David Priestland: Merchant, Soldier, Sage

I've just finished David Priestland's new book, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power. As the title suggests, David makes sense of history by juggling his three basic categories, analogous in some ways to capitalists, militarists, and intelligentsia. He defines them as castes, suggesting modes of thinking linked to occupation. David also discusses 'workers' quite a lot, but they rarely got to exercise power.

In general, David argues, a 'caste-balance' is a good thing. In the 1920s, and since 1970s, buccaneering 'merchants' have been hegemonic, with inegalitarian and de-stabilising results. Priestland looks back quite fondly to the post-war golden age of rapid growth and welfarism (whilst admitting its grave problems). Then a coalition of worker and 'sage' held the quick-buck market at bay. (This is quite similar, though with different terms employed, to the analysis in Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy's analysis in The Crisis of Neoliberalism (2010); they spoke more of a worker/manger alliance against finance-capital, which they hope to see re-instituted.)

David treats of a lot of themes I look at in my book, though I stick to more of a 'class' framework (tweaked about). I'll not judge whether that this following is also a difference, but David's prose really zips along! He's particularly adept at using portraits of individuals to illustrate wider themes.

There's some very intriguing data employed. For example, David cites the work of Graham Turner, which claims that had Britain and America not let domestic debt rip between 1997 and 2007 (private and government both, presumably), consumption would have been 20 percent lower! (p. 243).

Anyway, it's an outstandingly interesting, well-written and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended!

David's also got an article in the Guardian for you to take a gander at.

Prussia and the 'Free Right of Merit'

Between about 1859 and 1864, there was an acute struggle between liberals seeking greater powers for the Prussian parliament, elected on a wealth franchise, and the Crown struggling to consolidate its hold upon the army. With Bismarck's help, the Crown triumphed (more or less).

This was a key turning-point as I discuss it in my book. Rather provocatively, I said it came  "closest to being the most striking example of an archetypal bourgeois revolution".

Partly this claim depends upon my definition of 'bourgeoisie', which is neither as just a disparate rag-bag twixt gentry and labourers, nor a super cohesive class of capitalists. Rather, it is a class category bound by a common interest in what we'd call 'meritocracy'.

There's an interesting section on the dispute in F. L. Carsten's study re-published in his Essays in German History (London: the Hambledon Press, 1985):

The army conflict in Prussia was at the same time a social conflict between a rising middle class and a declining nobility. This was clearly perceived at the time. Thus the historian of the foundation of the German Empire of 1871, Professor von Sybel, said in 1862: 'in internal affairs, the great conflict of our time is not a conflict between Crown and parliament, but one between the excessive privileges of the nobility and the free right of merit.' Another moderate Liberal declared: 'it is a struggle about principles ... a struggle of the burghers versus the Junkers.' ['Bismarck and the Prussian Liberals', p. 239]

It's a nice little paragraph. Too late for the book, but I submit it for your consideration.

Laswell and the Social Basis of the 'Socialist Ideal'

Harold Lasswell, a political scientist, used to be very well known, though I don't think one comes across his name much now. His 1935 book, World Politics and Personal Insecurity, sold in very large numbers. It's hardly weathered as well as E.H. Carr's legendary The Twenty Year Crisis, but at the time seemed to many to be of the same standard.

Laswell noted the commonalities of the dictatorships in Italy, Germany, and Russia. They were all three boldly anti-liberal, and favoured a good deal of state direction of the economy. Laswell concluded that they should be understood by a common species of 'elites analysis'. They formed the extreme edge of a wider movement, apparent also in tendencies towards 'planning' in capitalist democracies (Roosevelt's New Deal etc). There was, since 1914, a socialistic-authoritarian drift. He wrote,

"Who gains by the centralized dictatorship which is in transition towards a socialist state? The answer appears to be the skilled, those who sacrifice to acquire technique. … This suggests that the socialist ideal is, in fact, the ideal of the lesser bourgeoisie, springing from resentment at the capitalistic distortion of the relationship between reward and sacrifice exhibited in the rise  of plutocracy."

[Harold D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York: The Free Press, 1935, 1965), pp. 202-3.]

Certainly fascism fumed and raged against the indolent rentier bourgeoisie, whilst lauding heroic self-made men as natural managers and leaders of workers. Communism was a bit more complex: the managerial specialists were relatively privileged in material terms, but they were also mistrusted by the regime as essentially disloyal, class enemies in formation. Not infrequently, this mistrust of the intelligentsia turned to persecution.

Communist leaders really preferred an industrial working class as the surest base to such consensus as they were ever able to muster. Working class interests, thus, were carefully balanced with inducements for managers and technical experts. Elite specialists didn't enjoy anything like the same income increments over unskilled workers as they did in capitalist economies.

It's quite plausible that the 'progressive movement' more generally has found sustenance in an alliance of worker and 'lesser bourgeoisie' against the 'plutocracy'. Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have argued that just such an alliance backed up the full-employment / welfare consensus between World War II and c. 1973. In the 1970s, they argue, there was a shift of professionals away from organized labour to the side of the super-rich, leading to marginalization of organized labour, and a rise in inequality. This alliance, they go on,  may in turn be breaking up in the fall-out of the Great Recession. Well, we'll see.

Who Were the Bourgeoisie? A Reactionary Definition.

In the early 1860s there was a major constitutional struggle in Prussia, between parliamentary liberals and the Royal state executive, sometimes compared in its passion and import to the English Civil War. The conservative Berliner Revue thought that the liberal demand for government responsible to the elected assembly was an attempt by the bourgeoisie to subordinate the state to their interests. In 1860 it angrily asked the question: who are these upstart “new bourgeoisie” seeking to become the “new nobility”?

The answer is provided by the membership list of the lower house of the legislature, in France as well as in Italy, in Germany as well as in Prussia. In the first place ahead of everyone else are those who have acquired a higher academic education by attending a secondary school and a university, but who have remained virtually strangers to the actual realities of life, in other words, men of abstract education which is instructive about everything and nothing. … the judical officials, the administrative officials, to a considerable extent the clergy, the physicians, the scholars, the teachers, at the higher level, the lawyers, and similar people. … [those] who have acquired a modern scholarly education, and whose spiritual sensitivity has been diminished to the extent that their intellect has been trained, in other words, the engineers, the higher technicians, the men of letters, especially the Reformed Jews of the press, and others of that sort.

[Source: Theodore S. Hamerow, The Birth of a New Europe: State and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 187-8]

The baddies here are the over-educated without a real grasp on the realities of life. There's no mention at all of entrepreneurs in this definition. Of course, in more dispassionate analyses, 'capitalists' usually were categorised along with the bourgeoisie, though as a distinct section. The German language differentiated between Wirtschaftsbürgertum and Bildungsbürgertum – the former referring primarily to an economic category (those who lived off profits from investments or the ownership of capital), the latter to an educated and ‘free professional’ category (doctors, professors, bureaucrats etc). 

It's interesting here that the 'bourgeois' are what we now might call a 'meritocracy'. The disparaging reference to the Jews highlights that strata historically deprived of juridically advantaged estate status often led the way in a society re-configuring around marketable aptitudes rather than inherited privilege (as Mitt Romney has maladroitly but not entirely unreasonably pointed out). It's more or less the definition I use too, in the book, though without the Berliners Revue's reactionary fury, I trust.

One problem with 'meritocracy', however, is that it very easily segues into a smug, self-entitled oligarchy (as Chris Hayes argues).

Wherein I say what Say Said about the Middling Classes

Part of my argument in Bourgeois Liberty ... is that Liberals and such applauded the bourgeoisie for its very particular attributes. In contrast to the working classes, the bourgeoisie had the time and energy to develop political rationality. But unlike the aristocracy they disavowed ambition to batten upon the state, because unlike courtiers and gentry etc. they did not rely for their living on politiking. The bourgeoisie, thus, provided an ideal support base for rational government: they would support the political executive without trying to take it over.

Here is Jean Baptiste Say making the point in his Traité d'économie politique - discours préliminaire (1814 edition):

For a long time it was thought that the science of political economy could only possibly be useful to the very limited number of persons engaged in the administration of public affairs. It is undoubtedly of importance that men in public life should be more enlightened than others ... But, is it possible for princes and ministers to be enlightened, when private individuals are not so? This is a question that merits consideration. It is in the middling classes of society, equally secure from the intoxication of power, and the compulsory labour of indigence, in which are found moderate fortunes, leisure united with habits of industry, the free intercourse of friendship, a taste for literature, and the ability to travel, that knowledge originates, and is disseminated amongst the highest and lowest orders of the people. For these latter classes, not having the leisure necessary for meditation, only adopt truths when presented to them in the form of axioms, requiring no further demonstration.

You can read it in context here [PDF].

The bit to highlight, perhaps, is this sentence: "It is in the middling classes of society, equally secure from the intoxication of power, and the compulsory labour of indigence ... that knowledge originates, and is disseminated amongst the highest and lowest orders of the people."

Part of the critique of the idea of 'bourgeois revolution' is that the bourgeoisie never seems to be seizing directly upon the state, which is what we tend to think of as 'revolution'. For nineteenth-century Liberals, however, it was precisely because the bourgeoisie lacked a political will to state-power that they were the foundation of a new kind of compact between government and civil society.

'The treason of the Bourgeoisie'

I discuss in my book the allegation that, as  the working class developed as a force no longer under tutelege of the middle class, the bourgeoisie reacted by drifting from their radical reforming commitments. As we have seen here, the eminent liberal historian Benedetto Croce - no socialist he! - thought just this. The Revolutions of 1848 are often taken as a turning point from where the bourgeoisie lost its mojo. However, it needs to be recalled that the bourgeoisie had long been accused of sucking up to aristocratic power, and indeed were historically keen to become aristo themselves if at all possible. The legendary historian Fernand Braudel, in the second volume of his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949, 1966), explicitly spoke of “the defection of the bourgeoisie”, when the bourgeois turned "class traitor" (p. 726). Braudel meant by this the tendency of urban families in the 16th Century, in seeking security, to move away from mercantilism into judicial and official pursuits. The exception to this pattern, however, was found in the Netherlands and England.

I think one may doubt whether one has to be in commerce as such to be a 'loyal' bourgeois. 'Career open to talents' is really the defining ideal of the bourgeoisie, and this can apply as much to state officialdom as to private prospects in the market-place. Indeed, bourgeois penetration of officialdom must have done quite a lot to shift state policy towards the bourgeois ideal over time.

Weber: Defining the Bourgeois

As might be expected, Max Weber turns up a fair bit in my book. Weber explicitly thought of himself as "a member of the bourgeois class", ""educated in their views and ideals". He asked Robert Michels to consider him a "class-conscious bourgeois".

What Weber meant by 'bourgeois' was pretty complex. In one context, however, he defined the 'positively privilged classes' as 'entrepeneurs, managers and members of the various professions "with sought after expertise or privileged education" (e.g. lawyers, scientists, physicians and artists), as well as, in rare cases, highly skilled workers who are not easily replacable.' [From Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Collected Essays (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1989), pp. 53, 64.]

As it turns out, this isn't so far from my own definition of the bourgeoisie. However, as I argue that there is - more or less - a fundamental (if relational) economic basis for bourgeois class interests and attitudes, I don't primarily use Weber's typology with its emphasis on multi-valency. I discuss my 'definition' of the bourgeoisie in the introduction to the book, already available here [PDF].

Heinrich Heine on the 'Politics of Fear'

The title of my book comes from Heinrich Heine. His most famous quote is, "That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also." He was referring to the burning of the Quar'an during the Spanish Inquisition. Heine's works were amongst those that were put to the flame by the Nazis when they came to power. The line is displayed at the Yad Vashem centre in Israel, as a still pertinent warning.

Heine was a friend of Marx, but did not share Marx's optimism that a better new society would emerge from the hegemony of the proletariat: Heine feared for the survival of educated merit. Hal Draper, a twentieth-century American socialist, whose massive series on Marx I used for my book, also translated Heine's poetry.

Anyway, here is the longer extract from Heine:

"The Parisian bourgeoisie are obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster. It is not fear of a republic but an instinctive dread of communism, of those sinister fellows who would swarm like rats from the ruin of the present regime. No, the French bourgeoisie would not be alarmed by a republic of the earlier variety, nor even by a little Robespierrism. They would easily reconcile themselves to that form of government and stand watch over the Tuileries regardless whether the building housed a Louis Philippe or a Committee of Public Safety. For what the bourgeoisie warn above all is order and protection - protection of their existing property rights and these are objectives that a republic should be able to guarantee as surely as a monarchy. But as already noted these shopkeepers sense instinctively that today a republic might no longer represent the principles of the seventeen nineties. It might become the instrument through which a new unacknowledged power would seize control, a proletarian party preaching community of goods. The bourgeoisie are therefore conservative by external necessity, not by inward conviction. Their politics are motivated by fear."

[Source: Heinrich Heine (12 July 1843), Geoffrey Bruun, Revolution and Reaction, 1848-1852: A Mid-Century Watershed, ed. Snyder, Louis L. (New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1958), p. 108.]