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Two compromises: Victorian and Bismarckian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Marvin Rintala
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EVERY POLITICAL SYSTEM, WHETHER IT IS PREDEMOCRATIC, DEMOcratic, or postdemocratic totalitarian, has both leaders and followers. All those who are leaders – in other words, all those who exercise power over followers – can be grouped together under the category of the ruling class. Any ruling class, to be such, obviously must be accepted by those who are ruled. Human beings are followers only if they choose to follow. Leaders must have recognition and at least some degree of consent from followers to be leaders. This is the necessary condition for possession of power by the ruling class. If the ruling class does not provide those elements which are necessary for the survival of the political system, both its power and that system are in peril. In return for the security which it provides its followers, the ruling class gives the tone to politics. It does not, however, have to occupy the actual administrative posts to be the ruling class, but it must possess a prestige position.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1968 , pp. 207 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1968

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References

1 ‘Unless a body of men feel that their place in the society is, granted that they are numerous enough, either certain to receive consideration or, alternatively, that its refusal will jeopardize the position of those in office, they are unlikely, if the object involved is one to which they attach any profound consideration, to acquiesce at all easily in the maintenance of social peace.’ Harold Laski, J., Parliamentary Government in England, New York, 1938, p. 4.Google Scholar

2 … it would seem that there existed in Britain the conditions and emotions which led to the liberal revolutions in Europe and drove men in many lands on to the barricades, or into the field of battle, in 1848 and 1849: Kitson Clark, G., The Making of Victorian England, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962, p. 42.Google Scholar

3 According to the Oxford Dictionary, the term ‘middle class’ entered the vocabulary of British political discussion in 1812. Briggs, Asa, ‘Middle‐Class Consciousness in English Politics, 1780–1846’, Past and Present, Number 9, 04, 1956, p. 67.Google Scholar

4 Spring, David, ‘Some Reflections on Social History in the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, Volume IV, Number 1, September, 1960, p. 62.Google Scholar

5 Christie, O. F., The Transition from Aristocracy, New York, 1928, p. 202.Google Scholar When, in 1858, Victoria visited Birmingham and Leeds, the local press welcomed ‘a wife and mother of so lofty a purity and discharging her duties so well that she forms the brightest exemplar to the matrons of England’. Briggs, Asa, The Age of Improvement, London, 1959, p. 459.Google Scholar

6 See also Jennings, Ivor, Party Politics: Volume I, Cambridge, 1960, p. 244:Google Scholar Guttsman, W. L., The British Political Elite, New York, 1963, p: 153.Google Scholar

7 Inge, William Ralph, The Victorian Age, Cambridge, 1922, p. 52.Google Scholar At least for the 19th century, Inge's statement is clearly exaggerated. See Pumphrey, Ralph E. The Introduction of Industrialists into the British Peerage: A Study in Adaptation of a Social. Institution’, The American Historical Review, Volume LXV, Number 1, 10, 1959, pp. 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Typical of the revisionist approach is the following statement, taken from one of the most influential studies ever to be published in the field of political history: ‘The strength and homogeneity of the aristocratic ruling classes, as witnessed in parliament, in the government, and in local administration, remained substantially intact after 1832 …l’, Gash, N., Politics in the Age of Peel, London, 1953, p. 28.Google Scholar

9 Martin, Kingsley, The Crown and the Establishment, London, 1962, p. 170.Google Scholar See also Guttsman, , The British Political Elite, p. 75 Google Scholar.

10 Appropriately, in 1852, when Derby (sic), as Prime Minister, submitted a list of names for royal household appointments, Prince Albert noted with horror that ‘the greater part were the Dandies and Roues of London and the Turf’. Briggs, The Age of Improvement, p. 458.

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15 An unsuccessful novelist, in describing the Peel of 1834, referred to ‘his talents and tone as a public speaker, which he had always aimed to adapt to the habits and culture of that middle class from which it was concluded the benches of the new Parliament were mainly to be recruited’. Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby or, The New Generation, New York, 1961, p. 80. Peel, of course, can properly be regarded as the first modern Prime Minister in the British political system. Part of the meaning of ‘modern’ in this context is precisely that aspect of Peel's political leadership to which Disraeli referred.

16 ‘The truth was that he not only represented intuitively, but almost personally embodied, the character and outlook of the commercial and industrial middle classes.’ Thomson, England, pp. 120–21.

17 Taper to Tadpole, in 1834: ‘A wise man would do well now to look to the great middle class, as I said the other day to the electors of Shabbyton.’ Tadpole to Taper, in response: ‘I had sooner be supported by the Wesleyans than by all the Marquesses in the peerage.’ Disraeli, Coningsby, p. 122.

18 Thomas, J. A., The Howe of Commons, 1832–1901: A Study of Its Economic and Functional Character, Cardiff, 1939, pp. 5, 9, 18–19.Google Scholar

19 Even Laski, who argued that ‘the the reform acts of the nineteenth century had little effect upon the, position of'the aristocracy politics’, conceded that ‘policy may have‐changed’. Laski, ‘The Personnel of the English Cabinet, 1801–1924’, The American Political Science Review; Volute XXII, Number 1, February, 1928, p. 27.

20 The most famous of all inquiries into the impact of German industrialization concluded: ‘The case of Germany is unexampled among Western nations both as regards the abruptness, thoroughness and amplitude of its appropriation of this [modern industrial] technology, and as regards the archaism of its cultural furniture at the date of this appropriation.’ Veblen, Thorstein, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, New York, 1954, p. 86.Google Scholar A parallel between 19th‐century Germany and 20th‐century non‐Western developing societies should not be over‐extended, however. Veblen certainly exaggerated Germany's need to borrow industrial technology from other Western nations. Furthermore, whatever meaning might be assigned to the concept ‘cultural furniture’, the furnishings of a society which produced and listened to Beethoven were considerably more modem than those of a society which listens to the beat of jungle drums. Nevertheless, ‘In any comparative study of the economic and social systems of Germany, France and England one is struck by the late and slow development of Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century from agrarianism to industrialism, and from feudalism to democracy.’ Bramsted, Ernest K., Aristocracy and the Middle‐Classes in Germany: Social Types in German Literature 1830–1900, revised edition, Chicago, 1964, p. 44.Google Scholar

21 Rosenberg, Arthur, Imperial Germany: The Birth of the German Republic 1871–1918 (translated by Morrow, Ian F. D., Boston), 1964, p. 2.Google Scholar

22 With his customary inflation of an important, and often previously unseen, truth, Taylor, A. J. P. has argued that in the Germany of 1848: ‘Industrial capitalists, still less industrial workers, did not exist as a serious political force.’ The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815, New York, 1946, p. 69.Google Scholar

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26 Ibid., p. 16.

27 Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, Garden City, New York, 1962, p. 35.Google Scholar

28 Anderson, The Social and Political Conflict, pp. 82–3. Bismarck, of course, was not the initiator of this anti‐industrialization policy. In the reign of Frederick William IV, which began in 1840, ‘… the unhappy middle class soon saw that modern trade had neither the understanding nor the sympathy of their medieval‐minded monarch’. P. Robertson, Revolutions of 1848, Princeton, N. J., 1952, p. 108. In 1849 the industrial freedom of the Law of 1845 was curtailed and those portions of the Prussian Code of 1794 under which guilds controlled choice of occupation, method of production, and manner of retailing were actually reinstated. Hugo C. M. Wendel, The Evolution of Industrial Freedom in Prussia 1845–1849, Allentown, Pa., 1918, p. 83.

29 The Course, p. 108.

30 Pflanze, Bismarck, p. 116n.

31 Ibid., p. 328.

32 ‘The capitalist middle classes ceased on September 3rd [1866] to demand control of the state; they accepted Junker rule and confined their liberalism to hoping that this rule would be exercised in a liberal spirit –“liberal administration”, not liberal government, became their aim.’ Taylor, The Course, p. 110.

33 ‘This alliance was unquestionably the cornerstone of the social and political system prevalent in Germany until 1918. Social and political power remained in the hands of the agrarian aristocrats; the industrialists received lucrative steel contracts, some tariff protection, an empire, and a guarantee against the aspirations of the proletariat.’ Ascher, Abraham, ‘Baron von Stumm, Advocate of Feudal Capitalism’, Journal of Central European Affairs, Volume XXII, Number 3, 10, 1962, p. 283.Google Scholar‘Thus the events of 1878–79 were of almost equal importance to Bismarck's unification of Germany in determining the nature of the German political system until 3918.’ Lambi, Ivo N., ‘The Agrarian‐Industrial Front in Bismarckian Politics 1873–1879’, Journal of Central European Affairs, Volume XX, Number 4, 01, 1961, p. 396 Google Scholar.

34 Pinson, Koppel S., Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization, New York, 1963, P. 239.Google Scholar

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36 Taylor, The Course, p. 110. In this respect, the Bismarckian Compromise merely continued and accentuated previous trends in vocational preferences among gifted members of the middle class. The middle‐class preference for business was, of course, matched by a reluctance of young aristocrats to enter business careers, even when the family fortunes needed strengthening.

37 Neumann, , Permanent Revolution: Totalitarianism in the Age of International Civil War, 2nd ed., New York, 1965, p. 26.Google Scholar

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39 Bramsted, Aristocracy, p. 229.

40 Ibid., p. 232; Ascher, ‘Baron von Stumm’, pp. 283–84; Dabrendorf, Ralf, ‘The New Germanies: Restoration, Revolution, Reconstruction’, Encounter, Volume XXII, Number 4, 04 1964 Google Scholar, p. so.

41 Rosenberg, Imperial Germany, p. 1; see also ibid., pp. 249–50.

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43 Neumann, Sigmund, ‘Germany: Battlefield of the Middle Classes’, Foreign Affairs, Volume 13, Number 2, 01, 1935, p. 274.Google Scholar