into a “humiliating peace.” But can it really be called that “rare example of a war that achieved what it set out to achieve” (Vincent, 1981, 37–38)?¹⁶⁶

In retrospect, the Crimean War has been presented as a “minor” exception to the Pax Britannica, involving “localized theatres of operations and…limited objectives” (Imlah, 1958, 1). Hugh Seton-Watson (1937, 359) calls it “the most unnecessary war in the history of modern Europe.”¹⁶⁷ It certainly did strengthen the British position in the Ottoman Empire.¹⁶⁸ But it had unexpected negative side effects for the British. The British government had to withdraw some troops from the colonies to use in the fighting. It even sought to recruit troops in the United States, which strained diplomatic relations.¹⁶⁹ But the use of these troops for the Crimean War backfired. For it proved that one could diminish the “burdens of Empire,” thereby giving Conservatives further arguments for the “rise of a new imperialism” (Schuyler, 1945, 233).

Even more important, however, was that the war had to be fought at all. Hegemony depends in many ways on the fact that implicit strength is never challenged. Although Great Britain won, it did so only after “the much publicized defeats and disasters of the first Crimean winter.” The resulting “paradox” was that Great Britain had now to spend much more on military preparedness and nonetheless witnessed “a decline of British influence in Europe” (Gash, 1979, 310–311). The defeat of Russia as a result was in fact only temporary. Russia found that she “only had to await patiently the moment when she would be able to shake off the restraints imposed on her in the Black Sea” (Seton-Watson, 1937, 359). And at home, the Crimean War persuaded previously recalcitrant British manufacturers of the importance of the liberal state being an actively imperial state.¹⁷⁰

The 1860s should have marked the definitive installation of the British-dominated pacific world order, in crucial alliance with France. It was indeed the moment of its apogee, but it also marked the beginning of its decline. The very period when the “tendencies in Britain towards the disruption of the Empire reached their climax” (Schuyler, 1921, 538) was also the period of “the final demonstration of British powerlessness and pacifism over Schleswig-Holstein,” and thus of the shattering of “the old confidence in the moral power of British influence“ (Gash, 1979, 317–318).¹⁷¹

The same thing happened in France. In addition to Crimea (1854–1856) and the conquest of Cochin in 1862, Napoleon III sought to consolidate France's position as a world power by an adventure into Central America, seeking thereby to limit the power of the United States. In 1852, France and Great Britain proposed to the United States a tripower protectorate over Cuba. The “haughty refusal” by the United States increased the suspicions of U.S. intentions.¹⁷² In 1859, in a situation of two competing governments in Mexico—that of Juárez in Veracruz and that of Zuloaga in Mexico City—President Buchanan spoke of U.S. ambitions in Cuba and Mexico, and threw his weight behind Juárez. Zuloaga turned to the French for military help. When the United States was then paralyzed by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the French and the Mexican monarchists joined forces to support Archduke Maximilian of Austria as the king of Mexico. France had begun its American “Crimea.”

When Juárez suspended debt payments, the French, British, and Spanish joined forces, demanding the installation of debt commissioners in Veracruz and Tampico. All three powers sent in troops in 1862, but only France was willing to support Maximilian. The other two powers and Maximilian himself pulled back, leaving France alone “forced into a real war.” Napoleon III sent a whole expedition, which failed, and the Second Empire was “discredited,” losing much of the “prestige on which [the Second Empire] was in large part based” (Schefer, 1939, 11, 241), and of course particularly in Europe.¹⁷³

The British-French attempts to create a liberal world order that they would dominate was thus a great success, but it was also a great failure. On the one hand, they had stretched their economic and military power to the limit and would not be able to stop the steady ascent of Germany and the United States, whose joint increase in real power and whose mutual rivalry would begin to shape the increasingly conflictual world order after 1870. Both Great Britain and France would now be forced to change their pattern of colonial acquisition from one in which they alone set the pace to one in which everyone (or at least very many) were free to “scramble.” But on the other hand, Great Britain and France had succeeded in imposing on the world-system the geoculture of liberalism, to which increasing homage had to be paid by everyone, at least until the outbreak of the First World War. Bismarck could not resume the language of the Holy Alliance, nor did he have the least interest in doing so. Rather, Bismarck and Disraeli would draw the positive lessons of the Second Empire and propound an enlightened conservatism, which was really a conservative variant of liberalism.

The turning point in the nineteenth-century world order would be the years 1866–1873—”a gigantic hinge on which the history of the later nineteenth century turns” (Clapham, 1944, 2:271). The United States had remained united, and in 1866 it seemed clear that Germany was about to become so. Thus, the two rising powers were in a position to increase their geopolitical role. At the same time, Great Britain was about to join France in the big leap to universal male suffrage. Parliamentary reform in Great Britain in 1867 is seen, quite correctly, as “the end of an epoch” (Burn, 1964, chap. 6). The British Reform Act of 1867 plus the paroxysm of 1870–1871 in France represent together the culmination of a process begun in 1815 of trying to tame the dangerous classes—in particular, the urban proletariat—by incorporating them into the system politically, but in such a way that they would not upset the basic economic, political, and cultural structures of the two countries.

In the prior fifty years, the extension of the suffrage had been in theory a proposition of liberals, resisted by conservatives. The classic evidence for this is the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Is it not then strange that most of the other crucial advances were made under the aegis of, or at least the leadership of, conservative politicians: Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which preceded the Reform Bill of 1832; Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; and, most important, the Reform Act of 1867, which granted virtual universal manhood suffrage? Himmelfarb (1966, 117), in her analysis of 1867, says that liberals, believing that individuals mattered politically, were so cautious about putting political arrangements at the mercy of the mass of individuals that they considered universal suffrage both “serious and perilous.” Conservatives, she says, with their “faith in eternal verities of human nature and society,” worried less, which is why the Reform Act was “a Conservative measure, initiated and carried out by a Conservative Government.”¹⁷⁴ This is no doubt a correct description, up to a point, of the reasoning process of members of these two political groups, but I am not sure that this is what really happened.

It seems to me that the Liberals never quite had the courage of their convictions, for the simple reason that they shared all the fears of Conservatives of the dangerous classes, with little of the political and social self-assurance of Conservative aristocrats. Liberals were always afraid of being accused of being reckless. Conservatives, on the other hand, were in no rush to reform, but when they saw that reform was essential, they were quite ready to move more decisively, free of the fear of being attacked for radical beliefs.¹⁷⁵ Besides, with a little cleverness they might turn the extension of the suffrage into votes for themselves rather than for the Liberals.¹⁷⁶ It thus might seem not totally coincidental that

[t]he years 1869–70 seem clearly to mark a turning point in the attitude of public opinion in Britain towards the colonies. When confronted with what looked like an imminent dissolution of the Empire, the British people, it was evident, were not ready to follow the doctrinaire disciples of the Manchester School, whatever some of the political leaders might wish. (Schuyler, 1945, 276)

The political leaders who might have wished this were Liberals, not Conservatives. Having made the working class into citizens with something to defend, and having reassured the middle classes that they were not about to be dispossessed, the Conservatives could now lead Great Britain into being more avowedly a liberal-imperial state. In any case, Great Britain did not have much choice. Given the erosion of her dominant economic and political position in Europe, she sought solace and renewed strength in her imperial role.

Could the Second Empire have made the same smooth transition to the mature liberal-imperial state? France already had universal suffrage. What it lacked was a fully liberal parliamentary political regime. But Napoleon III saw that and was clearly trying in the 1860s to move in that direction. As Plamenatz says (1952, 162): “By making the Empire liberal, Napoleon III…really wished to placate…the republicans.” True, his regime was being attacked for squandering money on prestige expenditures and for evading parliamentary controls through public borrowing.¹⁷⁷Still, the gradual liberalization of Napoleon III might well have succeeded were it not for the Franco-German War and the defeat of France.

Bismarck had correctly seen that the Second Empire was the weak link in the structure of British hegemony and that knocking down France would ensure a more rapid decline of Great Britain in the geopolitical structures of the world-system. What Bismarck did not anticipate was that knocking down Napoleon III also meant knocking down the political constraints that had been elaborately constructed on the French working classes and on French radical democrats in general. Hence the Commune of Paris. It was the siege of Paris and the armistice that aroused the workers of Paris:

They had resisted the Prussians for over four months and were willing still to resist them. It was the provincials who had been defeated, and it was the provincials, dominated by the church and the bourgeoisie, who had supported the Second Empire. They were unpatriotic and reactionary. (Plamenatz, 1952, 137)

In the elections of February 5–8, Paris and other large towns voted republican, but the provinces voted royalist (and for peace). The Bonapartists were out of the picture. The republicans had become the war party. Nationalism and republicanism/socialism were deeply intertwined in the Commune, which was no doubt the most significant workers' insurrection in the history of western Europe, and furthermore the first that attracted significant support from employés—that is, from those whose work was “cleaner,” better paid, and at the time more skilled:

[I]t was the first time that those who were not yet “white-collar workers” [cols-blancs] but still merely “pen pushers” [ronds de cuir] joined in such large numbers the ranks of a workers' insurrection. In June 1848, the employés had been fighting on the side of order. (Rougerie, 1964, 128)¹⁷⁸

What the middle classes feared vaguely in 1815 and more pertinently in 1848 was now occurring. The dangerous classes wanted democracy. They wanted to run their country, which they thought of both as their country and their country. The uprising was fiercely repressed by the troops of the provisional government at Versailles, which enjoyed the benign noninterference of German troops. The repression met equally fierce resistance by the workers, and after this resistance was overcome, there were widespread executions and sentences of exile.¹⁷⁹

But once done, what were the consequences? I think Plamenatz (1952, 155–156) gets it just right:

The Commune did for republicans in the 1870s what the June insurrection did in the middle of the century. It discredited the socialists and the revolutionaries. But this time it did not strengthen the conservatives….

The failure of the Commune did no harm to the republicans, but it did make the republicans more conservative than they would otherwise have been.¹⁸⁰

For the republicans took up exactly where Napoleon III had left off, speaking the language of the liberal-imperial state, ready to repress the dangerous classes if they should ask too much, but also ready to give them citizenship, and citizenship in a liberal-imperial state.¹⁸¹ Adolphe Thiers incarnated the transition. A man of many regimes, as were Talleyrand and Guizot before him, he had supported the workers in Lyon in 1834 but the Party of Order in 1848. He had not been compromised by participation in the Second Empire governments, was friendly with both royalists and republicans, and was a fierce enemy of revolutionaries. In 1870, he said that, though he had not wanted the Republic, it had one virtue (titre) in his eyes: “[I]t is, of all governments, the one that divides us least.”

By 1875, it could be said that the liberal-imperial state was now securely in place in Great Britain and France and had shown its ability to contain the dangerous classes. It had thus become a model for other states. What was most constant in the model was certainly not fidelity to the free market (a fidelity that varied with the shifting economic position of given countries in the world-economy and the impact of its cyclical rhythms). Nor was the liberal-imperial state marked by fidelity to the maximization of the rights of the individual (a fidelity that varied with the extent to which individuals used these rights to challenge the basic social order). What distinguished the liberal-imperial state was its commitment to intelligent reform by the state that would simultaneously advance economic growth (or rather the accumulation of capital) and tame the dangerous classes (by incorporating them into the citizenry and offering them a part, albeit a small part, of the imperial economic pie).

To this end, liberal-imperial states had to revolve around the political center and avoid regimes that smacked either of reaction or of revolution. Of course, to be able to do this, a state had to have no major unresolved nationalist problems vis-à-vis outsiders and no strong internal unhappy minorities. It had also to be strong enough in the world-economy that the prospects of collective prosperity were not unreal. And it had to have enough military power or strong enough allies that it was free from excessive outside interference. When all these conditions prevailed, the liberal-imperial state was free to reflect the collective conservatism of a majority that now had something to conserve.

Therefore, first of all the liberal-imperial state had to be a strong state, a strengthened state. To be sure, from the beginning, the extension of the state's powers was intended primarily to control the dangerous classes:

[T]he centralization which Bentham and especially [Edwin] Chadwick meditated did no more than touch the dominant middle classes. Centralization, swept clear of theory, meant authorization of those services which affected the labouring classes. Centralization, it cannot be doubted, was never intended to curtail in the slightest degree the economic and social freedom of the more respectable classes. Nor did it. (Hill, 1929, 95–96)¹⁸²

And second, the liberal-imperial state involved a commitment to the extension of the suffrage. But, as we have seen, this extension was managed prudently. “The right to exercise freedom was only guaranteed to responsible adults by classical liberals” (Crouch, 1967, 209). The concept of responsibility, as applied to extension of the suffrage, involved both timing and an application of the Enlightenment faith in the educability of humanity. Therefore, the liberal advocacy of universal suffrage was “deeply ambiguous,” as Rosanvallon (1985, 136–137) explains:

In most cases, [such advocacy] was but a sort of bet on the future, expressing merely an anticipatory representation of the movement of civilization and of Enlightenment progress in the nation….In the liberal and republican circles that were favorable to it, universal suffrage continued to be understood as a recognition of potential capacity, far more than as a consequence of the principle of equality, a symbolic translation of humans together in society….Hence the great debate about the premature-ness of introducing universal suffrage. It was often rejected because it was still too early. It was the suffrage of the ignorant and immature masses that was feared.¹⁸³

That said, liberalism was identified with rationalism, with science, and with economic progress, and for that reason and in that sense, by midcentury “almost every statesman and civil servant…was a Liberal, irrespective of his ideological affiliation” (Hobsbawm, 1975, 105).¹⁸⁴

The most interesting thing to notice about this period is the position of the Conservatives. If, in 1834, following the Reform Act, Sir Robert Peel “had rechristened his party ‘Conservative,' it was to make it plain that it was not his intention to pursue in any respect a policy of reaction” (Halévy, 1947, 57).¹⁸⁵ At the very same time in France, following the Revolution of 1830, conservatism was being elaborated in France as “the way one manages a post-revolutionary society,” as a way of “concluding the revolution.” As such, it is no longer in opposition to liberalism, as Rosanvallon (1985, 277–278) puts it so well: “Rather it conceived of itself as the completion of liberalism, as its eternity.”

As a result, Conservatives, too, began to favor the strong state. For Conservatives, there were at least three considerations. The first was the inbuilt weakness of the appeal to tradition and continuity, which Burke had wanted to make the basis of conservative ideology.¹⁸⁶ For, as Bénéton (1988, 116) notes, this position leads to contradictions, once there are, as in France, durable interruptions that have led to creating other traditions. What can one do then? Political conservative thought began to oscillate “between fatalism and radical reformism, between the rule of a limited state and the appeal for a strong state.” Hence, for many Conservatives the strong state became the road to the restoration, or at least the partial restoration, of tradition. Second, many Conservatives felt that conservatism was “an attitude that saw in law, order, and stable rule the first principle of government” and, like Peel, drew from this the conclusion that “the conservation and steady improvement of the institutions of the state [were] the necessary corollary in principle” (Gash, 1977, 59).

But the third reason was the most cogent, as perceived by the liberal ideologist Guido Ruggiero (1959, 136–137) in his discussion of how British Tories, influenced by German romanticists, transferred their defense of royal prerogatives to the state:

It was the State whose importance and prestige were to be reasserted. The State was to be regarded not as a compromise between opposing self-interests but as what Burke had called it—a living communion of minds.

For this reason the Conservatives recognized the need of broadening the basis of the State and building it not upon the tower of privilege but upon the humble yet solid platform of the feelings and interests of the whole people. The old Toryism had created an oligarchical government; but was not the Liberal government an oligarchy, less entitled to rule because based solely upon wealth detached from birth and the privileges of an ancient tradition?

Why, asked the Conservatives, did Liberalism wish to weaken the State? The answer was easy. It wanted to allow free play to the strongest forces in competition with the weakest, and full power to exploit the defenceless masses, which were the victims and not the protagonists of the struggle, by destroying all power superior to individuals and able to exercise upon them a moderating and equalizing function.¹⁸⁷

When, in 1960, Lord Kilmuir (1960, 70–71) sought to explain how it was that the Conservatives in Great Britain always returned to power after great defeats by “social revolutionary movements” (he so terms 1832, 1846, 1906, and 1945), his answer is “the Shaftesbury tradition,” which he defines as the association of Toryism with “state intervention to insure minimum standards in diverse forms, for example, factory acts, housing and public health acts, and acts on behalf of trade unions“—in short, because the Conservatives had used the state for their own version of social reformism.

This “mutually advantageous alliance between the [Conservative] party and the people” was the heart of Disraeli's so-called national Toryism. Despite the fact that Disraeli's original rise in the Tory party was the result of his fierce opposition to Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws, close observation of Disraeli's own later political practice shows it to be “largely ‘Peelite' in spirit” (Smith, 1967, 4, 15).¹⁸⁸ What Disraeli essentially added to “Peelism” was imperialism. Liberal reformism was to be seen as “a means, a path, a discipline, in the service of a higher end, Empire” (Ruggiero, 1959, 140)—thereby tying the working classes more closely both to the nation and to some extent to the Conservative Party.

It could be said that, if the great political achievement of liberalism in the period 1830–1875 was the taming of the dangerous classes, the great ideological achievement was the taming of conservatism—transforming it into a variant of the rational state-oriented reformism that liberalism propounded. The common ground was nationalism and the strong state, which affected even the cultural outlook of conservatives. Barzun (1943, 143–144), in discussing the cultural shift from romanticism to realism in the period 1850–1885, calls it a “rebound from [the] disappointment” of 1848. He notes the rise of both Realpolitik and materialism, each bolstered by the “august authority of physical science.” He argues:

Liberals, conservatives, and radicals were united by their common desire for tangible, territorial nationhood; scientific hypotheses were tested by their suitability to mechanical representation or analogy…; while force…was applied as the great resolver of social paradoxes and complexities.”¹⁸⁹

As liberalism and conservatism moved toward their “common policy of state intervention,” some Conservatives (such as Chamberlain in the late nineteenth century) tried to insist on the distinction that for Conservatives it was an act of “patronage,” whereas for the Liberals it was the belief that “all people should be assisted to govern themselves.” But, as Ruggiero (1959, 151) says, “in practice, the difference was often very slight.” Of course it was. In 1875, the socialists were still not totally tamed. That would be completed only in the period 1875–1914. Schapiro (1949, vii) would thus be able to conclude his book on liberalism: “When the nineteenth century ended historically in 1914, liberalism had been accepted as the way of political life in Europe.”

The Citizen in a Liberal State

That the principle of national sovereignty is at the very heart of the French Revolution is something on which we need scarcely insist. That this principle was created—and put into practice—by the transfer of absolute sovereignty from the king to the nation is a truism that is worth repeating. And worth examining.

—KEITH MICHAEL BAKER, “SOUVERAINETÉ” (1988)

I would say that the French revolutionary tradition…had a greater impact on the nineteenth century than on contemporaries.

—MERNEST LABROUSSE (1949B, 29)

Inequality is a fundamental reality of the modern world-system, as it has been of every known historical system. What is different, what is particular to historical capitalism, is that equality has been proclaimed as its objective (and indeed as its achievement)—equality in the marketplace, equality before the law, the fundamental social equality of all individuals endowed with equal rights. The great political question of the modern world, the great cultural question, has been how to reconcile the theoretical embrace of equality with the continuing and increasingly acute polarization of real-life opportunities and satisfactions that has been its outcome.

For a long time—for three centuries, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth—this question was scarcely mooted in the modern world-system. Inequality was still considered natural—indeed, ordained by God. But once the revolutionary upsurge of the late eighteenth century transformed the language of equality into a cultural icon, once challenges to authority everywhere became commonplace, the disparity of theory and practice could no longer be ignored. The need to contain the implications of this cultural claim, and thereby to tame the now “dangerous classes,” became a priority of those who held power. The construction of the liberal state was the principal framework that was built to limit the claim. The elaboration of modern ideologies was in turn an essential mechanism in the construction of the liberal state.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE CONCEPT OF CITIZENSHIP

The great symbolic gesture of the French Revolution was the insistence that titles no longer be used, not even that of Monsieur and Madame.Everyone was to be called Citoyen (Citizen). This gesture was intended to demonstrate the repudiation of traditional hierarchies, the incrustation of social equality in the new society that was being constructed. The French Revolution came to an end. Titles were reinstituted. But the concept of “citizen” (if not its use as a title of address) survived. It did more than survive. It thrived. It became the rhetorical bedrock of the liberal state. And it was adopted juridically everywhere, to the point that by 1918 the world found it necessary to invent the concept of “stateless” persons to describe the relatively small portion of humanity who were unable to claim citizenship somewhere.

The concept of citizen was intended to be inclusive—to insist that all persons in a state, and not just some persons (a monarch, the aristocrats), had the right to be a part, an equal part, of the process of collective decision making in the political arena. It followed that everyone should have the right to receive the social benefits the state might distribute. By the second half of the twentieth century, the existence of rights that are guaranteed to citizens came to make up the minimal definition of what constitutes a modern “democratic” state, which virtually every state was now claiming to be.

But the other face of the inclusiveness of citizenship was exclusion. Those who did not fall into this new category of citizens of the state became by definition that other new concept: aliens. The aliens of one state might be the citizens perhaps of some other state, but not of this state. Still, for any given state, even the exclusion of aliens within its boundaries did not limit very much the number of persons theoretically included. In most cases, more than 90 percent of the residents of the country were citizens—legally citizens, that is, for citizenship had now become a matter of legal definition.

And this was precisely the problem faced by the states after the French Revolution. Too many persons were citizens. The results could be dangerous indeed.¹ The story of the nineteenth century (and indeed of the twentieth) was that some (those with privilege and advantage) continually attempted to define citizenship narrowly and that all the others responded by seeking to validate a broader definition. It is around this struggle that the intellectual theorizing of the post-1789 centuries centered. It was around this struggle that the social movements were formed.

The way to define citizenship narrowly in practice, while retaining the principle in theory, is to create two categories of citizens. The effort started with Abbé Siéyès, just six days after the fall of the Bastille. In a report he read to the Constitutional Committee of the National Assembly on July 20–21, 1789, Siéyès proposed a distinction between passive and active rights, between passive and active citizens. Natural and civil rights, he said, are rights “for whose maintenance and development society is formed.” These are passive rights. There also exist political rights, “those by which society is formed.” These are active rights. And from this distinction, Siéyès drew the following conclusion:

All inhabitants of a country should enjoy in it the rights of passive citizens; all have the right to the protection of their person, of their property, of their liberty, etc. But all do not have the right to play an active role in the formation of public authorities; all are not active citizens. Women (at least at the present time), children, foreigners, and those others who contribute nothing to sustaining the public establishment should not be allowed to influence public life actively. Everyone is entitled to enjoy the advantages of society, but only those who contribute to the public establishment are true stockholders (actionnaires)of the great social enterprise. They alone are truly active citizens, true members of the association.” (Siéyès, 1789, 193–194)

Without blinking an eye, Siéyès then added that equality of political rights is a fundamental principle (but presumably only for active citizens), without which privilege would reassert itself. On October 29, 1789, the National Assembly translated this theoretical concept into a legal decree that defined active citizens as those who paid a minimum of three days' wages in direct taxation. Property became the prerequisite of active citizenship. As Rosanvallon (1985, 95) points out, “If reason is sovereign, men cannot invent laws. They must discover them….The notion of capacity finds its logic in this framework.”²

The attempt to circumscribe the meaning of citizenship took many forms, all of them necessarily involving the creation of antinomies that could justify the division into passive and active citizens. Binary distinctions (of rank, of class, of gender, of race/ethnicity, of education) are ancient realities. What was different in the nineteenth century were the attempts to erect a theoretical scaffolding that could legitimate the translation of such distinctions into legal categories, in order that such categories serve to limit the degree to which the proclaimed equality of all citizens was in fact realized.

The reason is simple. When inequality was the norm, there was no need to make any further distinction than that between those of different rank—generically, between noble and commoner. But when equality became the official norm, it was suddenly crucial to know who was in fact included in the “all” who have equal rights—that is, who are the “active” citizens. The more equality was proclaimed as a moral principle, the more obstacles—juridical, political, economic, and cultural—were instituted to prevent its realization. The concept of citizen forced the crystallization and rigidification—both intellectual and legal—of a long list of binary distinctions that then came to form the cultural underpinnings of the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: bourgeois and proletarian, man and woman, adult and minor, breadwinner and housewife, majority and minority, White and Black, European and non-European, educated and ignorant, skilled and unskilled, specialist and amateur, scientist and layman, high culture and low culture, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and abnormal, able-bodied and disabled, and of course the ur-category that all of these others imply—civilized and barbarian.

In states with citizens enjoying equal rights, the dominant groups were seeking to exclude, while the dominated groups were seeking to be included. The struggle was conducted both in the political and in the intellectual arena. All persons found themselves on one side or the other of each of the antinomies. Those who were on the dominant side tended to theorize the distinctions as in some way natural. The key problem of the dominant was to make sure that individually they were on the dominant end of each and every binary distinction. Facing them, those who were located on the dominated side began to organize, seeking to devalue, destroy, or redefine the distinctions in order to relocate themselves into the category of active citizens, into the category of the civilized.

The fact that there were multiple binary categories created a difficulty. It was possible to be on the dominating side in some categories and not in others. Those who did not have what might be called a perfect score had political decisions to make if they wished to be considered part of the group that comprised full-fledged citizens. They often, quite understandably, sought to give priority to those categories in which they were on the dominant side. The result could be some widening of the privileged group, but this merely increased the difficulties for those who remained excluded. It was this struggle about definitions of priorities of binary categories that was at the root of the continuing debates inside the social movements about the tactics of their struggles and the nature of potential and desirable alliances.

To be sure, the concept of citizenship was meant to be liberating, and it did indeed liberate us all from the dead weight of received hierarchies claiming divine or natural ordination. But the liberation was only a partial liberation from the disabilities, and the new inclusions made sharper and more apparent the continuing (and new) exclusions. Universal rights as a consequence turned out in actual practice to be somewhat of a linguistic mirage, an oxymoron. Creating a republic of virtuous equals turned out to require the rejection of others who were thereby deemed to be nonvirtuous.³

Liberalism, which would become the dominant ideology of the modern world, preached that virtue could be taught, and it therefore offered the managed progression of rights, the managed promotion of passive citizens to the status of active citizens—a road for the transformation of barbarians into the civilized. Since the legal process of promotion was thought to be irreversible, it had to be handled carefully, prudently, and above all gradually. On the other hand, those social movements that were being created to champion the interests of those whose rights were not fully recognized were always debating what might be done to end nonrecognition as rapidly as possible. There were those who insisted that the movements should be antisystemic—that is, that they should seek to destroy the existing historical system that made possible the travesties of equality. And there were those who were essentially integrationist—that is, who believed that the role of the movements was merely to speed up the already existing liberal program of the managed acquisition of rights.

The story, as we have already seen, began with the French Revolution itself. Siéyès, in that same memorandum, said: “All public authority, without distinction, is an emanation of the general will; all come from the people—that is, the Nation. These two terms should be considered synonyms” (1789, 195). The implementation of this view was simple and rapid. Everything that had been labeled royal was relabeled national.⁴“For the French revolutionaries, the nation was not a given; it had to be created” (Cruz Seoane, 1968, 64). The concept of nation spread rapidly to other countries.⁵ It was the French revolutionaries, too, who first used the concept of nation to justify the concept of the self-determination of nations. When the Assembly voted the annexation of Avignon and the Comtat Venaisson on September 13, 1791, it was done in the name of “the right of people to determine their own fate [disposer d'eux-mêmes]” (Godechot, 1965, 189).

However, once having noted that national sovereignty was constituted the moment sovereignty passed from the crown to the nation, Nora (1988, 893) asks pertinently, “But what nation?…And what society?” The enthusiasms of ordinary people during the heyday of the French Revolution may have given a momentary hyperegalitarian tonality to the concept of nation, but there existed as well a quite different Enlightenment tradition that had distinguished sharply between the “nation“—a concept used to denote the educated strata—and the “people,” who were “not depraved but easily influenced, [and who therefore] required a moral, technical (and physical) education appropriate for their status, that would best equip them for a life of labour” (Woolf, 1989, 106). Linguistic games would continue to be played, with shifting emphases from fatherland (patrie) to nation to people.⁶

It would not be too long before the term nation had become too mild, and the term people had become so popular that even autocratic rulers sought to use it.

By the 1830s, romantic revolutionaries were speaking almost routinely of le peuple, das Volk, il popolo, narod, or lud as a kind of regenerative life force in human history. The new monarchs who came to power after the Revolutions of 1830, Louis-Philippe and Léopold I, sought the sanction of the “people” as the king “of the French” and “of the Belgians,” rather than of France or Belgium. Even the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, three years after crushing the Polish uprising of 1830–31, proclaimed that his own authority was based on “nationality” (as well as autocracy and Orthodoxy)—and his word narodnost, also meaning “spirit of the people,” was copied from the Polish narodowo. (Billington, 1980, 160)

But it was more than a game. It was part of the crucial debate about who was a true citizen. Nor was this merely an abstract debate. The National Assembly and then its successor structure, the Convention, were faced with three concrete issues about citizenship: women, Blacks, and workers. The record of the French Revolution was mixed, but in each case, they decided on exclusions that left bitterness.

In the case of women, the whole matter started out badly. The royal decree summoning the Estates-General specified that women who held seigniorial fiefs had to choose male proxies to represent them in the Electoral College—nobles for laywomen, clergy for nuns (Landes, 1988, 232, n. 5). Nonetheless, women (religious communities, societies of tradeswomen) did write cahiers de doléance. And some of their complaints foreshadowed later problems of alliances. Mme. B*** O***, Pays de Caux, wrote: “There is talk of liberating the Negro slaves;…could it be possible that [the nation] would be mute about us?”⁷

It is well known that women played a major role in various popular demonstrations during the French Revolution, most crucially in the so-called October days in 1789, when the Parisian market women (along with national guardsmen) marched on Versailles and forced the royal couple to come to the capital to reside. But this demonstration concerned the rights of poor people, not of women per se.⁸ And two months after these riots, on December 22, 1789, the National Assembly formally excluded women from the right to vote. True, Condorcet did write a famous pamphlet in 1790 calling for women to have droit de cité, but he didn't persuade those in power. The Constitution of 1791 renewed the exclusion, and this was reiterated in a vote of the Convention on July 24, 1793, specifying that women were excluded from all political rights, which actually was something that at least aristocratic women had had in the ancien régime.⁹

Some improvements in women's rights were instituted, it is true. Marriage and divorce became civil processes. Primogeniture was abolished, and the rights of illegitimate children and their mothers to financial support were promulgated. A law was passed permitting women to be witnesses in documents related to the état civil, although this matter continued to be controversial (Abray, 1975, 55). And in the heated atmosphere of the Jacobin period, women began to organize. They began to play a much larger role in the popular societies. They stood outside the doors of the Convention, trying to control who would enter. They packed the galleries and shouted their views (Landes, 1988, 139–140).

On May 5, 1793, the Society of Republican-Revolutionary Women was founded. They pushed vigorously the demands of women for bread. Their language had distinctly feminist overtones. They were allied to the Enragés,¹⁰ who were critical of the Jacobins from the left. But above all, they were women, organized women, who insisted on being heard. When women in one Paris section petitioned for the right to bear arms, Fabre d'Eglantine sputtered in the Convention: “After the bonnet rouge, which the Républicaines wore during their meetings, comes the gun belt, then the gun” (cited in Abray 1975, 56). The Committee on Public Safety appointed a committee, headed by André Amar, to consider whether women should exercise political rights and whether they should be allowed to take part in political clubs. The answer to both would be no. The committee deemed that women did not have the “moral and physical qualities” to exercise political rights, and furthermore that it was the aristocracy that wanted women to have these rights “in order to put women at odds with men” (cited in George, 1976–1977, 434).

As for participating in political associations, Amar was quite explicit in explaining why women should not be allowed to be members:

If we consider that the political education of men is at its beginning,…then how much more reasonable is it for women, whose moral education is almost nil, to be less enlightened concerning principles? Their presence in popular societies, therefore, would give an active role in government to people more exposed to error and seduction. Let us add that women are disposed by their organization to an overexcitation which would be deadly in public affairs and that interests of state would be sacrificed to everything which ardor in passions can generate in the way of error and disorder. (Cited in Landes, 1988, 144)

As Banks noted (1981, 28), advocating the “rights of man” did not necessarily lead to the “rights of women,” since “it is quite possible to define women as having a different nature from that of men.” To be sure, the exclusion of women was often put forward as a temporary provision. An earlier report by Lanjuinais in April 1793 called for the exclusion of women from political rights “for the time that it will take to remedy the vices of women's education.” As Cerati (1966, 170) remarked acerbically: “[These vices] must have been terribly tenacious since it took a century and a half to overcome them.”

Why it was the women's clubs that became the first victim of the Law of Suspects¹¹ has been a matter of considerable debate. George (1976–1977, 412) thinks that “Jacobin nerves were taut, and Jacobin patience snapping with apostles of participatory democracy,” and that the women were an easy first target. Lytle (1955, 25) specifies that “the Revolutionary Women had become a danger to the Robespierrists [because the latter were] unable to satisfy the demands of Parisians for bread.” Hufton (1971, 102) links the latter issue to that of the attitude of the sans-culottes:

The sans culotte, Chaumette said when he dissolved women's clubs in October 1793, had a right to expect from his wife the running of the home while he attended political meetings….Others have lingered on the pride of the sans culottes in his new-found importance in société populaire, [in] section[,] or as a professional revolutionary on commission….While her husband was still talking she in some areas had joined the food queues and the minute she did that her loyalty was potentially suspect.

Applewhite and Levy (1984, 76) see the outlawing of the women's clubs as “the triumph of the bourgeois revolution over the popular revolution.”¹² But of course bourgeois feminists fared no better. Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen,¹³ was sent to the guillotine on November 3, 1793. Whichever the explanation for the Jacobin attitude, the situation did not change after the downfall of the Jacobins. In 1795, after the journée of 1er Prairial, the Convention excluded women from its hall entirely, even as listeners, unless accompanied by a man with a citizen's card (Abray, 1975, 58). And in 1796, the Council of Five Hundred excluded women from senior teaching positions. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code regressed over even the ancien régime. Previously, at least aristocratic women were allowed to handle property and legal matters. Now, in the more egalitarian mood of the French Revolution, all women were treated equally—all having no rights whatsoever (Levy et al., 1979, 310).

I have called this a mixed picture. One can emphasize the negative side. Abray (1975, 62) says that it “stands as striking proof of the essential social conservatism [of the Revolution].” Knibiehler (1976, 824) insists that it marks a “relative regression of the status of women,” one that, for George (1976–1977, 415), was “more clearly inferior than that of the Catholic, feudal past, because now defined, cloaked and justified by the bourgeois deities of Reason and the laws of Nature.” Cerati (1966, 13) asserts that the claims of women for greater rights during the French Revolution met with “a glacial reception from the [otherwise] enthusiastic [masculine] partisans of equality.” However, Landes (1988, 148) claims that part of the problem was that the feminists themselves “bore the stamp of ambivalence toward public women.”

But one can also evaluate the experience more positively. Landes (1988, 170) also points out that, after the French Revolution, “gender became a socially relevant category…in a way that it would not have mattered formerly.” Kelly (1982, 79) compares the situation of the post-1789 feminists favorably with that of those involved in the famous querelle des femmes launched by Christine de Pisan and others in the fifteenth century. The earlier feminists, she says, lacked “the vision of a social movement to change events,” whereas after 1789 they “were animated by a notion of progress and of intentional social change.” And Moses (1984, 14) insists that, whereas before 1789 feminism was an issue only for the upper classes, the French Revolution led to “the rise of a feminism more sweeping in its scope and more inclusive in its following.” The negative evaluation lays emphasis on the changes actually achieved and the justifying ideas of the times. The positive evaluation lays stress on the development of the feminist movement and its mobilization. This tension would remain the principal cultural-political antinomy of the nineteenth (and twentieth) centuries: the dominant theorized; the dominated organized.

The story of Blacks was not too different. There were of course few Blacks in hexagonal France at the time of the Revolution. But there were plenty in the colonies, and above all in St.-Domingue. I have previously told the story of the successive rebellions there, the creation of the first Black state in the Americas, the wars, and finally the diplomatic isolation of the Republic of Haiti (Wallerstein, 1989, passim, esp. 240–244, 253–256). Here I wish to underline the debate that took place in Paris.

St.-Domingue had had a clear system of social stratification before the Revolution. There was a small White stratum, most of whom were planters. There was a stratum of free mulattos. But the largest group were the Blacks, and the Blacks were almost all slaves. This was an ordinal social ranking. But none of these groups had political rights. The French Revolution was thus received enthusiastically by all three strata, because they all hoped it would bring them political rights. However, the Whites did not wish social equality to be granted to the free mulattos, and neither the Whites nor the free mulattos wanted the enfranchisement of the slaves. Once again, the norm of equality raised the question of who is to be included. As Aimé Césaire (1981, 342) notes so acutely:

Just as the royal authority could not oppress the Blacks without oppressing to various degrees all the classes, it became rapidly clear that the authority that emerged out of the French Revolution could not accede to the demand of one of the classes of colonial society for freedom without putting on the table the question of the very existence of colonial society. More specifically, the bourgeois power that emerged out of the French Revolution felt that liberty was indivisible, that one couldn't give political or economic liberty to White planters and keep mulattos under iron rule; and that one couldn't recognize the civil equality of free men of color and at the same time keep Blacks in the ergastulum. In short, to liberate one of the classes of colonial society, one had to liberate them all, one had to liberate St.-Domingue. And this seemed contrary to the interests of France.

It is not that there were not some in the National Assembly and the Convention who realized this. In the debate on the condition of the slaves, Abbé Grégoire declaimed: “There still exists one aristocracy, that of skin color” (cited in Césaire, 1981, 187). But, as Césaire suggested, beyond philanthropy and even antiracism lay anticolonialism, and even Grégoire and Robespierre were not prepared to go that far. Only Marat was. Marat noted the connection of this issue with the very principle of active citizens: “But how can we treat as free men persons with black skin, when we do not treat as citizens those who cannot pay one écu in direct taxes?” (cited in Césaire, 1981, 189–190).

The emancipation of the slaves in 1793 was not the fruit of the egalitarian impulses of the French revolutionaries. It was imposed by the power of Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the slave rebellion in St.-Domingue, and merely ratified by the Convention in a decree (Decree no. 2262 of February 4, 1794) that would be revoked by Napoleon in 1802 after Toussaint had been imprisoned (and one that would not be reenacted until 1848).

What is more revealing, however, is the prior debate on the rights to be accorded to free mulattos. Pushed by the Amis des Noirs and opposed by the Club Mas-siac, which represented the interests of the White planters, the Assembly decided “unanimously” on a curious compromise. After the adoption of the decree granting the vote to free men of color, Dupont de Nemours presented a “declaration” of the Whites explaining their assent on the grounds that the vote was being given only to “qualified mulattos of free parents” and was not being accorded, could not be accorded, “to unfree persons, or freedmen, since these were members of a ‘foreign nation’ “ (cited in Blackburn, 1988, 187–188).¹⁴ The poorWhites on St.-Domingue opposed any property qualification, since that would give the vote to some free mulattos while not to them. They applied the description of the White planters—“a species of foreigner with no entitlement to political rights”—to all free mulattos (Blackburn, 1988, 177). Even the free mulattos were by definition not part of the “nation”; they could not therefore be citizens.

As for French workers, we have already noted that the concept of active citizenship, by creating a property-based definition of political rights, resulted in excluding them, was intended to exclude them. In the heady revolutionary atmosphere, however, workers began to seek improvement of their situation by organizing. The Assembly had abolished the guilds. The employers and workers gave this opposite interpretations. For the former, the only law that now governed production was the law of supply and demand. The workers thought it meant they could not create organizations freely, as they wished (Soreau, 1931, 295).

The rapid rise of prices plus the collapse of the paper money, the assignats, fueled worker effervescence, peaking in the spring of 1791 just before the flight of the king and the enactment of the Constitution. Strikes and disorders seemed beyond the control of the Paris municipality, and led to calls for action by the Assembly. While maintaining the inegalitarian standards for voting, the Assembly sought to use the ideology of equality against the possibility of workers to organize by enacting an “anti-cabal” law. The notorious Loi Le Chapelier, adopted on June 14, 1791, outlawed any workers' combination, and on July 20 this proscription was extended to the compagnonnages, the long-existing mutual benefit societies (Wallerstein, 1989, 107 and n. 248).

Steven L. Kaplan (1979, 74–75) observes how, behind the facade of the new language of equality, the revolutionaries continued the very same practices that the royalist regime had followed:

One would henceforth repress in the name of individual liberty what one had previously repressed in the name of collective and corporate public weal….It is striking to notice that the two great means of social control of the world of labor utilized by the revolutionaries for the defense of liberty—the maximum, underpinned by a system of food supply obtained by constraint, and the anti-cabal law—had been the cornerstones of the prohibiting, paternalist Ancien Régime.

In his history of the French Revolution, Jean Jaurès (1968, 912) denounced this “terrible law” that, under the guise of symmetry between workers and employers, affected only the workers, and weighed upon them heavily for seventy-five years. He cites Marx, who called it a “bourgeois coup d'état,” and finds it quite unsurprising that Robespierre should have tacitly supported enacting the law by his silence.¹⁵

The French Revolution appealed to nature, which was a universal phenomenon, belonging to everyone. But it also appealed to virtue, which was only a potential (but not necessarily the actual) characteristic of everyone. From these concepts, it derived the existence of human rights. Since there could be multiple “natures” and multiple capacities, the discourse had an “ambivalent quality” (Landes, 1981, 123). Scott (1981, 2) sums up “the persistent question of the relationship of specific, marked groups to the embodied universal” quite well: “[H]ow could the rights of the poor, of mulattos, blacks, or women be figured as the rights of Man? The general answer is: with difficulty.”

Still, the French Revolution had the consequence that “revolutionary action acquired a status whose promise, or menace, was at once qualitatively different from rebellious action and morally comparable to that with which, in other times and places, great religious changes had been (and sometimes still are) invested” (Sonenscher, 1989, vi). Of course, since revolutionary action was both promise and menace, it was polarizing, and this polarization “provided the subsoil for the politics of the next century and a half” (Roberts, 1978, 73).

The great socially unifying concept of the citizen thus led to the formalization of multiple cross-cutting binary categories and to the binary tension of political life—the split between right and left, the Party of Order and the Party of Movement—a split that centrist liberalism would devote all its efforts to rendering meaningless. The result was an intense zigzagging of public life, energized by the juggernaut of a belief in progress, and distorted by the continuous and increasing social and economic polarization of real life within the world-system.

In the nineteenth century, the so-called middle classes came to dominate the Western world, and Europe came to dominate the world. When one has achieved the top position, the problem is no longer how to get there but how to stay there. The middle classes nationally, and the Europeans globally, sought to maintain their advantage by appropriating the mantle of nature and virtue to justify privilege. They called it civilization, and this concept was a key ingredient of their effort. In the Western world, it was translated into education, and education became a way of controlling the masses.¹⁶ And on the global scene, starting with Napoleon (but adopted subsequently by all the other European powers), “the concept of civilization as an ideology…became unashamedly a form of cultural imperialism” (Woolf, 1989, 119).

The French Revolution would come to a definitive political end in 1793/1799/1815 and become thereafter merely a political symbol and a cultural memory. It left, however, a monumental legacy to the whole world-system. Sovereignty now belonged to the people, the nation. And political debate and political change were the normal consequence of the sovereignty of the people. The privileged strata of the world-system had to come to terms with what was for them a poisonous legacy. They would see whether they could incorporate it institutionally in ways that would contain its potential for the radical dislocation of existing hierarchies.

This process of containment took three forms. The first was the crystallization of what came to be called ideologies, which claimed to be philosophical constructs but were actually primarily political strategies. The second was the elaboration of conceptual categories as a new discourse with which to describe the world. This was initially and primarily, as we have said, the work of the dominant strata, who hoped thereby to frame the debate and justify the limiting of citizenship. Eventually, this work of creative conceptualization became transformed and institutionalized in the structures of knowledge known as the social sciences. And the third was the establishment of a network of organizations, initially primarily the work of the dominated strata, which were to serve as agents of furthering change but would act simultaneously as mechanisms of limiting change.

The period 1815–1848 was one in which all and sundry seemed to be moving uncertainly in this transformed political terrain. The reactionaries tried to turn the clock back, to undo the cultural earthquake that was the French Revolution. They discovered, as we have seen, that this wasn't really possible. The dominated (and repressed) strata, for their part, were in search of appropriate and effective modes of organizing. And the emergent liberal center was unsure of how it should, or could, construct the appropriate political base to get the turmoil under control. They concentrated, as we have seen, on constructing liberal states—first of all, and what was most important, in the most powerful countries: Great Britain and France.

THE WORLD-REVOLUTION OF 1848

It would be the world-revolution of 1848 and its immediate aftermath that would require resolving these uncertain searches and efforts in order to stabilize the world-system and restore a certain degree of political equilibrium. The revolution started once again in France, where the July Monarchy had exhausted its credibility and legitimacy. The rebellion of February 25, 1848, had widespread support, from both the middle and the working classes, from Bonapartists, even from the Church and the Legitimists, “who saw in the fall of Louis-Philippe revenge for 1830” (Pierrard, 1984, 145). And it had immediate resonance elsewhere in Europe—in Belgium, to be sure, but also in all those countries where nationalism was becoming a rallying point: Germany, Italy, Hungary. That is why 1848 came to be called by historians “the springtime of the nations.” The one country where the revolution would not occur was England, something immediately explained in an editorial in the Times on February 26, 1848, as due to the fact that “the people feel that under the existing state of things they have a voice in the government of the country, and can utter that voice with effect.”¹⁷

The Times may have been right about England, but the revolution took on a more social, more working-class and radical tone in France. Four months later, on June 25, came the second so-called social revolution.¹⁸ The broad support evaporated almost immediately. By July 2, Le Moniteur Industriel was thundering: “[F]amily, property, nation—all were struck to the core; the very civilization of the nineteenth century was menaced by the blows of these new barbarians” (cited in Scott, 1988, 117). We know how this second revolution ended—in the overthrow of the social regime, and eventually the installation of Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire.

But the cat had been let out of the bag. The movement for socialism, which “had never been more than the tail, a lively tail, of the movement for bourgeois democracy” (cited in Droz, 1972a, 16),¹⁹ would now separate itself clearly from centrist liberalism.²⁰ For Halévy (1947, 204), “Chartism had triumphed, but in France, not in England.”²¹ To be sure, this nascent movement “suffered a very great set-back after 1848” (Cole, 1953, 1:157). And an economist of the era, Louis Reybaud, a student since the 1840s of the socialist movement, would even proclaim in 1854: “Socialism is dead. To speak of socialism is to give a funeral oration” (cited in Droz, 1972a, 16). This would not be the last of such premature opining.

It would have been more audacious, even at the time, to suggest that nationalism was dead. Lovett (1982, 92) sees the revolution of 1848 as the transformation of local and regional Italian democratic movements into a “national democratic network,” but one that would then have difficulty facing up to the “social” question.²²The Hungarian nationalist movement discovered a different kind of problem. Whereas, for Kossuth, “nationalism coincided with liberalism” (Fejtö, 1948b, 133), for the Serbs, Romanians, and Croats who were located within the boundaries of Hungary, Hungarian nationalism seemed “a movement of the nobility, a family quarrel between Hungarian seigniors and the rulers in Vienna” (Fejtö, 1948b, 153).²³ Still, 1848 “put in motion the revolutionary wave in Europe” (Djordjevíc and Fisher-Galati, 1981, 106), and it would spread throughout the Balkans.

The revolutions of 1848 constituted the first world-revolution of the modern world-system. It is not that it occurred in all parts of the world-system; it did not. Nor is it that the revolutionaries achieved their objectives; by and large, the revolutions were defeated politically. It is that the revolutions centered around issues of exclusion—exclusion from the benefits of citizenship. It was in 1848 that we first see clearly that there would be two kinds of antisystemic movements, two separate ways of dealing with this exclusion: more rights within the nation (the social revolution), and separating one ethno-national group from another, dominant one (the national revolution).

And it was in 1848 that the question of long-term strategy first became clearly posed. From 1815 to 1848, the ideological struggle was considered to be one between liberals and conservatives, between the heirs of the spirit (if not of all the tactics) of the French Revolution and those who fervently sought to restore the order derived from an older way of viewing the world. In this struggle, “democrats” and “radicals” had little place. Anathema to the conservatives, an embarrassment to the liberals, they played at most a gadfly role, pressuring the liberals to be more daring (without much success, be it noted). What the revolutions of 1848 did was to open up the possibility that these democrats/radicals, who now sometimes called themselves “socialists” but sometimes also “nationalist revolutionaries,” would be more than gadflies, that they would organize mass action separate and distinct from the liberal center. This is what Chartism had foreshadowed, and this is what Halévy meant when he said that Chartism had triumphed not in England but in France.

This was a terrifying prospect not merely to the conservatives but also to the liberal center. And both reacted accordingly. Suppression of the radicals became the order of the day, not merely in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and among the various regimes in the Germanies and Italies, but in the liberal states of France and England as well. This is the “set-back” of which Cole spoke. Socialist and trade-union movements would now have a difficult ten to fifteen years. So would feminist movements. So would nationalist movements.

The suppression would be effective, but not long lasting, since all these movements would reemerge in a decade or two, and in far stronger forms. What was lasting were the lessons that the proponents of the three classical ideologies of the nineteenth century—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—would draw from the experience of 1848. The liberals drew two lessons. One was that they were in many ways closer to the conservatives than they had thought, and that alliances with radical elements often proved dangerous to their interests. But second, they determined that they had to elaborate better theoretical justifications for the distinctions that they continued to wish to make among the citizenry, between the active and passive citizens à la Siéyès, if they wished to sustain this distinction.

The conservatives drew a different lesson. The strategy of Metternich (really of de Maistre, Bonald, et al.) would not work. They were impressed that only Great Britain did not have an uprising, even though it had been the country where radical forces had been the strongest. They noticed that Great Britain had been the only country where conservatives had followed a more centrist path, ready to make some concessions, in order to absorb and co-opt at least middle-class forces into the arena of political decision making. And they noticed that this policy had succeeded, as the editorial in the Times suggested. The conservatives would now be ready to go down the path of pursuing some version of centrist liberalism, albeit a somewhat more conservative one—what historians have come to call “enlightened conservatism.”

Radicals (erstwhile democrats) drew a still different conclusion. It was that spontaneity was not enough.²⁴ If one wanted to have a major political impact, systematic and long-term organization was a prerequisite. This would lead the “movements“—an ephemeral concept—down the path of bureaucratic organizations, with members and officers, with finance and newspapers, with programs, and eventually with parliamentary participation.

Sewell (1985, 82) says that the French Revolution changed the concept of revolution from “something that happened to the state…[to] something that people did to the state consciously and with forethought.” What 1848 led the movements to see was that the “people” were unlikely to do something that mattered to the state without their prior uniting in organizational form.²⁵ This would inevitably make them focus on the state, the national political level. It would also eventually and inevitably call into question the degree to which these movements could continue to be truly antisystemic and not simply a variant of centrist liberalism, albeit a somewhat more impatient one.

The story of the rest of the nineteenth century, and indeed of a good part of the twentieth, was that the centrist liberals would theorize, the antisystemic movements (both of the socialist and of the national-liberation variety) would organize, and the enlightened conservatives would legislate. They would enact compromises, and in the process they seemed to compromise the antisystemic movements. It was the theorizing of the liberals about citizenship, however, that would make this possible. It is this story that we shall now tell.

LABOR AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

In the liberal states—western Europe and North America, and later central Europe—the strongest demand for inclusion in citizenship came from the urban working classes. It is their struggle, which they most frequently called the struggle for socialism by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, which commanded most attention at the time and since. It is fitting to start with this part of the story. I shall organize it in the temporal division of socialism as idea and as movement, a division that was suggested by Labrousse (1949b, 5): 1815 to 1851—”powerful idea (grandeur de l'idée), weak movement“; 1851 to 1871—”movement on the rise, idea in decline“; 1871 to the end of the nineteenth century—”powerful idea, powerful movement.”

We have previously noted the beginnings of labor movements in the 1830s and 1840s.²⁶ Jones (1983, 59) explains well their confused efforts: “The elements of working-class politics had to be forged together from the mixed inheritance of the Enlightenment, socialism, Dissent and traditional notions of moral economy, in a situation which had no precedent.”²⁷ What they did feel was that they were somehow the heirs of the more radical elements of revolutionary traditions.²⁸

As we know, in 1830 there was a revolution in France but not one in England. Instead, England saw the enactment of the Reform Bill in 1832. This is largely because England had no equivalent of the regime of the Ultras under Charles X.²⁹But “revolution” or not, the development of working-class consciousness began to take root in both France and England, not within the parties but outside them.³⁰ In order to do this, the nascent socialist movement had to carve out a place for corporate demands not previously admissible within the revolutionary rhetoric of the French revolution (and its generic citizen). They began to speak of “cooperation” and “association“—not of a single trade but of all “workers” as a class.³¹ Even before 1830, the need for collective action by workers came to be seen. The logic of their position derived directly from the consequences of the dissolution by the French Revolution of the guilds. The controller of production was no longer a master; he was now an employer. Whereas workers had thereby gained more freedom, they had lost all claims to the paternal solicitude of the master. To compensate, they adopted “a modified version of the corporate idiom of the Old Regime,” creating workers' guilds with rituals and older organizational forms “to assert the continuing existence of a moral community of the trade, and to maintain vigilance over conditions of labor in the workplace” (Sewell, 1979, 55). It is these journeymen who became the strongest supporters of the early labor movements. Kocka (1986, 314315) says they came largely from “urban crafts that had great continuity, stability, and cohesion, usually guild traditions,…and relatively good bargaining power.”³²

They began to use the weapon of strikes, even though strikes were illegal, through anonymous calls launched by informal social networks.³³ At the same time, the workers began to concern themselves with the “nationality” of their fellow workers, the issue of non-“citizens” as competitors in the labor market. We have already discussed the ways in which the canuts of Lyon had made the employment of “foreign” workers one of their key complaints in 1831. Some of the artisanal guildlike structures would wither after 1830, especially because of the “ever growing migration to Paris in particular” (Judt, 1986, 57). The result would be a “new identification of the worker to the nation” (Derainne, 1993, 33). There would now come to be a debate about the bases of workers' unity. Flora Tristan, who was a very strong voice for workers' unity (as well as an important feminist figure), in her pamphlet on this topic written in 1843 (1983, 53), drew an inference that would become very controversial in the history of workers' movements—support for independence movements in colonial countries, the workers as a class blending into the “people” as a construct:

If I constantly cite Ireland [the Catholic Association, headed by O'Connell] it is because Ireland is still the only country to realize that if the people want to leave their slavery, they must begin first by creating a huge, solid, and indissoluble union. For the union gives strength, and in order to demand one's rights and to bring the right of such a demand to public attention, one must above all be in a position to speak authoritatively enough to make oneself heard.

Perhaps Tristan could say this about Ireland because she was French. English workers were notably more reticent on the subject. Their only focus was England. It was Chartism that was central to English history of the 1830s and 1840s. The Charter adopted in 1838 famously made six demands, demands that had, however, long been demands of English radicals: annual Parliaments, universal suffrage, equality of electoral districts, the secret ballot, parliamentary immunity, and the removal of property requirements for eligibility for election. To the question of whether this was not at most merely a set of demands for parliamentary democracy, Dolléans (1947, 127) replies that this was merely an “appearance,” that the Charter had a “clearly socialist character,” and that, for the Chartists, “true democracy implied a social revolution.” Whether this is the way to view Chartism has long been a matter of debate. On the one side there are those, like Evans (1983, 255, 257), who see Chartism as “much the most important political movement of working men organized during the nineteenth century” and claim that it was “a critical stage in the political education of the working people.”³⁴ And there are those, like Gash (1979, 209), who see it rather as merely “a continuation under another name of the old radical reform movement.” Jones (1983, 168, 171) provides a bridge between the two viewpoints by saying that “if Chartism became a movement of workers, it became so not out of choice but from necessity.”³⁵

Still, as we know, in the end, Chartism failed. Perhaps it was, as Royle (1986, 57–58) argues, that the Chartists had “no coherent or effective strategy to offer,” torn as they were between “hopelessly naive” moral educationists and “physical force advocates, caught up in their own rhetoric.” Nonetheless, as Royle (1986, 93) himself says, “the Chartists' greatest achievement was Chartism, a movement shot through not with despair but with hope.” Chartism was an essential part of the process—crystallized by the world-revolution of 1848—of defining the great social antinomy of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth: bourgeoisie versus proletariat.

Neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat are eternal essences. They were social creations, reflecting to be sure a certain social reality, which was then reified. And as with all such concepts, it was the dominant, not the dominated, stratum that began the process of reification, contrary to subsequent beliefs. We have already discussed Guizot's role, even before the July Monarchy, in elaborating the concept of class—a concept he had taken from Saint-Simon. He did this, of course, in order to justify the political role of the bourgeoisie as opposed to the aristocracy. But he also did this to situate the bourgeoisie (which he felt would in time assimilate the aristocracy) vis-à-vis the proletariat, and to distinguish between the two (Botrel and Le Bouil, 1973, 143). If he was seeking droit de cité for the bourgeoisie, and ultimately total political control, he was specifically opposed to the inclusion of the proletariat. The droit de cité was to be reserved for active—that is, propertied—citizens.³⁶

As the bourgeoisie slowly evolved into that much vaguer and more inclusive category of the “middle class” or “classes,”³⁷ so eventually the proletariat evolved into that vaguer and more inclusive category of the “working class” or “classes.” There would come to be a great deal of resistance to explicit class language by many politicians and social scientists, because the use of such language came to be identified with a particular political position—that of Marxism—and using it therefore came to signify for many people accepting Marxist analysis and politics. But the retreat to vaguer language did not eliminate the antinomy. If anything, it strengthened it—by making it easier for individuals to pass quietly over the line—while at the same time maintaining the line firmly. For those who passed, the important thing was that there be a line, one that might keep others from passing as well and thereby undermining the newly acquired privileged position of full citizenship of those who managed to pass.³⁸

Since in the end the concept of the proletariat, even in its watered-down version of the working class, was intended to exclude, it is not surprising that the persons so designated often worked hard to redefine the terminology. For example, in Catalonia, retail-shop employees, whose working conditions were awful, refused to allow themselves to be called obrers or proletaris, insisting they were treballadors. This was because the latter term was less associated in the nineteenth century with unskilled manual labor than obrers (Lladonosa and Ferrer, 1977, 284). In Germany, the politics of naming was quite clear. From the 1830s on, the term Arbeiter began to widen from its original indication of unskilled laborer to include journeymen, and to be accepted by the latter in their politically radical phase. The self-employed craftsmen, however, resisted this category, and the workers' movements resisted including them (Kocka, 1986, 326–327).³⁹

Of course, this was a game that could be played by both sides. Scott (1988, 123124) recounts the interesting story of a report by the Paris Chamber of Commerce in 1851 that attempted to recategorize the social structure in order to delegitimize the social revolution of 1848. The object was to reduce the number of workers by including in the category of heads of enterprises all self-employed persons; all persons making goods to order who employed others, even if these others were family members and not paid; all persons making goods for “bourgeois clientele” (this included washerwomen); and all those making goods to order for more than one manufacturer. By doing this, the report eradicated the class identification of these persons as workers or proletarians, which they had manifested in the February-June 1848 period. “Written in the wake of 1848, it was intended to dispute the revolution's most radical economic and political claims and to reassert a vision of economic organization [hierarchical and harmonious] that had been severely challenged, especially by socialist theorists.” Thus it was that liberals theorized when radicals organized.

The period from the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 to the end of the 1860s was a very difficult one for workers' movements. The initial reaction of those in power was to repress anything that seemed to hark back to those revolutionary days. The defeat of Chartism and of the 1848 revolutions in turn created a sense of “disillusion” in the working classes. Jones (1983, 71) argues that “the permanence of industrial capitalism now seemed assured, and all except the most despairing of the outworkers were forced to adapt to this fact.”⁴⁰ A closer look, however, seems to indicate that adapt may be the wrong word. It is perhaps more like lie low until better times come. Dolléans (1947, 1:225) seems to me to put it more aptly when he designates the period 1848–1862 as “the fire that is brewing.”

What author after author emphasizes is the continuity between the patterns of the 1840s and those of the 1860s, as though the tactics of the workers were simply taken up again once the repression was slightly lifted. “Popular radicalism not only survived after 1848, but remained a major political force” (Biagini and Reed, 1991, 5).⁴¹ And everywhere, we continue to see a primary role for the artisans, as opposed to the unskilled factory workers. Hinton (1983, 2) says of mid-Victorian England: “In the language of contemporary social commentary, ‘skilled' and ‘organized' were often used as synonymous.”⁴²

One can of course appreciate the warning that Kocka (1984, 112) makes “against exaggerating the continuity between Handwerk and working-class history.”⁴³ And yet we find a certain “radicalization” in this period among the artisanal strata, says Sewell (1974, 88–89), especially among those who are “immigrants.”⁴⁴ Hinton's comments (1983, 5) are helpful in unraveling this seeming paradox. He sees two kinds of skilled workers: those in craft industries, whose “trade-unionism was an outgrowth of the informal community of the trade“; and those in other sectors, where “skilled status was more commonly a product of trade-union organization” rather than preceding it. The first were sometimes quite radical, for they “experienced a greater relative deprivation” (Moss, 1975b, 7) than the factory worker, but they eventually were forced out of the picture, whereas the latter were going to be the mainstay of the future socialist and trade-union organizations.

During all this time, as indeed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “fear of the masses, the concern with order, was the motif…always underlying the actions of the ruling class” (Moorhouse, 1973, 346). The question always remained for the dominant strata as for the working classes, Which tactics are optimal? From the point of view of the dominant strata, repression has its merits, but it also stokes the fire that is brewing, and eventually breeds revolt. So in the late 1860s, both Napoleon III and the British Conservative Party felt the need to loosen the constraints, to make it more possible for there to be workers' organizations and perhaps to expand a bit the de facto definition of citizenship. In a report written in 1860 for the Congress of the National Social Science Association, in Great Britain, “trade-unionism as an essay in self-government” was approved, and the authors declared that “leaders of a strike, where there is no regularly organized society, are likely to prove more unreasonable and violent than where there is” (cited in Pelling, 1976, 51). It seems an elementary bit of social science wisdom, one that signaled the beginning of an attempt to deal with the challenge to the definition of citizenship that organized working-class movements were now making. One hundred years later, another social scientist, looking back, opined that “in England lower-class protests appear to aim at establishing the citizenship of the workers” (Bendix, 1964, 67). Bendix saw this as distinguishing England from the Continent. He is probably doubly wrong. The objective was as true of labor movements in continental Europe as of those in England. And it is not true, even in England, that this was their only objective. This is, however, all they would achieve, and the liberal center in their theorizing and the enlightened conservatives in their practice endeavored to persuade them that it was all they needed or should want.

This period was the moment in which the so-called First International, the International Working Mens' Association (IWMA), was founded. It was a very small and weak organization, whose member organizations were equally weak and were pursuing objectives that were not entirely international.⁴⁵ But in terms of the evolving strategy of the workers' movement, it served as the locus of the great debate of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin (Forman, 1998, chap. 1). This debate had many aspects. But the heart of it was that the anarchists regarded the state as an implacable enemy, with which there could be no compromise, whereas the Marxists essentially had a two-stage theory of social transformation: somehow obtain state power, and then transform the world. How to obtain state power would of course come to divide the Marxists severely. But first they had to overcome the strength of the anarchist view.

The situation would evolve in the last third of the nineteenth century. Socialism became, in Labrousse's terms, a powerful movement as well as a powerful idea. So there seems to be a considerable “radicalization” of class conflict, starting with the Paris Commune and followed by the rise of socialist parties and trade unions, at least in all the more industrialized, wealthier parts of the world-system. “In 1880 [socialist parties] barely existed….By 1906 they were…taken for granted” (Hobsbawm, 1987, 116–117).⁴⁶ But it is now also a truism that after 1890 there was a general deradicalization of these movements,⁴⁷ culminating in 1914 with the war votes of all the socialist parties (with the notable exception of the Bolsheviks).⁴⁸

The picture that is offered us by most historical writing on the subject is one of a curve of militancy that went upward via popular mobilization and then downward via reformist sagacity (or betrayal, if one prefers that rhetoric). This is undoubtedly true in its crude outlines, although the upward part of the curve may never have been as great as some believe. As Michèle Perrot (1967, 702) says of so-called revisionism among the socialists of late nineteenth-century France, “In order that there be a ‘revision,' there first has to be something to revise.”⁴⁹

The question is where the roots of this so-called radical political upsurge lie—an upsurge that, in the end (by 1914), no longer seemed to threaten any of the encrusted social structures of the modern world-system. It seems reasonable to interpret this as a clash about citizenship—that is, about who was to be included in the privileges and derived benefits of being designated the kind of citizen (active) who had these rights. It was a material issue, to be sure, but it was also a question of identity and identification. The narrowness of the prevailing definitions of real citizenship in the period 1815–1848 (justified by the premise that the workers were uneducated and propertyless, and therefore could have no reason to maintain social order) provoked a “world-revolution,” which appalled the middle strata (since it threatened to go too far) and led to repression. When the pluses of repression were exhausted in twenty years,⁵⁰ there came to be more political space for popular maneuver. On the one hand, the liberal center urged the “education” of the working classes. And on the other hand, the working classes pushed for their own “education.”

This is turn led to the creation of serious organizations that sought to force the pace of inclusion of at least the male, urban working classes. These organizations had to make their demands somewhat loudly in order to be taken seriously, both by the dominant classes and by those they were hoping to mobilize politically. Thus we heard a “radical” rhetoric. This rhetoric was effective, and the dominant strata reacted by various kinds of concessions—extension of the suffrage, the expansion of economic benefits (including the nascent welfare state), and inclusion in the “nation” via the exclusions resulting from racism and imperialism. Of course, this gave the results intended—the maintenance of the system in its major outlines, and the “moderation” of the workers' rhetoric. One does not need to intrude concepts of errors of judgment (false consciousness), self-interest of a leading, bureaucratic stratum (betrayal, the iron law of oligarchy), or the special interest of the better-paid workers (aristocracy of labor) to account for a process that seems more or less pandemic, more or less inevitable in retrospect, and which occurred in quite similar form throughout the world (the more industrialized, richer part of the world in the period 1870–1914) despite all the national variations in the details of their respective histories and immediate conditions—variations that proved ultimately to be of minor importance.

There is a sense in which the “radicalism” of the post-1870 period was actually a lot less radical in spirit than the “radicalism” of the pre-1848 period. As Jones (1983, 237–238) puts it:

One of the most striking features of the social movements between 1790 and 1850 had been the clarity and concreteness of their conception of the state….It had been seen as a flesh and blood machine of coercion, exploitation and corruption….The triumph of the people would replace it by a popular democracy of a Leveller or Jacobin sort.

The concrete program, however, was “republicanism, secularism, popular self-education, co-operation, land reform, internationalism,” and all these themes had by now become part of the litany of the liberal center, at least of its more progressive flank. The late nineteenth-century movements would shift their emphasis “from power to welfare,” and with that, they were encased in a “defensive culture.” In a sense, however radical the post-1870 movements were, they were less angry than the pre-1848 movements. The lure of the reward of citizenship was becoming too strong.

The period running from the 1870s to the First World War saw the first substantial organization of the working classes into political movements (primarily socialist and anarchist) and into trade unions. It therefore became the period of a major debate about strategy. The question that preoccupied all those who organized was how the working classes might achieve their goals, and in particular how they should relate to the existing states and parliaments. There was the debate between Marxists and anarchists. And there was the crosscutting debate between so-called revolutionaries and so-called reformists. At one level, these were real debates, and they absorbed a good deal of organizational energy and time. And on the other hand, they turned out often to be less consequential debates than people at the time and since have usually assumed.

It is important to note that the strongest and the most influential movements were located primarily in the countries that were strongest economically: Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Europe and Great Britain's White Dominions. And if one adds to this list Russia, then all the debates that subsequently formed the central historical memory of the world's social/labor movements and became the reference of discourse almost everywhere took place in these countries. What is striking, when one reviews the debates in these countries, is how amazingly similar they were, despite all the important and oft-noted historical specificities of each national situation, and despite the differences in rhetorical labels that are usually used to describe them.

Let us first remember that the post-1870 period was one in which male suffrage had become widely extended. Most notable had been the 1867 extensions in Great Britain instituted by Disraeli and in Germany by Bismarck. They matched those that had previously been instituted in the Second Empire and the United States, and would soon be matched elsewhere in Europe. Of course they were still less than universal.⁵¹Bendix (1964, 63) celebrates these extensions as channeling lower-class protest to “realizing full participation in the existing political community or establishing a national political community in which such participation would be possible.” He is probably right.⁵² The question is how much we should celebrate this.

In Great Britain, which served as one of the two principal loci of the pre-1870 movements, in the view of most observers, the so-called New Unionism of the late 1880s represented a new (or renewed) militancy. Of course, as Hobsbawm (1984c, 152–153) points out, we can have a “new” unionism in Great Britain because, unlike continental Europe, “we find an already established ‘old unionism'…to combat, transform, and expand,” a new unionism that would become the founding base of the Labour Party.⁵³ The new unions were intended to include more than the artisans or those with steady, continuous wage work. They were to be “general” unions for the highly mobile, unskilled workers who lacked scarce human resources and who had been unorganized because they couldn't use the tactics of craft unions. General unions were their hope as a weapon (Hobsbawm, 1949, 123–125).

The new unionism emphasized strategies and organizational forms, close links with the emerging socialist movements, and organizing the unorganized in order thereby to create a far stronger trade-union movement. Although the new unionism is often seen as a peculiarly British phenomenon. there were in fact analogous developments in various European countries (Hobsbawm, 1984d, 19; Pollard, 1984, 58). The new unionism led to a spectacular growth of trade unions at its outset in 1889–1891, but this sudden upsurge turned out to be quite shortlived. From 1891 to 1914, the numbers did continue to creep upward, but only at a very slow pace (Hinton, 1983, 45–53, 64).⁵⁴ Why was there such a “short heyday“? For Hyman (1984, 331), “various institutional correctives [checked and] considerably reduced the potential for disorder.” For Hobsbawm (1964, 189), it was the fact that the ability of class-militant general unions to ride out slumps depended on their being “tolerated and accepted” by employers, and this in turn depended on “a more cautious and conciliatory policy.” For Howell (1983, 111), similarly, given that the new unionism succeeded best when organizing workers (gas workers, metal trades) whose work had scarcity value, they found that they needed to abandon the “ecumenical hope of large-scale general unions,” and it then followed that “prudence [was] a condition of survival.” Burgess (1975, 309) lays emphasis on the development of a trade-union bureaucracy with a different “life style” from the average worker, which made the trade unions “reluctant” to be too militant insofar as disputes with employers might “endanger” union funds, the positions of the trade-union officials, and the friendly society benefits of the members.

The upshot was that British new unionism did accomplish a few things: It helped to wean the trade unions away from the Liberal Party to the Labour Party.⁵⁵It organized new sectors of the labor force—those in which the organizers did not have to compete with already existing trade-union structures (Hobsbawm, 1984b, 166–167). And it contributed to the “narrowing of differentials” among the working classes (Hobsbawm, 1984b, 156). But in the long run, there would turn out to be “no essential difference in outlook” between the old unionism and the new (Duffy, 1961, 319).⁵⁶

One of the central issues for the workers' movement in this period was the relationship of trade unions and socialist parties—a matter of much debate and some tension. In Great Britain, the trade unions were a major organizational base of the new Labour Party and received a greater institutionalized role within the party than would be the case in most other national situations. The new unionism in Great Britain was, however, perhaps the last instance in which the central locus of militancy of the workers' movement was to be found in trade-union action per se. As of the 1890s, the parties sought in general to control the trade unions rather than the other way around.

The Second International vigorously sought to make this relationship clear. Already in 1881, the Swiss trade unions “willingly” used the metaphor of man and woman to denote the relationship of party and trade union as one of subordination (Haupt, 1981, 31). Whereas the First International had often debated the relative merits of political and economic action, the Second International now went on to make an organizational distinction between them.⁵⁷ In 1891, its Congress passed a resolution calling on all socialist parties to establish a trade-union secretariat within the party structure (Hansen, 1977, 202). As the parties sought to control the unions more closely, the latter resisted, and the “idea of trade-union autonomy gained ground” (Haupt, 1981, 43). What had always been a “problematic” relationship of trade unions engaged in “the day-to-day processes with the existing social order” and the parties with a “project of social transformation” (Hinton, 1983, viii) led increasingly to “divergence” and “friction” (Hobsbawm, 1984b, 171) between them.

Politically, the trade unions were pushed to the sidelines, and the strategic debates about degrees and forms of militancy would center henceforth within the parties. The “model party” in the world social/labor movement would be, up to the First World War, the German SPD.⁵⁸ It was the most powerful party in the Second International. It was the only party with a true mass base. It was the party of the most intense theoretical debates. When, in 1877, the SPD was able to get sixteen deputies elected to the German Reichstag, this resulted in increased repression (the antisocialist laws of 1878). It also resulted in the deflation of the anarchist case (Ragionieri, 1961, 57–62)⁵⁹ and the acceptance, at the Erfurt Congress in 1891, of Marxism as the official doctrine of the SPD.⁶⁰

From this point forward, the SPD became the locus of the grand debate between Bernstein and Kautsky. Bernstein preached a “reformism” of a party that was no longer a “sect” and argued that, with universal suffrage, the party could achieve its objectives through the ballot. Kautsky represented “orthodox” Marxism, which was presumably the “revolutionary” option.

How important was this theoretical debate? Geary (1976, 306) says it concerned “only a small group of intellectuals” and that trade unionists “often voted for party orthodoxy” because it didn't affect what they were really doing and they “disliked all theoreticians, both left and right.” Even Liebknecht, who would later be a supporter of the Russian Revolution, argued (against a Dutch delegate to the International who objected in 1893 to electoral participation) that “tactics are essentially a question of practical politics” and that there are neither “revolutionary” nor “reformist” tactics (cited in Longuet, 1913, 29). There was an upsurge of revolutionary spirit after the 1905 Russian Revolution (Schorske, 1955, 28; Stern and Sauerzapf, 1954, xxxiv, xliii), but, like the 1905 revolution itself, it didn't last.

One can sum up this historical trajectory as “radical theory and moderate practice” (Roth, 1963, 163). And the basis of this contribution was “deterministic Marxism” in its two variants (Bernstein and Kautsky).⁶¹ Roth (1963, 167) asserts that it was the “fitting ideology” for a Social-Democratic subculture, given the inability of the labor movement to “break out of its isolation.” Nolan (1986, 389) states the same thing in more friendly terms, emphasizing that deterministic Marxism “provided the promise of a revolution in a nonrevolutionary situation, a theory of revolution in a country without an indigenous revolutionary tradition.” Mathias (1971, 1:178) argues that making Marxism the official ideology of the SPD was a “precondition for the acceptance of the fatalistic interpretation of Marxism.”

The key shift was not in the terminology but in the fact that, from the 1870s on, the socialists began to demand protective legislation. After 1871, the working classes “entered into a close relationship with the nation-states” (van der Linden, 1988, 333). Nolan (1986, 386) calls this a shift from “politics to social policy.” In Germany, they were responding to “an agenda that Bismarck had set.” This had to lead over time to “a general integration of the working-class into the state” (Mathias, 1971, 1:181).⁶²

In the German case, Roth (1963, 8, 315) calls this “negative integration,” which he defines as allowing “a hostile mass movement to exist legally, but preventing] it from gaining access to the centers of power.”⁶³ In any case, Kaiser Wilhelm I repealed the antisocialist legislation in 1890 and called for an international conference to promote international labor legislation (Ragionieri, 1961, 159) He gained the sobriquet of Arbeiterkaiser by making various small “reformist concessions,” although he continued to vacillate by occasional “recourse to further repressive legislation” (Hall, 1974, 365). Roth wants to see this as quite different from what happened in Great Britain and the United States. I agree that the rhetoric was more strident in Germany, but were the ultimate results so different?

If we turn from the two “model” national cases—Great Britain and Germany—to the other major loci of growth of the socialist/labor movements, we find variation without significant difference. Everywhere the pattern is one of organizing with some difficulties in the light of state repression, rhetoric that is often radical with practice that is on the whole moderate, and a sort of “negative integration” into the national communities. In France, the heavy repression after the Commune eased up after 1875, the government recognizing the wisdom of a “social policy directed at the working class” (Schöttler, 1985, 58).

The Guesdists in France founded the Parti Ouvrier Français (POF) in 1882 and called themselves Marxists, but it was a limited version of Marxism, one still influenced by anarchism (Willard, 1965, 30). What Marxism seemed to mean most of all was the rejection of “associationism” based on class harmony and “a revolutionary strategy in the pursuit of trade socialism” (Moss, 1976, 157). What the POF seemed most to like in Marxism was the Saint-Simonian tradition of industrialism combined with a “vitriolic critique” of capitalism. They were “heralds of a transcendent future” (Stuart, 1992, 126).⁶⁴ The POF was never a mass party, unlike the later Section Française de l'Internationale Socialiste (SFIO) (Cottereau, 1986, 143). Stuart's epitaph (1992, 54) on the POF is that its story was that of “a prolonged and agonizing birth, an unpromising youth, a prosperous and hopeful maturity followed by apparent terminal crisis and final transfiguration [in 1905].” Metaphorically, might this not be said of all the socialist/labor movements—at varying paces, to be sure?

French socialists were to take another path. It was Alexandre Millerand in 1896 who first coined the term reformism (Procacci, 1972, 164), and he would be the first socialist to enter a coalition government, one headed by Pierre WaldeckRousseau under the aegis of “republican concentration” (Willard, 1965, 422).⁶⁵ The subsequent failure of the general strike in 1906–1908 (as well as the second one in 1919–1920) “marked the death of a [last] dream: revolution via the strike of workers” (Perrot, 1974, 1:71).

In any case, all the parties seemed to follow the path of de facto reformism—that is, integration (even if negative) into the political structures of their respective countries. Heywood (1990, chap. 1) calls the Spanish socialists “decaffeinated Marxists.” The Dutch party and trade unions “were clearly moving in a reformist direction” (Hansen, 1977, 199). The Italian party pursued an “edulcorated version” of the program of the German SPD (Andreucci, 1982, 221), and its great expansion in 1901–1902 occurred “under the aegis of reformism” (Procacci, 1972, 163).⁶⁶

As for the United States (and Canada), which Lipset (1983, 14) insists are different because the absence of a feudal past “served to reduce the salience of class-conscious politics and proposals,” one merely needs to change a bit of the rhetoric to see the similarities. Herberg (cited in Dubofsky, 1974, 275) showed the degree to which the relationship of the IWW (“with its stress on proletarian direct action”) to the craft unionism of the AFL was parallel to the relationship of Kautsky's “orthodox Marxism” to Bernstein's “reformism.” Laslett (1974, 115–116) makes the same point essentially about the American Socialist Party. Foner (1984, 74), responding to the literature on why there was “no socialism in the U.S.,” says that the question should really be posed as “Why has there been no socialist transformation in any advanced capitalist society?” The most striking difference in the United States (and Canada) from the western European states was the ability of the Democratic Party in the United States (and the Liberal Party in Canada) to remain the prime vehicle of working-class politics (Shefter, 1966, 270; Kealey, 1980, 273), something that might be explained more by the role of the city machines in incorporating immigrant workers than by anything else.⁶⁷

What was crucial to all the social/labor movements in the end was their drive to participate in the nation. The unification of the Parti Ouvrier Belge occurred within the framework of the struggle for universal suffrage (Sztejnberg, 1963, 214). The demands of the socialists in France in the 1880s began to center around material needs that could be met only by “an appeal to the state, or rather, to the Republic” (Schöttler, 1985, 68). The U.S. trade-union movement became national in the 1860s to 1890s in order “to demand uniform wage scales” across the country—“that is, to impose some order on capitalism from below” (Montgomery, 1980, 90; see also Andrews, 1918, 2:43–44). And in discussing the Charte d'Amiens of the French trade-union federation, the CGT, in 1906, Bron (1970, 2:132) describes the “complementary battles” of the trade unions and the socialist party. The trade unions emphasized the productive role of the workers; the socialists, “the aspect of ‘citizenship.’ “

The workers regarded themselves as the working classes. The upper strata tended to think of them as the dangerous classes. A large part of the tactical struggle on the part of the workers revolved around how they could lose the label of “dangerous” and acquire that of citizens. In Germany, after 1871, the Social-Democrats had been accused on being “enemies of the nation” and “Vaterlandlos “ (without a fatherland) (Groh, 1966, 17). They needed to overcome this label. Chevalier (1958, 461) expresses well the analytic issue, which in the end was a political issue:

Distinguishing the working classes from the dangerous classes…is made all the more difficult by the fact that the borders between these categories are unclear, and that at the uncertain frontier between them there are found many intermediate groups, of whom it is difficult to say whether they belong more to the one or the other category. How can one finally distinguish them when they depend so greatly on economic, political, or biological circumstances that intermingle them, and make persons shift, according to the years or the season or the revolutions, crises, and epidemics, from one category to the other?

One key mechanism that was widely used was to distinguish workers by the category of ethnicity or of nationality. Racism internally and imperialism/colonialism externally served the function of displacing the label of dangerous to a subcategory of workers. To the extent that this was persuasive, some workers could become active citizens while others remained passive citizens or even noncitizens. Once again, inclusion was being achieved by exclusion.

The internal exclusions are most salient in the story of the United States—a zone of constant immigration during the nineteenth century—in which immigrants tended to settle in urban areas and start as relatively unskilled laborers, while native-born Americans formed a very large part of the artisanal strata and were more likely to be upwardly mobile, with their positions being filled in behind them by immigrant (and second-generation) workers. Already in the 1850s, the social distance between the native-born artisans and the predominantly immigrant wage workers took the political form of nativist parties (anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic) that “emphasized their artisan membership as well as their Protestantism” (Bridges, 1986, 176). In the Civil War, conscripted native labor was often replaced by foreign labor, and “race antagonism added intensity to the natural struggle between employer and employed” (Ely, 1890, 62). Immediately after the war, U.S. interest in and participation in the First International was spurred by the attempt of the newly formed National Trades' Union to regulate immigration by an arrangement with the IWMA (Andrews, 1918, 2:86)—an interest, as we have already noted, that was shared by British trade unions. The workers' organizations led the agitation for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Selig Perlman (1922, 62), in his famous history of the U.S. trade-union movement, goes so far as to say that this agitation “was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor movement might have been a conflict of races instead of one of classes.”

The Socialist Party disproportionately recruited immigrant workers. On the one hand, this was doubtless because the U.S. working class of the late nineteenth century, as was noted at the time, consisted “chiefly of men and women of foreign birth or foreign parentage” (Ely, 1890, 286). But this can also account for the decline of this party when immigration was cut off and the third generation shunned linkage with their immigrant past.

The employers took advantage of this ethnic split, of course, and often used “blacks, Orientals, and women” as strikebreakers (Shefter, 1986, 228). And it is certainly true that the top place of English-speaking White workers in the ethnic hierarchy was “implicitly accepted throughout [U.S.] history” (Soffer, 1960, 151) and that disorder was regularly blamed on the immigrants. But this is not enough to account for the continued centrality of ethnic/racial distinctions among American workers. Commons (1935, 2:xvii), it seems to me, captures well the essence of the issue—the relation of U.S. unions to “Americanism“:

[Anthracite mines had “open shop” agreements with the miners.] Consequently, with the weakness of the unions the companies in 1912 discovered that their mines were being invaded by syndicalists, the I.W.W. They reversed their attitude toward the union. It was discovered that the American labor movement, however aggressive it might be, was the first bulwark against revolution and the strongest defender of constitutional government. Upon the unions, indeed, falls the first burden of “Americanizing” the immigrants, and it has done so for more than fifty years. When President Wilson saw the need for unifying a heterogeneous nation for the World War he was the first president to attend and address the convention of the American Federation of Labor. When Samuel Gompers, at 74 years of age, and fifty years of leadership, returned from his alliance with the labor movement of Mexico, to which he had gone to prevent its capture by the communists, his last words on his dying bed at the Mexican border in 1924 were “God bless our American institutions.”

The other arena in which inclusion/exclusion played a major role was outside the country—in other countries or in colonial possessions of a metropole. On the one hand, it was easy for workers in western Europe to keep within a certain radical/liberal tradition of favoring the struggles of far-off persons for their liberation. In 1844, 1,505 Parisian workers petitioned the deputies to abolish slavery in the colonies, noting that “the worker belongs to himself,” that “whatever the vices of present-day organization of work in France, the worker is free, in a certain sense” (cited in Césaire, 1948, 11). British workers saw the Crimean War as pitting “free Englishmen against the Russian serf” (Foster, 1974, 242). And in the 1860s, the British working class supported Garibaldi, the North during the U.S. Civil War, and Polish insurrection (Collins, 1964, 29–30).⁶⁸

But it is also true that the antislavery movement in early nineteenth-century England met with working-class hostility, because “black slaves were already better off than white slaves; freedom for the blacks would be bought by further oppressing the white slaves; and once freed, black slaves would become as badly off as white slaves” (Hollis, 1980, 309). And at the beginning of the twentieth century, British labor centered its critique of imperial policy in South Africa around the importation of Chinese labor to work in the Rand mines, which they saw as “further evidence of Government-sponsored blacklegging” (Hinton, 1983, 73).

The Second International was deeply split on colonial questions (Haupt and Rebérioux, 1967a, 77–283). Those like Hyndman of the United Kingdom and Lenin, who denounced imperialism at every turn, were more than balanced by such as Henri van Kol of the Netherlands, who spoke of the “necessity of the colonial reality” and merely wished to limit its “crimes,” and those like Bernstein, for whom “the colonial question [was] the question of the extension of civilization” (Rebérioux and Haupt, 1963, 13, 18). Even the Austrian socialists, so noted for their more nuanced understanding of the demands of the multiple nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were vehement in their opposition to Hungarian “separatism.”⁶⁹

In the end, even for those who took an anticolonial position like the Guesdists, it was always a “minor combat” at best (Willard, 1965, 63). What dominated sentiments was the certainty expressed by the German SPD that, when the SPD prevailed, its “victory would sweep the peasantry along behind it and thus make the advent of socialism possible in economically backward countries” (Haupt, 1986, 57). This was argued as a question of priorities. But it rang a bell among the working class as a question of inclusion among the “civilized.”⁷⁰ Socialists in colonial countries had to draw their own conclusions about priorities. When Connolly, who considered himself both a Marxist and an Irish nationalist, observed what he considered the betrayal by the European working class of proletarian internationalism in 1914, he hung a sign outside the Dublin headquarters of his party—”We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland” (Bédarida, 1965, 20)—and proceeded in 1916 to lead the Easter Rebellion.

WOMEN'S AND FEMINIST MOVEMENTS

The story of the feminist/women's movement in the nineteenth century is similar in very many ways to the story of the social/labor movement. But for the most part, it is as though these two movement families were on widely separated and largely parallel tracks, almost never crossing each other and seldom collaborating. Indeed, in many ways the social/labor movement regarded the feminist/women's movement as a rival, a nuisance, a diversion, and even quite often as an enemy. This had everything to do with inclusion/exclusion.

There were of course a few voices who saw the two struggles as not merely compatible but intertwined. Flora Tristan in the pre-1848 period spent her life preaching this. Indeed, devoted as she was to the cause of the workers, she put into her book The Workers' Union (1983, 83), written in 1843, the message that “all working-class ills can be summed up in two words: poverty and ignorance. Now in order to get out of this maze, I see only one way: begin by educating women, because women are in charge of instructing boys and girls.” She was, it must be said, a voice in the wilderness, as was Aline Vallette, disciple of Guesde, who wrote in L'Harmonie sociale on March 15, 1892, that “to renovate society, it is necessary that the two oppressed groups of society, women and proletarians, unite” (cited in Zylberberg-Hocquard, 1978, 89).

The issue seemed to the male worker in urban wage work quite straightforward. Women were paid less—indeed, before 1914, “considerably” less (Guilbert, 1966, 21)—and this posed a threat to the level of wages in general.⁷¹ The asserted threat was raised in meeting after meeting (Guilbert, 1966, 188). Despite some mythology, the feminine component of the manufacturing work force was rather large. It is estimated at 40 percent for Paris in midcentury (DeGroat, 1997, 33). Women were relegated to the more “proletarian” positions (Judt, 1986, 44–46, 50–51), partly no doubt because they were barred by the skilled artisans from entering their trades (Hinton, 1983, 31), but partly because employers thought them more productive workers with more labor discipline (or docility) and more technical dexterity than men (Berg, 1993, 41).

Male workers reacted both at a personal level and at an organizational level. Alexander (1984, 144) sees their reaction primarily “as a desire to (legally) control and (morally) order sexuality.” One should never underestimate sexual motivations, and no doubt this drive fitted in very well with the cultural mores of the time, particularly among middle-class women who favored “reducing women to unpaid work in marriage and family along with their total exclusion…from remunerated occupations” (Kleinau, 1987, 199). It is undoubtedly also the case that, among male urban wage-workers, “proletarian anti-feminism predominated” (Thönnessen, 1973, 19). The German male workers referred to women workers as Fabrikmenschen (a curious phrase, since it literally means “factory men” but had the tonality of “factory girls”) and tended to regard them as “morally depraved” (Quataert, 1979, 153). Hobsbawm (1978, 8) notes that workers' imagery evolved in the course of the century, so that by the last third of the nineteenth century the image of “inspiring women” (see Delacroix's painting Les Trois Glorieuses) with which the century had begun had been transformed into that of women who merely “suffer and endure,” while the nude male torso now became the pictorial symbol of workers' energy and power.

The First International was divided on the question. At the first congress in Geneva in 1866, the representative of Lassalle's Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeitsverein proposed forbidding female employment on the grounds of “protection” of women (Hervé, 1983, 23). The final resolution compromised by saying that women's work was to be regarded positively, but criticizing its conditions under capitalist production (Frei, 1987, 39). The workers' organizations would now place their demands on three fronts: equality of wages, the family wage, and ending dangerous workplace conditions.

Equality of wages (for equal work) is a standard and obvious demand of trade unions. But it was frequently the secret hope that, if wages were made equal (for women, for minorities and immigrants, for workers in other countries), the hierarchically dominant worker (the male citizen worker of the ranking ethnic group) would then be employed in preference, if only for cultural-historical reasons. Notice, for example, the language of the resolution in the Ninth Congress of the French CGT in Rennes in 1898:

That in all areas of life we seek to propagate the idea that the man must nourish the woman; that for the woman, widow or young girl, necessarily obliged to provide for herself, it shall be understood that the formula, for equal work equal pay, shall be applied to her;…

Keep men from taking jobs and work that belong to women, and reciprocally, keep women from taking work away from men that is their natural province. (Cited in Guilbert, 1966, 173)⁷²

By and large, women did not join or were kept out of the trade unions. In the period 1900–1914, when trade unions had grown relatively strong, it is estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of women workers in France were members (Guilbert, 1966, 29, 34). There were some efforts to create special women's trade unions, and in England these grew relatively numerous in the same period, but they were less bargaining structures than “benefit societies,” from which they were “indistinguishable” (Olcott, 1976, 34, 39).

Of course, trade unions had a difficult time justifying the exclusion of women, as can be seen in the reluctant resolution of the Fédération Française des Travailleurs du Livre, notorious for having conducted the largest number of strikes aimed at excluding women from employment. Finally, the FFTL, admitting that for economic reasons even those workers opposed to the employment of women in their own trades regularly pushed their wives to work in other trades, offered the following compromise:

1. We shall support, morally and materially, those locals that…wish to react against the exploitation of women by obtaining for them the minimum trade-union rate of pay.

2. During a transitional period…women presently employed shall be admitted to the Federation on the same conditions as men. At the end of the transitional period only women employed at the trade-union rate will be admitted. (Cited in Guilbert, 1966, 62)

A second resolution simultaneously urged “workers who were heads of families to apply the principle of the woman at home and require their companions to refuse all work outside the home.” If this seems somewhat inconsistent with the other resolution, it is because it is.

Social scientists lent their expertise to validate these positions. Dr. William Ogle explained to the Royal Statistical Society in 1890:

There are men who work because work is a pleasure to them and there are others who toil because work is a duty; but the great majority of men are only stimulated to labour that in amount or character is distasteful to them, by the hope that they may be able, in the first place, to maintain themselves, and secondly to marry and maintain a family….If therefore, the well-being of a state consists in the mature well-being of the people, a country is then most flourishing when the largest proportion of its population is able to satisfy these two natural desires. (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, cited in Lewis, 1984, 45)

The “family wage” became a central demand of the trade-union structures. In part, this demand originated in a real problem. Whereas in the eighteenth century it had been considered normal that women and children work for remuneration as well as men, the shift of many productive activities outside the home meant the loss of income from the home work of women and children. This is probably a key element in the observed dip in real household income in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Pinchbeck, 1930, 4; Wallerstein, 1989, 124).

The family wage was a simple idea. The minimum wage an adult male should receive for his waged work should be a sum sufficient to sustain him, his wife, and his nonadult children. This concept had wide appeal. It was strongly endorsed by the labor movement (Lewis, 1984, 49). It appealed to many employers, since it seemed to promise stability of the work force (May, 1982, 418). It fit in with the nineteenth-century value of the “responsibility” of men to care for their family (Evans, 1983, 281). It appealed therefore not only to the IWMA and other labor movements but to centrist politicians of all stripes. Only feminists objected to the concept (Offen, 1987a, 183).

The concept of special “protective” legislation for women workers was always a “thorny issue” (Rowbotham, 1974, 114). It seemed a virtuous idea, and it was long a preoccupation of the socialist movement (Guilbert, 1966, 413). Anarchists didn't like it, but only because it involved government intervention. Middle-class feminists opposed it in the name of equality. The women workers themselves often feared that it would result in reduced wages. The socialist movement was somewhat divided. Clara Zetkin, for example, argued that it was irrelevant since, following Marx and Engels, industrialization had destroyed age and sex as “distinctive” variables, but hers was a minority view in the German SPD (Quataert, 1979, 39). The Catholic Zentrum in Germany endorsed the family wage as part of its search for a more social capitalism. For most male workers, it served as an alibi for their unwillingness to see an equal role for women in the workplace, and hence in political society. The inclusion of male workers, they seemed to think, required that women be treated as a weaker, more vulnerable, and hence more passive part of the population.

The issue of women's rights got a somewhat more sympathetic audience in socialist parties than it received within the trade unions. The most famous and important locus of socialist debate about the relation of women and the party was in the German SPD, which Quataert described (1979) as “reluctant feminists.” The important role of the Women's Conference and the Women's Bureau within the SPD was exceptional in socialist parties. It originated as the result of the restrictive laws of the German state. The Prussian Vereingesetz of 1851 forbade women not only to join political organizations, but even to attend meetings. There were similar laws in Bavaria and Saxony (Evans, 1976, 10–11). The SPD, in order to mobilize women, was obliged to set up separate structures that could claim legally to be apolitical. This turned out to be a double-edged sword. It enabled the SPD to organize women despite the government's laws. But it also enabled the women socialists to act as an organized faction within the party, “securing representation for women's special interests.” In addition, it meant that the socialist women, precisely because they had their own organization, were extremely hostile to the middle-class feminist movements, with whom their split was “pronounced” (Honeycutt, 1979, 32–33).

The result was a curious in-between position on feminist issues. On the one hand, August Bebel wrote the most important and most cited book on women by any socialist leader, Frau und Sozialismus, one that was considered relatively “feminist.”⁷³ And although the socialist women insisted there did not exist such a thing as a “women's question“—as did the Italian, French (Guesdist), and Russian movements—unlike the other movements, the German SPD did place emphasis on the political emancipation of women (Honeycutt, 1979, 37). Also, despite Rosa Luxemburg's views (she was never involved in the SPD women's movement), they did seek various reforms designed to “alleviate sex oppression under capitalism” (Quataert, 1979, 12). On the other hand, the SPD women's movement was in fact “largely a movement of married women“—housewives and not women workers (Evans, 1977, 165). And as soon as the German government passed a new Vereingesetz and ended its restrictions on women's political activities (1908), the SPD abolished the Women's Conference (1910) and then the Women's Bureau (1912). Honeycutt's assessment (1981, 43) is that the goal that Clara Zetkin, the leader of the socialist women, had set herself “of realizing feminist ideals through the socialist movement was utopian for the period in which she lived.”

The French socialist women shared the hostility to bourgeois feminism of the German women. Louise Saumoneau, the organizer of the first Groupe des Femmes Socialistes in 1899, rejected completely any collaboration with bourgeois feminists (Hause and Kenney, 1981, 793). But, unlike the socialist women in Germany, who were nearly 20 percent of the SPD in 1900–1913, women made up only 2 to 3 percent of the party in France (Sowerwine, 1976, 4–5). On the other hand, socialism and feminism seemed less incompatible in France. First of all, there was the very strong image of women as leaders of the Commune (Rabaut, 1983, 6). Indeed, the popular image was so strong that even the bourgeois women's movements seemed tarnished by its subversive flavor.⁷⁴

Second, there was the figure of Hubertine Auclert, to whom there was no equivalent in Germany. Auclert gave a famous speech to the Third French Workers' Socialist Congress of 1879, saying that she had come “not because I am a worker, but because I am a woman—that is, one who is exploited—a slave delegated by nine millions slaves.” She appealed for an alliance between the workers and the women, ending with a peroration: “Oh, proletarians, if you wish to be free, cease being unjust. With modern science, with the awareness that science knows no prejudices, say: equality for all men, equality between men and women” (Auclert, 1879, 1–2, 16). And she did get from the congress a strong resolution in favor of “the absolute equality of the two sexes” and the right of women to work (emphasizing, to be sure, “equal work, equal pay”), albeit insisting at the same time that women had the obligation to nurse their children (Guilbert, 1966, 156–157).

But in France, too, the alliance, momentarily achieved, would ultimately fail (Rebérioux, 1978a, xvi; Sowerwine, 1978, 233–234). The split among the French socialists in 1882, generally considered to be that between a more reformist faction (the Brassists) and a more revolutionary one (the Guesdists), took as its immediate excuse a women's issue. Léonie Rouzade, a Brassist, had stood for election to the Paris Municipal Council in 1881, and the Guesdists were decidedly cool to her candidacy. This led to their expulsion from the party. The Guesdists then formed the Parti Ouvrier Français, alleging that Brousse advocated a “sex struggle” rather than a “class struggle.” The Guesdists said that to advocate women's political rights was “reformist” since they could be achieved “legally” rather than by revolution, to which the Brassists replied that men had also achieved their “rights” legally. But then, nonetheless, the Guesdists incorporated women's rights into their own project (Sowerwine, 1982, 28–45).

In the end, both the feminists and the socialists in France gave up the idea of a coalition. What weighed on the socialists was the great fear that most women were too influenced by the Church and would use their suffrage against their party (Perrot, 1976, 113). When the SFIO created a feminine auxiliary, it was primarily to prevent the spread of feminism rather than to obtain full rights for women (Sowerwine, 1978, 1).

The unhappy relationship seemed at its fiercest in 1913 with the “Couriau affair.” Emma Couriau, with the support of her husband, who had long been a militant trade unionist, sought admission to the typographers' union. She was refused, and her husband was expelled from the union for permitting her to work. A great fuss was created, and Couriau received support not only in feminist but also in some trade-union circles. The issue was then referred to the next national congress of feminism and political radicalism….Given the links between the two movements in the early days, it is hardly surprising that from the outset mainstream feminism in France opted for a course of prudence and moderation which might better be described as timidity” (McMillan, 1981b, 84). the FFTL in 1915, which, however, never took place because of the war (Albistur and Armogathe, 1977, 361). Whereas many authors have emphasized that this incident demonstrates the depth of labor hostility to the right of women to work, Sowerwine (1983, 441) views it more positively: “If the Couriau affair is ‘an indication of attitudes toward women,' it indicates not the persistence of misogyny but a step in an evolution toward egalitarianism.”

The Italian socialist movement also had a famous debate on women's suffrage, one between Filippo Turati, the party leader, and his life companion, Anna Kuliscioff, in Critica sociale. In Italy, too, the male socialists wished to delay the struggle for women's suffrage in order to achieve more rapidly universal male suffrage. And in Italy, too, they used justifications of capacity—such as, for example, that women “were absent from politics.” As Kuliscioff replied, if this is the argument, one has to ask “how many men participate effectively in politics?” And when the vote is offered to illiterate men, she said, how can one argue that the vote should not be given to women because they are illiterate? (Ravera, 1978, 77–79; see also Pieroni, 1963, 122–123; Pieroni, 1974, 9; Puccini, 1976, 30–31).

The ambivalence could be found everywhere. In England, the Labour Party was reluctant to put its support behind the move for women's suffrage, many of its supporters believing that “feminism was simply another name for increasing the privilege of propertied women” (Liddington and Norris, 1985, 28). The fear of a conservative women's vote made most Labour men “not enthusiastic” for women's suffrage (Fulford, 1957, 113). It was only in 1912 that Labour resolved not to support any further extension of the franchise that did not include women (Hinton, 1983, 79).

In the United States, there was a famous incident at the National Labor Congress in 1868, when the credentials of Elizabeth Cady Stanton were challenged on the grounds that she did not represent a labor organization. In finally accepting her credentials, the congress felt it necessary to assert that they did not agree with her “peculiar views” but that they accepted her simply because her organization was seeking the amelioration of the conditions of labor (Andrews, 1918, 2:128).

In Belgium and Austria (as well as Germany), socialist parties refused to support women's suffrage in order not to jeopardize universal male suffrage (Evans, 1987, 86–88). On the other hand, in country after country, eventually (and to some extent painfully) the socialists came down on the side of women's suffrage (Evans, 1987, 76). And in postrevolutionary Russia, the Clara Zetkin brand of “proletarian women's movement” did get the endorsement of both Alexandra Kollontai and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife (Stites, 1957, 251).⁷⁵

Still, Kennedy and Tilly (1985, 36) insist that feminists and socialists remained “at arm's length,” at least from 1890 to 1920, and indeed “became bitter enemies.” Klejman and Rochefort (1989, 231) say that “[f]rom 1889 to 1914, the relations between organized feminism and the Socialist Party never ceased being conflictual.” For working-class women the basic choice seemed always to be: “Sisters or citizens?” (Sowerwine, 1982, 1). And in the end, working-class women who were politically active were not allowed to refuse the choice.

The feminist/women's movement must not, however, be seen primarily through the prism of the social/labor movement. It had its own dynamic, albeit one that was parallel in many ways. John Stuart Mill explained this dynamic well:

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them, that any arguments against the prerogatives of sex are likely to be little attended to by the generality, as long as they are able to say to themselves that women do not complain of it. (Cited in Rossi, 1970, 214)

Still, the story didn't really start with the women but with the men. As O'Neill (1971, 6) says of Victorian men (but was more generally true throughout the nineteenth-century European world), they “taught women to think of themselves as a special class….[They] created The Woman, where before there had only been women.”

In England, in the early years of the century, women organized primarily as part of the antislavery movement, and that would perhaps pay off well for feminist organizations later. As Banks (1981, 22) suggests, their active participation in this movement “gave them valuable experience in such fundamentals of routine political activities as fund-raising and collecting signatures for petitions.” It was perhaps a little less than manning the barricades, but surely a little more than conversation in a parlor. Early Chartist politics was more radical in its tactics—it was a mass politics—and in those days women took their part. But the Chartists would be as ambiguous on women's rights (particularly suffrage) as the social/labor movement later on. While, at an early stage, the Charter's calls for universal suffrage “specifically included” women (Fulford, 1957, 38), in most later statements, “the matter was left vague” (Thompson, 1976. 132). The sentiment was that the main issue was “one of class.”

Similarly in Italy, whereas Anna Monzoni insisted on the necessity to have alongside a socialist party an organization for woman's liberation, and if the socialists did not understand that, it was because the “working class was inheriting from the bourgeoisie a new form of antifeminism,” Anna Kuliscioff (the same person who debated her companion, Filippe Turati, on the importance of woman's suffrage) argued against an “interclass” organization, which, she said, even for such a “clear objective as woman's emancipation,” was unacceptable (Bortolotti, 1978, 105).

It was Owenite socialism that provided the friendliest environment for nascent feminism. Owenism had both a “theoretical and practical commitment to women's liberation” (Taylor, 1983, xiii).⁷⁶ But Owenism was to fade out with the collapse of Owenwood in 1845, just about the time Chartism was collapsing. Owen had seen women's liberation as part of the larger “social regeneration” he had been preaching. And with the disappearance of this movement “went the ideological tie between feminism and [English] working-class radicalism.” After that, what had been seen as “twin struggles of a single strategy [became] separate struggles, organized from different—and sometimes opposing—perspectives” (Taylor, 1983, 264).

The last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth were marked by the contributions of a number of striking women intellectuals, from the feminist writings in England of Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Martineau to the cultural centrality of Mme. de Staël and Georges Sand in France to the Berlin salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Dorothea von Courland (Hertz, 1988). But it was primarily in France that we would have the stirrings of feminist movements, albeit all inside the various, mostly small, socialist movements. Indeed, Abensour (1913, 222, 330) would explain the absence of significant success for French feminist demands between 1830 and 1848 (divorce, entry into the liberal professions, political rights) as the consequence of “their firm union with socialist doctrines.”

Most notably, feminists were linked to the Saint-Simonians and to the Fourierists. The Saint-Simonians placed a great emphasis on regeneration by love, therefore by women, and at first gave women a major role in their organizational structure (Thibert, 1926, 78). They founded many women's journals: La Femme Libre, the work of a working-class Saint-Simonian woman, Désirée Veril⁷⁷; the Tribune des Femmes in 1832, in which only articles by women were published (Moses, 1982, 251–257); La Gazette des Femmes, founded in 1836 by Jeanne Deroin, which sought to combine a Saint-Simonian spirit with democratic tendencies in general.⁷⁸

Thibert (1926, iii-iv) celebrates the “sentimental and idealistic” nature of Saint-Simonian feminism and speaks of “disinterested generosity.” Moses (1982, 265) makes a perhaps more sober evaluation of what took place. She notes how, as the women came to assert themselves, the Saint-Simonian men moved to curtail their powers in the organization. But, says Moses, “ironically, the result was liberating,” because in consequence “the Saint-Simonian women emancipated themselves from male tutelage” and created the first independent women's movement in history.

Fourier linked women's liberation to the “moral liberation” that was central to his socialism. But even more important, he argued that the moral and social freedom of women had as an “essential condition” women's economic independence, hence their “right to work” (Thibert, 1926, 99, 140). It is Fourier who is generally credited with having invented the term feminism (Perrot, 1988, 33),⁷⁹ but this is controversial.⁸⁰ In any case, it is better to be remembered as the inventor of the term than to be remembered, as is Proudhon (1846, 197, cited in McMillan, 1981b, 193), the leader of the other important early socialist movement (and one that would continue to be strong throughout the century), as the inventor of the formula “harlot or housewife” (courtisane ou ménagère), for which he was denounced immediately by Jeanne Deroin, and for which he has continued to be reproached ever since (Tixerant, 1908, 186).⁸¹

Flora Tristan, as we have already noted, made a valiant effort to insist that the struggle of women and that of the proletariat were a common cause, since both women and the proletariat occupied “an inferior station” in society (Puech, 1925, 337) and therefore the two struggles were “inseparable” (Albistur and Armogathe, 1977, 284). Indeed, she said, “the woman is the proletarian of the proletarian” (cited in Rebérioux, 1978a, xix; see also Dijkstra, 1992, 178; Portal, 1983, 95).

It seemed in the world-revolution of 1848 that such appeals might at last bear fruit. In 1848, feminism reasserted itself as part of the social revolution in France and elsewhere. In France, the demands were many. Pauline Roland tried to vote in the mayoralty election in Paris and was refused the right. Jeanne Deroin petitioned to stand for election to the National Assembly in 1849. The journal Voix des Femmes bore the subtitle Socialist and Political Journal, Organ of the Interest of All Women. Its editor, Eugénie Niboyet, even had the audacity to ask that the rooms of the Bibliothèque Nationale be open to women readers (Thibert, 1926, 313, 317–318, 327). But with the exception of a few tiny Communist groups, these demands were met by a “wave of puritanism” (Devance, 1976, 92). In 1850, Deroin, Roland, and others were imprisoned for having formed L'Association des Instituteurs, Institutrices et des Professeurs Socialistes, on the grounds that this was a “secret society with political goals” (Thibert, 1926, 332–334),

In the United States, the only expression of the world-revolution of 1848 was the Seneca Falls Convention, generally regarded as the founding moment of U.S. feminism. Its famous Declaration of Sentiments of July 19–20, 1848, echoing the Declaration of Independence, begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Among the grievances listed on August 18 was the fact that women were deprived of “the first right of a citizen, elective franchise,” a franchise that was given (this complaint foreshadowing future conflicts) to “ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners” (Rossi, 1973, 416).

In Europe, the repression was severe. The June Days in France resulted in the “rejection of even limited acceptance of social change” (Thompson, 1996, 399), undoing the more liberal ambiance of the July Monarchy. The feminist press would be closed (Adler, 1979, 175). And on July 26, 1848, a decree assimilated the status of women to minors, forbidding them even to attend meetings of a political club (Tixerant, 1908, 63). In Italy, the initial sympathy for women's causes in the Provisional Government (February 25-May 4) was negated by the discriminatory measures of the Constituent Assembly (May 4–28), followed by a legislature in which there could no longer be any “illusion of improvements in the status of women” (Anteghini, 1988, 57). The German feminists, linked to the liberals, “fell victim to the repression that followed the 1848 revolution” (Hackett, 1972, 362).

The net result of 1848 was thus not merely a repression of the socialists but of the feminists as well. This did not, however, draw them together. Rather, the two “pariahs” would now, for the most part, go on their separate organizational ways. What had happened in the first half of the nineteenth century is summarized thus by O'Neill (1969, 17):

The gap between women's narrowed sphere and men's expanding one appears to have reached its greatest extent at a time when liberal and libertarian ideas were in ascendance. In both England and America the exclusion became more obvious as the suffrage was broadened, and more difficult to defend.

Of course, this was equally true of continental Europe. It is this difficult-to-defend gap⁸² that would be the focus of the feminist/women's movements from this point forward.

The housewife had now become the dominant cultural image of the role the woman was supposed to play in the modern world. The woman had lost whatever element had existed in prior epochs of being an “appreciated collaborator in the economic sphere” (Ortega, 1988, 13). Of course, emphasis should be put upon the word appreciated, for most women did not cease to “collaborate” in the economic sphere. As Hall (1992c, 68) notes, “the bourgeoisie made their wives into ladies in a position of dependence economically and subordination ideologically and then used lower-middle-class and working-class women to service their households and produce their textiles.”⁸³

In the nineteenth century, the distinction between public and private spheres of life became central to the geoculture. It was being hailed as one of the great advances of modernity, and was the logical consequence of the demand for rationality, in which “good social organization” seemed to require “a stricter definition of spaces, roles and tasks” (Perrot, 1988, 35), which in turn “served as a justification for the assignment of personal characteristics and social roles to males and females” (Allen, 1991, 29).⁸⁴ This has been called the “gendering of the public sphere,” and Landes (1988, 2) notes the difference between this nineteenth-century cultural definition and that of the ancien régime, in which, “because rights were not universal, women's exclusion from formal channels of power was not deemed to be particularly exceptional.”⁸⁵ Precisely the point: rights were now supposed to be universal, as the feminists kept insisting. In 1876, Hedwig Dohn, a German feminist, proclaimed: “Human rights [Menschenrechte] have no sex” (cited in Clemens, 1988, 1).

However, feminist movements were from the beginning caught in the conceptual dilemma that had been created for them. On the one hand, they were heirs to the universalist, and individualist, tradition enshrined in the French Revolution. But when they asked for their full rights as active citizens, they found these refused on grounds of their difference from men in some important ways.⁸⁶ On the other hand, when they decided alternatively to seek “equality in difference,” a concept adumbrated by Ernest Legouvé, a French mid-nineteenth-century feminist,⁸⁷they were doubtlessly seeking “a way to expand liberalism and to negotiate the patriarchal political world which liberalism accepted” (Caine, 1992, 53). They were also fitting in with the “new scientific representation of the body” that saw male and female bodies “as a series of binary oppositions” that were incommensurable (Poovey, 1988, 6). But in doing this, they were inevitably acceding to their role as passive citizens, accepting, if you will, the role men had assigned themselves of “benevolent patriarchs” (Offen, 1983, 257).

Navigating the channel between Scylla and Charybdis has never been easy, and it has rarely been done successfully. Viewing this from a distance, one can come to some unusual conclusions. Yvonne Turin (1989, 359) suggests that perhaps we should think of nuns as the true women's liberation movement of the nineteenth century:

They were the first students of medicine, of pharmacy, the first heads of enterprises, the first strikers, too….Totally foreign to theorizing, whether feminist or not, they made their presence felt by their daily practice, by fulfilling what they called their vocation, which pushed them to assume responsibilities, but also to get their initiatives adopted by the Church and civil society. The Church was the only structure that offered them a sphere of liberty large enough for their activities….Before acting, today's feminist asks herself if men also do what she is asked to do. If the answer is yes, she agrees. If no, she refuses. She knows how to copy, to repeat, to conform, and kills female inventiveness. The nun of the nineteenth century, a woman to the tip of her toes, invented all over the place.

And in an orthogonal but strangely complementary argument, at the other end of the cultural divide, see how Rubin (1975, 185) analyzes (and criticizes) psychoanalysis:

[Psychoanalysis] is a theory of sexuality in human society. Most importantly, psychoanalysis provides a description of the mechanisms by which the sexes are divided and deformed, of how bisexual androgynous infants are transformed into boys and girls. Psychoanalysis is a feminist theory manqué.

But neither Turin's sense of how to navigate the rapids nor Rubin's sense of how to understand how the rapids became so dangerous in the first place was central to the ways in which feminists thought about and organized themselves after 1848 and up to the late twentieth century. Feminism had to make its way in a world in which sexism was not merely legitimate but openly and aggressively argued and therefore had an impact on any and all potential allies. Rebérioux (1978b, 154) speaks of “the force of ‘cultural’ antifeminism common to all European societies in the nineteenth century and shared as well by the socialists: the [socialist] parties could function as the anti-State, but not as the anti-Society.”

Neither the scholars nor the political commentators nor the political leaders were of much help. In England, Herbert Spencer's early support for feminism (derived from his individualist ideas) was transformed into antifeminism by his discovery of the principle of Darwinian selection (Paxton 1991). Michelet's La Femme (1981 [1859], 49) includes an incredibly sexist dialogue of two men about the limitations of women, who are “brought up to hate and disdain what all Frenchmen love and in which they believe”—that is, secular values, science, the Revolution of 1789. McMillan (1981a, 362–363) points out that Michelet, Proudhon, and Jules Simon—all staunch anticlericals—in fact shared the conventional views of the Church on the role of women in the home. As for the forces of the right, they made feminism into one more example of the degeneration of values, and connected their views to nationalist themes.⁸⁸ And in Italy in 1893, Lombroso and Ferrero published a book, La donna delinquente, la prostituta, la donna normale, that talked of the intellectual inferiority of women, their innate tendency to lie, and their genetic potential for deviance.⁸⁹

Rendall (1985, 321) notes that “by 1860, the common language within which, in [the United States, France, and England], the question of women's political rights was discussed […] was still the language of republicanism and citizenship”⁹⁰—and of course not only in those three countries.⁹¹ The search for political integration into the states became virtually the only political issue of a movement that had an “overwhelmingly middle-class composition” (Evans, 1977, 34). How does one demand to be an active citizen? The answer seemed simple enough: organize, ask that laws be changed, lobby for these changes. And that is what feminists did. And if one asked why it was important to become a citizen? The answer would be parallel to the two-stage theory of Marxism: first the vote, then everything else.⁹²

The question was how to get the vote. It required organization—organization as women.⁹³ The French feminists gave names to the two possible alternative tactics. They called them the “politics of the breach” (associated with Maria Desraines) and the “politics of the assault” (associated with Hubertine Auclert). The issue was whether priority should given to achieving civil emancipation or political emancipation (Bidelman, 1982, chaps. 3, 4). As a debate about tactics, this was not too diQ erent from the reformist-revolutionary debate among the German Social-Democrats. In general, the politics of the breach was dominant. “Almost everywhere, the radicals (i.e. above all those who demanded feminine suffrage) were a minority, often strongly opposed by the ‘moderate’ majority of feminists” (Evans, 1977, 37).

The usual explanation of the moderation of feminist movements is the fact that they were dominated by middle-class women with bourgeois values. “Bourgeois mentalités predisposed them to gradual, lawful solutions” (Hause and Kenney, 1981, 783).⁹⁴ But some feminists did move on to more radical tactics. Evans (1977, 189–190) credits the example of the socialist movements and the emergence of social-democratic women's movements for inspiring those who came to be called “militant” feminists by their “aggressive tactics and intensive propaganda methods….Mass demonstrations in the streets, banners and placards, slogans and colours, and the hard-hitting aggressive approach to opponents were all tactics pioneered by the socialist movement.”

The aggressive tactics took hold particularly in Great Britain and the United States. “The [British] suffragettes smashed the image of woman as a passive, dependent creature as effectively as they smashed the plate-glass windows of Regent Street” (Rover, 1967, 20). Chafetz and Dworkin (1986, 112) argue that it was precisely this militancy and “narrowing the issue to suffrage” that enabled the U.S. [and British] movements to achieve a “mass following.” If this didn't happen in France, Moses (1984, 230) says, it was not because the French movement “burned itself out” but rather because “repressive governments repeatedly burned feminism.”

The feminists who led the struggle for suffrage were faced with groups of organized women who placed other objectives ahead of suffrage, either as a goal or as a priority. The suffragists saw these other movements as essentially less militant, more socially conservative. But some invert the analysis:

Far from radicalizing the women's movement,…the emergence of the Suffragist Movement led to a contraction of its aims and an emphasis on pragmatism and moderation which considerably narrowed the scope of the movement….The dominating role of the suffragists led to an almost exclusive concern with an issue of direct importance only to some middle-class women, in place of the concern with the problems of all women evident in the Contagious Diseases Agitation and some of the earlier work in regard to marriage laws and employment. (Caine, 1982b, 549–550)⁹⁵

The argument was not simply suffrage versus other priorities. The fundamental issue was whether, when women entered the public sphere, they were entering it in order to demand genderless individuality (equality before the law in all matters, equality in the market, equality in education and any other cultural arena) or in order to ensure the recognition of women's particular virtues and talents (and to insist that these should not be confined to a “private” sphere). This debate within the feminist/women's movement informed the nineteenth-century movements and has not ceased to this day.⁹⁶

It is important to be aware that the social feminists were in fact as concerned with political questions (i.e., questions of the law) as were the political feminists who concentrated on suffrage. For the law impinged on women's rights and possibilities in countless ways. The illegalization (as opposed to the social disapproval) of abortion was an early nineteenth-century action (Rendall, 1985, 226). And its legalization has been a women's issue ever since (McLaren, 1978a; Evans, 1977. 108). So has birth control.⁹⁷ So was, especially in the United States, the issue of temperance, in which movement many suffragists participated.⁹⁸ And when German feminists argued for kindergarten education, it was in pursuit of their model of a liberal state, based on Rechtsstaat, “which required an active role for government not just in protecting individual freedoms but in positively encouraging a sense of community.” Kindergartens were thought to promote this goal “by stimulating the child's early instinct for self-activity” (Allen, 1991, 65).

All these attempts of women to control the elements of their femaleness met one obstacle, newly important in the nineteenth century: the rise of the medical doctor as the governing expert, based on the new scientificity of medicine.⁹⁹In general, these physicians “assumed that women and men were more different than alike and that the physiological differences between the sexes translated ‘naturally’ to different social roles” (Theriot, 1993, 19). The physician, in this more secular world, succeeded the clergyman as the “keeper of normalcy” in the sexual sphere (Mosse, 1985, 10).¹⁰⁰ In particular, the new concept of the “family physician” became a mode of “direct surveillance” within the home of approved behavior (Donzelot, 1977, 22, 46). It is no wonder that even conservative women sought to emerge into the public sphere, and thereby reacquire some personal autonomy.

Of course, in the shift from religious control to medical/scientific control of behavior, we shift from a concept of “natural” behavior, from which sinners may deviate but back to which repentant persons may return, to a concept of “physiologically essential behaviors” that can be dealt with by the scientist and to a degree “controlled” or “reformed” but not fundamentally changed. Foucault (1976, 59) shows how this works for sexuality: “The [seventeenth-century] sodomite was a relapsed person; the [nineteenth-century] homosexual is a species.” It is the difference, he argues, between a forbidden act (sodomy) and a person (a character) with a past, an infancy, a mode of life (the homosexual). And of course, once one reifies these behaviors into persons/characters, one can link one kind of deviance to another, since they are all rooted in biology. And those who could do this best were not biologists (very few in number) but physicians:

Medical men had enough training in basic science to be credible as scientific mediators between the mysteries of the clinic and the vexing problems of everyday life. Doctors were also well organized, thoroughly secular and political in their outlook, and fierce defenders of their professional and social prerogatives. (Nye, 1984, xi)¹⁰¹

Of course, the feminists were divided over what to emphasize in the public sphere. For some it was the “maternal metaphor” and the sense that “familial and maternal roles exert a positive influence on women's public and private behavior” (Allen, 1991, 1, 244). Some felt that the discourse on marriage and the family ended by confining women to a women's sphere, although very few advocated “free love.” Either way they intended to strike “at the roots of…patriarchy” (Basch, 1986, 36) and create more space for women.

The last important public arena in which women sought to play a specifically feminine role was geopolitics. Women formed peace movements, often insisting that it was because women, unlike men, abjured military traits, and because they were “maternal,” that they refused to see their sons die in pointless wars. Pacifism became a woman's specialty, with a special international organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which was formed in 1915 in the midst of the First World War to protest against the war.¹⁰²

The state action that women had the least ability to affect, because it was not a matter of legislation, was census categories. In late nineteenth-century Australia, married women were all categorized as dependents, “a political act carried out in the interests of working-class men for the purpose of labor-market closure” (Deacon, 1985, 46). Such a classification had become widespread: “By 1900, the notion that married women without paying jobs outside the home were ‘dependents’ had acquired the status of a scientific fact” (Folbre, 1991, 482). When social science concepts are legislated, they have an effect and gain a degree of legitimacy that carries great weight in the day-to-day functioning of the social system.

ETHNIC AND RACIAL MOVEMENTS

We have seen that the social/labor movements had great difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of the feminist/women's movements in their demands for the rights of active citizenship. In a similar manner, the feminist/women's movements had great difficulties in accepting the legitimacy of the ethnic/racial movements in the latter's demands for the rights of active citizenship. It was as though there weren't enough room on the ship to accommodate everyone. Or perhaps the better metaphor is an unwillingness to accept the idea of a one-class ship—citizens all, citizens equal. In the nineteenth century, this second organizational conflict was to be found primarily in the United States, where the oppression of the Blacks played such a central role in political tensions and therefore gave rise to Black social movements. The struggle for Irish rights in Great Britain posed a parallel issue, except that it included a demand for political separation that was largely absent in the case of the Blacks in the United States.

From the point of view of the dominant strata, the issue of women's rights and that of rights for Blacks (and indeed for other ethnic “minorities”) were not fundamentally different. Indeed, it often seemed that they fused the perceptions:

Republican gender ideology eased the development of a racialized citizenship. Gender ideology opposed manhood to womanhood, fastening manhood to productivity and independence and womanhood to servility and dependence….By assigning feminine traits to ethnic men, old-stock Americans not only neutered allegedly servile and dependent men but marked them as a peril to republican liberty as well….The flip side of dependent womanhood was virtuous motherhood; the flip side of dependent manhood was the germ of tyranny. (Mink, 1990, 96)

In the early nineteenth century, women were quite active in the abolitionist movements, especially in Great Britain and the United States. It was a period in which women's rights were deteriorating everywhere—in the case of the United States, “dramatically” (Berg, 1978, 11). It should be remembered that the first formal exclusion of women from the vote was in the British Reform Bill of 1832, which was intended to enfranchise some who did not have the franchise before. But in doing this, the bill specified “male persons,” a phrase that had never before been found in English legislation. This phrase “provided a focus of attack and a source of resentment,” (Rover, 1967, 3) out of which British feminism would grow.¹⁰³

Women turned quite pointedly to the concept of “natural rights,” which was the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in order to lay claim to their freedom. Abolitionism was also based on the concept of “natural rights,” and the abolitionist movement “served as a catalyst which transformed latent feminist sentiment into the beginnings of an organized movement” (Hersh, 1978, 1). Abolition, of course, involved the ending of slavery, and thus the entry into formal citizenship of those who had been slaves. But since, as we have seen, there were de facto two levels of citizens, the active and the passive, the immediate question was into which of the two categories the liberated slaves would be placed.

This was the kernel of the debate over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution following the end of the Civil War. President Lincoln had emancipated the slaves on January 1, 1863 (actually not quite all the slaves, but most of them). The Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, made slavery unconstitutional. The Fourteen Amendment, passed in 1868, declared that if the right to vote was denied in any states to citizens over twenty-one who were “male inhabitants” of that state, the basis of representation of that state would be reduced in Congress. And the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, declared that the right to vote shall not be abridged “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The feminists saw the Fourteenth Amendment as a “political setback” because for the first time the world male was included and thus for the first time women were “explicitly excluded from politics” (Ryan, 1992, 20). This was precisely parallel to what had happened with the British Reform Act of 1832. The franchise was enlarged, and in the process women were consciously and specifically excluded. The women, of course, argued that extending the suffrage should be done for all that were excluded, and at the same time. Wendell Phillips, one of the leaders of the U.S. abolitionist movement, had said in May 1865 that the demands of women's suffrage should not be pressed at the moment, for “this is the Negro's Hour.” This famous statement received a very strong and almost equally famous response from Elizabeth Cady Stanton in a letter to the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard on December 26, 1865:

The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were willing to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see “Sambo” walk into the kingdom first….

It is all very well for the privileged order to look down complacently and tell us, “this is the negro's hour; do not clog his way; do not embarrass the Republican party with any new issue; be generous and magnanimous; the negro once safe, the woman comes next.” Now, if our prayer involved a new set of measures, or a new train of thought, it would be cruel to tax “white male citizens” with even two simple questions at a time; but the disfranchised all make the same demand, and the same logic and justice that secures Suffrage to one class gives it to all.

The struggle of the last thirty years has not been on the black man as such, but on the broader ground of his humanity. (Gordon, 1997, 504–505)¹⁰⁴

The women suffragists did not stand by mute. They managed to get the New York State Constitution in 1867 to eliminate the word malealong with white, over the objections of Horace Greeley (O'Neill, 1971, 17). And in Kansas in 1867, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony supported the campaign of George Francis Train, a known racist, who, however, advocated women's suffrage.¹⁰⁵ In this struggle of the women with their long-time allies in the fight against slavery—the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, the former slaves—”the women were defeated in every encounter” (Griffith, 1984, 118).

Not all women leaders took the Stanton-Anthony position. Lucy Stone argued that “if the women could not win their political freedom, it was well that the Negro men could win theirs” (Kraditor, 1967, 3). The outcome was a profound split in the feminist movement. In 1869, Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, with more links henceforth to the Democratic Party. And Stone and Henry Ward Beecher formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, with more links to the Republican Party. The NWSA had the more social analysis, arguing that women's oppression was due to marriage and the sexual division of labor. The AWSA restricted itself to the central political issue of suffrage (Buechler, 1990, 50).¹⁰⁶

As the women's movement became more conservative on all social/labor issues in the second half of the nineteenth century, so did it on all ethnic/racial issues within countries (as in the United States)¹⁰⁷ or colonial issues (as in Great Britain).¹⁰⁸ In the course of this conservative shift, many feminists abandoned the “natural rights” argument. In the United States, they began to argue that women be given the vote “to balance the impact of the foreign born” (Berg, 1978, 269). When the NAWSA in 1903 came out for an “educational requirement” for the vote (to the notable but lonely dissent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman), they had shifted from campaigning to extend the franchise to a proposal “to take the vote away from some Americans—Negroes in the South and naturalized citizens in the North” (Kraditor, 1965, 137; see Flexner, 1975, 316).¹⁰⁹

To the antifeminist eugenicists, strong in both England and Germany, who argued against suffrage on the grounds that high fertility was essential for a superior race, some feminists felt it appropriate to respond that “unless women were granted their demands for a new social order their refusal to bear children would result in racial decline” (Rowbotham, 1974, 106).¹¹⁰ The so-called Ruffin incident in 1900 illustrated the dominant tone. At the Milwaukee meeting of the National Federation of Women's Clubs, the Women's Era Club was admitted as a new member. When Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin showed up as its representative, the Executive Committee realized that this was a club of Black women and revoked the decision. Mrs. Ruffin was told she could enter the convention as a delegate of the Massachusetts State Federation, a “White club” of which she was a member, but not as a representative of a “colored club.” The incident degenerated to the point of someone trying to snatch away her badge—unsuccessfully, since she resisted—but she then refused to attend (Moses, 1978, 107–108).¹¹¹

At the height of this tension, some suffragists resorted to crude racism. For example, they issued a poster of a “brutish-looking Negro porter sitting next to a refined-looking White lady” with a caption that read, “He can vote; why can't I?” Of course, this received the obvious reply from antisuffragist men that the presumed infusion of intelligent votes by granting the vote to White women would be undone by the granting at the same time of votes to Black women. And in 1910, in the Atlantic Monthly, one antisuffragist wrote: “We have suffered many things at the hands of Patrick; the New World would add Bridget also. And—graver danger—to the vote of that silly, amiable uneducated Negro, she would add (if logical) the vote of his sillier, baser female” (Kraditor, 1965, 31). It did not help that Blacks like Mrs. Booker T. Washington would plead for consideration on the grounds of the moral superiority of Blacks to immigrants.¹¹²

The First World War was in many ways a political turning point for feminist movements. In many countries, they had by then or at that time obtained the vote. And with that, the feminist/women's movements seemed to go into serious decline. One reason, of course, is that the process of mobilizing to obtain the vote had transformed the women's suffragist worldview from one that saw the suffrage “as a means of challenging traditions that were oppressive to a view that embraced many of those traditions and built on them to develop arguments for the vote” (Buechler, 1987, 78–79).¹¹³ Evans (1977, 227) notes that in the United States, Prohibition and women's suffrage were voted in at virtually the same time, and largely supported by the same people:

Both were associated with Populism and Progressivism. Both represented an attempt by middle class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to control the blacks, the immigrants and the big cities. They were a response to what was felt as a growing threat to the supremacy of American values. They achieved victory in the war not least because with the conflict against Germany and—to an immensely greater extent—the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the revolutions in Central Europe at the end of the war, the fear of the subversion of values by the Protestant middle classes reached panic proportions.

If citizenship—that is, active citizenship—was difficult to achieve for workers and women, it was even more difficult for persons of color (or other groups defined by some status-group characteristic and treated as somehow inferior). The intellectual justification for this had been building up since the beginning of the capitalist world-economy.¹¹⁴ But it was only in the nineteenth century that the theme of superior and inferior “races” was constantly elaborated and considered to be by Whites virtually self-evident. Above all, the previous theories of race all allowed for some possibility of movement—for example, via “conversion.”¹¹⁵ “Beginning in the nineteenth century,…implicitly or explicitly, there was a rupture in humanity; groups ‘are’ and no longer have a mobile status” (Guillaumin, 1972, 25).

The racial divide was made almost inevitable from the beginning by the forms in which class ideology evolved.¹¹⁶ When commoners asserted their rights to citizenship both in England and in France, one of the arguments they sometimes used was that the aristocrats were “strangers” and not of native origin. This was the theory of the Norman Yoke, put forward in England since the seventeenth century,¹¹⁷ and the theory of the distinction between the “race gauloise” and the “race franque” in France, which had been bruited for some time but became prominent during the French Revolution.¹¹⁸ A parallel argument emerged in Italy with Etruscomania (Poliakov, 1974, 65–66). But if the aristocrats were to be excluded from active citizenship on the grounds of their foreign origins, how much more obviously would persons of color be so excluded? Jus sanguinis as opposed to jus soli is by definition exclusionary and inevitably racist. Still, if there existed the theme of the racial superiority of commoners, there was of course an even stronger one of aristocratic “blue bloods” and their natural rights.¹¹⁹

If race became a theorized concept in the nineteenth century, and racism an institutionalized practice, it was the result primarily of the centrality of the concept of citizenship. For citizenship as a concept had two logical consequences: It led states to emphasize and to predicate and insist on homogeneity as the only sound basis on which to justify the theoretical equality of all citizens. And it led states to justify their political domination of other states on the grounds that their particular homogeneous quality incarnated a higher degree of civilization than that of the dominated state, equally homogeneous but inferior.

The organic quality of the nation is inherent in what we have come to call Jacobinism, the key concept of which is that there should exist no intermediary bodies between the state and the individual. All individuals being equal, they have no public (or state-relevant) qualities other than that of being a citizen. Groups, however formed, no matter what their basis, do not have legal or moral standing as such. Gilroy (2000, 63) calls the resulting nation “a violent, organic entity of a new type manifest above all in the working of the state.” This organic entity represented progress. Bourguet (1976, 812) analyzes how this may be noted in the Statistique des Préfets of the year IX (1800):

Progress was thus defined as the march toward a society ever more homogeneous, the triumph of man over nature, of the uniform over diversity.…The philosophy of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution forged this ideal of a rational society, from which the abnormal, the pathological, the different were to be excluded.

It would not be difficult or even illogical to transform the concept of organic qualities into different ones for each nation and, more generally, for a difference between the civilized (European) nations taken together and all the others. The slide from a created homogeneity to a culturo-genetic organic reality, which could not be easily changed, was not difficult, either. A good example is that of Gustave Le Bon, who, in his 1886 work on race psychology, defined the greatest danger to the organic nation as that of assimilation—of criminals, of women, of ethnic groups, of colonials (Nye, 1975, 49–50).¹²⁰ Thus did we go from an organic whole that legitimated the equality of all citizens to an organic reality that justified a hierarchy among those citizens. Once again, from citizens all to an active/ passive distinction. At which point, those excluded could demand inclusion. But they could also embrace the negatives, as angry riposte, rhetorical ploy, or organizer of identification.¹²¹

The nineteenth century was the apogee of Europe in the world. “[N]ever did white men of European descent dominate [the world] with less challenge” (Hobsbawm, 1975, 135).¹²² This was based on their military power, no doubt, but it was secured by their ideological constructs. “Europe had been ‘Europeanized’ by the construction of a unifying grid of civilization, against which all other cultures could be measured and classified” (Woolf, 1992, 89).¹²³ As the states sought to create homogeneous nations of citizens, they simultaneously sought to create a White (European) race, in the “crusade against the backward areas of the world” advocated by Saint-Simon (Manuel, 1956, 195).¹²⁴ And the crusade involved colonization: “The identification of colour with less than human became…an essential part of the process by which the French defined their role as colonizers” (Boulle, 1988, 245–246).¹²⁵ Of course, this was equally true within countries. Jordan (1968, xiii) notes that, in post-Revolutionary America, what the intellectuals did “was, in effect, to claim America as a white man's country.”

The concept of a racial hierarchy received the legitimation of science, itself the great cultural icon of the nineteenth century. Science did this by the “confusion of sociological reality and biological reality” (Guillaumin, 1972, 24),¹²⁶ egregious for avowed racists like Gobineau but evident in only milder form among centrist liberals.¹²⁷ In the mid-nineteenth century, “polygenism” enjoyed a vogue among anthropologists, despite the fact that it defied even biblical views. Or perhaps just the contrary: one of the reasons polygenism appealed was that it seemed more “scientific” than the book of Genesis.¹²⁸ Todorov (1989, 3) sees this “scientism” as somehow a betrayal of the Enlightenment's “basic principle, the triumph of freedom over determinism,” which he claims “refuses to subordinate what ought to be to what is.” But Cohen (1980, 210), it seems to me, is more correct in asserting that the Enlightenment thinkers left “unresolved” the debate on whether differences between “peoples” were environmental or biological in origin. The question remained unresolved in public debate until 1945, and perhaps, albeit more sotto voce, to this day.¹²⁹

One of the key scientific notions that contributed to this biological interpretation of social reality was the concept of the Aryan. It was originally and basically a linguistic concept—the discovery by nineteenth-century linguists of the links between a large series of languages: almost all of those that were spoken in Europe, in Persia, and some spoken in South Asia. Linguists call this family of languages Indo-European. In 1814, Ballanche suggested substituting the study of Sanskrit for the study of Latin. This was in fact to take the side of language as it was created by humans against language as revealed by God. Linguists like Schlegel and Grimm were discovering the incredible complexity of what had been thought of as “primitive” languages (Schwab, 1950, 190–191). During the nineteenth century, Aryan theory came to be “in the main current of scientific progress” (Poliakov, 1974, 327–328).

As the European powers moved into a more active imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, the racist ideas that had previously supported slavery were “dressed up in a new pseudo-scientific garb and given a popular mass appeal” (Davis, 1993, 73). The concept of the Aryan now became the justification of European domination of the non-European world. The concept of the Aryan then met up with the concept of the Oriental.

Gilroy (2000, 72) suggests that all this scientific and pseudoscientific theorizing added up to what he calls “raciology,” which he defines as the “variety of essentializing and reductionist ways of thinking [about race] that are both biological and cultural in character.” It is important to stress that the essentializing is just as pernicious if it is cultural as when it is biological.

Racist theorizing bred antiracist movements. But it must be admitted that such movements were in fact quite weak in the nineteenth century, much weaker than the social/labor movements and the feminist/women's movements. And in the end, they got even less support from the liberal center than did the other kinds of movements. In part, this may reflect the even greater strength of racist ideology than of ideologies of bourgeois or of male dominance. In part, it reflected the numerical weakness of those as the bottom of the racial hierarchy in Western countries. This was not true of the United States, but then the United States was the country where precisely racist ideology was most deeply rooted, because it was the country first of slavery and later of Jim Crow.

The difficulty of the centrist liberals in confronting racism was their acceptance, fundamentally, of the active/passive distinction, which they framed as the difference between the inherent potential of all humans to be civilized (hence active citizens) and the current level of those who had not yet achieved their potential (hence passive citizens). They assumed that those with potential would take “generations—even centuries—to catch up, even given the most careful, paternalistic attention from benevolent Anglo-Saxons” (Bederman, 1995, 123).¹³⁰ This could be seen in the equivocation of Frances Willard, head of the U.S. temperance movement, on issues of racial equality within her own organization, and the strained public disputes she had with Ida B. Wells, Black woman leader, when both of them conducted speaking tours in Great Britain (Ware, 1992, 198–221). This could be seen in the choices made by workers’ and nationalist movements regarding how boldly they would be willing to be antiracist.¹³¹

It was extremely rare to hear the kind of statement that Eugene V. Debs (1903, 255, 259), the American socialist leader, made:

The whole world is under obligation to the negro, and that the whole heel is upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized. The history of the negro in the United States is a history of crime without parallel….We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colorless.”

What is more pertinent is to remember that the nineteenth century was “an age of synthesis.” And that if Marx synthesized economics and Darwin biology, it was Gobineau who synthesized racism, with at least as much effect (Cohen, 1980, 217).

The racist binary split that was theorized was intertwined with the binary splits of sexuality. As Bederman (1995, 50) says, “ ‘[T]he white man’ represented ‘civilization’ as a single human being defined equally by his whiteness and his manliness.” It seemed always important to connect racial differences and ranking with differences in sexuality. This was logical insofar as one was making a biological case for hierarchy. Mosse (1985, 133–134) notes how, from the beginnings of a racist discourse, “the description of blacks included their supposed inability to control their sexual passions.”¹³² To regard the male racial inferior as someone who cannot control his sexual impulses served also to reinforce the man-woman binary distinction. Not only did it give a further excuse to the White male to act as the protector of the White female, but it also allowed the White male to treat the Black male as he would treat a female.¹³³ And should the White male somehow falter, he would then be taxed with “neurasthenia,” which was seen as a “bodily weakness” that needed to be cured.¹³⁴

Sexuality was in turn linked to nationalism. The prevailing nineteenth-century concept of bourgeois “respectability” spread to all classes via nationalism, which “hardly wavered in its advocacy of respectability.” But at the same time, to be “abnormal” was to be not respectable. Enter the physician as “the keeper of normalcy” (Mosse, 1985, 9–10). The full circle of binary constraints thus englobed class, gender, race, and sexuality—all mechanisms of limiting the pervasiveness of citizenship. Nationalism required giving precedence to those who would, who could be active citizens.

Difference and inequalities of persons of different social origins—orders (Stände, Estates), class, gender, race, and education—were not invented in the nineteenth century. They had long existed and had been considered natural, inevitable, and indeed desirable. What was new in the nineteenth century was the rhetorical legitimacy of equality and the concept of citizenship as the basis of collective governance, as the centerpiece of centrist liberal ideology. This led, as we have seen, to the theorizing of the binary distinctions, the attempt to freeze them logically, to make de facto transiting across the boundaries not merely against the rules of society but against the rules of science. What was new as well were the social organizations created by all those excluded by these binary reifications in order to secure their liberation, or at least a partial liberation, from the legal constraints. Each success of a particular group seemed to make easier by example and more difficult in practice the attempts of the next claimants of liberation. Citizenship always excluded as much as it included.

The nineteenth century saw the creation of our entire contemporary conceptual apparatus of identities. Once rule was no longer an apparatus guaranteed by heritage—a system whose legitimacy, if not whose reality, the French Revolution had definitively undone—identities were required to delineate who had and who didn't have the right to power and wealth. The identities of the powerful were the most urgent. They were, however, relational—that is, they identified not only who they were but who they were not. In creating their own identities, the powerful thereby created the identities of the others.

The concept of the bourgeois preceded and provoked the concept of the proletarian/worker. The concept of the White preceded and provoked the concept of the Black/Oriental/non-White. The concept of the masculine male preceded and provoked the concept of the feminine female. The concept of the citizen preceded and provoked the concept of the alien/immigrant. The concept of the specialist preceded and provoked the concept of the masses. The concept of the West preceded and provoked the concept of the “rest.”

Concepts preceded and provoked organizations. But organizations institutionalized concepts. And it was organizations/institutions that guaranteed heritage for some and an oppositional role for others. Of course, all these categories were ancient, but they had not been previously defining concepts of one's identity in the modern world. Before the nineteenth century, identities were still a matter of “orders” (Stände), and persons were defined by their family, their community, their church, their station in life. The new categories were the mark of the new geoculture of the modern world-system, informed and dominated by the ideology of centrist liberalism, which came in the course of the nineteenth century to dominate mentalities and structures.

Liberalism as Social Science

The values liberals hold dear are absolute not relative values….Where recognized, the liberal order of justice is eternal, immutable and universal.

—D. J. MANNING (1976, 79)

I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present or nothing but the past.

—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (1926, 16)

[W]e tend to overstrain a new principle of explanation.

—FREDERICK A. VON HAYEK (1952, 209, N. 9)

The century stretching from the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of the First World War has been called the Age of Steam, the Age of Nationalism—and the Age of the Bourgeoisie. Defensible names all, but it might well be called, too, the Age of Advice.

—PETER GAY (1993, 491)

The French Revolution, as we have been arguing, had enormous consequences for the realities of the capitalist world-economy. It led to the construction of the three modern ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—and then to the triumph of centrist liberalism as the basis of the world-system's geoculture. It led to the construction of the liberal state in the core zones of the world-economy. It led to the emergence of the antisystemic movements and then to their containment. And it led to the creation of a whole new knowledge sector: the historical social sciences. Hayek sums up (1941, 14) the impact of the French Revolution on our knowledge systems thus:

In the first place, the very collapse of the existing institutions called for immediate application of all knowledge which appeared to us as the concrete manifestation of that Reason which was the Goddess of the Revolution.

In this field, too, centrist liberalism would come to be triumphant. It is the story of this other pillar of the nineteenth-century world-system (one that lasted indeed for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century as well) that we wish to tell now in order to complete the picture of this triumph of liberalism in the nineteenth century.

The real social world changed remarkably during the nineteenth century. But the ways in which we perceived, analyzed, and categorized the world changed even more. To the extent that we do not take cognizance of the latter, we exaggerate the former. What had changed most in the real social world was the wide acceptance of the twin doctrines that were consecrated by the French Revolution—the normality of change, and the sovereignty of the people. For those who were immersed in the politics of the world-system, it now became urgent to understand what generated normal change in order to be able to limit the impact of popular preferences on the structures of the social system. This is the task for which the historical social sciences and its new conceptual language were invented.¹

To be sure, social analysis and social theorizing were ancient activities, and eighteenth-century Europe in particular was the locus of important theoretical debates that we might find useful to read still today, were we to read them. However, this prior tradition of social analysis was not what we call today social science. The social science that was invented in the nineteenth century is the systematized, organized, and, yes, bureaucratized research on how our social systems operate, and in particular on how the modern world-system operates. This “social science” was conceived of as a knowledge activity that was to be distinguished from, and somehow situated between, “humanities” or “letters” on the one hand and “natural science” on the other (Lepenies, 1989).

THE INVENTION OF THE “TWO CULTURES“

The period between 1789 and 1848 was one of great confusion, in terms of both the content of the emerging ideologies and the content and structure of the emerging knowledge systems. Neither the terms to be used nor the boundary lines to be drawn, nor even the number of basic categories (the key question being whether there were two or three) had yet been clearly decided, and certainly these were not yet in any way institutionalized. At that time, these political and intellectual battles took place for the most part in a geographically very restricted arena: primarily in Great Britain and France, and secondarily in the Germanies. the Italies, and the United States.

Social science did not emerge solely in the shadow of the political consequences for the world-system of the French Revolution. It also emerged in the context of a several-century-long transformation of the knowledge systems that had led, was leading, to a consecration of a concept that we would later call the “two cultures“—a term popularized much later by C. P. Snow's famous 1959 Rede lectures at Cambridge (1965).

Once upon a time, in Europe as elsewhere, there was only one knowledge culture—the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful. It was not divided into differing and opposed epistemologies. Rather, there was a continual struggle as to who would control this single knowledge culture. In medieval Europe, the Church laid claim to being the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. It claimed a privileged access to God's truth. In a sense, all knowledge in its view was theological. When Europe rediscovered, primarily via the Arabo-Muslim world, the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, the Church sought to absorb it as part of theological knowledge, as for example by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The creation of the modern world-system was accompanied by a long effort of nontheologians, who called themselves philosophers, to liberate themselves from the heavy hand of the Church. They argued in self-justification that human beings could acquire knowledge through the direct use of their intellects without passing through the straitjacket of revealed knowledge that had a special institutionalized guild of interpreters—the theologians. The philosophers argued that there were, as the Church had said, natural laws—of truth, goodness, and beauty. The philosophers insisted that they could perceive these natural laws as well as (if not better than) anyone else. Gradually, between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the philosophers were able to push the theologians aside and gain equality, even primacy, of place as the purveyors of knowledge.

Among the more practical persons involved in the economic and political institutions of the modern world-system, it was not clear that the philosophers offered much greater help than the theologians. Their work seemed too abstract, with too little immediate practical consequence. The universities, which had originally been the bailiwick of the theologians, were sorely weakened by the struggle of the philosophers and the theologians, and receded as a locus of the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Other institutions, like the Collège de France and the Royal Society in Great Britain, emerged as substitutes.

By 1750, there was great confusion and uncertainty about where and how knowledge could be constructed. There was even greater confusion about the names that could describe knowledge categories. There were a large number of terms that described phenomena we today call social science, and they were used indifferently and almost interchangeably.²

The natural scientists now began to assert that the search for truth could not depend on the proclamations of either theologians or philosophers but had to be located in the concrete world of empirical observations. Such observations, they argued, could lead to hypotheses that could be verified by other natural scientists and offered as tentative laws, which could then be applied to the solution of practical problems.³Although the natural scientists still suffered from lower prestige as of 1800,⁴ their arguments nonetheless began to persuade more and more people. Turner (1974, 2:524) argues that, by 1820, wissenschaftlich had become “the supreme scholarly accolade” in Germany.⁵

There was, to be sure, resistance to the rising prestige of science. Bonald had already in 1807 noted unhappily in Des sciences, des lettres et des arts that this was happening. As Lepenies (1989, 9) notes, he saw “in the widening divorce between science and literature a sign of modernity and thus a symptom of decadence.”⁶Carlyle, on the other hand, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1829, seemed far more sanguine about what was happening. He noted that

metaphysics and moral sciences are falling into decay, while the physical are engrossing every day more respect and attention….[W]hat cannot be investigated and understood mechanically cannot be investigated and understood at all. (Cited in Ross, 1962, 69–70)

In a certain sense, the organizational objective of the natural scientists (the word did not yet exist) was to secede from the combined blur of knowledge activity and create a haven for certain kinds of activity from which others were to be excluded. The natural sciences presented themselves as the sole guardian of the search for truth. They were to be distinguished from letters or philosophy, which was, in the view of the natural scientists, something quite different from the activity in which they were engaged. To succeed in this intellectual “divorce,” the natural scientists needed a secure institutional base. They began to ensconce themselves in the universities and to create organizational niches in newly created faculties of natural science.

Once the natural scientists went down this path, the “humanists” felt impelled to respond defensively, by seeking to establish similar organizational niches (Lee and Wallerstein, 2004, esp. chaps. 1–3). In this way, the university began to revive as a locus both of the production and of the reproduction of knowledge systems. But it was a different kind of university than its putative ancestor, the medieval university. By the eighteenth century, the university had descended to being a site, perhaps primarily a site, of “brawling students” (Ziolkowski, 1990, 220–236). In the nineteenth century, it would be transformed into a professionalized university quite different from the medieval university. Scholars earned their basic income within it, and received full-time appointments in what were beginning to be the units of organization we would come to call departments and which presumably were based on distinctions between disciplines. In these departments, the students were now full-time as well and pursuing serious study.⁷

Such a structure took a while to construct. It would not be easy. Oxford adopted new statutes in 1800 and 1817, creating honors both in Literae Humaniores (classical studies, history, languages) and in science and mathematics (Engel, 1974, 1:307). The distinction between faculties of letters and of science dates from 1808 in France (Aulard, 1911). Nonetheless, as late as 1831, Sir William Hamilton still believed it necessary to write an article, “Universities of England—Oxford,” in the Edinburgh Review (53, June, 384–427) in which he called upon the university to realize that “education had to be conducted by professionals who taught one subject they knew well, rather than by college tutors each of whom had to teach all subjects, though not qualified to teach any particular subject in depth” (cited in Engel, 1974, 313). The scholars were now beginning to find their appropriate and different places within the universities. The economic base for scholars now became double—university appointments and royalties from books, the latter more important for the humanists than for the natural scientists.⁸

The epistemological difference and quarrel between “science” and the “humanities” was being institutionalized. Science was being defined as an activity empirical in method, in search of general laws in objective, and consequently as quantitative as possible in description. The humanities were being defined as hermeneutic in method, considering general laws to be reductionist illusions, and consequently qualitative in description. Later, we would come to call this the difference between a nomothetic and an idiographic epistemology. Furthermore, it was more than a simple difference between epistemologies. Each side tended to consider the other side as engaged in activities that were intellectually dubious, if not useless and even harmful.⁹

In 1859, as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Prince Albert asserted:

The domain of the inductive sciences…is the domain of facts….We thus gain a roadway, a ladder by which even a child may, almost without knowing it, ascend to the summit of truth. (Cited in Benson, 1985, 299)

To which John Henry Newman responded by saying that science simply “brings us phenomena….We have to take its facts, and give them a meaning” (cited in Benson, 1985, 300). And Matthew Arnold further specified: “The humanist's task was to put what is ‘only' knowledge into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty.” (cited in Benson, 1985, 301).

Romanticism as a movement emerged in large part as a response to the increasing scorn by the natural sciences of all that was literary and metaphysical. As Dale argues (1989, 5):

The essential intellectual history of the nineteenth century may fairly be described as a search [by the humanists] for an adequate replacement for the lost Christian totality, an effort to resurrect a saving belief, as Carlyle poignantly put it, on the ashes of the French Revolution….[Romanticism remade] Christianity for the modern world, secularizing it as a metaphysical idea of social and individual wholeness.¹⁰

It is in this context that the need for a coherent understanding of social reality, the source of ordinary change, led to the construction of the social sciences—in effect, to new kinds of disciplines.¹¹ The natural scientists and the humanists both laid claim to controlling this emergent arena of knowledge. The scientists argued that the rules of scientific method applied to human activity just as they applied to physical or biological activity, because the rules of scientific analysis were universal. The humanists argued, against this, that humans, unlike the subjects of the enquiries of natural scientists, were conscious actors affecting their own destiny and that therefore any analysis of their activities could not be subjected to the mechanical use of lawlike generalizations.

Which path would the social sciences take? The general answer is that the practitioners of what would be constructed as the social sciences were profoundly split over this question, and remain so to a considerable extent to this day. Some social scientists would opt for a scientistic path, others would opt for a humanistic path, while still others attempted to wiggle in between.¹² Whole disciplines made collective choices, but in addition there were individual choices being made within the organizational framework of each discipline. To appreciate this, we must look successively at (1) the degree to which social science was explicitly linked to social reformism and (2) the efforts to “professionalize” social science, which was linked to the debates about the nature of objectivity and the merits of value neutrality. Then we shall be better able to appreciate how and why what we have come to denote as the separate disciplines of the social sciences came into institutional existence.

SOCIAL SCIENCE AS SOCIAL MOVEMENT

In the wake of the French Revolution, its promises, and its perceived failings, science in general—and later, social science in particular—came to be seen as an alternative path to human betterment. Knight summarizes (1984, 3) this view succinctly:

It was not political revolution but scientific development which would bring prosperity and reduce misery. This would happen both through science being applied to what were previously activities done by rule of thumb, traditional routines; and also by the general adoption of “scientific” ways of thinking. This was the programme of the Age of Science; an age of innocence and of faith.

It was in this context of innocence and faith that social science began its life in the nineteenth century—not as a set of university disciplines (nor even as a single one) but rather as a social movement, which in the words of L. L. and Jessie Bernard (1943, 33)

was much more epochal than anything specific it may have accomplished. For it represented the transition from a theologically oriented society to a scientifically minded one. Social Science [in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century]…was not a generic term for all the social sciences; it was the religion of a society in the throes of industrialization, just as theology had been the religion of the old feudal world.

And because it was a social movement, its initial expression was not within the universities but within structures that were called social science associations, the most important of which emerged first in Great Britain and the United States, and later in Germany. These associations were “the product of the urge to understand and correct the social evils of the times…, the child of the urge for social reform (Bernard and Bernard, 1943, 25–26). When later the social sciences became institutionalized within the university structures, they would not lose this focus.¹³

In Great Britain, the earliest of these associations were statistical associations. Those who founded the Manchester Statistical Association were “united by common social ideology, [in particular] a commitment to social reform” (Elesh, 1972, 33). The two principal subjects on which they collected data were public health and education. It was “urbanization which dominated the minds of the statisticians” (Cullen, 1975, 135). Amid the political turmoil of 1832, William Jacob, then Comptroller of Corn Returns for the Board of Trade, called for the creation of a statistical department, giving as his argument that

the best mode of allaying disquietude and of diffusing contentment on the subject of public affairs is an open and clear disclosure of their condition and management.…A more general diffusion of accurate knowledge regarding the state of public affairs would tend to check that excitement and party spirit which has often been created by misrepresentation or exaggeration, and has produced an annoyance to the government, and at least a temporary disaffection of the public mind. (Cited in Cullen, 1975, 20)

Jacob was not alone. Abrams suggests (1968, 38) that “in the 1830s the fear that poverty was the father of sansculottism was a powerful motive to social research.”

In 1856 the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science—otherwise known as the Social Science Association (SSA)—was founded specifically to aid legislation.¹⁴ Rodgers (1952) calls the combination of social reformers, social workers, lawyers, educationalists, economists, doctors, and businessmen who made up its members “an inchoate body” (p. 283), but one that “was pretty confident that everything could be accomplished by Acts of Parliament” (p. 289). Goldman sees the association as less incoherent than that: “[B]ehind its rhetoric of neutrality, its cultivation of a bi-partisan image, the Social Science Association was an essentially Liberal Forum” (1986, 101).¹⁵

There were parallel developments in the United States. As the Civil War ended in 1865, the American Social Science Association (ASSA) was founded, “sponsored by genteel New England intellectuals […] who wanted to understand and improve their rapidly changing society” (Haskell, 1977, vi). But at the same time, in addition to this reform sentiment, Haskell sees the ASSA as involved in

a Tocquevillean impulse to defend authority, to erect institutional barriers against the corrosive consequences of unlimited competition in ideas and moral values in an interdependent mass society. (1977, 63)

He calls this a “movement of conservative reform“—what I have been calling centrist liberalism.

Indeed, Edwin Godkin, who in 1865 founded the quintessential left-liberal magazine in the United States, The Nation, was at the same time one of the principal creators of the ASSA in 1869. He wrote of the founding meeting that the ASSA would

render society a great service if it simply helps to rouse the public into a perception of the fact that there is no subject of greater intricacy, and of greater importance, than the proper adjustment of the relations of men in society; and that with regard to it as with all other subjects, men who have made it a special study are better worth listening to than men who have not. (Nation, November 4, 1869, p. 381; cited in Goldman, 1998, 22)

While the social science reform movement was perhaps strongest in Great Britain and the United States, the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales was created at a meeting in Brussels in 1862, with delegates coming from Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States (Villard, 1869), but it survived only until 1866 (Goldman, 1987).¹⁶

It was only some time after the unification of Germany, in 1890, that a similar social science movement developed in Germany. It was called the Verein für Sozialpolitik. The Germans were more open about their objectives. Its name spoke not of social science but of social policy. Like the others, it brought together scholars and businessmen, civil servants, and free professionals (Lindenaub, 1967, 6). As Krüger (1987, 71) notes:

The Verein was the manifest link between the dominant socio-scientific paradigm and socio-political conviction. Since the 1870s, the Historical School had emerged as the leading tendency in German political economy….It was accompanied by the prevailing opinion among scholars and the cultured bourgeoisie that the outmoded institutional system should be amended in favour of an improvement in the situation of the working classes. Academic knowledge and socio-political convictions thereby legitimated and stimulated each other….[T]he Verein was a “combat patrol of social reforms,” that is, a platform for cultured bourgeois commitment to social reforms.¹⁷

The question was, What kind of reforms? On the one hand, “entrepreneurial circles sometimes put the Verein für Sozialpolitik and Social-Democracy in the same category, insofar as they were both accused of being too friendly to the working classes” (Plessen 1975, 59). Indeed, hostile critics accused the academics of the Verein of being Katheder-Sozialisten, or professorial socialists (Dorfman, 1955b, 18).

But that's just the point. They were Katheder-Sozialisten, not revolutionaries. Although the social reform movement began life in intellectual opposition to what was called the “Manchesterism” of the “Berlin economists” of the period 1820–1850, with their emphasis on the virtues of free trade (Lindenlaub, 1967, 2), the movement was also opposed to Marxist Social-Democracy.¹⁸ Their essential analysis was very centrist:

The founding generation of the Verein für Sozialpolitik believed that the reactionary social attitude of the economic liberal circles and the social-revolutionary commitment of the Socialists aggravated social tensions and had to lead to the class struggle and revolution. They thought that only through social reforms could one stabilize the shaky social order. (Lindenlaub, 1967, 4)¹⁹

Plessen points to the congruence of the sociopolitical program of the Verein and Bismarck's program of social legislation. He goes further, arguing that “Bismarck's path breaking legislation would not have been possible were it not for the work of the Verein für Sozialpolitik” (1975, 127).

PROFESSIONALIZATION AND VALUE NEUTRALITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

Despite what might be considered to have been the manifest success of social science as a movement for social reform that was an incarnation of centrist liberalism, the academic half of the combination of academics and middle-class nonacademic reformers grew increasingly uncomfortable about the role that they were playing. The academics sought a more autonomous and a more distinctive role in the social order. This required breaking away from the social science associations and creating professional, exclusively academic structures.

The academics would now reject the claim of the dilettante to pretend to scholarly knowledge, which had been so widely recognized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Torstendahl, 1993, 115) and was still being legitimated in the nineteenth century within the framework of the social science associations. Instead, the professionalization of academics was advocated as

a means of establishing authority so securely that the truth and its proponents might win the deference even of a mass public, one that threatened to withhold deference from all men, all traditions, even the highest values. (Haskell, 1977, 65)

But authority to do what? Dale reminds us (1989, 14) that all the early social science positivists (such as Comte, Mill, and Spencer) felt that “social science theory was meant, in the end, to lead to the regeneration of social order. This, to be sure, is a political objective.” One should not miss the antiegalitarian thrust that was the basis of this new tendency. Professionalization was directed against both the pretensions of popular culture and the narrow perspectives of profit-oriented busi-nessmen.²⁰ This double objective could be accomplished by installing in authority what Haskell calls “the community of the competent.”²¹

The authority of professional competence required a new “social organization of science” (Wittrock, 1993, 318). This was the research university, a structure that permitted the university to resume its central role in the production, and not merely the reproduction, of knowledge. The rise of the research university was “intimately linked to…the rise of the modern nation-state,” as a result of which the universities were given “much greater resources than had previously been the case” (Wittrock, 1993, 305, 344).

This did not necessarily mean the abandonment of centrist social reform as an objective, but rather putting its implementation more solidly in the hands of experts.²² This meant that direct advocacy was no longer safe, since the academics lacked the cover of prominent nonacademic figures. What was necessary was rather to cloak reform objectives in the garments of “objective” knowledge, knowledge that only the scientific experts were capable of establishing and offering to the public.²³

The trick was to be political without appearing to be political. Furness notes that in the United States in the 1880s, both Herbert Baxter Adams and John Bates Clark believed that unregulated industrial capitalism caused injustices. They found that they could not directly denounce the injustices. Rather, “as they began to achieve scholarly recognition both also began equating moderateness of opinion with objectivity, and objectivity with scholarly worth” (Furness, 1975, 91). Pre-witt points out that searching

for social theories to buttress politically derived goals…is difficult territory, full of traps for the unwary and not easily navigated even by those alert to the inherent contradictions. Can there be a social intelligence that is both useful and in fact used that stands outside partisan advocacy? Social science leaders schooled in pragmatic liberalism…have insisted that this can be so. (2004, 782)

The most famous debate about advocacy and value neutrality was the so-called Werturteilstreit (values controversy). In 1909, Max Weber and others withdrew from the Verein für Sozialpolitik to found the German Sociological Society, which was to be wertfrei (value free). This objective was not, however, as straightforward as it may seem; indeed, it has been plagued by ambiguity ever since. For the social scientists who claimed to be value free nonetheless believed that

the progress of science would ensure prosperity for all time to come….[S]cience, pursued for its own sake, would enable men to transcend their petty differences; science would triumph over war and social conflict as it had triumphed over ignorance and disease. Science was a harmonizing force, a unifying force. (Proctor, 1991, 96)

It was the particularly difficult political situation of German academics in the Wilhelmine period between 1871 and 1918 that created a very awkward squeeze on social scientists. On the one hand, they were being accused of being hidden socialists, while at the same time the socialists were pressing them to become their open allies. On the other hand, they were under pressure from German nationalists to identify openly with German military and imperial objectives.²⁴ Value freedom was the ideological expression of “science under siege.”²⁵ Value neutrality involved moral and intellectual wiggling.

But did it work? Two later scholars, Ralf Dahrendorf and Raymond Aron, both deeply influenced by Weber, underlined the difficulties and the moral uncertainties of these arguments—what Dahrendorf calls their “explosive ambiguity.” If Weber's distinction between facts and values, between an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility, is so clear, asked Dahrendorf,

why did Weber himself find it all but unbearable to live with his distinctions? Could it be that the distinctions are, at the same time, intellectually compelling and impossible to sustain in practice? Are they a prescription for breakdown? (1987, 577–578)

Aron is less harsh in his analysis, but in the end is not very far from Dahrendorf's reservations:

The originality and the grandeur of Weber derives first of all from the fact that he was and wanted to be both a political person and a scholar, or more precisely to the fact that he separated and united politics and science. Separated: science must be independent of our preferences, pure of any value-judgment. United: science is conceived in a way that it is indispensable to action….Neither science nor reality impose any law; science, which is incapable of prophecy or total vision, leaves man entirely free; each of us must decide for ourselves….[M]an must choose between the gods….History is the story [of] the rivalry of the gods, the conflicts of faith and necessity. (1950, 97–98)

It is perhaps for these reasons that Novick said (1988, 7) that objectivity is like “nailing jelly to the wall.” The debate has always centered around what one means by being “disinterested.” As Rueschmayer and Van Rossen point out (1996, 150), the Verein claimed as evidence of their disinterestedness “their distance from capital and working class alike“—the fact that they were attacked by both “interested parties.” But given the increased political and ideological conflicts within the community of scholars, Weber drew the “logical conclusion” (p. 147) that social science had to be insulated from morality and politics.²⁶

The arena in which the objectivity of value-neutral social science most manifestly seemed to falter was eugenics. Eugenics was of course intimately linked to a basic characteristic of the modern world-system, its continuing racism—a phenomenon overtly in conflict with the theoretically egalitarian doctrines institutionalized in the geocultural structures spawned by the French Revolution.

When Linnaeus in the eighteenth century formulated a morphology with which biologists classified all biota, it became necessary to explain why, if homo sapiens were in fact a unified genus/species, there seemed to be substantial visual differences between people in different parts of the world. Substantial visual differences are of course a matter of social definition. Few people create or utilize social categories according to the color of human eyes, but many do so according to the perceived color of human skin. By the late eighteenth century the term race was used primarily to classify groups differing in skin color.

In the eighteenth century, there were two basic theories about the origins of racial differences—monogenesis, which accorded with the traditional Christian concept of the unity of mankind (Heiniger, 1980, pt. 3); and polygenesis, which asserted clear lines of distinction between the races and thereby “provided a useful rationalization for the apparent historical subservience of non-whites to whites” (Lorimer, 1978, 132). By the second half of the nineteenth century, although polygenesis had been discredited, a sociobiological argument about significant differences between the races came to be articulated to which we have given the label “scientific racism.” It presumed the existence of “impassable walls” (Guillaumin, 1992, 25) between biosocially unequal groups. And “significant efforts to popularize this authoritative scientific view were developed (Lorimer, 1990, 369).²⁷

Eugenics was a social movement that derived from scientific racism. It called for state action to preserve the “purity” of the races and to favor in various ways the increase in numbers of the race that was considered superior, at the expense of the others. Despite what Hofstadter calls its “fundamental conservatism,” it attracted strong support at first from liberal centrists:

[T]he eugenics movement had about it the air of a “reform,” for it emerged [in the United States] at a time when most Americans liked to think of themselves as reformers. Like the reform movements, eugenics accepted the principle of state action toward a common end and spoke in terms of the collective destiny of the group rather than of individual success. (Hofstadter, 1992, 167)

“[T]he idea of race [was] linked to the development of nationalisms in Europe [and the pan-European world]; the two facts [were] at least contemporaneous” (Guillaumin, 1972, 37). What Parker (1981, 827, 846) terms “liberal racialism” was part of the search for national identity, one that “led all too easily to hostility to those beyond the pale.”

Of course, as we know, eugenics was brought to its most horrendous, but logical, conclusion in Germany with the Nazi program of extermination of lesser breeds. The “reciprocal involvement of science and politics” took on a particularly strong form in Germany, where

the small community of race hygienists (as eugenicists called themselves there), seeking status and recognition, formed a coalition with politicians of the conservative and radical right. (Weingart, 1989, 260)²⁸

It was because eugenics led in Germany to the Nazi conclusion that the liberal center after 1945 so firmly rejected “scientific racism“—to be replaced in its turn by what might be called a scientific antiracism, which would also be put forth as value free.

THE CREATION OF SCIENTIFIC HISTORY

The professionalization of social science took the form, within the universities, of the establishment of distinctive disciplines and the creation of corresponding professional/academic national (and eventually international) organizations for the various disciplines.²⁹ It did so not as a single discipline, but “fragment[ed] into many sub-disciplines, new organisations, and specialisms” (Goldman, 2002, 356). As we shall see, a discipline, a profession, is “a vocabulary, an organisation, a journal and a conference” (Maloney 1985, 2).

The first discipline to assert its presence in the new university structures was the one with the longest presence as a university category—history. History is of course a very ancient term. And it is common today to speak of noteworthy ancient historians. There certainly were always writers who described the “past” and who eulogized important rulers. The major source for these historians had traditionally been the work of prior historians insofar as their written works survived.

What happened in the nineteenth century was the creation of a new concept of appropriate sources for the work of historians. It is sometimes called a “scientific revolution” in historiography, and is associated prominently with the work of Leopold von Ranke. It was Ranke who bequeathed to us the notable insistence that we write history wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (as it really happened).³⁰

There are two things we should notice in this famous slogan: the belief that it is possible to achieve a true description of the past, and the assumption that not everything that had previously been done in the name of history adhered to this rule. Ranke was asserting the potential existence of an “objective” analysis of the past. For all those who shared this view, the questions ever since have been what renders an account objective, and what it is that historians are writing about. Nipperdey, who considers Ranke the “father” of the idea of scientific objectivity in history, insists (1988, 218) that the core of Ranke's ideas was the strict binding of the historian to both the “sources and their critique (Quellenkritik),” which he calls a “methodologically restricted objectivity.” Herbst underlines (1965, 216) the contradictions of Ranke-ian historicism: “[A]s idealists they asserted the autonomy of their discipline and of all Geisteswissenschaften, while as empiricists they proposed to use the tools of natural science.”

Sources are a very empirical concept. Originally (and for a very long time), they were thought to consist only in written documents. Later, the concept was extended to include material objects such as archaeological finds that were available for careful study. Archaeology was used primarily as a mode of studying zones and times for which written sources did not exist or were very rare—a sort of second-best.

But why were written sources the basis of objective knowledge? The principal argument was that they were not created for the eyes of later researchers but somehow reflected immediate reality as seen by the participants of the time. To be sure there was the possibility that such sources could be fakes that were written later than the source seemed to indicate or were meant as modes of deceiving others at the time they were written. And it was for this reason that sources had to be subjected to Quellenkritik. Still, it was considered that there was no substitute for using such sources. Ranke “approached the past as virtually a revelation of God….It was, as Ranke himself remarked, a sort of Gottesdienst [church service]” (McClelland, 1980, 173).

Historical research of this sort was “scientific” insofar as it was considered legitimate only if it was linked to empirical evidence. However, the historians were in other ways very unscientific. Most of them were antitheoretical, rejecting any search for lawlike statements that might be inferred from this empirical research.³¹They took this stance essentially because of their opposition to the Enlightenment radicals and their successors who wished to reform the world.³² Novick believes (1988, 27) that Ranke's “abstention from moral judgment, rather than manifesting disinterested neutrality, [was], in its context, a profoundly conservative political judgment.”³³

And yet this “shrinking” of the analysis of politics to “events in the narrowest sense” (Burke, 1988, 197) served well the interests of the centrist liberals. For, when generalizations were shunned, historical writing became for the first time in the nineteenth century a “national religion” (Barrett-Kriegel, 1988, 264). The reason was very simple. If one was to construct liberal states, there had to be states within which people could create their identities as a “nation” to which they could offer their primary loyalties. The creation of the nation was essential as the basis of the liberal state. And to create a nation, one had to have a state.³⁴

The historians were charged with the task of discovering/creating the memory of the historical past for a state. This was true for Great Britain and France, the original liberal states, but it was even more true for Germany and Italy, states to be created in the course of the nineteenth century, and then by extension for everywhere else.³⁵ The French revolution of 1830 had, as we know, an echo in Poland (under Russian rule).

And this in turn had an impact on German intellectuals, stimulating their concern with national unification. Ranke, for example, wrote a series of articles in 1832 around the theme previously argued by Berthold Niebuhr: “The historical development of a people is a function of its national genius.” Ranke concluded that “we have a great German duty: create the true German state which will reflect the genius of the nation” (Renouvin, 1954, 75–76).³⁶ Younger historians at this time, “skeptical of Ranke's conservative leanings and looking to Prussian leadership in German unification, turned back to Humboldt, Fichte, and Hegel for inspiration.” But the failure of the 1848 revolution convinced them, too, “of the primacy of state action and of the ethical rightness of political power.” By 1871, conservatives, liberals, and even democrats (radicals) came to share in the “common religion of history” (Iggers, 1983, 11).³⁷

The engagement of German historians in the construction of a German nation was matched by the engagement of British historians in what we have come to call the Whig interpretation of history. Great Britain being then the hegemonic power of the world-system, its historians took comfort in the belief that everything that had occurred to put Great Britain in this position was both inevitable and progressive. Manning (1976, 84) explains the logic of this position quite clearly:

All events which helped to constitute the civil society liberals admire are necessarily progressive and all those which mark resistance to those changes are necessarily reactionary. By definition a civil society is more civilized than a feudal one. In the vocabulary of liberalism, part of the meaning of the word civil is something open and progressive, and part of the meaning of the word feudal is something closed and reactionary.³⁸

German historicism and the Whig interpretation of history (which was in fact a variant of historicism) concurred in placing the progress of the nation at the center of their analysis and their concerns.³⁹

France, like Great Britain, began to make history central to the national state it was creating. Hauser (1903, 119) sees the July Revolution as the turning point:

Precisely because it wasn't an “historic” royalty, the July monarchy could neither ignore history nor dispense with it….Under the direct influence of political events, history turned towards questions of organizing society. The new state had every interest in having the Guizots, the Thierrys, using memories of medieval France and the lessons of English revolutions, create for it a new legitimacy founded on reason.

But whereas the July Monarchy legitimated history in order that historians legitimate it, it was the traumatic events of 1870–1871—defeat of France by Germany, the Paris Commune—that finally established history as central to integrating the state. The newly established Third Republic turned to the historians to help reinvigorate and reunify the nation by reforming the curriculum of the secondary school system. Logue (1983, 80) describes the thinking of leaders of the republic's education system this way:

The hitherto ignorant and superstitious masses were seen in those early years [after 1875] as less formidable potential enemies of the republic than those middle-and upper-class youths who had received their education at the hands of priests, lay brothers, and—worst of all—Jesuits. It was disunity within the elite that most worried the liberals of the late nineteenth century, not disunity between the elite and the masses….A truly republican and liberal elite would be the natural leaders of a democratic people.⁴⁰

Hobsbawm (1983, 270), however, sees this emphasis on national history as motivated more by the fear of radical tendencies, arguing that the historians invented “imagery, the symbolism, and the traditions of the Republic” to control the working classes. The “men of the centre” (he is talking of the Radical Socialists) did this by “masquerading as men of the extreme left.”

No doubt the centrist liberals were seeking to limit both the conservative forces, whom they identified with the Church, and the radical forces that had shown their face and vigor in the Paris Commune. They were able to make use of the new scientific history to establish in the public mind a past that could unify a nation, and render national identity the basis for a patriotism that would stabilize the state. It was not, to be sure, the only mechanism. Service in the armed forces for young men integrated and socialized them as much as the public school system. It was particularly effective for those who came from rural districts and from minority ethnicities. The construction of national monuments and the invention of public ceremonies (such as Bastille Day in France) were also part of the systematic campaign (Hobsbawm, 1983, 271).⁴¹ But these, too, were the product of the work of the historians. The past was thus becoming secure. But what about the present?

THE CREATION OF THE NOMOTHETIC DISCIPLINES

Creating and reinforcing a national identity was only part of the liberal agenda, however important. A strong national identity served to legitimate the states and limit severely the justification of alternative and potentially oppositional loyal-ties—to class, religion, ethnicity, or language community. But the liberal states, in order to function smoothly and in particular to anticipate the antiliberal pressures of the dangerous classes, needed to understand the ongoing reality of the present. This came to be the function of the three nomothetic social sciences: economics, sociology, and political science.

The first thing to notice about this trinity is that it is a trinity. When writing about the past (the role of history), the emerging university structures combined the so-called economic, political, and social domains into one single “discipline.” But as soon as one engaged the present, the social scientists insisted that these were three separate domains, to be studied separately.

Wherefore this division? There is only one source—the insistence of liberal thinkers (but not of either conservative or radical ones) that the signal feature of “modernity” was the differentiation of the social structure into three compartments that were quite different from each other. They were so different that they had consequently to be isolated from each other in practice, and hence analyzed quite distinctly. These three domains were the market, the state, and the civil society. It was from the theoretical distinction of these three domains, which presumably had been differentiated as the outcome of modernizing, that the universities derived the three disciplines: economics for the study of the market, political science for the state, and sociology for the civil society.

Centrist liberalism has always devoted itself to the prudent and competent reform of institutions, and in the mid-nineteenth century this objective posed a fundamental question for the emerging social sciences studying the present, as we have seen. Were they to constitute themselves as social activists or merely as those who produced the analyses that the social reformers could use to implement their objectives? When thinkers like Mirabeau and Condorcet first used the term social science, they had made it synonymous with social art, which “carried practical and reformist connotations as a rational guide to public policy and social reconstruction” (Goldman, 1987, 141). The initial result had been the creation of the social science associations, as we have discussed. But in the late nineteenth century, the arena shifted to the universities and to the creation of disciplinary departments that would produce the needed specialized professionals.

Economics

The first of these nomothetic disciplines to be institutionalized was economics. The name economics was a late invention. Up until the late nineteenth century, the usual term in Great Britain and the United States had been political economy. In France, there was somewhat of a struggle between the terms social economy and political economy. A similar split existed in the Germanies, where the term national economy (Nationalökonomie) competed with Volkswirtschaft, with all the ambiguity of attaching the term Volk (literally “people,” but with a strong ethnic overtone) to the term Wirtschaft (usually translated as “economy” with or without the prefix Volks-). Why did all these other terms come to be rejected eventually in favor of the shorter term economics?

The term political economy suggests that there is some relation between the political and economic spheres of life. But what kind of relation? One of the earliest expressions was the so-called Scottish historical school of the eighteenth century, which included such diverse figures as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and John Millar. Diverse perhaps, but they shared some clear premises, both about history and about political economy. Their macrohistorical imagery was that of a world in which mankind had passed through a progressive succession of different stages. The most frequent list of stages at the time was that of hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. The basis of the list was a sort of “techno-economic determinism.”⁴²

If these men spoke of political economy, it was because they analyzed these successive forms of economic structuring, and particularly that of commerce, as occurring within a polity—that is, a state. They all therefore placed emphasis on the “mode of subsistence,” a phrase invented by Robertson (Meek, 1967, 37). And they all believed that if one knew the state of property, one would know something about the political system, because there was a “causal connection between property relationships and the form of government.”⁴³ For a later unremitting believer in the primacy of the market like Friedrich von Hayek, the eighteenth-century political economists would be seen as persons who could not decide whether they were scientists or moral and social philosophers (Hayek, 1952, 13). And neither they nor successive generations had particular training in the kinds of skills we would today associate with economics.⁴⁴

Hayek was right, of course. Adam Smith in fact occupied the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. And this concern both with moral philosophy and history explains the great difference between the political economy of what we now call the classical economists (from Smith to Marx) and the so-called neoclassical economists who came to define the field in the late nineteenth century.

The classical economists hoped to unravel the skein of history, to find the great central forces which move (determine?) the course of nations and empires….[T]hey were engaged in the delineation of the “magnificent dynamics.” By contrast, the task set by [the neoclassicists] Walras and Marshall seems mean and petty, but it was their efforts to analyze the mechanics of markets that produced the problem-solving economics we now possess. (Gordon, 1973, 255)

The ambiguous relation of the market and politics had its parallel in France. Before the French Revolution, it was the Physiocrats who held center stage. The term physiocracy means the “rule of nature.” And the nature that ruled for them was the land, the sole source of productive labor and therefore of net profit. Their emphasis on distinguishing who or what was productive from who or what was sterile became a constitutive element of political economy, even if there were differences of views as to which groups were indeed the productive groups. The Physiocrats, like the Scottish political economists, were materialist, not rationalist. Their economic determinist views were endorsed strongly by the words and deeds of the leaders of the French Revolution.⁴⁵

But they were more than mere economic determinists. After Thermidor, their legacy was continued by a group called the idéologues, for whom, however,

political economy was not an economism. It was one means among others to achieve the happiness of a society founded on the rights of man. The affluence which would result from understanding the laws of economics would render men “more virtuous,” more able to govern freely. Political economy took its place alongside other moral and political sciences. The [French] Institute [which included an Academy of Moral and Political Sciences], created in 1795 [on the instigation of] the idéologues, was intended to promote [such good government]. (Le Van-Mesle, 1980, 272–273)

However, these views came to be considered dangerous, even subversive, first by Napoleon, and then even more so by Louis XVIII and the leaders of the Restoration. Political economy thus fell into disgrace. However, political economy soon returned to acceptability in France. It did so by revising its self-presentation. It shed its subversive image and emphasized rather the degree to which it was a “centrist” doctrine. As such, of course, it was attacked both on the left and on the right. It would nonetheless seek to establish its political utility by demonstrating the link between what it defined as the centrist principles of the French Revolution and economic liberalism. In 1845, the political economist Eugène Daire wrote:

The glory of the French Revolution is to have inscribed in the law, on normal bases, the constitution of liberty, property, and family….Today the task of men who accept these principles is simply to make them realized completely in reality, and to combat energetically any retrograde or so-called progressive doctrines which tend to undo the work of our fathers, and to deprive future generations of the rewards of the blood spilled on their behalf. (Cited in Lutfalla, 1972, 495)

It is because political economy became so centrist that some left Catholic thinkers sought to oppose “social economy” to “political economy.” The 1835 catalogue of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Catholic University criticized political economy for concerning itself only with how wealth was accumulated and failing to discuss the fact that the wealth was badly distributed.

Thus the fortune of some was based on the misery of others. And society, awakened from its dreams by the clamors of the poor, discovered at last that it had lost in security what it had gained in opulence. (De Caux, 1835, 35)

Hence, it followed that there was need for a course in social economy.

The voice of these left Catholics was not heard by the political elite, and the clamors of the poor (De Caux was no doubt referring to the uprising of the canuts in Lyon) were not to find a significant political expression until the Revolution of 1848. One of the noteworthy decisions of the provisional government in 1848 was to abolish the chairs of political economy in the university, precisely because political economy was seen as linked to social conservatism, despite the vain protests of the Society of Political Economy. In turn, the Academy of Moral Sciences responded to the appeal of the government by asserting that it was “not sufficient to restore material order by force if one did not restore moral order” (Le Van-Mesle, 1980, 286).

The radicalism of the Revolution did not last long, as we know, but political economy was not restored as a discipline. Perhaps it was considered too centrist and insufficiently conservative in the aftermath of the revolution. By 1864, however, Victor Duruy persuaded the emperor to found a chair of political economy in the Law Faculty. He argued that Great Britain had avoided a bloody revolution in 1848 precisely because “the principles of political economy were widespread in all strata” (Weisz, 1979, 87). France was returning to centrist liberalism.

In the Germanies, the Cameralism of the eighteenth century, which emphasized the economics of public administration, gave way to the “national economy” of the early nineteenth century. Staatskunst (the art of the state) was replaced in Prussia by Staatswissenschaft (the science of the state), of “governing in relation to economic processes” (Tribe, 1988, 8). And once again, the simple advocacy of market principles was replaced by what was called in Germany historical economics, the last defense of a political economy that was as much political as it was economic. In effect, Germany was still holding on to a variety of political economy at a time when Great Britain, the United States, and France were finally ready to bury it in favor of (neoclassical) economics.

The big shift occurs with the change of name. Political economy became economics. The widely influential W. S. Jevons suggested this in 1879.⁴⁶ But it was Alfred Marshall who institutionalized this change when he became professor of political economy at Cambridge in 1884. He had already written a text entitled The Principles of Economics in 1881. And in 1885 he argued that the Statistical Society should change its name to the Society for Economic Science and Statistics. He would proceed to be a founder of the British Economics Association (later the Royal Economics Society) in 1890, which he and his followers firmly controlled (Kadish, 1982, 143–144, 152; Coats and Coats, 1970). By 1903, Marshall was able to establish Economics Tripos as an undergraduate course at the University of Cambridge.

What did Marshall institutionalize, however? One way to describe it is as a shift in the focus of economic enquiry:

The change of name signified a break with a “classical” economics preoccupied with the capital and labour in the production of value and the distribution of national wealth, and relaunched economics as a science of exchange and price formation. In place of a theory of production and distribution centred on rent, profit and wages with their corresponding agents of production—landlords, capitalists and labourers—the new science of economics became a theory in which the allocation of scarce resources was effected by the calculations of an abstract economic agent. A new theory of value turned on the interactions of these self-interested agents, whose drive to satisfy their own wants led them in turn to satisfy the needs of others and hence create market prices. (Tribe, 2005, 116–117)

Another way to describe it might be to say that neoclassical economics ended definitively the connection of economics and history. The marginalization in Marshall's Cambridge program of the economic historian William Cunningham is notorious, and his actions seem to have led Cunningham to leave Cambridge by 1891. There were no doubt personality conflicts between the two men. Still, Geoffrey Hodgson disagrees with the idea that Marshall was hostile to economic history as such. Hodgson points to Marshall's sympathetic praise and support of the German historical school. He also points to the fact that he did not side in the Methodenstreit with Carl Menger despite the fact that Menger, like Marshall, was a pioneer of marginal utility theory.⁴⁷

Perhaps the correct way to interpret Marshall's organizational transformation of economics is to see it as a way to consolidate the ability of economists to influence policy making more effectively by becoming professional and abstaining from direct partisanship—in short, of being centrist liberals.⁴⁸ To guarantee that, Marshall needed to control the program of university training by creating an economic orthodoxy, the true source of his dispute with Cunningham.⁴⁹ Church then explains that the very process of professionalization led economists away from historicist leanings.⁵⁰ But at the same time, this professionalization permitted the same economists to rescue economics for social reform.⁵¹

The emphasis on the ability to influence policy affected the practice of French economists equally, although there economics tended to be located within the Faculty of Law rather than in the Arts and Sciences faculties, as in most countries.⁵² Nor was this different in Germany, where training in economics had its historicist focus that was linked to the long-dominant role of the Verein für Sozialpolitik.⁵³

With this in mind, it seems that one should not think of the famous struggle in the early days of the American Economic Association as one between advocacy and expertise—the usual line of analysis—but rather as a debate of what was the most effective way to achieve appropriate reforms in public policy.

In the United States, the key figure in the late nineteenth century was Richard T. Ely. Ely was trained in Germany at Heidelberg under Karl Knies. He was very impressed by the German historical school and, when he returned, become a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University in 1881. As early as 1882, he was urging acceptance of the German social legislation of Bismarck (Dorfman, 1955b, 24–25). He formulated a plan to create an association of economists who, as he wrote in a letter in 1884, “repudiate laissez-faire as a scientific doctrine” (cited in Coats, 1960, 556).

In 1885, he was one of the founders of the American Economics Association (AEA), of which he became the first secretary. In the AEA's founding statement of principles, the first point read: “We regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress.” Its other three points emphasized “the historical and statistical study of actual conditions“; the need to solve the social problems resulting from the conflict of labor and capital; and the insistence that, although the AEA was not partisan, it felt that that a “progressive development of economic conditions…must be met by a corresponding development of legislative policy” (Dorfman, 1955, 27).

Ely himself asserted twenty-five years later (1910, 60) that this statement “was a compromise in behalf of catholicity….[E]ach modification represented] what has been called a ‘toning-down' process.” The compromise did not work. In 1892, Ely ceased being secretary, and although he was later elected president of the AEA for a year, his view that the AEA should engage in relatively public advocacy was rejected in favor of a more “professional” orientation.⁵⁴ This did not mean, however, that there was a turn away from seeking to influence public policy, precisely because the “upper and middle classes” saw this as a positive role.⁵⁵ It simply meant that the political implications—primarily those of centrist liberalism—of a professional, neutral economics became sub rosa, not to be avowed publicly.

Sociology

Sociology underwent the same process of professionalization as economics. It was, however, as a discipline somewhat less coy about its commitment to social reform. As is well known, the term sociology was invented by Auguste Comte, who considered the study of social relations the culminating positivist activity, the “queen of the sciences.” But where can we place Comte's work in the political spectrum? For Koyré (1946, 56), Comte's ideas were those of the ultraconservative Bonald, “dressed-up, or rather disguised in modern garb.” Nisbet (1952, 173) gives a similar appreciation:

Comte himself was no scientist; but through his romantic worship of science, the social structures of family, community, language, religion were removed from the frankly theological and reactionary context in which they lay in Bonald's thought and were given the context and terminology, if not the substance, of science….Comte's work was the means of translating the conservative principles into a perspective more acceptable to later generations of social scientists.

Yet we know also that Comte started his career as the secretary of Saint-Simon, who may be difficult to characterize politically but was certainly someone openly hostile to a Bonaldian view of society. Hayek (1941, 9, 11, 18) sees Comte evolving from a more left position to arrive more squarely in the political center. For Hayek, the two great intellectual forces of the nineteenth century were socialism and positivism (which he preferred to call scientism):

Both…spring directly from this body of professional scientists and engineers that grew up in Paris, and more particularly from…the Ecole polytechnique.…

[T]hroughout the development of French positivism this rationalist element, probably due to the influence of Descartes, continued to play an important role….

That synthetic spirit which would not recognize sense in anything that had not been deliberately constructed…was a strong new element which was added to—and in the course of time even began to replace—the revolutionary ardour of the young polytechnicians.

The other major figure of French sociology in midcentury was Frédéric Le Play. His training was that of a metallurgist, a graduate of the elite École des Mines. What he drew from this education was an aversion to abstract theorizing and the belief that social science was not analogous to physics but rather to “the classificatory and eminently practical [science] of metallurgy” (Goldfrank, 1972, 134). He thus pursued an empirical, observational sociology, quite the opposite of Comte. At the same time, he was a devout Catholic, again the opposite of Comte. But he was what might be called a pastoral Catholic. From this, he derived an aversion to Saint-Simonian rationalism and individualism.

The Revolution of 1848 was a formative experience for Le Play. In a political atmosphere riven between the Party of Order and the working classes, he sought to promote “a reformist social policy” (Kalaora and Savoye, 1989, 100). He founded the Société d'Économie Sociale in 1855, which was specifically concerned with the social implications of economic development for the working classes. He established links with the British SSA and pursued an objective of social harmony, with a conservative coloring:

Le Play, being a careful but not value-free social scientist, insisted that “social peace” could be achieved only through an understanding of “social reality.” That reality…consisted of a hierarchy of unequal classes reproduced in the industrial division of labour. He thereby threw out the market-place as a model for social relations, and brought in the seigneurie, with the grande bourgeoisie acting as the ascendant “social authority.” (Elwitt, 1988, 212)

Le Play's reformism was not that of social and economic change but of “moral reforms, reasserting the five bases of social organization: religion, family, property, work, and patronage” (Chapelle-Dulière, 1981, 745). But despite his paternalistic conservatism, Goldfrank (1972, 148) considers him “a curiously contemporary figure: the upwardly mobile conservative (liberal) technocrat hoping to solve ‘scientifically' problems perpetuated by the very ruling groups he begs to serve.” It is noteworthy that, in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, Le Play was perceived as linked to the new liberalism of the nascent welfare state. He was seen as representing a “third alternative to the anomie of disordered capitalism and the tyrannies of socialism” (Abrams, 1968, 60)—in short, as a centrist liberal.

The other great figure of preuniversity sociology was Herbert Spencer. Spencer was by far the most widely read and esteemed sociologist in the English-speaking world in the last half of the nineteenth century. His sociology was of a totally deterministic variety. He adopted an extreme version of Darwin's “survival of the fittest.” This harsh, unforgiving version of evolution asserted that whatever is, is beneficial. It followed, as Abrams argues (1968, 73), that “the greater purpose of sociology was to impress upon men the fatuity of efforts to accelerate the improvement of their condition by legislative measures.”⁵⁶ Social Darwinism was, needless to say, incompatible with the image of centrist liberalism. So, despite his fame in Great Britain and the United States,⁵⁷ Spencer's meteoric presence came and went, leaving little residue in the emerging discipline of sociology.

The three birthplaces of academic professional sociology were France, Germany, and the United States. We have already discussed the ambiguities of the version of value-free sociology professed by the leading figure of the new German academic sociology, Max Weber. These ambiguities were in fact analogous to those that were part of the institutionalization of sociology in France and the United States.

In France, the key figure, both intellectually and organizationally, was Émile Durkheim. Durkheim, like Marshall, was an organizer. His academic training was in philosophy, which he found too arcane and too removed from the moral and political questions of the day. In 1887, he received an appointment in Bordeaux in philosophy. But at the instigation of Louis Liard, the director of higher education for the government, he was permitted to teach a course in social science. By 1896, he had become a full professor of social science, the first such appointment in the French university system. In 1898, he founded a scholarly journal with the name of sociology, L'Année sociologique. It became a major institutional meeting ground for all those, in France and elsewhere, who were oriented to empirical social science. In 1902 he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris and in 1908 became a professor of “the Sociology of Education“—a title changed by ministerial decree in 1913 to “the Science of Education and Sociology”.⁵⁸

During this time, he was also active politically, notably during the Dreyfus affair. He was the secretary-general in Bordeaux of the Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme, the principal Dreyfusard organization, and was a “favorite speaker at rallies in the Bordeaux area” (Clark, 1972, 161). The question here, as it is in discussing Weber, is how close the link was between Durkheim's professional activities and his political ones. And here, too, the answer is ambiguous.

Clark offers us one answer (1972, 170):

[Durkheim] had a remarkable ability to formulate problems strategic both for sociological theory and pressing moral and political concerns. His prestige both with his collaborators and the general public was enhanced by the timeliness of his theoretical works for definition of a secular morality, development of a theory of solidarity, and isolation of causes of social deviance. The Durkheimians also shared a common training and career pattern. They were brought together again by a series of important political experiences.

But Clark's answer is itself ambiguous. For it evades the issue of intention. If Durkheim sought to turn sociology into a genuinely positive science,⁵⁹ it is also true, as Richter argues (1960, 172), that for Durkheim

sociology was to create a solid base for the Republic. It would indicate what reforms were needed; it would provide principles of order in politics, as well as a moral doctrine on which the country could unite; for he believed that beneath the choppy surface of political and ideological differences lay a real consensus of values. This belief motivated his effort to discover what the ties are that hold together the members of a society and produce at least that minimum of order and harmony requisite to its maintenance.

There is considerable agreement that Durkheim saw himself as, and was, a firm supporter of the Third Republic. The question is where this put him on a political spectrum. Conservative members of the academy often labeled him a socialist. And there is evidence to indicate that, at a personal level, he was a fellow traveler of French socialists, if never a party member.⁶⁰ On the other hand, Lewis Coser (1960, 212) makes the case for his “abiding conservatism.”⁶¹

But most analysts place him in between the two, a proper example of centrist liberalism. Weisz (1979, 111) catches, I believe, exactly where French social science in general, and Durkheim in particular, stood:

One should note the intimate links of the social sciences in the university with a certain republican-progressive ideology, one that was clearly anti-socialist. It is true that the case of Durkheim was more ambiguous in the degree to which certain circles considered him a socialist. But, by emphasizing how his thought was evolutionist, pragmatic, anti-utopian, and sometimes even conservative, Durkheim managed to reassure the leading university figures.

To which Logue adds (1983, 151):

For Durkheim rejected traditional conservatism, laissez-faire liberalism, and collectivist socialism, while much of his thought was occupied with the main problem of the new liberalism: how to combine social integration with individual freedom.⁶²

Overall, Durkheim's variety of centrist liberalism was perhaps a bit closer to the position formulated by the German Katheder-Sozialistenthan to Weber's national-liberalism. But Schmoller, Weber, and Durkheim all emphasized the importance of the state as the incarnation of collective values, and in the end all three were nationalists. As Maier (1992, 134) puts it:

Sociology from Comte to Durkheim represented, in effect, an intellectual project for encouraging an organization of civil society that might stabilize an increasingly democratic politics. And not only in France.⁶³

The United States was in fact the country in which academic sociology was institutionalized the earliest. The debates and the solutions were not too different from those in France and Germany. The principal organizational figure in the history of American sociology was Albion Small. His own career illustrates well the trajectory of most of his contemporaries. Son of a Baptist minister, he studied at a seminary but was not ordained. Instead he went to Germany in 1879 to study history and Sozialwissenschaft. He then was appointed to Colby College in 1881 to teach history and political economy. He decided to obtain a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in economics and history. In 1889 he returned to Colby as its president. There he replaced the course in moral philosophy with one in sociology—one of the very first courses so entitled.

In 1892, he was called to the newly founded University of Chicago to found the first accredited department of sociology in the United States (and indeed in the world). In 1895, he founded at Chicago the American Journal of Sociology (AJS). And in 1905, he was one of the founders of the American Sociological Society. That same year, he published a basic text, General Sociology. His fundamental outlook is well defined by Bulmer (1984, 34–35):

Small believed that sociology was a science, that it was changing from a discursive to an objective discipline grounded in empirical study, and that it was a cumulative discipline with a nomothetic, theoretical character….

At the same time, sociology was also an ethical discipline and the sociologist had a distinctive role to play in the improvement of society. His expertise and commitment enabled him to be involved in social reform without espousing the position of any class or interest group. Scientism and moralism were integrally connected.

For Oberschall, this meant that Small “literally walked a tightrope.”⁶⁴ When J. W. Burgess, as dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, recruited Franklin Giddings in 1891 to teach sociology, it was because he felt that “many special questions of penology, charity and poor relief could not be treated from the standpoint of pure political economy and many problems of social ethics could not be studied from the point of view of individual ethics” (Dorfman, 1955a, 176). Oberschall calls this the demand for courses in the “3 Ds: the defective, dependent, and delinquent classes.”

All the other leading figures in the early history of American sociology also linked their sociology in varied ways to social reform. Lester Ward “replaced an older passive determinism with a positive body of social theory adaptable to the uses of reform” (Hofstadter, 1992, 68). E. A. Ross wanted the “wise sociologist” to speak to “those who administer the moral capital of society” in order that he “make himself an accomplice of all good men for the undoing of all bad men” (cited in Dorothy Ross, 1984, 163). Even Sumner, generally identified as a conservative, was critical of “the laissez-faire content of [Spencer's theories, seeking to] put the case that ‘progress' meant government by skilled social scientists” (Crick, 1959, 50).

As both Bulmer (1984, 39) and Oberschall (1972, 188) note, the underlying influence of liberal Protestantism, very influential in the Progressive movement of the time, permeated the work of these sociologists. Still, all of them were aware of the possible confusion of sociology and socialism. When Albion Small sought to convince President Harper of Chicago to allow him to found the AJS, he wrote him that a journal was “needed both to exert restraint on utopian social effort and to encourage and direct well advised attempts at social cooperation” (cited in Dibble, 1976, 301). Government in the hands of the specialists was a key element in centrist liberalism.

Political Science

Of the three nomothetic social science disciplines, political science was the last to emerge as an autonomous discipline. Its early period was marked by the establishment of three major institutions—Sciences Po in Paris, the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, and the London School of Economics (LSE) in London. The curious thing is that none of the three was originally designed to establish an autonomous discipline of political science. Indeed, they were all three intended to be pluridisciplinary, and indeed were so in practice. And yet, the three all left a lasting imprint on the discipline of political science, even though, in the twentieth century, political science went its own and separate way as an autonomous discipline, first of all in the United States, and later (particularly after 1945) throughout the world.

The three institutions were not founded simultaneously. Sciences Po was the first, established in 1871. It is harder to date the establishment of Columbia's Faculty of Political Science, since it went through many organizational versions. But the best date to use is probably 1880. LSE was the last, officially founded in 1895. Their stories are linked, but need to be told in order.

Sciences Po is the popular locution for the school, but it is not its formal name. In the semiofficial history of Sciences Po, written by Richard Descoings in 2007, we read (p. 27):

Émile Boutmy founded the École libre des sciences politiques [the original name of Sciences Po] in 1871….Who was Émile Boutmy? Why 1871? What should we understand by a “free school“? How should we define “political science“? That is what at Sciences Po one calls “baliser le sujet.”⁶⁵

Boutmy was a center-left bourgeois, a cultured political commentator (publiciste cultivé), a man with many connections and much influence. An entrepreneur. All this at the same time.

Why 1871? This is perhaps the place to begin. The years 1870–1871 were very traumatic ones for France. France was militarily defeated by Prussia. The empire of Napoleon III came to an end, and the Third Republic was proclaimed. The Prussian monarch, Wilhelm, somewhat flamboyantly used the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to have himself proclaimed emperor of Germany. And, perhaps most important of all, Paris was the site of a profound social revolution, the Commune, which was finally repressed with much bloodshed.

The French world of knowledge suffered as a consequence the “German crisis of French thought” (Descoings, 2007, 32–33). Vincent says (1987, 28) that “Germany's victory was perceived as that of knowledge over ignorance.” But more than that, the experience of the military defeat plus the Commune transformed French political life:

[The combination of these two events] led to the belief that another social explosion was probable, and another (military) defeat possible. One had to borrow from Germany its formulas to use them against her. The pilgrimage to Germany became thereupon part of the educational program [cursus] of the French academic, and it is from German universities that Émile Boutmy borrowed the new pedagogical system that he established at the École libre. (Vincent, 1987, 13)

Nor could the Commune be separated from the experience of the French Revolution, still a subject of great controversy in France, and about which the centrist liberals had ambivalent feelings. Vincent suggests (1987, 13) that this, too, was on Boutmy's mind:

In six years (1789–1794), the traditional elites were…swept away and replaced by others who, by and large, did not manage to rule for more than a brief time. The leaders of 1792 were all practically unknowns in 1788, which leads one to think that the “mass” has some “formidable” potentialities, dangerous but—why not?—utilizable, “recuperable,” as we would say today.⁶⁶

Boutmy's principal solution was the formation of elites. As Vincent notes (1987, 12),

Boutmy did not hesitate to use the word [elite], and for him this meant endowing France with economic and political deciders recruited in the superior strata of the dominant class—including in the group a few exceptionally gifted persons coming from the “lower classes” (better to have them on your side than against you).⁶⁷

So Boutmy used his connections to raise the money to establish a private institution. But in the first year he did not find too many students who were ready merely to study the political situation, to pursue what we might think of today as academic political science. So he quickly adjusted his strategy, adding a professional objective to the imparting of knowledge. In his report to his investors in 1872, he suggested that what was necessary was “to offer something such that the two top-rated (haut vol) professions that have such a great influence on the destinies of nations—diplomacy and the higher civil service—find in this institution that first-class preparation which has up to now not been available” (cited in Descoings, 2007, 40). In Vincent's metaphor, it was the shift from being an institution of knowledge to being an institution of power. “Liberal, anti-state, the École became a center to prepare the examinations for appointment to the Inspection des Finances, the Conseil d'État, the Cour des Comptes, and the Quai d'Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry)” (Vincent, 1987, 61).⁶⁸

Boutmy thus created an École libre—that is, a private institution, one that was not subordinated to the Sorbonne but also was not clerical. It was a school of “political sciences” (note the plural). But the words political and sciences were both somewhat ambiguous. Sciences in French was still being used to mean knowledge in general, like the German Wissenschaften. And political sciences was still a term that could mean social sciences in general. Indeed, what Boutmy actually offered was mostly what we would call today history, economics, and sociology, rather than political science more narrowly defined.⁶⁹

John Burgess was called to Columbia University from Amherst College in 1876 with the title Professor of Political Science, History, and International Law (Hoxie, 1955, 6). The intent of the Columbia administration, as Burgess later recounted in 1893, was “to neutralize the intense professionalism of the Law School by supplying the students in private law…with those studies in ethics, history, and public law necessary to complete the science of jurisprudence” (cited in Bryson, 1932, 322). Burgess found the Law School “impenetrable” and turned to creating a School of Political Science instead.

In Hoxie's official history of the Faculty of Political Science, written for Columbia's bicentennial, he delineates the link to Sciences Po:

The story of the Ecole Libre was an inspiring one for John Burgess. He, like many other students of our government, was much concerned in 1879 about the state of the United States Civil Service and was carefully following the reforms attempted by the Hayes administration. Moreover, the ideas he had gained from Sir Stafford Northcote regarding the British Civil Service had made a strong impression on him. He had noted during his visit to England in 1878 that civil service was viewed as a professional career for which one prepared much as for medicine or law. Could not a graduate school be established in this country for the training of civil servants—a school, or at least a department, not unlike the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques? Might it not also provide the complement to the apparently unalterable professionalism of Columbia's law curriculum? (1955, 11)

This fit in very well with a political movement of independent Republicans called the “Mugwumps“—a group drawn from the social elite and devoted to civil service reform. They were quintessential centrist liberals. They opposed the so-called Greenbackers and the labor unions, who they thought wanted to confiscate property. They also opposed the so-called Radical Republicans, who had been leaders in the struggle to ensure political rights for the liberated Negro slaves. The Mugwumps considered the Radical Republicans to be fanatics. On the other hand, the Mugwumps also inveighed against the social irresponsibility of the rich, which gave them their centrist credentials. They saw salvation in an educated elite. It followed that “enlarging social science's place in the curriculum was another part of this educational effort” (Church, 1974, 577).⁷⁰

When the trustees of Columbia gave the go-ahead for a School (later called Faculty) of Political Science, they noted that Burgess “explicitly avows it to be part of his view to train men for the service of the government; but it is hardly necessary to make this a declared object, and to do so might awaken jealousies prejudicial to its success” (cited in Hoxie, 1955, 15). The trustees may have feared the reactions of other faculty but had no doubt themselves as to the merits of the objective. In Columbia's College Handbook of 1880, the new School of Political Science's objectives were stated this way: “[The] prime aim [is the] development of all branches of political science. Its secondary aim is the preparation of young men for all branches of public service” (cited in Crick, 1964, 28).

Just as Émile Boutmy was the driving force to create Sciences Po and John Burgess to establish the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia, so Sydney and Beatrice Webb were the driving forces to create the LSE, whose full name is the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Webbs had long wanted such an institution when, in 1894, one Henry Hunt Hutchison died and left a bequest to the Fabian Society of twenty thousand pounds—a princely sum at the time. So, at a breakfast meeting on August 4, 1895, convened by the Webbs and attended by George Wallas and George Bernard Shaw, it was decided (over Shaw's opposition) to found the LSE.

As in the case of the other two institutions, the initial intention was to improve the training of Great Britain's political and business elite. The Webbs used the curriculum of Sciences Po as the basis of their own offerings. Indeed, although their concerns were heavily oriented toward economic issues, Ralf Dahrendorf, a later director of the LSE, explains in his centennial history of the school (1995, 196) that the phrase “and Political Science” in the title was inserted because

the Webbs did not want to lose the allusion to the Paris École Libre des Sciences Politiques and the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, so that political sciences had to find a place in the name.

Furthermore, Dahrendorf notes (1995, 21) that in the beginning all classes were given in the evening as a means of pursuing its object of professional education:

Students would not be prepared especially for any degree, but attendance would be useful for Civil Service examinations as well as those of the Institute of Bankers, the London Chamber of Commerce, and others.

Although Sciences Po continued to have as one, but not the only one, of its roles to prepare students for entry into diplomacy and the higher civil service, this eventually ceased to be a major role of the LSE, whereas the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia became a graduate school in the social sciences, one of whose departments was political science (called at Columbia at the time Public Law and Government).

Political science, as we knew it after about 1900, emerged first in the United States.⁷¹ Its emergence was part of what Hughes (1958, 66–67) has called the major ideas of the 1890s, one of which was “to penetrate behind the fictions of political action…[to the] actual wielders of power.” Crick (1959, 37–38) indicates how this idea was developed:

The theories of a necessary progress and of a therapeutic science of society both appeared upon the scene. They were to result in a new split between political theory and political practice; a predilection to psychological explanation, and an antagonism to historical and philosophical explanation….They were to furnish added conditions…for the emergence of a unique type of philosophy, pragmatism, and of a largely unsystematized but increasingly influential positivism.

The positivist and presentist orientation of the founders of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1903 represented a break both with history and economics on the one hand and with the civil-service training orientation of Burgess. As Gunnell argues (2006, 481), the principal reason to break with history and economics was not, however, method but a concern about “the relationship between social science and politics.”

The founders of the APSA were interested, as were their predecessors, in achieving “an effective practical role for social science, but they were also rejecting the stance of Kathedersozialisten” (Gunnell, 2006, 481). They were trying to do exactly what Weber and Tönnies would try to do in 1909 in the establishment of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie. In taking this path, the American political scientists, like the German sociologists, were approaching what Dahrendorf calls (1995, v) the Sydney Webb fault line “between wanting to know the causes of things and wanting to change things.”

The way to navigate the fault line was centrist liberalism, an option Lowi suggests (1985, ix) was particularly evident in the United States, and within the United States, in political science:

National government in the United States, emerging late and slowly, built nevertheless of liberal lines. So did the social sciences, especially political science….Rejecting the Right and the Left, liberalism avoided judging the morality of conduct or of capitalism. Liberal government could be justified by concerning itself with conduct deemed harmful only in its consequences. Social science could analyze such a system and also serve such a system by concerning itself with hypotheses about conduct and its consequences or, correlatively, conduct and its causes. This helps explain why political science and the emerging national government both has such an affinity for science.

THE NON-WESTERN WORLD

The institutionalization of history and the three nomothetic disciplines—economics, sociology, and political science—in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth took the form of university disciplines wherein the Western world studied itself, explained its own functioning, the better to control what was happening. I say the Western world, but in practice, as we have noted, 95 percent of the scholarship was located in just five countries—Great Britain, France, the United States, Germany, and Italy—and concerned primarily those five countries. The last 5 percent was mostly about Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Russia, Iberia, and to a very small extent Latin America.

Since we are talking of a period in which the Western world, and particularly the five countries, dominated the rest of the world—politically, economically, and culturally—this should be no surprise. Still, the rest of the world was a matter of some concern to the powerful of the world, who wished to know how best to control the “others” over whom they held sway. To control, one must understand, at least minimally. So, again, it is no surprise that academic specialties emerged to produce the desired knowledge.

The rest of the world was, however, divided into two parts politically—a division that came to be designated by often inexact terminology. Analysts sometimes spoke of colonies and semicolonies—a distinction between those zones under direct colonial rule by a “European” power and those that were still nominally independent but subject to considerable European domination. As we shall see, this mode of categorizing particular places created analytic boxes that had to be transgressed if one were to read the situation accurately. Nevertheless, we can begin by noting that a discipline called anthropology emerged in this period, and it dealt largely with areas that were either colonies or special zones within the metropolitan powers' home territory. A second discipline, called Orientalism, dealt in this period largely (but not exclusively) with the semicolonies.

These two “disciplines” were entirely separate from each other, with rare exceptions. Indeed, even in the twenty-first century, few social scientists see the two “disciplines” as even vaguely connected with each other, much less two variants on a set of common themes. Nonetheless, common themes there were. The first was that both disciplines dealt with the “rest” of the world, those that were not part of the dominant pan-European zones in the late nineteenth century. The second theme was that the peoples with whom they were dealing were not considered to be “modern“—meaning that they did not have the technology and the machinery that was thought to be constitutive of modern “progress.”⁷²Consequently, it was not believed that they shared the values of modernity as these values were imagined and practiced in the pan-European world. And the third common theme was the assertion that these countries/zones/peoples had no history, meaning that they had not changed, developed, progressed over historical time.

There was, however, one important difference between the peoples dealt with under one or the other label. Anthropologists dealt with populations that were relatively small, both in their numbers and in the size of the area they inhabited. These peoples, with rare exceptions, had no written documents at the time they came under colonial rule. They all spoke a single language, which was normally not shared with other neighboring peoples. Their gods also were not shared. From the perspective of their European conquerors, these were denominated “primitive” peoples, strange in every way, whose modes of living and thinking were virtually incomprehensible to the ordinary European.

Orientalists dealt with quite different kinds of peoples. They dealt with peoples or “civilizations” that were large both in their numbers and in the size of the area that they inhabited. They did have written texts, albeit ones that were difficult for Europeans to decipher. There also seemed to be a shared common language over a large area, or at least a lingua franca. Hence, the number of speakers was very large. They seemed in addition to have a single dominant religion in this large zone, a religion large enough that, in the nineteenth century, Western scholars deemed it to be a “world religion.” And they clearly had a history, but one that Western scholars would deem somehow “frozen” and therefore one that had not evolved into “modernity.” Upon inspection, it turned out that all these large, “frozen” civilizations were the product of large, bureaucratic empires that existed at some time in the past, what we have been terming “world-empires.” It was these bureaucratic empires that gave rise to a common language or lingua franca, a common “world religion,” and common cultural traditions. Many, but not all, of these zones were still coherent enough politically and militarily to be able to resist direct colonization.

As a result of this crucial difference between the two kinds of non-European zones, two different intellectual questions formed the basis of disciplinary enquiry, and two different practical methodologies of research came to be utilized. The anthropologists sought to decipher how the peoples they studied—peoples that they began to treat almost uniformly as “tribes“—actually functioned. That is, they sought to discover the rational bases of behavior under the outer layer of what seemed to most Europeans to be irrational behavior. In this sense, the quest for the hidden rationality of behavior was not all that different from what other social scientists thought they were doing when studying “modern” peoples. It was a quest that derived from Enlightenment visions of the appropriate role of social science.

But how could they do this? Initially, there was nothing for the anthropologists to read, and they were unable even to communicate orally with such peoples, at least at the outset of their work. The solution to this problem came in the form of a practical method called participant observation. This method required field-work. The anthropologists typically went to live among a particular people for some time. They sought to locate persons they thought of as “linguists“—that is, some members of the group who had acquired, for some reason, command of a European language. These persons would become not only intermediaries between the anthropologist and their people but also interpreters (both literally of the language and intellectually of the culture).

The anthropologists would seek to learn everything about their people, whose culture was defined as a single, integrated whole that was unchanging, in order eventually to write an ethnography of this people. Once done, the anthropologists became cultural and political interpreters of their people to the European world in general and quite often to the colonial authorities in particular. This is, of course, a highly idealized picture of what occurred, but this was the standard description of the activity at the time,

The Orientalists had a quite different concern and a quite different practical methodology. Since they were dealing with what they termed a “high civilization,” but one that did not seem to them modern in the sense that European civilization saw itself as modern, the most obvious and immediate issue to resolve was to explain why this “high” civilization never made the evolutionary leap that Europeans were presumed to have made into modernity. This was, of course, a highly self-congratulatory question for Europeans to pose. It presumed superiority and sought less to demonstrate its reality (for it rather was a largely unquestioned premise) than to explain its origins.

The question was how this was to be done. Since there did exist a written literature, it seemed hardly urgent to engage in the kind of fieldwork that was the pride of anthropologists. Still, this literature was written in a language quite different from the languages native to the European Orientalists. Learning the language required a long training, especially since these texts were for the most part ancient and many of them were religious texts. The needed skills were largely those of philology, and the locus of research was primarily a limited number of major libraries. To be sure, the Orientalists shared the same basic premise of social science as the anthropologists. They, too, wished to explicate the rational underpinnings of seemingly irrational behavior and philosophical argument. They, too, wished to become interpreters of their civilization to the European world in general and quite often to its political authorities in particular.

The desire of the anthropologists and the Orientalists to explicate the underlying rationality of their tribe or their civilization led them almost inevitably to be centrist liberals in their implicit ideology. They sought to ameliorate the rough edges of the relations of the powerful to the weaker, while aiding the powerful to govern their charges and/or deal with other civilizations more intelligently and more effectively.⁷³ They abetted reforms that served to limit conflict and above all radical subversion of the status quo of pan-European geopolitical power.

Orientalism was heir to a long tradition in the Catholic Church. Already in the Middle Ages, there were monks and other Christian scholars who were studying the languages and texts of the Muslim world and of China, as part of the effort to evangelize these zones. Such scholarship got a new (and often more secular) impulsion in the late eighteenth and especially in the nineteenth century, when European expansion began to embrace all the different parts of the Asian continent.

The study of a reified Egyptian civilization—Egyptology—began in the second half of the eighteenth century. Two political events were, however, critical to the serious development of Egyptology as an Orientalist subdiscipline. One was Napoleon's unsuccessful invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the other was the Greek war for independence in 1823. Napoleon's invasion was in the end abortive politically (see Cole, 2008). But he had had the idea to bring with him a whole group of scholars to study Egypt. One major result was a multivolume work called La Description de l'Egypte, a compendium of articles on the history, architecture, flora, and fauna of Egypt, plus maps and engravings.

This monumental work was perhaps less important in the creation of Egyptology than the incarnation of Greece as the fount of Western civilization—a concept so common today that it is hard to remember that this was not always a given of even Western perceptions of history. Martin Bernal, in Black Africa, the book in which he argued for the Afro-Asiatic roots of (Western) classical civilization, entitled volume 1 (1987) The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985.

The point he was making is the counterpoint. It was Greece, as opposed to both Rome and Egypt, that represented for the Romantic movement “models of liberty” (p. 289). An overly favorable picture of Egypt might pose a threat to “the uniqueness of Greek civilization and that of Europe as a whole” (p. 269). When the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire in 1823, European Romantics led the call for solidarity, proclaiming it a “struggle between European youthful vigor and Asian and African decadence, corruption and cruelty” (p. 291).

It is not important here to analyze the scholarly controversy that Bernal's book has aroused.⁷⁴ What is undeniable is that Egyptology developed in the nineteenth century as an Orientalist subdiscipline, as a study of the other. The largely deprecatory picture of Egyptian civilization that dominated the nineteenth-century literature (and indeed that of the twentieth century) corresponded to the geopolitics and geoculture of the world-system of that period.⁷⁵

It also seems clear that the emergence of Classics as a field of study, a discipline, in British (and then American) universities reflected the thrust of centrist liberalism in the geoculture. Classics represented on the one hand, in its emphasis on a close reading of the literature, a break from the stagnant curriculum of traditional Oxbridge education. But at the same time it also represented a rejection of the radicalism bred by the French Revolution. It was a sort of “third way.”⁷⁶

Egypt was nonetheless secondary, in the emergent discipline of Orientalism, to India. In 1818, James Mill published the first edition of A History of British India. In it, Mill developed the thesis of Oriental despotism as something quite different from European enlightened despotism, drawing quite negative portraits of both Hindus and Muslims in British India, both seen as unchanging peoples (Bannerji, 1995, 60–61). The book was highly successful, republished in ever-expanded form. It led to his appointment in a senior position in India House, of which he eventually became the director.

But, despite Mill and despite the fact that India became a British colony, it was not Great Britain that became the prime locus of the study of Indian civilization. Rather, it was Germany. Dietmar Rothermund, himself a late twentieth-century German historian of India, attributes the origin of the German romantic “quest for India” to the struggle of German poets and playwrights in the late eighteenth century “against the supremacy of French style and classical literary precedent in Germany.” He notes the translation by Georg Fischer in 1791 of the Indian epic Shakuntala, which “created a veritable sensation in literary circles” and had a “much more enthusiastic reception than the English translation by William Jones in Great Britain” (1986, vii-viii). Indology served the German rejection of Anglo-French universalism.⁷⁷

German Indology took a heavily linguistic form. The discovery of the links among that vast group of languages we today call the Indo-European family can be traced to the late eighteenth century. Although there had been suggestions of the existence of such linguistic links by both an English Jesuit and an Italian merchant in the sixteenth century, by a Dutch linguist in the seventeenth century, and by two French Jesuits in the eighteenth century, these suggestions got little purchase until Thomas Jones, founder of the Asiatick Society, proposed it in his presidential address in 1786. The actual term Indo-European was subsequently coined by Thomas Young in 1813 (Decharneux, 2000, 13).

In Germany, Indo-European was, however, labeled Indo-Germanic (Shapiro, 1981), and German research emphasized the search for an Urspache (an “original language”), sometimes associated with a search for an Urheimat (an “original homeland”). This search could take on romantic notions of linguistic purity, making of Sanskrit the oldest language and German the closest language to Sanskrit in terms of its structure (Mawet, 2000, 62). This is what Rothermund (1986, 53) considers the “conservative” version of German Indology, one “which saw in the most ancient past the manifestation of the greatest purity and perfection of language and religion,” one whose object was “to penetrate the veil of later decay and corruption so as to reach the fountainhead of original revelation.”

Nonetheless, the most famous of Germany's nineteenth-century Indologists, Max Muller, was also infused with the liberal optimism of evolutionary doctrines, and he conceived of the possibility of a religious evolution of Hinduism that would bring it closer to Christianity. He was personally close to the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, a group that actually pursued such a process, as did comparable movements in other Asian religions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Rothermund, 1986, 54).

Of course, not all German scholars were Indologists. It was precisely in opposition to Orientalist views that Hegel laid such great emphasis on the idea that it was only in ancient Greece that mankind began in seiner Heimat zu sein (“to live in its homeland”) (Droit, 2000, 91). As with Egypt, so with India. It was point-counterpoint of European universalism versus the frozen civilizations of the Orient, which might evolve, but only under Western tutelage. It was therefore no accident that German (indeed all Western) nineteenth-century scholarship concerning India and other Asian countries took no interest in the contemporary history of these countries.⁷⁸

China is in some ways the most interesting case of the tilt that the Orientalist perception involved. The image of China as an old, wealthy, far-off civilization was one that had aroused European admiration for a long time. But somewhere in the mid-to late eighteenth century, the image was inverted: “[T]he Chinese were now condemned for what the Enlightenment had considered admirable, their stability” (Bernal, 1987, 240). China became, especially in the period after the First Opium War (1839–1842), “a civilization conventionally interpreted…as archetypically ‘static' and ‘traditional' “ (Blue, 1999, 94–95).⁷⁹

Here, too, Germany seemed to take the lead. But unlike in the case of India, German thinkers seemed unforgiving on all sides. Herder led the way, arguing that China was “the definitely dated and localized product of the Eastern Mongolians,…a mere petrification of an ancient way of life,…a hibernating marmot and…an embalmed Egyptian mummy” (Rose, 1951, 58).

Hegel was slightly more generous. Rose (1951, 59) summarizes Hegel's views:

The Chinese State was an admirable patriarchy and a well-functioning bureaucracy, but it also represented an unbearable despotism….Hegel could not find any free spirit, inward religiosity, deep feeling, or high ethical standards in China. In their place, the dead hand of abstract reasoning had arrested all life by its withering touch. China had no share in history. “It has always remained what it was.”

Finally, Gobineau, although deeply opposed to progress and modernity, nonetheless found reasons for disdaining China, if reasons that were virtually the opposite of those of other Western thinkers. Blue (1999, 134) characterizes Gobineau's analysis in this way:

[Mediocrity, despotism, and lack of freedom] were for him typical characteristics of “the masses” and “Revolution.” China was thus a striking example of democratic despotism and “progress” as he conceived it, and of the consequences he saw flowing from these—namely, slavery, stagnation, and eventual doom.

Thus, by different particular arguments but by similar logics, Orientalism as a mode of interpreting the “high civilizations“—those latter-day descendants or continuations of historic world-empires—combined to produce an image of these zones as frozen civilizations that always remained what they were. They were, in Hegel's language, zones that could advance further only through some intervention by the European world.

The anthropologists in many ways had an easier task in demonstrating their arguments. They dealt with peoples who had no written documents and whose technology was by and large beneath the level of that of nineteenth-century Europe. As Hinsley (1981, 29) says of the study of Native Americans in the United States: “The central, nagging, political and religious dilemmas were these: Are these peoples in any sense our brothers? By what right can we claim their land as our own?”

The early history of anthropology turned around a debate over so-called poly-genesis—the concept we discussed previously: that Europeans and other peoples were not part of a single species. In 1910, John Lynton Myers (1916, 69) gave a presidential address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He sought to explain why polygenesis, by then a totally abandoned idea, had ever been taken seriously. He starts by noting that it was never seriously suggested before the late eighteenth century. Then something changed. That something was the emergence of a strong abolitionist movement in Great Britain:

The slave-owning eighteenth century knew quite well that Negroes and Chinamen were no more Homo ferus than they were chimpanzees, and justified enslavement as Aristotle had justified it of old, on the ground that, if anything, it was to the advantage of the slave.

But it was no accident that the generation that first doubted, on the political side, the legitimacy of white man's ownership of black man, and translated these doubts into practice and acts of Parliament, was precisely the generation which first doubted on the theoretic side, whether white men and black men were of the same blood. As long as slavery was regarded as justifiable morally, no one troubled to justify it anthropologically. But no sooner was the naturalness of slavery called into question by the Abolitionists…than the slave-owners raised the previous question: “Granted that I am my brother's keeper, and granted that this means I may not be his master, yet is this man, this black brother, in any true sense my brother at all? Is he not, on the face of him, only an exceptionally domesticable animal, and of different lineage from mine?” ⁸⁰

Polygenesis was a crude racist idea. It was used, even inside Great Britain, as an argument to deny the suffrage to Celts (Rainger, 1978, 69). But by the late nineteenth century, it lost out within the community of anthropologists to an older, alternative version of the “primitive“—one linked to the basic concept of progress.⁸¹

John Locke (1965, 383) had said in 1690: “In the beginning all the world was America.” In the mid-eighteenth century, in France and in Scotland, the concept of multiple stages of mankind's evolution was put forth as a theoretical position, notably by Jacques Turgot and Adam Smith. In their presentation, the Native Americans provided “a plausible working hypothesis about the basic characteristics of the ‘first' or ‘earliest' stage of socio-economic development” (Meek, 1976, 128).

This hypothesis fit in better with the Zeitgeist than did polygenesis. It also fit in better with the emergent distinction between “natural history” and “science“—part of the more general divorce we have noted between philosophy and science. Whereas previously the two terms “had meant pretty much the same thing: knowledge about the natural world” (Merrill, 1989, 12), they now signified separate enterprises, as science came to be divided into separate disciplines. As Merrill notes, now “[a] naturalist could still study all of nature…; a scientist only studied part of it….Natural history remained accessible to amateurs, while (science) became the province of professionals.”

It is clear that anthropology, in adopting its emphasis on ethnographic delineation, was a version of natural history centered on human groups. And, of course, it remained open to amateurs for quite a while before finally becoming, in the early twentieth century, a domain reserved for professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, anthropology still depended on the work of travelers—sometimes scientists aboard naval expeditions, sometimes explorers sent by geographic societies, sometimes members of colonial bureaucracies, sometimes missionaries, sometimes agents engaged in philanthropic tasks.

The crucial transition was in the definition of what constituted the “primitive.” What up to the mid-nineteenth century has been “considered a social or artistic condition of simplicity” (and therefore analyzable as a biological phenomenon) “was now redefined as a particular cultural state of existence” (Betts, 1982, 67). Once that shift was made, anthropology could become a discipline with a clear object of study.

Trouillot (1991, 40) captures the heart of it: “Anthropology did not create the savage. Rather, the savage was the raison d'être of anthropology.” Two famous statements made in 1871 set the stage for this. The Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso said: “For the dreams of the theologians and the phantasms of the metaphysicians, [we have substituted] a few dry facts…but they are facts” (cited in Zagatti, 1988, 24). And that same year Edward Taylor put forward his proposition in Primitive Culture (1920, 410) that “the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science.”

The outlines of the profession were now set. It would be holistic and descriptive, producing idiographic ethnographies based on fieldwork. It would be interpretative of the rationality of “primitive” peoples. It would stand for the better integration of such peoples into the modern world, for their benefit and for the benefit of the European authorities that ruled over them. And this it would remain until the anticolonial revolutions of the post-1945 era undid the basic geopolitical and hence geocultural framework within which anthropology carved its niche in the structures of knowledge.

The Argument Restated

This book is about the modern world-system in the long nineteenth century, which conventionally runs from 1789 to 1914. There are endless numbers of books that have discussed the basic characteristics of this period. There exists what we may think of as a conventional view, shared by scholars of varying ideological and/or scholarly views.

It is seen as the century of multiple revolutions—the industrial revolution, the scientific-technological revolution, the popular revolutions (and notably the French Revolution). The usual view is that the combination of all these revolutions is what created, or was labeled as, modernity. Begun in the long nineteenth century, modernity would continue into the twentieth century.

The view of this work, as expressed throughout the whole of the four volumes written up to now, is different. Take first the concept of “the industrial revolution.” For most scholars, it occurred first in England or Great Britain—the most common dates are sometime between 1760 and 1840—and then was copied or emulated in a number of other countries in continental Europe and North America. We have explained at length in volume 3 why we think that this is incorrect.

We consider that what occurred in that period in England was a cyclical upward increase in the mechanization of industrial production, one that had occurred a number of times previously and would occur again a number of times later. We consider also that it was a process of the world-economy as a whole, one that accrued to the particular advantage of Great Britain because of its defeat of France in the struggle to become the new hegemonic power of the world-system.

For a long time, the dominant view of the French Revolution was the so-called social interpretation, which argued that the Revolution represented the overthrow of feudal forces by the bourgeoisie, enabling France to become a “capitalist” country. In the last forty years, this interpretation has been challenged by one in which the French Revolution was seen as an attempt to pursue a liberal, parliamentary path, one that went awry.

Once again, we have disagreed with both views. In volume 3, we explained why the French Revolution could not be thought of as a bourgeois revolution that installed “capitalism,” since we considered that France had long since become part and parcel of the capitalist world-economy. Rather, we saw the French Revolution as in part a last attempt to defeat England in the struggle to become the hegemonic power, and in part an “antisystemic” (that is, anticapitalist) revolution in the history of the modern world-system, one that essentially failed.

We have argued that the modern world-system has two major cyclical processes. One is that of the Kondratieff cycles, more or less fifty to sixty years in length—cycles of expansion and stagnation in the world-economy as a whole. The second major cyclical process is a much slower one. It is of the rise and decline of hegemonic powers in the interstate system. We explained in volume 2 how the United Provinces (today's Netherlands) achieved the status of hegemonic power in the mid-seventeenth century. And we explained in volume 3 how Great Britain was able to become the hegemonic power following its defeat of France in the revolutionary-Napoleonic “world war” of 1792–1815.

Finally, we recounted in volume 3 the second great geographical expansion of the functioning boundaries of the capitalist world-economy. We explained the processes by which four zones that had been essentially outside the capitalist world-economy (Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Indian subcontinent, and West Africa) were pulled inside and transformed—economically, politically, and socially—as a result of this inclusion.

Hence, when we arrived at telling the story of the long nineteenth century, we based it on the analyses made in the first three volumes. The modern world-system had been a capitalist world-economy since the long sixteenth century. Great Britain was the hegemonic power in the mid-nineteenth century. The effective boundaries of the modern world-system had been expanded, although they did not yet include the totality of the globe. The third and last expansion would occur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were stories we did not need to retell in this volume. (We explained in the preface why we were postponing the story of the third and final expansion of the modern world-system until volume 5.)

Instead, we chose to concentrate in this volume on what we thought was novel in the long nineteenth century. We label that newness the “triumph of centrist liberalism.” Of course, we are not the first to note the strength of liberalism as an ideology in the nineteenth century. But our approach to this issue is somewhat different from that of other scholars. This required, among other things, reviewing the difficult terminological history of the term liberalism and the confusion that its ambiguous usages has made for cogent analysis of ideological reality.

To pursue this task, we needed to argue, first of all, that there was something that had not yet been achieved in the historical development of the modern world-system: the creation of what we are calling its geoculture. By a geoculture, we mean values that are very widely shared throughout the world-system, both explicitly and latently.

We have argued that, until the long nineteenth century, there had been a disjunction between the political economy of the world-system and its discursive rhetoric. In this volume, we have argued that it was the cultural impact of the French Revolution that made it imperative to overcome this disjunction by the development of the three main ideologies of the modern world-system—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism.

We have sought to explain how it is that liberalism has always been a centrist doctrine, neither of the left nor of the right. We have argued that none of the three ideologies was in practice antistatist, although all three pretended they were. And we have tried to demonstrate the ways in which centrist liberalism “tamed” the other two ideologies, transforming them into virtual avatars of centrist liberalism. In that way, we could argue that by the end of the long nineteenth century, centrist liberalism was the prevailing doctrine of the world-system's geoculture.

We develop in detail how centrist liberalism imposed its ideology in three crucial spheres. The first was the creation of “liberal states” in the core regions of the world-system, in which Great Britain and France became the initial and leading exemplars. The second was the attempt to transform the doctrine of citizenship from being one of inclusion to being one of exclusion. We illustrated this by reference to three crucial groups that were excluded—women, the working classes (propertyless and often illiterate), and ethnic/racial “minorities.” The third was the emergence of the historical social sciences as reflections of liberal ideology and modes of enabling the dominant groups to control the dominated strata.

We have put forth this analysis with as much empirical evidence as we could amass, and with whatever theoretical arguments we could assemble. The case is offered as one that better fits the totality of the world social reality than alternate modes of explaining the long nineteenth century.