Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century

R. Neale, R. S. Neale, Ronald Neale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317219606
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

First published in 1972, this collection of essays by R. S. Neale focuses on authority, and the responses and challenges to it made by men and women throughout the nineteenth century. Employing a more sociologically-minded approach to history and specifically using a 'five-class' model, the book explores features of class and ideology in Britain and its Empire. It includes a range of case studies such as the Bath radicals, the members of executive councils in the Australian colonies, and the social strata in the women's movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian history and sociology.

1

Class and class consciousness in early nineteenth-century England: three classes or five?

The three-class model of social structure in the early nineteenth century is that in which, for the sake of convenience, individuals are placed into one of three categories: aristocracy, middle class, working class. The boundaries of the classes, particularly of the two lower ones, are rarely clearly or explicitly explained, and there is little general agreement among writers about the bases of classification. Nevertheless this model and these categories are regularly used in analysing the interplay of economic, social, political and cultural forces.

It is my contention that both model and categories have outlived their usefulness for any rigorous analysis of the relationship between class, class consciousness, and political ideology in the early nineteenth century.

Of course, it may be that historians and others only use the three-class model of Victorian society as a convenient shorthand form of expression for something which, implicitly, they recognize to be more complex. If this is so, then in order to communicate with each other, we need to be sure of two things. First, we need to be sure that each of us uses the same shorthand symbol for the same idea, that is, we need a key to the shorthand. Second, we need to be sure that our system of shorthand has as many symbols as we have ideas worth expressing. It is in connection with this second observation that I wish to press my point.

Generations of students brought up on the conventional shorthand are too frequently hamstrung by it. Either they find difficulty in comprehending that the social structure is indeed more complex than the conventional shorthand indicates, and cling desperately to the signs they know, however unhelpful they are in pointing the way, or, when they find that the shorthand does not describe the real world, they reject altogether the possibility of handling history through the medium of aggregative concepts like class.

Some students grow up to be historians. If they do, unless they clearly and explicitly add new symbols to the shorthand and continually refine their concepts they will find difficulty in advancing the frontiers of their discipline. They will become Schoolmen.

Take as an example the continuing debate on the standard of living between 1780 and 1850. By the early 1960s it had reached a stalemate because both optimists and pessimists seemed increasingly happy to regard labour as a homogeneous class experiencing and participating in the process of industrialization as a whole, and both sides were content to use one or more global indicators like mortality rates, consumption indices and figures of national income per capita. Such an approach has its uses. For the purpose of amassing evidence about broad shifts in the rate of economic development, the growth rates of income per capita have a place. But the same approach immediately becomes useless if the problem is to say something about the welfare of specific groups of short-lived workers and to relate changes in the welfare of these groups to other phenomena. This was the reason for suggesting that historians should and could move away from the position of stalemate simply by employing a more fruitful disaggregative, regional and multi-class approach to the problem.¹

Recent discussion on the relationship between various social classes, class consciousness and ideology during the early nineteenth century seems to point to a similar stalemate. It is my purpose in this chapter, therefore, to take a close look at the usefulness of the conventional three-class apparatus. My schema is: (1) Show something of the limitations of the three-class model by commenting on two recent contributions to the problem of class and ideology in the early nineteenth century. These initial comments should also show that in taking to task those historians who use the three-class model as an analytical tool I choose real historians and not straw men; (2) Suggest the need for a clarification of the terminology of class; (3) Using this improved terminology and empirical data, discuss the relationship of Philosophic Radicalism to English society with the purpose of showing that this relationship can be fully comprehended only if the three-class model is explicitly rejected; (4) Suggest that we would do well to try to increase the number of concepts we can handle by abandoning the three-class model. The five-class model to replace it is described. Its purpose is to focus attention on the crucial role of a dynamic, achievement-motivated middling class which, as a political class throughout the 1820s and 1830s, was neither middle nor working class; (5) Finally, use the concept of the middling class to throw some light upon the problem of the Charter and its relationship to class consciousness.

The first contribution which shows the limitation of the three-class model is that by D. J. Rowe on the ‘Peoples’ Charter’.² Rowe begins by positing the existence of a middle-class consciousness vis-à-vis the aristocracy and the labouring classes. He contrasts this with the absence of a working-class consciousness. That is, he adopts the conventional three-class descriptive model into which he incorporates the new orthodoxy about middle-class and working-class consciousness. Rowe then attempts to show that the Charter was not a political manifestation of working-class consciousness because the Charter, and the forerunner of the London Working Men’s Association—the Association of Working Men to Procure a Cheap and Honest Press—were themselves the product of a Radical middle-class initiative.

In arguing thus the author introduces another concept, ‘a Radical middle class’, and makes the next analytical step, using what is in fact a four-class model. This is a useful advance. But it is so only if its main implication is made explicit. It is that the author sees the possibility of two images of social class consciousness developing in one social class, i.e. that the one middle class in the descriptive model can generate a Radical middle-class consciousness as well as one which is, presumably, purely a middle-class consciousness. The recognition of the possibility of such a phenomenon is itself a denial of the initial assumption about the existence of a middle-class consciousness. It could be that a more rigorous attempt to delineate the various social strata and social classes in the omnibus term ‘middle class’ might help to account for the dualism in middle-class social class consciousness which changes Rowe’s model from a three-class to a four-class one.

In this same article, there is an implicit identification of a working-class consciousness with a ‘proletarian’ social consciousness. But, to approach the problem of the connection between class consciousness and the Charter with the preconception that what one is looking for is a ‘proletarian’ social class consciousness means that the historian is constrained within a mental strait jacket as soon as he attempts to show of which social class consciousness the London Working Men’s Association and the Charter were organizational and political manifestations. Again it could be that discussion of the existence of working-class consciousness would be improved given a more rigorous attempt to differentiate workers according to social stratum and social class.

Another historian, Joseph Hamburger, in attempting to identify the Philosophic Radicals, correctly concluded that their political philosophy was not an expression of middle-class aspirations.³ But, because he began his analysis within the framework of the three-class model and because, as it were, he never went into a constituency, he also concluded that it was a political philosophy devoid of all class interest or connection. The essence of his position seems to be something like this. The Philosophic Radicals were hostile to the aristocracy. Yet they were not representative of the middle class and clearly not associated with the working class. If this was the case, where did they come from and how did they develop as a political faction? The answer given is that Philosophic Radicalism was a mental construct in the minds of its adherents owing nothing to the existence of social classes or class consciousness, except, perhaps, that it did have a distant connection with the Philosophic Radicals’ own concept of ‘the people’.

In this manner, the answer narrows the range of concepts available to us. It offers the two-class model employed by the Philosophic Radicals themselves and requires us to admit their claims that they represented no class except the people in their struggle against the aristocracy. We are asked to comprehend these historical figures according to their own self-evaluation though we know, on general grounds, that it is not uncommon for leaders of political parties to set out programmes and contribute to ideologies which they claim to be above class and other factional interests, but which, nevertheless, attract class or factional support.

An answer to the question, ‘Was there any class content in the doctrines and policies of the Philosophic Radicals?’ cannot be resolved simply by asking the Philosophic Radicals what they thought about the matter, or by using a three- or two-class model to find it. It can only be found by approaching the problem of class and class consciousness in the manner already suggested and through detailed local studies of constituency politics. Furthermore, a clarification of the class content in Philosophic Radicalism might throw additional light on the problem of class consciousness and the Charter.

Historians who may be concerned with identifying the derivation and nature of class consciousness and of political class in the early nineteenth century face problems similar to those faced by sociologists concerned with the same question in the mid-twentieth century. These problems fall into two categories: conceptual and methodological, and empirical. Most probably the empirical problems in each period will have to be resolved in different ways. But with regard to the shared conceptual and methodological problems, the concerns and methods of attack of historians and sociologists should be the same.

Four principal concepts will need to be distinguished.⁴ They are social stratification, social class, class consciousness and political class.

Social stratification will probably be determined by some objective, measurable and largely economic criteria such as source and size of income, occupation, years of education or size of assets. Some aspects of stratification, however, are more likely to be identified by other less easily quantifiable criteria, i.e. by things like values, social custom and language. Many of these criteria will be particularly difficult to identify since, in addition to the problem of measurement, they may exist in the minds of members of a social stratum only as norms which are not always matched by behaviour.

Social classes, however, are really conflict groups arising out of the authority structure of imperatively co-ordinated associations.⁵ Social class defined in this way can be objectively identified, at least in part, by setting out the authority structure of associations. But this in itself is not enough for the identification of social class as a conflict group. At best it will produce a sorting out of people with similar authority or subjection positions into what Ginsberg and Dahrendorf have called quasi-groups. Quasi-groups, however, function as recruiting fields for classes.⁶

Whether a quasi-group produces or becomes a social class will depend upon the technical, political and social conditions of organization and the generation of class consciousness within it. These, in turn, will depend on the specific historical conditions. Nevertheless, the formation of a social class as a conflict group will always have much to do with the growth of sensations of collective identity of interest among individuals in a quasi-group vis-à-vis other groups or social classes, and much to do with relationships of authority and subjection as felt and experienced in a quasi-group. The crucial notion to grasp is that there is a distinction between social stratification and social class, and that social classes are conflict groups based on relationships of authority and subjection.

The existence of social class as a political class will be most easily inferred from the existence of continuously organized political and/or industrial action.

It is at the point of determination of the existence of class consciousness that the investigator should be especially careful to make explicit his preconceptions about class consciousness. It is all too easy, as the example of Rowe shows, to slip into assuming that a working-class consciousness must be a ‘proletarian’ one. Historians who do assume this will, of course, look for what they assume. Consequently it will be what they find or do not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Class and class consciousness in early nineteenth-century England: three classes or five?
• 2 Class and ideology in a provincial city: Bath 1800–50
• 3 Class conflict and the poll books in Victorian England
• 4 H. S. Chapman, class consciousness and the ‘Victorian’ ballot
• 5 The colonies and social mobility: governors and executive councillors in Australia, 1788–1856
• 6 ‘Middle-class’ morality and the systematic colonizers
• 7 Working-class women and women’s suffrage
• Notes
• Index